Sent to Shannon M. Lake Sr in response to his article.
I'm sure you're getting far too much feedback over your Linux Seen as OS Lifeboat article, but I figured I'd add my voice to the mix.
Thanks for a good introduction, as a convert to the Linux religion I appreciate all the press Linux gets. I've got a couple of clarifications:
I haven't played with Caldera which I understand comes with quite a bit of commercial software, but the downloadable Debian and Slackware (http://www.slackware.org) distributions are complete Linux systems, nothing is shipped on CD that can't be downloaded for free. Red Hat reserves a couple of commercial applications, most notably an X server that supports proprietary video cards whose manufacturer's licensing agreements won't allow the release of source code, but except for those few things the only thing missing from the freely downloadable portion of the standard Red Hat distribution is the telephone support.
Of course when you weigh the cost of the CD sets against the time involved in downloading all that software, the CD wins very quickly.
In general the only hardware not supported by Linux is from manufacturers too short sighted to release interface specifications to Linux developers. This is the fault of the hardware manufacturers and blame should be placed squarely on their shoulders. On the other hand, that this most often happens in cheap hardware that quickly becomes obsolete can also be viewed as a feature.
Finally, Linux already supports an advanced 64 bit architecture, the Alpha. Given that most of the issues involved with porting to a 64 bit platform have been dealt with, and that multiprocessor support is fairly advanced, there's no reason to believe that Linux won't appear on the Merced processor as soon as Linux developers can afford to buy them.
I still develop for Windows because that's one of the platforms I get paid for, but all of my personal computing has moved to Linux; it's a stable, well thought out platform that allows me to work with my tools and quickly implement ideas, and it's got an active user base that more often than not has already found a solution to the problems I face.
Friday, March 27th, 1998 danlyke@flutterby.com