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A Linux User Goes Back
An anonymous reader says "A friend of mine recently switched to using Windows XP after three and a half years of Linux. I thought the community might benefit from reading his story. Even as a dedicated Linux user, I agree with many of his points. 'Unix on the desktop" has come along way in recent years, yet could still stand much improvement. It is no longer an issue of having a fancy GUI (KDE can't get much better), but rather the real problems lie in the foundation.' Some of his points are wrong, but it's a reasonable article.
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!
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.
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.
That is exactly where I kinda thought he was making it all up. I actually use Debian unstable at work, and upgrade regularly.
Yes, there have been about 2-3 hiccups per year, but it is really nothing that someone who can set up RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, and SuSE cannot handle pretty easily. The truth is that Debian unstable is still more stable than most other distros.
I also agree about Mac OS X. I would definitely check it out before going Microsoft. It can run Microsoft Office, and it has an X server (Darwin), and it makes multimedia trivial (especially, for me, simple home digital movies).
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.
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.
I'm not. His last MS OS was Win95. And according to his Linux experience, he seemed to want to go out and get the latest and greatest OS. So when he went to purchase a new MS OS, which one do you think appealed to him? Why, XP of course. If you go to microsoft's website, they have a comparison between XP and Win98 and between XP and Win95, to show you how advanced XP is over their "old" OS offerings. No mention of XP vs Win2k.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
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.
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.
... 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
- ssh -XfC -c blowfish workbox.work.com mozilla
The ability to run a fairly responsive browser on my home desktop with access to the internal network without having to have everyone and his brother in on the setup of some overblown VPN solution is not something I can live without.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
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.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
I doubt it can at the moment, but back whent it was NeXT's DisplayPostScript it definitly could, and did. I use to do the "shooting holes" thing on other people's display at school. Great fun.
Under OSX, if you were to dig deep enough into the frameworks you could probbably get a "MACH port" open to a remote machine's window server (one hopes tunneled over SSH) and there is a good (but not great) chance that it would "just work". Even the old sound APIs were that way. NeXT actually had a way to ask for this though, and Apple doesn't. Of corse so few people did anything at all with it on the NeXT, who blames them for dropping it?
For network transparency, yes. A step forward for anti-aliased text. A step forward in fact for anti-aliased everything. A step forward for using vector based drawing. A step forward for caring about the physical size of rendered objects rather then pixel sizes (rember it's all PostScript inside, even if it is pronounced PDF). Oh, and in gaurenteeing backing store to apps.
That could all be added to X11, but it wouldn't be apps that wanted to use those features would either fail on old X servers, or be six times as complex to write. And adding all that to X11 would take way to long.
Don't beleve me? Well think aobut this, Quartz is what NeXT had in 1990 (1991? 1989?) plus alpha transperency. Why didn't X take the decade and catch up already? Since it didn't, what makes you think Apple should have grabbed X11, and slammed all the wonderful crap the bought from NeXT into it?
(and yes I know about Keith Packards' nice aa extentions to X...but are they done yet? And are they pervasave like they are in Quartz? Oh, and do they solve the other 15 giant gaping voids that X has instead of features?)
If X11 hasn't cought up in a decade, do you think maybe it would be quicker for Apple to be able to make Quartz network transparent then for Apple to help X catch up? Oh....and does Apple's rather expensave "remote desktop" package count?
Sure, on the other hand unlike the other Unix vendors so far they seem to be winning. Sure, for reasons other then the rendering technology (it really isn't that much more then NeXT's DPS, or Sun's NeWS!). However the rendering technology is definitly not hurting them.
I have written a lot of X apps in my life. Ones that used Xlib directly (xtank for example - no I didn't write all of it, but I was one of the lead maintainers for far too long), ones that used toolkits (Xt and Xaw, Xt and Xmw, Xt and other random crap....GTK--, and others). I know just how big that baby is. If you add more to it, the rest of the bathwater will be forced out of the tub. Of corse you risk the tub busting through the floor too.
I don't hate X. But after writing some small OS X Carbon apps, I really can't keep defending X. I mean Quartz does so much more the X11, and it sure seems faster, and simpler to use. And I expect the network transparency could be fixed. Who knows, maybe I'll poke at that sometime.
The first thing to realize is that the "slowness" is not actually slowness but blinking and flashing of intermediate displays before the final one is shown. If when you moved a window it jumped every second to follow the mouse, but jumped exactly and cleanly with all the underlaying windows appearing fully-drawn instantly, it would probably be more preferrable to the way X works now.
The problem is primarily due to the seperate window manager. This guarantees that windows will move and resize at a different time than their contents are redrawn. This is because the window manager moves the window, but then exposure or resize events must be delivered to a different application which then generates the drawing. If the same program could deliver the move and drawing instructions in a single block it would look way smoother. Unlike what a lot of people think, latency is NOT an issue, what is important is that all the instructions come from the same program and can be delivered as one block. This in particular makes resizing terrible on X, window dragging is about equal on X and Windows nowadays.
Another problem was "visuals" which produced annoying color flashing. Fortunately XFree86 has pretty much gotten rid of these on Linux, but if you try an Irix or Sun machine you will see this lovely stupidity in action. This is just BAD design, a proper design would consider the visual part of the "paint" so you don't change a pixel's visual until it is drawn.
Another problem is background clearing, which made sense on older slow machines but produces annoying flashes nowadays, as when you expose an area it is changed twice, first to the background, then to the final display. Windows does not do this (it does do some kind of timeout and clear to white so that dead programs don't end up with garbage in them, but in normal use this does not happen).
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
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.
I would suggest your linux troubles would vanish if you would just spend a little time learning about what you're doing instead of blindly following instructions in HOWTOs and such.
On the other hand, some of us have this thing called A LIFE. I've done more than my share of changing config files, and like the lounge singer said, "the thrill is gone, baby".
I can just see the Linux advocate on his deathbed. He won't be thinking about his wife, or his children, or his family, he'll be lamenting not being able to read JUST ONE MORE installation guide.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.