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OS Combat - Ubuntu Linux Versus Vista
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek pits Ubuntu Linux versus Windows Vista in a detailed comparison. They run down a number of points for this comparison, including installation, hardware support, software, and backup. For IW, backup was a crucial feature. As a result, the conclusion are unusual for this type of review because it straddles the fence. The verdict is: 'a tie, but only because both platforms fall short in some ways. Vista's roster of backup features aren't available in every SKU of the product; Ubuntu doesn't have anything like Vista's shadow copy system and its user-friendly backup tools are pretty rudimentary.'"
Come again? Vista has nothing like the Ubuntu software repository. Just because the two look a little similar in the screen shots doesn't make them the same.
Ho hum. It tries to be balanced, bless it, but its clear the reviewer is just going to go back to using Windows once it's all done. It fails it.
Before we get a bunch of people chiming in to say "but XXXXX is easy in ubuntu, you just open a terminal and type..."
I KNOW.
But the audience this is intended for has no intention of using a terminal. Broadly speaking, they are of the opinion that desktop computing should be easy enough that any idiot can do it without having to spend ages learning the nuances of some command you type in.
They are of this opinion thanks to 20 years of GUI R&D in home computing, from the earliest Apple ][ right the way up to Vista today. That's the whole point of the GUI. You don't have to like it, but at least accept that a lot of people do.
As soon as you say "Open a terminal and type sudo apt-get (package)", you've lost.
Frankly, I don't understand what the problem here is: I pop in an Ubuntu CD, hit yes, yes, yeah, sure, why not, and bam! A Working desktop. Not only that, but I can use the LiveCD for web browsing or what have you while the install is going. No dice for Vista (AFAIK).
Ubuntu recognizes all of my hardware at boot (and I have some rather odd hardware on top of it). No hunting down drivers from a now defunct company, or having to sell my sou^H^H^H^H^H^H^H register to a website that says they have the driver, only to find out they were lying.
Linux has all the security of Vista, minus the UAC.
Ubuntu may not have user-friendly backup out of the box (I wouldn't know, I use ssh+rsync), but the repositories for it have a plethora of options that are free.
And if you are in it for teh shiney!!1!!!!111oneoneone, then Ubuntu can cater (at least on a basic level) with its desktop effects. On top of that, you get immediate (or as near as can be) security updates, and even better a method to upgrade (quite flawlessly, from my experience) to the next version.
Oh yeah, ummm, Ubuntu = free (as in beer, choice, and ideology), Windows = $$$+DRM.
So, why the fence sitting?
FTA:
Add/Remove Applications lets you search the entire directory of applications recommended for Ubuntu -- dozens of programs in 11 categories -- and install them with little effort. I added applications like Adobe Reader and the Thunderbird mail client without too much difficulty. It all compares pretty favorably to Windows's Add/Remove Programs system, which should be familiar to everyone reading this.
I stopped reading after this. Anyone who thinks Ubuntu's package management 'compares favourably' to add/remove programs is not in his senses.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Your right. it's not the feature count that matters. It's little things like does it have Bash (or for me Perl) that are disprortionately large factors. On the other hand, I'd be kidding my self if I thought there were a lot of perl and bash users out there. it's spit in the ocean of devil spawned end users.
Linux shoul dnot try to play microsoft's game of putting up feature charts and trying to claim them all. What matters to the user is how good a tool it ends up being and that things like consistency of use, intuitiveness and in fact hiding stuff from the user that they don't need to know about.
Windows does a better job than Linux at seemlessness. That is you can configure a lot more things in the gui, and expect them to actually work, before you have to open the hood an dive into the scarey bits. On the other hand things like KDE and GNome, do expose a lot more raw power in a very accessible gui way than windows. For a certain class of user, windows just dumbs things down too much.
For me the sweet spot between power and seemlessness and data hiding is Mac OSX. My mom, who really can't operate a 3 button mouse, is able to use it. Yet Me a power user loves it too. I have hundreds of linux machines yet my desktop machine is nearly always mac osx.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A tie! This is a big frickin' deal, people! Remember "Linux will never work on the desktop"? And now quasi-mainstream press says it's just as good as Windows Vista?
The Ubuntu team should be very proud.
Except that this does nothing to protect you from drive failure.
This disturbs me as the person who has written the article had not previously used Ubuntu until he/she decided to write this article. Ubuntu, I can firmly say, has been around significantly longer than Vista. Granted he/she could have said the "Windows" Add/Remove.
The section concerning Image-Editing/Picture management being a tie also seems to give more credit to Vista. The fact of having GIMP alone blows vista out of the water let alone the several picture managers available on Ubuntu.
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
While Ubuntu's package management is technically much, much, much better than that on Windows since it includes application discovery and acquisition and updates, it is in some practical, workflows inferior. No matter how large your software repository is, there will always be binaries distributed via a Website or on CD or via some other mechanism. On Windows this means you do discovery, acquisition, and updates by hand, the same as every other program. On Linux it means you have a special case where you do all those by hand as well as installation and uninstallation by hand. This means users have to juggle two techniques and remember which applies to which software. This is an area where Linux in general could improve. Package managers are built around the concept of open source software and thus everything you need can be in a repository. When software is not in a repository, it is not handled well and I don't know any package manager for Linux that supports using a software package from some random Website, and managing the install, registration, and updates for that application through the standard package manager. Hopefully this deficiency can be addressed if linux ever gains serious market share on the desktop.
A swap of a SATA cable and my Win XP machine becomes an Ubuntu 6.10 machine. I need to be able to support Linux but don't need it very often.
I was shocked that my network connection Just Worked on first install. But my screen was at the wrong resolution, and I had no 3d acceleration. Time to install nVidia drivers.
A day later, now with experience with run modes and editing config files, I had nVidia drivers installed and my 3d app worked fine. It turned out to be simple, but there are an overwhelming number of bad-advice posts to be found on googling for help. This is A Big Problem.
Google a windows problem and you'll find some easy-to-understand magazine editor to explain it, or something on Microsoft's site. Google a linux problem and you get geek-speak. And most of it is bad advice. Usually the bad advice...
"edit the conflabulating confic spec generator and type '@*$&T IU H@U HR@&*&@BFG @&(G' at the third prompt"
is answered with
"No, don't do that! You'll gaspulate the modulating interferometerizing reverse vectral sync mode!"
so you avoid those. Eventually you end up typing '@*$&T IU *^HC* HR@&*&@BFG @&(G' at the *fourth* prompt, because nobody had a heart attack over that suggestion. But then your modulating interferometerizing reverse vectral sync mode is fubar, anyway.
Anyway, I eventually found a suggestion that looked more elegant than the rest and didn't involve editing any conflabulating confic spec generators, wiped to drive and started from scratch, and the nVidia drivers Just Worked.
If I had the power to Make It So, I'd purge 90% of the online linux discussion, because most of it is crap.
RAID 1 doesn't protect you from user error, such as deleting your home directory accidentally or file system corruption. Nothing replaces the need for backup solutions, whether they're user initiated or scheduled incremental backups.
I have a couple of Win2k boxes, an XP box, a couple of ubuntu edgy eft boxes, and a Fedora 4 or 5 box at home, some used as desktops, some as servers. My 17 year old utterly non-geek daughter got an HP laptop recently, with Vista Home Premium (whatever that means). It was slow, rebooted occasionally of its own free will, and refused to see a shared printer on a Win2k box or see any of the shared directories on any of the other boxes. I wrestled with it for 20 or 30 minutes, to no avail. Granted, I could have gone online and researched it and figured out the stupid trick, but for what? To make a Windows box see a printer on another Windows box? Isn't that why people resist using Linux, to not have to dig around for every stupid little thing?
Yesterday I set her up with Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Everything went smoothly, just moronically pushing the OK button to very reasonably selected options. Updated all the software, and installed more stuff than she really needs, all in about an hour and a half with a single reboot. Setting up the printer was as easy as it ever has been in Windows, easy, painless, fast. The network server browser immediately shows not only the other linux boxes, but all of the Windows shares as well, and copying files was nothing more than a mouse-driven copy/paste.
Wake up, folks. Linux is ready for the desktop. It will pass the test with most middle-class college-educated grannies, at the very least. The Aunt Tilly's of the world will soon realize that spending hundreds of dollars on software is no longer a requirement.
We are there, people! Hallelujah, we are fucking there!
dpkg -i foo.deb
.tar.gz files that they don't know how to compile. That's a legitimate complaint, but these days users who don't want to learn how to compile anything can easily stick with repositories and get everything they need.
rpm -i foo.rpm
Those work quite easily for a software package from some random Website when it's been packaged for your distro. For the people who insist that noobs refuse to open terminals, the GUIs nowadays have support for this integrated in as well. Installations this way won't do updates, but yikes, that's a really tall order and that's what repositories are for. (FWIW Windows won't update randomly installed software either.)
As for things that are not packaged, these are often installed quite easily. I installed RealPlayer (I know, I'm crazy) a few days ago in Ubuntu, straight from the Real website. Worked without a hitch. Google Earth installs very easily. So do many other apps such as Moneydance.
People are making a problem here where there really isn't one. I think people are complaining about ramdom
Penny - plain text accounting
So, when I click on "Add New Programs", it comes up with a list of thousands of programs that I could install? No, you say? I know you were refuting the GPP's point, because you technically can add a program through there, but you almost never do in practice. All programs have their own installers. The Ubuntu package manager takes care of finding the program you want, getting it and installing it. Windows will just install whatever disk or install.exe file you point it at. There is no comparison.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.