Ah, it gets worse…
I open a terminal and type “java -version” and yes 1.4.2 IS installed… it’s some ridiculous GNU thing!!!
with no plugin for Firefox!
I’m not impressed.
blame the livecd maybe the distribution policies don’t allow to ship sun vm.
do you have sun’s java installed in an out of the box windows installation?
No, but on Windows software installation is very easy. If I attempt to install Java there are no “package conflicts.” There is a single well established directory structure in the file system on Windows compared to each Linux distribution doing their own thing… so you can’t find anything, and installing Java from Sun doesn’t replace the older version of Java that might be there already, etc. It’s quite a pain.
But I use a Mac whenever I can, and it comes with Java. 
(See OS X for how to do unix in a user-friendly way.)
[quote]That’s pretty much the key thing about .net in the first place - why, when I’ve got Java?
[/quote]
There’s still the quality perception of MS stuff versus Java.
The general concensus seems that Windows is a pretty decent OS these days, and I guess .NET benefits greatly from that. Probably partly because of good marketing, but you can’t deny that also technically MS has improved a great deal.
Many, many people still just hate java for whatever reason, even though .NET is essentially the same thing.
For example, I have installed our java applications many times at our customers, and usually when the tech heads see the java logo popping up they start mumbering things like ‘oh no, java, horrible…grlmbl…’. Until they actually see what it does and that our application doesn’t actually look like a crappy java app as they expected
Java is a great platform, but somehow many people just don’t know it.
I also see a lot of our customers moving away from Unix and even IBM iSeries in favour of Windows and hardly ever the other way around, and I visit a lot of companies (many of them multinationals).
So it isn’t so unreasonable then to ask ‘Why Java when we’re on Windows anyway where we have .NET?’. Sure, you can come up with many reasons, but they can be more difficult to explain, especially when you have to argue emotional reasons against java.
yeah I want commucials about java on tv! ;D
[quote=“erikd,post:24,topic:26423”]
Because I’ve been around long enough to see how Microsoft operates. So I’m going to keep my options open such that I’m less screwed when Microsoft gets around to doing what they do.
[quote]Because I’ve been around long enough to see how Microsoft operates. So I’m going to keep my options open such that I’m less screwed when Microsoft gets around to doing what they do.
[/quote]
Don’t get me wrong, that’s exactly my thinking too, I’m just writing down what I see happening around me.
it’s not such a paint, you have just to replace the java executable on /bin or /usr/bin with a symlink to the one in the jre OR export the java variables to the path correctly. Linux is WAY easier than people thinks it is, but if you want the ultimate user-friendly-nes stick to the mac where you have to do nothing which implies understanding how anything works
I know how to do it… it is just that I shouldn’t have to. My mom and dad would never be able to do it in a million years. The average computer user would have no hope at all.
/bin? /usr/bin? already you are talking gibberish to any average computer users. Then you expect them to open a shell and start replacing symlinks? Get real!
You’ve got the point there - it is 100% unreasonable to expect end users to have to know how stuff works in order to use it. My mom and dad can drive a car, but my mom at least doesn’t know how the engine really does it’s thing. I’m sure my dad doesn’t understand the full math behind thermodynamics involved (I know I don’t). And yet that is the level of understanding expected of the average unix user when it comes to operating a computer. It’s insane. I’m a computer engineer. This is my field, and I hate how cumbersome some of that stuff is to use.
On the Mac I have the best of both worlds. I have a powerful unix OS, with a user interface made for users. When I want to geek-out the underlying unix is one terminal session away. On Windows it’s actually not that bad, just much more undocumented. The Windows XP shell is more powerful than it was in the DOS days… there is built in support for jscript and vbscript, but it generally goes unused even by the nerds, because the nerds would rather just use unix where they have a better known shell and scripting tools like perl and python.
But back to Java…
Why does every Linux distro put Sun’s Java in a different place so that Sun’s own Java installer doesn’t install Java in a way that “fits” the rest of the system? Are the people making these distributions just brain dead? The Linux community is just totally disorganized. A state of chaos that seems to have arisen naturally from their “free” software model where everyone has the power to totally screw things up. They’ve hopelessly fragmented Linux and Linux is suffering greatly for it. It’s one of the main reasons I’m against Sun releasing Java to the open source community. I’ve seen what happened to Linux and it isn’t pretty.
Btw… I installed the full Ubuntu at home… it is behaving better than booting from the live DVD. The screen appears to be synced properly at least The only thing I can say for SuSE is that their bootloader and installer is prettier
Now I just have to “fix” Java so it it doesn’t try to run some crippled GNU thing instead of Sun’s Java. (That was really foolish of them.)
(Sorry for the ranting… it’s just my personal observations… how I see it and nothing more.)
swpalmer,
this might be interesting to you:
Debian GNU/Linux Java FAQ - Chapter 5 - Java Development
Debian policy for Java
Note, I neither agree nor disagree with these statements. I posted the links only because they might help to understand, why the GNU’s fear to distribute SUN’s Java and why the directories seem to be unorganized…
please, don’t blame me
I’ve heard the GNU argument for not distributing Sun’s Java. I think it is pure BS of course. Probably just the Open Source community trying to put more pressure on Sun to give up their rights. I can distribute the JRE with my apps for free and they try to claim that they can’t? Give me a break. What a bunch of “give me everything for ‘my version of free’ or I’ll cry” whiners.
I’m not blaming you :), it’s the Linux community in general that needs to get kicked back to reality. At Least the SuSE distribution included Sun’s Java. (why not they include every other bit of software that they possibly could, regardless of how crappy it is.)
the is free of cost and free… etc. I can see why one would be avoiding adding suns java from that perspective.
how ever how free is the user now if the ‘free’ version obstructs the use of an other. hmm…
and what’s that reality? that i have to pay to get something with quality?
and free != libre sun’s java is free but it’s not libre, i can understand that some distros won’t include in their default packages something else than software libre.
Sure.
(EDIT: this was much more angry than I intended. Year after year I’ve had to jump through hoops to make java work on debian, and the amount of unnecessary stress I suffer because of these people sometimes just gets to me. They seem to not care that their “free alternatives” literally DO NOT WORK. There’s no “you could use sun, or could use free software”, because there isn’t a free version - so they force you to use nothing at all, and they work tirelessly to force programmers not to use java. I find this behaviour rather offensive.)
However, those links are typical FUD BS. For instance “What full-fledged Java development platforms are available in Debian?” has a deliberately untrue answer. The answer was written to try and convince people sun’s java does NOT work 100% without any problems at all on debian. If you simply ignore the person who decided to NOT include any instructiosn at all in the debian manuals for pure political reasons.
My favourite bit is the edited bit:
“My example why this is a bad clause was not so good since someone pointed out that you do not want to create something that is non standard. I do agree that we want a standard implementation of the core classes, but I also think that you should have the freedom to create non-standard classes. (Or fix bugs or stupid mistakes in the standard classes.)”
Right. So … you’re all in favour of a standard, except where it constitutes a “stupid mistake”, in your subjective opinion.
Go figure.
PS: what I love most is that the previous versions of the debian java pages went on about how it was illegal to distribute java in any form. They’ve apparently given up that in favour of this.
What especially annoys me is that you are in fact free to fix any bugs you like and submit them to the JDK team. Grrr.
Cas