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.

Comments

Why Not Mac / OSX?

[idonotexist]

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 I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so...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

OSX

[isa-kuruption]

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.

Re:As a Windows user I'm a bit surprised.

[gosand]

I'm a bit surprised he didn't go to Win2K.

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.

Linux needs games

[Fastball]

My parents, fed up with how their PC had been brought to its knees by AOL and Windows Me (I know, I know), asked me if I could come up with something easier. I had been singing of Linux to them for some time, and I decided I'd try to set up their box with a Linux distro in such a way that they could do what they typically do with a PC. E-mail, web browsing, word processing, spreadsheet stuff, and personal finance. It was a snap.

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.

Re: commodity PCs

[King_TJ]

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....

nirvana of computing

[valmont]

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.

How can a subjective experience be wrong?

[mactari]

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.