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Fedora, SuSE And Mandrake Compared
gmuslera writes "This weekend 2 comparisions were made between latest Fedora, SuSE and Mandrake Linux distributions. The first one was done by FlexBeta and in general goes deep, done by people that seem to know Linux, and good around its 9 pages. The later one was done by The Washington Post (yahoo news link) and shows another view of those 3 distributions, from someone that seems to dislike Linux and don't know enough about it. In what of those extremes are the average new user experience with those distributions?" Update: 07/06 01:01 GMT by T : Note that long-time Washington Post tech writer Rob Pegaroro doesn't seem to dislike Linux -- far from it; he's just writing what he sees as truth.
Fedora buggy, SUSe bloated, Mandrake the way to go?
Where was this last week when I was looking for this exact comparison?
The only Linux based distro I've tried recently was Suse... and it blew me away. Previously, Linux Distros in general, weren't too friendly and you had to spend a lot of time configuring things yourself. When I installed Suse, EVERYTHING was detected on my text box... which is no small feat considering I had some rather obscure hardware in there. It literally blew me away... I don't think I've seen anything better than YAST at this point, even in my best case senario with Windows installations. Unfortunately, I can't say much about Mandrake or Fedora... but Suse was enough to convince me (and some other very leary friends) to make the switch. Mainly because of Yast itself.
It would seem to me that new users would know nothing, if not less than the Washington Post guy, at any rate. Plus, unless they had some friends that ran Linux, they'd probably dislike it as well.
"It's a clever system. Except -- duh -- there's no graphical front-end to it, forcing users to use a text-only, command-line interface."
Oh God NO!!!! Anything but the command line. I need pretty pictures and maybe a dancing paper clip thingy. It's too much to remember a few commands.
Makes me wonder if this same guy went insane when using Dos.
Hello,
I recently read your FastForward article on the Washingtonpost about how Linux is still an awkward alternative. Towards the end you mentioned:
"That brings up Linux's biggest embarrassment: software installation. Outside of core system updates (ably handled by each distribution's auto-update software), my attempts to add new programs were routinely stymied by the chancy availability of prepackaged downloads and "dependency" issues, in which the installation failed because the computer lacked needed library files."
Are you getting these packages from the servers of the distribution you are using? You should only download rpms which are specifically built for the linux system you are using. For example, if you are using Mandrake linux 10.0 Official Edition, you should only download packages which are built for Mandrake linux 10.0 Official Edition.
But really, on Redhat/Mandrake based systems, you should use urpmi or the graphical installation managers that come with the distributions; they all manage dependency issues for you, if you have your mirrors set up properly.
I primarily use Mandrake linux, and I can almost always find packages I am looking for in the main or contrib sections on the online mirrors.
There is a great site for managing mirrors on Mandrake systems, it's http://www.urpmi.org/easyurpmi
This allows you to easily add main, contrib and external mirrors. You can use these in the Mandrake Control Center, which is a GUI interface that makes installing much easier than the command line.
Also, much of what makes linux what it is, is the community that surrounds it. There are many support channels on irc.freenode.net where you can get support for any issues you may have. Using a chat application such as X-Chat, you can connect to FreeNode and type
Where distributionname is the name of the distribution you're using; e.g.
or
etc.
Linux certainly isn't as friendly to new users as other operating systems such as MacOS or Windows, but in order to honestly evaluate the distributions, it's important to take into account the communities that surround them. Linux is definitely a different breed of operating system, and should be treated as such.
The main reason why distributions don't tout the communities is because the communities are not officially affiliated with the distributions. It is entirely a volunteer based system, and you can get any number of different types of people in those channels, ranging from experts who have worked for years in the field, to new users like yourself.
I know you're probably not looking to use linux as an operating system, since it doesn't seem from your article that you are seriously considering it, but it might be nice in the future to mention some of the things I have, to get a more complete picture.
Thanks!
I've been using Linux (almost exclusively) for probably 8 or 9 years now. I set out to install Mandrake 10 on my new network last week (old thinkpad laptop and new shuttle MB). It took me several days and lots of "ifup" hacking to get my Netgear WG511 wireles card finally working. (It still causes a 60s pause during bootup, but I'm happy that it works)
I still can't get xdmcp to work right. What the hell are all those MIT_MAGIC_COOKIE-1 errors that I'm getting from my Xserver?!?
Linux is great and all, but it requires more persistance than most people have. I think that Washington Post fellow struck the correct tone. Linux still isn't for everyone. Maybe when more hardware vendors get on board and release open drivers....
Hell ... for the first moment I thought '... compared by Eugenia from OSNews ...'. If you want some quality and nonbiased reviews then Eugenia is your man :)
I, for one, link Linux.
Logic, macros, and more
several of the gripes the reviewer mentioned about fedora can be solved by the following:
/etc/sysconfig/init
/usr/share/pixmaps/splash/gnome-splash.png
/apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser -s true
# get rid of the graphical boot in fedora
edit the
GRAPHICAL=no
# change your gnome splash screen
replace
# reset nautilus to default browsing
gconftool-2 -t bool
--Gaydar
Am I the only one who is getting tired of these "One Distribution _MUST_ be better than the others" articles? They never comment on that fact that open source means you can mix and match features for the perfect distribution. We need some sort of "Festivix: A Linux for the Rest of Us" that will capitalize on that fact, instead of leading readers to think that the Linux market is fragmented and dying.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hello--I used Mandrake exclusively for a couple of years on a Dell Laptop. It was the easiest system to install & use.
However, I wanted to learn Linux more, so I'm trying Gentoo & Debian. I like Gentoo's "from scratch" installation & that I can choose each item. However, emerging sucks--if I need to get something done but need new software, it's a pain in the ass to compile every freakin' program & dependency. I don't have time to sit around & wait for the process to complete.
Debian on the other hand didn't let me choose my kernals or bootloader. Thus, I was stuck with 2.4.x + Grub as the default. What's more, without a working network connection, Sarge's installer froze at the point where the installer tries to download security updates. How crappy!
I want Gentoo's choices with Debian's precompiled packages (Portage apparently gives you the choice to use precompiled packages but I cannot access them without a network card.)
Mandrake was by far the easiest to use but I didn't learn anything in the process.
OS X is great but makes me feel guilty because I love KDE & IMHO, OS X is not all that compared to KDE/Linux. Konqueror by itself makes KDE absolutely amazing. But OS X works & is really really awesome if you're not comfortable with Linux or are used to Windows. It can do some amazing things.
In the Washinton Posts' article -- 'Dell's Centrino Circuitry' this proves that the Author of this Article had no idea what he was talking about......
Unfortunately, to install any of these versions without wiping out most Windows installations, you'll need to buy a third-party program to partition your hard drive.
Do any of the Linux Distros come with some sort of "Magic Partition" style software that can be run on install? If not, this might be a very nice addition. I know Live CD allows you to try out Linux without risk to your windows install, but a partition manager that creates a linux or windows boot up automatically would be very cool. And of course, the windows partition could be mouted under linux and directories like "My Documents" could be linked into the GUI on Lunx.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
For the Windows user, one might tend to gravitate toward Mandrake for preconfiguration. Some say it's too dumbed down.
For the tinkerer, one might tend to gravitate toward Fedora for ease of use and configurability. Some say it's buggy.
For the admin, one might find that Suse fills their need for control and power. I can't comment too much on Suse, I only know one person who runs it.
These 3 distros don't even scratch the surface of what's out there. I'll elaborate on a few other distros.
Gentoo, Slackware & Debian: For those who wish to learn by doing. These distros do very little to automate your installation and configuration.
Be prepared to read man pages, how-to's, and write config files.
Slax, Knoppix and a number of other Live CD distributions: For those who want it running NOW.
These distros are running from boot with little configuration thanks to hardware detection and automatic module loading.
LFS (Linux From Scratch): For those who want intimate knowledge of the inner workings of their system.
This distro takes much time to get running....and...it's not really a distro as much as a set of basic instructions.
As I stated in the subject, there are a number of distributions to suit your level of expertise and style of system administration. When choosing a distro, be aware of the available support options and understand that Linux is (for the most part) a 'help yourself' kind of Operating System. In some cases you can pay a support team to assist you, but in most cases you should expect little direct (one on one) assistance.
My suggestion.....if you've got a buddy who's a Gentoo guru, you should run Gentoo because you've got a support system and someone to mentor you.
"Lame" - Galaxar
The first one was done by FlexBeta and in general goes deep, done by people that seem to know Linux, and good around its 9 pages.
So it goes deep and good around its 9 pages? That makes absolutely no sense.
The later one was done by The Washington Post (yahoo news link) and shows another view of those 3 distributions, from someone that seems to dislike Linux and don't know a enough about it.
No comma needed. What am I pausing for?
In what of those extremes are the average new user experience with those distributions?"
Huh?
WTF I hate the stupid Washington Post. Could they perhaps actually talk to a computer user or techie about their story before they just post this crap for the world to see?
One interesting thing about the washington post's review is that they found the interface of Mandrake and SUSE to be very cluttered, while they found fedora's interface to be far cleaner. GNOME vs KDE ? Many always assume (including me) that KDE would be better liked be windows users.
Also while the washington post's article says linux is an awkward alternative, the experience was that some hardware support was better and easier than windows XP and that it was far cheaper. Since I have to disagree with the statements about it being harder to install software (look at apt-get, urpmi, yum, emerge -- the problem is that there is a LOT of outdated information on the web, this will eventually change), it _definately_ makes linux a contender. Its simply amazing to me that someone who isn't a linux head is doing an article on yahoo/washington post. Slowly but _surely_ I say.
From the Post:
Unfortunately, to install any of these versions without wiping out most Windows installations, you'll need to buy a third-party program to partition your hard drive.
Which is, of course, wrong. Using parted and a graphical frontend like QTparted, you can easily resize partitions. The last SUSE install I helped out with had a partition resizer during the install. Did they take this feature out?
Its the fairest review of the three I've seen _ I'm a Fedora fan, yet I can understand what they liked about Suse and Mandrake.
One thing the reviewer missed about KDE in Fedora - Konqueror is right in the root of the KDE menu. Just click 'Home dir'.
To be fair, the article on Yahoo DID point out some of the frustrations in Linux that many clusers face when using Linux.
* Not all hardware is detected and/or supported (and when it gets supported, it's at least a year after Windows had the driver)
* Installing stuff (while automated over the internet) requires something called a command line... which scares the living hell out of Grandma. Not to mention binary &'%+$*%& only modules!
* Fedora STILL doesn't want to give us MP3 and NTFS
* Then there's that "lack of software" issue (which while considerable on Linux, still gets dwarfed by that of Windows).
* Hard disk partitioning... actually I think Mandrake does well here, but trying to get a cluser to learn what a hard disk is and what a partition is is on par with pulling teeth.
Also, that writer made an ignorant mistake saying that you needed expensive partitioning software to dual boot on a Windows system. That's just plain garbage (fdisk/cfdisk/parted on floppy-based Linux or Knoppix do the job)
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I like the quote "SuSE didn't recognize the sound cards on two of three PCs until after a reboot". God forbid we can't listen to music in the installer, of course even if the sound did work he would have probaby had to use the evil-linux-command-line-of-death to mount a partition and listen to music.
One thing that doesn't seem to be discussed in these reviews is updates. If you want a truly free distro, then (Fedora, Debian, Slackware) are what you want. Mandrake and Suse charge extra for update services and/or disc iso images. Fedora is the only one of the three that offers free system updates (via up2date). The up2date utility was broken on Core 1, but it seems to be working on Core 2.
I installed Mandrake 10.0 Official on one of my systems, only to discover that system updates cost extra. Also, the free downloadable iso images for Mandrake only contain 3 of the 4 discs. I was really annoyed when I found out that xdvi was on the 4th disc! I think Mandrake is a very nice distro if you are willing to pay extra for the update service and the 4th disc.
Let me begin this with the disclaimer that I am fairly new to Linux. I can do all of the basic stuff fairly well, but when it comes to having to hack out wierd stuff that doesn't work right off the bat, I'm...well, deficient.
/dev/sda1 to /mnt/jump and I'm all set. But for some reason Mandrake doesn't set up an sda1 and I'm too newbed to know how to fix that myself.
Anyway, my first choice for Linux is definitely Mandrake. The interface is beautiful, fast and easy and it runs stable (I've had some stability problems with Fedora) all of the time. So why don't I used it? Well, first of all, Mandrake HATES my trackball mice. I have two of them, one from Logitech and one from some other company I can't remember. Anyway, both the mandrake install and mandrake itself refuse to recognize these mice. That wasn't too too bad, I can handle using the regular kind of mouse. But then came the USB problem. No distribution of Mandrake that I have tried up to and including 10.0 liked my USB flash drive. On Fedora I just mount
The final thing I have against Mandrake is its configuration tools. Fedora comes with a nice set of tools to configure all of the stuff I want to use / customize and it always works. Mandrake's on the other hand, have a bad habit of reverting to the settings it liked without even trying my new ones.
I'm running Fedora 2 right now and it works fairly well and does all of the stuff I need it too (it's much better than Fedora 1 for reliability IMHO), but as soon as Mandrake gets to liking my trackballs and jumpdrives I will have no hesitation in switching over.
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
When i learnt abt Linux, I dont know for some reason i chose Redhat .Looking back , Its the marketing for Redhat that pushes into the lead whne the compettition is tight.Easiness of use , good looks , robustness , help and support were the features that i relished.I never compared Redhat with other flavors as i was busy customizing my linux to defeat the co existence of windows .
And i never looked back for other Flavors.
Moral is : First impression is the Best impression.
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way
Cheers,
Mike
I like the idea of forcing people to the shell (or "command line") a little now and then.
It's like owning a car; sooner or later you HAVE to pop the hood and have a look, maybe refill the oil or something.
Forcing users to the shell will, eventually, teach them how the OS works. Or at least, give them a brief idea on what's going on "under the hood".
I remember back in the good ol' days when you bought the C64. You were handed the computer and a manual. You had to tune the TV yourself, and hell, you even had to type in BASIC programs by hand. This way, many users learned BASIC and became software developers -- like myself.
From the Post:
The better solution is the smart package-installer Fedora employs; its "yum" utility fetches a program from an online archive, resolves dependency issues and sets it up with one command. It's a clever system. Except -- duh -- there's no graphical front-end to it, forcing users to use a text-only, command-line interface.
Cobind has a GUI
This is a grapical partition editor that is shipped with several distros.
It allows you to resize/move/delete/create/etc, as one would expect.
I dont have a list, but i know that it comes with Mepis, and a couple of 'rescue-distros'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One thing that may work wonders is to just change some of the syntax to something perhaps easier to understand. For instance, instead of "mounting hda0", change it to "browse (disk label name)". Refer to a "window management system" not as a graphical interface but as the desktop or icons. Most people know what you mean when you say desktop or icons, but if you get into the KDE vs GNOME argument here then people will just get confused and leave.
As far as the Washington Post article reads I can relate to it. I tried using Linux before knowing how to code - that's rough. After learning a bit of c and c++ (enough to do some basics) I found it much easier to comprehend why things act the way they do. Perhaps Linux could stand to have an average Windows user hanging out by a programmer's desk saying "Why does that do this?" and "Can't you make this happen?". For example, my mom, who happens to be a nurse, has been attending a developer's conference in Oklahoma lately because the hospital is purchasing some new software being developed exclusively for them. Rather than just work off of the hospital's "to-do" list the developing agency asked for 15-20 end users to come down, play with the software, find any points of contention, and the developers would take care of it. I velieve this went on for 3 times at 2 weeks a pop, and the end result is a piece of software that cost a bit more to develop but was created with the end user, not the programmer, in mind.
I do believe that Linux's time is coming soon. I think the major sticking point might be some fragile egos and the "Well, EVERYBODY SHOULD know how to compile from source, download dependencies, and run command line syntax that looks like a keyboard went under a hammer." (I saw a comment in an earlier thread suggesting that ANY end user ought to be able to run complex command line code. Alas, this is not going to fly in the face of Windows or Macs, where command line is secondary to the GUI, whereas in Linux is is the exact opposite). I'm not asking for dancing paperclips or those damn pop-up balloons that won't go away...just an easy way to accomplish what can be done at the command line.
"This food is problematic."
This will instantly be modded as flamebait, I know -- but he's right. For all the open-source community is waiting for that eleventh hour of deliverance when an intern in a cheap Penguin suit exclaims publicly that "the era of the Linux desktop is here" -- it's not happening for a while.
Why? Because every post thus far has been about why the gripes he has about various distributions can be simply, oh-so-easily changed by typing a few lines into a prompt, or replacing this file with that file -- or "God no, not the command line, sarcastically".
A few days ago I was teaching my friend how to use a few command line programs (like 'ls' and 'cd') in FreeBSD. This ended up turning into a two hour circus regarding where the spaces go.
Yes, the command line is that bad for normal people. And even a dancing paperclip?
YES, YOU IDIOT!! THE PAPERCLIP TOO!
Especially the paperclip. I don't care if it's a dancing penguin that takes up your entire screen, if it ends up being annoying as opposed to just plain hard for the normal user, that's a step up.
All the different distributions hurts non techy users. Linux is just a kernel so therefore you have incompatibility like installing software across distros. There needs to be another attempt at forming a standard so apps work on all the distros.
I think linux is almost there.
To get more public usage and software devel. some government intervention is needed to stop OEM bundling of microsoft would help , or counterbalanced by including it on all new computers.
Now if I could find a distro to use acceleration on my 9600xt...
First I had Windows 98. I deleted that because it was too unstable.
Then I had Windows 2000. It ran well, but I deleted it because it was a pirated copy.
I deleted Debian six months ago because I didn't like being told everything on my system was unstable.
I deleted Gentoo one month ago because it took two weeks to install on my 650mhz computer. And two days to do big updates.
I'm using Mandrake 10 now, but I don't like it either. KDE is too busy for my tastes, and though I'm going to switch it to Gnome eventually, I really just want Irix.
Eventually, I'm just switching to one of those linuxes that boot straight to a PVR interface when they support my ATI AIW.
Did have a winmodem ?
Suse never got mine to work.
This article submission was written by someone that seems to dislike English and doesn't know enough about it.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
1)Login as root
2) Download: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freetype/freety pe-2.1.9.tar.bz2?...
3)Unbzip and untar the file.
4) Uncomment line 439 in freetype-2.1.9/include/freetype/config/ftoption.h
5) Go back to the freetype-2.1.9 directory
6) ./configure --prefix=/usr
7) make
8) rm -rf /usr/lib/*freetype* (be careful here!)
9) make install
10) Grab Microsoft's core fonts and stick them in /usr/share/fonts
11) Start up KDE, go to the font preferences panel, and turn *off* anti-aliasing. Make sure to select the MS fonts as your UI fonts
My CAD 0.02
- granted, one of the reviews was published by the Washington Post, or as it is more affectionately termed by the clueful here inside the Belchway, "The Washington Fishwrap," due to its many mindless liberal-biased headlines and stories... - however, Pegoraro has regularly covered Linux/OSS issues in the Fishwrap's Tech section (hidden inside an embarrassingly small Business section for a major daily), such as Red Hat's distros and OpenOffice.org... he has done so with an objectivity not found on other tech sites (hint, hint: OSNews??) - it's frustrating to read about 'Joe Six-pack' views of Linux-based operating systems... - but frankly, while Pegoraro's views have not always been 'spot-on Linux knowledgable,' they have been objective... - my point? give the guy a break, send a *nice* email (you do know how to do that, right?), and be helpful! - i suspect, and IIRC, he is a Mac OS X user...
Geez, some of the partition foolery that I've gotten up lately to would frighten the pants off of the old Windows-using me of the past. QParted and GParted are my new favourite software tools.
It literally blew me away...
How far did it blow you? Are you ok? Any broken bones?
You mean figuratively, not literally.
Can't you see the fundamental wrongness of the bias presented here?
I mean, the write-up clearly soft-peddles the advocate review and downplays the consumer-oriented review. I think it is because the first review panders to the satisfaction unix-monkeys get in knowing the arcane and counter-intuitive technologia extremis of Linux, and condemn the consumer oriented approach for its simple, direct perspective of coming at Linux with no pre-conceived notions. The things they mention in the Washington Post article are quite accurate, if you are new to the Unix system layout paradigms.
The thing that bothers me is that there is an undercurrent of hysterical hatred for anyone speaking frankly about Linux and her Unix derived cousins. It's as if the question of OS somehow meant something deeper than what you have installed on your computer. All sorts of strident idealism and contempt for different opinions grip this community, and the community welcomes it!
This same undercurrent pops up from time to time through history, and it is quite dangerous! Consider all the book burning, witch hunting and other such miserable episodes in our collective past, and realize that what drove (and drives today) those awful episodes is the same contempt for difference that lies at the heart of the slashdot bias.
Now, I certainly don't want to conflate the relatively benign Linux over-advocacy problem and the tragedy of those horrible times in the past, but you people should realize that if you start allowing yourself to act like this here and now, indulging in what amounts to simple-minded bigotry, what is to stop you from carrying through with that thinking in realms more directly related to personal liberties, civic safety and common decency?
It's high time some of you stepped up to the plate and decry such flagrant ill manners along with me. It's not a matter of MSFT or APPL vs. Linux, it's a matter of being a decent human being. This sort of indulgent wankery is not decent at all.
Check reviews on google, it's not too difficult. Please be more self sufficient. Not for yourself, but for all the people who you probably keep asking for help. "Is rpm revolutions per minute?" "I hope Linux has a Windows Update." ect
I however, am currently (yes, this second) installing BeOS on my laptop (or craptop, as I call it). You just have to ask yourself what you want to do with your computer, and pick and choose the OS, software from there. For me, aim, simple web browsing, and word fuctionality are sufficient for my craptop: Thus, Abiword, BeAIM, and Mozilla are all I'll be using on this P166MMX w/40MB, 2gigs.
Next week we will find out the author of the Washington Post article never even saw a copy of Linux let alone install it on any computer. It was a made up story that he phoned in from home.
:)
Or worse yet that this story was publish on slashdot three months ago.
Yeah, read the WP article earlier off of Google news. What really got me about it though was this fellow's supposed to be a tech writer. I have no problem with someone making a reasoned critique of Linux distros and such. However, I got the impression this article was rather thrown together, I mean really, using LiveCD SUSE as a test example? Come on, a tech writer who gets thrown in a whack because one of the DEs, KDE, uses single click instead of double? And who complains about having (he doesn't seem to be aware of niceties like synaptic mind you) to actually use commands to install something? Like others have mentioned, what the heck was this guy using in the 80s anyway? (LOAD "*", 8, 1 and we liked it!)
I mean. In this day and age. I really love the way he tries to get all "pally, pally" with Linux users right at the start. Probably best to leave things like this to professionals. Its like reading a carpenter's review of metalworking and how its so difficult to lathe sheet steel.
It's a clever system. Except -- duh -- there's no graphical front-end to it, forcing users to use a text-only, command-line interface.
It's a clever system. Except -- duh -- I only read the pictures.
I have read both articles before this ./ article. First one, (non-NYT one) is crap. I hate those reviews where they speak about KDE look and similar stuff. I was unable to read a normal review about SuSE 9.1, although it is one an half month old distro.
Here is the list of some real problems:
I used to run RH8. It's PITAs: write something on rewritable CD (problems, probably due to my CD drive), MP3 does not work until you replace XMMS, but no such quick solution for KDE's native player. RH9 PITAs: Konqie works worse than in RH9 (I even upgraded KDE to latest version from KDE's site). Gnome's tool for CDs does not work, just like it did not in RH8. Connexant modem does not work, driver went closed source. But even that closed driver does not help me, since I have AC97 sound card (and they fight, for some reason). Fedora Core 1: unable to install nvidia 3d drivers, because kernel is not compiled with gcc that's in distro. Complete kernel compilation fails, their config files do not work. [So I moved to Suse, but i have changed the job meanwhile, so I use Linux now only for fun, and even that rarely, so I can't speak about my problems any more.]
Why I am pointing this list: I need some deep article, where someone who has real experience can say - look, i see/don't see improvement. He does not need to say "your Matsushita DVD-CDRW combo works now ok", I would be quite satisfied if he can find any real problem and to spend some time to speak about it. Single click on folders could be set up easily in KDE ages now. It is not a problem. SuSE has ugly mouse pointer, but that is not the problem, too. Say something about ssh version, apache version, whatever, but say something that may matter to someone (it does not have to be me)! Then I could be able to see if this particular distro is right way to go.
And NYT article is simple crap, full of prejudicies and full of incorrect information.
No sig today.
My apology: it was not NYT, as I said in parent, it was Washington Post.
No sig today.
From someone that seems to dislike Linux and don't know a enough about it.
Translation: "From somebody who is obviously biased against linux and spreading M$ FUD about linux being hard to use, and who is a stupid 1u53r who doesn't want to learn anything how his computer works, who wants everything all pretty GUI and clickity-click-like, who has been brainwashed into proprietary-style thinking that the command line is evil, and whose so-called 'usability problems' are nothing more than him being used to Windows."
I don't think the Washington Post article said very much about the state of desktop linux, but I think that the reaction to it speaks volumes.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Except for the fact that recent RPM's are near impossible to get with out paying... which is a small part of why I am so against linux these days.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I prefer GNU/Linux you insensitive clod!
Fedora is an RPM based distro. Fedora's default desktop is GNOME. Fedora's GNOME does not have a default file association for *.rpm files. DUMB
When you do have a program associated with RPM, you can double-click the RPM, only to spend a few minutes realizing that each of the packages you downloaded need each other installed first. Sure, you can do an "rpm -ivh blah-*.rpm" from the command line (or whatever the switches are - I don't use RPM distros anymore), but is it so freaking hard to have the graphical RPM tools "see" the other RPMs sitting right there in the same folder, and handle them intelligently? DUMB
Way, way, way, way too many packages that aren't available through the distro's repositories themselves. There's only about a dozen RPM repositories for Fedora Core to chase various packages down from. This is the one biggest thing that makes me dump SuSE every time and head back to Gentoo. Instead of Pacman and usr-local-bin and etc. etc. etc., would it really be so hard to have a "contributed" repository maintained by SuSE (and "known" to YaST at install time), where these places (and god knows what others) just submit their packages to? Virtually everything I can imagine, I could get through Portage in Gentoo. Why can't the "big" distros have their prebuilt package repositories be similarly comprehensive? It was such a task for one of my buddies to get/install divx4linux - all the guy wanted to do was watch a little pr0n on his fresh Linux install! Even though it's not that hard, nobody should *have* to fall back on tarballs and ./configure / make / make install. DUMB
There's a lot of little things that keep pissing off potential Linux users, and sending them back to Windows. It's the "little things" that the Mac platform usually does so well. It's those same "little things" that Linux distros, desktop environments, etc, need to pay attention to.
All of them are about the same.
What I recommend is Fedora, this is because of the widespread support of Yum and the abundance of online sources of RPM repositories.
Dag, FreshRPMS, and a couple others offer much of the software that Fedora lacks by default.
Yum makes it easy to update your OS, install new programs etc etc.
In fact I beleive that tools like Yum and Apt are the killer application for Linux.
Hundreds of programs at your fingertips, just type apt-get install progrname, or yum install progname, and you have your program.
No messing with dependance, chasing down RPMs on obscure home sites. All that dependancy hell solved for ever and ever and ever.
Plus you guess what?!
YOU KEEP YOUR OS UP TO DATE.
By installing programs you keep your OS up to date.
yum update
yum install software
Apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install software
Then you have GUIS like synaptic for Apt and you'll have nice ones for Yum shortly.
No security patches go unpatched. If you want nice new games or programs you keep you OS up to date by default.
Good stuff, easy to use, modiretly easy to setup.
Something that Mandrake's urpmi and Suse's Yast tools aren't even close to as good as Yum for Redhat/Fedora and Apt for Debian.
NO MORE DEPENDANCIES TO DEAL WITH. Wasy, and third parties fill in the blanks for things like libdvdcss and other programs.
He had has a lot of other "facts" wrong. He indicates that fedora core2 costs $199 at one point, and also implies that to install Linux on a Windows partition reqauires buying some partitioning software, which is wrong, since at least Mandrake and SuSE will repartion a disk no-destructively. As a journalist goes, his ability looks limted.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Now that there is decent VM software for both Windows and Linux, I will never set up a dual-boot system again. That is the very worst way to get two OSes, particularly competing OSes, on one box. There goes any "need" for a third-party partition program to support two OSes, or competition over a boot sector.
Agreed with one addition: a fast net connection (something other than dial up) is a very big plus. When I setup my latest Gentoo box I must of downloaded a few hundred megs. If you can bring your box someplace with a fast connection you can always:
emerge -f bigOldPackage
-f will fetch the packages for compiling later. Grabbing the "Package CD" helps too.
I left RH after they killed off their $80 per year RHN and started running Gentoo. Haven't looked back. Installing mplayer in one shot ("emerge mplayer") is a very cool thing.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
I just bought an iBook this weekend. On first bootup, it asked me to setup the wireless network and enter the WEP password. I tried so many times to enter it and it would say incorrect password. It was only deep in a manual somewhere that I found out I had to prefix the password with a dollar sign if entered in hex. Nowhere during the install did it say that. And here I thought Macs were the easiest to use!
IMHO the place that these distro's keep missing the target is when they try to do too much for too many.
Linux is massively customizable by its very nature regardless of how it's packaged. So let the people that want to customize every little aspect of their system figure it out for themselves.
A desktop disto should be a windows workalike or work-better. Like Mozilla's Thunderbird or Firefox. That's how you steal market share... work better.
The desktop distro should be able to do (and do well) everything that a windows box can do from a default install. Workalike interface, SMB networking, browsing, mail, music and video, brainless hardware detection and configuration, printing, and IM. Out of the box, default install.
Anyone who has an answer to the question "KDE or Gnome?" does not need this sort of distro, But the rest of the world does.
If you want to see unix working better than windows on the desktop then you need look no further than OS X. OS X has it's problems too (like being handcuffed to Apple hardware), but it can do all of this out of the box, it's *nix and my grandma can (and does) use it.
Over the last 8 weeks I have installed 2.6 based kernel systems: Mandrake 10, Fedora C2, Knoppix 3.4 and Suse 9.1.
I used 3 platforms:
a. An old AMD K2 350 b. VM Ware c. A 2.6Ghz P4
Personal assessment:
1. Sound - alsa is better than 2.4 OSS
2. All distros were easier to install and manage than there previous kernel 2.4 offerings
3. I liked Suse9.1 the best (mainly because of YaST and ease of mangement)
4. I liked KDE better than Gnome (don't flame - it just my preference)
I had used RHL 8 in the past - this was an eval on my part - I'm now a Suse fan.
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
For Mandrake:
search Google for "easy urpmi". Follow instructions. Then use built-in GUI tools to find, pull down, install, upgrade whatever software you want.
For Fedora 2:
Search Google for apt-get rpm. Install it. do apt-get install synaptic. Use Synaptic GUI to find, pull down, install, upgrade whatever software you want.
It is really quite easy and powerful (tons of free stuff).
Some distributions, which were not reviewed, already address these issues. ( however, few of them are 'free' )
You put the disk in, answer a couple of simple questions ( if any at all ) then *poof* you have something that vaguely looks like what you had when you ran windows. Only that now its 'better'.
The distributions he chose to 'review' inadvertently tainted the results, I believe.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"The first one was done by FlexBeta and in general goes deep, done by people that seem to know Linux, and good around its 9 pages." Even if we overlook the switch from past to present tense (and back again), "...was done by...in general goes deep, [was] done by ...", this sentence is still atrocious. The coup de grace is "[the first one was] good around its 9 pages."
But our suffering is not over, as we soon find out "...from someone that seems to dislike Linux and don't know a enough about it." I would sure like to meet this someone, this someone who 'don't know' a thing. Finally, I'll leave you with a question: "In what of those extremes are the average new user experience with those distributions?" In what of those extremes indeed! Bravo slashdot staff, bravo!
I actually thought the mainstream media account was pretty well-balanced. I've used multiple distributions, including Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, and most recently, Gentoo.
Many of the experiences I've had match what the author experienced. I have yet to have a distribution where everything worked 100% out of the box. I've run into numerous occasions where I've had to play musical chairs with RPMs to get things to install.
I generally have had pretty good luck sorting out these problems out since I'm a pretty advanced computer user, but I have also had problems that were very perplexing. I could see how the experience for a user who does not have the experience or the inclination to spend hours configuring their computer would still find the experience daunting.
While the author brings up all of these issues, he also notes that some of these problems are due to poor manufacturer support. He also expresses faith that the user interface problems with yum will quickly be solved. The fact that a mainstream news outlet would note Linux's strong security record and mention it as a strong possibility for replacing Windows is encouraging since it will raise the visibility of Linux for the mainstream.
I've seen great improvements since starting to use Linux. I enjoy the fact that my scanner now will only work on Linux, while the drivers for Windows 2000 are fairly worthless. Gentoo has been pretty satisfactory on my 64-bit Opteron, while Microsoft is still not shipping 64-bit Windows XP.
Let's acknowledge that works needs to be done and keep improving. I'm looking forward to trying new versions and seeing this platform mature.
======
In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
Let me start this post by saying I have been an exclusive Linux user since 1996, back in the old 1.3 days, with Slackware. I have more or less only been a "RedHat Man". It works on my workstations at work, it works at home. Now recently I got a new Athlon 64 and so of course wanted to run 64 bit Linux on it, right? We ran into so many problems with (or so we attributed) Fedora 1 x86_64 that we decided to install Fedora x86 instead. Well, guess what, same problems. Finally we got everything working, but it took a while, and this is by someone who generally knows what he's doing with Linux.
Now, just a few days ago, I was looking to upgrade my RedHat 9 box to Fedora. I decided to try Fedora 2 (it's got to be good, right). Wrong! It took 4 solid hours to get a clean install. It crapped out numerous times when installing specific rpm's (openoffice for one), and then a mesage would come up and say something to the effect of "OpenOffice won't install, so aborting entire installation." So, off you go from scratch again, only to have another problem pop up. No kidding, 4 hours installing Fedora 2 from scratch.
Don't try a custom installation it will crap out. Don't try a typical Home installation, it will crap out. Don't try a typical server installation, it will crap out. And never at the same point.
I am still a diehard Linux user and appreciate all the effort the Fedora community has put into their distro, but man guys, test it out first! It's seriously put me off Fedora 3 in the future.
B - It has a GUI on each and every user's desktop
C - There is no C.
If something I said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, I meant the other one.
Windows users use NTFS in these modern times. PartEd's NTFS support is essentially nil. So what the author said was correct.
At the risk of being somewhat off topic, where do people suggest asking Linux-related questions and getting a minimum amount of condescending attitude back?
I'm an experienced computer user, but I'm definitely going to need some help getting things set up. Plus I have some questions about direction before I even start (and pick a distro).
The author himself said it best:
"And in this way, bit by bit, Linux will continue to grow stronger. It's a fascinating process to watch, even if the results aren't always what you'd want for your everyday system."
he did not install any of these distros.
he contradicts himself all the time
"Unfortunately, to install any of these versions without wiping out most Windows installations, you'll need to buy a third-party program to partition your hard drive."
this statement is a lie - suse comes with a dam good windows resizer and works with ntfs too - I have done it on windows 2000,xp and it worked without any problems.
"That brings up Linux's biggest embarrassment: software installation. Outside of core system updates (ably handled by each distribution's auto-update software), my attempts to add new programs were routinely stymied by the chancy availability of prepackaged downloads and "dependency" issues, in which the installation failed because the computer lacked needed library files."
this is also bowlshit - if he used the installers to add software they would of taken care of the dependencies - yet he complains about yum not being graphical. - uh has he ever heard of automation - kind of hard to automate something that is graphical. so on one hand he is installing software with rpm command line which they all have graphical installers to do that with - and then goes on to complain about not having a graphical yum.
what a boso - he needs to just stick to writing windows articles - uh - click this button - then click that button - you are done.
The gentoo forums will literally save you're life at times. Probably one of the best linux-centric knowladge portals out there. And they're noob friendly.
Well just reading your answer, the email you sent him, prove the Washington Post guy points. Reread yourself, it's awfull the stuff you consider normal and easy, and by the way, "almost" is not enough.
going on chats to install stuff or find it is totally counter-intuitive, even more when you need info. Hell, IRC is counter-intuitive! I never have done IRC more than 20 min. in a row, too much commands, specifications, preferences, abreviation, assholes... if you have to go trough this "simple" step to understand how to install a software, you're doomed. And I'm not a noob or something I just consider knowing the equivalent of a dictionnary to use a software stupid, I'm the type of geek that prefers productivity, simplicity and getting the work done, not marveling in front of my supa skillz mastering the chat commands and understanding every acronyms in existenz!
man -k requires that the apropos database is already built. How do I find out about that? Info is a word easier to guess, but learning the navigation takes effort. The user really needs to be able to type "help" and get enough information to at least tell him how to find things.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
He is wrong to say that installation must be done from the command line. In SuSe, when clicking on an rpm file using Konqueror, a page with a description of the RPM wil come up and there will be a button saying "Install with Yast2". Click on the button, and the package is installed if there are no dependency issues. If there are dependecy or package conflict issues, Yast2 wil point it out. I am a laptop user, and have installed SuSe on several laptops. As far as the hardware, SuSe has picked up all my hardware, so long as it is a new distro and the hardware has been out for six months. I've yet to have the same exprience using MS Windows. With MS Windows, you have to hunt down for the drivers on the web. In the end, though, it is the responsibility of the hardware vendors to provide the drivers. You cannot possibly expect a distribution to write drivers for every single piece of hardware out there. It is neither fair not logistically possible.
" Unfortunately, to install any of these versions without wiping out most Windows installations, you'll need to buy a third-party program to partition your hard drive."
Nobody told me that! I've installed Mandrake 8.0, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 10.0 on computers with pre-existing Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2K and XP. Not once have I ever required anything but the Mandrake and Windows CD's.
So now I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I guess all those computers are going to burst into flame or something because I didn't purchase a third party program?
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
* Font size: how about the fact that running a gtk+ app on kde would have different font sizes when running the same app under native gnome? or vice versa: running a kde app would have different font size in kde and gnome - to me that's annoying. for whatever reason the tool bar font config is greyed out (disabled) under gnome and you'll have to adjust that in kde's control center.
* As for install divx codecs, in debian you only need add (for debian unstable) - but should work in apt-get in redhat/fedora...
* linux video drivers: DRI anyone? Not really linux's fault, but companies like ATI... *sigh* anyway...
* filemanager: I use the command line for all file operations, but the new user might prefer a file manager that's fast and responsive. Konqueror's too slow on my PIII 450HMz (384MB ram), but I found nautilus to be surprisingly fast, but that's only the case when I'm running gnome - because it gets preload.
* X being responsive: let's try dragging a window and wiggle it around your screen. just look at all the after-images...
my blog
I should have known from my overflowing inbox that my story had gotten posted on Slashdot...
Well, after reading all 118 e-mails to date and re-reading the column itself, I'd like to address the questions that have come up about it. I'll start by addressing the contention that I am some sort of shill for Microsoft: Please read a few of my recent columns and tell me if you think I'm doing any favors to the good people in Redmond.
Second, the "why didn't you cover distribution X, Y and Z?" question. Since there are only so many hours in the day, I decided I'd only look at distros using the 2.6 kernel; I'd also only look at the distributions readers might already recognize--either by seeing them for sale in computer stores, or by seeing books about them in bookstores.
Third, my comment about NTFS disk partitioning. Throw all the rotten tomatoes at me that you want, because I got this wrong; SuSE and Mandrake can resize NTFS partitions, although Fedora and many other distros cannot. (Granted, there are apparently a few bugs in their implentation of this, but still...)
Fourth, the "what's so hard about using the command line?" gripe. Command-line interfaces have gone out of style in consumer operating systems for Very Sound Reasons. They're not remotely "discoverable"--unlike a row of menus or toolbar icons, a blank command-line prompt has no way of telling you what you *can* do. They're unforgiving--one typo in the command and it won't work.
Fifth, my complaints about the problems of installing software in Linux: The results I reported came from my attempts to install software as most Windows refugees might: by downloading fairly well-known applications (for instance, Firefox and AbiWord) and double-clicking them once they had landed on my desktop.
I went on to note that there are automated package-installers, then focused on Fedora's in particular (I did give Cobind's YumGUI a whirl too, but since that's a) in beta and b) not included with Fedora, I can't consider that the answer). I could have discussed Mandrake's rpmDrake instead, in which case I would have criticized the way it's buried four menus deep (will any new user even think to look under the "Packaging" sub-menu?). I also could have used SuSE's YAST2 as an example, in which case I would have had to note how this was smart enough to alert me of dependency issues while installing downloaded SuSE RPMs, but not smart enough to fix them automatically.
If anybody's actually read this far, I'd add that my goal in this column was to try to assess these three releases not as a Linux expert might find them, but as somebody moving from Windows might find them. I.e., the vast bulk of the potential user base.
I personally found all three of these distributions quite usable once set up properly--certainly much more so than the versions of SuSE, Mandrake and Lycoris that I reviewed two years ago, or the Red Hat release I tried out in late 2002--but that doesn't mean that, say, my brother or my mom would put up with the initial setup work. And I'd be lying to readers if I didn't tell them that.
I downloaded Mandrake and Fedora and SuSE, just as it happens. Mandrake and Fedora both failed to enable my Soundblaster Live card or automatically configure my LAN/ADSL connection. I _think_ SuSE got my LAN/ADSL okay, but for some reason it never put a real image up on my monitor display...I got an Sync Out OF Range box floating around on the screen.
HOWEVER....The latest Knoppix automatically connected me to the net and got my SoundBlaster card working fine, without additional input from me.
I'd like to work with Linux, but until I can set up an initial install that just plain _works_, as well as oh, say, Windows XP right out of the box, I'm not going to bother to do much with it.
Yes. Fedora, SuSE and Mandrake approach Linux differently. So what? So does Gentoo and thirty other distros at least one person on earth "swears by".
Let's lay to rest the distribution game and start working together for one common goal: Linux that works well enough to replace a desktop OS in business, one that a COO has confidence in.
This distro squabbling is what's holding Linux back. After all, isn't Open Source for us all and not for specific distros?
This is my $0.02.
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
It's just different. Computers are tools. When you go to Sears and buy a new tool, you read the manual and learn to use it. The same is true of operating systems. Read the manual and learn to use it.
This really kills one of the big advantages of linux -- all the available software, mostly free. I've been trying to get my computer to do midi for several months. It looks like Rosegarden ought to be able to do about the same as Band-in-a-Box does under Windows. But I've had _ZERO_ success. Debian is billed as rock-solid-stable, but it doesn't support new hardware, and installing anything not from debian fails because of dependencies or some such. Remudi and Demudi don't work. CCRMA doesn't work. Mandrake doesn't do very well at sound. Fedora Core 1 may not like my soundcard. Etc, etc.
The problem is that it's a big world. Lots of distros with lots of versions, lots of application software with lots of versions, lots of different user-machine configurations. The chance of a linux beginner finding a helpful soul who can explain how to get correct all the interconnections of a particular combination is just about zero.
OTOH, if you just want to do what the typical typical user does -- word-processing, email, spreadsheets, web-surfing, photo-album stuff, linux looks to be a wonderful improvement over Windows.
I've tried to get answers to my beginner's problems setting up linux for sound on comp.os.linux.setup or such, and no help there.
Where's "AnimeFu Linux" with all the blue-haired girls? =)
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Sure, you can roll your own, but most people don't want to. Let me restate that: Sure YOU can roll your own, but most people CAN'T. Just because it can be done doesn't mean the general public is capable. If you can't deal with that reality don't read reviews intended for the general public.
I'd love to. No support for my modem under Linux. I have to reboot to Windows, download the missing RPMs, and reboot to Linux, try again. And again. And again.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The gui is called up2date and it is launched by the Red Hat Network Alert Icon lives that lives in your system tray.
It's just another example of a clueless reviewer who doesn't realise that anything that can be made to use a command line interface by design can have a python gui slapped onto it to make it pretty if you just complain to the right people enough.
The reverse is not true of things that come designed for GUI.
"Mandrake will non-destructively repartition any MS-Windows partition."
Oh ho. Not if you are using say NTFS.
" none of the modern laptops include real modems, only "win" modems which are proprietary and designed to work only with MS-Windows"
A meaningless technical quibble to the audience of that article. Their laptop has got a modem that configures and works automatically under Windows, but won't work without some hair pulling under Linux. If you don't see that as an issue, fine. I agree with the author, it is a show stopper for non geeks.
I downloaded Mandrake yesterday, installed it today, booted up, ran Mozilla and went straight to /., where I found this story.
I don't know about the others, but Red Hat never suggested that Fedora was meant for random users. It's for hackers and people experienced with Linux, isn't it? I've never heard them say otherwise. So why is it being reviewed in the Washington Post?
What about the other two distro's?
Note that all those pseudo-gui screens in the slackware (10.0) installer have 2 choices: 'OK' and 'Cancel.' 'Cancel' kills the install and throws you out to the command line. No 'Help' buttons to explain any of this mumbo-jumbo. No 'Back' button if you see that you got where you don't want to be. This is a sub-par intro for anyone coming from an OS that pretends that somebody gives a turd.
Debian is the true winner.
Sig: I stole this sig.
By repartitioning he probably meant, "and leave you with an undamaged fully functional Windows insallation afterwards".
Even a 10% failure rate would be too high. I see no sign that NTFS repartitioning has achieved that level of reliability.
On the CLI, this is solved with a simple "apropos integrated development."
Nly n Unx wld ll th vwls b sqzd t nd thn wld ppl b skd t spll "apropos" crrctly. Tht's Pgrro's pnt xctly.
See this.
Is it reliable?
Yes, it is reliable. Since July of 2002, when ntfsresize became publicly available, there were countless success reports for both enlarging and shrinking Windows XP/2000/NT4, Windows Server 2003 and Longhorn NTFS filesystems on both workstation and server versions (Home, Professional, Server, Advanced Server). No destroyed filesystem was reported who followed the instructions correctly.
Exactly! User friendly!
OK, that seems authoritative, I'll give it another go.
Mind you, as Mandy Rice Davies said, "they would say that, wouldn't they?"
My only question is, to install Windows without wiping your Linux system what does he use? Windows Installer wont help him...
When Linux gets software of the same or better calibre in the area of graphic design and video editing, I'm there. Solid, stable, feature filled packages is what I'm after, not Rube Goldbergian systems of programs. Real equivalents to existing Windows and Macintosh software.
Everything else seems to work OK, just need those specialized apps and not running on Wine, either.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
I agree totally that linux has its quirks that are really annoying. Just the other day, I tried to install the MythTV (pvr program) for linux. After downloading the latest Fedora core of 3 CD ISO's, I go through the steps of trying to install MythTV and find that the kernel needs to be updated. So I go through the painstaking process of downloading another 600MB+ of updated files. I downloaded new kernel source code, new video drivers, new tk files and all of its dependencies.....
After that is all done, I find out my TV capture card is too new and not supported by linux. So I return the card and get an older one. Turns out this capture card's drivers require me to recompile the kernel and compile the module (because all of the precompiled binaries are for older versions of the kernel.....) I try to recompile and somewhere in the whole updating process, something got broken because the make file breaks halfway through compiling the kernel. I pulled my hair out trying to find out why. I spent weeks on the whole process of trying to download the iso's, install linux, get all the drivers, update the files, figure out what's wrong..... and it still doesn't work!
I spent a day reformatting the hard drive, installing windows, and now I have a working PVR. I would like to use linux, but not when it's this big of a pain in the butt.
If I was on the witness stand, I would say Microsoft does have a monopoly, but it hasn't hindered development. It's made it a whole lot easier to do stuff with computers.
My two cents.
I agree with you totally. I was actually being sarcastic in my original post. My apologies if it came off completely different. I guess it's true that sarcasm doesn't work on the net.
The part of my post in italics was a quote from the person who had originally posted the story. I've seen zillions upon zillions of people like that in the FOSS community who accuse users with legitimate grievances with linux usability who've had problems doing stuff of anti-linux bias *while* simultaneously calling those very same users idiots, questioning their intelligence, and trying to force arcane unix dogma upon them. Often, these people (who I call Kernigheze, because there's no pre-existing word to describe people like that) thinly vail this opinion because, well, it just doesn't make them look very good to claim Linux is just as easy to use as Windows/OS X and then call Joe six-pack a moron. However, there are certain catch phrases you can pick up on that alert you to the presence of a Kernigheze. "Doesn't like Linux" is a euphemism for "Is biased and spreads M$ FUD about linux being hard to use". "Doesn't know any thing about linux" is a euphemism for "is an idiot who doesn't want to learn anything about unix and wants everything spoon to him in a condescending, dumbed-down GUI". Not everyone on Slashdot has had enough experience with the FOSS community to be able to read between the lines and look behind the veil, so I took it upon myself to perform a public service for the community and do this.
My rant is not one of a Linux zealot. My rant is of someone who despises Linux zealots and who thinks the disciples of Thompson and Ritchie just are as evil, corrupt, and abusive towards end users as Microsoft; they just screw end-users for fun and the principle of it, whereas Microsoft screws end-users for money. IMHO, Open Souce would be a lot better and successful for non-technical users if the Kernigheze left. Whether they are going to leave voluntarily or whether they will have to be forced to leave, that's really up to them.
In regards to the CLI, I'm actually for getting rid of the CLI totally, because CLI's are like silicone breast implants: their proponents keep telling us the nasty stuff is hidden inside many layers of protection and no one will ever have to see it or deal with it, yet despite what they say, it inevitably leaks through and people get hurt. I believe that the work of the artist carries with it the imprint of the tool--if you make a piece of GUI software using a CLI-genre tool (bash, vi, emacs, etc), somehow or other that CLI will leak through into the UI. That's why we need public licenses stipulating that anyone who wants to ship or modify the software can't ship a terminal program with it. Force 'em to use GUI's; the ones who get upset and leave are the ones who never had good intentions and are the ones we need to be getting rid of--it's about time we took out the Text-Trash!
I can only hope that people working on Linux development have more sense than the average slashdot poster.
Sadly, the developers typically have even less sense than the posters on Slashdot.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
I've been using Xandros Linux for 18 months. It allows Windows partions to be dynamically resized when it's installed. Very easy. Very painless. It does a very good job of easily networking with Windows as well, and autodetects and configures a *LOT* of hardware. It's a good Windows refugee distro for those who don't need the latest and greatest, and are more concerned with using their computer. It's not too good for people who want to play with Linux at the fundamental level. If you like Gentoo, you probably won't like Xandros. It's based on Debian.
Xandros 3.0 should be out 4Q04. Then I'll see how good the installer is at obliterating a WinXP partition. I haven't used XP once in the last 18 months. I only kept it to preserve my HP hardware warranty, if you can believe that. Anybody want an OEM XP Home certificate of authenticity sticker and product key?
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
It took J Random Backpacker (Dave "FreeSounds2000", in case you happen to know him) about half an hour, and most of that was because his Yahoo account had expired and he couldn't be bothered reading the login screen. Kopete rocks! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Pegaroro is right: the installation of software is a pain in the @$$ on Linux. It was the biggest one of my few gripes with my newest experiment with Linux (Mandrake 10.0). They are improving on it, too, but Joe User must get his/her easy Redmond-style installation before you can call the process even remotely easy. Remember, Joe and Jane User usually find even the Windows installation process to be rocket science.
Here are some points:
-No command lines, absolutely NO command lines. They scare the bejesus out of people. And they are difficult, really. Remember, I'm brainwashed by Windows and GUIs.
-You need to make getting those needed libraries easy. The easiest way is to make the installer download and install those needed.
-Some kind of standard for installation packages in style of the installer exe in Windows.
I see most of your points, but they're all still arguable. In particular, I want to see how many levels deep you have to go to find Microsoft's package manager.
In my case, if I keep digging for Microsoft's package manager I come out somewhere near the Bermudas. How many menus deep is that?
The closest Microsoft come is that some software - including some of their own - registers itself enough that you can de-install it. Dependencies? We don' need no steenkin' dependencies, we 0wn3rZ the desktop, dude!
The vast majority of the problems you raised have to do with un-learning and presumption inherited from MS-Windows land. They are not shortcomings in Linux, and I sincerely hope that Mandrake et al don't turn to emulating MS-Windows so slavishly that you're happy with the result.
Many of your criticisms would be as appropriate to the Mac, which is indeed a shiny, user-friendly gem of an OS in comparison. That alone should be a wake-up call.
Having said all of that, the original article is indeed a lot less Linux-hostile than some of the complete drivel I've seen posted as a review by others in the last year or so. If you can just be more aware of your MS-Windows "provincialism", your future reviews should be just fine.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
it's really getting on my nerves !!! ANY modern distribution has an automated dependency checking and HUGE online repositories with up to date software and makes software installation as easy as it can be. But there are still comparisons between suse, fedora and "real" distributions, ignoring the web forums are FULL of suse and fedora users whining because of dependency issues. DROP that stupid suse and fedora and get to a modern distro in the year 2004! Mandrake has an equal system to debian and also huge online stable and testing repositories. Software installation is super easy. Last time i was sitting aside a suse user and told him he had to install cups, he went to "www.cups.org" and stared at me. Any more Questions about "fedora and suse -users" ?
SuSE pared down the complexity but suffered from initially puzzling settings (icons on its desktop respond to single clicks instead of double clicks).
Actually double-click is patented, don't you know that!?
Ye gods, single-click SHOULD be the default for anyone that doesn't want a carpal tunnel syndrom in a couple of mouse kilometers. Thanks Billy to force us to use it. Amen.
42.
I've been looking after Solaris and FreeBSD boxes for a few years, and recently decided to take the plunge and drop Windows. First thing I tried was FreeBSD 5.1, it was a breeze to setup - was running in an hour, sound was simple to get running even though I run an old Aureal Vortex2 card, X was up as quick as i could compile it and the nvidia drivers were simple to install. However, i'm a gamer so went shopping for a linux distro.
Previous experiences with Linux colored my opinion somewhat, so I wanted a pared down, sensibly organised distro, and came across an article about portage so picked up Gentoo.
It took a few goes to get it installed right, following the handbook at www.gentoo.org. The first go, I did a "stage 2" install, and realised that for my needs the only thing it gave me was an extra few hours compilation time. I'd picked 2.6.7 kernel on this install and once it was up and running I did an "emerge nvidia-kernel" and the drivers wouldn't start. I went off and got the latest ones from nvidia and those wouldn't work so I hrmmed and not really knowing linux reinstalled from stage 3 using the earlier 2.4.31 kernel. Bingo, nvidia drivers worked.
Now I wanted to get sound going and followed the guide in the handbook and nothing. After much faffing about, I enabled the CMI sound on my motherboard and switched to that and finally got it working with ALSA.
I really wanted to run the later kernel, as it had ALSA builtin and supposedly performed better, after digging around discovered there was a compile option in the kernel that nvidia needed to be at a different setting (the newer drivers fix this), so I upgraded to 2.6.7 again and compiled ALSA + CMI + Aureal + NVidia tweak and this time around the graphics were accelerated but boom, no sound.
More digging around, and I found out that Alsa was a bit broken in the kernel so recompiled again without Alsa builtin, ran through the Alsa install a few more times with reboots until the sound started working again.
All in all it took a few days to get a machine that did sound and accelerated graphics up and running. Really expected things to be a lot easier, perhaps it would have been with Redhat or Suse.
As to Gentoo itself, I like it - it's clean and fairly logical, portage is decent. The runcontrol scripts are taking a bit of getting used too, I do prefer the Solaris way of doing things but will adapt no doubt.
Still have a few annoyances though. I can't get audio cd's to play with sound (they are recognised, can rip em etc). I'd like to get my gamepad working too, but thats not really a priority.
Oh yeah, during initial boot the cd didn't detect my network card. Needed to do a modprobe 3c59x then net-config to get up and running.
http://www.suse.com/en/private/products/suse_linux /prof/images90/mainactor5.png
...now why the hell would you go and put THAT screenshot on your site?!??
Look at the very bottom left-hand corner.
Yum...there's no graphical front-end to it, forcing users to use a text-only, command-line interface.
To judge from comments I've read in online forums, I'm not the only person bugged by that. That, in turn, means that a friendlier interface can't be long in coming.
Hahahaha!! HAHAHA!!! HA HA HA HAAAA!!!!
It'll be a cld day in hell before yum gets a decent GUI. And an even colder one when software installation in Linux become truely point and click.
The cabal will not allow it.
May the Maths Be with you!
He says in his piece you have to buy a third-party partition manager to install any of these distros in a dual-boot configuration.
This may have been true five years ago - it's not now. Mandrake at least can resize even NTFS partitions during the install.
Which means his article is about as accurate as Bush's next statement about "WMDs".
He also drags up the notion that installing Linux is a nightmare of unsupported hardware - which is also no longer true (in most cases).
It's just more bullshit FUD.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I installed SuSE 9.1 professional 64bit yesterday on my AMD64. It worked like a charm...
It detected my SATA controller and HDD in the blink of an eye. (WD on a Promise controller of my Asus K8V mobo)
Konqueror has a flash plugin installed out of the box. This is supposed to be a big issue on 64bit distro's, but SuSE manages this just fine.
I installed the nVidia driver update through Yast and reconfigured X (also trough Yast - SaX) with 3d acceleration without a problem. Tried out UT2004 (bought the SE DVD) and this runs very smooth.
Though I have not tried any other 64bit distro, I strongly doubt they'll be as easy to set up as SuSE 9.1 is.
Now if i could just get my eMagic MT4 USB MIDI Hub to work i could finally get rid of my Win XP installation... but i won't see this happening very soon.
Anyway; Nice Work SuSE!
Can you really claim that if Linux were substituted for DOS at the very beginning (accepting it might not have been a Monopoly position and therefore unable to attain global dominance) that it wouldn't be ruler?
The nit picking usability at a fine level doesn't matter to the majority of users. They don't tinker even with the little things. They just install software or plug in hardware. (And maybe tinker with their wallpaper or screen saver).
Your point about dowloading software for specific distributions is totally correct.
LINUX is a kernel NOT an OS.
RedHat is an OS
SuSE is an OS
FreeBSD is an OS
MacOS is an OS
The point being is that packages built for one OS are not nessessarily compatible with other OS's (even other LINUX based OS's).
I agree it's actually an honest review from his standpoint. Amazingly there's one journalist that isn't a complete moron, which has obviously become a requirement so they don't mind writing to the median IQ.
Kudos on the Opteron + Gentoo. Is the -O2 optimization making any appreciable difference in execution, or will programs need to be written to abuse the phat address?
Quick heads up on an easy install: Libranet 2.8.1 is offering that download free for a while. 'Found correct wireless logitech kbd + wheel mouse through linksys kvm, all drivers for via mini-itx, correctly identified/setup old sony trinitron multiscan e100 monitor, and an HP Desk Jet 600C. No other distro has come close, and I've installed 13 of 'em now (DamnSmallLinux came close, but you'd expect that from a Knoppix knock off).
You da man!
I have a winmodem. SuSE 9.1 detected mine and was able to get a dial tone...but couldn't actually dial or hang up the modem. I might have configured something incorrectly and I haven't messed with it a lot, so it still might work. I don't know. Has anyone had any luck getting winmodems to work with SuSE 9.1?
Are you trying to tell us that newbies nowadays don't even know how to run makewhatis ? shocking :)
Most distributions seem to stick it in a cron job by default, so it shouldn't be much of an issue. They might have to wait a bit for the first run though. Or if they go as far as figuring out the "-k" switch to man, they might as well run it once themselves.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Okay I tried Fedora 2 as soon as it got released and all I can say about it is that I was disappointed. The kernel upgrade via rpm permanently out-of-synced my clock, and in general the distribution was very sluggish even on my P4-1.6 GHz 768 MB laptop. The default GNOME 2.6 included with Fedora 2 still needs lots of refinement and even basic menu editing is made inaccessible to the users by fedora 2 folks apparently due to some bug with GNOME menu. So right now KDE seems to be the only way to go, and that is having first cleaned up the horrile customization done to it Fedora 2 people. There is XFCE 4.0.5 lightweight desktop environment included in the installation disks but not in the anaconda installer. How could they have forgotten to include this? XFCE is a very good alternative over GNOME and KDE especially on old hardware. I haven't tried Suse or Mandrake because I am myself a Slackware fan and very satisfied with it. The recently released Slackware 10 is excellent and after a bit of compilation, installation (kernel, mplayer, kermit, openoffice, etc...), and customization it stands out to be a pretty solid linux distro.
I haven't gotten a feel for how good the performance truly is on the Opteron/Gentoo front since I'm mostly learning how to administrate Gentoo properly (had to re-install after I let etc-update clobber one to many conf files :-/).
Initial impressions are that it is pretty quick. I had a weird problem where using a USB mouse seemed to slow the system to a crawl, but I switched to using a PS/2 adapter and the problem went away. After that pretty sweet.... I did an emerge world that built X and KDE among other things and it was pretty much done overnight.
My big disappointment right now is that I can't use the win32codecs package. The NVidia drivers now support 32-bit alongside 64-bit OpenGL drivers, so I may actually have a chance of trying the Transgaming Wine impl... Really, games and May a learning edition are the only reason I keep Win 2000 around.
======
In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
He could have installed everything on a clean drive and then didn't see have the option come up and assumed it wasn't there.
SUSE does a great job repartioning; so easy I almost missed it being done.
The jModule
had to re-install after I let etc-update clobber one to many conf files :-/
.conf's (after initial configurations), and weekly, rinse, repeat... and I can pretty much recover from any silly distractioon udating pukes up.
That's a tough one I've experienced too. I just started backing up all the
As for the codecs, it would definitely be an optimal setup. Good luck!
I have to say that the last time I installed Windows XP on my home built AthlonXP machine, it was no cake walk either. Ok, getting windows up in its most basic functionality is simply a matter of following the prompts. However, after the install completes, there is still the matter of installing specific drivers for every piece of hardware. I'm not just talking about the video, sound, ethernet, and modem cards). But also a handfull of main board specific drivers.
This problem is not just limited to my homebuilt machine either. I have a Gateway laptop, and after reinstalling Windows XP, I had to go through a lengthy driver installation procedure that hung in the middle on the first try.
On the other hand, I've been very impressed with SuSE linux. I was a big Red Hat user before they changed their business model. My machine at work is still running RH 7.3. But my home desktop and notebook both have SuSE 9 (notebook 9.1). Installation was very simple. No complicated installation of countless drivers. Even the driver for my NVIDIA video card was available automatically through Yast.
In the Wash. Post article the author states incorrectly that none of the linux distros can automatically repartition your windows drive to setup a dual boot. This is incorrect. SuSE does include whatever the latest version of the partition shrinker software is (I used FIPS for this long ago, but don't know what it is called now). The resizing happens automatically, if you accept the default partitioning scheme. Granted, you still have to be smart enough to defrag your windows partition first and have enough free space at the end of the drive. But even my mom could understand that.
Gentoo > all.
You've got full conrtol.
You get optimized binaries compiled to meet your needs and demands. It's great.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Windows install are never easier MS marketing just makes false claims and pours large amounts of marketing dollars in attempt to convince people it is easy (and that they are just a dumb users). Most windows boxes I have come across are poorly configured and are running generic drivers.
As for installs, when I first started playing with Linux (redhat,mandrake and suse), breaking/fixing it etc., if I really mucked it up (don't use yast-KDE configure-terminal in su, at the same time strange things can happen), it was quicker and easier to wipe it out and re-install. I would never consider doing that on a windows box because it just takes to long with a lot of annoying reboots (and really strange random events can and do happen depending upon which order you install the correct drivers).
Talking about drivers, why is that, windrones blame hardware manufacturers for bad windows drivers and then turn around and blame the Linux community for bad Linux drivers (sounds like the latest round of MS-BS marketing to me).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
especially as first contact for an operating system.
Its great if you know how to use it, its hell if you don't. I like to install/manage my operating systems from a nice safe GUI using my mouse.
Monkey see,
Monkey click
Here, I'll put it in English for you: You don't amble over to the nearest construction site and demand to know exactly what gauge wire is used to feed your little ceiling fan project at home, do you? No - you pay an electrician to find out, or to have it done for you... just like an MS customer would do.
Instead, in spite of having paid for tech support that you do not use, you decide to stamp your feet and demand to know the answer to a specific item that has prolly been answered thousands of times, and in spite of having the answer (as best as can be gleaned considering the lack of info to go on) handed to you right here on a silver fucking platter, you still stamp your feet and claim some sort of abuse.
You know what? Go back to Windows... please. We don't want or need arrogant retards like yourself clogging up the works, eh?
Linux may indeed be a village of hackers, but that does not require the coddling of the village idiots such as yourself.
That's funny, considering that the last time I tried to install Mandrake (v9), I went through the partition configuration during install like I did on my Win9x machine, but on my WinXP machine, partitioned with NTFS, Mandrake's install wiped out everything. It was the last time indeed.
That's because those whose filesystems were destroyed couldn't get online to report it! They probably then decided "to hell with computers" and bought log cabins in the Ozarks.
Actually, Mandrake 9 did destroy my Windows XP Pro install by writing over the boot sector. (I had no trouble installing Mandrake on my Win9x machine.) Suffice it to say, my XP machine is still solely an XP machine (a new install).