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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."
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The report is available ... for a short time
Okay, which one of you hosers told them we were coming?
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.
And he loves it. I first tryed it on my own computer and was really surprised at how polished and stable it was. It detected everything out of the box and I had very little to do to make it work like I wanted. :).
So I decided to make my Dad switch from WinXP to Ubuntu, installed Abiword and gnumeric (oo.org was to slow on his P4 with 96MB RAM), setted them as default editors, copied all his Documents over from the Win partition and made a shortcut on the desktop to his Documents folder.
He really likes Ubuntu. At first he was a bit bored because he had to learn some new things (for example the "Applications" menu is on the top left, and not on the bottom), but he got the changes quickly and adapted to the new OS in a few days.
I asked him yesterday if he likes more Windows or Linux now that he tryed both, and he told me that it makes no difference for him, as long as he can use spreadsheets, write letters, read his emals and organize his pictures like he did before (btw. he loves gPhoto and Gimp is his new favorite program
So to him it makes no difference, but now I don't have to clean his computer from spyware and viruses every few weeks.
So for me (and for my dad) Linux IS READY for the desktop. At least Ubuntu is.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
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
'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
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
The author doesn't bother explaining that Linux is free, that updates to Linux are free, or that Windows is a thousand times more likely to suffer from trojans and viruses. That article continues by marking down OSX for not having a 'live cd' despite there being no conceivable reason for a Mac owner to need one, marks OSX down further for lack of help files without commenting that it needs them less, marks Windows down for lack of built in Excel support (jesus, how monolithic do you want your OS?), then adds marks to a Linux distro for having a windows emulator without saying how well it works, or that Windows doesn't need one! Most of the marks are dependent on the bundled software, not one word is given to the possibility of adding more software, and practically no marks are given for stability or security, which leads me to wonder if the author even knows what an OS is - certainly any non tech-savvy readers won't know after reading the article.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Linux needs to come a long way before installing software is as easy on Windows. On Windows I just need to plug in the network cable to get Netsky, Klez and a bunch of other software installed automagically. I don't need to click on anything.
Compare this to Linux, where installing software requires complex things such as clicking or even double-clicking an icon, which in turn requires learning to use a "mouse", a very counter-intuitive device, that you need to move while looking at something completely different, and when you reach the edge of the mouse mat, you need to carefully lift it and move it back to the center, such that the little arrow doesn't move, and then continue moving it where you already moved it once.
I noticed they commented on how some of the Linux distros couldn't resize the Windows partition down to do a dual boot. I've yet to see a version of Windows that allows me to size down my Linux partition and add a boot menu so I can easily choose which OS I want to run on startup.
Microsoft's website seems only to be able to tell me how to remove Linux (1, 2) and not have a Windows bootloader installed to allow me to run both. All the other Linux-related KB articles are to do with Virtual PC and SMB problems.
installing.
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Worth noting that prices seem to be in Australian dollars, so the price gaps are somewhat less in American $.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
... for 'Average Joe' to use. Seriously.. you type 'man' instead of 'help'? Ok mom.. now type ./configure
What?
DOT SLASH CONFIGURE.. no.. THE OTHER SLASH! GEEEZE!!!!
And my document It didn't save?
BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T MOUNT the DRIVE AS READ WRITE NTFS CAPTIVE! FOR FSCK'S SAKE GIVE ME THE KEYBOARD!
MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOve!
'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 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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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).