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A Visual Comparison Between XP And Mandrake
Mifflesticks points to this interesting "visual comparison" between Mandrake 8.0 and Windows XP. Even though it's specifically a visual / aesthetic comparison, this piece actually sums up the good things about XP -- good device detection, multiple users set up from the install, improved network configuration -- better than anything else I've seen. The conclusion seems to be that anyone who's set up a modern Linux distro (Mandrake in particular) on supported hardware would find nothing too new in XP.
You mean like aRts on Linux/Unix?
Your example is way off base anyway. Brother is going to tell sister to take a hike, and sister is just not going to want brother reading her email. Too bad for sister, MSIE will continue to cache that mail where brother, or anyone local or remote for that matter, will be able to read it.
If they were really co-operative they would set up some scripts to su and call various applications, then put links on the desk top.
call bash
su sister
netscape -mail (or whatever)
Heh, I'm at an annoying NT machine at work or I'd paste a real script that worked. I think you can see how to do it from there.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
How can you possibly do a 'visual' comparison of a linux distro vs. anything? And that begs the question who really cares about a visual comparison? I'd rather see a comparison at how elegantly and efficiently each UI does a particular task. IMNSHO, OS/2's WPS has them all beat, and did it back in 1993 with 486's on 8MB of RAM!
I'm on Mandrake 7.2 here, running Windowmaker + ROX-Filer. I hate any UI that depends on a braindead 'task bar' somewhere on the screen. Either I'm smoking crack, or what I'm running must not be Mandrake, eh?
My preferred UI stays the hell out of my way, but is pretty enough to show off at the same time.
This is already available in Linux:
Now you have two completely separate X sessions running at the same time. I've no idea if there's a point-and-click (x|k|g)dm way to do this, but the capability is there.
It really is getting to that point. Having installed recent versions of Linux, I can say its true. Every time I install a new version of Linux, I'm astounded by how far its come and how different it is to the version I installed six months before it - I feel like I have to learn a whole lot all over again. Every time I install a new version of Windows, OTOH, I'm astounded by how little has changed in the couple of years that have passed since the last release. From what I've heard about XP, it sounds like MS may be starting to respond to that by actually improving things... that would be pretty neat, the OS industry has stood stagnant for far too long.
I started using Linux in 1995, and installed it on my own PC first in 1996. At that stage, I had to recompile the kernel just to get my Sound Blaster to work! There were some OK windows managers, but "desktop environments" (e.g. Gnome and KDE) did not exist. There was no linuxconf, i.e. no centralised configuration system - everything had to be configured by editing its own text files somewhere in /etc. There were no graphical installs. I remember a year or two after that having to download kernel patches and recompile to get FAT32 support, and I remember having to recompile the kernel to get IP forwarding to work for IP masquerading. Internet dial-up involved editing numerous script/chat files and figuring out pppd parameters. There were no decent game API's like SDL, no decent widget toolkits like Qt/gtk. I find it mindblowing just how rapidly the average Linux distro has evolved in six years. Compare that to Microsoft and you suddenly realise just how stagnant the commercial OS industry has been - in 1995, there was Windows 95. Now there is WindowsME, which has hardly changed. A nicer browser has been integrated into the OS, and has finally become more or less stable. Some more hardware devices are supported, and a few minor eye-candy changes have been added. A few bugs have been fixed, but many obvious bugs that where there in the first release of Win95 are still there. That about sums it up. Microsoft would have us believe that that is six years of development? Of course, there is also Windows 2000, which, while not bad, doesn't represent all that much development either from NT4.
My general feeling for the past year or so was that Linux would catch up to being equivalent (and superior) to Windows sometime toward the second half of 2002. It still seems to be on track to do so. I haven't seen XP, but as I said, it sounds from what I've heard that MS might be realising that they may need to start improving their software again. Thats a good thing. There is no question of course that Linux has been behind in most things (with the exception of networking, I've always preferred the Unix networking model), but its definitely about to catch up.
Seeing how XP Professional is based on a new kernel...
XP is based on the same kernel as Win2k and WinNT before it. Sure there's been some revisions, but hardly even enough to justify a version change - if you look at the versioning it's gone from 5.0 (win2k) to 5.1 (winxp)
I just find it funny that the first time I saw this type of "easy network setup" was in Mandrake.
Guess he never installed a Windows system before. This has been around since Win95 and Win2k. In fact, the XP install is almost identical to the 2k install.
Microsoft has managed to piss off my wife by making her default to a frog icon and has now nearly completely crossed over to the dark side of the "I Hate Bill Gates" club.
She got pissed over the cute green frog, that you could have changed for her to just about anything (note that you can import pictures). Sheesh. Hardly a damning indictment that they kept the install simply by defaulting the user icons.
I actually like this better and it PROMOTES others to not use your account because your name happens to be already typed into the field.
Umm... you can turn this off in profiles if you want?
but I'm sure there's some keystroke out there that changes users easily in XP
Yup - right there in the help on it if you look. Window-L.
The real problem I have with XP is that by default it encourages you to run with root level permissions. This is going to get nasty from a security point of view pretty quickly.
Oh, yeah, you forgot that XP lets you have raw sockets just like Mandrake. Damn those evil Microsofties for implementing a standard!! The world will end! Well, at least according to Steve "Conspiracy" Gibson.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
No in 2k you don't have to reboot everytime you blink...but having my 2k box just randomly halt with no rhyme or reason is a pretty neat feature.
You probably have hardware problems. I've been using Win2k at work and at home for 2 years now and I've never had the machine randomly halt. Could also be a faulty driver, if you have some strange hardware.
Have you checked to see whether your hardware was actually supported under Mandrake?
As for me, the Linux hardware support for my home-built PC is BETTER than Windows 98 SE's. Particularly for my HP Deskjet 952: its Windows drivers are utter crap. Modem support seems to be better as well. When I upgraded my modem, Mandrake didn't even hiccup. Windows 98 nearly died.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Oddly enough, Mandrake work better on MY particular laptop (minus Sound, of course)- an IBM Thinkpad 760 XD. In Windows 98se, my PCMCIA modems (I have 3 to choose from) all get detected and setup twice at each boot. Eventually (say, after 2 reboots) the machine will lock up hard during bootup, causing me to power off/on, enter safe mode, clear out all of the modem entries in dev manager, and reboot again. Mandrake 8 does none of this. It detected my 56k card, configured it, and left it alone. I know I can always use Mandrake if I need to get up and running on the net without any hassles. Windows just doesn't give me that.
Now if IBM would only write sound drivers for the MWave device I'd be rocking.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
That's why brother xlocks his session before leaving.
make world, not war
Yep, this is true- stuff like lex (which gets called flex I think) which is used by tons of make/configure scripts is left out, as are all the 'devel' rpms - those rpms aren't unstable development versions, they're actually the source header files which you do quite often seem to need to compile against to Get Anything Done (TM). I think that Mandrake needs to acknowledge the difference between 'Developers' and 'People who compile from source' - tons of stuff is only distributed in source form!
The exclusion of telnet is almost forgiveable, I think they do install ssh, and we all know we shouldn't be using telnet these days(but does your workstation have a ssh client? do all of the servers you remotely access run sshd? Um probably not)
My tip-go to rpmdrake as soon as you install the machine, type 'devel' in the 'find' box, and install anything that looks remotely interesting- and don't forget flex too!
Roberto
I suppose you never have tried to install W 2k in any computer with a modern SCSI controller and finishing with a beautiful message:
your CDROM is not currently supported
In RedHat 7.1 with GDM, all you have to do is: