So, what’s up with the fucking dumbass naming conventions lately? I thought the Linux world owned the rights to fucking stupid names like Feisty Fawn, Dapper Dickhead, Whorry Hedgehole, and apps like Joomla. (what the fuck is a Joomla anyway? nevermind. Don’t answer that).

Then came Microsoft and their penchant for the fucking stupid long names like “Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Extras Edition” and “System Center Configuration Manager” or even “Internet Explorer”. The competition has names like OSX, Tivoli, OpenView and Firefox. Simple. Brief. Not good enough for the overpaid marketing goons in Redmond.

But wait! If you call before midnight tonight!… you’ll discover that hardware isn’t immune to marketing idiocy at its best. How about Intel’s preferences for naming chips? Tigerton? WTF? Merced? Klimath? Who cares if they’re proper names for places. Why not “Moorehead” or “Brisbane” or “Hiroshima”? Those are places too? Tigerton? Geez.

I have a solution: go back to version numbering. Versions that include the date/period are nice. Simple. Helpful. When did Pentium 4 HT come out? I dunno. When did chip 2007.01.1234 come out? I’d guess sometime in early 2007. For God’s sake, even Apple has enough sense to use a version number with OSX. Hence 10.4. Don’t hold your breath for a version following behind “Windows Vista Home Premium Edition”.

I wonder why we sacrifice so many brave men and women in the middle east when we could simply dress up marketing pukes as soldiers and let them market their services in the Al Anbar or Waziristan provinces. I’m sure the locals would embrace them warmly (and explosively). The world is getting dumber and dumber every day.

The shake-down result?

Well, it depends. If you have basic needs, OO will suffice. If you have specific needs, you will need to take a careful look to know if OO will suffice. I have to say however, that while I applaud OO’s efforts, they have been left in the dust by Microsoft. Office 2007 is simply amazing. I don’t like the price tag at all, but the features are simply better. The products, each of them, are all much improved and amazingly stable. Not that OO isn’t stable, but MS-Office has a reputation for being anything but. Aside from the arguable “ribbon bar” change in MSO, the individual features, options and tools are what make it shine overall. They are most noticable in PowerPoint and Visio, but even Word, Excel and Access have some nice goodies to discover. I have to say that discovering them has been *almost* fun. Software? Fun? Again?!!

I haven’t found software fun to learn since the 1990′s. I don’t know what’s happened, but innovation has turned into refinement. Boring. BO-RING. Even Google has become another corporate sloth. Yeah, sure, they’re still more “hip” than Microsoft, but so is my dog. So is my neighbor. Well, maybe not him. Ok, but my kids are surely more hip than MS. So where does that leave RedHat, Novell, Yahoo!, etc.? In the snoozer bed with a blanket. Nothing new to write home about. I think all the development teams are busy playing on their Xbox 360′s or Wii’s or PS3′s. The “vision” they once had, has been replaced by MBA visionaries with fancy checkbooks. Repeat the last success because it’s less risky (even though it always turns out to be the most risky). WTF? What happened to us?

So, putting all this into larger context, the stuff that amazes me about MSO 2007 isn’t that it’s intrinsicly “amazing”, it’s that they actually made the effort. OO on the other hand seems to be playing catch-up. Let’s face, THERE IS NOTHING INNOVATIVELY “NEW” in OpenOffice. There’s nothing it has or does that wasn’t already done in WordPerfect/PerfectOffice or MSO. Don’t get me started on little, mamby-pamby buried features. I’m talking about the big ticket features, like syntax/grammar checking, auto-completion, auto formatting, mail merging (that over-stated feature), and the retreaded tires of import/export lists. It’s all been done. T-shirts sold out long ago. The same appears to be true for Linux. Yes it’s cool. Yes, it rocks. Yes, it does the job. But what does it “do” that CANNOT be done on Windows or OSX or whatever? Not much. It’s free, so that means it rocks. I’m not bashing it, but I would really like to see it taken to the next step BEFORE the competition goes there first.

I’m not impressed. I’m waiting to be impressed by software again. Maybe this should be a challenge to the new crop of techie kids? Take the challenge. Do something amazing and make it fun to use a computer or mobile device for a change. The iPhone, like it or not, is proof that there’s still room for innovation and taking risks to do something different… and better. Then again, until the techies toss the MBA’s out of the meeting rooms and get back to driving the business, it might not ever happen.

So, again, ultimately, MSO 2007 isn’t really that “amazing” but it’s amazing in the current limited context. Sort of like how Superman doesn’t impress anyone on Krypton, but drops jaws on Earth. Same basic principle. Maybe that’s it? The new generation isn’t aware of what happened 10-20 years ago. It’s all lip-service, reminiscing by balding techies. They don’t care. A remake of a remake is still new to them. Uh oh, that means DOS might make a comeback?

As I’ve said before: A person’s experience “switching” to Linux will vary as much as their DNA varies.  Every person has their own unique needs, preferences and capabilities.  This is not lost on an operating system by any means.  If you’re the kind of user that is 100% happy doing nothing but Gmail/Hotmail, YouTube, reading news, and playing games, you will likely be 100% happy with almost any operating system, including Linux (whatever distro gives you wood).

If you are a seasoned Windows or OSX user, who has developed an intricate web of applications, scripts, utilities, and configuration settings to do an assortment of specific tasks, you may not be as happy… or happy at all.  You can still do email, surf the web, manage office suite documents, play (some) games and watch YouTube all day long.  But some of the dearest things you depend upon in OSX or Windows will not make you happy on Linux.

Am I picking on Linux?  Not really.  However, it brings up the viability of the argument that Linux is “ready” to knock Windows “off the desktop” of most computer users.  For some it is.  For some it is not.

I could cite specifics like lack of specific hard device drivers, flakiness of video options, limitations and complications of various FOSS applications, and nebulous support.  To be fair, Windows can suffer from those very same issues (except that FOSS apps are only one option, not THE option).  Case in point: Which is better?  Posting the same confusing question to dozens of discussion forums and getting flamed with answers like “RTFM!” and “stupid noob”, or pulling out the credit card to call for suppor, getting put on hold and then getting some half-baked goon in Bangalore who not only can’t understand the question but reads the “solution” from a queue card and closes the case.  Not much of a choice, is it?

As for applications… I got a ton of emails and blog replies suggesting this or that as a “perfect” or “near-perfect” replacement for “x” on Windows.  Almost NONE were “perfect” replacements.  In fact, only one was (GPAR2 in lieu of QuickPAR).  K3B is not a replacement for the entire Nero Ultra suite.  Not even close.  PAN is not a decent replacement for Newsbin Pro.  gtkPod, RhythmBox and Floola are not 100% replacements for iTunes (even though I despise iTunes).  Firefox and Opera still have problems (even on Windows) dealing with some sites developed only for IE.  OpenOffice still does not provide 100% compatability with MS-Office documents.  Gimp is a very worthy contender for replacing PhotoShop CS2 however (maybe CS3).

And that’s just the apps that exist for Linux.  Then there’s the ones that don’t.

There is no AutoCAD replacement for Linux.  There is no Inventor or SolidWorks.  There is no Macromedia/Adobe Flash MX.  Sure, there’s Wine, Parallels, VMware and VirtualBox.  But those are cop-outs.  They offer a half-way solution to getting the job done.  But that’s a lame excuse.  Until these types of applications have 100% suitable alternatives there will be a large segment of OSX and Windows users that simply cannot “switch” without paying a heavy price.  Even the price of searching for replacements, and then learning how they work, and then learning to how to tweak and optimize them, is a very expensive proposition for some.  I’m speaking of those who rely on their apps for their careers.  Downtime/learning time is expense time.  It’s time lost from executing work, spent on retooling, and with almost no garantee of a net gain in the end.  Only a sideways shift or lateral move.  For a business environment that makes no sense at all.  In many cases, that cost is not recouped by the elimination of software licenses, mainly because the OSX or Windows licenses have already been paid for.  If you dump them after that, you’re literally throwing money away.

What Linux and the surrounding “community” needs (and it’s not really a community at all, it’s more of a collective label of “people that hate Microsoft and Apple”), is a desktop environment, and a complete suite of all of the top 50 or 75 applications used by OSX and Windows customers.  That would be the starting point.  If there were a package like that, it would already be sliding into every corporate office everywhere.  It’s not.  It’s creeping into IT backrooms and server rooms and IT geek desktops.  Until this is resolved, Windows and OSX are only going to continue growing.  And growing they are.  If you doubt that, check the investor reports for each company for yourself.

I really don’t care who wins.  I really don’t want ANYONE to “win”.  I want to see intense competition.  It makes better products, and cheaper prices.  We all win.  I just think Linux and FOSS could do more to put pressure on Apple and Microsoft than they are.  The fact that Windows and Apple prices aren’t dropping drastically is a clear indication that FOSS isn’t eating away at their profit margins.

After running into some problems meeting an urgent demand to get work done for my brother and some friends, I found running the apps inside VMware unsuitable.  If not for performance reasons, well, for performance reasons.  And besides, as I said in an earlier post: Spending a significant amount of time doing work inside a VM amounts to stupidity.  It’s not a “native solution” as I also said.  If I have to explain that, well, you’re just not going to get it anyway.

I thought, well, this might be a good time to see if the “Complete Backup” I created within Vista actually would work.

I booted to the Vista DVD and ran the repair option.  I pointed it to the backup I created on the second hard disk and let it rip.  It restored alright.  Did it boot?  Nope.  Why?  Because GRUB was still sitting in the middle of the sandbox and not letting any little Windows kids come in to play.  My guess is either the boot record or MFT still had GRUB hooks.  “Sector Error 17″ is all I got.  Enter: Vista install take II:  A complete partition rebuild.  I blew away the partitions and created one big partition, reloaded Vista and was finally back on the evil dark side of operating systems.

Problems solved?  Not exactly.

After Vista, I soon found that I still needed to install some Dell updates to get things back in order.  I will say this: if you have a Dell Dimension E520/521 and you’re running Vista: get the latest updates/drivers for the BIOS, hard drive, video card (nVidia GeForce 7300), and most importantly: the DVD/RW drive.  Before doing that, the performance was horrible.  Operations would time out just trying to read from media.  After the updates, all is working great.

I’m not giving up on Linux.  I still have my lab machines at work running Ubuntu and the VM’s with Ubuntu and Fedora are still in use.  I will post my reflections on trying to get Linux apps to reliably replace Windows apps for my needs.  It was a mixed blessing.  I continue hoping that will improve with time.