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.
Ha!
that should keep you guys posting for days!
Some of his points are wrong, but it's a reasonable article.
/. has posted this article. I'm impressed by the maturity of the staff to do so.
Isn't the first step denial??
I'm joking, I'm joking.
Actually, I'm surprised
Now everyone else be mature and comment instead of flame, k?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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.,
I had to laugh at this...
Stupid users don't doggedly stick at something for three and a half years, trying distribution after distribution in the hope of finding the holy grail of Linux desktops.
Hmmmm.... I don't know about that...
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Tell your friend that if you want to switch, you're supposed to go here:
http://www.apple.com/switch/
not here:
http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/
Friends don't let friends use XP.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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
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 I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so...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"
His complaints mirror some of those from people I know who have migrated from Linux to Mac OS X. To me, that's a better play than a return to Perdition.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Imagine a marketroid given a linux box with email, a browser, and OpenOffice. He's going to absolutely hate it because of the fonts. I am a hard-core techie and I have a hard time looking at OpenOffice. But give the marketroid the same box with great-looking fonts and his tolerance for linux will go way up.
Fix the @#$%ing fonts!
kNIGits says: "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."
How is this different than a business user or someone who works in desktop support (aside from the games part)? It isn't. Until this scenario can be neatly met by Linux, it will forever be a server OS.
If anyone out there is support an installation of over 1000 linux desktops I would like to know their experiences.
The greatest point he makes is that, although there are plenty of gurus willing to help newbies with simple questions, there are even more elitests that will either flame your question or give you a "RTFM!"
I say, if you are friendly and willing to help newbies, answer their questions. If you want to flame, or send a RTFM, stay silent. If they don't get an answer, they'll eventually look their, anyway.
Elitests are the biggest weakness of Linux.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
One point the person in the article seems to miss is that he clearly was into chasing the latest distributions whenever they came out, as he seemed to have jumped up the Mandrake/Redhat/Debian releases when they came out, and he even seemed to run the unstable releases too. In the Windows world you don't get to do this much at all (except for installing the security fixes and extra clipart upgrades). It sounds like that a good deal of his problems would go away if he stayed with a distribution when it stopped giving him problems just like if he sticks to WinXP for the next few years.
Golly, it looks as though there's trouble once again in Gotham! Someone appears to have assembled a variation on the tried-and-true Lunix troll and gotten it posted to the front page of Slashdot!
He remembers to point out that X is slow, that Windows problems can be fixed with "a point and a click," and even throws in some prime bait about driver support and stability in Windows XP.
What should we do, Batman?
"...I haven't completely abandoned the Linux community. My home server still runs Mandrake, and IPCop on my gateway/firewall. There is no way I'd ever put any form of Windows on my server, nor would I ever connect a Windows PC directly to the internet without a *NIX gateway in between. Microsoft has a history of poor security, so I protect myself the only way I know how; using Linux. I will continue to advocate the use of GNU/Linux in the server arena. This is where its strength lies at the moment."
I am the only IT at my company, and all of our workstations run XP. Why is this? Because,
1. The software we need runs well on them.
2. Our users (not extremely computer literate) have problems, at times, doing things in Windows. How could I ever expect them to run Linux?
I run various flavors of boxen, but only on our servers or at home. I do not believe that Linux can hang with the ease of use of Windows.
Sure, Linux might be a better all around OS, but if it adds training time and cost to our infrastructure, it comes out to be much less useful than letting our employees run Windows with almost no training.
I use Linux (and various kinds of Unix) for the interface. I detest the mouse. Clicking all over the place is much too slow for my tastes. Clicking alternated with typing is even worse.
Tab completion is one of my favorite interface inventions ever.
Just my opinion.
The Desktop ain't rocket science... It just takes time effort and experience to get it workng the way most people want it to. Ximianis doing a pretty decent job at it and will only get better. I personally love the redcarpet feature for installing updates or new software. It just handles everything for you like it should.
I think this guy got into it too early and bailed at the wrong time. This is just the start of Linux on the desktop, before now nobody but a commited hacker could install and work with a linux desktop, now I think things are changing. Still could be better, but I would say things are in some ways better than the windows desktop. How many people install windows from scratch?
Linux just needs to come pre installed and pre configured on desktops and laptops, then we can start having some real fun.
The article makes good points, all of which are pretty common knowledge. All of the points, with the exception of replacing X though are pretty easily done.
Here's the thing though: nobody's doing them. Could someone write a package manager that hid all of the "critical" packages? Sure. Could someone write something to autodetect hardware, recompile or add a module for hardware? Yeah.
People that write for Linux don't though, because they don't want it. People don't need it. Linux isn't an OS for your mom or your gandmother. It's an OS for elitist nerdy shmucks who code a little and want to dabble with their OS.
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
Some of his points aren't wrong, they are just different from yours.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
X-Windows is an idea that sucked over a decade ago, and it hasn't improved much since. The whole concept, dumb graphics terminals tied to application servers, is obsolete. The problem is that it's marginally good enough that it hasn't been replaced on Linux by a better windowing architecture. More than anything else, X is the boat-anchor of Linux.
I will concede that Macs have their good points, but how is using a Mac ethically equivalent to using Linux? If you're using Linux, you're either doing it because it does something better than the rest or you're using it because you believe in the ideals of Open Source software.
Why do people use Macs? Because they like them. Why do people use Windows? Because they like it or don't care enough to look elsewhere. Using a Mac is no better than using Windows from an ethical standpoint because they're both offered by companies that would/have monopolize/d the market given the chance.
Aside from that, you disregard the fact that the author did not (to our knowledge) have a Mac around that could run OS X. Why should he go buy all new hardware just to run OS X? Does that make any sense?
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
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
>> Linux was all you tried? You didn't try Mac OS X [apple.com]?
Considering he's talking about his K6-2 233 it seems he doesnt have the cash to drop $1,000+ dollars on OVERPRICED Mac hardware just to try an OS. Last I checked Apple doesnt have a try before you buy program. I've been looking at buying one myself so to diverge from MS completly however to get a decent desktop I have to drop $1400-$1600 bucks. Dropping the G4 cube [and concept] was the worst thing they could have done. Before someone says "buy it used" consider the issues surrounding that particular product. When Apple can put out a G4 box (those Amiga clone boards are unacceptable) for under $1000 wo monitor, I'll switch.
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
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.
Perhaps it isn't that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, but rather people aren't ready for linux. I like Linux for the reasons that thus guy doesn't! I like compiling my own programs and I like editing my /etc/lilo.conf and my /etc/fstab. I like compiling my own kernel. It gives me a feeling of intimacy with the Operating System because I know exactly what is going on.
As for his X server gripes, I don't have any of his problems. My fonts out of Redhat and Mandrake are fine, I've got 3-D on my Radeon out of the box and I can play Tux Racer, my 2-d is as fast as on my windows boxes.
He says he hates recompiling his kernel every time he gets new hardware. What is wrong with the default distro kernel? They're usually full of everything conceivable, and you can even switch motherboards and usually have it boot flawlessly. Do that with Windows and you'll be fighting with drivers and IRQ conflicts as Windows tries to initialize the non-existant hardware before your new stuff. In my experience, recompiling the kernel/running kudzu is MUCH faster than messing with drivers. I switched all the hardware on one of my dual boot boxes, and Redhat was working in about 5 minutes with no reboots. Windows98 took about 2 hours before I just formatted and reinstalled.
Unlike this guy, I'm never going back. Ever.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
He has a few points, sure. A lot of them he obviously didn't try hard enough, despite what he says. Fonts for example, I have beautiful anti-aliased fonts under X, using KDE3/QT3. I've even managed to get some GTK Applications with good fonts using gdkxft. And when there is an application I can't get AA fonts with, I set the fonts to a well drawn font. No problems there. .. However, the one point he does drive home is games. If you are a home user who wants to play lots of PC games, then there is only one real choice, Windows. Sure you can play games on Linux, even good ones like Quake 3, and various WineX emulated ones like Halflife and StarCraft. But to play the variety of games available, without problems, and without having to post to mailling lists on why such and such doesn't work correctly in WineX, then Windows it is.
/X). The only times I use Windows now are at work, or my laptop, and I get just about everything I need done without a lot of hassle. All in all, the article only reiterates what we already known. Linux has come a long way, and still has a long way to go. However, some of this can hardly be blamed on Linux. It's not Linux's fault that popular games aren't written and distributed for it. It's not Linux's fault that hardware is designed for Windows only with propertitary protocols that are closed source and protected by IP laws. Linux is doing the best it can.
I still use Linux as my desktop of choice, and I have been for over 5 years. Before that I had OS/2, and before that DOS with Desqview (not
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Linux is great for work because I can get my job done. Sometimes I need to edit 4 or 5 files at once and refresh a web page to see changes, etc...
but at home I don't do that. I come home, play and mp3, watch a divx movie, etc...and I do that on XP. Why? Because there isn't any filesharing app that runs on Linux that has as much content as Kazaa. Where else can I find every MP3 I am loking for as well as hundred of movies. Then if I want to listen to an mp3 or watch a divx, its much easier for me to install winamp or the latest divx codec. I just double click and go. With linux I'd have to download it, install the rpm or compile the source, setup the kde file manager to open that filetype with that application, download and compile xine, get the divx codec for linux (which usually lags behind), etc...
And another big point, alot of the movies are slightly over 700M so I have to recompress them to a hair under 700M so I can burn them to cd. I haven't found a linux divx reconder that is as good as virtualdub.
To put it simply, Windows has better media apps, filesharing utils, video encoders, and codec releases then Linux.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
But it wasn't Windows that was at fault. The motherboards that the K5 CPU's ran on were junk. The VIA and SiS chipsets were horrible. I used to reinstall my Win98 box on a K6-350 monthly. Never had any problems like that on intel CPU's. VIA actually made you install drivers for the chipset.
I like the current AMD CPU's, and have stock in AMD. But anything concerning K6 and earlier was a joke.
Generic PC -- spend a few hundred dollars and you can try Mandrake, RedHat, SUSE, Windows XP, Windows 2000...
Macintosh -- spend over a grand and you can try os x. Tough luck if you don't like it.
"on the desktop" has come along way in recent years, yet could still stand much improvement."
Amusing. Every time I say this I get modded down.
"Derp de derp."
Saying GNU/Linux isn't ready for the desktop based on you setting it up misses the point slightly... you found it difficult to set it up for your desktop, and as someone has already said, had you stuck to one distro, you *might* have got a nice desktop working. But what if someone came along and set it all up nicely for you? What if they got the fonts working, installed KDE with KOffice so you don't have to worry about Open/StarOffice's silly font system, got all the drivers sorted, put some nice little games on, put almost all of the software you needed on, and then gave it to you?
A friend of mine recently set-up a box for my parents, who have used Windows for the past few years, and freaked when IE crashed on them... the only thing they whined about was the Internet not working, but that's a bug we can fix. Other than that, because it was set-up, they were content, and it didn't crash, and the GIMP was faster than Photoshop.
If a company were to sell vanilla boxes all with the same hardware, one install and ghosting would solve all your problems except for X being sluggish.
My point is that your conclusions are generalised and oversimplistic. Yes, give a CD to a friend and they'll kill you for the stress you give them. But find someone who is able to set-up the box nicely for them, and they're not likely to be *that* miffed. There's still work, but its not like GNU/Linux is a no-go, oh well let's look at Windows and MacOSX... it's just an option. Nobody except the immature slashdotters pretend it matters if certain people prefer one OS to another, just so long as people in the end have the *choice* to go with a more free OS.
From the article:
When (not if) I go back to Linux, I'll definitely try SuSE again.
So on the long-term, we're still doing something good very well. We don't need or even want a 100% userbase at the moment.
My home server still runs Mandrake, and IPCop on my gateway/firewall. There is no way I'd ever put any form of Windows on my server, nor would I ever connect a Windows PC directly to the internet without a *NIX gateway in between. Microsoft has a history of poor security, so I protect myself the only way I know how; using Linux. I will continue to advocate the use of GNU/Linux in the server arena. This is where its strength lies at the moment.
Tony, when you're back in a couple of years or even a decade, remind me to buy you a beer.
My wife and I use Mozilla for web browsing and email, OpenOffice.org for word processing, and Psi (Jabber client) for instant messaging. All of these are true multi-user win32 programs, and are perfectly interoperable with their Linux counterparts.
And all of these are free software, so when KDE 5.0 and SuSE 12.0 are out, you can use those applications without any of the problems a lot of developers are now working on.
There are good points here that every Linux Newbie should read. I agree with most of them. I think that what wasn't said was that for most Linux Users it is an upgrade for people that want the "Fine-grained control" over the simplicity.
"I think you know what I'm talkin' about, Mr. President; We're gonna kill us a mummy!" - Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley
- Yes, Officer, this is an original borrowed CD. It is a copy? Oh, yeah, I was afraid the original got scratched. Pirate? Who? Me? What do you mean, pirate?
*clunk*
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
We are finally getting to the point where the software is good enough, it's now just the packaging that is driving people away.
Some of his points that do not hold up well are the source issues. Most modern programs use configure, it does not get much easier than configure, make, make install unless omething goes wrong.
Games. Transgaming works so well I have heard of people using linux for games and windows for everything else.
Sounds like he just needs a better distro. Debian ( nothing personal ) is not easy to get working well. Mandrake 8.x series is just too bloated and useless. Gentoo has been a breath of fresh air, but it's not for the source code phobic. Mabye he would be better off with licorish or whatever they are calling it.
Cheers.
I should not have said firewall I meant the antivirus firewall windows scripting host disabler
regards
john jones
I recently got sick of Windows 9x. But unlike the author, I didn't switch to Linux. While I am a geek, and I keep Linux running on a few boxes, I agree with the author in that it's just not a desktop OS for me right now. I agree COMPLETELY with his gripes about X. So I switched to an OS with stability and games. Windows 2000. I haven't had any problems with playing games on it, and it's very solid. It's no linux, but then I don't like having to wait 6/12/28/infinity months for a game to come on on Linux. I have avoid XP because I don't need it and because of the DRM spyware type stuff. Just my opinion.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
"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."
That's EXACTLY right.
The biggest problem with Linux on the desktop is that there isn't a standard desktop. Which ironically is also it's best feature.
If you want linux to actually compete on the desktop, you need to have one desktop to represent the linux desktop. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have the freedom to tweak it to your heart's content. But the starting place for everyone should be the same. To convert an average user (ie. a user that doesn't give two cents about programming, but just wants to use the computer), you need to keep the learning curve as flat as possible. It's unfortunate that every distribution seems to have it's own way of doing things. Which means from linux box to linux box the computer will be completely alien to the inexperienced user.
Again, for an experienced user, this is a feature!
But to the average user this is just pure annoyance. They don't care what is happening underneath the desktop. They want to use their computer the way they use their TV. Turn it on, pick a channel, watch, turn off (repeat).
Not only are the distributions different, but versions of a distribution change too dramatically! I've had to change my desktop appearance at least 3-4 times in the last 2 years. And I've stuck to one distribution. From RedHat 6.2 to 7.3, I've seen gmc dissapear for nautilus, linuxconf go bye-bye and I still can't get zip files to open up within the file manager the way they used to. If this were my mother on her computer, she would have traded it in for WinXP the instant that her favorite webpages disappeared. There's no way that you're going to get her to go spelunking for config scripts!
A common desktop would be a nice start. But if you can't get all of the distributions to agree to one, then at least have a very small common "set" of desktops from which to choose. Upon installation you could have a "What OS are you familiar with?" checkbox, and then build the desktop accordingly (similar to KDE). This would also make the learning curve less steep. Win9x, Mac, OS/2, gnome, whatever... but in such a fashion that the average user would know exactly what to expect. Then the expert is free to go in and modify it to whatever he/she would like!
kNIGits: "I expect that the Linux community will have something to say about this article; I welcome comments and constructive criticism. Flames will be automatically sent to the Windows equivalent of /dev/null, once I find where that actually is."
Try to pipe it to the NUL: device (an old DOS trick)
// Fraxinus
In conclusion, I'd just like to make it known that I haven't completely abandoned the Linux community.
abondon it? please do! for the sake of all that is holy!
go back to windows where you belong and stay there. most of the arguments you have against linux are half-baked concepts that you've done little or no research on.
perhaps this paper was written as a publicity stunt; shame on slashdot editors for letting this one thru.
People have been saying stuff like "This is just the start of Linux on the desktop" for years. It's starting to sound like Daikatana...
It's a little perverse, but I think one of the strengths of Windows is that it's such crap, and no one outside of Redmond really tries to convince you otherwise.
Take some other OS, like MacOS: My experience has been that if something breaks, you generally get useless answers like "Well, mine works fine" or "It shouldn't do that" or "I don't know how to help you," largely because normally, the thing works ok. People who can fix really difficult problems on Macs are few and far between in my experience.
Likewise, on Linux, intractible problems are answered with "You're doing something wrong" or "You're stupid" or "You don't want to do that" or "Recompile the kernel." There are lots of experts, many of whom are helpful, and can often help fix the problem, albeit without ever imparting to the naive user what they have to do to dig themselves out the next time. In the mean time, the user just feels stupid.
Windows, on the other hand, breaks and breaks often. Go to your nearby expert, and they'll roll their eyes and say, "Yeah, that happened to me, too" (probably because it did). First off, we have a community being built: users screwed by Windows. The nerd comes over, eats beer and pizza while he fixes your problem, all the while reassuring the user that it isn't because he was stupid, but because Windows sucks. User feels a lot less slighted, and because the tweakability is so limited on Windows, he might even learn to do it himself. Probably not, but at least he won't feel bad about asking for help again, 'cause he knows he won't be blamed.
We're all in it together.
Linux is designed and written by programmers, for programmers. If what you do most often on a computer is programming (like me), there is no better system, as far as I'm concerned,
Windows is designed by marketroids for a market. If what you do most often on a computer is what most people do, and you don't want to learn something different than what you're using in the office, there is no better system for that (with that second stipulation in mind).
MacOS is designed by a entirely different set of marketroids plus UI experts for a not-entirely understood market. But if you don't care about perfect interoperability with your windows buddies, there is no better system for that.
The point of all this is that I couldn't care less about desktop users not being able to use Linux. Both they and I will be much happier if they use something else.
I have been using Linux (RedHat in paticular) since the 2.0 release, wanna talk ugly...:)
But I have stuck it out and I always maintain at least 1 linux workstation.
I had almost for about 2 years gotten away from Win32 all together only using it for VB6 application maintenece.
I am an application developer mostly web-centric applications, so PHP and I became quick friends.
BUT for my home desktop I installed XP for the kids and wife. They loved it , I tolerated it. I installed Visual Studio 7 and was hooked, development, things I used to fight with, mostly gone.
For a no brainewr desktop enviroment XP is bar none the best MS has put out to date. Its pretty brainless, very stable, and has all the eyecandy crap the wife and kids like.
I then realized something, I dont need a desktop machine for 80% of my work. By the time I had PHP running and MySWQL under it along with an Xwin32 to connect to some of my linux systems, and ports of all the damm Linux tools I use EVERY day , I had 2 weeks investedin making my XP box act and feel like a linux box.
Problems SOLVED, I made a VERY serious decison, No more evening work from home, no more trying to make XP like linux, I decided Home is XP Pro Land, At work its Linux Land.
It also gives me a PRIME excuse not to do anything but play games when at home and have to be on a computer.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
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.
Um, no. Mr. Joe User is crackhead who thinks that he should be able to turn on a computer and magically understand every aspect of it's operation. Mr. J wants to call tech support and have them tell him how to use his computer because he paid all that $499.00 for it, and they owe him some help. Mr. Joe User doesn't want to take any training or read any books or manuals. Mr. Joe User takes his car to Jiffy-Lube to get the oil chainged, but thinks he can install ram himself? No, no, not Mr. Joe User.
Mr. Joe User is the guy at our office (we run linux desktops) who doesn't get to have the root password on his box. Mr. Joe User is a user, he gets to come into work. Type in his user name, type in his password (he can do this because he keeps it on a sticky on his monitor) and lauch an office suite. In support, we don't hear from Mr. Joe User much any more, since we switched to linux, he desktop is stable, and he doesn't have the power to mess it up.
Is linux ok for Mr. Joe User? Sure, my grandma uses the system I setup for her to browse the web and send email, all on linux. Does she have the root password? Does she even know what a root password is? No, to both.
Mr. Joe User is a fool is he thinks he can be a system administrator without any training, reading, or studying, regardless of the os. My father uses Windows, and he called be all the time because he fouled something up, grandma rarely calls about the computer. She knows how to use her car and she knows how to use her linux computer. Would she try to change her spark plugs or oil? Nope. Would she try to recompile her kernel? Nope.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
I once heard a song by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie called Every OS Sucks, where Linux users were described as 'elitist nerdy shmucks'. Sadly this is true for much of the 'community'. Too many consider themselves better than the rest of the world because they run Linux. Can you believe that? It's just a computer operating system, but somehow they think that it makes them better than those people who run systems such as Microsoft Windows! Elitism drives people away, as does saying "RTFM" or belittling people who choose a different distro from yourself.
Exactly. There is no better way to drive people away than to act like a know-it-all asshole. In open source culture such as Linux and applications for Linux, we should be very careful to be more personable. "RTFM" does certainly apply to some people, however, when a linux newbie is trying to find out how to compile an application, saying "RTFM" doesn't help anyone. Send him a link to a specific man page, or maybe give him a short answer, but when you know nothing about the OS and are presented with the mountains of literature that goes along with it, Reading TFM will take forever, and isn't practical. If the people in the know will help out those who aren't, more users will come and more of them will become more advanced, and some will even contribute to Linux itself which will benefit us all.
~ now you know
Linux still has a shot on the desktop for a couple of reasons:
1. OSX does not and will not run on x86 based hardware. (And since 90%+ of the machines are x86 based...)
2. Microsoft is well...Microsoft. You don't have to be much of an activist to detest the way they do business -- And anyone who continues to use products produced by them is "dancing with the devil".....(Just my opinion)
Still -- this guy makes some valid points. I don't really agree on the hardware side. I have actually had better luck with my hardware in Linux than I ever did in Windows. My SCSI card, WinTV PCI card, and Sound Card never played along with each other in any version of Windows. I have never had any problem with them getting along in Linux. X is ultra cool in areas where I need to spawn desktops around the house -- or even around the country....But it's a heavy price to pay when you add in the negatives he talked about. (I guess that is what intrigued me to play around with BeOS and QNX at times --- it was *nix like with nice fonts and performance on the graphical subsytem side of the house. A breath of fresh air if nothing else.)
The problem with finding a solution for application packaging and graphical subsytems is not so much technological rather it is the lack of mass acceptance to any 1 solution. You could end up with "100 packaging solutions that kicked ass" and "25 of the best graphical subsytem solutions ever" but you would then have the bigger problem of usage base and fragmentation. (No 1 solution would get enough mass acceptance to make it a viable standard.)
What apple did with OSX is to take all (most) of what was good about "*nix" and mix that up with what was good with Apple. The problem still being that most people cannot afford to replace all of their x86 hardware with PPC hardware --- and a majority of us would not like using such a high percentage of closed source software in our solution.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
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 seems like this is really necessary. I assume we can't just include the MS TrueType fonts with a distro. I just installed NetBSD and added the MS TrueType fonts via kde from my Win2k partition. KDE looks great! It would be great if we could bag the old 75 & 100dpi fonts. But obviously NetBSD can't just install with default MS fonts.
If you know of any Free versions of these fonts, perhaps you could provide a link?
Maybe there should be a project somewhere for the development of quality, free TrueType fonts for use with every system.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
I also switched from Linux to Win2k for my home machine after using tux for a couple years. Win2k is a stable OS and is the best product that Microsoft has right now. I sit in front of a Linux machine all day at work using vim and a shell. I know Linux inside and out and have done kernel work. I really do appreciate Linux and think its a fine OS. However it is refreshing to come home to a consumer OS that was designed as a GUI-based OS from day one and has the polish and responsiveness that Gnome/KDE/etc lack. I get my techno-geek thrill of using Linux at work. My machine at home is an entertainment/productivity/information device and I don't need the power of a UNIX environment.
Plus I have recently become addicted to games (ones that cost millions to produce)!!! Even Mozilla on Win2k is just better...can't place why, it just is.
However my next machine may be an Apple running OS X as it combines the best of both worlds!
One could suggest Darwin, which is the BSD/Mach core OS of Mac OS X. It's been ported to x86, so one would not have to chuck their investment.
However, Darwin is even less mature than Linux from a desktop standpoint, and the user would be stuck with an X interface there as well. It helps to note this stuff, however.
I agree--nice as OS X is (I use it continually), most folks can't just go buy a new box when they feel like it. Still, if a person tired of Windows but needed UNIX flexibility, Mac OS X would be the most logical (and generally economical in terms of time spent using vs. hacking) way to go.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
linux based gateway and firewall running on an former desktop
linux on my hp laptop
dual monitor windows 2k machine I have to run 2k on for work--primary desktop
xfree cygwin on the 2k desktop that remotes to both the gateway (rarely) and the laptop (always up)
this way, I've got my linux desktop (all linux in this house is gentoo), i can still run windows apps if necessary, and all is right with the world...
Mirror: http://openglforums.com/switched_back.html
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.
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
Why XP is better: Drivers: Point and click to install (as a superuser, of course). Windows warns you if the driver isn't likely to work properly, and can roll back to working drivers if you deliberately choose to install one that hoses your system.
Yeah. You WISH. I've REALLY had much better luck with linux and funky hardware, than Windows and funky hardware. Most recently I have an ATA-66 controller with a Highpoint chipset. Sure, the BETA drivers are stable, but guess what? They have a different NAME than the drivers from the OEM. Guess what happens when you UNINSTALL a driver? It gets removed from the 'listed' products, but the DRIVER STILL EXISTS. I had XP (win2k also I think) crashing on me on bootup because it was trying to load TWO DIFFERENT DRIVERS FOR THE SAME PIECE OF HARDWARE. What the hell does 'REMOVE' mean to MS programmers?
In any case. I also liked the 'As good as Mandrake 8.1 was, it wasn't what I was after' and 'Eventually I became dissatisfied with Mandrake, and briefly tried a number of other distros until I finally settled on Debian.'
Apparently, he had good luck with both distros, but all of a sudden was BORED with them. At least that's how I read it. That's not a reason that linux isn't for the desktop, it's a reason that linux isn't for HIM.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
eMacs start at $1099, iMacs start at $1399, and PowerMacs start at $1599. Right now Dell has similarly featured Dimension 4500 starting at $899. $500 is not an insignificant price difference, but of course the Dell does have the downside of coming with Windows.
The Desktop ain't rocket science...
Don't underestimate how hard it is to build computers that are easy to use. I'd say the problem is even harder than rocket science. The basic principles behind rocket science are well established, but the basic principles behind human-computer interaction are still being discovered. Building desktop systems is very hard, and the job will have to be taken seriously if it's to be done well.
There were some points in there that were a little undefended, but I didn't see any that were wrong. All in all, I'd say he hit the nail on the head. He even pointed out that he intends to switch back to Linux, when it is ready. I think this article really lays out soemthing that seems to be lacking in many Linux circles: Pragmatism. Eveyone is talking about "linux on the desktop" on how it's this big goal right now, but they seem to be missing the point. It doesn't matter how stable or configurable something is, if you want it "on the desktop" Joe User has to be able to _use_ it. And it's not ready for that. Granted, I use Linux as my desktop OS at home and for my independant work, but I'm not "Joe User", and even that is likely to change soon. OSX is exactly what I want and need in a work machine. But even then, I'll still keep my Wintendo, since that is practically the only platform for decent games, with a few notable exceptions.
At my day job, I use Win2k, because it works easily and I can do my job with it. That's the very reason I'm taking the server farm to Linux, away from MS server products. With Linux there, it works easily, and I can do my job with it.
If the Linux community wants Linux to become a serious force in the desktop world, we are well on their way, but we would do well to heed the points that were brought up here. Especially about X, it really is a pretty clunky system for desktop work. Apple seems to have the right idea, IMHO.
Packages are a nightmare right now, and it seems to be a real sore subject with a lot of people. I read somewhere recently about a guy who wanted to remove sendmail and use a differnet mailer system, but couldn't get the package to install. The general response was "who cares that it didn't work? that system sucks anyway, just stick with sendmail". They totally missed the point, it doesn't matter that the other system sucked. What matters is that he wanted to use it but couldn't, because the package system is so clunky. On other OSes he would have simply installed it, played with it, then _decided for himself_ that is sucked, and then switched back. Probably in less time than he wasted with the RPMs. Apt is a step in the right direction, but it's still not there yet.
This is getting too long and I'm rambling. I'm stopping now. Have fun.
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.
My case is much the same. I used to dual boot - Windows for gaming, etc. and Linux for development. Then came Win2k and XP. And I discovered that, with Cygwin, I get all the convenience of unix tools and a commandline with all the convenience of running games, having hardware work, being able to watch quicktime trailers, etc.
I don't dual boot anymore. 2k/XP are more than stable enough and Cygwin gives me all the Unixy goodness I need. Hell, I even installed Deskwin so that I have multiple desktops, one X11 feature that I really miss on Windows. Funny thing is, people come up behind me, see my typing away in vi, hacking from the bash prompt and say, "Is that KDE?". "Nope, XP", I reply. Always good for a laugh.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
WAAAAAAAAAH Linux isn't pretty!
Sorry, had to get that out of my system. Truth be told he does have some (slight) points. I've had my share of nightmare linux installs, hardware pains, and general irks that make me pine for the ease of windows. Not the stability, just the ease. Linux has some ground to gain in the home market, given time it will get there.
Oh, and if you've got that much of a hard-on for fonts, buy a goddamned mac.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
How is clicking alterated by typing worse than only using the mouse? With a well designed GUI, you can do more complex things with a one second mouse click than a series of commands, which in turn can be reduced to a fraction of a second by using a shortcut. Sadly, not all programs have a good GUI. But that's another story.
:) If you aren't pleased with Windows' built-in tab completion (works good enough for me), there are shell replacements.
Clicking alternated with typing usually speed up work tremendously, although it's probably something you need to get used to.
And, of course, tab completion is definitely not anything *nix specific.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This weekend I had to upgrade my machine. My old motherboard blew so I had to get a new one. Boards with ISA slots are almost impossible to find these days!
Because of the new board, I had to replace my ISA->PCMCIA controller with a PCI->PCMCIA controller. This controller is required because I use a wireless network adaptor.
The Windows drivers that it shipped with seemed to work. My wireless card was recognised and I could connect to the network at home. But every now and then it would lose connectivity.
3 hours and gods only know how many mouse clicks later I found out that it was a known issue. All I had to do was upgrade the drivers. No probs I thought
First I had to download the new drivers. Then I had to go into device manager and remove the device completely. Then I had to unzip the drivers and I needed a password to do this. Then I had to install the drivers and reboot. On reboot, all of my NIC information was lost so I had to re enter all of my network information.
And this is easy? To who exactly?
Next issue - Install my new GeForce 2MX card, download the latest nvidia drivers and install them. Start a game and wonder why my monitor is flickering. Check the refresh rate and it is set at 60Hz. So I hunt around and find a tool to fix nvidia refresh rates in games for windows XP and 2000. It won't install. Some more reading shows that it only works with older versions of the drivers.
Now I have a choice of using outdated drivers or playing games with headaches.
And this is simple and just works for the Joe average home user?
WTF ? ? ?
It doesn't. http://www.apple.com/macosx
/etc text files were gone, some were still there but didn't actually do anything and some behaved normally. You didn't know which ones which without trial and error. The Unix file hierarchy was also destroyed with /Apps directories scattered about and binaries in /usr/etc (I still don't understand that). The schizophrenia has gotten better, but that was done by making OSX even less Unix like.
It really depends on what you want to do with it. The people from the fink people have done an excellent job of getting *nix apps working but if you think a *nix person will sit down and be instantly at home, think again.
When I first bought my NeXTStation I thought it would be like sitting down in front of a Solaris box... boy, was I wrong... it took me a while just to get used to NeXT way of configuring stuff, THEN I had to actually make it work for me. You were supposed to use the config app to configure stuff, but it couldn't do everything so you had to drop back to text files. Some of the standard
If you want a usable system that works the way it's supposed to, OSX is great. It's a beautiful system, but it's not "pretty Unix", it's a Mac workstation and selling it to people as anything but isn't telling them the whole story.
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.
just need to have their hands held while you do all the real work. It's just a fact of tech support. When you are paralysed by either fear or stupidity over a machine it's hard to follow instructions.
If you have to think about changing directories for more then a second then yes, installing drivers is hard. Take the nvidia driver for example, You have to download the file, find the file, goto the file, extract the file, go into the new directory created, find the readme, goto the readme, read the readme, maybe compile the driver, and then install the driver. Maybe having to reboot the system. And if you think the system is your x server then yes you have to reboot. Nvidia does provide rpms for their driver and though I haven't used those, (I have a non-standard kernel) they should work. But I'm fairly sure that you have to quit the x server to do it and most people are scared of the command line.
That $900 dell comes with a cheap CRT. Upgrade to the flat screen CRT and you've got a machine to compare against Apple's eMac, which starts at $1100. Only a $150 difference, and that assumes that desk space is free.
To compare the Dell to an iMac, you have to upgrade to a digital flat panel screen, and that costs $340.
My reasons for not using Linux on the desktop are similar to this guy's, and I'd be willing to bet that very few of the people reading this are more technically able than I am so maybe it's another interesting data point. I was in the kernel group hacking the guys of a sophisticated SMP UNIX ten years ago and nowadays I write distributed filesystems for a living. I hack all day at work, then I go home and often hack some more. Conventional wisdom says I should love Linux, but it - and XFree86, which for all intents and purposes is part of the same package - has always been a big pain in the ass for me. Some examples:
OK, let's compare how Windows did in these areas.
Pretty stark comparison, isn't it? Now, the point isn't to say that Windows is all that great. As an OS professional I can recognize some of the very serious design mistakes they made, and their business practices deserve plenty of condemnation. It's also not my point that Linux is bad technically, although I have to say it's nowhere near as cutting-edge as its proponents would have you believe. The point is that one OS lets me add capabilities quickly and painlessly, while the other forces me to waste hours on broken builds, broken installs, and general dicking around with stuff that in my own professional life I'd barely even dignify by calling it a prototype.
As a result of all this, I don't consider Linux suitable as a user environment. When I'm doing development I prefer to do it on Linux...by logging into a Linux box remotely from my Windows desktop. It's not because I'm stupid, or lazy; as I said, I love to hack. It's because when I sit down at a computer I have a task in mind other than babysitting my OS. Maybe some people enjoy doing that for its own sake, but I went through that phase a long time ago and I have very little patience for it now. Windows simply wastes less of my time.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I hope linux doesn't become a widely used desktop os. I like it how it is. Mass use hurts things. It brought spam to email. It brought lawyers to the web. It brought aol'ers to irc.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
OSS is not always written as fast as commercialware (although Mozilla was very fastly written). However, after gaining momentum, it is very difficult for a project to stop before it reaches the optimum feature set (like TeX and LaTeX).
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
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 stable too, so I apt-get dist-upgraded to unstable and I can't believe he found it too unstable, especially if Windows was the alternative. As long as my server isn't mission-critical, unstable is plenty stable for me where I can't remember the last time I needed to reboot for a crash. But perhaps as a home user, his demands are more than meets the eye...
I've nothing to say here...
I have to agree with you on this...
In my cases, there are two situations with hardware under Linux:
It doesn't work at all due to lack of a driver or
It works great if a driver is available
Rarely is there a middle ground.
But with Windows, you can reasonably expect to spend at least 2+ hours with any new hardware getting it to work, and then it may not always work. I often wind up using Linux to perform hardware detection (Finding out where quirky devices are putting their IRQs, etc) - It used to be you had to use Windows to identify hardware for a Linux box, now it's the other way around.
I recently spent 4 hours trying to get an ISA Zoom 56k modem working under Win2k - Not a winmodem, a genuin honest-to-god-looks-like-a-UART modem. My Linuxcare BBC found it after every jumper switch, and it worked in 75% of the configurations. (Other times, I knew from bootup that it was conflicting.)
Did it ever work under Win2k on my cousin's machine? Nope.
On the same machine: My dad swapped the mobo, and later reformatted Win2k. Apparently, 2k's reformat utility isn't the hottest (NT's is the same) - I have very often found a "reformat" leaving vestiges of the former OS, which were in this case causing symptoms that made me think the IBM HD had gone Deathstar on me. 2k consistently reported bad blocks, and the HD made funny noises.
Run badblocks in destructive R-W mode from the BBC - Not a single sign of problems.
Reinstalled 2k on the wiped HD - The mysterious "hardware" problem was gone.
XP is wonderful - If you have it configged for multiple users, the mouse cursor sometimes disappears in the login screen, leaving you unable to do anything with the machine except pull the plug and deal with Scandisk on the next bootup.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
... I just can't afford the hardware. The day they find a way to release OS X for x86, I (and i would bet a large portion of the market) are there. It's just got to be so hard to support so much hardware.
Berto
Why not run both on two separate boxes connected with a KVM (thus to cut down on the desktop space but having the benifit of direct access to both). Hell, that's what I do. I can fiddle with my ipchains all I want and then cut over to hack through Neverwinter Nights for a few hours.
Ok, so there is a cost associated (ie two boxes) and it doesn't solve the "single machine => single solution" everyone seems to be championing.
But is there ever a single best solution at anything? Maybe I'm greedy but now I have the strengths and weaknesses of both OSes. Personally I hated having to live with one and not the other.
What is music when you despise all sound?
My hats off to this guy. I've been doing UNIX admin work for over 10 years now and I've been using Linux since 1994. It has NO PLACE on my desktop. As the old saying goes:
"Linux is only free if your time is worthless"
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
Please do not trouble x86 users with comments like this
I wasn't aware that this was an x86-only forum. Next you'll be telling us not to bother Linux users with information relating to other platforms.
"News for nerds" doesn't imply x86, nor does it mean others need not apply. It's a big world out there with people in it who aren't exactly like you. Get used to it.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
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
This excuse went out the door several years ago. Apple's hardware isn't ANY more expensive than comparable WIntel hardware. People just don't understand that macs tend to outperform PC stuff hands down. But really, when you go to Dell or any other big manufacturer advertising a whole system for "under $500", you end up paying well over $1000 by the time the machine is remotely usable. When you go to apple and buy an iMac for $1100 (or one of the older ones for as low as $700-800), you're getting a system that's WAY more powerful than that PC one, with a better OS.
LOL, Slashdot's Mac fanbois are simply the best. Saying something as brutally ignorant as "People just don't understand that macs tend to outperform PC stuff" does _not_ automaticly make you the elitist you are so desperatly trying to be.
Next time bring along some benchmarks or numbers PLEASE. anything.
An older benchmark, I see no ass whipping here, and this is from a mac site, so you know the numbers have been skewed in apples favor.
Sorry to be off topic, but trying to rush this guy off to OSX as a alternitive to Linux really just strikes a bad chord with me. Your not his desktop savior, your just a fanboy trying to score browny points for being as "difrent" as apples comercials want you to be. Mac "stuff" is nowhere near supirior, and from hands on experience its not even that good. If I had to pick anything as a speed demon I would advocate PA-RISC, but I live in the real world, and in the real world you will get alot more done, with a lot less headache, and for a lot cheaper with a Single or Dual TBird / P4 then you ever will with a Mac.
I overwhelmingly agree with his point on the separate user/system application databases. This is one of the things that absolutely infuriates me about linux. You install something - well, where the hell did it go? Who knows? I haven't found a way to get rpm to tell me, there's no standard place that things go you can look in, and half the time you have to be root or something. Maybe I'm just retarded, but it should be more clear cut. If anyone knows a solution to this - I'd love to hear it also.
$45 per U Colocation Special
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.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
To Pipe output In Windows/DOS to NUL:
dir > NUL
SomeProg > NUL
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
I, too, agree with everything you've said. I had a friend who would take it upon himself to install Linux on someone's home machine if that person promised to give Linux a try (and see why it is "better" than Windows). Now this was back in the mid-90s and a good install really required a Linux expert to get everything set up correctly (I know it's better nowdays). So my buddy had a standing arrangement: if it took him more than 3 hours to do, you'd have to buy him dinner. But he was happy to do it because he'd seen one too many Linux desktops that had been configured by a moron so that lots of stuff wouldn't work correctly. "This is why people think Linux is junk!" he would scream. "The problem's not with Linux, it's with whoever did a crappy job installing it!" So he felt that if someone was willing to give Linux a try, they should compare Windows against a properly configured Linux desktop. Something that was set up so that an application wouldn't spew lots of missing library or font errors and refuse to run when you typed the command.
I know full well that most Linux people love to tinker with the settings of their machines. But Joe User does not want to have to tinker with settings. He wants the thing to be properly set up out of the box.
GMD
watch this
While it is true that Linux has a number of niggling problems, Windows does as well. It seems that ultimately the reason he moved to XP was because of two things:
1) frustration with graphics in general (both performance and fonts)
2) frustration with hardware support
As far as #1 goes, I'll back him on that one. Fonts have continued to be an amazing pain to deal with. Both MacOS and Windows have systems that make managing fonts trivial. I susppose the source of the complication is that X provides multiple ways to provide fonts which complicates any unified easy means to add fonts.
As for performance of graphics, I find that the performance of Linux is on par with windows. And though admittedly I'm a power user, I find it rather handy every so often to be able to run remote applications so easily (thank heaven for SSH).
Now as for point #2, though his point is true, this should not be attributed to any inherent limitations in Linux itself. The problem is simply a matter of market share. Why support the few percentage points of the market who use Linux when you can just support Windows and cover 90+% of your users.
Personally I find that for 95% of what I do, Linux is as good if not better than Windows for doing it. Evolution is an excellent mail program, both mozilla and konqueror are great browsers. With crossover I'm now able to view a lot more of what's on the Internet. Honestly the only long running grip I have that hasn't been adequately addressed is the font problem.
If you've got problems with hardware support, just make sure to research your purchases before hand to suit your needs. I've only had problems when trying to install on very new hardware that wasn't built with running linux in mind.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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 agree with you to a point. People do need to make *some* effort to find resolution to their own problems before running for free help. That's why I say "You can't save the world." Some people trying to get Linux going just don't need to be using it. They tend to be the type that doesn't enjoy problem-solving, doesn't really "like computers", and expects free hand-holding for every little project they embark on.
Commercial packages are best suited to these individuals....
But by the same token, it's not fair to ignore questions because you personally feel the time can be "better spent" answering "more worthy" questions instead. The guy asking a simple "how do I set up ppp" could be doing some important stuff using Linux - and can't get there simply because he can't get his box on the net to download the files he needs to proceed.
Meanwhile, some esoteric and complex question that sounds like a "real, worthy question" is often asked by a guy who can figure it out on his own anyway. He may just be asking, hoping for a quick solution found by someone else like him. If he doesn't get one in a few minutes, he'll proceed to use his pretty-good problem solving skills to find it for himself.
I'm a 7 year Linux user and RHCE so I don't consider myself a Linux newbie. I decided to try Debian out recently. I was getting tired of the RH bloat and wanted a thin but functional install to run on a P75 w/48MB without X. No CD-ROM so I built net install floppies for stable and unstable. This is an IDE system with S3 video (no X anyway) and an Intel eepro100. No other peripherals at all. Should be cake, right?
Stable works perfectly every time, but the damn unstable install was shoddy at best. The initial floppy load would go, but upon rebooting for the additional package loads, it would pull packages from the stable directory off the mirrors, resulting in many failed package installs. It would eventually get to the point where it would say, "your system has failed to install critical packages. you may choose to ignore this error, but your system will most likely be rendered unusable" or something along those lines. It finally got to the point where the package database was locked and I couldn't add or remove any packages from the system. Just a complete failure, on many attempts, too. I'm sure the CD install goes better, but the Woody floppy install is just plain useless.
I'll stick with stable for now. I get a usable system in just 96MB of used disk space.
Intelligent Life on Earth
I beg to differ. It is not obsolete, and it's getting bigger every day. I have a huge number of users who now interact with *nix X apps purely via Exceed. It's simply not economical to have two boxes under people's desks.
But it's not just that, in the Woindows space, terminal server just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Published apps via Citrix to thinner clients, or even pure thin clients.
And then look at XP itself, from an enterprise stanpoint one of the best things about it is that it comes with a terminal server built in to every client.
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
A lot of people are attacking this author over his stance that Linux should come down to the level of Joe User. The most common response I see is "Well, Joe User should come to Linux! Not Linux to Joe!" That is just idiotic. Computer geeks make up a very small chunk of the overall computer using populace, it's Joe who makes up the majority, and if we want a technology to become popular and successful on the desktop, we have to bring it to Joe... because Joe doesn't know, nor does he have the patience to figure it out otherwise.
:P
The point of technology is for it to serve users, to make tasks easier for them to accomplish. If you want Linux to succeed on the desktop, it has to become as easy and mindless to use as MacOS or Windows, otherwise it will always be a niche OS useful only on servers and for geeks who have the time and knowledge to mess with it.
Face it, when it comes to widespread success, we are not the people who decide what lives and what dies... it's the people who know far less and need far less out of their computers, because they are the majority.
And let the flames and negative karma begin
The fact that it's free, and not controlled by any one individual is it's biggest strength but also it's biggest weakness
The reason people bitch and moan about the fact that at the moment, desktop linux is not 100% perfect is simple: they've never seen this development model before. I can guarantee you, if I'd shown this person an early version of Windows (by comparing timescales, current Linux would be Windows 3.1) he'd barf. Ditto for showing people early betas of Mac OS X. I did in fact see some early betas of OS X and they sucked. Font support wasn't there right. Graphics was SLOW! Ditto with Mozilla, ditto with most software in fact.
People tend to forget that you can see Linux in all stages of its development. There is no period of hidden years with developers scurrying away under NDAs, you see it all the time. Yes, I know SuSE is on version 8, and KDE is on 3, but that's not to imply they are "ready" for anything, only that some people want to see them. Pretend the versions have the word beta in front of them. Happy now? Because that's basically the state of play at the moment.
All the problems he raised will be sorted out, and at the current rate of progress soon:
- X: why do people bitch about it so much? I think this guy heard "X is slow dude" and believed it. Seriously, I don't see any serious speed problems with X, maybe this was a problem a few years ago but I wasn't using Linux back then. SHM means communication between the server is basically instant. I would be more impressed if I could see statistics that demonstrate that X is much slower than anything else, not subjective impressions. Fonts are simply a technical issue, they will be fixed in time.
- Drivers: I was under the impression that kernel modules were pretty version independant. Of course this point wil always be valid to some extent, because people can and do make their own kernel versions. Anybody can change it enough so that kernel modules no longer work - I can't see how this point is valid as the majority of users need never recompile their kernel (I never have).
- Hardware setup: Linux doesn't have a few billion dollars lying around like some other platforms I could mention, and hardware vendors don't play ball. I can't see how this is the fault of Linux per se, it's merely an inevitable result of the fact that Linux is an open (non-proprietary) platform without any resources to buy the stuff, and currently without enough market share to make it worth their while. In time, hardware vendors will start producing drivers.
- Software distribution: yep, he's right here. As a side project, I'm working on a solution, as are many other people. This one will be solved in time, and is basically caused by the fact that there is no software management engine powerful enough to deal with the myriad differences between different Linux versions.
- Support: in time, this won't be a problem. Besides, has every Windows techie always been smiles and helpfulness? Most windows users rely on technical friends/family for when things go wrong - you have to rely on a stranger if you're unlucky and don't know any other Linux users. Elitists can be a problem, especially on IRC, but as Linux usage goes up, this will recede into the background.
To be honest, with the difficulties Linux has faced, I'm amazed it's here at all. All it's current problems will be solved given time, and at the end, we'll have an open platform that is available to all on equal terms. I think that's a fair reward for not having a tight hierarchy of leaders/dictators writing platforms for profit with everything under their control. I, for one, am not going back.I just bought a mac. Until now I have always wondered what it was exactly that Apple brought to the table. Until OS-X it just wasn't worth it, but now... I don't even bring the WinXP notebook home anymore and my Win2000 machine has become a big chunk of DASD on my network.
Sure, I tried Redhat and Caldera. They are nice, but Apple got it right. Unix stability with a beutiful GUI. Unless there are drastic changes to XP, I have no doubt that my next purchase will be a Mac.
Go buy a Mac. Nix on the desktop is wonderful.
If a person feels that being knowledgeable about more than one platform is more than trivially complicated, I would not say that person was a guru. Maybe a good administrator of whatever platform they happen to be on, but not a guru. This goes both ways.
:) I use linux as my desktop system as I can grok it and it allows me to do administration tasks cross-platform much more conveniently and quickly, using rdesktop and vnc for windows stuff.
I personally seek to learn as much about as many platforms as possible. Being tied to a particular platform by your knowledge is not too useful. For example, I also work in a software development company where Windows is the development environment. However, when the firewall broke (hardware breakage) and the replacement part would not arrive for a week, I grabbed a retired 90 Mhz system, and wiped windows 95 off of it and put linux on it and had it doing firewall stuff in half an hour. The testing department has all sorts of platforms, from HP, to Solaris, to IRIX, to AIX, and soon linux (thanks to a recent development
All platforms have their strengths, to blindly follow any particular platform without the 'complications' of other platforms is foolish. For most people on slashdot, this means the blind bashing of Windows is bad too. I know the jaying 'Jack of all trades, master of none', but the goal is to be a master of all trades, or platforms as the case may be. Especially if all you are doing is administration you can certainly afford the extra knowledge of other platforms.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I know there are several tiny GNU/Linux distros around (muLinux, etc.), but of the "big" distros, the one that I use on really low-end equipment (I recently dragged an old AMD-486 machine with 16M of RAM back into service) is Slackware. RedHat and SuSE won't install themselves on a machine as small as the one I dragged back into service.
Slackware did.
I think the key to "Linux on the Desktop" is to break Microsoft's monopoly control of the OEM channel. Linux already configured for your specific hardware is the easy way to go.
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!
No Premiere,
No After Effects,
No Illustrator,
No GoLive.
So basically if Adobe ported everything to Linux I'd be in... At least A|W Maya is available, only five more apps to go, c'mon Adobe! [Let the GIMP flamers fly.]
This statement is false.
Obvious troll/flamebait, but I just can't resist. Linux is a very mature core system. The UI lacks the spit and polish of OSX, but under the hood you still have a superb engine....
:), and, of course, x86. It can run on many other platforms, including mips and others I'm too lazzy to look up right now :) It has run pretty well on all above platforms, now what platforms does MacOSX run on? Just PowerPC and nothing else.... MacOSX is a great OS, but don't be the pot calling the silver kettle black about platform limitations...
And as far as hardware goes, though the most popular platform is x86 (price/performance sweet spot), I've run it on Sun hardware (32 and 64-bit), alpha, powerpc, sh4 (my dreamcast rox
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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 can understand why the guy went back to using Windows after his troubles in the Linux world - but I can also understand why so many people go to Linux after the headaches in the Windows world. Let's face it, no OS to come out yet is perfect, and until one is, there will always be people leaving OS A for OS B.
But really, if you enjoy the free-as-in-speech aspect of Linux, then it shouldn't really bother you if somebody else would rather use Windows. The freedom to do whatever you want to do with Linux includes the freedom to not use Linux on the desktop. You can still use Linux wherever you please; it is not affected in any way by this other person's choice. Even if nobody else uses Linux, you can still use all the open source software that exists today, plus modify any of it.
I am glad to hear that he liked SuSE, though, as I am planning on installing 8.0 myself within the next few days.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
---"Um. Most people aren't going to run out and buy all new hardware just to *try* a new OS."
;-) Haven't seen you in a while..
Actually, I did. AT the time, I bought a refurb computer from a company (back in the 300MHz days). A 350 was fairly new and sold for about 1300$ us. Well, I got a great deal on a return (Acer 333). I did a bit of gaming on it, however whenever I used the CPU too much, the modem died. Course, this is also the time when I bought a book that included RH 5.1 . Essentially, my modem was crap (WInBlodem). I then proceeded to fork over 50 bucks for a ISA hardware modem. Considering that I'm still using that, I see that it has paid for the investment.
Also, nice to see you posting again
There are still a few things missing from Linux to make it truly popular as a Desktop machine:
- Multimedia playback and recording support. Hard to count how many times I've read a comment asking for Apple to port QuickTime for Linux.
- Low kernel latency for music professional: 2.5 is definitely promising here. OS X is really impressive with average latency under 2/4 ms.
- Better support for printers/scanners/cameras. It's a chicken&egg problem. It will happen when Linux is popular as a desktop platform because people will realize that they can sell more of their stuff if they support it.
- Customer support: It drills down to getting IRC working and posting questions that you can get answered by others in 2 mins 24/7. However, to get to that point, you already know enough to find the answers yourself. Google is usually working ok, but you probably need another box if your problem is howto connect to internet.
- Reputation: lots of people shy away from Linux because they fear that it's too complicated. One answer for them: use Mandrake or Redhat and things will probably be smoother than you think. Move to something else like debian when you feel confortable if you ever need to do that.
- Newest hardware support: For the exception of rare cases, Linux lags the support of new systems. You better make sure that when you buy your system, someone has already put up a page that details the gotchas on the machine you are getting. If there is not and you are really crazy about this system, then why don't you put a page with your experience installing Linux on it.
- Fonts: that's a major pain because it's not that obvious. Also MS has a clear advantage with the use of ClearText in IE (and other viewers.)
- Web support: it's unfortunate but pretty much all web sites are designed with IE in mind. There are some sites that are not even letting me enter with Mozilla. Plugin support doesn't work for some of them. It's a pain to have to reboot to do banking online or trade stock.
- UI: until before KDE 3, it was true, but now it's pretty much solved. KDE is a better Windows (I hate WinXP Jimboree LnF).
- APM: It took me a little while to figure out on how to give my laptop as much battery life under Linux as under Windoz. Tweeking all these cron and initrc files was not what I would call obvious and intuitive. But I got help from lots of folks on IRC, so it was fun and rewarding to get there.
- Major apps: I miss a few apps that I used to run (mostly Adobe stuff.) But the price the companies were charging for upgrades wasn't realistic in the long run anyway.
- Upgrades and new kernel: It's not obvious to find out when is a good time to upgrade and why you should or not (unless it's on a server and the reason is security.) It's also really easy to break the system and find that is really hard to get back to where it used to work. For that reason, a distro like RH or Mandrake is really appropriate.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
But when I first tried a Windows machine I was amazed at the speed of the multitasking. Apple always claimed to have 'true' multitasking
:)
both multitask like dogs, try BeOS or AmigaOS
Even though I develop for KDE, I must agree about the current status of Linux on the desktop. That is probably why I work on KDE in the first place.
I've written a response (might still be in the voting queue), mostly aimed at the KDE community, argueing for new efforts for system configuration and integration. Yes, this is a difficult task with all the distributions and *NIX flavours around, but it is a must.
If you feel at all involved with the development of a distribution, system application that needs configuration, a user friendly environment, or whatever, please let me know. This is the one thing that keeps Linux from the desktops and the ability to configure servers graphically with ease (in addition to the beloved edition of text files).
Watching for changes to configurations should be easy, the kernel supports file change modification and so does KDE for example, with KDirWatcher.
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 understand how he could feel the way that he does but much of what he says WAS true a few years ago but Linux is changing rapidly.
I find it much easier to install Linux than an old copy of Windows 98. The new Mandrake, and I'm sure other distros as well, will pick up all of my new hardware without a glitch whereas Windows 98 requires that I laboriously load each driver from support CDs that came with my equipment. This process can easily add an extra 30 - 45 minutes to the install process.
Newer versions of Windows will come with better built in support but as time goes by and new equipment comes out you end up right back in the same position. This happens with Linux distros as well but the big difference is that I can upgrade for free if I can't afford to pay for a distro.
His experience with being able to get on-line is totally different from mine. I have a cable modem that is attached to a routing switch which connects my home LAN. With mandrake I simply tell it to auto detect. No hassles. Maybe he has a regular dial up modem that isn't well supported. WinModems for example are not well supported.
I only have one piece of equipment that didn't get picked up by the default installation. That is my scanner. I purchased it without doing the research first and have regretted it ever since. It's a Cannon scanner and the reason Linux doesn't support it is that the specs are unavailable. It's my own fault and I will never gain buy without doing my homework first. If it doesn't support Linux it doesn't come into my home. I purchased an Epson printer that is actually better supported by Linux than by Windows.
As far as X being slow, it's interesting that Quake 3 for Linux runs faster than Quake 3 for windows if you use a NVIDIA graphics card and OpenGL. So, obviously Linux can be a gaming OS if people would write for it.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
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.
For a hardware company, Mac has put out a real killer OS. An underlying engine as powerful as linux with a polished GUI and more decent commercial application support as well as the ability to run most all of the open source projects out there... All of his issues are addressed by MacOSX.
For him, and the many users like him, it would be a great platform, if the price/performance ratio wasn't crap...
Personally, I would like both Linux and Mac. For all of its spit and polish, I think I would miss some things about fine tuning my system and having ultimate configurability I have in linux. If I could afford it, I would add a Mac system to my collection. I probably wouldn't bother with yellowdog (the whole reason I use linux over FreeBSD is thanks to some oddball hardware and applications that are linux/x86 binaries, and wouldn't work on PPC..). If only linux had an API-compatible graphics layer, then getting a company to compile for linux mgith be easier... oh well..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
I think we want 'good users', and don't want 'bad users'
If they read the docs, ask questions and work with you to solve their problems they are good users.
If they flat out lie, or are unwilling to read the appropriate documentation, we don't want them.
All non trivial tasks have a learning curve, you have to put in effort.
If they aren't ready to put in the effort for laces we can leave them in their velcro shoes and rubber boots.
Bill's Switch Commercial
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
IMHO, I agree that winXP and 2K are completely stable. This used to be a major reason to run Linux, but I don't think it applies anymore.
Many of the items pointed out by this atricle are among the reasons I exclusively use the BSDs. (OpenBSD primarily)
With (Open)BSD, while it may be behind Linux when it comes to support of oh-so-many sound cards, anything it does support is extremely easy to get working...
BSD is really plug and play. You stick in new hardware, and when you boot up your system, you'll see a message for every piece of hardware, and a note if drivers for it are not loaded.
This may not sound to exciting, but you NEVER have to recompile a kernel (it does not need to be recompiled to operate as fast as it can). You never have to screw around with hdparm, or anything like kudzu. Support for everything is in the kernel, so no debian-like setup is needed.
Despite the fact that not all sound cards are supported, the same can't be said for other hardware. The BSDs really do support just about every piece of server hardware in existance... That means SCSI cards, network cards, IDE, USB, et al.
That really only leaves X to configure manually. I've often wondered why the system could not just pass along the detected video card and parameters to some XFree86 program, which could modify the config...
But I digress. I must say, to a point, I must agree that X is not ideal. It uses up a good deal of memory to do practically nothing. It's using up about twice as much memory as mozilla (even for someone who surfs with dozens of windows like myself) and about 60 times the ammount of memory that my window manager is using. Even with this, I'm still not mentioning how much knowldge and work is needed to get dri working, a mouse wheel scrolling, and to have X shut off my monitor after a certain time.
Don't think I'm not greatful to the X developers, or think that it isn't much better than Windows' graphics. X's windows don't tend to break up when you move them, and never distort when one window overlaps another (every windows user has has blotches on their screen from desk-mate type programs, and similar). I just think that something more lightweight, more simple to configure, and doesn't have baggage like network support might be a better solution to Unix GUI concerns.
Hell, you don't even need to support all the video cards. Just write a VESA 2.0 driver and everyone will have video on every card. Even X doesn't support every card out there.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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
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.
Let's say your a typical PC user that doesn't know the difference between a hard drive and a computer case (I can't count how many of my customers tell me the hard drive is making a noise when they mean the case).
You manage to find some neato piece of software and download it via Mozilla to your user folder. Now you've got a file foo.tar.gz. What next? What manual do you read to figure out what to do with it?? You double-click the file for some help, and after a few seconds you get a screen full of seemingly random characters. You then email or call a friend, or post in an on-line support forum to learn that you need to open a shell and type "gunzip -c foo.tar.gz | tar -xvf -". You think "That makes no sense, but okay." and you do it.
Now you get a command prompt back. Nothing that says the task completed successfully. Nothing that tells you what happened. You poke around in your GUI file browser and notice there is a new directory called "foo", so you double click it. You now see a bunch of files, one looks suspisiously useful "README". So you double click it.
The file tells you to type "./configure". Again you don't have a clue what it means so you type it in and the editor obligingly inserts the text at the top of the README document your are viewing. Nothing tells you there is an error, that a task completed, or that you just typed the command in the wrong place.
Another trip to email or posting to the support forum and you find you need to type that command (and all others) in to the shell prompt window. You get done with the "make install" command and again, nothing tells you that it all went well, what went where, or what to do next. Nothing in your home directory looks different so there's nothing new to double-click on.
For kicks you switch back to the shell and type the command "foo" (the name of the program you downloaded), and get back a "command not found" error message. Back to the email/support forum and you learn you must type "rehash" in the shell window, then you can type "startfoo" to actually get the program going.
There is nothing inherent about the filename "INSTALL" that tells a novice user that the installation directions are in that file. Even if the README exists and directs the user to INSTALL, there's still many points where there is no intuitiveness to the installation. A file named "HELP" would probably be the best choice for the "average" user.
Now compare that install to a Mac OS X software install: Download double-click the new icon, stuffit expander launches and expands the archive. (depending on browser config, this step may be optional) A new icon appears Double-click it A window opens with a big icon and text that says "drag to hard disk to install", or an icon named "Foo installer". You either drag or double-click. In either case, a window appears showing you the progress of what is going on. Usually during an actually installer program you get information about what will happen, where files are going, and what to do next. Almost anyone with any level of computer experience can figure this Mac OS X install with no help. Throughout the installation there are new icons and windows appearing as a direct result of user action. During operations they are informed of the status of the operation and the result of it. Until a GNU/Linux desktop can achieve this type of intuative ineraction it will never achieve any significant install base in the home user desktop environment.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I run X11 on NVidia, ATI, 3Dfx, and some handhelds. It is stable like a rock, small, lightning fast, and it doesn't crash, either itself or Linux.
KDE, Mozilla, and Gnome can be slow, and some misbehaved applications that don't use mouse grabs properly can make X11 appear to "crash" (it's really working fine, you just need to kill the application--happens under OSX and Windows as well).
Those are not X11's problems, they are problems with the toolkits that those systems use. Switching to a frame-buffer based system is not going to fix those problems with the applications.
Exactly! I tell you slashdot needs and "Amen Brother" mod. Congrats on joining the mac community. Just out of curiostity, which comp did you buy?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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)
This is a problem with Linux today, I agree. But before you lament, try going to GNOME 2.0. It antialiases the fonts :)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I've been using Linux since about Slackware 96 - so I know where the author of the article is coming from. Most of his points were quite dead-on accurate ... as long as you're talking about Slackware 96. These days, I use Red Hat - up-to-date versions (7.2 and 7.3) on all my machines. My Linux experience now is quite different from my experiences with Slackware 96.
:)
:)
...
;))
:)
...
Slackware 96 *was* ugly. Heck, FVWM-95 was atrocious. It took me forever to get it to look and act the way I wanted.
With Redhat 7.2/7.3 and Gnome I didn't even have to edit anything.
Back in '96, there really wasn't much you could do for everyday "office" tasks. These days we have Star/Open Office and other rather good office tools. I find (I'm a teacher) that I simply don't need to use MS Office. Plus, I find that my laptop (an IBM thinkpad) is orders of magnitude more stable with Linux/SO/OO than Windows/MSOffice. I'm not talking about OS crashes here (W2K is fairly stable) - I'm talking about application crashes that cause me to lose data. I don't like losing data.
Internet tools? Give me Sylpheed any day over outlook. It loads in a second - even on a slow machine - and lets me *not* look at whatever silly fonts/colors someone has decided to inflict on the faculty today. (Where is the option to have HTML mail rendered as plain text by default in Outlook? Darned if I can find it). I also don't get the virus-of-the-week automatically executing on my machine. A little fringe benefit, I suppose
I use Galeon, and I wouldn't trade it for the latest IE if you paid me. (Well, you could pay me, but it'd have to be a lot.
Hardware? All the hardware on my laptop was autodetected. I plugged in my PCMCIA network card. It Just Worked(tm). Same with my PCMCIA modem. And my JAMP3 player that I bought from Wal Mart for $20. (To be fair, this Just Works on W2K too, but I've yet to be able to make W2K see the multimedia card instead of just the internal memory. Linux sees it just fine.) My USB Zip drive works great too. I didn't even have to configure anything. I plugged it in, booted up, and RH just added it and added a mount point for me (This device actually DID work with Windows with equally little fuss).
I don't buy all the latest little doodads from CompUSA, true. (I don't need 'em.) But for the most part, Linuc Just Works(tm) for me. And keeping up to date is trivial with Red Carpet.
Of course, half the time I think I need something I realize that it's on a RH CD already.
I guess there's something just wrong with me. Linux does what I need it to do. And I'm a (chemistry) teacher, not a programmer.
But if Linux didn't do what I needed, I'd probably look elsewhere. Maybe that shiny new Mac OS
-- Rick
From the article:
I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date
But it lets you be out-of-date on 11 different architectures!
XFree86 is very fast. XFree86 is far more stable than either the Windows or Macintosh GUI. XFree86, as well as MIT X11, also are tiny and can be configured to run in around 1.5Mbytes and will live happily on a 66MHz handheld. Try that with any of the other window systems. X11 font installation doesn't have to suck either--if it does, it's because the desktop you are using lacks the right utilities.
XFree86 is also the most stable window system I have used. I use XFree86 with ATI, NVIDIA, 3Dfx, and some frame buffers. It certainly doesn't "crash Linux" (it's just a user process), and I can't remember when I got the last crash (with some newly released, proprietary NVIDIA driver at that). In contrast, I have seen my share of blue screens on both OSX and Windows, even though I use them less and even though they came preconfigured. When a desktop running X11 appears to crash, usually what happened is that the desktop manager of the desktop you are running died and the desktop doesn't handle that case (this happens with some regularity under Windows and MacOS, but they just quietly restart it).
Run X11 with twm, icewm, or blackbox, and use only applications with toolkit actually written for X11, and you'll see that it is really fast. Look at X11 on a handheld and you'll see that it can be really small and fast.
X11's supposed X11 overhead really is overhead that comes from toolkits and applications that were not really written for X11. Most of the major X11 toolkits aren't X11 toolkits at all, they are cross-platform toolkits with an MS Windows orientation: Qt, Mozilla, FLTK, and wxWindows, were designed as cross-platform toolkits and Gtk+ might as well be. People wrote those with a local frame-buffer API in mind, and it's not surprising that their performance under X11, whose APIs are very different, is less than optimal. Gnome and KDE are also not using the X11 IPC mechanisms or the X11 resource mechanisms, instead substituting their own inefficient and less functional versions. It's not surprising that applications are slow if they need to talk to an object broker; if, instead, they communicate with each other through X11 properties, they are zippier and they work correctly over the network.
Of course, the user doesn't care why the Linux GUI is big or why it appears to crash, and these issues do need to get addressed. But they need to get addressed where they are being caused. Replacing X11 with a frame buffer system will not fix anything, it will just waste many man-years. If you want a faster and more reliable Linux desktop, either Qt, KDE, Gtk+, and Gnome need to shape up, or you need to use another desktop. While it still uses a fairly inefficient toolkit, XFCE is already a great improvement over those other desktops in terms of performance.
'nuff said
Maybe you think this whole 'graphical user interface' thing is a fad?
No, I believe this is what happens when a post is modded as Overrated or Underrated
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
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.
1. when something breaks in windows, your only hope is that its gets fixed on the next service pack, and then after a few service packs the product gets abandonded like NT after service pack 6 forcing a costly update.
on Linux you have the source and therefore can fix the problem, even for the non programmers usually a fix is available in rpm and the problem is disclosed, unlike windows the problem is kept secret from the average user.
Provided you know that there's a problem. Doesn't get much easier than WIndows Update.
2. any fix in windows requiered several reboots.
In linux you normaly do not need to reboot when updating software or fixing something, unless you are updating the kernel.
Same deal in Windows.
3. Security, linux is much more secure than windows by default, and it can be made even more secure.
I dont see you giving any proof.
4. The uptime in linux is far superior to the uptime in windows.
Again, I dont see any proof.
5. Some people claim X is slower than the windows gui, but this is not true, since it depends on the graphic chipset that is being used, and when you think of X think of total time something takes, for example changing the resolution is only 3 keystrokes, in most versions of windows this means rebooting after going in the control pannel.
Ever since Windows95, i've had an icon in my task bar that I right click and can select my color depth and resolution. No reboot was EVER required. When it asks, you click the option that says "Make changes without rebooting".
6. usually hardware that does not work on linux, is because the manufactures do not provide the hardware specifications, and it is usually very poor hardware like winmodems, or bad scanners.
for example I have an acer prisa scanner wich is very bad it does not work on linux, but on windows it is very slow and uses all the cpu of the system that why you are scanning you can not do anything else.
My RealMagic decoder doesn't have official drivers for Linux. Neither does my Logitech QuickCam. Pretty much standard hardware.
7. There are things that you can do in linux which would be very difficult in windows, for example setting up x terminals vs setting up windows terminals.
Windows Terminal Services hard to set up? nah.
8.In linux you can update programs individualy, in windows in many cases this is not possible.
for example in linux you can update the kernel, in windows this is not possible without updating the whole os.
in linux you can update X and only X, in windows you can not update the GUI without updating the whole OS.
Hey bud, Linux IS the kernel, and nothing else. You can also update the NT kernel without updating anything else.
9. Viruses.
In windows a virus can kill your OS.
In linux the most damage a virus can do is limited to the files owned by that user.
Uh, no? Only if your logged on as administrator. Then again, if you always log in as root on a linux box, you're asking for the same thing.
10. Technicall support.
Windows has only tech support from ms which is bad and costly, mostly you are on your own.
For linux there are many distributors that offer tech support, and many independent consultants, for example http://wwww.consultorlinux.com offers linux tech support for very low fees, even free in some cases.
Why is linux tech support better than windows, well most users that use linux is because they like the os, in windows for many years you could not buy a pc that was not bundled with windows, and history shows that the average user will use whatever he gets.
Or, you could ask your friends/people on IRC like every one else does, and I guarantee you there's more people on IRC using Windows than Linux.
...the Unix on the desktop vote goes to Mac OS X. No, it may not be the bleeding edge of the BSD set, but at least it looks good and runs what I need it to run.
I fiddled with the system for weeks, I got some books, I reinstalled a few times...in the end I just wanted to ask someone. But that never worked.
Yeah, I could be a full time Debian user by now if it wern't for that compost. As it is I gave up but have a partition empty and waiting for the day I feel like tackling nvidia driver kernal compiles, and trying to configure the GUI, and figuring out which mail program is the best (and most compatible with my current files), and finding a smoothly integrated PPPoE client, and polishing that all up...
I like the do it yourself nature, but it'd be nice to have a responsive help person even if they just say "I dunno" instead of the outright ignoring and RTFMs.
RTFM doesn't cut it when your tulip.o is outdated and you don't know where to get a new one, or even if tulip.o is what is needed.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Yeah you got me. Having to compile the module and do all the rest is actually SO much easier than clicking 'Yes'. How could I have been so blind?
The point is one requires work from the user, while the other makes the OS do all the work automatically. It's not that a keyboard is hard to use, it's that I don't want to do any work, which I think is quite an admirable goal. I'd actually like the computer to research the best price for the part, order it, sign for delivery, and plug the unit into itself without me being involved too, but we're not quite there yet. And while we're at it, it might as well cook my dinner for me, bathe me, clothe me, and troll for me on slashdot.
"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"
Well, if you had RTFM or had looked on Google you would realize that the desktop can be chaned to a look other than Fisher Price that's quicker and takes up less ram.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
I'm going to dive into this one as well, since you both seem bent over by your particular favorites.
> I bought a flat panel imac at home. It has worked flawlessly since the first day I turned it on. The screen is great, much nicer than typical cheap PC screen.
The flat panel on the iMac I use is roughly identical to the flat panel monitor on the Linux (Intel) machine next to it. If you'll pardon the pun you should compare apples to, well, Apples.
> The system is faster than the PC is replaces (an "old" 2 year old PII-800 with a geForce 2 GTS card and u2w2 scsi disks).
Again, unfair comparison. Will a two year old iMac outrun your two year old PC? Will a current PC keep up with your new iMac? The answers, by my experience, are no and yes, respectively.
> It cost a lot less than a PC with a similar configuration (you got the math wrong, sorry)
You must have gotten your iMac off the back of a truck, then. For price I've always found PCs to be cheaper. Quality is a different issue, but the sticker war is no contest.
> I saves a lot of money on aspirin now that I do not have to listen to the PC power supply and cooling fans.
I'm right with you on this. The Intel PC is a noisy beast compared to the iMac.
> To get a good PC, i.e something that is not a piece of shaking noisy junk, you need to spend a descent amount of $$$.
True, but the same is true of Macintosh. You just can't choose to build a bare-bones, bottom of the line Mac. Quality is good, but sometimes price trumps it. At least with an Intel box you can go rock bottom if it's necessary.
Virg
Other issues:
Once installed and configured, who cares what OS is running? To say Windows is easier than Mac OS or Linux is bunk. I tried to explain to my mother yesterday how to make a backup copy of her Quickbooks data to another drive -- it took me about 15 minutes. Lord help her if she wants to do it again! With Linux, I could have remotely configured an icon or root menu option that would forever accomplish the task. Or, I could send her a command via email, she could have copy/paste to xterm window. I have a customer using xvscan for document imaging on a Linux box that runs its own Apache for retrieval. She finds the system easier to use than the Windows scanning system with a much more expensive, less-featured retrieval system. She can look up information from any Windows workstation on the network and I can perform remote maintainence.
Click here or here.
Chief software architect for the biggest software company in the world and his personal page breaks in Mozilla. Go figure. Note the image on the upper left. In Moz. he's no longer the Chief Software Architect, and the navbars all break, hit "About Microsoft" in IE and Moz. for example.
If they want people to SWITCH to their product, they should make their site accessible to all browsers and code to standards. This would make it easier to find out about the plethora of fine offerings available to me from Microsoft.
Forcing Useragent in Konqueror to an IE variant will show that the menus work, but don't line up, at all.
The lack of basic HTML skill present makes me wonder. Not that I'm any better, certainly not, but then again, I'm not the Richest Man, and I don't claim to make the best software in the world either.
I like music
Most Linux newbies have the SAME questions time again and time again. How do I configure X? How do I use non-ugly X fonts? How do I configure PPP? How do I install these new drivers? Instead of documenting these procedures in the numerious "Linux HOWTOs", these problems should be fixed in SOFTWARE. Anytime someone needs to download a HOWTO doc that describes some obscure incantation of commands and settings, I consider that a BUG in Linux.
cpeterso
I mean XP is more stable than 95 if that was the only reason he switched then it makes sense. I actually use the power of the command line on my linux machine and like the security of a secure web server.
> he mentioned osX in the article (itwasalink)
I know he wasn't paying attention to the article like he should, but calling him an "itwasalink" is completely uncalled for. Keep your epithets to yourself, punk.
Virg
He wants to be able to do work on it. He doesnt' want to have to pick out a computer to match his drapes. I will give Apple credit for a better UI, but as for everything else...
OK, for one, macs are great for getting work done. Have you ever even used one? I don't have the link (nor do I feel like looking for it), but I have seen studies which show that companies which have macs as workstations generaly have more productive workers because the machines have a lower downtime over-all. The windows downtime may have improved since that report, but the point is, you can get work done very easily on the mac.
Apple's back-end is just a pimped-out unix. At least Micro$oft can write its own OS and doesn't go converting to *nix when they realize it sucks.
Linux's back end is just a pimped-out unix too. What's your point? UNIX is a tried an true system that works great. As a matter of opinion, windows still sucks, M$ just hasn't realized it yet. No, Apple has realized that with the advent of Linux and the continued success of SUN, UNIX (and it's varients) is becomming a more widely seen OS. It seems very likely that UNIX will become one of the most predominate OSes. To move the Mac OS to a UNIX underpinning is one of the best moves apple could make. The only reason M$ doesn't do it is because that would sacrifice most of it's control over the OS.
Hardware: Remember back when apple supported BeOS? Ever wonder why they dropped it? Because they realized that if people could run a MacOS on IBM hardware, they'd abandon Apple's hardware like investors from Arthur Anderson.
No I don't, so could you tell me when they supported BeOS? Last I knew, BeOS was simply writen to run on mac hardware, just like yellowdog and LinuxPPC. That doesn't mean Apple supports them. And Apple has made attempts to port to PCs in the past. Each time they did however, they killed the project because a) it went over budget, too many different things to support and b) it wouldn't provide a good source of income.
I don't really feel like getting my ass reamed out every time i want to upgrade my system. Getting raped on IBM hardware doens't make me gay, but pushing back by willingly getting more expensive apple hardware does.
To start, that statement is so blatently flame bait, it truly reveals the fact that you are 1 of 3 things.
1) Uneducated drone of microsoft who knows nothing about computers except how to turn them on and download viruses.
2) A 13 year old trying to be cool
3) A moron who doesn't care about their credability.
Either way, if you hadn't before, you lost all the respect of any reader right there. All macs are upgradeable, even the processor (http://www.sonnettech.com/). RAM, HDs, and just about everything else is standardized.
Do research before you post.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Well, there's trade-offs to every choice you make. Buy Windows to use all of the available software, and you open yourself to numerous security holes. Install Linux, and spend your time ranting about the lack of software. Buy a Mac and you have fewer hardware options available.
However, Mac has something that you won't find elsewhere... the ability to run OS X concurrently with any x86 OS natively on top of an x86 emulator. Linux has a clunky Windows emulator, and Windows has a clunky (now useless) Mac emulator, but only on a Mac could you run any actual PPC or x86 OS.
When we say "desktop" do we also mean "developer's desktop" or is that called workstation? Because as developer's desktop Linux (or in my case FreeBSD) is much nicer than any of win32s. I know a guy who refuses to use Linux on his desktop, but he also refuses to do any programming on his win2k and does everything on Linux. So my point is that Unix is not only suitable for servers, but also for desktops used for work.
I passed the Turing test.
Anyhoo, I won't be throwing away my backup systems, after installing SETIqueue server my XP boot.ini got corrupted somehow, and when I rebooted I got "HAL.DLL" is missing or corrupt, operating system cannot boot. System restore that comes with XP only works after booting, so... I consoled in and extracted hal.dll from the XP CD. Didn't work, ah well. I reinstalled XP, and despite having Admin rights I can't access my old "My Documents" because Administrator doesn't have enough permissions to perform a system recovery. So now I'm stuck with "My Documents" from before my system failed, I'll need System rights to access it or delete it
On my Win98 system I trust Roxio GoBack completely, it gives me far more control over everything than linux gave me, I haven't booted into the linux partition for 2 years.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
I'm just curious. Most of the Linux zealots came from the Amiga and OS/2 worlds.
Now they appear to be getting disenchanted with Linux, and now we see a lot of these posts telling how great OSX is.
It appears that we are in the next phase of the cycle. Amiga lost it's luster, as did OS/2, and now Linux falls to the wayside. The zealots have adopted MacOSX as the Next Big Thing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
$1500? I just paid about $1000 yesterday for a retail AMD 1800+, slick retail motherboard (from Elitegroup), 40x12x32 CD-RW drive with an included OEM version of Nero Burning ROM, DVD ROM drive, great Radeon video card and great live sound card and 3 speakers, a 512 stick of RAM from Crucial, an optical mouse, a very ergonomic keyboard, and lots of other parts making up a complete state of the art system excepting the monitor and printer (there's a $150 laser jet printer I'm gonna get and I can probably find a 17 inch monitor for $100 or $150 if I wait for a good CompUSA deal). Subtract $90 if you don't want the OEM Windows XP license. I just got that so I can run games and stuff, but I'm gonna try out Mandrake and later Debian since I'd like to learn them. Plus I could save a few more bucks various places if I spent more time searching out other parts. $1500 is much more than necessary for a state of the art PC.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
Most of them are trolls, as are many of the "newbies" on IRC. You should know as you say, "I have about a dozen impersonators, so keep your eyes open." One Stephen Barktoo can kill many many news sites and IRC channels with a few robots.
Who could believe that people who spend their time making a free operating system, utilities, programs and all the trimmings would waste their time flaming people? Yet it's easy to belive that a ruthlessly competitive comercial software entity known for such behavior and proven guilty of anti competitive behavior would waste resources on this as part of their advertising budget.
Who here has not been very patient with many newbies and others filled with irrational M$ BS? It only took two knowledgeable people and many manuals to enlighten me to the point of M$ independence. I've never personally met any kind of "flamer" though I've run into plenty of them online.
Read The Fine Manual, however, is very good advice. I spend plenty of time answering questions and helping but at some point everyone has to help themselves. If they have gotten to that point in their use of general computing devices, they would be up to their eyeballs in useless M$ manuals if that was their OS of choice, so I feel little guilt in pointing them to a good book.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Being closed-source has anything to do with binary compatability. Both open and closed source could be binary compatable or incompatable. You could say that Windows made the right decision and Linux the wrong one, but you seem to be implying that either Linux could not do this because of open source, or that closed source somehow forced Windows to do this. That is wrong.
Go check out:
i ty
ftp://ftp.uu.net/vendor/dux/SimCity/README.SimC
Seriously, its motif based... More amusingly, look at the price list.... only $49 for a node-locked license!
I remember seeing that page over 4 years ago, and it was 4 years old then!
" Because there isn't any filesharing app that runs on Linux that has as much content as Kazaa"
Try mldonkey. You'll find as much content as kazaa without the spyware and fake files.
Have to MORE than agree with you about divx support though, but then I am using freebsd which is even worse in this area than linux.
As for >700 MB files, you can either overburn them, or sometimes, bizarrely, RARing them up on max compression will make them small enough.
graspee
Did I say 1800+? I meant 1900+. And the CD-RW drive is actually 40x12x48 (the ASUS CRW4012A). Also got a nice 80 GB HD and a 250 MB Zip Drive and other nice stuff.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
well, I guess I just have to speak from my experience. Redhat 6 and previous kde gnome versions I tried sucked and wasted many hours of my time trying to install. Redhat 7.2 was easy to install and I installed ximian gnome (not sure what version) right on top. It was cake.
My biggest problem has been associating file types with appropriate executables and installing new software. But redcarpet is pretty good with installs and updates. I would still like to see some basic stuff like compression utilities associated with executables by default so you can just double click icons and such.
taken seriously yes, but desktop development doesn't require vaste resources like rocket science. This goes to the point of the previous poster who thought only organizations with vaste resources could put together a good desktop. I disagree. The desktop, like many software applications, lends itself to individual contribution and collaboration. Although, it is important that a central group/person/organization pulls it all together to make a system that makes sense. It just takes time and a lot of hard work and smart people to bring it all together and it seems like Ximian gnome is almost there and in some ways is much nicer than Windows.
And maybe you should switch to DECAF. And break the little pills in HALF tomorrow. Learn to RELAX a little.
Seriously, you make it sound like I can't go buy new vid cards, hard drives, fans, IDE controllers, SCSI cards, processors, NICs, CD-RWs, etc. for my 4 year old G3 whenever I want to. I assure you: much to my wife's dismay, I can. It's not nearly as different as you make it out to be. Maybe you should know more about what you're talking about before going off on me.
And maybe I shouldn't even bother responding to posts like this *sigh*
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
I liked his article because it makes so much sense in this FUD filled area of which OS to use. Linux needs to be able to accept criticism to grow. Without criticism, the OS stagnates. His points on framebuffers are also interesting. X is the one thing that to me makes Linux ungainly. A much smaller system that would be more modular (not confined to GTK) would be nice.
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?
Cisco includes an installer like that with their aironet (802.11b) 300 series cards. Because of distro fragmentation, it only supports RH 7.x but still a step in the right direction.. some companies are better than others. I have no idea what the installer actually does (maybe a kernel module install?), it just worked..
then again, maybe not.
yeah, i was a big gamer for a while. then i slowly started to realize that all the games are going for eye candy and no substance. they've lost their luster.
of course, half a dozen win2k reinstalls in a year to keep things clean and stable has also cooled that fire a bit. i now have a PC desktop and an iBook. my pc sits there unused most of the time now. i don't game as much as i used to, and i realized that computers are actually fun when they don't puke their brains out every day.
the little iBook is stable, easy to use and....trustworthy.
i don't have to wonder when it's going to die on me next. i never worry about getting that latest virus patch. i'm not concerned that apple is worried about what licensce i have installed on my machine. i don't have a care in the world about those strange e-mails when they come in.
why? 'cause it works. it works well, it works all the time, and i LIKE IT!
yeah, i actually like computers again. this little fucker is fun to use, go figure! i don't fight it, it doesn't fight me, we work together and stuff actually gets done. today i learned how to make my terminal window transparent. it's totally pointless but cool.
i can tweak, i can twist and pull, and it doesn't break!
for all of those in the windows world this is something that's slowly been drifting away from us, and i've found it again, and i found it in a Mac.
oh yeah, and WC3 is fun to play, on my Mac. (although i do use my MS intellimouse, need those extra buttons!)
and a kernel interface for binary-only drivers.
what's the point in having an easy tool to detect and configure new hardware if we still don't have drivers for basic things such as easy-to-find software modems ?
or video cards ? or printers, scanners, and the list go on.
hardware manufacturers are paranoid with their "secrets" and many of them believe if they release specs and/or code they'll be giving too much informartion to the competition.
ideally kernel developers would have all the specs they need, but this is a far from perfect world.
another thing: backward compatibility isn't a top priority IMHO, but a standard architecture for the whole system, to allow Average joe to simply download a pre-compiled binary without worrying with distro/version of distro is a good idea.
if the people who develops Linux and who packs Linux with GNU/OS to form the distribution doesn't get a litle more flexible on these points... well... Long Live Windows, because GNU/Linux will be relegated to a niche smaller than Mac/OS on the desktop.
What ? Me, worry ?
I've got true type font capability on my linux system, and am "borrowing" the fonts from a directory on the windows partition. It works fine, but only for *some* programs, and then only for *some* parts of those programs. What gives? I thought font management should be invisible to the high-level apps and handled entirely by the X libraries. For example, if I install the "prisoner" font (the font used in the Prisoner TV show), I can use it in menus of Opera, but not in the text of the web page inside Opera - If I select it, a completely different font is used instead that looks nothing like it. I get the same behaviour with other apps too. The only common point seems to be that it happens with the serif fonts (of which the prisoner font is one).
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
We have (about) a 50 person company. Half (development and development-related teams, including some "less technical" users) are on Linux. The other half are on Win2K.
On the Linux side we strictly enforce RedHat (currently 7.2). Mail client is Ximian Evolution, using the Connector in conjunction with our main Exchange/2k server. Exchange/2k is a disaster, generally, but sales absolutely needs the diary functions.
WP etc. for the Linux community is StarOffice/OpenOffice. Absolutely no problems with document interoperability (presentations, documents and spreadsheets). Some minor functions are missing from OO - notable minor irritation is that in presentations it doesn't let me have a different background for a title page. On the other hand, the XML storage mechanisms have allowed us to integrate our internal doc handling with CVS, far better than we could have with Word.
Some people on the "Linux side of the house" are still on Windows, by reason of applications support. Notably our docs person uses FrameMaker, and usability/graphics use a bunch of Adobe stuff (even if they just used Photoshop, Gimp is still distressingly behind).
Biggest issues that I can see:
- font handling, as the guy mentioned. It's better than it used to be, since if you can get xfs to recognise your TT fonts StarOffice will pick it up. Linux lacks the Adobe Type Manager kind of interface Windows had back in 3.1.
- Games, which are the only reason I use Windows at home
- Sysadmins. Windows sysadmins are cheaper, basically because they know less. They don't need to know less, in reality, but windows still leaves you with the feeling that it's simpler to set up and configure, even when it isn't. Linux could do with better, more integrated systems management tools for the server side.
- Evolution should be able to handle offline stuff better.
- Lack of certain apps. There are fewer than you think though. Most of our business apps are web based
That's it though. Maybe 2 years ago you would have said lack of integrated email clients and decent office productivity were insurmountable obstacles. All the obstacles around now are easily surmountable. At some stage a very large (and probably public sector) organisation will realise that it's cheaper to commission open source fixes to problems, and maybe new applicaitons, than to go with large scale windows licensing. I expect that to be the big next step forward on the business desktop side.Sure you can. I've been upgrading from a skanky 386DX-40 for like a decade now.
Granted, there aren't any parts left from the original, but never once have I bought a "new PC".
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
People who want Linux on the desktop to succeed need to do one thing: get the rest of the community to shut up and go away. No matter how many times I ask companies for good Linux drivers, the five hundred flaming hate mails/day from pissed GNU zealots will overshadow my pleas. GNU zealots are elitist, psychotic bastards, and until we can flush Richard Stallman and his followers down out of the community and establish a new community of friendly, happy Linux geeks, we're screwed.
Only when software/hardware companies WANT to work with Linux users will we get the support it takes to really move Linux forward on the desktop. Until then, vendors will keep supporting Windows rather than wasting their time coding Linux drivers/SW only to have it spit back at them in month-long flamewars on support message boards because the entire source isn't under the GPL.
when I first installed Linux, I spent several DAYS getting XFree86 to run. Figuring out your monitor timings and building an XF86Config file was really, really difficult. And that was just X.... every other program I wanted to run would take large amounts of time. Most of the time, downloaded source code would fail to compile, and I am not a programmer. Figuring out and fixing errors in just the Makefile was hard, let alone errors in the program itself.
I just manually installed Mac OS X 10.1 on my girlfriend's Power Mac G4. I only had to push the NEXT button about five times and then everything worked. I did not need to spend "days figuring out your monitor timings and building an XF86Config file". I did not need to download any source code. I did not need to worry about broken Makefiles. I did not need to worry about
Linux is "sexy", but I will not bother using it until it is as easy and seamless as Mac OS X. Linux, X, GNOME, and KDE are older than Mac OS X. Why can't they do what Mac OS X does? Of course, Mac OS X was based on old NEXT STEP software. Linux, GNOME, and KDE are newer than NEXT STEP. Why can't they do what NEXT STEP did?
cpeterso
While I agree that X11 is dated, I disagree strongly with the notion many seem to have that the fix must be to replace it with something that is locally usable only. No, no, no, a thousand times, NO! Making it so each individual application needs to decide on its own if it will support some type of remotablity is plain wrong. It should not be necessary to destroy unix's usefulness as a server in order to make it more useful as a desktop machine. If I wanted an OS that sucked at serving I'd run some variant of Windows.
X's "problem" is that is not really a full-fledged windowing system. Properly viewed, it's more of a hardware abstraction layer for the screen, keyboard, and mouse. The rest of the system on top of that fills in the rest of the functionality - the window manager, the desktop (Kde, Gnome, etc). What needs to be done is to make a subsystem inside X that maps directly to the hardware and doesn't bother going over the network when it realizes the display is intended to be on the local machine. But, Wait, that's already been done. It already works that way. So the problem is non-existant. (or at least, isn't something to scrap X over, the problem is at a higher level than that.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
They why are there numerous posts here suggesting that Debian users can use Microsoft TrueType fonts with the simple incantation "apt-get install msttcorefonts"?
cpeterso
My story is very close to his, although the reason for "switching back" was to fulfill a need: school. I started off with Windows way back with Windows 3.11 for workgroups. I migrated to 95, and a bit later got introduced to linux. It got to be where I used linux 23 out of 24 hours a day with Windows for an hour to burn CDs. Then college came along..
I just didn't have time to screw around in Linux when it came to schoolwork. I needed to get stuff done right now and not worry about if the printer will work or if something bad will happen. I also started having some general linux problems like I'm sure everyone has had before and I started to get annoyed.
So pretty soon I was spending most of my time in Windows working on papers and just doing stuff quickly. I currently am still a Windows-majority user and toy with Linux a little bit. But to me personally, and I'm not referring at all to the community or fellow Linux users, but Linux is more of a hobby toy or thing to play with rather than something that will get my work done quickly for me.
So there it is, my version of his story. I'll most likely start using Linux more and more in the future but for right now schoolwork @ RIT is a bit more important. No time for spending 2 hours trying to get my simple USB devices to work.
-Scott
x86 hardware is cool?! Cheap. Ubiquitous. Brutal and Medieval. Hot as an oven with an overclocked Athlon microcontroller in Hell's at 3:00 PM on a sunny August afternoon and sixty miles from the nearest beer cooler. Less hip than your parents telling your girlfriend about your potty training. But cool?! x86 hardware is cool?!??? x86 hardware is about as cool as training wheels on your Edsel, as Pat Boone blairs out of the speakers, with a Latter Day Saints bumpersticker.
If you think x86 hardware is cool, your brain is infected. Have you been watching "Dude, you're getting a Dell" commercials?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There is a difference between ideology and reality.
So many open source hippie zealots (OSHZs) like to flame on about how all the problems that people attribute to linux are the fault of Microsoft not playing nice.
Okay, yes that's true, yes that's because of their monopolistic abuses.
But that doesn't make those problems go away, or make them any less real.
All you OSHZs need to realize that there is a huge difference between criticizing a platform on technical merits and criticizing a platform on practical merits.
Linux is simply not a viable solution, yet, for my mom, my sister, or my aunt. This is not due to *ANY* technical inferiority, it's just a fact. THe software available, the way the industry/market works precludes using linux as a desktop OS in many cases. Why is that so hard to accept?
I know linux well, very well. I know what it can and can't do. I know I *can* use it for my daily operations. I could get by with it quite well, but it would take me more time. Every time there is an upgrade to some MS product, I have to wait and/or fiddle with Linux until I get things more or less compatable again. Now.. I used to like that stuff.
But it takes too much time.
To paraphrase The Princess Bride, "You're using that phrase, I do not think it means what you think it means."
You're not making a statement about the particular points that the poster claimed were wrong, just about some of the writer's points. Sorry, the grammar nazi inside me escaped again. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread...
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
Was it actually the case making the noise, or something inside the case? (probably the harddrive actually, as they make the most noise!)
:D ) Even 'computer' is a possibility -- but in many minds, 'computer' includes peripherals.
:)
You have unwittingly stumbled on one of my pet peeves, what exactly to call that thing. Obviously 'hard drive' is no good, but I feel uneasy calling it 'case' too, since when you say "I'm buying a case", you don't mean a case full of components. 'Box' is usable but too jargon-like (and has too many non-geek meanings
Finally, let me relate perhaps my funniest moment in PC history. I had, after much debate, finally convinced a family of Amiga (500 and 1200) users I knew, to get a PC. One day they did so, and called me up excitedly, and during the discussion came up with the gem:
"There's a box beside the computer!"
It took about 10 seconds for the penny to drop, when I recalled that the Amigas have their "computer" bits in the same unit as the keyboard.
Terminal Server. Much more bandwidth-frugal protocol too.
Sorry buddy, but this guy is on the mark. I run Linux on a server I co-locate at an ISP, just because Apache w/ mod-perl is faster than IIS on the same machine (and little script kiddies haven't paid enough attention to it yet to blow holes in it like IIS). But when it comes to the system I use to do things, it's MS. I can play games, type documents, connect my camera or what not, and it works 99% of the time with minimal configuration or reconfiguration. The other upside is that I can do all this and 99% of the world can read my docs and play the same games online with me. Linux requires too much piddling with every little bit of system minutiae in order to do anything, even "simple" things.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Thank you for pointing that out, since it further supports my point: XP GUI desktop apps are generally no more lightweight than equivalent X11 GUI desktop apps.
Sorry, but that isn't the answer for people who are really interested, as he seems to be, in just being able to hook things up and have them work. OS X is great; but it doesn't support nearly as much hardware as Windows does. It also doesn't support nearly as much software, particularly important for a gamer--while many of the best new titles get ported to the Mac, many do not, and there's a whole back-catalogue of wonderful games that are Windows-only. I can even play most of the cool older Mac-only games on Windows or Linux using the open-source Basilisk ][ 68k Mac emulator. However, newer games require hardware acceleration, so will never be playable under VirtualPC or similar on Macs.
That's why, despite my love for the look and feel of MacOS (I first got started on Macs), I could never buy an Apple machine. I like hooking up new bits of hardware, and being able to use almost all PC games, and being 100% interoperable with the hardware and software used by 85-90% of my fellow home computer users.
OS X is a fine OS. But it doesn't have the hardware and software support many, and perhaps most, want.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
But your comparison is ridiculous for another reason. Windows NT on a Pentium 90 box is as different from Windows XP on a modern machine as CDE on an old IBM workstation is from Gnome/KDE on today's Linux boxes. The fact that Microsoft marketing calls both of them "Windows" and that they share APIs doesn't change this basic fact.
Gnome/KDE are designed for current machines. That's why they use a lot of resources. The same is true for current generation Windows. And when we actually look, lo and behold, the Windows (and MacOS) desktop environments are just as big and just as resource intensive as currently popular X11-based desktop environments.
However, unlike Windows, Linux gives still gives you the choice of running the older desktops, even if you are using the latest versions of the kernel, OS, and X11 server. And that's really great. In fact, I see no reason really to run Gnome/KDE. Even if you want an "integrated desktop environment", there are more lightweight choices (I think XFCE is pretty neat).
The mantra is: Optimize for the common case
You put this in bold face, so you must think it's important. What are you actually trying to say?
$ mv dlltool.dasm2 /dev/null :-)
mv: cannot move `dlltool.dasm2' to `/dev/null': Invalid cross-device link
May we never see th
I'm happy to learn useful things to get the most out of my software. That's a different thing altogether.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I think this touches on a key point in that ease of use is proportional to the user's familiarity with the system. Someone who has never used a computer can find the GUI just as daunting as the command line. A phenomenon I recently witnessed.
It all boils down to familiarity and ultimately to personal preference. Someone familiar with the command line will likely find it easier than navigating menus and vice-versa. A point I failed to make earlier.
I gave Linux a chance. I gave Linux a lot of my time. I'm all but giving up Linux as a desktop solution.
When I hear of guys using linux everyday, they always talk of doing "real work" with it. I can't do MY "real work" with Linux. I can learn to program C/C++ with it, I can throw up a web site with it, I can protect myself from the outside world with it (my gateway/firewall runs linux), BUT I cannot do what amounts to "real work" in my world.
For me, "real work" consists of the following: Music Sequencing/Audio recording, 2D/3D graphic design, and a bit of Flash animation from time to time. I cannot do any of these with efficiancy under Linux. There is nothing available for sequencing and multi-track audio recording on the level of Cubase VST. There are no audio editing apps that have the sheer expandability that Wavelab and SoundForge have. There is nothing like Bryce5, 3D Studio Max, and TrueSpace. Blender doesn't cut it. PhotoShop rules in my world. The Gimp is nice, but it's a pain to use. Oh, Flash simply doesn't exist under Linux.
That's what "real work" is to lots of computer users. It seems that the Linux Elite forgot that many that use computers could care less about programming. They could care less about shell scripts, perl, and whatnot. They would like ease of use over everything else. They want a GUI, not a CLI for their apps. They want something to install without compiling.
They want an OS they don't have to fight with to use.
Before you even begin to write your elitist rant of a reply, understand this: I'm a systems administrator by day. I've worked for companies where I had to administer over 400 Sun boxes running Sybase by remote and I currently work in an environment with Sun servers, WinNT/2000 servers, and an AS/400. I CAN write shell scripts, I CAN compile apps without a problem, I CAN use Linux for what you may consider "real" work (except C programming, I'm using Linux to learn that), and my gateway is configured to act as a samba fileserver, ftp server, AND webserver. At the end of the day, though, I want to record a new dance tune (check my website for more info on that), I might want to whip up a new picture or whatever I want and I can't use Linux for these things.
Don't get me wrong here, I do like Linux and I'll always keep a hard drive in my machines dedicated to it. But for someone like me, Win2000 is the way to go (I hate Mac OS and I own 3 Macs... anyone wanna buy one?). I love the linux desktops/window managers, especially BlackBox and WindowMaker. I can setup a Linux gateway/router far faster than I can with Win2000. I like the ability to pick and choose what goes onto my machine with nearly unlimited flexibility (can't do that with Windows or MacOS). I like what Linux represents. I just can't use it for my "real work".
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I consider myself average or maybe slightly above average. I'm good at configuring things once they're installed and working properly.
I can use apache, sendmail, bind and mysql quite well.
But there are a lot of things that I can't get to work and I have no idea where to get help sometimes. Luckily I have friends who know more than I do, but whenever I run into a brick wall the only place I know is to jump on openproject IRC. I run SuSE, but more often than not that room is filled with people and dead as a doorknob.
Most other rooms are filled with people who know only as much as I do and I constantly see people giving bad advice or saying things like, "I know it's right because it seems to work." Geez... You should see the DNS advice people give out sometimes... yikes.
Where does everyone go? The how-tos aren't very well maintained and there isn't a ton of consistency to how they are written. Most are horribly out of date.
Google will sometimes reveal answers, but if you have some off the wall question and you aren't even sure what to search for I often find myself up a creek.
I think as time goes on linux will obviously become more and more userfriendly, but like people have said before... it's not for everyone.
I personally only use it as a server platform (I also use Win2k), and I like it much much better than Win2k, but for a desktop system... Ugh...
Besides all the bugginess of it, I can almost use it except some of my favorite software such as Macromedia Homesite isn't available.
In the meantime, to help me transition over to linux as a desktop system, I use cygwin, putty, winscp, wincvs, windiff, and db Browser.
With those utilities I can accomplish anything that I do on a daily basis.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Here's something I posted on Slashdot around a year and a half ago that pretty much explains why linux has been having such a hard time getting on the desktop. This is an actual experience of mine and I haven't made it up. While a few things about the installer's UI were changed, the changes have not in any way made the installer any less user-hostile, and a couple of changes has increased it's difficulty.
"Why Linux isn't ready for the desktop"
Case in point:
I was at a restaurant with some of my lug members. I won't name names, the city, or any specifics (so I don't have to pay the price of my criticism at next week's meeting). In my home town, there is a very, very big linux distribution company. Everyone has heard of its distribution and many, many people use it. There are a number of programmers who work at this company who are also lug members, and at the restaurant, I got into a discussion with one of them about the distribution's installer and why I thought its UI was so poorly designed (after the conversation, I found out he wrote most of it. Boy, I felt stupid). Now, this installer is revered by many to be easy enough for your grandmother to use, but I counted a good 15 or 20 usability errors.
As a little bit of background, I am studying to be a UI designer (and a damned good one at that). I can give you the professional opinion that many of these errors involve simple, "duh" kind of stuff. The problems were things like ambiguously labeled check boxes and radio buttons. Or widgets laid out in ways that users do not naturally progress in. In some of the worst cases, the widget layout conveyed information so badly that it could confuse a user into not being able to start up in X (very important for newbies and secretaries). The most annoying error was a modal dialog that obscured information outside the dialog that was pertinant to making choices inside the dialog. The only way to refer to the information outside the dialog was to close the dialog, look at the information, and then re-enter it. All these problems are things that would be easy to change (just modifying/adding 300 lines of code at max). And making these changes would not involve creating stupid talking paperclip avatars or wizards that insult the intelligence of power-users and inhibit their progress. Making these changes would simply add greater clarity to performing the procedures involved in installation, and would allow both power user and grandma to navigate more efficiently and effectively. Real Ease-Of-Use (as opposed to Microsoft Ease-of-Use) is not about wiping the user's ass, it's about not kicking it . But despite the ease of changing the UI code and the benefits it would bring, I seriously doubt this linux distribution company will ever see these problems as problems and make the necessary changes. And I'm certain the programmer I talked to probably wouldn't, either. And probably no one in the linux community will step forward and make the changes, since they all think this distribution's installer is the greatest thing since sliced bread just because it's graphical. And because they can use their linux expertise to get around the most confusing parts of this installer's UI.
Back to my conversation with the guy who wrote the installer, when I mentioned several of the problems I listed above, he still couldn't understand what was wrong with it. "You don't think it's pretty enough?" he asked. I think that moment, more than anything else, defines why Linux just isn't making as much progress on the desktop as it should be.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Well, all we really have to go on here is the evidence of history. To date, only Mac OS Classic, Windows 95 and later, and Mac OS X have been accepted as general purpose desktop OSs. All three of those have been developed and refined by giant corporations with vast resources. All the other efforts have not succeeded in creating widely used desktop OSs.
So it's reasonable to conclude that creating a desktop OS that's suitable for widespread use is harder than most people realize, and does, in fact, require vast resources like rocket science. Any other conclusion can only come from theory and speculation, it seems to me.
And I've always had a bit of a problem with talking about this sort of thing in terms of ``almost there.'' I don't think it's possible to say that Ximian Gnome is almost there, because we have no good working definition of what ``there'' means. You could compare it feature-for-feature with Windows, if you like, but that doesn't tell you anything in the absolute sense.
The only way to evaluate whether a desktop OS is ready or not is to get thousands of people to use it, and see how many of them get frustrated and throw it out. If that's the criteria, I'm not sure how Gnome or KDE would compare.
Really, the only gaming I do with my Debian system, aside from xscorch, is running emulators for the NES, SNES, and (sometimes) Genesis. I don't feel bad about this because either my brother or I owned all of the "good" games for these systems at some point, and I'm pretty sure we gave them away.
(This was not very difficult for the Genesis; the good games consisted of Shining Force, Shining Force II, and Landstalker.)
Maybe you owned some of these games, or maybe you have a black thieving heart and don't care
Then too, we have a PS2, Dreamcast, and Saturn downstairs. It's not like my Linux desktop is my gaming machine; I've always preferred console games, and unless Square and Working designs start making games for Linux, probably always will.
But do get them xscorch...
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Well, when I had to run NT on a 64Mb PII 350, it was almost completely unusable. Not enough memory.
Win95 was *barely* usable on a 486DX66, You telling me that NT uses less resources?
dave
Linux (RedHat and Debian) is installed on all of my desktop machines. Along with some variety of Windows. I hadn't used Windows much over the last couple of years, save for three programs that have no parallel in the Linux world: MS Word, Adobe Photoshop, and Forte Agent. (If you suggest StarOffice/AbiWord, the GIMP, and that whatever-it-was-called Agent clone, you're either high or have never gotten deeply into the features of the aforementioned commercial programs.)
Recently, I resurrected my old Thinkpad 560 after buying a broken 560 from eBay to scavenge for parts. One of those parts was a larger hard drive, and unlike my RH-only original drive, this one still had Win95 on it.
(I'll spare you the rant on how horrible it is to try to get Linux installed on a CD-ROM-less laptop without actually pulling the hard drive and mounting it in a desktop machine, and how it's just flat-out impossible to get networking and X11 to work with certain hardware.)
I finally got an obscure Slackware derivative, DragonLinux, to live peaceably inside a FAT32 partition so I can continue my software development projects, but beyond that, I've been actually pleased to do everything else in unstable-as-hell outdated Win95. It is so refreshing to be able to perform so many simple non-development end user tasks without the endless pain in the ass that is Linux.
Don't get me wrong -- I've been using Linux for seven years now, and I will continue to do so both for servers and on the desktop 80% of the time, but until some real, high-quality, end-user applications are available for it, I am reluctantly obliged to pay my Microsoft tax for the remaining 20% of the time.
And if you are inclined to work on non-sexy end-user applications like word processors and such -- for god's sake, please don't be "creative", just clone what's already out there. Give me innovative system libraries and kernel modules instead. The word processor (and for that matter, the bitmap editor and newsreader) are mature technologies.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The one thing that keeps users from the desktop is the availiblilty of applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and the like. you could also argue that people want *visual* development environments that fall in line with Visual Studio dot whatever the fuck they call it, and *even* Mac OS X comes with a spiffy set of tool.
Linux zealots will go on and on about Emacs, and While I am with them, I onlu need VI or Emacs for most tasks, getting over the Macho weirdo delusion that joe developer, or joe graphic artist, or joe so and so are completely set with command line tools, is the ravings of a truly *high* individual.
Yeha those tools rock. I make web pages in Emacs.. So the fuck what? I want Dreamweaver, and not so I can paste my websites together. Its os I can have code completetion and all sorts of tools to make my life easier as a developer.
Gimp is great. It has claylike texture and all sorts of cool shit. But man oh man, I am a photoshop user for like 10 years, and as much as I try to use the gimp for certain functions, I truly can't. It sucks.
Illustrator.. Well, its not there.
I think the Linux on the desktop folks should move away from the Office suite thing (which we already now have, in multiple forms) and start looking at development and content creation. This is most important. Until we have this, we have nothing.
I've used windows XP on a lot of systems, and the graphics are not entirely smooth until you have at least a 1500 mhz or faster cpu or a geforce 3 or better gpu. on a P-3 M 1 ghz the artifacting is so bad I have to disable skins just to make things reasonably fast. Even with skins disabled, it's still a little jittery. Although I have seen XP move a window around on a dual Athlon MP 2000+ (OCed from 1666mhz to 1750 mhz) smoothly but it still uses 40% total (or 80% of a single 1750 MHZ) cpu utiliziation if moved constanly. /var/db/pkg/ tree. Any package added through the ports tree, pkg_add, or the system install app will show up there.
And at least one of his issues is (mostly) covered by FreeBSD, with it's
Although I do have to agree, Linux (nor FreeBSD) are ready for the desktop yet. Mac OSX is ready for the desktop though, and I'd sooner buy that for PC than any pre-packaged linux distro that I could just as easily download.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Here's the e-mail I sent to dude:
Hi,
Saw the mention on Slashdot.
While I agree and feel you're 100% right, I'm migrating from Windows 2000 to Linux.
The issues you raised are completely valid, but not being the average home user, they don't bother me that much, especially in the face of the headway Microsoft is making in its (assumed) goal of Internet domination.
I can't say that I blame you:
However, "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty." - Edward R. Murrow.
Despite all these frustrations with Linux, I can't condone your actions. We're 99.98% to the finish line, and the threat of losing is too great. If the Internet is Microsoft's, we're all locked in to one supplier, one philosophy, one vision. One *architecture*. We're too vulnerable, anyone and everyone.
The next Klez, Code Red, or licensing agreement, 5 months or 5 years from now, could shut the Internet down.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Sometimes it's not the speed of the car as much as the quality of the ride
Disclaimer: I confess, I've never tried using any Linux versions of LaTeX.
That said, I'm surprised to hear of your problems. Installing new fonts using other LaTeX distributions has been child's play. With MikTeX on Windows, it was pretty much as simple as downloading the font files off CTAN, and sticking them in the appropriate fonts directory, for example. The actual bitmaps and such were all generated automatically the first time I used the font.
It also seemed pretty straightforward to get output using any TrueType fonts I had installed using MikTeX->dvips->GhostScript. I've certainly never had to convert any fonts (downloaded METAFONT-type fonts, TrueType fonts or otherwise) into PostScript before using them. Hell, using fonts in LaTeX is so easy that my girlfriend and I designed a whole font for her to typeset Hindi for her masters thesis.
If the version of (La)TeX that you're using with Linux makes it so much hard work, then sadly, it seems this is another case where the Windows/Mac versions are way ahead of the Linux one.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm a 7 year Linux user and RHCE so I don't consider myself a Linux newbie.
Here's a quick lesson for you, even tho you're not a newbie. Lesson:
Debian comes in three flavors. Those three flavors are: stable (potato), testing (woody), unstable (sid).
The install floppies for woody are unlikely to help you with installing unstable. However, you could install woody and then do a dist-upgrade to unstable.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
I want open information for all, not information and data controlled by a few.
If the price I have to pay for that is a few (very few, how difficult is apt-get install? ) session tweaking this or that, so be it.
I have not touched Windows at home for 1 year now(I play games, I write and share documents, I make presentation, I scan, I print).
The fonts are ugly you say? Gee, I can read these ones very well, and any way I have in no high regard somebody that chooses restrictive technology based in subjective aesthetic reasons.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I would have said that for most people, using Linux places more restrictions on them than Windows, simply due to the fact that there is more software out there for Windows (for the average user) than there is for Linux.
You choose your OS for philosophical reasons, but many choose pragmatic reasons.
"No manual shipped. Online guide sucks dick"
And how is that different than most Linux based software?
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
VNC is nice if you can tollerate the overhead and don't mind running an entire (second?) desktop on the target system. However, given remote X display, it's not necessary most of the time.
Don't get me wrong! When VNC comes in handy, it's an amazing tool. I once floored a tech support guy from one of our vendors when he was trying to walk me though something, and I asked "why don't you do it, and I'll watch?" He couldn't imagine how that was possbile, but I had him download VNC for his Mac, and I ran a shared session on our server. We debugged the problem in 30 minutes, where it might have taken us hours or even days otherwise!
$ # Note, you can't create port-80 client-side unless you're root
$ # I'll use port 8000 for the example
$ ssh -CNnfx -L 8000:serverhost:80 you@target.host.com
$ mozilla localhost:8000
Comment removed based on user account deletion
my titanium powerbook is the first model they put out, my company bought it fairly late when prices had dropped for $1300, and that includes airport card and 384MB of RAM.
if you go to store.apple.com, look at the bottom-left corner, they have a section for refurbed or older-model systems at great discounts.
you can also scour eBay for people selling their older macs, any mac above the 1996 PPC 7500/100 is still worth buying for dirt-cheap ($200?), upgrade the processor to a new G4 or fast G3, maybe add a separate PCI SCSI or ATA controller to add internal and/or external IBM drives and install OS X on it, or LinuxPPC which is free, which would at the very least make a *great* little server.
is that cheap enough for ye?
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
X is fast. Drivers are always a Nightmare with windows. My USB scanner takes forever to get the drivers into 2000 or XP. Edit on line in Linux boom. My CDR burns at 8x in Linux if I go faster than 4x in windows the disks are coasters. This guy is just a complainer/moaner/bitcher. Good riddance.
Get a free ipod.
Windows users are more pragmatic.
If something goes wrong it usually is "Oh, yeah, I've seen that before... let me show you how to fix it." It's not some sort of realization that it sucks, it's just a realization that complex software tends to be like this.
The same thing tends to happen with commercial Unix market, etc. Perhaps because it isn't a "movement", there isn't any defensiveness about it?
One of the troubles with Linux is that so few people really have good knowledge of it in a complex environment, and whenever you ask some question like... "Ok, I have a Linux server handling LDAP requests for about 3,000 clients. But occasionally it exhibits this behavior..."
You'll get maybe 1 person who has a clue, and 99 people who will say it works fine on their desktop at home.
"Despite the arcane nature of the Linux man files, they are always there for me to read, and don't lead me through a silly and time-wasting checklist ("Did this help you...?" nonsense). I used to hate the man files for their arcane readability, but have found them, over time, to be far more explanatory and reliable than any Windows help I have tried.This is not surprising, though, as the Windows help files try to help you without explaining what is really going on. "
Agreed. One has too little information, the other too much information (and they both can be very obtuse at times).
"However, I can tell you are fairly fond of Windows, and see any criticism of Windows as baseless, so I won't press the point further. "
Not at all. I can unload a fairly huge amount of criticism on Windows and anything else coming out of the demented minds of those at Microsoft. I unload criticism where criticism is due, unlike what seems to be most here on Slashdot I don't shower praise where it's not due. Personally, I prefer any Linux distro to Windows when I actually need a machine to work, and keep working (such as when I need a server that's not going to take a crap on me every few days). I actively point out faults with MS products such as Office (pick any version) in my workplace, and do my best to get people to understand that the errors they are getting are because of shitty programming (theirs or microsofts), not hardware.
"However, I see now why some people complain about the moderation on Slashdot: how a ham-handed response like "And how is that different than most Linux based software?" manages to get modded up to 3 while far more enlightened and/or thought-provoking messages (not necessarily my own, as I have made some intentionally silly remarks) get entirely missed, well, it boggles the mind."
Probably because I'm usually straight and to the point.
The thing is that Linux just isn't ready for the desktop of Joe User, but works great if a server is needed that stays up. There's an old saying that goes "There's always a right tool for the job.", and Linux ISN'T the right tool for the desktop of Joe User untill it and it's devoted fanatics grow up a bit and realize that Joe User doesn't give a shit about screwing with they system... Joe User just wants his shit to work right out of the box. Joe User wants to use MS Office because he's been sold that bill of goods way back in '95 and it's in his comfort zone. As far as I'm concerned, Joe User can just kiss my ass and use Star Office or other brands of items that attempt to give the MS brand of office integration, but that's not realistic because telling Joe User to kiss my ass and use something different on a more stable OS wouldn't pay the bills.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
If you really want to try it, pop into any computer store that sells Macs and give it a whirl. CompUSA, Apple Store, etc etc.
Oooh, very nice computer, I plan I getting one of the newer models in the near future. By the way, a word to the wise, if you ever have to call apple techsupport, and they ask you have you bought an apple product within the last 90 days, always say yes. They never check.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984