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Linux Foundation Announces 2010 "We're Linux" Video Contest
prourl writes "The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the 2010 'We're Linux' video contest. The contest seeks to find the best user-generated videos that demonstrate what Linux means to those who use it and inspire others to try it." Sadly, the winner will almost certainly be edited in Final Cut Pro on a Mac ;)
Sounds like you had no clue what you were doing.
... with the damned "I'm a" bullshit? It's getting really old.
I'm a PC! Well I'm a Mac!
And back there you have Linux who is insecure and just has to jump onto the bandwagon.
NOOB !!!
You shouldn't have to know what you're doing to install an OS.
Linux was a community many years ago, but the days of songs around a camp fire are over. These days when I think of Linux, I think of:
Tivo
Apache Web Server
Android phones,
WiFi routers,
OLPC
Portable media players
Server Farms
Linux has really come into it's own, but I don't think anybody will ever mistake it for a hobbyist niche again.
Unless his "generic PC" had a vendor recovery disk, I don't see the re-install of XP going terribly well either.
With a near total lack of information, it is hard to tell.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This contest makes me think of the "sexy nerd" calendar they did in The IT Crowd.
Shudder...
I thought that, that didn't matter with Ubuntu
Why is that sad? It's a great program that puts world class non-linear editing within reach of most everybody. What is sad, is the insanely expensive and fiddly avid workstations and non-linear editors of the past.
Linux is just like macs in that there are huge disciplines where no applications exist. For example there is no credible 3D solid modeling programs or printed circuit board layout on the Mac. Now there is no credible non-linear video editing program for linux. Both platforms are a niche market, both excel in ways that windows does not, and both are a victim of that nitch-i-ness.
It's only sad if people tried to make a video editor for linux and somehow were denied by forces outside their control. If the only reason is that nobody has bothered to write a good one, then that's not sad.
Sheldon
That's not the kind of expectation that Windows can live up to really.
OTOH, any PC is a "random collection of spare parts".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you actually understood how to use Ubuntu then you would love it, but I guess that will never happen.
Yes you do. You need to know how a computer works on a rudimentary level, you also need to know how to install an OS.
If you really think that you don't need to know what you are doing, give the first six-year old you can find a computer and a windows installation cd/dvd. Have fun!
to actually make the video, or can you use Win/Mac?
I was perfectly happy with Linux until I wanted to start editing video. Most Linux video editing apps while "free" and do a basic job, they IN NO WAY compare with even iMovie that comes included with your Mac.
Your approach to the situation flatly contradicts your claims regarding "experience".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And I chose Windows because Linux is still too obtuse for the average user."
Wake me up when it's actually the Year of the Linux Desktop. These false alarms are getting old.
I understand your point, but if you really have a love for computers what's making you have to stick to one OS? I dual boot with Windows & Linux. I get to have my fun with both.
It would also need people in the background belittling your computer skills. This thread provides sufficient input.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
but if you really have a love for computers what's making you have to stick to one OS?
Because it does everything the person needs?
I can point out a handful of people with (n) years of experience putting mirrors on a car, but that doesn't mean they are an expert car builder. Being "in IT" anymore could be someone that runs Ethernet cable to someone that processes orders for NewEgg. It could even be someone that works at Best Buy in the support section. It doesn't mean they know how a computer works and can install an operating system. (Although, every version of Linux I've installed recently has pretty much just worked so I can't see the problem here...)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Sometimes, the OS itself can make up for failings in the "applications".
My favorite examples are iTunes and iPhoto.
Then there's stuff that's "3rd party" but is trivial to install due to how the core OS is setup.
Ignore the OS and you will probably be patching it up piecemeal with annoying crippleware shareware apps.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So I guess you are advertising yourself as a PC user by being easily frustrated, violent and unable to learn anything so you resort to using an OS soon 10 years out of date...
Somehow I don't think MS will be calling you to advertise for them.
Lets face it:
Mac users = Gay.
Linux users = Elitist assholes.
BSD users = Even more elitist assholes.
PC users = Wishing they could be any of the above so they to could have cool sites to post upon rather then having to claim "I am a geek" on a windows machine.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Can we at least get the Linux Foundation to support Ogg/Theora as a supported format to upload videos in. Ideally they would accept only Ogg and use HTML5 to show the videos instead of Flash..
KB? SI units are meant to be computationally convenient, not arbitrarily assigned
They are? I thought they first and foremost need to be independently verifiable. Sure, the kg isn't, but afaik all others are.
Also, an argument could be made that base 12 unit systems, e.g. inches/feet/miles, are computationally more convenient. I think.
Never used that system myself.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
Link?
What?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I'm a Mac
I'm a PC
I'm IBM
I'm a Windows
Got milk?
Can't we just trash all these? Also, the annoying commercials where lots of multi-culti people finish each other's sentences. Exactly what are you trying to say, that using your product will turn you into a hivemind? Well, isn't that neat.
How about we get more creepy children whispering about mirrors, or babies making stock trades. Babies talking like adults is PURE ADVERTISING GENIUS.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20070322/1157960476967.jpg
You cannot assume other people's experiences to match yours, especially based on so little information.
Of course it's not my place to criticize your social interactions, but when you act almighty towards others, don't complain when others do the same to you.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
I might actually buy that if I didn't have plenty of firsthand experience to the contrary.
The average n00b consumer would have no hope without special purpose made vendor recovery disks.
That's the fun thing about Windows bashing. EVERYONE has been forced into having experience.
It's not nearly as easy to get enough Mac experience to eviscerate that OS.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In my experience, every time Linux (any unix, actually) doesn't work, it is a hardware error. Windows is just more forgiving with the hardware.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
And you shouldn't have to learn how to drive a car to drive it.
The Linux Foundation also did this in 2009. Here are last year's winners.
Also, I'm pretty sure that good results come from people who know their tools, and not from the tools themselves. A large amount of the video-editing tools on Linux leave a lot to be desired, but they're still light-years ahead of what was available, say, 20 years back. People made (and still make) good videos/movies without any kind of digital intervention, so that snide remark is probably debatable.
If you really believe this then you've been exposed to very little hardware in your life. Try installing XP on a machine with a SATA controller it never heard of in it's life without slipstreaming the install cd
And a cell phone that doesn't ring. Contrast that to my "I am Windows" support team: they haven't left town yet being called back to the office to reboot machines, fix virus problems, mange servers, handle local applications.
Ah....aren't thin clients and Linux grand :)
the army of porn sites happily hosted on Linux servers open their collective floodgates spewing video offerings.
I think the adjective you were looking for is "ejaculating".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
> Also, an argument could be made that base 12 unit systems, e.g. inches/feet/miles,
> are computationally more convenient. I think. Never used that system myself.
Divisible by 3 and 2, both easy to "eyeball".
Ever tried to split something up into 5 equal parts without the aid of a scale?
Rationales always depend on context and not all contexts are interchangeable.
Some methods are better for machines, and some are better for people.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Linux isn't for the Trig Palins of this world.
Depends on your field of expertise, i'd say. Project Managers are also in IT, and i've seen some very 'limited' people in that role...
It sounds like something wasn't supported. Instead of whining about how something isn't supported, this loser would rather make it out like it's "hard".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I have 2 monitors right now. Kernel updates sometimes break closed drivers, too bad so sad.
The other problems sound like sour grapes.
Then you might want to think about a new line of work.
I've installed Ubuntu on roughly 20 different platforms (laptop, desktop, and servers) since 6.06 and I've never had it not boot. In the past some hardware didn't work immediately but was a trivial fix (or ATI) if you could use google and even that hasn't been the case for a few releases for me.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Better still: http://comixed.com/2010/02/06/comics-comic-strip-yonkoma-trilogy-of-awesome/
I don't particularly care about "loving" an OS. It's a tool. I couldn't "love" an OS any more than I could "love" a screwdriver.
I don't respond to AC's.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-22EpQOm8c
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
I have a Mac under the desk (tiny little thing) but I have no great temptation to use
it despite being a Linux user and Linux tools supposedly all being so inferior to Mac
tools. It really helps to use other stuff and see what all of the various pitfalls are.
It would still be a MythTV box but better and cheaper PC hardware came along.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Put Windows CD in computer. Turn on. Click "next". After the install is done, Windows Update starts automatically, and grabs most of the specific drivers.
I don't respond to AC's.
Eh? I have been using muti-monitors under Linux for over a decade. Are you going for a retro 80's ad?
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
You're right. It's for the "Comic Book Guy"s of the world.
I don't respond to AC's.
I have been using muti-monitors under Linux for over a decade
How many monitors? I wasn't referring to two. I have EIGHT monitors on my windows box, and it took a total of 2 minutes to set up.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sounds like that is what I would do, although the other way around. Wait, I'll be honest. I'd probably actually install OS X. Btw, mod parent funny, not troll.
Sounds like you didn't know what you were doing then ;)
Frankly I don't find Linux to be all that much harder to install than Windows though. It's those edge cases with obscure hardware where Windows has always proven to be easier in my own anecdotal evidence.
See my comment to the other guy. I didn't mean 2 monitors. I meant MULTIPLE, as in 6 or 8. You try setting THAT up. I have. I gave up. You may laugh at what seems like an insane amount of monitors, but we day traders need them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well I do know what I'm doing and didn't much care for Ubuntu, but it probably depends on what it is used for. My brother on the other hand, loves Ubuntu - easy to use from an end-user's perspective, so YMWV.
I had issues installing graphics drivers in a VM for hardware accelerated graphics (yes, the VM is set up for it), issues with getting developer packages installed, issues finding certain packages (admittedly, they were non-GPL and I did manage to install them by pointing to another server, but it was a hassle) - it was a total pain in the butt. I spent 1/4 the time with setting up my dev environment on OpenSuSE than I did with Ubuntu and the graphics driver worked in the VM as soon as I set it up.
In any case, I didn't have any issues installing Ubuntu like the grandparent, that was simple - getting the packages I need was the pain. One project I work on has a lot of non-GPL packages that need installing (and most are BSD or similarly licensed). I also work on Linux in a commercial environment, but I don't do installations on that, just end user (SuSE and Red Hat).
Well, it could be true, i've seen linux do weird things on some hardware, like kernel panics on Asus boards, but most often flashing the bios will fix that. The problem is that hardware these days gets minimal testing against windows and the rest can be damned because that's not where the money is.
Frankly, the fact linux runs on so many machines despite that is a testament to it's & the community's power.
Who cares? Most people don't want a bezel in the middle of their desktop. It's just not something they would be into.
So this whole idea that "multi monitor is a killer" is just PC gamer wannabe nonsense.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
An OS is nothing more then a tool, use the one that fits your needs best. In my case that's linux, but your needs are probably different from mine.
Make unsubstantiated or wild claims & people will attack them. Such is the nature of people.
My video would be one showing me frustrated, angry, swearing a lot, and ultimately smashing my keyboard (last time I tried Ubuntu on a generic PC). It would end with me saying "fuck it" and installing Windows XP again. I doubt that would win.
Sounds like you had no clue what you were doing.
Ubuntu's brain-dead "easy install" fails terribly when it can't recognize a video card. Ironically, if he had tried a less-user friendly distro, he would have had less keyboard smashing as it would have gone into a perfectly usable ncurses install instead of making xorg reload every second.
with apologies to the "Red Riding Quartet"
How many windows users install it? Usuially it's installed at the factory and that's that.
I've installed it several times, likewise various linux distros. I'd say the share of installation problems is about equal.
Oh, and 1983 called...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's more then just KDE out there.
Just saying....
Can I just vote for this instead of some dumb video?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
As many as you can get video cards for. Ex.: 6 monitor setup running AwesomeWM
Linux's supported this for ages...
I'll bite.
I'm actually using a multi monitor setup on my Ubuntu system, don't suffer of 'driver breakage', know where to find the related documentation and have received plenty of friendly help from fellow linux users.
Why, you ask?
Because i'm not a douche, that's why.
No multi-monitor support. Kernel updates that break drivers. Poor if any documentation. A "community" that trips over itself to insult you when you "dare" ask for help.
Are you talking about Linux, or Windows? IINM Linux has had support for multiple monitors for quite some time; Windows took a while to catch up. Kernel updates that break drivers? Windows again, only with Windows it's mandatory. The first automatic update that hit XP when I first got it replaced my perfectly good network driver with one that didn't work at all. Poor documentation??? That's my #1 complaint about Microsoft; their docs are TERRIBLE unless you buy a third party book. If I hit F1 more often than not if I actually find what I'm looking for it directs me to a nonexistant menu item. When I've looked for Linux help I never ran across insults, maybe you're being arrogant and insulting the community while asking for help ("How the fuck do I get this retarded POS Linux to work? You guys are all assholes").
You Microsoft employees need to take your meds, because you're delusional.
Free Martian Whores!
Being "in IT" anymore could be someone that runs Ethernet cable to someone that processes orders for NewEgg.
I was just reminded of how many different things the term "medical professional" can mean.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
A six year-old will have problems with Win7 as soon as it's 'generic' drivers crap up over new hardware, hey, just like any other OS, well i'll be damned!
BTW, given supported hardware, a six year old will have no problems installing Ubuntu neighter.
1) IF it recognised your NIC.
2) IF Windows actually has drivers for your hardware
3) IF it actually had 'generic' drivers that work with your disk controller
I can hack my own drivers if necessary. Clearly what I find difficult is not a useful metric when considering the vast majority of users out there.
Besides, the fact that I can do it doesn't mean I want to be bothered by it. That's what progress is for, so we don't have to be stuck in 1983. We can take advantage of niceties like networking, automation and graphical interfaces.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You're doing it wrong. The Ubuntu installer has a graphic user interface and I can see where that could be frustrating if you tried to handle it with keyboard only (quite seriously, trying to install it keyboard-only is frustrating, I can vouch for that).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's the other way arround, the hardware gets tested for faults against windows, linux is secondary
Not necessarily. By now most people who have more than a few years of computer experience also have a lot of experience (re)installing Windows. Simply due to necessity. And it can be very frustrating to try to install a new system, even if it is easier to install than Windows, simply because they already know all the quirks and kinks of the Windows installer. Practice makes perfect, ya know...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How warm does it get?
I don't know about you but I'd like to have something like that to put my feet on to keep them warm, its cold in the basement.
See the response you got in your other comment. X really doesn't care how many monitors you use. If you can plug them all in, you can use all of them at once. You may have had issues, but it certainly is not the fault of the kernel...
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
But like all tools, you need to know how to wield it properly
There's the server install for that.
Although if you've got a video card that is fighting with the installer then you probably want to give Linux a pass.
We're not the Borg here, or Microsoft.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sounds like you had no clue what you were doing.
I have computers that run Windows XP, OS X and Fedora. Each one is particularly good at one set of tasks while not so good at others so I switch around as needed. From my experience of installing different operating systems over the past fifteen years, the only one that goes without a hitch every time is OS X, mainly because there's a limited amount of hardware it's expected to support. I've run into install problems with Linux (various distros), Free BSD and Windows and it's always been related to drivers for some obscure piece of hardware. Free BSD, in particular, is very fussy about Ethernet cards.
While I'm not a huge fan of Windows, given the huge variety of hardware out there it's probably not reasonable to expect any OS that's intended to be installed on a generic PC to install flawlessly every time.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Do you work at Best Buy?
I mean, seriously? That's like advertising the keys on a keyboard, or the wheels on a car. Linux always forms part of a product, like a distribution, or a PVR or something, what's the point in it having it's own advert? Now, if they were making Ubuntu, Fedora etc. adverts then yeah that would make sense.
That said, I quite liked the winning ad, if they replaced "Linux" with "Ubuntu" or some other distribution name it would make more sense though.
P.S. Why for the love of code do I have to wait 30 seconds for my preview to come up before I submit? And now I have to wait again coz I edited.. grr..
Hell, multiple monitor support doesn't even require using closed source drivers, I haven't used one for almost 2 years now.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Put Windows CD in computer. Turn on. Click "next". After the install is done, Windows Update starts automatically, and grabs most of the specific drivers.
Um, that's most definitely *not* how Windows installs. Not any version ever installed like that.
Well, the main difference is that Linux offers more choices. More choices, more "uhhhh.... dunnnoooooo..." moments.
It already starts with the partition. Do you want to resize your existing system, do you want to use the unused portion of your disk, do you want to wipe your old system, do you want to use the MBR or install it in a partition and have some other boot manager make the "main" decision... Windows simply offers "I take it all and your old system can suck it". And behold, people accept it because it's easy. It doesn't ask a lot of "stupid" questions they have no answer for.
And that continues throughout the install process. What browser do you want to use, what mail system, what this, what that... Windows simply slaps IE, Mediaplayer and ... whatever their crappy mailproggy is called, forgot it ... at you. Don't like it? Sucks to be you.
People appearantly want their OS like their politicians: Making decisions for them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've been using Linux since '94. And it's dorky "community" stunts like this that make me want to disassociate and pretend I still used Windows.
"Hey Kids! Let's put on a show!"
"Oh, super! I can recite all the dialogue to "...Holy Grail!" What can everyone else do?"
No problem, here's a driver disk.
Uhh... where's the disk drive?
Ok, here's the drivers on a USB stick.
What do you mean, WinXP can't use it to install the drivers?
(can you tell I already had that problem?)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My 5 year old learned to install Ubuntu just a couple weeks ago. I don't think he understands what the password is for, or why the default option of using the entire hard drive was desired over of the other options, but everything else he could figure out on his own.
http://www.mhall119.com
It doesn't, if you don't plan to make any critical decisions yourself (read: Install like you have to install Windows, because the options don't even exist). You can simply accept the default everywhere and you will eventually end up with a useable standard system.
Of course, if you actually read what is offered to you and become insecure when you don't understand what's offered, it can be a bit frustrating.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Put Windows CD in computer. Turn on. Click "next". After the install is done, Windows Update starts automatically, and grabs most of the specific drivers.
Assuming it has the base set of drivers to start with and that the computer is configured to boot CDs before the hard drive.
Granted, most cheap computers are probably easily covered. but that doesn't mean their network cards are, or modems, or other things. For example, it's pretty difficult to get a WinModem working in Windows without manufacturer provided drivers. Too many built-in network cards suffer from non-standard drives too.
And don't forget that WinXP until SP2 didn't come with SATA drivers either. So if your hard drive is now a SATA drive, but you only have a recovery disk for WinXP original, you'd be out of luck in using it.
That's where the vendor disks come in - they provide support for how they shipped the system to you, even if the drivers were not part of the standard Windows media.
So I'd still have to say that the average person cannot so easily re-install Windows without a vendor disk - especially when so much of the Windows-oriented hardware does depend on vendor specific drivers that Microsoft doesn't provide.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I was only able to see one video on the site hosting the contest results. I actually had to google search the winner, and watch a copy from Viddler.
Divisible by 3 and 2, both easy to "eyeball".
This is silly. This only works for whole units. One could easily say the same thing about metric, 12cm and 1.2 meters, and so on.
Besides, since division by 3 only works once in imperial units. Interestingly, it's actually *easier* to divide by 2 in metric. 1 meter / 2 is 0.5m or 500cm. It's simply a matter of moving a decimal point, whereas in imperial units, you have to convert between feet and inches to go from 0.5 ft to 6 inches (not that that's hard, just that it's even *easier* in metric).
Ever tried to split something up into 5 equal parts without the aid of a scale?
You can do that easier somehow in imperial units?
Rationales always depend on context and not all contexts are interchangeable.
Sort of, but there are so few contexts in modern life where imperial units are superior, that it's not worth degrading performance in all other contexts.
Some methods are better for machines, and some are better for people.
N.B., computers don't deal with KiB or KB. They deal exclusively in binary. KiB and KB (and MiB and MB, etc.) are what the computer tells us instead of something like, "101101010010".
The only situation where KiB has any direct connection to what the computer is doing is in terms of addressing capabilities, as addressing naturally falls into binary-based boundaries.
Could someone with modpoints hand that guy a few? It's hitting the nail so hard on the head that I'd guess the poor piece of iron needs a pack of Aspirin.
I've seen far too many claims along the lines of "I've been in IT for (n) years and so I should be able to figure this out if it was well done". Nope. You don't. I've been in IT for about 20 years by now. Still I would be hard pressed to compare two graphics cards sensibly or actually put together a state of the art machine. Why? Because I know jack about hardware. I also still owned until about a month ago a Nokia 6070. Why? Because I know shit about cellphones either. And I'm still struggling to figure out how to use my new N97 (took 2 days to figure out how to accept a call...).
I'm fairly sure even the average shelf monkey at Best Buy knows more about hardware than me. Hell, maybe even about cells.
And I sure as hell am no Linux wizard either. I can use it, I can write software for it, but I still use the standard KDE desktop simply because I don't want to spend the time figuring out how to configure it. And I'm fairly sure I still do a lot of things "wrong" and in a way that waste a heck of a lot of time.
But even I managed to install Kubuntu easily. Even though I could probably not put a current CPU into a socket without doing some damage in the process.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Dual-booting is a real pain if you need to actually do work on two different OSes. Especially between Windows and Linux. It's likely you'll have files you need on both systems, so... what filesystem are you going to use for that? FAT?
I can understand dual-booting in a couple situations. First, if you're considering switching, say, to Linux, but you're not sure. And, second, if you're going to use the secondary OS for something isolated like games.
When I need Windows (for development purposes) I run it in KVM. I don't have to install nearly as much software duplicating what I already have in Linux because Linux is still running.
I don't know that I've ever had Windows recognize my network card on a fresh install from a non-OEM CD. Makes it hard to get an internet connection, let alone run Windows Update.
I've also never had Windows actually locate drivers on Windows Update when installing a new device (and I usually have it try, because I'm too lazy to actually dig out the driver CD if I don't have to).
The few times Windows Update does show me a device driver update during the course of normal Windows updates, the "updated" driver is rarely the same version as the latest one on the manufacturer's website (e.g. nVidia's graphics drivers).
In my experience, your description is much more accurate when applied to Ubuntu. (Perhaps not entirely accurate, but more accurate than with Windows.)
what was the problem? I have done 5, the issue recently was more finding cards that supported enough pixels to run 2 panels at once vs not having enough pci slots.
And to extend your analogy, DogDude must know only what a car looks like, but nothing else.
I mean, really, I have a bunch of co-workers that don't know much about Linux but all of them have at least created a VM and installed it. One has gone Linux for his netbook, and another (that has only generic computer experience) is trying different Ubuntu flavors. It's all pretty buttons nowadays and anything "too difficult" (such as partitioning) can be totally skipped. More likely that DogDude is a troll than anything.
I understand your point, but if you really have a love for computers what's making you have to stick to one OS? I dual boot with Windows & Linux. I get to have my fun with both.
Personally I've found that this increases maintenance issues without substantially improving the overall experience. If I played a lot of PC games I might see things differently: Windows would be nearly essential in that case. (I only say nearly because some folks apparently do well with Wine, etc. And there's still a few games being published for Linux...) But running two different operating systems means each is taking its own chunk of hard drive, shared volumes need to be something both systems can understand, and I wind up having to keep software on two systems up-to-date instead of just one. When I was using my Powerbook it was frustrating when VLC or Mplayer on the Mac couldn't play the same stuff as the same programs on Linux (due to version lag between the two platforms, and later my unwillingness to upgrade Mac OS). It's nice to have one fairly coherent environment - though I do feel that I miss out on learning about other platforms this way.
Bow-ties are cool.
ObRalphWiggum:
I'm a unitard!
I'm Idaho!
I'm a viking!
I'm special!
This won't end well.
Get off my lawn.
You know, I enjoy Linux a lot - but if a video like this were actually done well I think it'd be a lot of fun. :)
Bow-ties are cool.
Windows is just more forgiving with the hardware.
Uh... what?
I have a laptop that bluescreens with regularity under Windows. The error codes it gives me in the brief seconds before rebooting point to glitches in the hardware (sometimes the RAM, sometimes the video card, sometimes a generic error).
The same laptop runs Linux without issues.
I'd say Linux is more forgiving of hardware glitches - or rather, the Linux kernel doesn't panic at the first sign of a ripple in the pond, like Windows' does.
This is anecdotal evidence, YMMV, XYZPDQ, etc.
Depends on what kind of porn you're watching.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
So let me get this straight. You set up your new Linux machine, and it's working well. You've compiled everything you need to compile, and since you're compiling anything at all it's pretty apparent that you're a geek. Now you set up your machine to dual-boot into Windows, and you stop being a geek all of a sudden? Specifically at what point does that occur?
Around the time the start-up chimes would play on a default install. XD
Bow-ties are cool.
I agree here, except for getting dual monitors to work the way I want. That is effing difficult in every linux distro I've ever used, and simple as pie in Windows.
My vid would show a blank desktop, with apps opening as I stabbed at the keyboard (custom keyboard shortcuts for my most used apps), or for less used apps, using the keyboard to bring up the run dialogue or the keyboard shortcut for the terminal.
Perhaps one shot of revealing the hidden taskbar by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen. It would show logging in to remote servers using ssh on the command line, transferring files with scp, and using the multimodal vim editor to edit code and configuration files.
I think "my" Linux would scare most Windows users. If this is a Linux advocacy thing, maybe I should refrain from making a vid.
Loose lips lose spit.
Unless one of the ones it doesn't have is the network card.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
and so can you!
Meep.
There's a setting to stop that auto-reboot if you want to actually read the message: Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery Settings -> Automatically reboot checkbox.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I've installed it several times, likewise various linux distros. I'd say the share of installation problems is about equal.
Bah... it depends on what you mean by "installation problems." I've been using Linux on and off for over a decade. This is BS. My primary machine is Linux these days and has been for a few years, and I've been through a number of different distros on a number of different machines. Even on really, really common, standard hardware, I've had completely bizarre problems emerge during installation. Sure, sometimes I've had weird Windows problems too, but those usually only affect some minor weird setting; on Linux, almost every installation I've tried ends up with some major disruption in basic desktop functionality.
If you're running a server, probably the installation problems are about equal. If you're a typical desktop user, they definitely are not, and the solutions needed to fix them are much more complex.
Typical Windows install for average desktop user -- (1) install on machine, (2) boot to gui, (3) realize that many things were detected correctly, (4) do Google search and download drivers, (5) now 99% of system usually works for basic desktop functionality (unless you're using some truly weird hardware)
Greatest difficulty encountered? Usually using Google to find drivers.
Typical Linux install for average desktop user -- (1) install on machine, (2) boot to gui in wrong resolution or sometimes get kicked to command line, (3) spend time fixing monitor detection, video drivers, etc., perhaps involving recompiling kernel if you're unlucky, (4) hopefully get to reasonably working gui, (5) start trying to get other hardware working, (6) after some basic troubleshooting fails, spend hours searching in linux forums for someone with a similar configuration, (7) try out 2 or 3 solutions to the bugs you're encountering until you get the hardware to work for every hardware item that doesn't work, (8) even after everything seems to work, deal with intermittent sound problems, codec issues when playing various media types, problems with plugins to view the most common internet sites, etc., and (9) eventually give up after a weekend with a system that has about 75% functionality of what the average desktop user wants (browsing, email, basic multimedia playing, etc.).
Common difficulties encountered: having to deal with a CLI, having to solve weird problems caused by interactions between hardware and OS manually rather than by simply downloading a driver, settling for odd multimedia behavior and/or lack of basic functionality on some common websites, etc.
Sure, I have enough experience myself that I can sort through these problems relatively quickly, perhaps sometimes as quickly as the average Windows user could find drivers and download them. I don't think I'm the average desktop user. But I would never make the claim the Linux installations are less problematic or equivalently problematic for average desktop users than Windows installs... despite what many people like to claim on Slashdot.
You can bitch about having to download drivers for Windows installs as much as you want, but it's not like troubleshooting Linux installs. And 99% of the time I've had such issues in Windows, the drivers work, at least for the basic functions most people want. Usually solving such a problem takes 5 minutes. In Linux, similar problems often take me a couple hours of research and fiddling if it's something I haven't seen before.
I've probably spent almost equal time using Linux and Windows over the years, but I think I've spent at least 20 times as much time troubleshooting Linux as I have troubleshooting Windows. Perhaps I'm incredibly unlucky, but I find that Linux desktop installs tend to be broken in ways that are less easy to fix. Complicated server installs are a different story... but that's not what the GP was talking about.
On Windows XP, I had one or two computers that did... mostly older ones.
I've only installed Windows Vista on one computer and then Windows 7 on the same computer, and they both recognized the NIC in it. And this computer is newer than Vista is (only slightly, but still...)
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
But if you had such a bad experience just trying to install Ubuntu, I can only suggest that something about your hardware was bleeding edge new,
FWIW, last time I installed Linux (around July of last year), the Gentoo minimal CD (nightly build) wouldn't even boot on my machine with an MSI X58 Platinum motherboard, but the then-latest Ubuntu LiveCD worked just fine. (So of course I used that to install Gentoo, which now runs perfectly.)
"Bleeding edge new" would have to be bleeding edge indeed for Ubuntu to not work... but if he's running a machine that bleeding edge, I don't know how he could expect XP to work any better than Ubuntu. XP has enough trouble with regular components as it is. (Who else loves hunting down NIC drivers to stick on a flash drive so you can get your fresh XP install online?)
You win 1 Internets for telling me that. :)
This project can not be considered complete unless it contains footage of Richard Stallman wearing a hard-drive platter as a halo, holding a conucopia and his GPL sheild. Bonus points if he is heard correcting someone on terminology during the video.
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
Very true. I used to do on site repair work for a few different companies and I had more than a few times where the vendor supplied restore disc didn't even work (wrong drivers supplied on it). Oh, the good old days (circa 2002-03, so it wasn't Windows 3.1, just in case someone misunderstands). It wasn't that rare, either (though probably something like 5% at most, which when you average 600 repairs a month, with at least half of them just being hard drive corruption (usually due to viruses) equals a lot of frustration.
Another person experiences the joy of OpenSUSE over Ubuntu.... It never ceases to amaze me how many people think that Ubuntu is this pinnacle of ease of use and that any other distro is like trying to type on a terminal screen in 1985.
Splitting something in 3 equal parts isn't any easier than doing it in 5. Face it, if 'ease of eyeballing' was paramount for our units, we'd be using binary (or more likely octal) just like our computers.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
My video would be a split-screen labelled Linux on the left side and Windows on the right side.
The video begins with left-side user installing Linux and right-side user installing Windows.
The time span shows Left installing Linux, messing up, starting over two or three times and text that says "time elapsed: 3 days" at the end of which the user looks a bit tired but finally satisfied.
During this, the user on the right side pops in the Windows XP disk and installs Windows mostly by clicking OK. A text appears that says "time elapsed: 2 hours"
Then both the left and right users sit down and start using their computers.
Many quick-succession shots follow, indicating passage of time.
On the left side, the Linux user sits and uses his computer as the caption indicates the passage of time: 3 months, 6 months, a year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years, 6 years... This goes on with no end in sight. The user is oblivious to everything as he is absorbed in actually using his computer now.
During this time, the user on the right repeatedly complains that his computer is getting slower and slower. He reluctantly stops every three months and backs up his files, angrily wipes everything from the computer, reformats and reinstalls everything. This happens over and over, with the user becoming more and more frustrated each time as the user on the left continues using his computer with no interruptions.
The video ends with the user on the right giving up and asking the user on the left for his Linux install disk.
The caption reads "This is based on a true story" and then "Linux: What do YOU want to do today?"
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Can we please have more IMB-like ethereal commercials showcasing how Linux is growing and is ultimately unstoppable because it represents the collective knowledge of the world?
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
You know, I learned some modeling and animation with Blender and I'd heard it could do editing - but I haven't really found out anything about how it's done or what it's capable of...
Bow-ties are cool.
I'm using Linux. And I'm boycotting flash. So I'm here on an Ubuntu Linux (my home computer) and can't watch the videos on http://video.linuxfoundation.org/category/we-are-linux-foundation-video-contest the linuxfoundation is talking about. WTF? You people should try to make some accessibility example for OSS folks if you want to be taken seriously. What is this carp??
On the other hand, reading about the content of the videos, maybe it's better this way..
Worst comeback ever!
And I chose Windows because Linux is still too obtuse for the average user."
Wake me up when it's actually the Year of the Linux Desktop. These false alarms are getting old.
It could be that the "Linux Platform" (i.e. what you get from a "Linux Distribution" as opposed to, say, something like Android) will always be too obtuse for you. Honestly, I'm fine with that. I'm more interested in it being a good system for me as opposed to a good system for you. I am interested in the technical aspects of computing for their own sake, and I'm interested in participating in the future direction of the platform. I am interested in making Linux a better computing platform - but the direction I want to see it go is not necessarily the one that would suit you.
It may be that I've missed something but I haven't really seen anybody claiming, "OK, casual users, Linux is finally ready for you!" - Rather, I've just been seeing guys like you dragging out the tired old "Year of the Linux Desktop" line ad nauseum to remind everyone that no one has quite bent Linux entirely to your specifications yet... So where's the "false alarm" here?
Bow-ties are cool.
I know how to use Ubuntu........ I still don't like it. I'd rather use Debian if I had to use a Debian based distro, and I don't want to have to use one.
A sensible sentiment. Use what you're comfortable with and does the job for you. If other people use something different, that's not your call, any more than your choice is their call. I've used Linux for a very long time. Yes, it takes a little more effort to install and configure than Windows, although I would argue that the "average" user can't successfully install either one. But in the end I'm willing to put in the effort because (1) I'm able to do so and (2) I appreciate the results. And I like what I've paid out for my O/S and all the tools and applications: nothing. I am easily a few thousand dollars ahead on each and every machine that I fully configure. (Think about the cost of proprietary office tools, project management tools, graphics tools, etc., and my estimate is not exaggerated.)
That is so funny and the Linux guy looks just like my neighbour!
Yeah, well the jerk store called and they're running out of YOU!
The windows installer has given me 100 times more headache due to the activation process alone, ignoring the less powerful disk formatting and partitioning tools, having to load drivers from other media, et cetera.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
It's too hard... Mummy (it burns)
No offense meant to morons - we all know we can't offend anyone. And "good Samaritan" is an insult (do-gooder). Hey everyone stay back for two years in schools so the lazy ones don't feel left behind - oh wait - that's not fair for pinheads - better pass them anyway.
Duh - no wonder the mentally challenged tend to champion the "evolution is a lie" campaign.
I'm afraid that's not possible. See, to get in the ad industry you have to take an IQ test. If you score over 80, you fail.
Free Martian Whores!
Typical Linux install for average desktop user -- (1) install on machine, (2) boot to gui in wrong resolution or sometimes get kicked to command line, (3) spend time fixing monitor detection, video drivers, etc., perhaps involving recompiling kernel if you're unlucky, (4) hopefully get to reasonably working gui, (5) start trying to get other hardware working, (6) after some basic troubleshooting fails, spend hours searching in linux forums for someone with a similar configuration, (7) try out 2 or 3 solutions to the bugs you're encountering until you get the hardware to work for every hardware item that doesn't work, (8) even after everything seems to work, deal with intermittent sound problems, codec issues when playing various media types, problems with plugins to view the most common internet sites, etc., and (9) eventually give up after a weekend with a system that has about 75% functionality of what the average desktop user wants (browsing, email, basic multimedia playing, etc.).
I suppose you think you are cool 'cause you just bought a body shirt to match your safari suit - and you've got one of those new colour televison sets
lspci. use it. love it. And don't buy POS unsupported hardware. It may come as a surprise, but the hardware that is troublefree in linux is troublefree in Windows too.
Our *expert* meant Idiot Talking.
(not my quote) Ubuntu - African word for "Debian is too-oo hard"
and you'll recognize those submissions as the ones where the audio and video are totally out of sync.
Try Audacity, it's much better than that crappy knock-off, Audicity.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
That's no excuse for the OS to be difficult to install and configure properly.
Which kind of sounds like you think you have a "right" to an easier experience... How's that? Where's my paycheck? Dude??
I've installed Ubuntu on roughly 20 different platforms (laptop, desktop, and servers) since 6.06 and I've never had it not boot.
I've had several installations of Ubuntu fail to boot on a few systems over the last 3 years. Eventually, I figured out it was the fault of my CD burner (8 years old) failing to write good disks. They'd be good enough to mount, good enough to pass Ubuntu's self-checker, but about half the time the installed OS would have some failure. I would not be surprised if bad disks contributed to many of the linux install headaches.
People appearantly want their OS like their politicians: Making decisions for them.
Exactly, because the average end user wants a computer that just works, and they don't care about the specifics of how it does.
Imagine you take your car to the dealer for service and the technician asks you: What would you like to set the spark plug gap to? What would you like the ignition timing to be? Would you like the tires to be rotated in a cross or mirror pattern? You would give him a funny look and say "I don't know, I just want it to drive like it's supposed to."
WorksForMe(TM)
you know, at least half of the videos are going to end with a Rod Serling like quote
"That book, how to serve the Linux Community, it's a cookbook!"
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
All you have to do is open up a terminal window and enter these twelve 12 cryptic commands
My mother (in her eighties) bought a netbook with Linux pre-installed for Xmas. She's never used a computer before. She's been emailing me since New Years (stop it mum - one email a day is heaps). Command-line? She doesn't know what a terminal window is... Like "Ubuntu" is the end all and be all of Linux. Like if the install doesn't support your video card out of the box you can't just choose a vga install option.
If Linux was as hard as you make out, uh, duh - google, the net, and this site would never have come into existence
P.S. Did you know Homer Simpson is "satire".
If at first you don't succeed - give up
Of course it's not my place to criticize your social interactions
I call them weasel words.
Of course, you are right sir. Slashdot is not the appropriate forum for criticism.
Lets all have a big group hug and do each others hair
Juvenile of me right?
As apposed to "condescending" sharp thingie??
Not as funny as a video of the support tech smashing the smashed keyboard of the arseclowns' head!
I've been running Slackware since kernel version 0.9something (93? 94? there abouts) and I definitely know what I'm doing - and yet I gave up on an Ubuntu install just a couple weeks ago, because I simply was unable to get sound to work on a generic white-box with no special hardware in it.
Poking around the website I find that I cannot actually have sound in the current version of Ubuntu unless I'm willing to use a kernel from a different (previous) version of the distro. Had nothing to do with my qualifications, and everything with a borked distribution (that I had downloaded from the official mirror just that day).
Like the GP, I ended up slapping XPpro on it and forget about Ubuntu. I understand that the hardware has to be supported by the OS one way or the other, but when a whole class of hardware (namely every sound card ever made) is amongst the "unsupported hardware" then the OS is faulty.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Then why do 16 year-olds take Driver's Ed?
I believe you mean "you shouldn't have to know how to replace a cracked head gasket in order to drive a car" or something along those lines.
I run Ubuntu skinned to look like a Mac on a PC. Go figure.
Was the last Linux distro you installed Yggdrasil? If not, this example is pure crap, as I can't remember the last time the defaults (clicking NEXT) didn't work, with ANY Linux distro I've come across.
The only reason people have a poor impression of Linux installs these days, is because some people try to setup a dual-boot scenario, which is inherently more complex. Since they're trying to set that up to try out Linux, guess what gets blamed for every problem along the way, with resizing the Windows partitions, bugs with Windows seeing Linux partitions as "corrupt", bugs with the Windows boot-loader, et al.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I disagree. I recently installed Windows 7 on a computer and the GP's sentence sums up my experience. It installed with a minimal amount of clicks. After installation nearly everything "just worked". It also connected to the internet and found drivers for the rest of the hardware. When it was done, everything was working. I was really impressed and told my friends that it's almost as easy to install as linux.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Premiere 1.0-6.5 sucked royally. Once they revamped it and made it "Premiere Pro", some of the more recent iterations have been fairly solid; IMO version 2.0 was the best balance between features and bloat. No, it doesn't have perfect compatibility, but I've gotten just about every AVI codec to import and edit properly. While DV-AVI is the codec that Premiere natively edits (and in many cases I find myself transcoding before editing anything else, lets the render times triple), it has supported virtually everything I've tried to edit. The only issue I had was editing .mkv files (which Adobe officially states isn't supported), but even that I was able to Google my way to a workaround. Most of the stability issues I've had have either been due to a corrupted video file, or a third party plugin misbehaving. Premiere has other issues, but it's come a LONG way in recent years.
Love your work, keep it up. Time I bought a new boat - kingfish are running. Think I'll name the new one "Windows 7".
You probably *think* "Where do you want to be tomorrow" is, uh, installing Office, etc, etc, etc, then next week installing updates, antivirus.
I call fanboy.
Granted, most cheap computers are probably easily covered. but that doesn't mean their network cards are, or modems, or other things.
Wow, you're right - and it's really difficult to install Windows on a toaster as well.
In the real world, of course, I haven't seen a computer with a "network card" or a "modem" in a decade or so. I am guessing that you are living somewhere in the third world and when you write about "installing Windows" you mean "Installing Win95 on a 486DX".
Can you name one brand-name motherboard made in the last 5 years that does NOT have ethernet built in? Or that does have it and WinXP is NOT able to talk to it? Just one?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
I don't know that I've ever had Windows recognize my network card on a fresh install from a non-OEM CD. Makes it hard to get an internet connection, let alone run Windows Update.
Sure, if you're installing a pre-SP1 version of XP. I doubt if you're installing a vanilla SP3 version of XP you'll have that problem.
Mod P and GP up!
You can be in whichever religious camp you want, but when it boils right down to it, the right tool for the right job.
Yes, I use Linux. I use it a lot and I much prefer it. But then again, I maintain a 1500+ node network, use home-grown Perl scripts, perform direct command-line SNMP queries (snmpget/snmpwalk from Net-SNMP), and parse that data primarily with sed/awk/grep. Once I write a script or a procedure, I know that it will move from a Linux system to some flavor of UNIX (Solaris in particular) with little-to-no modification. And yes, when I have a lot of data to examine, I'll export it to a .CSV or .TSV file and import it into Excel or OpenOffice in Windows, then use the filtering and sorting capabilities.
I could use Cygwin for the base utilities and ActivePerl on Windows . . . but why when I know that it's going to end up on a UNIX-type system? OTOH, if we were a Windows-centric shop (we're split pretty evenly, but most of the network management stuff is on UNIX), then I would set up my environment such that I was using Windows so that I could port the solutions to Windows boxes. The right tool for the right job.
I'm sorry, but when I think of a "I'm a Linux" commercial I imagine some 600lb man in a scooter making some incoherent gurgling about something as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
You're funny.
Either a complete moron or lacking reading comprehension, but really funny.
Feel free to feel criticized. Not patronized though.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
Come on man, even a 5 year old should install /home on a separate partition. Frikkin' n00bs.
No, it was Gentoo, six years ago. It didn't have a graphical installer back then and I chose to install from source. Can't remember if there was also a stage-3 back then...
I didn't know or understand very much about Linux back then and after screwing up 3 times and starting over (which in hindsight was unnecessary) and getting a not-very powerful machine to compile everything, three days HAD passed.
Remember, my example was based on a true story (mine)
But the silver lining (and the point I was trying to make) is that since then I've NEVER had to reinstall from scratch, unlike Windows forces you to do far too often.
Yet, my computer is always right up to date and running the very latest kernel and userspace.
Linux is way more seamless that way, especially since it is not based around an artificial must-upgrade-every-time-MS-decides scheme.
I suppose if I had to sum it up my bottom line would be that Linux required more effort up front, but is far more rewarding subsequently.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
You don't have to reinstall Windows anymore after a few months, though. That's outdated-- yah, Windows 2000 and XP had those problems, but Vista and Windows 7 doesn't.
Comment of the year
Also, an argument could be made that base 12 unit systems, e.g. inches/feet/miles, are computationally more convenient. I think.
No. The claim can be made, but there's no argument here anywhere.
How many cm are in a km? How many inches in a mile? How is the latter "computationally more convenient"?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
So I take it your grandma didn't try to install anything outside of Ubuntu's standard app repository, or plug any non-trivial device into the USB slot. Very few users will go 2 years without either of these scenario's happening.
Similes are like metaphors
That is so funny and the Linux guy looks just like my neighbour!
FYI, the Linux guy is Jay Maynard, the Tron Guy
Yup, Linux fanboi here.
Look, I wasn't kidding, that WAS my experience six years ago.
That's why I wrote 'based on a true story'.
I started out pretty inept with Linux and back then it wasn't as slick as it is today. Those things explain the trouble I had initially.
But I stuck with it because after the installation was done, it was a delight.
And the end tag of my video "Linux: What do YOU want to do today?" should probably have read "Linux: Lets you do what do YOU want to do today"
Thanks for the feedback. ;-)
Now I know how Spielberg felt facing focus groups
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I'll have to take your word for it, Blake.
I gave up at Windows XP. It was just not good enough for me.
I'm sure that Windows 7 has improved though. I used Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, WFW 3.11, Win95, Win98, NOT WinME, Win2K and WinXP and each one of them got succesively better up until WinXP, which I felt was less stable than Win2K.
It's just that I don't care anymore. Once you really give Linux a shot, you see that it is more thought-out, has better quality, security, etc...
As a computing platform, it is a shame it is not embraced by more vendors because then we would have more progress, truer competition instead of what we have now, which is MS's predatory lock-in tactics for their clients and exclusionary tactics for their competitors.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I recall seeing either 6 or 8 attached to what I believe was a Red Hat machine, back in 1999 or so. That was in an FAA facility.
Um, that's most definitely *not* how Windows installs. Not any version ever installed like that.
What GP described is precisely how Vista and 7 work. After your first boot, if it managed to get network up with the stock drivers that it has (which it usually can - remember, most of that DVD is actually drivers!), you'll see a bunch of non-generic drivers for your hardware pop up in Windows Update. Granted, it still takes one more click to tell it "yes, I want to install all that".
You'll get updates via WU, too - I've had one for NVidia graphics drivers a day or two ago.
The video begins with left-side user installing Linux and right-side user installing Windows.
The video should begin with the right side user unpacking the boxes FedEx delivered from BestBuy or TigerDirect that afternoon. He clears his desk. He connects the cables and he is online with Win 7 in ten or fifteen minutes.
During this time, the user on the right repeatedly complains that his computer is getting slower and slower. He reluctantly stops every three months and backs up his files, angrily wipes everything from the computer, reformats and reinstalls everything
The user on the right installs the free security bundle offered by his cable ISP. Perhaps this time around he opts for Microsoft Security Essentials. The belt-and-suspenders solutions offered by McAfee Site Advisor. Secunia PSI.
He skipped a generation or two of hardware - and finds the migration of his old favorites to the 64 bit OS a little bit rocky. But he'll manage it, somehow. D2D, Steam and Gog.com will be there to help.
He lost interest in P2P about the time subscription services like Rhapsody began delivering music and video on demand.
His hardware upgrades are almost entirely defined by the OEM bundle - and he hasn't found an excuse to re-format a drive since Win 98.
The video ends with the user on the right giving up and asking the user on the left for his Linux install disk.
The video ends with the user on the right playing Fallout: New Vegas. The user on the right swearing at Pulse Audio.
The caption reads "This is based on a true story" and then "Linux: What do YOU want to do today?"
SATA drivers were the worst. Windows required you use a fucking floppy drive to install them.
I suppose you think you are cool...
Hey, you just quoted something I wrote about the "typical Linux install for the average desktop user", and then bash me. I wasn't claiming this was my typical experience. But most people who try to install Linux have this experience.
If you want to be in denial about the typical experience for the average desktop user, fine. I'm telling you what I see from people I talk to, forums I read, etc. I had an experience something like that when I first started, too, but -- as you'll note at the beginning of my post -- I actually use Linux primarily now, because I like it, and after many hours of troubleshooting and learning all the ins and outs, I no longer have these crazy problems and/or I've figured out how to solve them efficiently.
My point was -- my experience is now different from the one I described, but only because I've invested many, many hours in learning how the system works. On the other hand, my 8-year-old niece could very easily figure out how to download and install drivers in a couple minutes.
As far as I know, Linux has never had a decent marketing campaign. I don't care if it's not the most imaginative approach as long as people start to see it as a viable alternative. I'll reserve judgment until the results are in.
That's what I'd do, but my wife's using it now, and she is being very stubborn about moving to Linux. The biggest roadblock right now is Netflix.
Nope. I've had this situation with every version of XP I've ever installed from non-OEM CDs - plain, SP1, SP2, and SP3.
That's true, win7 has quite a lot of drivers included. Not so for vista, xp, and earlier ones. But, you should know, 7 doesn't have ALL the drivers in the whole universe. It's not that good.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Either a complete moron or lacking reading comprehension
Your opinions say nothing of me, and speak volumes of you
Of course you could put up a constructive point to support your argument - or continue, as I did, to use ridicule...
Typical Windows install for average desktop user -- (1) install on machine, (2) boot to gui, (3) realize that nothing was detected correctly, even network drivers, (4) Oops, this is a home-install, so likely no second computer to do Google search and download drivers, (5) now 1% of system usually works for basic desktop functionality. Have to sneakernet nic drivers from work or a nice neighbor. (6) Connect to internet, (7) contract a trojan while googling for drivers (you forgot to sneakernet technet updates), (8) windows auto-updates, (9) install basic software (browsing, email, basic multimedia playing, office suite, etc.), (10) now 95% of system usually works for basic desktop functionality. (11) Never know your system is a botnet member, because viruses these days aren't screwed up like Blaster! was.
Greatest difficulty encountered? No Fing drivers. At all. The botnet's not a difficulty until ISPs start cutting off access.
Typical Linux install for average desktop user -- (1) install on machine, (2) immediately use a system that has about 95% functionality of what the average desktop user wants (browsing, email, basic multimedia playing, office suite, etc.), (3) discover that some Windows programs install, and some don't, (4) eventually discover that there is a software repo
There, fixed that for you. Unless you're using Gentoo, or installing Ubuntu with some (common for gamers, not for average) nvidia graphics cards, Most things Just Work with Linux. When I do a Windows install, it takes me long enough even for just one machine that I like to make an image. With a Fedora system, I just save the kickstart file somewhere. I'm sure there's something similar for Ubuntu/debian, but I never checked.
Once you really give Linux a shot, you see that it is more thought-out, has better quality,
I've given Linux a shot, several in fact. I've never come to the conclusion that it's well thought-out or has better quality.
But then again, I'm this crazy and wild person who actually cares about usability, especially in a GUI... the Linux philosophy has always been "once you learn Linux it's great," but I think the OS should meld to the user's expectations, not the other way around. After all, human behavior is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution-- a 20-year-long development process isn't likely to change it.
That basic philosophical disconnect is why I'll probably never be a full-time Linux user.
I also believe your statement that Linux has better security is wrong; from my perspective, Linux and Windows have pretty much the exact same permissions system and the exact same amount of protection in them*. The only difference is that Windows has tons of people trying to crack into it, and Linux doesn't.
In other words, Linux may be a better choice for you, but you're not everybody.
* Actually, Windows permissions are more powerful than Linux ones... and Windows' UAC feature is more usable, since it alerts the user before the application fails. The corresponding technology in Linux requires the application to fail the first time.
Comment of the year
Linux is hard... a bit of a broad statement, maybe?
But, but,
No she didn't have to install anything. Period. That's the point. She wouldn't know Linux from Windows from Mac. It just works.
Read my first post - I'm not championing *any* OS. Horses for courses etc.
My point is that any OS/distro/flavour can be easy. Easy is relative to the situation and the user.
Though, I do have a Thinkpad 380D running a stable modern GUI and a full suite of modern apps that runs at a usable speed and is secure enough for general internet use. Was it easy to install? Relatively. But then I've installed OSs' onto thousands of machines. And in this case only one or two OSs' are capable of doing those things.
Most of my system builds are not completely straight forward - some frustatingly so (currently onto ARM machines) - but I don't go smashing the keyboard. I just try and learn from the experience, and provide useful feedback to the developers and support to other users.
Indeed, they do, because 99.9% of people couldn't care less about any of the things you mentioned.
As for Politicians... I think you are confused. The very job.. in fact, the entire reason politicians were created was to make decisions for their constituents. That's their only purpose. You act like them doing their job is horrific thing.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I had two SCSI disks with the same SCSI id attached to the same SCSI controller. Windows NT 4.0 was able to use them both at the same time, but Debian would randomly pick one to use at each reboot and not a line about it in any log file.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
Thanks for the feedback.
Don't mention it. My pleasure.
Really.
demonoid-penguin@wonderland.mil:~$ uname -r 2.6.32-trunk-686
So you want to install a 10 year old OS on a new computer. Good luck with that. Let's see you install a 10 year old copy of Linux on the same computer.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I was browsing Wikipedia a while back and found a this prgram, SGO Mistika, which is intended to run on SuSE. It looks pretty high end, though the Wiki page says it has a reputation for having a difficult UI and seems to have a small but dedicated following. Still, it's neat that there's something like this on Linux.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
Ah, but there's the rub: You (likely) started out with Windows, and now it feels natural to you.
After unlearning everything I had learned with Windows and learning how to use Linux, I feel that way, but about Linux!
I mean program-installation (package management) seems far more logical in Linux... No need to go hunting around for what I want, then hunting for the download, then trying to find the downloaded package, etc...
Linux is neater: Look in the catalog, then select what you want and it installs.
You can also install things manually if you want or even in your home folder. It's much more logical.
And coming from long experience programming Windows at every level (device-driver through services to gui apps) I can attest that Linux IS more secure by design because its parent specification (POSIX) was just much better thought-out, whereas in Windows it's always been an afterthought.
When you talk about security, it's a bit of a matter of the underlying filesystem, isn't it? If you were to use FAT32 instead of NTFS then the security would be reduced quite a bit.
Same thing in Linux, I suppose...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Actually, I wanted to say that, if Linux crashed all of a sudden, most certainly there is a hardware error. Windows crashes because of bad hardware too, but the software issues are more frequent and one (me) doesn't think of hardware until most possible software issues are ruled out.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
100 cm in an m, 1000 m in a km.
Thus, 1.0*10^5 cm in a km.
According to Wikipedia (as I said, I never used this system myself):
12 in per a foot, 3 feet per yard, 220 yards in a furlong, 8 furlongs in a mile.
12*3*220*8=63360 => 63360 inches in a mile.
Honestly, I find neither very intuitive. But I do find dividing 1.0*10^5 by 3 to be harder than dividing 63360 by 3, as integers feel more natural to me, and I'd guess to most people. So in that regard, yes, I think it's computationally more convenient.
It's not like there's anything intuitive about multiplying 100 by 1000 to get from one very common unit to another, as is the case with cm and km (sure, centi means 100, kilo means 1000. but who knows that?).
I am not at all advocating replacing SI units with the imperial system, but I do see uses for both and don't think the imperial system necessarily has to be replaced.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
My apologies if my post upset you. But my criticism of part of what you wrote - that which I quoted, stands.
Windows crashes because of bad hardware too, but the software issues are more frequent and one (me) doesn't think of hardware until most possible software issues are ruled out.
That's because in Windows, crashes are usually caused by software, whereas in Linux, crashes are only rarely a software issue.
The only conclusion you can draw from this is exactly that - if Windows crashes, you should first look for a software cause, whereas if Linux crashes, you should first look for a hardware cause.
You can't use that to conclude that Windows is more tolerant of hardware faults than Linux (not even when NT 4.0 behaves itself better than Debian with your weird SCSI setup), because you're ignoring one extremely important data point:
The frequency of crashes on each OS.
See, Windows machines in general crash far more frequently than Linux machines. The reason for this is something you've already pointed out: Windows is far more prone to software glitches than Linux is.
In other words, your problem is that you're saying "Linux experiences A, Windows experiences A and B, therefore Linux is more prone to A than Windows." I hope you can see the flaw in that logic.
Ah, but there's the rub: You (likely) started out with Windows, and now it feels natural to you.
No I started on Mac Classic, which is where I got my appreciation of a good clean UI. Now that Apple OSes don't got one, I tried Linux and eventually moved on to Windows when Vista came out, as I believe Vista's UI is right on-par with Apple's at the moment.
I'm actually kind of insulted you believe the only criteria I use when judging the quality of a UI is how familiar I am with it. Believe me, I've tried everything from GeOS to BeOS... I appreciate good ideas when I see them, regardless of where they come from.
I mean program-installation (package management) seems far more logical in Linux... No need to go hunting around for what I want, then hunting for the download, then trying to find the downloaded package, etc...
Linux is neater: Look in the catalog, then select what you want and it installs.
Well, ok, but that one thing Linux does better than Windows (if you even believe it's better; I'm not so certain) doesn't make up for the millions of things Linux gets wrong in other areas.
You can also install things manually if you want or even in your home folder.
Are you suggesting you can't do this in Windows?
It's much more logical.
To your way of thinking. But I don't think like the typical Linux user... I much prefer a spatial UI, and Linux doesn't provide one. (Actually, GNOME is pretty close.)
Again: you must realize that not everybody is like you. You're welcome to like Linux. Notice how I'm not trying to talk you into using Windows, because I want you to use whatever makes you happy. But at the same time, you can't make these sweeping claims that Linux is better for every user! (If for no other reason than, if those claims were true, Linux would probably be more popular.)
And coming from long experience programming Windows at every level (device-driver through services to gui apps) I can attest that Linux IS more secure by design because its parent specification (POSIX) was just much better thought-out, whereas in Windows it's always been an afterthought.
Windows is based on the NT kernel, which is POSIX-compliant. It always has been. So you're just demonstrating my point: NT permissions and Linux permissions are the exact same thing. Or at least, the differences are so minor as to be meaningless.
(Microsoft has recently removed some of the POSIX layer. But if you're implying that OSes based on the POSIX specification are secure, you're also claiming Windows NT is secure.)
When you talk about security, it's a bit of a matter of the underlying filesystem, isn't it?
Not really, no.
If you were to use FAT32 instead of NTFS then the security would be reduced quite a bit.
How?
NT permissions work fine in FAT32. Windows 2000 and Windows XP actually support this configuration. Of course, Microsoft has switched to NTFS because of the thousands of other benefits it offers, but... well, I'm going to have to see some evidence that your filesystem has anything at all to do with your level of security.
Comment of the year
Why would you? You can download a recent version for free, in fact, it's easier to obtain a recent version then a 10 year old version.
.iso file, and burning a new CD still is easier then slipstreaming a WinXP cd, especially if that CD pre dates SP2
Now, if you were to try installing a very old (10 years *is* very old) version of linux, it might be possible, assuming that Linux would use the system's BIOS to access the unknown hardware, the result would be useless though, because you'd still need to acquire a more recent kernel (the linux kernel contains the relevant drivers), and update the system to be able to retrofit the kernel into the OS.
The advantage evidently here is for Linux, because unlike Windows, you can legally & easily obtain a new CD or
There is a flaw in that logic, but that is not what I wanted to say. What I'm saying is: if Linux crashes, you can go directly to hardware test; if Windows crashes, you cannot go and check the hardware, because there are other more likely causes.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
Actually, that may be how Win7 works, but that is only theoretically how Vista works.
Yes, I had the same click "Next" simplicity. The difference is that in Vista, you click Next and it fails obscurely the first time, and then you click Next and it fails in a different obscure manner, and then you click Next a third time and it installs perfectly for no reason that you can fathom since you have done pretty much nothing to affect or remedy the cause of the initial problems (whatever the hell they were).
That's not what you said at all:
In my experience, every time Linux (any unix, actually) doesn't work, it is a hardware error. Windows is just more forgiving with the hardware.
You weren't unclear at all with your assertion: you clearly stated that you believe Windows is less prone to problems caused by hardware. You then contradicted that statement with later comments :P
In any case, I disagree with your assertion: if Windows crashes, you can most certainly check the hardware first if the error message indicates you should do so. If the error was "Video driver crashed", then no, you don't need to check the hardware; if the error was "unrecoverable error in RAM" or "OMG MY HARD DRIVE IS EXPLODING", then yes, it's obvious you should check the hardware first.
(Obviously I'm leaving out the part where you have to google the error code from the bluescreen to figure out what it means, but that's largely irrelevant to my point.)
This was true in Vista for the first year after release or so (when drivers were simply not there, on WU or not). A lot of people got burned back then and didn't even look again (I was burned myself), so it's not surprising that the stories from those days are still being spread around, and believed.
You're also leaving out the part where the mouse pointer freezes and the hard-drive led is on and NumLock doesn't work and Ctr+Alt+Del doesn't work. And this happens every n-th time you start one of the following: web browser, office suite, IDE, IM, favorite game. Ah, also n varies between 1 and 25. Let's not forget that, due to the frequency of this phenomenon, Windows is set not to save dumps and not to automatically reboot. And, also, due to the sudden nature of the crash, Windows is unable to log any error in any event log. Do you have a better diagnostic method for this, other that "go for the most probable causes: recent driver update, virus, malware, hardware fault"? If you do, please share with us, because I don't.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
Sadly, the winner will almost certainly be edited in Final Cut Pro on a Mac ;)
Why not Cinellera on Linux?
Well, the main difference is that Linux offers more choices. More choices, more "uhhhh.... dunnnoooooo..." moments.
It already starts with the partition. Do you want to resize your existing system, do you want to use the unused portion of your disk, do you want to wipe your old system, do you want to use the MBR or install it in a partition and have some other boot manager make the "main" decision... Windows simply offers "I take it all and your old system can suck it". And behold, people accept it because it's easy. It doesn't ask a lot of "stupid" questions they have no answer for.
And that continues throughout the install process. What browser do you want to use, what mail system, what this, what that... Windows simply slaps IE, Mediaplayer and ... whatever their crappy mailproggy is called, forgot it ... at you. Don't like it? Sucks to be you.
People appearantly want their OS like their politicians: Making decisions for them.
At work, our standard network based server install does that. It will blat your disk drive (if you hve more than one raid array it will ask you), in general it simply asks for IP/subnet/gateway/hostname/dns. Installs a bare-bones ubuntu server install, with a few extra packages (vim-full, ssh-server, linux-server, some internal packages that do compliance things like changing /etc/issue, disable ipv6, etc), Doesn't even ask for a username or password.
I think I managed to do an install, including 2 POSTs, in 15 minutes once, but that was installing on a machine with an SSD.
The windows guys have a series of 4 cds, or a dvd and a cd. It takes 15 minutes just to finish answering the network questions. They then have to deal with various things like partitioning. We're some gold-platinum-enterprise partner or something, we have whole teams integrating the windows build. It's terrible, you can't even PXE boot it!
If you noticed I explicitly called those out as being some of the greatest offenders.
Also, even if a motherboard has an ethernet card built in, you typically get better performance in desktops with dedicated cards.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
*sigh*
You seem to have missed my earlier comments where I've specifically acknowledged that the majority of Windows crashes are not caused by hardware.
No, if it's just a hard freeze, you don't look at hardware first. I don't think I've ever had a hardware problem that caused hard freezes but still allowed Windows to complete the booting process. (I've had hardware glitches stop Windows from loading in the first place, but that's another issue entirely.) Not saying it isn't possible, just that given your problem description, you should be looking at software. I haven't ever indicated otherwise.
Well, believe me or not, the above freeze was caused by the video card, which was not completely and securely inserted into the slot. And the random factor determining the freeze was the optical disk. I noticed that, if the disk in the DVD drive was generating strong vibrations, the system would soon crash. This led me to check the hardware and I discovered I forgot to put back the screw that was supposed to hold the video card in place.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
You wouldn't want to base your self image on statements by somebody like the above AC, would you?
Your Windows admins are incompetent, then. Ever heard of WinPE?
That's pretty cool - an excellent description on one of the major advantages of using Linux.
A variation on your theme:
Video begins like yours.
Both users in unison say "I need to do $task, maybe there is a program that does this?"
The user on the left opens up synaptic, types in $task, reads a few description, and clicks "Apply". He uses the new application, and goes on with what he is doing.
The user on the right opens up google and types in "$task software". He reads reviews on Cnet and decides which program he needs. He then either forks out $$$, or decides to google "$software serial OR crack". He eventually finds what he wants. Soon after, pop-ups break out all over his screen. After cursing, he reinstalls his OS.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
What brand and model is your NIC?
Blake, NT WAS designed with Posix-compliance, yes, but the over-arching goal was backward compatibility with Windows 3.1, remember?
And yes, I agree, Linux may not be for everyone. As a matter of fact, I sort of like it NOT being for everyone, that way when people ask "you're in computers, right? I'm having a problem with mine..." I simply say "Windows?" "Yes" - "Sorry, I run Linux" and I can avoid all that.
Long live Windows!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
It starts with the typical Mac/PC ad. Just as the argument starts to get annoying to the viewer, a penguin comes in and starts pecking the other 2 off the screen. "Linux: The OTHER PC"
Another option is any one of those really annoying Microsoft ads. Just as the guy starts raving about how he can line up 2 Windows, the penguin mentions his PC was added to a bot net during the commercial before pecking him off the screen. "Linux: The OTHER PC"
Or maybe you could have a "Project: Sahara", where everyone is raving about the new version of Windows, how fast and secure it is, and many applications it has, when it is revealed they are running Ubuntu.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Blake, NT WAS designed with Posix-compliance, yes, but the over-arching goal was backward compatibility with Windows 3.1, remember?
So what you meant to say is, "POSIX-designed OSes are secure, unless they're Windows." Great job with that double-standard, there.
Look, POSIX-compliance says nothing about security. It does specify a method of file-level security, but it's a bare-minimum standard... Novell went way above and beyond and so did Windows. Modern Linux probably does also, frankly.
In the year 2010, security is about two things:
1) Keeping grandma from installing the cute kittens screensaver trojan
2) Keeping buggy-ass third-party software (like Adobe anything) from bypassing your normal security
Comment of the year
This has happened across several machines, mostly Dells (which usually use generic Broadcom-based NICs). My 3-year-old Dell Inspiron 6400, for example, has a Broadcom-based wired NIC, but XP SP3 doesn't come with drivers for it, so I have to download the drivers ahead of time and install them from a flash drive whenever I find myself needing to reinstall XP.
Come to think of it, Windows 7 did recognize the NICs on my new MSI X58 Platinum.
Wow. That sucks. I feel sorry for you :(
I'm reminded of a fried video card that prevented the motherboard from POSTing... which of course took us five hours to figure out.
Solutions seem so obvious once you know them...
IINM Linux has had support for multiple monitors for quite some time; Windows took a while to catch up.
Windows has had working multi-monitor support for a very long time. Windows 95 did OK, and Windows 98 did very well. NT4 would do it, but Windows 2000 did it quite well. Meanwhile it's still a pretty sad joke on Linux, because X has practically no concept of multiple displays. Most fullscreen software in particular breaks when you try to use it on Linux. It usually just fails to start, but sometimes it will just demonstrate some seriously wacky behavior. Even when using nVidia's binary driver it's a crap shoot.
I actually had two 22" LCDs on my Linux system until I found that it just caused too many problems. For example, if the second monitor is disconnected, X fails to start because a working configuration cannot be found for all screens. And if you have only one screen configured at boot, you'll have to restart X before you can use the second one. Windows XP does not have either of these problems.
You are very much mistaken about the state of multiple monitor support on Linux.
The first automatic update that hit XP when I first got it replaced my perfectly good network driver with one that didn't work at all.
I don't believe you. Hardware updates are optional.
Poor documentation??? That's my #1 complaint about Microsoft; their docs are TERRIBLE unless you buy a third party book.
Nine times out of ten the answers to my questions about the OS are found in the MSKB.
If I hit F1 more often than not if I actually find what I'm looking for it directs me to a nonexistant menu item.
If you load a help option in a Linux program, more often than not it launches your web browser and takes you to a site with some documentation with chapters listed in the ToC but whose contents are "This chapter has not been written yet." Most of the time any actually included online help is inadequate at best, and typically refers to a prior version of the program. This is one of my biggest frustrations with Linux. My main computer and both of the netbooks I regularly use run Linux. Occasionally I fall back to the one netbook still running XP for something that just can't be done on Linux, though.
When I've looked for Linux help I never ran across insults, maybe you're being arrogant and insulting the community while asking for help
I find that most of the insulting replies are to questions like "how do I do this thing I can easily do on Windows, this is how I do it there." Then people say things like "why don't you go back to windows you ignorant fuck, RTFM next time." Often if you scroll down far enough you find a useful answer. But I think that more often than not you can get a polite but useless answer on Ubuntu forums.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Opportunist's point was that when you (even tacitly) give someone else the unchecked power to make as many decisions as possible on your behalf, this power corrupts. In both operating systems and in government.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
What graphics card(s) and drivers do you use, pray tell?
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
While it's true that X doesn't care how many, you can't migrate windows between different screens if they're connected to separate graphics cards (last I tried). For example, Xinerama (randr, etc) just don't work! This means that you must open each application on the screen where you want it to stay. And programs that open a whole slew of windows, well you're just kinda stuck. That's why his comment about day traders was spot on. (You want as many screens as you can get, each with several charts and studies - all one program)
I hope things have changed since I last looked at this. I know there were people working on the problem.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
You shouldn't have to know what you're doing to install an OS.
The user doesn't want to an install an OS.
Instead he'll wait for the attractive OEM system bundle that upgrades hardware and software both. It works as advertised or will be returned for a refund or exchange.
You can offer him incentives to install an upgrade-in-place - within the same OS "family." That much may still be in his comfort zone.
It's a much, much. tougher proposition to persuade him to migrate to the truly alien, alternative OS.
Yea, but can you migrate windows from one graphics card to another? Dual head on one card works great. Beyond that it's kinda spotty (as of last year).
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Actually, I've found that installing Linux is much faster than installing Windows. This is especially true when you consider that reinstalling all your software takes a single apt-get install ... whereas on Windows it's an endless succession of wizards that takes at least a day.
But then, by Linux, I mean Ubuntu. No idea what the experience would be like with other distros.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
As many as they can get. I've heard it said: Never hire a stock broker with only one computer at his desk.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
There are dozens of GUIs which can be used on a Linux system. I seriously doubt you've tried them all. Just as Windows has a couple choices for a horrible UI, and a slightly-less horrible UI.
That's laughable.
The way that the Windows GUI, and X11 work is vastly, fundamentally different. There is a whole class of attacks allowing local users to gain Administrative, which are fundamentally impossible to solve on Windows, but have never been possible with X11.
For servers, see something like Apache's Windows port, and read the documentations for the reasons they severely discourage the use of eg SSL/certificates, due to the lack of security/protection in the OS.
See "chroot" on Linux. Privilege escalation in OpenSSH. setuid/setgid applications. setuid() in code, allowing easy dropping of privs. Many simple but strong security method utilized far and wide in the Unix world, but still unheard-of in the Windows world.
Windows permissions are more cumbersome, that's all. Sure, it looks advanced, but it's really just more complicated, as you have to handle every little in and out of the permissions on each folder, and parent and sub-folders, enabling or disabling propagation on a case by case basis. Sure, you have 500,000 knobs on Windows permissions, instead of the simple 4 digits for Unix, but there is NOTHING... absolutely NOTHING you can do with Windows permissions, which you cannot with Unix permissions.
Linux is used on tons of servers... a far more valuable target than your personal desktop. There are also far more computers running Linux in the world than Windows. Try finding a new excuse.
I haven't got a clue what you're talking about.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Meaning: BSD users desire Linux?
There is no hardware acceleration in flash 10 on linux. Heck, it can't even manage tear free video.
Yes, but a good mechanic will say something like "What would you like to set the spark plug gap to? A smaller gap has ($ADVANTAGE and $DRAWBACK), while a wider gap has ($NEW_ADVANTAGE and $NEW_DRAWBACK)". Lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of the options that are better left up to the driver. If options were presented to the user with no more than two sentences worth of explanation written at a 7th grade reading level, it just might be possible for the user to make an informed decision.
lol, I was going to wait until he did his first re-install so that he'll appreciate the reason for doing it.
http://www.mhall119.com
What else would they need? 22k apps not enough?
What usb devices do not work? ipods work great.
NTFS is fine, linux reads that or get and ext3 driver for windows. This is a solved problem.
and yes KVM is a much better method.
Does sound work in windows under kvm? virtualbox has some problems with that.
What do you mean Windows permissions are more powerful than Linux's? Take a look at setfacl. (or for that matter selinux)
Yes.
I picked the longest possible example (newbie-ineptness and building everything from source) for Linux and it still comes out on top!
I mean look at the Mac, they finally dumped their home-made O.S. and slapped Unix under there and we know they're actually technologically-advanced space-aliens, right? ;-)
Typically when I install a software, the whole selection-download-build-install operation takes less time than it would with Windows, that's for sure. The only exceptions I can think of are for monster-sized jobs like Open-Office...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Or replace motorcycle carbs.
Wait... What?
Yes, you do need to know what you are doing to install an operating system, whether it be Ubuntu, Windows, or MacOS. You may not need very much knowledge, but most motorcycle mechanics wont have it, because they don't care (just to pull some generic profession out of the old hole). You need to know about drivers on some, and networking on others, and what the machine is to be used for.
My apologies if my post upset you. But my criticism of part of what you wrote - that which I quoted, stands.
No prob. I was unclear, and I realize I may have overstated my case. I guess I get tired of hearing the "Windows and Linux are equally hard" thing said around here. I'm a big fan of Linux, and I fully support its goals, but I think Windows, though poorly designed in many ways, tends to be more tolerant to beginners. Specifically, in this discussion, to inexperienced users doing an install. It can still be a pain, and yes it can require a lot of reboots, and if something goes wrong, that's often the easiest solution. For power users, I'd definitely agree that doing a Windows install is much more of a pain than a typical Linux install.
However -- my experience, and that of quite a few of my friends who have experience doing a lot of such installs, seems to be that when a Linux install goes wrong, it goes wrong in ways that require less-than-obvious solutions and/or in ways that are much more disruptive to the basic user experience. That's what stops me from putting Linux on my parents' computer, for example. Windows may be less efficient and it might break in lots of subtle ways all the time, but the OS usually seems to keep chugging along with basic functionality (even when broken under the hood)... and if not, a reboot and/or driver reinstall often is all that is needed to get that basic functionality back.
With Linux, on the other hand, I've uniformly had some major configuration issue whenever I tried installing a new distro or installing it on a new machine... something that I couldn't walk my parents through easily or even tell them how to expect or fix such a thing. It might take me five minutes or less to figure out and fix, but I'm not around to do that for them. And I've had lots of things break on upgrades to new distro versions; again, I can't be around to handle such things for inexperienced users.
Maybe I've just had bad luck, but my experience has all been major distros on common hardware. The only exotic thing I've tried was installing Linux on a convertible ultraportable a few years back, and that was actually one of the easier computers to get most of the hardware working. But when I have gone searching for people with similar problems with standard hardware on forums or bug reports occasionally, I still see (even in the last few months) lots of people complaining about getting basic elements of their system working... so I don't think it is all just my bad luck.
Three responses:
(1) I love how you turned this into a rant about viruses. I don't disagree at all that Windows is crappy in many ways. Note that in my post I said I use Linux as my primary OS now and have for years... that's because I dislike Windows and Microsoft's philosophy, and I like a lot of things about Linux. But I was making a claim about the ease of installation, not about which system works better.
(2) Oh... and I love the bit about the network driver. Every Linux fan always seems to have problems with the network driver on Windows. Personally, I've never had this be a problem, and I don't see how it could be a problem for most users if they have the Windows OS CD plus the driver CD (or whatever media) that came with their network card. Well, if you were doing an upgrade to a new version of Windows and the old drivers aren't supported, I guess this could be a problem if the card isn't autodetected. This could catch an unwary user, I admit, but a power user should be prepared for such a thing (by grabbing appropriate drivers in advance).
That said, I believe the thread was originally dealing with an issue of a reinstall, in which case a user should at least theoretically have the driver CD laying around somewhere, so this is a moot point.
In any case, you make this mistake once, and you know how to fix it and/or prepare for it on your next install. It's not a difficult issue compared to troubleshooting many common Linux problems.
When I do a Windows install, it takes me long enough even for just one machine that I like to make an image. With a Fedora system, I just save the kickstart file somewhere.
(3) Yeah, see you have a different metric for installation because you understand more than the putative "average desktop user" I was talking about. Most desktop users don't do installations enough to try to optimize them. They just want to be able to do something that they can actually figure out. If you asked which installation generally takes longer for power users, I completely agree that Windows sucks in this regard. But for the average desktop user (which is what I was referring to), what generally would matter if they had to do the one install they do in three or five years is whether they can easily figure it out and figure out how to fix things that are broken... rather than how efficient the process is.
Windows installations may be a pain, but I submit that when things go wrong in Linux, they are more likely to go wrong in a disruptive way, and they are more likely to require skills beyond the average desktop user to fix. And, drawing on my own experience, the experience of a number of friends, and the people I encounter when reading forums and bug reports about the problems I encounter, these problems are more common than your glowing picture seems to suggest.
File a bug report. They work for me every day.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I use an ATI graphics card (r500 series, about 2 years old) and the FOSS 'radeon' driver. Fairly common stuff.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Comparing a Linux distro without non-free components to Windows in ease of install for beginners is only relevant if all the hardware has open-source support
While I understand this philosophy, I don't think it applies to all or even most Linux distributions. Most Linux distros make some concession to at least allow the possibility of proprietary drivers written for Linux. If Ubuntu or -- perhaps for an even better example -- Linux Mint make claims that they should work out of the box, even for products that require proprietary (Linux) drivers, users ideally shouldn't have to delve into the bowels of Linux to sort out a problem with Linux and proprietary drivers that are supposedly written for Linux.
Case in point -- less than two months ago, a friend bought a new Dell netbook and decided to install Linux Mint. Everything seemed to work great out of the box, except for the proprietary wireless driver, which Linux Mint actually offered to install for him. It wouldn't work. After a bit of fiddling with GUI settings, in which he found he could get it to work by reinstalling the driver, but it would stop working after reboot, he gave up and called me. After a short bit of playing around, I discovered that some kernel module wasn't getting loaded at startup. A couple commands, and it then started to work. A quick and easy fix for someone who understands the underpinnings of the system. But for someone who has never played around at the command line in Linux or Windows before??
Because I was curious, I looked at some online forums dealing with this network driver. This particular problem was identified, but there seemed to be about a half dozen other bugs people were having with this and similar chipsets, which are quite common. So, a new user who's trying to troubleshoot this thing has a couple options: (1) try out the fixes he found blindly, with some risk to screwing up his system further, or (2) post his problem in a naive manner and risk getting a bunch of "haven't you done searches" or "please post the output of these commands, you idiot" replies. Even if he does the latter, since it's clear that there were a number of different bugs for this device, any responses he got might set him on the wrong track, or might not consider the particular issue -- particularly if he hadn't been diligent enough to notice that he could get the thing working by reinstalling the driver, but it stopped working upon reboot.
I've never encountered something that required this level of sophistication to solve on a Windows install just to get a basic system component working. I've seen things like this often, though, on Linux installs. It's not only obscure or new hardware (this particular chipset had been around for over a year), and as is clear from the fact that Mint volunteered the driver, it clearly detected and claimed to support his hardware. Different problems occur when comparing Gentoo versus Debian versus something like Linux Mint, but I have seen such problems frequently.
But you're right, by carefully choosing hardware, one should be able to avoid such a problem. And yet, this was a very common Dell netbook, and someone doing casual searches on it would see that Linux supposedly supported all the hardware.
By the way, just to be clear, I should note that the particular bug did not appear to be the fault of the proprietary driver, but rather something that broke in the newer version of Ubuntu and got carried into Linux Mint.
I guess that would have a similar effect that I had at one of the poor saps at Starbucks: I want coffee. Don't care about how you brew them or what kind of syrup you want to squirt on it (none, preferably, coffee already has a flavor: Coffee), don't care what kind of cream you use (use milk. No I don't give a shit about how you foam it) and I don't care about ... FUCK, I WANT MY FIX, SO GIMME!
I'd guess the average car driver wants the same. Don't care, plug in that plug and fix it!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Maybe, but so do 99.9% of the people when it comes to politics, it seems.
And no, we elect politicians with the intent to have someone do the execution of our will. At least that's the stated goal of a representative democracy. That various politicians offer different general "directions" and you pick the one that suits your needs, desires or intentions best. It's not their job to make that decision for you. They should be offering and you should be choosing. Just like in a free market economy various suppliers should offer different products and you should be able to choose which product suits your needs best.
Unfortunately, both systems have been corrupted to the point that they all offer basically the same crap with different flavoring.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hmm... so far it's been stable. Then again, I don't really stress the system a lot and I have fairly standard components in the machine, so I'd say yes, it's working for me. Linux is my "office OS" as well as the OS that runs my VMs (which don't need a graphical interface), so I'd guess my experience with KDE is limited to what could be called standard use.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I hope things have changed since I last looked at this. I know there were people working on the problem.
File a bug report. They work for me every day.
Oh, there were already bug reports. The problem came down to the Xorg architecture and how it dealt with screens. The problem was caused somehow when Xrandr was introduced. Apparently, there were proposals on how to fix it, but there was no sign that anything was actually being done. (which doesn't mean that there wasn't, or that nothing has happened since.)
Do you mean to tell me that you have Xinerama (or Xrandr) running across multiple distinct video cards? On a moderately current Xorg installation? That would be cheery news.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
It's like the special olympics ... just entering makes you a retard.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
1 meter / 2 is 0.5m or 500cm.
How long has a metre been 1000cm? :D
Apparently metric isn't as easy as he would have us beleive. <_<
"You shouldn't have to know what you're doing to install brakes or an engine in your car."
Good luck with that, just don't drive near me!
Yeah, sure because MSWindows users never have problems with graphics drivers. That is usually the fault of the graphic chip manufacturer, not the people who wrote the OS--especially when those chip manufacturers refuse to release enough information to write drivers for their products.
Sure.
Hell, you can have Xinerama running across multiple distinct computers with distinct X servers running on each one with a little bit of work.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
You are very much mistaken about the state of multiple monitor support on Linux.
I probably am, all I know of it is what I've read. I don't have first hand experience with multiple monitors in Linux. I do have first hand experience with the double monitors at work, under Windows. By afternoon, alt-tab stops working. I don't know if thet's Microsoft's fault or the video card's fault, as they're using the software that comes with the card.
When they first installed the second monitor, Windows thought there were three of them. I had to go in and remove a driver to make it work.
I don't believe you. Hardware updates are optional
I had it set to automatic update, and went through hell trying to find out why I couldn't get on the internet. I thought the cat had broken the modem (it was on the floor the morning it broke), the ISP saw the modem and thought it was the network card. I thought maybe a cable, and had I not reinstalled Windows because XP had disabled the software that came with my CD burner, informed me of it with one of those annoying balloons on every boot, and wouldn't let me uninstall it I would have bought a new networks card.
I stopped letting it update automatically after that, of course.
If you load a help option in a Linux program, more often than not it launches your web browser and takes you to a site with some documentation with chapters listed in the ToC but whose contents are "This chapter has not been written yet."
Yes, I've run across that.
Free Martian Whores!
You're making a stupid argument. Really stupid.
People that don't upgrade to newer versions of windows don't do so because of the "difficulty" of getting a newer version of Windows. They do so because they have some kind of reason to continue using the old version (even if it's just "I don't like change"). The same would be true of someone wanting to use an old version of Linux. You can't just get a newer version because that goes against the reason you're wanting to use the old version.
As such, the exact same issues exist. In fact, i'd argue it's a lot harder to "slipstream" in the SATA drivers into an old Linux distro as it would be an original XP.
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(1) I love how you turned this into a rant about viruses. I don't disagree at all that Windows is crappy in many ways. Note that in my post I said I use Linux as my primary OS now and have for years... that's because I dislike Windows and Microsoft's philosophy, and I like a lot of things about Linux. But I was making a claim about the ease of installation, not about which system works better.
And I was talking about the installation too. I worked for a university back when blaster was still around (but fixed). A poor grad student was trying to reinstall her laptop and it kept rebooting after installation (because blaster worm kept getting loaded because her XP installation CD was SP1). I had to instruct her in the clean-room installation method (not something an AVERAGE USER would ever think about.
(2) Oh... and I love the bit about the network driver.
Let me guess, your experience with installing OSes for computers is limited to your own two or three at home? There are a _lot_ of computers that use newer Intel NICs that even XP SP3 won't detect. And believe it or not, Dell doesn't usually give a CD slipstreamed with their drivers. They expect you to download them. Yes, even the NIC drivers. Next you'll tell me that people should be reinstalling with Vista or Win7. Maybe they don't want to pay for a new OS/computer.
(3) Yeah, see you have a different metric for installation because you understand more than the putative "average desktop user" I was talking about. [...] Windows installations may be a pain, but I submit that when things go wrong in Linux, they are more likely to go wrong in a disruptive way,
I'll give you that one, but lack of NIC drivers can really put an Average home user up a creek. For me, there's no problem, because I've got several computers to download with.
And no, we elect politicians with the intent to have someone do the execution of our will.
Incorrect. You have a very flawed understanding of the political process. Politicians are not, and never have been under any requirement to seek out, or do what their constituents want them to do. Of course, if they wish to be re-elected, they need to satisfy them in some way, but this is not, nor has it ever been "the execution of [their] will".
You elect a politician because you agree with his or her beliefs. You elect them in the hope they will make the same choices you would have made if you were in their place. However, that will not always happen, and in fact probably rarely does.
You elect a politician to do what they want, not what YOU want. You just hope those things are the same on important issues.
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Name me one reason why you would install a 10 year version of linux on new hardware. Just one.
I can't think of any situation where you'd need to do this, the more efficient way would be to install the newer base system & install the older parts you 'miss' for some reason or the other, be it with software packages, source code or other means.
Another means to achieve this would be to install a base system with virtualisation & toss the ancient system on that.
The truth of the matter is, with linux, you have multiple ways to achieve this, even if your ancient linux version is completely unsupported on the hardware you use, and you won't be dependant on the manufacturer to support your ancient OS for eternity (incidently, the virtualisation approuch would also allow you to still use ancient versions of windows, but it won't magicly support new hardware)
False. Windows 7 installation is not merely, "insert disc, power computer, press next, reboot and software update finishes the rest". It is similar, but there are Linuxes that are similar as well.
But regardless of all that, that's most definitely *not* how Windows 7 installs.
What GP described is precisely how Vista and 7 work.
Untrue. See my post to the reply above yours.
Windows 7 is close, but most definitely not that precise process.
Cool, can you send me an email when my email goes down as well? Or give me a ring when the phone network is down?
You seem to have lost the original point, which was that it was so much work to slipstream SATA drivers into a copy of XP, now you're goin on about a whole ton more work...
Yes, you can do all that stuff you're referring to, or they can also slipstream SATA drivers into their existing CD, probably less work.
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No, but I can tell you how to see the diagnostic messages from your emsil server when your email goes down!
As for your phone, if you don't see some little bars near the little antenna icon, you need to get a better provider. ;)
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The original point was that the Dogdude claimed it was easier to install XP on current hardware then it was to install a current version on current hardware, the need to slipstream drivers into an XP cd proved that claim incorrect.
Making the claim that installing a 10 year old version of linux on current hardware is hard, while factually correct, is a straw man argument in this context, because there is no reason or advantage to do that.
Good news.. I now want to get my hands into the old forgotten cyberlink video creator.