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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.
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.
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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 I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so...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
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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....
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?
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
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!
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."
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.
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
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.
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.