Slashdot Mirror
Is Linux or Windows Easier To Install?
Mark Cappel writes: "Joe Barr, a LinuxWorld.com columnist, compares Linux and Windows installations. He expected Windows to be faster and easier since Microsoft has been at it for 21 years. (DOS 1.0 was released 21 years ago today.) It turns out Red Hat is quicker and less manually intensive."
then shouldn't the article be comparing RedHat and Windows installs?
If he is only testing with Redhat, it seems unfair to lump all of those installs as "faster" than Windows, based on the performance of only one type.
Just something to think about.
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
Does anyone else think this review would have been more fair if he had used a retail win2k pro disc instead of using the Sony system restore cd's?
How's my typing? Call 1-800-eta-shut
This test has one serious fault in it that I can see. The tester didn't use a stock W2K disk on a clean system, he used a Sony restore disk, which is a lot different than what Windows 2000 would normally be installed as. A lot of that time installing Windows could be attributed to the restore disk installing all of the myriad programs that come with new computers
Sure, I truly believe that Linux can come out on top with new installs. But do we really need to bias test results in our favor, and then expect corporate users to take us seriously? If Linux users want to show the superiority of the OS, they need to present fair, unbiased tests that are indicative of real-life situations, instead of twisting tests around in subtle ways.
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I'm a Lunix-loving looser (tm Trolls, Inc.), but I think this could in no way be called a proper test.
A better test:
2 identical stock computers, fairly recent but not top-of-the-line hardware
1 copy of Windows XP
1 copy of the latest version of Red Hat, Mandrake, or other selected distribution
2 clueless users
2 clueful users
1 administrator to wipe the machines after each test
1 instruction manual per OS
No gurus
4 runs - one with the cluebies doing Windows, one with Linux, and one of each with the clued-in pair.
Neither user can help the other; both are isolated
We know Joe's a Linux advocate. Let's have a real test.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
And if you do that install with win2k pro on a modern system it takes nearly a whole 20 minutes. (40 if you need to reformat the drive)(60 if you need to hunt down drivers, which most people won't)
IMO it's patently simple to install win2k or RedHat these days, and is a non-issue.
I'm sure the Slashdot groupies would get a laugh if Microsoft compared Windows XP to Redhat 6.0.
This is like comparing a 1.5 ghz Athlon and a 1.5 GHZ Pentium 4. You don't... There's no point. Stop comparing apples and oranges people.
Flamebait, maybe. So what, reply. Prove me wrong.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Is not which OS installs faster, but which OS installs with less exploitable services off a fresh install.
... vendors install it for you!
I don't care how "easy" Linux ever is, 90% of people will never, ever install it. Unless more vendors start offering it pre-installed (hooray for Wal-Mart), Linux will never be adopted by any sizable percentage of desktops.
The whole conversation about "ease of installation" is completely wrong-minded.
I agree too, but you must remember one thing. All of those components go into making a stable, secure, and reliable Windows installation. Windows is *not done* when you pop the disk in, set up time zones and users, and run. Great care must be taken to get the system ready to go, and install all of your other apps. Drivers are almost *never* current on a vanilla Windows installation. Viruses are going to be a big threat, so you have to nail that one down. A firewall is essential (not the XP firewall, either).
In most respects, a modern Linux distribution will do all of that for you the first time. Red Hat has a bit more stuff than most distributions, but it really is quite less than what you find on a "recovery CD" when you do a standard Red Hat install. Slackware is great for me. Though it takes a bit of know-how to partition your HDs, and get the X server configured, it can still be faster and easier to do, if you are an experienced user.
After that, you can probably install something like Slack in a half hour - 45 minutes. It takes about 15 minutes to configure the video, sound, and a few other things. I can't say that I was ever able to install Windows 2000, download drivers, install and tweak them in that amount of time.
There isn't anything wrong with Windows 2000... It is good software in most respects. But the old arguments about Linux being to combersome, and slow/difficult install processes are over. Something like Lycoris makes it even easier, if you can believe that.
Ask yourself if this is a symptom of "bloat": the Mandrake Linux installation requires 1 boot floppy. The Windows 2000 installation requires 4 boot floppies!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I tried installing the latest Debian release this last weekend.... took me the whole weekend, and 6 re-installs. The best I could get was running, but had some serious problems, such as: no networking installed, didn't recognize my mouse, couldn't run X because it didn't know how to work with my monitor, and top it off, it couldn't read the damn floppy drive.
So I downloaded the latest Mandrake... first shot, I got everything loaded that I wanted, and it took me less than an hour.
How does that compare to Windows? Who knows? I wouldn't touch that shit, but I would believe that Windows users experiences range anywhere between the two. Hell, my OS X installation was about as smooth as the Mandrake install.
- passion