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Switching to Windows, Not as Easy as You Think
rchapman writes "Mad Penguin writer Simon Gerber has published an amusing review of Windows XP as seen from a Linux users point of view. He really makes you feel like you are trying to use Windows for the first time after exclusively using Linux. The article covers everything from the hideous installer and its lack of partitioning/formatting capabilities to the utter wasteland that is the Windows desktop, devoid of useful applications and everything in between. A fun read."
How about doing a review from the perspective of someone who has never used a computer before - then lets see which one is easier to use (hint: the answer will be Windows XP by a massive margin).
This "review" is flawed in so many ways it's not even funny - of COURSE a UNIX nerd is going to hate Windows, and vice versa. In fact it's even worse than the various Microsoft "independant" TCO studies, because at least they try to hide their bias.
All you have to do to switch to Windows is buy a new PC. They all come with it installed out of the box. They also come with all the software most people need either already installed or available to buy at your local Best Buy/Circuit City. I set up my non-tech parents like this over a year ago and have only had to help them twice when my dad accidentally told his firewall not to allow his browser to connect to the internet.
The only support I've had to do to my own computer is fix the bootloader everytime Ubuntu decides to override it and I forget to back it up. Sometimes I think we spend a little too much time nit picking things and tweaking systems to get that extra percent performance increase.
Time for some coffee.
The article covers everything from the hideous installer and it's lack of partitioning/formatting capabilities to the utter wasteland that is the Windows desktop, devoid of useful applications and everything in between.
Someone has already mentioned the fact that you CAN partition and format drives in the installer, so thats wrong for a start.
And what is Microsoft supposed to do about applications? If it bundled Microsoft Office in with Windows, the anti-competition people would be on their backs the day it hit the shelves. They have no choice but keep the OS relatively free of apps - too many partners they don't want to piss off and the anti-competition people just waiting with multi-million dollar fines! Look at the shit they are having to go through here in Europe with Windows Media Player for example!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I had a similar experience, and it cost me days to install XP on a new computer wher Ubuntu installed cleanly. That was about 6 months ago, and the Ubuntu disks had been fresh from my letterbox (fee & all!) whereas my "spare" copy of XP was already a few moons old. So maybe that's why it stymed an old geek like me about SATA drives. Still haven't got Internet going on this "XP" thing, since it can't find network card drivers (not sure I want to). Maybe the M$ release cycle is just uselessly slow for today's hardware market?
If Vista is a marketing success, then MS will dominate for a long time on the x86 desktop.
Seems like circular reasoning to me. Any operating system which is a marketing success should dominate the market.
I remember struggling with the inadequacies of Windows when I had to switch to that OS after Amiga went bust. It was hard and extremely annoying, but eventually I knew enough to administrate both Windows 95 and the Windows servers in the business I worked for then.
I also found Linux hopeless to use and work with the first months after I installed it, but again, business dictated I learn it, so I did. I like Linux more than I like Windows, but it's apples and oranges, really.
I had some randomly bad RAM not long ago, and both Windows and Linux failed with it at totally unexpected times. It may be an application crash, or the whole system may go down hard. The day when software can ignore dodgy hardware is still a long way off, although it is getting better at spotting it (SMART for HDDs is wonderful, saved my data twice by warning my prior to a disk crash)
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Ability to partition your hard drive is important. I've seen brand new PCs coming out with 120+Gb HDs with a single windows-already-installed partition. This is utterly idiot. All stuff (system, apps, data) packed together in C:\.
Should the system go bad (virii, etc), which happens often, the most used solution is to format. Hmm so, where do I backup my data before formatting when this data is in the same partition as the system and the apps... Not that joe-six-packs are organized enough to separate data from apps and system, thou.
And I guess there is some slight performance boost in working with smaller partitions.
Some Windows zealot once said me there's a good reason for this: most users won't even see they have another partition (usually D:\) with the remaining space for data and are likely to complain and annoy the vendor about it, saying "but I bought a 120Gb drive!!!!". This is utterly weak reason too: an user stupid enough to not notice the existence of D:\ is the same user who use his PC to play solitaire and read mail and is not likely to need 120Gb anyway...
So, IMHO, windows installer should have a decent partitioner... And brand new PCs should be sold with a reasonable partition scheme. E.g: a 120Gb should have about 20Gb for system and apps and 2x50Gb for data.
If you want full Linux-installer-style partition and format control over a Windows install, it's there, and it's not that hard to find.
... no media under the installer, can't use drivers from another optical drive, external drive, network share, nfs, and I could just go on
I call BS, and big time. Let's see some crapness in the windows installer:
- no sata or raid support (wait, see next line),
- you can have sata and other "exotic" hw support with third party drivers on a floppy disk, and nothing else (just think of people like myself who doesn't even buy or have fdd for about 6 years now), which leads to
- you can't use, mount, read,
- you have only two choices for partition format, fatxx or ntfs; besides the goal for monopoly, how can one explain the lack of native support for other, high quality journaling filesystems
- no support for defining separate partitions for swap or user homes (that is Documents and Settings) - I know you can make these steps after a finished install, but why not during install ?
- network will be about the last things activated during the install process and still no use since you don't have no other terminals or guis or anything, you can't do anything but wait
- the installer gives you about 0 amount of information about the status of the install, in a lucky case you can see some filenames of dlls being copied, other than that nothing but some crappy images and blinking pixels
Don't get me wrong (I suppose you already did), I'm not saying the way the installer works is bad for the average user, I'm saying you have no other option, which is bad. Sometimes very bad.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
That might be the problem. I've seen quite a few instances where auto-updates applied an update that then completely takes a system down. I've seen systems come up but fail to ever get past a login screen. Hell, I've watched servers that were updated manually get severely messed up and cause downtime thanks to a Windows "Update".
Long story short- Automatic updates are just asking for trouble. I use auto-download, but manual install. At least that way I know if I'm getting a stupid Windows Driver update, a system update, or some other piece of junk update, and if the system bails on me I have a baseline to know if it was from an update or not.
Switching to Windows: Intended for the average computer user:
1) Get a blank Hard Disk or create a new partition. Use partition magic or get a friend to do it
2) Boot the windows CD and install
3) Install firewall software
4) Get updates from Microsoft or a friend
5) Install other programs
Its not that hard. I run a tri-boot system at home, with Windows-Work, Windows-Gaming and Linux. If I had to switch over from Windows to Linux, the main issues is not just the changes in interface, configuration style (init files etc), but finding replacement programs for things I am using under Windows. Like all my games, EndNote, Wakan/KanjiQuick(Japanese Writing), RatDVD and CDisplay for my manga viewing. Sure, there are similar tools available under Linux, but some features are missing, especially for rare programs like CDisplay. One can see that this reverse situation is arguably worst than going from Linux --> Windows. Sure, you may have to pay some money to get the software you need, but, at least they are available.
It all comes down to a popular OS always having more variety of software, paid or open source, being developed for it. Personally, I think most computer users will end up dual-booting Windows (Vista) and Linux as time goes by, unless emulation becomes easy enough (for the average PC user) and fast enough to be a viable option.
Now, let me go play som WoW, followed by a reboot to do some programming in Visual C then another reboot to start up my FTP server under Linux T_T
If I can do it, its probably not worth doing... probably
Like hell. On a Linux-only machine, they're also there to separate /home from the main distro so that if you have to reinstall it's a piece of cake to re-link the home directory. Obviously, there should be a swap partition too. Anyone installing a linux distro should be doing this.
Depending on the situation, splitting off /var, /usr/local, and/or /etc can make sense too.
Long story short, I've been running Gentoo on it since it showed up at the house some time ago. Now, there was some drive weirdness -- I think the boot drive was actually hdd with another drive present but unused on hdc, and the CDROM was on hdb with hda empty (??) but the point is, Gentoo installed and ran just dandy.
For work reasons I now need to install Windows 2000 on the box and I've now rebooted half a dozen times, reformatting drives all over the place and still haven't managed to get the damn thing to boot. Why? Well, it looks like the BIOS is toast because it keeps reporting different sizes for hda (I've changed the cables to where they should be) every time I boot, and -- not surprisingly -- the drive is just totally useless to boot from. Windows won't install unless it can write an MBR to the drive, it seems.
So -- even though I know the hardware isn't working quite right, at least Linux could work with (or, more to the point, around) the problem whereas Windows just pulls up a blank. Nothing I can do about it, either -- I've tried all the configurations that were worth trying. Next, it's time to try using a separate PATA controller card and spend another hour or so to see if Windows likes that any better ...
You obviously don't support Windows systems for laymen.
In every instance that I've replaced someone's Windows-only system with a dual-boot Windows/Linux install, they've thanked me.
I didn't install Linux to computer illiterate family members but I did install Windows XP without any problems and they have no viruses, spyware, scumware, whatnot, to this day.
I usually have a "nazi" checklist like this:
- I am admin on the machine. No one else is. Yes it's a very severe limitation but it's worth gold. Before switching to these "nazi" rules, every month or two I had to clean up myriads of spywares and viruses. For the last 2 years, not one single virus, adware or spyware.
- Only root has execute rights on iexplore.exe.
- Firefox is default browser (thank $DEITY$ my mom's and sisters' banking sites support it well).
- Thunderbird is default mail client.
- OO.org installed (so far no complaints!)
- Autoplay disabled.
- SSH installed.
- Router used as firewall.
There are limitations like installing software, but I can connect remote to the machine and do maintenance and/or installs if needed. There was no antivirus nor antispyware installed, and for shits and giggles I did install one of each and no scumware was found on the machines.
And referring to BSODs, I yet have to see Windows BSOD on about 7+ PCs in my family that wasn't related to some goddamn piece of shit ATI video driver. The only other BSOD I had on one of our PCs was because of a bad memory stick.
I have at least managed to enable focus follows mouse, although I've scrapped window managers that have handled it better than Windows does -- a lot of applications can and do grab the focus out from under whichever window I was working on, usually while I'm in the middle of coding something. You can also find a marginally useful virtual display manager for Windows, though I don't tend to find it to be as useful the UNIX ones I use. Windows on the other displays still clutter up the task bar and tend to raise when you're looking for something else.
Ultimately I realize that it all comes down to what you're used to, but I know for a fact that many of the things that frustrate me about the Windows UI experience also frustrates Windows users who I interact with on a regular basis. Unlike them, though, I know that using the computer desn't have to be like that, which makes it a lot harder to simply grin and bear it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Thank god someone said this! I go into gnome or KDE and have things sensibly subset into various usability categories like "Office" (which stores word processors etc) or "Internet" (which stores messengers or file sharing programs or browsers), and there's a clear distinction between the administrative menu and the programs menu. I don't understand how this isn't a very clear, well organised system that anyone can use, as opposed to "let's dump EVERYTHING under weird names in the start menu!".
I installed Adobe CS2 the other day and had to spend five minutes working out how to reorganise everything into one folder. Because there's actually several subsets to the start menu: there's the global one and there's your personal one, and you have to learn how to navigate between the two within the filesystem to be able to reorganise the menu effectively. But there's no HINT of that being the case until you start to wonder "Huh, why does the start menu folder in the file browser only have four programs in it?"
How to use coral cache: http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/~oscartheduck
I have to disagree with you. I recently (18 months ago) got a Dell 8400, nice system by the way. The reinstall disks (WinXP SP 1a) did not see the SATA drive, I believe the 8400 has the Intel 925 chipset with SATA support. My neighbor who purchased an 8400 several months after me got install disk (WinXP SP2) that do see the SATA disks.
At fist Dell would not replace my reinstall disks, their argument was since the hardware was no longer under support they didn't need to provide a new reinstall disk. The first guy I chatted (on-line chat support) wouldn't budge. All I wanted was a reinstall disk with WinXP SP2. I guess I should have wiped it clean before I used it and then had to wait for Dell support to get me a new reinstall disk before I could have used my new PC. The second guy (Bruce) I talked (actually called support) agreed to send the disk out right away.
So no WinXP does/did not support SATA straight away. Dell's initial solution was to use a floppy to load the driver. When I asked them to provide me with a free floppy dirve they then suggested a USD pen drive.
Give me a break. Microsoft provides a default install location. If you don't like it, you're most likely a power user and can manage to change it yourself.
Yes, but don't forget that the "common files" folder (which stores many installed-by-default DLL's) is located below "Program Files". Moving them is a pain in the ***, because their registry entries are NOT affected by TweakUI.
When I installed WinXP in my 2GB C:\ partition a few years ago, I had never expected that this folder would grow and grow. I had to repartition because everything i installed kept putting things in this common files folder.
When Microsoft had released Windows 3 and 95, the installation asked if you wanted to install in another directory. I used C:\WIN31 and C:\WIN95 (and later, C:\WIN98) so i could uninstall if i ever wanted. This spared me from reinstalling Windows once after a trojan had tried to delete my unexisting C:\WINDOWS folder.
But now that's gone, it's "Microsoft's way, or the highway". (Users who want customization have to depend on third party tools, either expensive or unverified).
And that's something i absolutely hate about Microsoft. First they offer choices, then they don't respect them, and finally they don't offer choices AT ALL.
The process would be like this (like apt):
Does anyone know of anything that exists currently? Cygwin is sort of like this, but doesn't include near the variety of apps available in a Debian repository.