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Windows Nearly Ready For Desktop Use
wallykeyster writes "NewsForge (ed: a Slashdot sister site) has an interesting review of Windows XP Home, written from the perspective of a longtime Linux user (ed: Editor roblimo). The article clearly is intended to be somewhat humorous while making a point to the 'Linux isn't ready for the desktop' crowd. The reviewer does a fair job of pointing out the strengths of Windows along with the weaknesses that would be apparent to someone trying to make the switch from Linux." From the article: "Windows XP can't be considered consumer-ready until it has driver support for common LCD monitors during its installation and bootup procedure, especially if those monitors are easily and routinely recognized by popular Linux distributions. It's possible that the monitor manufacturers aren't willing to give Microsoft and other proprietary operating system companies the information they need to create appropriate drivers and that the manufacturers, not Microsoft, deserve the blame for this problem."
SCNR
There's more than LCD monitors that don't work with XP. From my experience:
1) Adaptec SlimSCSI APA-1460A PCMCIA card will make the computer reboot
2) Genius ColorPage HR-2 scanner, ditto
3) JVC camcorder, I don't have the part number because my cousin borrowed it, ditto
People have told me that these things don't work because of "broken device drivers", but I don't want detailed technical analyses, I want them to "just work", like they do with Linux.
My personal opinions
How do you 'guess' OSX is a third option?
I wouldn't consider it 3rd, I don't value OSX so much. Even though I have G5.
Grab anyone off the street, and 10x more people will know what 'Macintosh' is as opposed to 'Linux'
Not in our coutry, apple just hasn't got the popularity here.
(even better, try a distro-guess the number that will recognize 'Debian' as opposed to 'Apple')
While Debian is OS distro, Apple is not. Apple is computer company. I think that valid description would be comparing apples to oranges:)
You could try Debian vs. OSX, but then again it is wrong too. OSX is OS, Debian is not, it is just one of Linux distros out in the world. Wrong again.
Valid comparisions here are, OSX to Linux (OS vs. OS) and for example Red Hat vs. Apple (Vendor vs. Vendor).
Guess my comment is doomed to be troll (as always when I state my OSX dislikes).
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
"gave two typical home users PCs with fresh installs of XP Home and a variant of Linux I think we both know which PC would end up being used,"
And that has nothing to do with Windows being the dominant operating system for the last 10+ years does it... And thereby something that the home users are familiar with, having at least seen it from 3.1 to 95 to 98.
A much better experiment would be to find people who have NEVER used computers in ANY form or OS. Give them a configured Windows machine, and a configured Linux machine. THEN see which one gets used more.
Now that would actually be a USEFUL study.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
> A much better experiment would be to find people who have NEVER used computers in ANY form or OS. Give them
;)
> a configured Windows machine, and a configured Linux machine. THEN see which one gets used more.
> Now that would actually be a USEFUL study.
And it's been done. And GNU/Linux won. And it was something like RedHat 7.3 with Gnome 1.4.
Hopefully somebody still has that story, as I've long since lost the link
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
What kills me is printers. I mean, there are very few ways printers differ, really, until you get to high-end and professional printers. But every single home printer requires its own goddamn driver! In order to get them to "just work", Apple has to include 1.5GB of printer drivers. (Presumably, Windows still operates on the "install drivers as you need them" philosophy.)
FIFTEEN HUNDRED FUCKING MEGABYTES.
TO SQUIRT INK ONTO A PAGE.
Good point.
- Reliable DVD playing support (Including menus)
xine is reliable (including menus) for me on all my dvds, though I do wish it had less of a crappy interface.
- Better sound quality as there's no need to resample
Come again? Although I've tried many times to switch over to Linux completely, the above have kept me using Windows, especially since there is no 64-bit Cedega (AFAIK) and there doesn't seem to be any benefit to setting up a 32-bit chroot over simply using Windows.
Why do you have to set up a 32-bit chroot? I use cedega all the time on my 64-bit Fedora home machine (in fact, I use it far too much).
Easiest to buy preinstalled:
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
As much as I love Linux (and the uNix-y underpinnings of the Powerbook I'm typing on at the very moment), I have to say that most of us geeks just don't get it - nearly all users in the world are technophobes who appreciate and need computers but have neither the desire, knowledge or need to access/tweak/control every last flippin' setting.
In many ways this post was really good, really funny and spot on... but I keep wondering when we'll will grok the fact that the things we find important (fine control, infinitely flexible features, elegant abstraction, cool frameworks) are astonishingly unimportant and even intimidating to the most of the world's technology users.
I really have no love for MS but at the same time, from a techno-secularist perspective, can you fault them for at least trying to give *the people* what they want and need? Is Linux giving the people what they really want and need? Is Apple? Are you?
Oh yeah, I almost forgot... no one except geeks gives two sh*ts about what language any software is written in. But they do want it to be safe. And they defintely need it to work.
Frankly, I wish we'd stop being so damn smug about all this. And I wish we'd stop deluding oursleves into believeing that somehow the cool, geeky-tweeky OSs are the same ones that users want to buy and, subsequently, actually use.
Because I was leaving for a year of traveling and couldn't bring my computer (linux box), I lended it to my younger sister. Usually, she needs a reinstall every 3 weeks (don't ask me how she manage that) which I have to perform. She always hated computers. After one year of using Linux, she loves computers (she still is as much technically clueless though). She only use the Windows box (unplugged from the net) to use MS Office (couldn't get her to try OpenOffice for more than ten minutes, she would complain "this is not like word" all the time). She is going to Uni this fall and guess what she'll use on her new computer ? That right : Linux and Office via Crossover. I hope she will switch completely when OOo 2.0 will be out.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
This article is dead on.
About 2.5 years ago I installed Suse 9.0 on my son's PC and he hauled it 900 miles away up to college.
Since then, it has crashed several times during power failures and became so badly corrupted that it was unusable. Not to mention, 9.0 is soooo old now..
My son is no computer prodigy and was left without a working PC. He was unable to find a single person in his school or area that could help him fix the problems and I can't just drive up 900+ miles to reinstall Suse.
His only option left was to install XP. There are plenty of XP "hotshots" around. So, he bought a student discounted version at the campus bookstore and his friend set about to install it for him.
Onboard nic = not recognized.
Onboard audio = not recognized.
Nvidia video card = not recognized.
One thing he forgot to take with him, the mobo and video drivers discs (which were NOT needed for Linux).
So, for the past two weeks he's sat around with no internet and no sound and shitty video while I tore the house apart looking for the discs.
I finally found them and overnighted them to him.
What I want to know now is, how/where is he going to get the program M$ word which is REQUIRED by his school? ALL of his classes distribute word files and require homework to be turned in in word format and powerpoint.
Is the college going to provide him with a free copy of these programs? (they should, at $8k a semester!) I hope so because I sure as hell ain't gonna pay for it.
And now he is open to all the problems the winders people constantly suffer.. His first year there, the entire campus became a huge petri dish, EVERY computer on campus was infected, except his Suse machine. No longer will he enjoy that exclusive privilege..
So I've been playing with Linux on my desktop receantly, Fedora Core 3 specifily. I've used Linux in server settings for a long time but never on the desktop, figure it'd be good to get some experience. Now, as you point out, when Windows is installed, it lacks hardware OpenGL acceleration. It does have a basic software layer, but it's slow. Direct3d acceleration also doesn't work. It only does 2d, and not all that fast. Easily solved, however. I go to ATi's site, download the driver, and click install, the rest is taken care of. DirectX, OpenGL, and the GDI are all fully accelerated.
So I get Fedora installed. It comes up, and recognises my card correctly and we go. However the interface is a little sluggish when it comes to refreshes. I run a GL app and discover it's using software rendering which is very slow, and low quality. So I again go to ATi's site and download the drivers, ATi does have Linux drivers as well as Windows. Then begins my quest:
The drivers are RPM, so I tell them to install, no dice, conflicts with Mesa. Removing that proves to completely hose X. Ok so leave Mesa there, force the ATi installation. X comes up and it looks like it's using the ATi driver, but still no acceleration. Dig around on the net, turns out you have to run a script to make them work. Ok, run script, no dice, can't find something. Consult with Linux guy, says the error means they need kernel headers, maybe source too. K, thought those were there, I told it to install all the dev stuff. Whatever, get kernel source, recompile kernel, and now headers are there. Try script again, no dice. More digging turns up reference to drivers being for 2.6.10 not 2.6.11 but try these patches. Patch files, run script, success. Then run next script, no dice, won't install the module. Linux guy looks at it, not sure why. Decide to just try 2.6.10 since I have something else that likes that anyhow, there's actually an apt package (no not yum, apt, apparantly you can get that for Fedora) that is supposed to make it work all nice and easy with that. Try that, it goes and installs successfully. Reboot and.... reports the kernel module is incompatible on bootup.
And that's where it stands until I go back to work next week.
I'm failing to see the big advantage here. While it looks like Mesa is a more complete implementation of GL than comes with Windows, it's still software so the quality is horrible and it;s so slow that it's totally unusable for professional work, or even gaming.
Now in Windows the problem was a simple fix. Download a driver, click install. Everything else was handled and it works superbly. In Linux, I've gone through quite a lengthy process and it STILL doesn't work. I'm sure I'll solve the problem on Tuesday, however I can gaurentee a non-techie would have given up long ago.
I can't believe it. Has Slashdot gone so far downhill that they now write their own massive flamebaits, post them on another one of the corporate websites, and then point to it, calling it an article? Is Slashdot getting so desperate for traffic that they've resorted to this kind of ridiculous garbage? At the very least, they should have put the silly foot icon next to it so it's obvious that it's a joke. But then again, the picture of the Bill Gates Borg is about as juvenile as you can get. I now consider Slashdot's "jounalism" to be on par with the Onion as far as accuracy. Unfortunately, the Onion is actually funny, whereas Slashdot, more and more, makes me just surf elsewhere.
I had a personal experience along these lines. One night I reinstalled our house computer with Ubuntu (OpenOffice, Firefox etc) and just left it sitting there. When I asked my girlfriend a couple of weeks later what she thought of it, she said that it was still the same - and pointed out that the little ViewSonic logo on the monitor didn't change.
In her view, the computer still performed all the tasks she was accustomed to - Gmail, university research, document and spreadsheet editing and playing flash-based games. This is great news for me - next, I will change my grandparents computer with Linux and see how it goes. One thing for sure, it will be much easier to administer remotely.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
See, that's not really Linux's fault. With ATI, your choices are a) decent support with open drivers or b) crappy support (but better 3D) with closed drivers, whereas with nvidia it's a) crappy support with open drivers or b) great support with closed drivers which also happen to be easy to install. I guess it's a trade-off.
"I've got a decent accounting package on Linux (gnucash)."
Personal finance only, or have I missed some major breakthrough developments?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
* A decent GUI installer (heh many Linux dists get hammered with that objection).
* A decent set of commandline utilities (grep, awk, sed, etc).
the article missed something important. It fogot to point out how friggin' small the product key is printed, and how similar the letters look. I have very limited eyesight, and the 8s and Bs look the same, and there are quite a lot of them in my product key (at least 6). It usually takes me 9 or 10 tries to read the product key correctly.
How much extra would it have cost to print it jsut 1 point bigger?
... wait and see the face of the guy when he plugs my Canon USB printer and runs Linux. Why do we care about compatibility of modern PCs? Except for accelerated 3D there are no issues any more. The issues arise when it comes to peripherals! And NO, buying Linux compatible hardware does not solve all the problems, imagine going with a linux laptop to a friend that doesn't have linux friendly printer.
The end user wont notice intially but over time, they will and then they will start to cry, and they will cry out loud.
Just one word DRM everywhere.
Microsoft took one step away from their original Palladium plans developers wise, you wont have to pay a huge amount of money to get the permission to program for (for now it is still open), but due to the demands of the Content industry, they introduced an entire secure layer which is basically encrypted from the hardware (harddisk etc...) back to the transmission into the digital output, it never really leaves the encryption state, with the possibility to lock the affected box remotely out. What happens is, that they bascially made a vault for the content providers, which will be enabled in longhorn. Remember parts of the technology already is in place. SATA has extensions for encryption on hardware level, same goes for DVI ouput, with the TCPA you will have a crypto chip on every box as well with the private key stored on the chip. You wont get the stuff you are used to instantly taken away, but I think the turning point will be with the move to BlueRay or whatever HDTV next gen DVD will be, then the users will start to scream, but too late, as much as they are mentally bound to it. Linux and other systems probably wont give them an alternative as well, since the players there will follow the same strict rules if they will exist at all and the remote lockout can affect the hardware (consumer hardware as well, but just blacklisting certain keys in future DVD replacements.
Those who now long and rave for longhorn should think twice, they will have the severe problem that they will get it. Xaml, total onslaught on the W3C after Microsoft successfully torpedoed the W3C into oblivion by not supporting their standards and lying on their fat asses for 8 years. Replacement technology for PDF in place, which in the long run also will become Windows only. Trivial patent grabbing left and right just in case we want to sue the competition into oblivion, and having DRMed the system left and right without informing the users (dont expect the journalists except a few mags writing about those things, most of them are either ignorant about TCPA, NGSCP (Palladium) or on the payroll of Microsoft)
When Palladium comes out, in the beginning it wont make that much of a difference to the end user, everything will work perfectly, but then extended services will be pushed in and the end user will slowly be fed with DRM hell (try this nice HDTV movie, WMx of course, that is another onslaught area, of trying to take over the movie codec protocolls and getting rid of the pesky mpeg consortium), you wanna save it do it... You wanna give it away oops... sorry man, you can move to alternatives if you want, but then you will loose your already bought 20-30 movies. A few years later... no more buying man, just renting.
I like the fact that he's realistic; if you keep XP SP2 autoupdated, run Windows Update every now and again and keep the Firewall up it's actually very easy to avoid viruses and worms unless you have a habit of retardedly clicking everything people show you.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)