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SuSE 7.3 vs XP
rutledjw writes: "This should be good for some flame wars. A story on HPWorld that I read about on NewsForge gives an interesting comparison between XP and Linux. I personally think the story wanders a little and wouldn't call it comprehensive, but it is interesting. It does point out a particular bottleneck in how the 2.4.x kernels handle asynchronous IO. Apparently this is being addressed in the 2.5 kernels..." It actually appears quite low-flame and balanced, and unlike some Linux vs. Windows comparisons, goes into decent detail rather than just glib generalizations.
Who cares which one is faster, or better, or more stable. Seriously. I just plain don't like Windows. I dare them to address that. I think I can sum it up: I was typing the other day... a window poped up. Something had happened. I inadvertantly hit enter (since I was already typing) and as a result, still don't know what the message said... Well, that and I lost what I was typing. The irritation factor was a 9.6.
Cygwin almost works... I use that at work. But it's all slow and icky. I've known for a million years that ext2 is slow, but I like that filesystem a shatload more than some of the faster ones... Mostly, I think that's because I know how it works. I can look it up. ls -l shows me a bit more under linux, ya know?
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
"That solution, however, raises an intriguing issue concerning Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Windows versus open source systems. Until now, conventional wisdom held that Windows wizards were a key factor in holding down TCO by countering the initial licensing costs with lower maintenance costs and lower skills requirements for the maintainers. OpenBench Labs' initial foray into the unconventional world of Windows XP puts that conventional wisdom about TCO into serious question."
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
A very fair assessment and a good article. One minor caveat - Can someone clarify this quote from the article?
"Another annoying gotcha for business users is the dropping of support for Netscape-style plug-in modules in the XP version of Internet Explorer 6.0. Just try to download a PDF file from any site on the Web. It's easy as long as you right-click on the link and choose the option to "Save target as." The alternative is to make Opera your default Web browser."
The last one or two versions of Acrobat Reader I've used have a little "save" button at the top of the toolbar that the PDF opens inside.
Any clue what they're referring to? Sounds like an interesting UI issue if it exists, but I wonder under what conditions it occurs.
Well said. I have to admit, when I moved to Suse7.3 about six months ago, I really missed the handy-dandy pop-o-matic wizards that made Win98 such a no-brainer. It was a bitch having to figure everything out from scratch, with FAQ's either stopping too low down the clue scale or starting too high. I very nearly gave up (as I had done with RedHat 6.x a while back), but I stuck with it, and now I'm starting to get a clue.
Then two months ago, I upgraded from Win98SE to WinXP on another machine. I realised that I was suffering Linux cognitive dissonance (overvaluing the utility of it simply because it was hard to learn), and resolved to come to XP with an open mind. I was particularly looking forward to returning to the "one way to do it, it's our way, and we'll do it for you", which (be honest) is what Jane Homebody or Garry Gameplayer(me on that machine) really needs.
But oh dear. What's with the vile animated crap? How do I turn it off? Stop asking me if I want a passport account. Where's the network info? STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT. OK, I've set up TCP/IP, but how do I change the workgroup, it's not on the identification tab any more? STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT. Where's my single click interface? Hey, I thought I told you to stop animating those menus. No, I've already set up TCP/IP, stop asking me if I want to set up a connection to the internet. It's right there! STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT!
Even coming from Win98SE, it took me a long time to get WinXP set up the way I wanted it. If I'd come in cold, it would have been much worse, because I wouldn't even have known the right questions to ask. In all honesty, it's still a little easier than KDE on SuSE7.3, but it's not much easier. The gap has narrowed significantly, and - significantly - it's narrowing from both ends. Linux distros are getting better, but Windows really has got worse.
By trying to hide the inescapable fact that you do need to know what you're doing with WinXP (as you need to know with Linux), Microsoft has actually made it harder for those who do actually have a clue to drive it. How curious.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
SuSE's success is based on the distribution's quantity, not its quality. A few years ago, my coworkers and I made industrial servers based on
SuSE.
Very soon it was quite clear that you can't rely on any release of SuSE's distributions. Good choices in 1998/1999 were 5.3 and 6.2, in between that there was a major libc change (6.0 to 6.1) which messed everything up.
My nowadays coworkers tried SuSE 6.4 to 7.3, with especially the 7.3 sucking hell. They complained about (GNU/)Linux being slower on a P800 than Windoze on a P100. As I know that in such case something must be wrong, I checked it. After startup, "updatedb" was running, eating plenty of system ressources away from the user's frontend while indexing a 20 GB harddisk. After about 20 minutes ("updatedb" was still running), the user gave up and rebooted into Windoze... After me stopping that job, the box was about as fast as it is on Redmondware.
Our old file servers still run SuSE (dunno which version), with the system being about in the same state when the box was installed. No matter how easy it could be to upgrade the packages to current versions, nobody dares to risk fscking up a box with inconsistent packages obtained through auto-upgrade.
Now I'm using Debian and the problems are gone. You can rely on _any_ release, that is, from the stable (Potato) branch and in most cases from testing (Woody). Even the Unstable branch is more consistent than some SuSE distributions I used to play with. Debian is more difficult to install than SuSE, but it is much more easier to maintain if you know what to do.
People migrating from SuSE to Debian is only bad for SuSE, but people migrating vom SuSE to Windoze is bad for us all.
I have noticed that back in the 90's the UNIX OS was the best network operating system.
Nowadays I do not know anymore. I see that most Linux distro's somewhat looks more and more like Windows, thus one can see that the two OS'es are making a convergence, where they finally probably would make the inevitable 99,99% similarity.
I know you guys say that "We'll go for the free OS!", but I allready have Windows XP and it was free for me (I've not payed anything). So untill Microsoft do something really stupid like blocking piracy completely, I guess the normal @home workstation would contain a "free" OS.
The next logical step for Microsoft would be to secure its OS, and the Linux must become more User-friendly and, as some might say, more open. I still would like to see that my 6year-old neighbor able to install Linux like the Windows 2000.
I feel that some people who like Linux really likes that they can use the OS on old boxes like pentium 2 400mhz or similar. This is because Linux is normally an OS that most people actually upgrades every now-and-then. However, when it comes to Windows, Microsoft have seen that they only sell their OS with new PC's (99,9% sales i guess), thus they do not care about older PC's like the P2 400.
Now back to topic,
Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Windows versus open source systems. Until now, conventional wisdom held that Windows wizards were a key factor in holding down TCO by countering the initial licensing costs with lower maintenance costs and lower skills requirements for the maintainers.
My main point was that the relevance of TCO and other stuff is not that high anymore, and in the end we just have to say: Know your OS and do what you want the best way. There is no Best OS and there is no Best Way.
Win Modems are supported in the standard kernel now. My install is aroun 400mb, I run Debian. Config can be cryptic, it depends purely on your administration style and which distribution you are running. I have a SuSE machine and YaST is a pretty easy admin interface.
e4 e5
moving a herd of secretaries to Linux is easy. you just have to have management behind you and some guts. make the change, and help them through the tiny differences. but not put up with crap.
Office workers are the laziest people on the planet. if something changes a tiny bit, they whine and bitch, and whine more.. you need to tell them that this is the way it is and if they dont like it there are many temp companies that would like them to work for them.
Basically, I had to tell them to "SHUT UP, this is the way it is and get used to it. I will start calling you a STUPID MORON if you whine about something stupid like the color of your desktop or your screensaver." gladly I had a upper management person that backed me up and we now save Tens of thousands every year. and quite possibly saved the company.
SuSE prefers KDE, which is arguably more "window-esque" than Gnome, in terms of integration and user interface (Specifially DCOM, and applications such as Konqueror, KOffice, and KDevelop). Furthermore, RedHat lacks GUI tools such as YaST2 (SuSE) and Control Center (Mandrake).
And probably to be fair they picked the distro that you have to pay for (if you want the pretty install).
I've tried all three of the latest offerings from RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE. In terms of desktop use (not server use), RedHat is seriously lacking in comparion to the latter two, and SuSE is beating Mandrake by a narrow margin with all of its YaST2 modules (NIS, NFS, and LDAP setup wizards, especially).
I can't read the article (it's slashdotted), but there's something about Windows (specially XP) that I rarely hear people talk about: it uses outrageous amounts of RAM. Yes, RAM is cheap, but I find it extremely suspicious when simple applications consume so many resources.
I have 128 MB of RAM and with Linux it's enough for everything I need, _including_ Mozilla (which as we all know, can use a lot of memory).
I find it ludicrous that I can't even boot XP without swapping and it takes forever to open up apps like the media player. Should I face this with a smile and say "well, I'm at fault because 128 MB of RAM clearly isn't enough"?
I can't bring myself to respect an OS which needs this many resources to do nothing. Yet I know people with 64 MB of RAM who praise XP in favor of Linux. I firmly believe that they either don't use their computers for anything productive or they lie.
The hard ones are graphic designers and the worst are DTP people who can't handle the Linux command line and automatic document production via piped commands chains.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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So there you have it, if you wan't to strain your fast computers and totally laugh about the idea of 640k. If you wan't big brother bill to spy on you and let the hackers put loads of viruses down your computer then go right ahead
Personally, I use XP as desktop OS and Linux for the DSL-router.
XP *really* is a hundred times more stable than the 98se, 98, 95b, 95a, 3.11, 3.1 that I used before. the only thing that sometimes totally crashes it is the damn openGL driver for my old Voodoo3 (a hacked version since 3dfx is dead long before xp was even thought of - 16MB, 350MHz, it still reaches 30fps in 1024x768). everything else is stable, no crash no BSOD, no nothing.
And that *hibernate* feature is nothing less than perfect. xp takes over the powerswitch, one press, system saves RAM to HDD, power off. powerswitch again system loads HDD-RAM back, ready to work.
from power-off to your last edited spreadsheet with continued dvd-rip in background in less than 30seconds. show me that in linux.
press reset on running linux, will check ext2-fs'es forever. press reset on xp, ntfs'es don't even notice. though I dunno how to check uptime in xp like in linux, it must have been at least a week since last real restart (not hibernate). ok, linux servers have months as uptimes. but not on a desktop where you frequently change or tweak something. and if you have to shut it down to have some silence in the evenings
linux is by far the best for servers. linux desktop I tried and it sucked. but as server, its cool. I'm using linux-router-project distribution on the server, fits on one floppy disk and converts 486dx50 junk to a lpd-printserver and dsl-router with ~20W power consumption. (2000/xp can access lpd printers with no problems) Put that onefloppy-distribution on an old 100mb hdd and set hdparm to hdd-off 1 minute and the server boots in 20secs from off to lpd/dsl-online. impossible with windows. (that with stripped down-windows and connection-sharing on pentium 133 was like being in slow-motion-HELL) = router cost: 0.00$
conclusion: use windows for desktop, linux on any other (server, networked, embedded)machine.
that way windows can't be hacked from the internet and can't send anything to the NSA/BSA. Plus the server with the first client starting from off to ready in 30-40secs. All your customers can read your documents. All your family (except grannie) is able to use the desktop.