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.'"

Comments

I would have given Ubuntu the edge

[oliverthered]

Reading through the article Ubuntu really should have had the edge over windows in the end, e.g. Add remove programs in Vista and the package manager Ubuntu work in simila ways but you get a hell of a lot more packages with Ubuntu than you do with Windows. but his summary puts them on equal par.

Re:There's nothing to compare

[metlin]

All the so-called solutions aren't good since it's not OS-Based solutions!.

Excuse me? Cygwin may not be, but Monad is an OS shell. In fact, if you are admin, you can pretty much do anything on Monad. Hell, it even has pipes like on *nix. Perhaps you should try it first, before passing judgement.

Re:(While Ubuntu++ Vista)

[Clever7Devil]

What games? With a little patience, most games can be run in Linux.

Note: I am looking to help this person make the shift to Linux, I'm not arguing that Windows games "just work" in any distro. It does take some jerry-rigging and trial-and-error; however, there are many good guides and it's completely worth my time to help someone figure it out.

Re:I would have given Ubuntu the edge

[LWATCDR]

Over all I thought the article was pretty well balanced. The author clearly stated he loved Vista at the beginning but made an effort to be honest. As much as I like Linux I think in some areas it was too biased towards Ubuntu.
1. Software. He praised Ubuntu for Gimp and OpenOffice but you can download Gimp and OpenOffice for Windows. Ubuntu makes it easer to get a lot of free software but a lot of the best FOSS applications are available for Windows.
2. Printing. Printing on Linux is a pain. It has been a pain since day one. But I know of more than one person that has had printing problems with Vista. I would call printing a tie.
3. Ubuntu has issues with detecting monitors. What is worse is they don't give you a nice easy interface to let you MAUNUALY select what monitor you have. The suggestion from the wiki? Manually edit your xorg config file. If you mess it up then you loose your screen and have to go in to the command line and fix it. I still don't have it working but I made a copy of my xorg config file before hacking it. NOT a user friendly way to deal with the problem.
4. Ubuntu is having some issues with Wifi. A lot of people are having problems even when their wifi card is in the kernal and worked under the last version of Ubuntu.
As I said I really like Linux but I just don't think that Ubuntu 7 is as good as everyone seems to think. I have had more luck with OpenSuse and CentOS than the latest version of Ubuntu. Yes it has a great community but I just don't get it. I am going to try the 32 bit version on my desktop to see if it is any less problematical. I tried it on my notebook but the WiFi problems are a show stopper for me.

Re:Can we just deal with the obvious trolls now?

[AusIV]

People usually suggests apt-get because it is faster to describe, but there is nothing you can do with apt-get that you cannot do with Synaptics using only GUI and point and click.

Exactly. A couple months ago, my girlfriend's windows installation crapped out on her. She had heard me talking about Linux and wanted to try it. I stepped her through the Kubuntu install, answering a few questions but she did most of it on her own. There were a couple of times I pulled up a terminal to install a program, and she was worried that she was going to have to learn to use the terminal. So the next time there was a program to install, I had her do it with Adept. I tried describing exactly what she should click, and after about 2 minutes she'd found the package and installed it. I told her she could have done the exact same thing by typing 'sudo aptitude install -package-', and the instructions would have been a lot simpler. I didn't expect her to know these commands off the top of her head, and graphical interfaces are great for figuring out how to do things, but when giving someone instructions on how to do something, the command line is as easy as it gets.

Since then, she's only used the terminal to run commands I tell her to run. She hasn't learned to use it on her own, but she gets along just fine with the GUIs - she's even found some cool games in the repositories that I didn't know existed.

Re:There's nothing to compare

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

If you download a .deb then double-click it, Ubuntu knows to launch gdebi, which will let you install the package onto your system. It will then also be in Synaptic where it can be removed.

Commercial software companies won't use the package formats or the repositories. Official repositories are not an option for them because they need to control redistribution rights (legally and for risk management). Further, even if they did use the official package format and the repository they still need to contact their own servers to handle registration of the software and updates to the software (since not all updates are free). Given that, it makes more sense right now for them to roll their own installers that include all this functionality.

Package managers are insufficient for commercial companies because they don't include:

• discovery of software hosted by a publisher instead of in the official repository
• updates of software whose original source is a DVD or random Web site and whose update location is hosted by the publisher
• registration of software with a key at the publisher's server
• free and paid updates for the same software and registration and payment for them

Unless this changes, any commercial games or applications that are ported to linux will bypass the package manager and thus be just as limited as Windows, except that users have to juggle two different methods of doing things.

The *real* solution is for Ubuntu to achieve World Domination so that .deb is used by everyone. :-)

I'm all for standardization, but I'm not really seeing .deb as the ideal package format. Rather, I'd like to see a new format that is an extension of OpenStep packages. This would allow for portable packages that can be run off of a USB drive or CD without modification, that can be e-mailed or IM'd, that can be moved anywhere on the disk without problems, that support FAT binaries for different distros, OS's, and chipsets, and that can include source and build instructions for custom binaries all in a single "file." It would also allow OS X and Linux to share a package and would make it easier to find and extract resources from the packages.

I mean if we're going to choose a single package format for the future, lets make it a versatile and extensible open standard one appropriate for desktops of the future.

Re:unhelpful linux geeks

[lahvak]

It used to be the other way around. Some 10 years ago, to find any information online about Windows was nearly impossible, while I always found anything I needed easily about Linux. I think there are four problems:

1) Lot of information out there is outdated. You can find HOWTO's about configuring something by editing a config file. The problem is that these days most distributions use some sort of GUI config tool, and in order to accommodate that, the config file was moved, split into several other files, etc, and even if you manage to find it and edit it, next time you run the GUI config tool, all your edits will be overwritten. Then there are HOWTO's for ipchains and iptables, XFree86 and Xorg, and so on. Some of them are clearly described as obsolete, and point out newer, more relevant version, but some of them were not even updated for 10 years.

2) Formerly most of the discussion took place on the usenet. Every once a while some good soul extracted the useful information from the usenet discussion and other sources and put it on the web. So if you searched the web, most of the stuff that came up was already processed in some way. Now nearly all discussion boards are web based, and so if you search for something, all the raw discussions, arguments and flamewars come up, and you have to sift through it to extract anything useful. Also, the usenet hierarchy was somewhat organized, so if you for example wanted to post a question or answer about a newsreader, there were only one or two groups you could go to. These days everybody is posting on their own blog, and the whole discussion, if you can even call it that, is completely fragmented.

3) As Linux is becoming more popular, more people end up posting advice, and often they don't really know what they are talking about. Most of them are trying to give back to the community, which is good and should be encouraged, but combined with what I wrote above about web based discussions, it can actually create more damage then good. Perhaps some sort of centralized linux documentation wiki should be created, where all people can contribute by editing a document, rather than arguing on a web forum.

4) In addition to that, Linux is making inroads in corporate world, which is followed by more and more Linux related "corporate speak" on the web. So you search for some problem, and you end up with pages and pages of Novel generated buzzword dripping marketing drivel, which tells you how the stuff you are trying to configure is wonderful, but which is totally useless as it offers no information about the configuration process itself.

I have no idea how to fix it, and I expect it will actually get much worse before (hopefully) getting better.

Re:I would have given Ubuntu the edge

[delire]

So it is quite obvious that the author has very little knowledge of Ubuntu.

..and this is a good thing. Reviewers that are already an expert of the product they under trial generally have a completely different experience and appreciation of the given product than those they are writing for.

The reviews I've read on Ubuntu that are the most insightful are written by those with very little prior knowledge of either environment: as such they reveal their expectations about those products, expectations that reflect more of the 'average user's' needs than that of the expert.

I've been a daily Linux desktop user for 8 or so years, but only now am I seeing reviews by people that start with "I really like how in Ubuntu I don't have to websites to download and install software" and howtos that begin with "So you've just installed Ubuntu and want to change your theme?".

These are very good signs. People are actually trying out this stuff and getting there on their own. The software is working. Our ideas are good.

Re:There's nothing to compare

[3choTh1s]

Wouldn't this also be indicative of a problem also from the general users point of view? There is no consistency in what you say. If there is no package in the repository you download and use the command line(bad). Sometimes you can download from the website directly and get it working... Sometimes. And for everything else there's Synaptics or your package manager of choice. I mean all these things are well and good for us who know what we want(which is always choice) but not for those who want consistency. OS X also fails in this regard for a few things... not as much as linux but some.

I can't remember a time in Windows where I didn't download something(.msi or .exe) from some website then install using whatever installer they provide. Say what you want about a good number of packages being available via the package manager but until they're ALL in there it's not going to provide a better experience.

I'm going to put this here since I don't feel like making a new conversation. I was talking with my girlfriend which I set up her computer with linux. 2nd thing she asks me about was how to install new applications. I showed her the package manager and told her that most things she'd want are in there, just look around and see if anything tickles her fancy. She looked for a while and saw a few things but then promptly asked me what they looked like. And this is the great failing I see with current package managers. We need screenshots. Any regular person would at least like to see what they are getting before they try something out. They aren't going to waste their time downloading and installing, then promptly uninstalling stuff because it doesn't work the way they think it should.