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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
Worth noting that prices seem to be in Australian dollars, so the price gaps are somewhat less in American $.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
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.
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)