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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...
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.
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.
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
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).