Slashdot Mirror
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.
If this guy switched from Linux to Windows XP what hope is there for me switching from XP to Red Hat like I have been trying to do? So far I have had problems with getting sound and printing to work on Linux and I havent' even tried to get my scanner or CDRW drive to work. The Linux communities' intentions are certainly in the right place but why does *nix have to be such a pain in the ass for workstation use.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
This user's wish:
I wanted something simple. I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so... well... unstable. I got tired of having to recompile my kernel every time I got new hardware. I got tired of using command line to talk to my PC. It was time for a change.
I wouldn't be surprised if this guy, again, becomes frustrated with his OS because it sounds like he is looking for something that just works, is refined, and has new technology (wanted to use latest unstable Deb, didn't he?). Well, Win XP scores maybe 1/3 of that criteria. However, a Mac seems to fulfill 3/3 IMO. Sounds like a Mac / OSX user.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
You know, I had the same problems with Linux on the desktop - I like it as a server, but many desktop pieces are just a pain in the ass to do. (Change screen resolutions, get some games running, etc).
I went to OS X because I wanted the power of Unix - but I didn't want the hassle - I wanted to be able to enter rm por[TAB] and ln -s and all the stuff I'm used to - but if I want to pop in Warcraft III, I want it to run, not try and figure out why Mesa3D isn't configured right for my video card.
But that's me. Like I said, I still like Linux on the server side, but it just drove me crazy on the desktop.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I simply don't get it. I bought the best hardware I could get and haven't had any of the problems I read about. Running RedHat 7.2 and looking at upgrading to 7.3 soon. I'm running an Intel P4 1.6 Ghz system with an Asus P4B266 board and 512 megs of ram. Sound works good. Had one "little" problem with my GeForce 4 card (downloaded drivers from their site.. fixed in 5 minutes).
:-)
Other than my G4 problems it just... works
Personally, I've never liked any of the X-based desktops. I've always used the command line exclusively with Linux and Unix. The flexibility of the command line with standard Unix stuff like bash, less, sed, awk and perl is something I don't ever see Windows catching up to. I've never seen a scripting language more adept than Perl, a web server more capable than Apache, or a scheduler that makes more sense than cron. Servers are where Linux and Unix make sense.
Conversely on my desktop, when I want to use a graphical IDE to debug programs, or create graphics, or play games, nothing beats a Windows desktop for me. The clincher is that things work the same across most programs - simple things like copy and paste, or Ctrl-F to search. I'm almost always working with 10 or more programs open at once(including a couple of SSH sessions) and I need an environment that doesn't slow me down.
In fact, I really don't know any Linux or BSD users who never rely on a good closed-source OS for at least some things. The most rabid Microsoft hater I know still keeps a Windows partition for games. Lets face it, the only people who use Linux and nothing else do it for ideological reasons. Most of us just want stuff to work right and pick the best tool for the job at hand.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I have no formal IT/CS training. I'm not much of a programmer, at all. I've been using icewm on Debian with a Japanese environment for about a year now. The latest OpenOffice1.0.0 Japanese distro is here too, so I am serviceable to my M$ using contemporaries. I don't need any fancy desktop, I just use the krxvt terminal and man pages (with less as the pager). Once you've editted on .config file, you can do them all, in just a couple of secs.
But the best thing is that I have paid no money for any of this, and none of it is warezed. It really only took me 6 months to get fully comfortable, and I think slowly the people at work are starting to take me seriously when I say, I don't use Windows and I don't want to.
But I agree with most of the stuff this guy said; but I think that if you read the start of his article, it's clear that he never really had a strong feeling for the philosophy of GNU/Linux, which is something I believe in quite strongly. It is true, Linux still requires either prior know-how (ie, you have always been a computer person), or a strong belief that you really don't want to use M$ or any other proprietary money sucking, spying etc. corporate-ware.
I have no sig
I went through the Linux desktop thing a couple years ago, and switched back to Windows 2000 as my primary desktop after some time. While I know the Linux desktop has improved (and I have dabbled in trying Linux as a desktop since then for a month or so), I still thought 2000 and eventually XP was just a better platform with Linux on another box or in a VMware window....
;).
I recently had grown tired of XP, and Linux still wasn't cutting it, so I bought a PowerMAC G4 and love it. OSX offers the best of both worlds. While it still does not have all the programs XP does, it still has more than Linux. On top of that, all the hardware I was running on XP run under OSX, I can easily and seemlessly run X applications using XFree's rootless X server, and ALSO there is a VMware like program called VirtualPC which allows me to run x86 OS's in VM windows (right now, running XP, OpenBSD and Linux in the VM's).
Also, since the mac processors are just a tad better, I get better performance and my machine never bogs down. (Yes, look for me doing those Mac "switch" commercials in the near future!
I just think this is the best of both worlds.
for i in *.jpg
do something ${i}
something quite complicated `basename ${i}
done
as the most time efficient user interface ever developed. Not simple, or intuitive, but by crikey it doesn't half make your life easier.
I once watched my sister start to convert 1000 jpegs into pngs by loading them individually into photoshop and using "Save As..." (her employers couldn't afford any more specialist conversion software. I let her do about 50, just for comedy value...
Automating, dull repititive tasks. When I was growing up, thats what the told me machines were for...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I don't think, X as an architecture is the main problem for Linux on the desktop. Most problems are solved. When windows aren't moving fast, this is a problem of the driver and not of X. When you have a card with decent drivers, you won't notice many differences in speed.
Many of the problems desktop users have with Linux are related to missing (or in many cases bad) drivers. Windows has drivers for everything. So Linux will always be behind. This will be disappointing. Sooner or later.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
I'm not. His last MS OS was Win95. And according to his Linux experience, he seemed to want to go out and get the latest and greatest OS. So when he went to purchase a new MS OS, which one do you think appealed to him? Why, XP of course. If you go to microsoft's website, they have a comparison between XP and Win98 and between XP and Win95, to show you how advanced XP is over their "old" OS offerings. No mention of XP vs Win2k.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Fantastically enough, XP has tab completion.
/F:ON. But XP got it right, it's tab, it's always tab, and it's on by default.
/.ers there are like me that are terrified of posting because they know they'll be eaten alive.
Win2k had it too, tho it was borked for some weird reason, you had to use CTRL-F for files and CTRL-D for directories, and you had to ENABLE this functionality by changing your command line to CMD
And yeah. Seriously, the tagline here is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." I'm very much a nerd, huge into games, I do software development for a living, and I USE WINDOWS. I've always felt very turned off by the excessive and downright STUPID anti-MS mentality of slashdot (and yet somehow I keep coming here. Like watching a trainwreck I guess).
2k is stable, XP is stable, VS.NET is the best development environment I've ever used. Valid criticisms of MS are welcome but most days it's just PETTY. (HAHA M$ HAHA BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH HAHA WINTEL awepfjiweopf) Microsoft puts out a lot of quality software these days and trying to keep denying it is just pathetic.
I am impressed that slashdot posted this article, and think the author was very fair. The comments here have even been pretty fair. I wonder how many clost windows-using
I run plain FVWM2 on my older K6-2 machine and my Sparcstation 5. With NetBSD. It's damn snappy, and it gets the job done.
KDE and Gnome are almost ENTIRELY bloat. It's a 'let's see if we can drag in as much bloat as Microsoft' effort.
Sorry, not interested.
Ok, I've got to get this off my chest. I'm sick of hearing how Linux is unready for the desktop. I know everyone has different experiences, but I can't be that much out into left field. I've used Linux as my home workstation since RH 6.2, and am completely satisfied (the only hole being the Sorenson codecs). My last installs were Mandrake 8.2 for a laptop, and RH 7.2 for my workstation, and everything was fine. RH even detected and configured my CD-RW, and my DVD player just works. When I bought my TV card (back in dual boot days), guess which OS the card worked in fastest? Linux. When I set up a dual monitor configuration, how much blood did I shed? None. I'm no programmer either, and I didn't start using Linux in the "dark old days", but nowadays there's no reason for much bitching about using Linux on the desktop, it just works!
The real question is, like we asked before, why does Joe Sixpack get a pass on reading documentation? No problem I've run into on Linux couldn't be solved by a little RTFM. Sure, bitch about point, click it works, but then don't turn around when the latest virus has you by the balls cuz you pointed and clicked!
Peace out, happy hacking
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
I'm surprised that Red Hat hasn't gone through everything and fixed the font situation.
:-)
Have you seen the new RedHat Beta (supposedly for 8.0)? Since RedHat uses GNOME and GTK for everything, and since they're using gtk2, everything is anti-aliased with really nice TT fonts. Even the GDM greeter. I think they're going to get it right in the next release.
I'm lucky enough to have a lot of machines at home. I always have had. I still have my C64 here... and my amiga... and another 12 machines which are much more up to date and current.
I've been using linux since 1992 when I first downloaded it at 19.2K onto 11 floppy disks.
I've never _just_ used linux though. I've always used a mixture of linux and other operating systems. At the very least, I've always had a dual-boot machine around for playing games on. For the last three years or so, I've used a couple of windows2000 boxes as workstations, and the rest of my 8-10 machines have run either solaris, linux or openbsd.
Now, maybe I've just been sitting here reading slashdot and theregister for so long that I can't read the word Microsoft without seeing red, but I finally decided I'd got totally sick and tired of viruses, continuous reboots, mythical uptimes which simply don't exist if you maintain your machines properly, and overpriced broken software.I'd always kept Windows on my main workstation because I need to use Visio and Word for my work... and of course there's the games too... But regardless of this, I thought I'd see how I could get along with linux on my main machine for a while. So far, the 'while' has been about 4 months, and I've no plans of switching back.
mplayer is superior to media player. Full stop. No messing. Don't argue. It's faster, it looks nicer, it doesn't try to download 'Media Guide' from microsoft every time it starts up, and it works with _everything_ these days.
Mozilla 1.0 is superior to IE6. Don't argue here. I'm not trying to bait you. It's just my opinion.
Mozilla Mail & News can do everything outlook express can, except for spread viruses.
KDE3 is a superior GUI to Windows2000. I can't comment on WindowsXP's gui because I haven't allowed it anywhere in the house.
KvIRC 3 is as good as mIRC, but there's a couple of annoying bugs that still have to be fixed. It's totally useable now tho'
Kate is a perfectly good text editor. I'd rate it significantly better than Notepad, but not as good as ultraedit.
Samba support is fine. Konqueror makes a useable interface for browsing/copying files like you do on windows. I double click movies.. mplayer loads... I double click mp3s... xmms loads... Just like with windows...
Word and Visio.... now there's a problem... but.. I figured.. if I just need Windows to run Word and Visio, then why not do that... so I set up a vmware machine, installed windows2k, word and visio on there... problem solved...
Just one left....
Gaming under linux isn't too great yet. but.... I've checked out the cvs for the transgaming stuff and it's well on the way. I figure that in about 6 months time, all the games I currently own will be supported, so I decided to be patient and try to help them out by sending them money and support. If I don't, who will?
I can't honestly say that I never boot back to windows... but I can honestly say that the last time I did was about 3 weeks ago when a couple of mates came round for a gaming session. I'm hoping that my patience and attempts to actively support gaming on the linux platform will save me from having to reboot in the future.
The moral of this story....
Guy who's been using Linux and Windows both together for 10 years finally ditches windows altogther because there's no longer any good reason to run it...
Did I mention that it's written by criminals, and it's not liebellous foe me to say that because it's true... Proven in a court of law in front of god.
At that time all I wanted to do was:
So as soon as GAIM was released I could do all this and I made the switch. My feelings were, as long as Linux did what I needed, I would use it....I was a CS student who could handle its complexities.
5 years later it's a different world. Yes, Linux has made a LOT of progress, more than I could have imagined. But Windows has come a long way (especially with 2k and XP). While X is struggling with fonts, XP has cleartype fonts that look great on LCDs. XP is almost (or equally) as stable as Linux. More and more sites are IE specific. Lots of flash-only sites don't work with Linux's version of flash (yeah I hate flash only sites too, but the point is, they're out there). Realplayer used to me enough to watch news videos on cnn.com, now you gotta have the version that you can embed into the html in the seperate browser window that will open up. And there are a few Windows only programs coming up that I would really like to use. Not that I wouldn't love to see Linux suceed on the desktop, but it probably would have been MORE likely 5-10 years ago.
So in the end, I'll probably obtain (or buy, if I really have to) a copy of XP pretty soon. I'm going to be moving and I want to set up my computers fresh, start over on a clean slate. And in my new setup I'm keeping Windows on the Desktop, and Linux on the servers.
I brought my Redhat 7.3 CDs with me (burnt from ISOs) and went to work installing as minimal a workstation setup as I could. These baby boomers aren't going to break out gcc and go to hacking on CVS source any time soon. I left off as much as I could without running into RPM hell with dependencies. An hour later, we were up and running.
We subscribe to a local DSL provider, a telco, and the Internet is just a /usr/sbin/netconfig away.
Went online and downloaded OpenOffice 1.0 and Mozilla 1.0. All that was left was a decent personal finance package. Off we went to grab GnuCash.
Acclamating my folks to OpenOffice and Mozilla was easy, because after all, a web browser is a web browser and a office suite is an office suite (licensing aside, of course). GnuCash was a little tougher to sell to my dad who is a MS Money fanatic. Time will tell if he'll stick with GnuCash long enough for this experiment to pass muster, but I'm optimistic.
So the weekend over, I leave satisfied that I've freed two more human beings, my parents no less, from the confines of proprietary software. The drive home is a beautiful thing.
Then my mom calls. She wants to know if I can reinstall Monopoly (by Infogrames for Windows 95/98). And dad wants me to reinstall SimCity. These are their two favorite things to do with the PC. They've probably etched a couple of deep grooves in their hard drive where these these two programs reside. In short, we're fucked in full.
To make a long story short, I was able to satisfy my mom's Monopoly jones by installing Kapitalist, a free Monopoly type game. She missed the animations that the Infrogrames game provided, but she got by. My dad however was SOL. I was hoping to find a copy of SimCity 3000 Unlimited by Loki, but as most of you know Loki is no more. My dad took it in stride, and explained that he'll just find another game to get hooked on. As you can see my parents are gamers, and I do love them so for that.
Problem. Finding and installing a quality game for Linux that a Linux neophyte or general non-hacker can install is difficult. Remember, my folks were running with AOL before all of this. They don't want to worry about glibc versions and the like.
So my folks were happy that they could get online with one click to Mozilla, happy they could read and compose documents and spreadsheets, and curious about GnuCash's abilities, but they seriously doubted they could have any fun in between.
I would say that a Linux distro, if properly tamed, can be a quality desktop solution provided you're willing to bite the gaming bullet. How many of us dual-boot for this alone? Sorry to hear we lost one to the dark side, especially after 3.5 years of grinding it out.
Who is this 'Joe Average' and why are we always thinking we have to play to his level? If we applied this way of thinking to everything, cars would run down embedded tracks in the road, preventing collisions yet also preventing you from leaving the pavement for picnics, road trips, etc.
If we applied it to telephony, we'd still be cranking up the dial for Gertrude at the central switchboard and asking her to connect us to long distance... Then asking Mary at long distance to connect us to Albuquerque... Then... You get the picture.
Nowadays, we LEARN TO DRIVE and we LEARN TO DIAL A PHONE NUMBER. Joe Average just has to keep up.
I have successfully held out on XP here at work. In fact, we have but ONE pc running it, and only that because it was a laptop that came preinstalled with it. Personally, XP feels like a crazy gene-splicing experiment using DNA from Windows and the Fisher Price Little People. I have yet to discover any significant improvement in the OS. It is a memory hog--and for no reason other than the fact that is now needs RAM to present this gaudy, new Colorform-type GUI. Additionally, I find extra steps where there used to be none, specifically catering to the self-inflicted mental retardation of this 'Joe Average' person. Screw Joe Average. Joe Average is the guy in school who was a screw-up and a class clown and never learned anything, and whose antics kept YOU from learning anything, either. If Joe Average wants to use a computer, make him turn off the pro-wrestling and crack open a 'Learn Visually' book on the subject.
CASE CLOSED.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
Bleah.... after close to 10 years of doing PC support, consulting, and technician work - I'm convinced that there's really no "better way" of dealing with the new hardware purchases.
If you constantly chase down compatibility (EG. Our new systems must be able to boot using the same Norton Ghost drive image we built for the last ones!), you cheat yourself out of better deals for the money spent. Manufacturers don't just change around system specs because they enjoy frustrating the consumer. They do it because they can add new functionality, better performance, or simply because old components they used are no longer in production.
On the other hand, if you don't insist on "nearly identical" hardware - your productivity suffers as your techs have to learn to deal with all those different configurations.
So in effect, it's pretty much a wash. You either save $'s by always getting the best value for the money in new hardware and lose some of the savings in added support costs, or you blow it up front paying premium prices for outdated but compatible hardware, and make your support jobs less taxing.
Given those considerations - I'd typically opt for getting whatever hardware is latest and greatest for the money. Modern OS's generally behave pretty well on modern hardware, and by buying large number of systems at a time (instead of 10 here, and 5 or 10 there a month or two later), you minimize the headaches of multiple system types scattered all over....
Yup, you are right. There is no such thing as a scripting language in the land of Windows.
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not. In case you're serious, I'd like to point out the following:
1) Windows has VbScript built in. This plus WMI allows you to do many things. If the application you want to use has a CLI, your problem may already be solved.
2) Perl and TCL are available for windows as well.
3) There are many keyboard/mouse macro recording utilities available (Aldo's Macro Recorder for example).
And this is just a small sample of what's available.
he should have moved to a Mac running OS X.
If you want a platform that has absolutely ALL the benefits of a BSD unix platform, including security by design, stability, reliability, on TOP the ability to use your machine as an everyday desktop operating system to perform any task such as accounting, web surfing, office documents authoring, J2EE web applications development, mess around a tcsh shell, author and run scripts, play with your /etc/hosts file to filter ad servers, mixed-network-protocol networking at both server AND client levels, open any document from any other platform, create PDF documents from any application from which you can print, then OS X is the operating sytem for you.
you don't believe me?
Check out my journal to see my migration story from a win2k laptop to a titanium powerbook.
You want to see more gorey details on some of the crazy things you can do with OS X?
Then you might wanna take a look at this journal entry.
Face it. OS X is by far, and i'm carefuly measuring my words here, the absolute best operating system whether you're a unix geek, a business development drone, an engineer or ... my Mom.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Yes, fonts can be quite frustrating, but kfontinst (which is now in KDE 3) makes it much easier. It's in Control Panel->System->Font Installer
:>)
btw - I am a marketroid with a linux box, using Kmail, Konq and Open Office
Why go throught that step?
C'mon, you can't keep upgrading your skanky old p133 forever. At some point you'll have to buy new hardware. At that point switching to the Macintosh seems like a pretty reasonable suggestion. People buy new computers all the time in fact for all kinds of reasons. Even new x86 ones! Go figure! Nobody's suggesting gnawing off one's own leg here. It's buying a computer - a concept everyone here should be familiar with.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
This works on NT (3.1+)
.cmd files (NT's version of .bat) and the resulting code took up less space then the similar perl code, minus the heartache of getting perl to work correctly over the network (Problems in older version of perl for Windows, which have been fixed now) and the biggest thing; Perl is not as clean as a language for other IT people who don't know perl.
for %a in (*.jpg) do CMDTORUN %a %a.new
ren *.jpg.new *.png
(You must replace % with %% in a batch file)
You can place the entire command into a single line, and use replacement characters instead of renaming the file afterwords. If you don't want to see the output, you can pipe it to null
ren *.jpg.new *.png > nul
The really nice thing is most of the POSIX apps will compile on NT3.1 - W2k nativly, so you can have things like fgrep and wc.
While working for a large organization (17,000+ desktops) and designing the automated loadset for Windows NT desktops, I wrote the entire thing in
Windows NT command prompt has a very powerful syntax if you spend the time to look into it.
I decided to try Linux as an alternative to Win98SE on my laptop right about when Red Hat was releasing the betas that became 7.1. I let the Red Hat installer walk me through things, and basically everything (with one exception) worked right off, with no tweaking. The default KDE setup was quite useable - I did later switch to Gnome (and then Enlightenment) because of speed, but since I was coming from Windows I didn't realize how fast a desktop could be. ;-)
I've been surprised by how well my various devices have worked without tweaking. A Microtek SCSI scanner, a USB Sony CD-RW drive, an Epson Stylus 800 printer (with CUPS, admittedly) - all worked right away. It's been impressive how well Red Hat has done to create a useable system out of the box. The one exception was my Xircom modem/ethernet card, which didn't work with that first RH beta (but has been just fine from the second beta onwards). Heck, I could even plop an audio CD in my CD/DVD drive, and it would start playing - just like Windows. Also, the apps in Gnome and/or OpenOffice pretty much cover my desktop needs. Then once I learned to use the GIMP, I really had very little use for Windows anymore - pretty much everything I used in Windows has a perfectly functional Linux GUI counterpart.
My Linux-using friends are a small group, but their experiences have basically been the same as mine. We all now tend to tweak things anyway, but that's more in the category of playing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H making things work more efficiently. When I use Windows now, it's not by choice - and I spend a good bit of that time grumbling at the slowness of the system.
#DeleteChrome
Didn't IBM kill off OS/2 years ago, and sell it to another company?
I vaguely recall seeing an article (somewhere) that showed the "new" OS/2 version after the new company got ahold of it. Looked pretty much the same, sans the WARP moniker.
Having worked at IBM (supporting OS/2) I can say it was a superior OS at the time. Unfortunately, no one was writing software or drivers for it (compared to the WIntel combo) and every time we turned around, IBM was pointing both barrels at its feet in regards to the OS.
Hell, they even gave copies away to IBMers to try to get them to use it and spawn a quasi-grassroots campaign to get the fire fanned. You would've been amazed at the number of internals that called our support desk bitching about what a big POS it was...
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
There is a very good reason I don't switch to OsX. I don't feel like giving a company control over my PC. As long as Apple monopolizes the hardware, I'll never switch. I've been a M$ user since DOS 5.0, and for the most part I've been happy with it because it lets me do want I want with my computer. I'm running win2kpro now, and pretty satisfied. However I don't think I'll ever upgrade to XP or Longhorn, I'm seriously considering moving to Mandrake instead. M$ has gone to far, Register my computer every time I change the hardware? I don't think so, none of their damn business. Palladium, no way, its my box, not yours. .NET, aren't we having enough security problems as it is? Replacing the filesystem with a central database, talk about the end of user intervention.
Basically, any one company that thinks they can control my machine and how I use it, is going to go the way of the dodo as far as I'm concerned.
I even play games, native Linux games, and using winex, no need for windows. I use winex because it's easier than rebooting all the time. I don't even bother mounting my winblows partition in Linux, nothing useful there.
IMO, best of both worlds would be Linux and OSX desktop machines, and Linux/*BSD servers, screw windows, it's the only "modern" OS around trying to limit what the user does instead of trying to empower the user. Fuck that, computers are supposed to be general computing devices, not restrictive appliances like DVD players and VCRs.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Well. I have opposite experience than this guy.
1. My X never crashes. He mentions he has
NVIDIA - well, this is his problem, binary
drivers not X.
My Linux never crashes. XP crashes regularly
even though I use XP 5% of the time - just
for Spanish and for hardware config: my Spanish
program crashes XP and d-link configuration utility
crashes XP if I plug the AP in the different hub than initially. The only program on XP which I
use and does not crash it is DVD movie viewer.
2. I agree fonts are far from perfect but
I do not care about them anyway. The only thing
is that I do not like anti-aliasing - my eyes ache
from it.
3. Binary kernel drivers are a bad thing.
They are usually far less stable than OS ones.
He mentions he has NVIDIA, he complains that
X crashes, yet he still praises binary drivers?
This guy contradicts himself.
It is stupid he argues for them.
He should rather be much more carefull in what
he is buying. If you buy right hardware - you
have no problems with drivers. Even better -
drivers are in the system so you do not have
this nasty CD-juggling/OS-rebooting as in Windows.
4. You do not have to compile the whole
kernel. The whole idea of modeuls is that
you compile just the module - just the driver.
With right Makefile made by someone foryou
it is quick and painless.
5. cd-writers : adding a single, well defined
line to lilo.conf or grub.conf is not
a big hassle. Also some distros do it for you.
Why not suse- I have no idea.
I do not know about GUI. CLI with simple
basic scripts is far simpler and faster for me.
6. most of the time you do not have to compile
software on Linux - just get rpm. You need
to compile only when you need the latest version
or you need a new driver.
Now about XP: well I had a lot of cases when
drivers are crashing XP while the built-in driver
does not work. Honestly - I had many more
problems with Windows XP than with Linux.
But I am buying hardware carefully - after
insuring it does work with Linux.
I used Linux for a couple years, and dropped it when Windows 2000 came out. Now that XP is out, I find it to be an excellent OS. Here are some of the apps that I use:
1) Powerquest Drive Image. After a perfect installation of my system and applications, I take an image. I take images in steps so that I revert to one or another at any time. Fifteen minutes sure beats 6 hours of installation. Drive Image is a gem for any windows users. It preserves perfect installations from viruses, trojans, and other possible system problems.
2) Virus protection. Any file should be scanned prior to use. I have EZAntivirus since it has a small footprint. I use it in manual scan mode only.
3) Firewall. Nuff said.
4) Regcleaners or reg tracking software. Windows poor design makes it challenging to keep the registry clean. Of course I can always use Drive Image to revert back. This gives me the means to try any software with zero risk.
Windows XP is a huge advancement over previous versions. With the addition of some thrid party apps, you can take control of it easily and avoid any catastrophe.
Regards,
javajeff
I think you're absolutely right wrt Windows; everyone who is anyone knows that it's total crap, and there is lots of beer and pizza to be consumed over many bizarre breakdowns/failures of hardware and software. Maybe he won't suffer a blow to his self-esteem because his computer is broken, but I would imagine he's still pissed that he can't just install a CD-RW and a scanner at the same time.
However, my experience dictates the inverse of your statement about MacOS. When someone's Mac has a problem, the same tactics will work for fixing most problems with OS 9 on down, because your list of software culprits is relatively short, and nearly all of them live in the system folder. Usually. Anyone who tells you, "Well, it shouldn't do that," or "Mine works fine" probably doesn't have any interest in helping you fix it, anyways.
Meanwhile, I am rendered helpless at the myriad ways Windows finds to screw its users, and its total unwillingness to explain to you why it died. When people ask me why the blue screen o' death appears, I have no other answer than, "It just does that sometimes. Heck, maybe someone else did it to you... there's no way to know." And so I fear that Microsoft is directly responsible for the distrust many people have for computers - they simply don't know that there are ways you can have a computer that isn't frustrating.
And that's too bad.
Olde Cmdr Taco says:
;^)
[Some of his points are wrong, but it's a reasonable article.]
I'm a little lost on how any of the author of the linked article's subjective feelings on the suitability of *NIX on the desktop can be "wrong". I think he's done a good job to document his gripes when they deserve it, and I bet he'd be the first to admit that perhaps his $99 (Australian) CD-RW isn't representative of every IDE drive out there.
But you can't fault this guy for not being honest or for not doing his research. Heck, the only point I could find to argue with at all was in this quote:
[When I move a window [in WinXP], it refreshes so fast that I don't miss X11 at all. While not quite as nice as some other operating systems, font support is outstanding compared to XFree86.]
"other operating systems" links to Mac OS X. I hope he meant font support, b/c the Finder's dog slow in Appleland.
Sounds like a reasonable cross-platform guy who's done his research to me. Though his reasons for not using Linux on the desktop might not be the same as someone else's, that doesn't make him wrong. [-1 Troll] Mr. Taco.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
If Linux was a car, it would still be that old junker that Uncle Fred keeps in his garage and tinkers with every weekend. He's having fun, but most everyelse just wants to drive someplace.
And here I'd say it was more of a Delorian that looked like the death star as far as not being completed yet. Only nutjobs in black hemlets or old men who like to tinker with flux capacitors really feel at home with it. Lots of people think its cool and build off it, some people just want the brakes to work and leap off in frusteration/terror. Others just look at it and with a strained smile say they're happy where they are.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I use Linux at work and at home for exactly the same reasons you use Windows at home. I'm a graduate student doing research in computational models of particular aspects of vision. I do not have time to "fiddle with little bits to make it work better" either. This is why I use Linux.
:( Everything is free and this is critical to a lab. I set everything up years ago and haven't touched it (significantly) since.
This is also why the 22 other machines in our lab run Linux. This is also why half of the department runs Linux or Solaris.
They are all "desktop" machines. We use these machines over 10 hours a day sitting in front of them or from home. Since every minute I spend dorking around with the OS is a minute of delay in my graduation I have great incentive to settle on the OS that just gets the job done.
I use vim, latex, g++, matlab, feh, and mozilla every single day. All of our machines have uptimes of months. There are automated backup systems for the entire lab. I rarely need to do administrative work, and let me tell you, no one else does.
So, to me, this story comes across as written by a guy who liked to change systems. You see this all the time with people who are interested in trying out Linux in the first place. It's part of the nature of things. I got the impression that he would be trying something else in 3 years, whether its OS XII, Linux SuperSlink, Microsoft XP++ or whatever. He's going to be trying something new. This overrides any sort of comments he has over "getting work done".
He, to me, sounds like someone who likes to tinker with his computer more than I do. I mess around with it, when necessary. This is what brought me to Linux in the first place. Set it up right and it doesn't break. With Windows I would set it up and then it would break after a few months (95,98). I'm still running Win98 for games and Joy of Cooking and my Palm Pilot but I got SICK AND TIRED of watching it degrade around me.
Maybe it's just that I have both systems and use Linux 98% of the time that I get defensive. It just sounded like, to me, that he's spent WAY more time than I would have imagined buying distros, installing them, searching around, blah blah blah, as opposed to just setting the thing up right and getting on with it.
If that's in his nature, he'll do it again.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Mr Joe Average is someone who wants to install their OS, boot it up, and it works. He wants to be able to upgrade his PC , and have the hardware work in a few short minutes. He wants to read email, browse the web, talk to his mates online, and play some games. Feel free to disagree with me, this is merely how I see myself. Note: I'm not referring to Grandma using Linux, or even my mum using it. I'm referring to average users who know a little about their computer.
Sounds like you want Mac OS X.
Step forward, not back. It's real, it's powerful, it's easy, and you can sleep at night.
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
Bravo! Great article. I hate Arial, and I love (love!) Helvetica. It's a gorgeous font that doesn't suffer from overuse like other fonts (including Times.) Arial is crap, and anyone with any sort of eye can see it. Look at the example on that page! It's just ugly.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Switching from MS Windows to Linux is like fleeing a country run by a mad tyrant dictator.
Sure, in your new home you might have to work a little harder, but at least you are free. You can even participate in the local politics if you want. Maybe the food isn't as good as in the motherland, but at least the ingredients are listed on the label.
I was/still a Linux user/admin (@work) from 1996 till 2000,in 1999 when I installed FreeBSD, all my "linux" problems just vanished. whenever you need install something, just go to the ports, make install, and ur done.
wine, crossover, vmware, these things make ur life easier when ur stuck with some app that requires a winbl0ws arch. to run..
try out FreeBSD! or OpenBSD! }:>
To get fonts that look much better than Windows (and on par with those of Mac OSX) try David Chester's Xft Hack.
Reminder: find a new sig
If we, Linux users, limit ourselves to using hardware that is Linux friendly. For instance, I have Samsung ML-1210 laser printer (600x600dpi) which cost me $180 and comes with Linux drivers (heck, it's got even Tux on the box to attest for its Linux-friendliness). I use Nvidia's cards since they openly support Linux, I use pcmcia-to-pci card that comes from a vendor that supports Linux, I use 3com network cards that have downloadable drivers for many of their cards off of their website, and finally, I use Linux-friendly soundcard(s), RME Hammerfall and SBlive!. And this is not the only choice, there is ATI with TV cards and Radeon GPU's, Matrox cards, and many soundcard vendors.
While not all hardware is supported well under Linux, what is, offers top-quality performance, and that's what matters.
Also, many hard-core Linux fans complain about some of the drivers being closed-source. I simply do not care, as long as it works. Most companies will sooner or later open-source their drivers in order to cut costs, and once they reach certain stability which community can expand upon (like Creative did with SBlive!).
In the end, what matters is that Linux users should buy only Linux-friendly hardware, and if there is really as many of us as the numbers show, these sales will amount to something real soon. Just check ATI's recent investments to get Radeon 8500 drivers going and you'll see that it is possible.
Linux community already has a strong enough leverage for further driver development to take place.
Because I have plenty of other projects in the pipeline already, and can make more progress on those other projects by avoiding the platform where they occur than by fixing them. Were either not the case, things might be very different. As it is, I do try to help out here and there on open-source projects as time and talent allow, but I'm not about to abandon my own projects to become a near-full-time Linux bug-fixer.
Of course, lots of other people feel approximately the same way, and that's part of the problem. There's little incentive to do grunt work in open source, like there is in the commercial world where supply and demand can create lucrative opportunities for people willing to hold their noses. If it's no fun, and the pay's the same, why do it? Maybe what we need is some kind of barter system, so that people with complementary skills and problems can make arrangements so that each performs the (personally) least odious task and gets their (personally) most severe problem fixed. Sort of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" instead of everyone doing contortions trying to scratch their own.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
XP is based heavily on VMS. Do you have some issue with VMS, the only OS ever able to compete seriously with UNIX in a server enviroment?
Been there, done that. Linux/X/KDE/GNOME or whatever all completely sucked ass on the desktop. Case in point: Mozilla when I used it was, and is still not ready for prime time. Many pages just do not look right, tables that look fine in IE (Windows/Mac) are all fucked up, the fonts suck, the cut/paste is counterintuitive. I really wanted Linux to work on my desktop, but I do MIDI and audio production and there is no Sound Forge or Cool Edit Pro (or anything for audio that even comes close...my ideas cannot wait. So.... I run Linux on my servers, and talk to it via an SSH client.
All of my coding and Web development is done in vi, I read mail in Pine, and use all of the power of *NIX, albiet via the Windows interface. Plus I can test my Web pages on the targeted browser (sorry guys, its an IE world. Get over it. Imagine if TVs were like browsers -- Things would look different depending on whether or not you were viewing a Sony, Toshiba, or NEC!!!)
I'm sorry, but the Windows 2000 GUI just works better and more intuitivley for me than anything I have ever tried, and I've been thru Amigas, various flavors of X, and MacOS. My way, I get the best of all worlds: Linux on the server/command line where it _truly shines_, plus the unparallelled application and driver support in Windows. Flame on, but my computer is a tool for my professional, semi-pro and hobbyist endevours, not a tinkertoy tha requires endless tweaking.
I think the way it should be done is that each window's client area always gets its own variable-size frame buffer, and X drawing calls draw to the private frame buffer, rather than directly to the screen. When the window is resized, the private frame buffer's size changes and the client gets a resize event, but when one opaque-moves a window over it, or a window over it disappears, the X server already knows what to draw in the pixels that were exposed, since all of those pixels are stored in the window's private frame buffer in the X server's memory. Voila, no more background clearing, no more slow opaque move, no more nasty flickering stuff because of synchronous calls, etc. This also doesn't actually require changes to the X protocol or X clients; the X server simply needs to pretend that all windows are not occluded, so they will draw themselves completely and not redraw themselves unless their contents change.
Having a frame buffer for each separate window would obviously eat memory, but it avoids having to do away with the separate window manager, which I think was an excellent design decision, and testament to X's superiority. It also avoids having to break compatibility.
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
One problem is that older programs won't call the "swap" function and the screen will not change except when expose events happen. Automatically copying every vertical retrace would remove a lot of the advantages of double buffering (such as flicker-free update no matter how stupid the program is). My recommendation is to fix xlib so requests to read events send the swap command, but I don't know if anything can be done about old remote X clients. I suspect these problems are the main reason this is not being done.