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4 Linux Distros Compared To Win XP, Mac OS X
Morf writes "The Australian Consumers? Association has evaluated Xandros, Linspire, Mandrake Discovery and SUSE personal and compared them to Mac OS X and Windows XP in its latest Computer CHOICE magazine. The article is very much focused on "mums and dads", and concludes Linux is just about ready for consumers, although installing new software could pose some problems for those who aren't really computer savvy. The report is available free for a short time."
man is not nice enough.
while the information is correct, man-pages suffer from severe information overload - something the average user certainly won't appreciate.
From the article's conclusion: 'Linux fell short on common tasks such as installing new software.' This is the most important point. Joe Average wants a usable system, which includes being able to work in an intuitive way. the 'friendlyness' of most GUIs that I have seen (KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, etcetera) still leaves a lot to be desired, which hampers accomplishing common tasks. These 'Linux is ready for the desktop' stories have been piling up for quite a few years now, but will it really happen?
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Jokes aside, I bought (ie assembled at home) a PC which I picked off the hardware HOWTO. Ended up being a charm to get Linux working on it. I would like to call that Voting with your Money.
These days you should check TuxMobil or some other Linux site rather than just the hardware vendor's site for the compatibility from the wild.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Apple Mac OS X (10.3) $229
Microsoft Windows XP Home $324
Xandros Desktop OS 2.5 Deluxe $135
Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows XP were easier to use than any of the Linux distributions tested - but not by much.
Mac OS X lost marks for poor help files but was easier to use for most common tasks. Windows XP had excellent help files but scored lower for installation, which was complicated and time-consuming. You may also need to spend extra money on additional software for common tasks.
Xandros Desktop OS was the top performing Linux distribution. It was easy to install with very good help files but was more complicated to use for tasks such as burning a DVD and viewing digital photos. It didn't include DVD burning software and you need to find the correct folder for photo and movie files. However, at $135, it's a considerably cheaper option than Windows XP or Mac OS X.
None of the operating systems are ideal, however.
* The Linux distributions fell short on some common tasks including installing new software, setting up an internet connection and the availability of help files and instructions.
* Mac OS X could have more comprehensive help files and we'd like to see the inbuilt firewall switched on by default.
* Although Windows XP usually comes pre-installed on computers, the installation process could be easier, as could some of the common tasks such as playing a DVD.
We'd also like to see inbuilt antivirus software in all operating systems -- the tested operating systems don't currently include a virus checker.
In brief
* Microsoft Windows is the dominant operating system.
* The Linux-based operating systems we tested aren't quite as easy to use as Windows XP and Mac OS X, but they're not far behind.
* Linux fell short on common tasks such as installing new software.
Overall, however, Linux has improved in leaps and bounds over the years. It's probably not suitable for beginners yet but if you're a confident computer user, any of the tested distributions should suit you.
I tried SuSE 9.1 when they made the personal ISO available for free. Since then, I have recommended it to anyone who would listen. YaST makes it easy enough to install software for almost anyone. It only takes a few times before people learn how to search YaST for whatever they might need, it resolves dependencies automatically, etc.
I know apt-get, emegre, etc do the same thing, but IMHO, those utilities aren't as n00b-friendly as YaST. For one, in my experience, "mums and dads" are terrified of the command line, and will avoid it like the plague.
bash: rtfm: command not found
Availability of help files?
Did this guy even use the OS? It's called "man" buddy, and its definitely more than enough information.
Um, don't (at least) KDE and Gnome both provide help icons right there on the panel by default? I don't know if xfce and other do or not, but damn man, did this dude even try clicking on things? What kind of geek goes blindly into something without clicking on whatever he or she can find, consequences be damned? Isn't that how we all learned how electronics, electricity, plumbing, etc works?
I hate to sound cliche here, but the point remains. You have no right to bitch if you didn't at least spend *some* time trying to figure it out.
bash: rtfm: command not found
Linux is still not ready for Joe User. What I really think needs to happen is that there needs to be a "no-brainer" distro bundled with specific, compatible, low-end hardware. Optionally, you could purchase all the common, user-expected peripherals like a dvd-player, camera, etc. And make sure that they are assured to work on your hardware - no configuring required. Linux could be easier than Windoze, some installs are easier already! Make it cute and fuzzy and absolutely unintimidating for Joe. If you could walk into a Best Buy, or Frys, and get assurance that things would just work with this "Penguin Box" with a point and a click, the Penguin could really take off. Have it all displayed together in the same general area with an info kiosk or something. But, it's gotta be easy! Hell, I'd buy one just to not have to fsck around with configuration hassles. I'm learning how to program and really don't want to waste time on some configuration/imcompatibility issue when I could be coding. I mean, I still use Linux primarily, but "it just works!" is a heady thing, even for the technically savvy.
In fact the report noted that none of the OS's installed, including all four Linux distributions, had no trouble with any of the test hardware on the two test machines. The even note that Linux came with drivers for their printer while they had to locate and install the drivers on WindowsXP, so Linux was actually "one up" on Windows in this case.
I don't know, I never tested Xandros myself, but please tell me they do not use a Wine'd Internet Explorer as the main browser, instead of say Konqueror, Firefox, Mozilla or galeon. Or might the table on page 8 of the report be slightly flawed, like the rest of the article? Talking about the ease of use of installing software on linux here, the call for antivirus software onlinux as a necessity for everyon with linux viruses being as rare as you-name-it (yet), the statement that none of the linux distros keep the installed software up to date (the last Suse I installed sure did), etc...
Well researched article, I'd say.
Worth noting that prices seem to be in Australian dollars, so the price gaps are somewhat less in American $.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
There's an option to version modules in 2.6, so potentially they can be used with a different kernel than the one they were compiled against.
But a lot more work needs doing in that area.
All modern desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) has some kind of aggregator for all kinds of help: info, man, html and so on. At least KDE has good docs for all the "KDE apps" in a very friendly docbook-based format, which integrates nicely together with all man and info pages into a little app which per default sits right of the K button. GNOME has its scrollkeeper, but I'm not familiar with it.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
I recently dived back into the *nix world (altho I always had shells), by installing fedora core 3 on my laptop.
I had spent a couple years using mainly windows as my OS, but when my laptop needed a reinstall, I decided to try linux again.
Let me say that I have hated redhat for years, and to me, mandrake was no better. I was a FreeBSD guy, and if it was linux I was using, it had to be slackware.
The reason I tried fedora core 3 is because i'd heard good things about it.
I wanted to see how far linux had progressed on the laptop side of things... I had slackware running on my old pentium 200 mmx machine with xfce back in the day, but alot of the configuring I had to do by hand.
So I tried this on my Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 448MB, 40 gig HDD widescreen laptop.
I must say I was amazed at how nicely it all came together once i had installed... the only things I had to do was add "1280x800" to my xorg.conf file (for widescreen), and ad another IP to eth0 to access the LAN. Everything else "just worked" for the hardware... and was up on the net in no time.
The documentation to get the few things I needed running was excellent, and didn't spend hours googling for ways to play dvds and mp3s (which I wish fedora had by default.. stupid patents)
Now I'll make a long story short, and tell you that I would have NO PROBLEM recommending this to a friend or family member who was not adept in computers, and just wanted email, music, web, video...etc from their comp.
The problem with installing programs is still a negative, yet if it were say MY DAD.. I'd probably have set it up for him anyways, and wouldn't mind installing the VERY odd program he'd want installed via ssh or vnc.
There are only two things which I think FC3 messed up with (besides the dvd/mp3 issue): First is their choice of xcdroast for a cd recording application. It didn't work from the start on my laptop, due to not having SCSI emulation compiled into the kernel. I fixed this easily by using k3b, which I prefer anyways.
Second thing is their remote desktop application, which was ok for vnc (altho I switched to TSClient), but did not work for my Windows XP Pro SP2 box... complained about the rdesktop version I had. I used rdesktop at the command line and it worked no probs.
Even with these things, linux is a great desktop replacement for windows as long as the person involved is not a gamer.
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
Don't you mean that the rest of the world does have a u in words like colour and honour?
Grammar, for what it's worth, is whatever people decide it is. Without linguistic change, English would still be Anglo-Saxon.
It's probably all down to the user-befuddling issue of charsets (also known as character sets, character codes, encoding etc.). In this case it's probably the fault of Microsoft and understandably ignorant Microsoft users.
Microsoft (ab)use invalid (non-ASCII, non-ISO-8859, non-Unicode) codes to represent typographical sugar like prettier hyphens and backwards quotes in their own charsets. And if a system doesn't know what charset source material is in- or is told the wrong charset- then it can't correctly translate the material into some other charset.
In this case, it may have been a non-standard quote (92 hex in Windows-1252), replaced by a simple question mark (34 hex in ASCII and supersets) because it wasn't valid in ISO-8859-1 (Windows-1252 and Unicode are divergent supersets of ISO-8859-1). I doubt the author could even tell the next person what charset they used.
Hopefully divergent incompatible charsets (even the more modern ISO-8859-15) will die out as the world standardises on ASCII, ISO-8859-1 and Unicode according to their needs. I'd like to see Windows charsets die as well but it's another Microsoft lock-in method. I'd also like to see web sites etc. reject any submitted text containing non-ASCII codes (e.g. £) and insist that the user type charset-neutral entities instead (e.g. £). Or should I write those as £ and £ to make them look right?
Having said all this, I'm constantly learning new quirks of charsets. There's an excellent resource at http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html , complete with images of glyphs for various charsets.
Yay ubuntu indeed -- especially with the "installation of programs is still hard" comment - my 8 year old sister uses synaptic to browse & install the games category, and generally likes ubuntu more than windows "because everything's much simpler"
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
As some one else pointed out, the winXP setup is not any more freindly than the Ubuntu Setup (which by the way, is MUCH better than the winXP setup, when you get right down to it--faster too).
I would be 100% confident in handing the Ubuntu disk to anyone and saying here, install this, and know that they could do it, provided they know two things: how to put the disk in, and how to reboot the computer. A few MIGHT have trouble getting their computer to boot from cd, but they would be the minority. Everyone else would end up with a fully functioning Ubuntu linux installation. Of course, they would also be sans windows, but that's not so bad, now is it.
I do have some other gripes with Ubuntu (it doesn't recognize my epson cx5200, which mandrake does), but they are minor. Personally, I think that their installer needs work, for ANYTHING other than the basic installation.
I promise that if you handed a winxp disc to most people, they would end up with a functioning system only after much confusion. I mean, NTFS or FAT32? What in the name of $person is that? Ubuntu gives even less control than windows, but it's not any worse.
Oh, and another thing, Ubuntu, like Linspire, installs in a flash (sub 15 minutes for a working system on a reasonably modern computer). Compare this to the 30+ minute install for ANY version of windows (well, maybe not 3.11, but I've never installed that).
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Mmm... Half true.
8 .html .
UTF-8 is merely a means of expressing multi-byte Unicode codes in a way that can be passed through single-byte systems without corruption. Much like how UUEncoding protects 8-bit data (e.g. JPEG images) passing through 7-bit systems (e.g. Usenet).
There's no need for it to be compatible with any charset because it's *not* a charset or any other means of representing characters. So the ç doesn't really have a different code in UTF-8 than in ISO-8859-1; it's just that the representation isn't a single byte with the value E7 hex.
If UTF-8 was as compatible with ISO-8859-1 as it already is with ASCII (for simplicity for itself, rather than actual compatibility) then it would be complicated to the point of being useless.
My understanding of UTF-8 is far from expert. A better resource (one of many I refer to regularly) is at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/ISO-10646-UTF-
The Battle of Hastings 1066
Except that the Normans weren't French, they were transplanted Vikings. Sure they spoke French and lived in France, but they were (and still are) culturally distinct from the French.
I've got a friend in France who does exactly this. He started his own small business to setup and administer computers for home users and small businesses. He will do Windows, Linux and Mac depending on the needs of the users and I'm sure he's had more than one person switched to Linux that way. He's got quite a lot of business because he is local and can respond to queries very quickly. In fact, he just hired his first employee.