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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."
> 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.
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.
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.