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A Linux User Goes Back
An anonymous reader says "A friend of mine recently switched to using Windows XP after three and a half years of Linux. I thought the community might benefit from reading his story. Even as a dedicated Linux user, I agree with many of his points. 'Unix on the desktop" has come along way in recent years, yet could still stand much improvement. It is no longer an issue of having a fancy GUI (KDE can't get much better), but rather the real problems lie in the foundation.' Some of his points are wrong, but it's a reasonable article.
I'm a bit surprised he didn't go to Win2K. WinXP has some cool features, but unless the latest service pack really changed things, it feels very unpolished (read: Rushed to compete with OS X).
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
apt-get install msttcorefonts :)
They're something Microsoft got right, and you're free to use them, even on linux! I haven't looked at an ugly bitmapped font in over two years.
Under debian you can "apt-get install msttcorefonts" and have nice microsoft fonts that they provide, including arial, ahhh arial... Under other dists, you probably have to manually find them and install them the trutype way.
It is a royal pain in the ass to install a ttf under linux, it's not just copy it to the directory, you have to do all other retarded things, add it to config files, etc. Maybe that's because I don't have xfstt installed, and rely on X11's built in ttf support.
If you use the debian mozilla, it gives you the option to turn on antialiasing on install of mozilla... ahhhh much better, it's not too overdone, thank goodness...
Tab completion is one of my favorite interface inventions ever.
Agreed. But you can have this in windows too. A simple registry change will enable this functionality on win2k for example by changing the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Command Processor/CompletionCharacter
Set this to 9 and you'll be be command completion heaven.
if you run debian add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list line:
#open office
deb ftp://ftp.vpn-junkies.de/openoffice unstable main contrib
then "apt-get install openoffice.org" I think it is..., if you have the msttcorefonts then openoffice should use those fonts if they're installed properly or so it seems. I can select and use Arial, etc.
Elitism drives people away, as does saying "RTFM" or belittling people who choose a different distro from yourself.
I totally agree. I sat in a meeting with a cocky systems administrator wearing an RTFM t-shirt. When it came to deciding who got layed off, he was the first to go. He may have been very good with UNIX and Linux systems, but speaking in a condescending tone made people who worked with him feel small. He had to go.
It is a royal pain in the ass to install a ttf under linux, it's not just copy it to the directory, you have to do all other retarded things, add it to config files, etc. Maybe that's because I don't have xfstt installed, and rely on X11's built in ttf support.
Recent KDEs have a font installer in the control center, where you can add fonts easily and it will generate a good
publicsource.apple.com
Don't expect it to ever work nearly as well as anything running on Apple hardware, though. One of the main reasons OS X works so well is that they're not trying to support every computer ever made.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
Uhm, yeah. So, tell me, do you own a car?
Do you like to configure the ignition curves for your engine?
Do you like to machine your own oil-filter base plate?
Do you like to plumb your air intake exactly the way you want it?
Do you like to adjust the exhaust pipe lengths to change the resonant frequency?
Most people want to just get in the car and drive. Heck, they want to NOT know the gory little details.
Much is made of the fact that X is fundamentally remotable. However, WinXP editions other than "Home" support running remote GUI applications using terminal services technology. The machine is still fundamentally single user (you either "take over" the main console session or that session is suspended for the duration of the remote session), but I've found for home use it gets the job done nicely.
I used this capability routinely while traveling on business, proxying the terminal services session over SSH running on my OpenBSD gateway. It actually performed usably when dialed up to an ISP from a hotel room halfway across the country. And by usable, I don't mean "it could be used if you're a masochist". I mean, I used it to send / receive home e-mail and do Quicken regularly. Although X has it's strengths, working well over high-lag, low-bandwidth connections is not one of them.
Agreed. My old box was a Win2K machine, which worked fine for everything I needed to do. Last week I had the dubious honour of setting up a new WinXP box. While there are certainly things to like about XP (it's almost worth it just to lock the toolbars so you can't accidentally drag them around), I have seen plenty of irritating niggles.
I have other reservations as well, but the poor UI work and lack of performance/stability are enough to rule it out as an advance over 2K as far as I'm concerned, before you even get into the whole IE/Media Player/DRM/M$ 0wnz U thing.
I'm about to get a new top-of-the-range box, and I'm looking seriously at what type of system and what OS I install. Right about now, the options under consideration are Win2K, Linux and MacOS X. After my experiences at work, WinXP isn't a contender.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You think it's easy to hook up a CDRW or a scanner to a Sun?
/dev/cdrom0 when I insert blank media (needless to say, I click "No").
Well, I haven't tried a scanner, but I have been installing Plextor CDRWs in the Ultra10s at work and they wok just fine under Solaris 8. No configuration necessary. They even automount under vold and ask if I want to format the blank floppy in
utter rubbish
no-one ever complained that you have to recompile your whole kernel with the new hardware support
Maybe they've never complained because it's not true?
If the driver is written correctly (as is everything I've ever tried), and your kernel supports modules (which is every distro I've ever seen) then you _don't_ have to recompile your kernel, you compile the module, do a depmod -a, and modprobe.
Title of parent post is:
Re:Kinda (Score:3)
Is this a bug? Since it's been moderated, shouldn't it be Interesting or Informative or Troll or something?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
... I just can't afford the hardware.
Like most other things in life, the decision is a tradeoff. Here's the thing to think about: how much is your time worth?
I ran Linux. I like linux. I still choose Linux for my web hosting (thinking about OpenBSD, tho'). I bought a Powerbook Laptop 2 years ago, though. A few months later, I picked up a copy of the OS X public beta. Inside of a month I was sold. Even factoring the extra amount of time I sometimes had to futz to get not-quite-totally-makefile-ported software over, I spent so much less time trying to get things to go my way that there was no contest. When I want the command line and UNIX goodness, it's there. When I don't want to think about it, I don't have to. That savings was easily worth $500. Maybe more.
As for affordability.... I'm typing this on that same Powerbook G3/333 Mhz. I had to put 384 MB RAM in the thing to keep it usable, but usable it is. You can probably find something nearly twice that Mhz for under $600.
Worth it to me.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
The first thing to realize is that the "slowness" is not actually slowness but blinking and flashing of intermediate displays before the final one is shown. If when you moved a window it jumped every second to follow the mouse, but jumped exactly and cleanly with all the underlaying windows appearing fully-drawn instantly, it would probably be more preferrable to the way X works now.
The problem is primarily due to the seperate window manager. This guarantees that windows will move and resize at a different time than their contents are redrawn. This is because the window manager moves the window, but then exposure or resize events must be delivered to a different application which then generates the drawing. If the same program could deliver the move and drawing instructions in a single block it would look way smoother. Unlike what a lot of people think, latency is NOT an issue, what is important is that all the instructions come from the same program and can be delivered as one block. This in particular makes resizing terrible on X, window dragging is about equal on X and Windows nowadays.
Another problem was "visuals" which produced annoying color flashing. Fortunately XFree86 has pretty much gotten rid of these on Linux, but if you try an Irix or Sun machine you will see this lovely stupidity in action. This is just BAD design, a proper design would consider the visual part of the "paint" so you don't change a pixel's visual until it is drawn.
Another problem is background clearing, which made sense on older slow machines but produces annoying flashes nowadays, as when you expose an area it is changed twice, first to the background, then to the final display. Windows does not do this (it does do some kind of timeout and clear to white so that dead programs don't end up with garbage in them, but in normal use this does not happen).
As much as they try to make the G4 machines look modular, they are not. It is a totally different ballpark than what you get with a PC.
Really? A friend of mine bought a G4 (400 or 450, cant remember) a couple years ago. Since then, he's upgraded the CPU to a faster G4 (500?), upgraded the video card to a ATI Radeon, added a second NIC, added additional firewire ports, and replaced the CD-RW. Not to mention that he's used a 3rd-party mouse and keyboard since he bought it. Having owned a PC for several years, I can safely say I've done far less upgrades to my PC (only a faster CD-RW, more RAM, and firewire ports). Just based on my experiences, I'd have to say the G4 machines are just as modular and upgradeable as any PC you could build or buy.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Just yesterday, Mozilla 1.0.0 hosed X 4.2.0 on ATI (Radeon) hardware. It was font-related, I think. First, xfs began consuming 98% of CPU, and X bloated up to 350MB. I have a physical 256 MB in the machine. Then, xfs crashed, mozilla crashed, etc.
switch to terminal,
So, yeah, this was pretty much an X problem.
The whole multi-window application thing bothers me on X. On Windows or Mac, a dialog for an app stays in from of the app. If I focus the app, the dialog comes to the front. On X, it doesn't. I have to hunt for the dialog. This is annyoing, for instance, with The Gimp. Or pop-up dialog boxes in Nautilus.
I think the best solution is MacOSX's slide-down "dialog sheets" (or whatever they're called).
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
As for windows XP, I can't say drivers are any easier than linux, as even relatively recent hardware, such as a HP 3400c scanner, just doesn't work properly.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
I'm dubious about XP being a good OS.
I don't have any huge problems with the NT line of kernels (NT, 2k, XP). They're a bit slow, and the VM subsystem sucks in performance compared to Linux. They also lack a lot of cool functionality that the Linux kernel has (uber-powerful packet filtering and routing, low latency/realtime extensions). OTOH, they have very finely grained protection schemes, which is nice.
However, the 2k kernel is not what bothers me -- it's the software that comes with the kernel -- the file browser, the file search utility, the web browser, the dock. They suck. The dock isn't anywhere near as flexible as any but the worst of the UNIX docks. The file browser isn't very flexibile, keeps forgetting saved views on me, is slow and RAM hungry, and has security problems out the wazoo. The file search utility is incredibly slow and weak (combine locate, find, and grep and you have a far faster, more powerful system). I don't like the networking subsystem -- trying to get NT to have two configurations to switch between (where I have a PPP connection at home and an Ethernet connection at school) without uninstalling drivers was a pain -- disabling interfaces resulted in screwy routing. I dislike the lack of symlinks. I think the command shell sucks, lacking basic functionality and running extremely slowly. I'm unhappy with network file system performance -- SMB from Windows box to Windows box is sloooowwwww. I think the ACL system has some bad design decisions. I can't figure out why MS has never updated some of the truly ancient, lame software (Solitaire, Notepad (a bit better in 2k), the Calculator) that comes with the OS. I *really* don't like the file locking scheme -- an open file cannot be moved or renamed or deleted, unlike UNIX. I also think that it's really dumb that there's no concept of "limited right drivers" that can't barf all over your kernel (granted, Linux lacks this too).
I will say that the NT kernel is pretty stable, and that it's better than the truly horrific 9x line. But as for "hard pressed to find a better OS"? Nah.
May we never see th