Is Linux Ready for the Future?

I'm running late this month so you'll have to settle for some random musings.

To some, television is the mush of the masses. Shopping networks, music video networks, movie trailer networks make people wonder if there's anything intelligent to watch. Even news networks, as I noted in a previous column, contain recycled footage that is often unverified gossip rather than real news (Linux and the Media: The Truth is Out There, Lone Coder). The Canadian multicultural networks, the OMNI's (Home Page), specialize in showing foreign soap operas all day--good for ratings, but if you've seen one love triangle you've seen them all. According to my Spanish-speaking neighbour, even the Mexican soaps are fake: the good-looking stars are all from other countries.

Compare that to CITY-TV (Home Page), the Toronto renegade station that used to broadcast from the extreme fringe of the airwaves--channel 79. I didn't care much for the edgy, urban, push-the-censors feel of the station. On the other hand, original CITY-TV programming, like MediaTelevision: The Modern Art and Science of Persuasion (Wikipedia), took a low-budget "60 Minutes" approach to critiquing and criticizing the TV station's own TV and advertising industry. While most entertainment shows feature plastic hosts in designer dresses presenting advertisements for half-an-hour, CITY-TV treated the viewers as intelligent human beings who were good for more than pablum. People who want to understand, not to be told. And the station was successful at it, purchasing up stations in other cities and spreading their founder's view of what television could, and ought to, be.

Now, after CITY-TV was bought out, it has predictably been passed around from one Canadian mega-media corporation to another as a bargaining chip. It's as if the media moguls don't know what to do with such a rule-breaking property. With the inevitable budget cutbacks, it seems increasingly possible that CITY-TV--the Apple Computer of Canadian broadcasting--may end up as a new Omni-style station, filling its broadcast day with nothing but Hollywood advertising and simple-minded foreign soaps.

So what kind of future is waiting for Linux?

I've been wrestling with Fedora Core 9 (Fedora Project Home Page) for the last few weeks. Fedora, the forward-looking version of Red Hat Linux has been problematic for developers. Red Hat employees claim that it's a way of testing advanced concepts with early adopters. Open source developers claim that it's the same old free Red Hat with it's quality assurance budget slashed. Either way, Fedora Linux is notoriously unstable and bug-filled.

I had Fedora Core 6 installed on my old Pentium III laptop. When I upgraded to Core 9, the laptop strained with difficulty under the load...even though I kept the install size small. Red Hat's new Networking Manager, much praised by Red Hat at the Fedora 9 rollout party at the Linux Caffe in Toronto (Caffe Home Page), never worked properly. Some days I could make a network connection. Some days I couldn't. It finally gave up a few weeks ago with a "nm-applet" crash.

I had to go back to old school Linux principles. Deducing "nm" meant "Network Manager", I had to hunt around confusing Fedora Project website, find the Fedora file mirror, and manually downloaded the latest updates for the Network Manager and installed them them with "rpm -Uvh Net*". Once I got the network back up, the Red Hat package updater wouldn't download any packages, saying there was a conflict. So using "yum check-update" and "yum upgrade" on the command line, I installed over eighty pending software updates...all without any conflicts. How is the average Linux user supposed to figure this out?

Of course, getting their site hacked in August didn't help Fedora any, making people wonder if they could trust their security updates (Red Hat admits to getting hacked, Vnunet).

Fedora 9 on coLinux (coLinux Home Page) didn't fare much better. I installed it but for some reason konsole (the KDE terminal) wasn't included. I tried running the Gnome terminal but it locked up inexplicably. The only thing that ran was clunky old xterm. I had to resort back to an old version of Ubuntu.

Novell's OpenSuSE Linux (Home Page) has its problems, too. Last week a power outage in Germany brought down the main OpenSuSE site, which meant the mirrors as well since people couldn't navigate to them (OpenSuSE News). It's too bad there's no way to tell the difference between their network failure and a network failure on your end.

The biggest installation and configuration hurdle for all versions of Linux continues to be the desktop. I usually create a separate partition on my disk for "/home" so I can upgrade without losing my work...or my desktop configuration. However, there's no guarantee that new versions of open source software will read old configuration files or update them correctly. With Linux's fast pace, reinstalls of every six months is not uncommon. That means having to reconstruct your desktop every six months: all your launchers, icons, menus, Firefox themes and plugins...everything. Linux distros make no guarantees about desktop stability between versions. With my move from OpenSuSE 10.3 to 11.0, the desktop crashed. I had to manually copy each old dot-prefixed config directory in the hopes of minimizing the amount I had to rebuild by hand.

This problem of desktop migration is one of the main issues holding back the Linux desktop. What good is the greatest 3D effects (Compiz Wikipedia), OS X-like features (Apple, Avant) and clever applications (gDesklets Wikipedia) if they break every six months? But as companies like Red Hat have said, the desktop environment is not their business goal...even though we all use one, even Red Hat employees.

What can I say about the current global economic crisis? People in the U. S. bought houses with money they didn't have. The banks promised money that the didn't have. Now the U. S. government is considering a bailout plan while being deeply in debt. Over a dozen states are in financial trouble. (News Hour, PBS, Oct 10) For many years, people have been trying to make money with fantasy money that the didn't have, like teenagers who think their dad will bail them out if they get into trouble. But you can't deny reality forever, because it's reality after all. People who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930's could tell you that, but there aren't many around anymore. Maybe that's the problem when you start lying to yourself. With the government absent at the helm, news pundits are starting to use the word "depression" for the world's largest economy.

Meanwhile, things are not looking good for employment in computers. The rising cost of gas, up a staggering 27% since last year alone according to Statistics Canada, is taking a big chunk of of many paychecks. Perhaps the free price tag of open source will protect Linux developers. ("The open source jobs boom", InfoWorld) but what does it mean for Red Hat and Novell? Will a struggling economy mean that users can no longer afford to pay the inflated prices of Microsoft desktops? Will Red Hat and Novell have products people can actually use as viable alternatives? Or will Red Hat and Novell get swallowed up by Microsoft in the end when money--even fake money--seems to be what people value these days? I don't know.

The question to Linux is: what do you want to be when you grow up? According to Wired, Google, the Linux darling, has backpedaled on it's ethical stance (Hooking Google to the Evil Meter, Wired). What will Linux do with the opportunities it has been given? Will Linux distros get serious and be ready? I wonder.

October 13, 2008