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 I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so...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"
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.
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.
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.
Personally, I've never liked any of the X-based desktops. I've always used the command line exclusively with Linux and Unix. The flexibility of the command line with standard Unix stuff like bash, less, sed, awk and perl is something I don't ever see Windows catching up to. I've never seen a scripting language more adept than Perl, a web server more capable than Apache, or a scheduler that makes more sense than cron. Servers are where Linux and Unix make sense.
Conversely on my desktop, when I want to use a graphical IDE to debug programs, or create graphics, or play games, nothing beats a Windows desktop for me. The clincher is that things work the same across most programs - simple things like copy and paste, or Ctrl-F to search. I'm almost always working with 10 or more programs open at once(including a couple of SSH sessions) and I need an environment that doesn't slow me down.
In fact, I really don't know any Linux or BSD users who never rely on a good closed-source OS for at least some things. The most rabid Microsoft hater I know still keeps a Windows partition for games. Lets face it, the only people who use Linux and nothing else do it for ideological reasons. Most of us just want stuff to work right and pick the best tool for the job at hand.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I went through the Linux desktop thing a couple years ago, and switched back to Windows 2000 as my primary desktop after some time. While I know the Linux desktop has improved (and I have dabbled in trying Linux as a desktop since then for a month or so), I still thought 2000 and eventually XP was just a better platform with Linux on another box or in a VMware window....
;).
I recently had grown tired of XP, and Linux still wasn't cutting it, so I bought a PowerMAC G4 and love it. OSX offers the best of both worlds. While it still does not have all the programs XP does, it still has more than Linux. On top of that, all the hardware I was running on XP run under OSX, I can easily and seemlessly run X applications using XFree's rootless X server, and ALSO there is a VMware like program called VirtualPC which allows me to run x86 OS's in VM windows (right now, running XP, OpenBSD and Linux in the VM's).
Also, since the mac processors are just a tad better, I get better performance and my machine never bogs down. (Yes, look for me doing those Mac "switch" commercials in the near future!
I just think this is the best of both worlds.
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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.
Uhm, yeah. So, tell me, do you own a car?
Do you like to configure the ignition curves for your engine?
Do you like to machine your own oil-filter base plate?
Do you like to plumb your air intake exactly the way you want it?
Do you like to adjust the exhaust pipe lengths to change the resonant frequency?
Most people want to just get in the car and drive. Heck, they want to NOT know the gory little details.
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.
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 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
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
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?
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.
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
There is a time and place for every attitude, and this is certainly one of them.
First of all, I liked your comment. It's absolutely right on in terms of how the desktop needs to be deployed by the system administrators to the system users. The users need functionality, stability, lack of hassle, and no interaction with the setup of their systems. (in a business setting) This makes the sysadmin job easy, enjoyable, and you get some real work done instead of constantly fixing mistakes.
Secondly, if I was your boss and ever caught you expressing this attitude to Joe User, you'd be on the sidewalk on your ass so fast it'd make your bits spin.
BOFH is funny. Very funny. I absolutely crack on it. It has no practical or applicable place in the industry, however.
I develop software for nursing homes and the nurses that use it. Nurses aren't computer geeks, they're barely computer users. They're nurses, and most of them are very good at it. They don't want to know how their computer and software works and they shouldn't HAVE to. They want to do their nursing job quickly, efficiently, and correctly, that's all.
I don't know about you, but when I walk into the hospital and I need medical attention now, I don't give a flying poke at a 9-track tape if they can hack their computer, I want to be fixed.
My job is to be an excellent computer programmer and admin. Part of that job and responsibility is to have respect for people whose job is not computers. This is the secretary down the hall, this is the pointy-haired boss, this is your father, this is burger-flippin' Jimmy. If you lack that respect and understanding, you are going to go nowhere. That is what probably pisses me off the most about the elitist community, which is probably most often expressed in the Linux and OS communities due to our "rouge" nature. Learn when and when not to express your ego because not everyone's going to bow at your feet to pay homage to your skills if you don't acknowledge theirs.
Blog,Twitter
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.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
If Linux was a car, it would still be that old junker that Uncle Fred keeps in his garage and tinkers with every weekend. He's having fun, but most everyelse just wants to drive someplace.
And here I'd say it was more of a Delorian that looked like the death star as far as not being completed yet. Only nutjobs in black hemlets or old men who like to tinker with flux capacitors really feel at home with it. Lots of people think its cool and build off it, some people just want the brakes to work and leap off in frusteration/terror. Others just look at it and with a strained smile say they're happy where they are.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"No manual shipped. Online guide sucks dick"
And how is that different than most Linux based software?
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
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.