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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."
If Linux distros could enhance their drivers, use a standard package installer (like apt), make it easy for gandma yet her geek grandson could use it as a PHPBB server for a weekend, and advertise it on TV so people will know that it exists, we'd have more converts from the Darkness of Microsoft.
We have tested the following pieces of food:
1. a snickers
2. a jam of pure honey
3. an apple
4. a carrot
We found out that snickers is the best food because:
1. it comes in a nice wrapping
2. has many calories and can give you an energetic boost
3. its taste is supreme to others
Some people say you need vitamines, you should not spoil your teeth etc. But for an end-user what matters is the ease of use! And the snickers is the ultimate winner here.
Although an apple and a carrot keep quite close they have a long way to go.
best regards
michal
Told him to google it and figure it out on his own. I mean - all the info is there in the HOWTO's. I think he's just lazy.
He told me to come back over and re-install Windows XP Home or he was writing me out of the will.
'man' is absolutely not the solution.
The pages are outdated, archaic and written in a way that takes too much time to find out anything useful and of course teh few existign exampels vaailable in Unix and Linux documentation are totally irrelevant.
I do not want to read a cool example of how to use a potato as a galvanic element in order to create a serial connection to a tomato - I want to find out how to use my serial modem to connect to Internet.
Most people don't want to read gibberish, or manuals at all. If Linux can't be made as easy to use as Linux, at least the instructions should be made usable.
When I build together a IKEA furniture I rarely look at the instructions, and when I do it is for a quick reference. I do not wish to read a 10 page book describing the philosophy behind the use of screwdrivers and cool things you can do with a screwdriver, like using it as a throwing knife on the cardboards that the furniture came wrapped in.
The elitistic attitudes and documentation does nothing but harm Linux and delays its introduction to the mass market. And it doesn't make you that cool either to point out the 'man' command.
man how do I connect to to Internet?
No such page.
Here Here.
I installed Ubuntu on my gf's grandmother's laptop, a Toshiba Tecra A2. Setup was a breeze. It detected everything right down to the wireless eth card.
I also stuck a "My Documents" shortcut on the Desktop so the other Windows people woulnd't get lost and in addition made it boot straight into her profile with no password.
That was a few weeks ago, and I saw her the other day quite happily looking at photos of the grandkids and playing a mpeg clip with mplayer. Keep in mind she's 80 odd and has never used a computer before. She wanted to play some games also, so I stuck shortcuts on the desktop to Solitaire and minesweeper.
After using Ubuntu, my gf's dad now wants it on his computer because he says "Windows XP is too hard to use" and he "really likes it how everything makes sense on Ubuntu". Hmmm a logical desktop OS where everything Just Works(tm) is the exact reason I use Ubuntu on my desktop.
Is Ubuntu ready for the desktop? You bet your ass it is.
PS If anyone's interested you can read the blog entry here
"And then I visited Wikipedia
Oh lord, is someone bringing up "man" again? Let's ignore the total lack of features that any other help system have, and concentrate on the dense text. From a past post of mine:
--
Just as an illustration, try "man find". It took me years to figure out that "find . -name {file_name}" would find all files matching {file_name} below the current directory - which I imagine is the usage of 99% of users.
Check out the description of the tool:
"find searches the directory tree rooted at each given file name by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of precedence (see section OPERATORS), until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for and operations, true for or), at which point find moves on to the next file name."
Do you imagine that most users would know what on earth that meant? Why not at least prepend it with "This tool enables you to find files"? Then give one or two examples of common usage? _Then_ by all means bombard them with the myriad of possible parameters.
Nothing that 20 million people do is a big deal to US readers but Choice magazine has been around for a long time. A heap of (particularly older) people pay for a subscription and it carries a very good reputation.
They may not be as enthusastic as your average slashdotter but the fact that they even did this comparison means Linux is getting consideration by people who are very quality sensitive. Also retirees who like to fiddle with PC's and photo's but don't have heaps of cash will read it next year in the doctors waiting room.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
True. Documentation for Linux is still pretty sparse in distributions.
Many average joe's expect there to be a help icon somewhere in the distro. I know Linspire has one, and Windoes always has it's "Help" tab and chm files.
Frankly who the heck is going to bother with the man pages and the command line? I know I will cause I'm a sysadmin, but my mother would have a heart attack upon seeing the command line! Anyone who intends to use the command line will have to learn about it from a GUI first, and quite frankly, I can't see the documentation for that in Gnome at the moment.
Maybe it's time the distributions (or Gnome or KDE or whoever) provided us with some decent pdfs from tldp and stuck them in their packages. Maybe it's time that all the linux zealots stopped posting on slashdot so much and helped out....
The Gnome "help" function is really sparse and doesn't go into enough detail. I'm using the latest version, and the "find" function is hidden in the menu bar. To add injury to insult, a search on "mp3" yields nothing.
Now imagine you are a cluser who wants to know where the mp3 app is....
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
They noted "No Live CD" as a negative point of Xandros, but this isn't listed as a negative point for windows or osx, since these don't include a livecd either...
(MacOS9 used to include a livecd, infact the installer involved booting to a full macos desktop from which you ran the installer)
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I just don't get this "software is hard to install" crap. I use xandros and let me describe the process for those who don't.
There is an icon on the desktop, it says "get software"
You click on it and there is a list of hundreds of pieces of software. Each software has a description along side it. SOme have pictures too. Most are free, some you have to pay for.
When you want something you just click on install and it does, the icon shows up in your menu when you are done.
This is far easier then anything else including mac and windows. All the software that is compatible with your system is in one place. It's right at your desktop. 99% of it is free. It installs with one click.
None of this hunt the web sites, download something, unzip it, install it, click a licence agreement. Just click and install no problems with dependencies or anything.
How much easier could it possibly be?
evil is as evil does
Is ubuntu ready? No - the point is that *you* installed it... *you* set it up... a geek was needed to get this beast working smoothly, and that shouldn't be the case. It may work wonderfully now, because you've set it up and got everything where they expect them to be, but what would have happened if you'd handed them the install CDs and said get on with it? (ok, other than your gran telling you she wasn't going to bother because it's too confusing to put a CD in the drive ;) )
This is not entirely fair, is it?
Try to hand a WinXP install CD to a non-geek and watch him suffer.
While I'd agree that windows being bad is no excuse for linux in general being bad also I'd simply dispute the fact that installing linux is that hard for non-geeks. Ubuntu is in fact a good example for this. Granted, it doesn't come with a nice looking graphical installer, but the install is pretty straight forward and all you have to do is click yes a few times and you'll end up with a working system.
'Mums and dads" want to go to Target, pick up Hallmark Card Studio, and Blues Clues for the kids, pop in the CD when they get home and have it all install and work automatically. They can get that with Windows.
There's too much choice in the Linux world for "mums and dads" to deal with: which distro, which user interface? People don't like choice, unless is about a topic they're really interested in. And "mums and dads" aren't interested in their computer's OS; they just want things to work. You pick out a name-brand PC (depends on which store you go to and what the salesman tells you) with Windows XP Home on it; you know that you can pick up any game or program and it'll just work, no major decision-making required.
Back when the choice included IBM PC, Macintosh, Apple ][, Commodore 64, Atari, I knew a LOT of people who complained that there were too many kinds to choose from. Why, oh why couldn't there be just ONE type of computer that'll run any program I buy? Now they've got what they wanted and they're happy, even with the virus/spyware problems. Linux, however, is all about choice.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
I still don't understand how typing apt-get install PROGRAMX is complicated.
That is not where the problem lies. The additional problems in ascending order of size are --
1 -- (for the non-geek mum/dad user) getting used to the CLI
2 -- (for quite a lot of others too) figuring out what to do if
apt-get install programx
coughs over a dependency issue and shows up with screeds of error messages.
I'd be quite interested to read your simple advice to get over problem 2!
-wb-
I really don't think that users being able to administer their systems should be considered a serious problem when considering linux on the desktop.
In recent months I've come to believe that Linux, and many other unix-like systems for that matter, are not only ready for the desktop and have been for some time, they're near perfect for it. The major catch (apart from that whole software compatability thing, perhaps) is that they're only perfect when someone who knows what they're doing is adminstrating the system.
I administer my own home linux system, and I like it that way absolutely, but I wouldn't reccommend it to any of my friends. Sure, I could get them set up and rurning, but every so often they'd want to change something and would need help.
At my university, we run a department network of NetBSD machines, and they're administered brilliantly to the point where new students who are used to Windows can get started in using them for many things without a lot of problems. The security's locked down to a reasonable extent so it's hard for any badly written software the seriously break any of the workstations, but if we want something changed then there's a responsive team of administrators who'll look at providing what's needed. Most importantly, the workstations are reliable and they're looked after by experts who know everything that's on them inside out. Just like my home machine, unixes very rarely break or collapse if they're administrated well.
My point is that Linux is very ready for the desktop, but people shouldn't be expected to administer their own systems. Luckily, though, Linux has several other very handy things going for it:
What surprises me is that nobody yet seems to have seriously jumped into a potentially great business opportunity of offering remote linux administrations for home users. Essentially it'd be linux by subscription, ironically enough.
I really do know lots of people who use Windows because they're afraid of everything else, and they only even try to administer it and understand the issues because they have no other option. Really they'd rather concentrate on actually doing things with their PC, and would often be happy to pay someone else to administer it if the price were reasonable.
The business would be in providing a remote service which, once a customer's home PC had been set up in an appropriately standard configuration, would offer the service of administering the PC remotely. For instance, if the customer wants new software, they phone up and ask for it. An admin logs in, installs the package, and sets up any appropriate configuration. Perhaps every so often, administrators come along and upgrade whatever software is installed, probably (usually) keeping the configurations within bounds that are known to work on a large scale. Perhaps they even provide conversion services for things like Word files, in cases when something like OpenOffice simply won't handle it properly.
On occasion
I can't believe they consider windows to be easier to install than OSX, OSX must be one of the easiest installs, easily easier than windows or any of the linux distributions.. asidefrom that, windows doesn't even support serial ata out of the box, so installing it on modern hardware os a HUGE pain in the ass, especially if you dont have a floppy drive to load the driver from, and even if you do.. its far from intuitive
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There's actually no need to enable the OSX firewall by default.. The purpose of enabling the windows firewall by default is to prevent access to services which (stupidly) you cant disable.. On OSX it's possible to disable everything from listening on the network, and this is the default, so the firewall being enabled wouldnt actually stop anything.
On the flip side, on all systems, having the firewall enabled often hinders legitimate uses of the system, such as dcc send/chat on irc, or p2p apps etc, so having the firewall enabled by default on osx would actually cause problems while not providing any benefit.
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Sure Linux is rather easy to install when you have all the information. You know the name of your distribution, you know how to use your package manager (Different on every distribution). Lets say you want Yahoo Messager. First you will need to know the name and version of your distribution if you happen not to have Red Hat or Debian you will need to know which one your distribution may support. (that would stop most newbees right there) But if they did get the right run then they will need to follow the directions on the site on how to install the software (If they remember seeing it and didn't close there browser) So the muddle threw and install the package. Now where is it? There is no Icon on their desktop No Icon in their Dock, or in the menu structure. So you will need to call up some linux expert and find one who isn't a jerk and tell them to type in rm -rf / as root, because to any linux user it is obvious that it is in /usr/bin or maybe /usr/local/bin there is a chance that it could be somewhere is /opt or ~/usr/bin or ~bin. so they finally find the product now that is assuming that they know the file name is ymessager not like ytalk or some other utility that are cluttered in the bin directory. (depending on the windows manager) they may not be able to drag that icon to the dock or to the menus they will need to do some funky right click combination to find the and retype and refind this file again.
Yes to people who have been using linux for over 10 years like myself the process is very quick I know where to look and what to look for and how to manage different windows managers. But for a newbie this is a incredible process that is way to much work. And most of them will just go screw it I will just use windows and face problems with bugs, crashes, viruses and spyware because I rather take my chances and be able to install the apps I want.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I stopped reading one paragraph in to the second page:
"Mac OS X could have more comprehensive help files and we'd like to see the inbuilt firewall switched on by default."
Anyone who thinks a default client-based firewall is anything but an admission that the OS developers couldn't figure out how to make any network services secure by default simply has NO BUSINESS even commenting on security issues.
I suppose that excludes most of the pundits online and in magazines, but that's always been true, all the way back to Jerry Pournelle (after his friend Maclean died, anyway).
Gnome does seem to have a simpler GUI than XP, although I haven't used it extensively for some time. For me, I tend to focus on the GUI's associated with the applications I use more than the os specific functions. If I spend all day using Firefox, that experience is going to be fairly similar on almost all major operating systems. One thing that I have noticed about Linux is that many applications differ greatly from the appearances/layout of things in the GUI. Especially ones that are written for a different window manager but get run using something different. For instance, applications written for X11 usually feel much different than native Gnome apps. This problem also affects Windows even though all applications are written for the same window manager. I think the only operating system that I have used that keeps a fair amount of similarity to the UI between applications is Mac OS X. At least, as an example, for that system, I know that the prefernces should be located in the same menus for each application. This isn't always true, but I think most developers try to follow Apple's guidelines.
SIGFAULT
Well... I had to stop reading the Linux/OSX propaganda document when I read things like:
You can't restrict applications to only one user account.
and basically the complaint that Excel isn't bundled with Windows but the other distributions of Linux/OSX have OpenOffice or something bundled with it that can read an Excel document. Microsoft always gets blasted for *bundling* apps (ooo...ooo... the beeg eval monopoly!) -and at the same time- blasted for not bundling apps (ooo...ooo... basic functionality left out!).
That "report" is nothing more than propaganda to further someone's agenda. It's garbage.