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Windows vs. Ubuntu — Dell's Verdict
Barence writes "Remember how Dell put up a website declaring Ubuntu was safer than Windows, only to later change its mind? Well, the company has gotten right back into the Windows vs. Ubuntu debate with a highly sophisticated website arguing the pros and cons of each OS. People should choose Windows, argues Dell, if: they are already using Windows, are familiar with Windows, or are new to computers. People should choose Ubuntu if they're interested in open-source programming. Brilliant."
Irons with labels that tell you to remove your clothes before attempting to iron them are being truthful, too - but anyone who need a label to tell them that is probably too stupid to be allowed to get near an iron.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
If you don't change your mind we'll stop providing you with cheap licenses and Gold Partner status and cut off your MSDN subscription. I worked for a couple of Gold Partners and it's the same everywhere, Microsoft uses it's monopoly status and high prices to force people into compliance.
Ubuntu is good enough for most people especially when pre-installed on a computer. Unless you're just plain stupid you will be able to work with it and do whatever you need to do. Sadly Windows is so ingrained in users that are resistant to change that it's hard to change platforms for a lot of people.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Really. It hurts Linux when people log in and ask for MS Word. It is important to be sure your customer is getting what he wants.
The only part that is gonna get flamed is the last bit on Windows Section: "use windows if you are new to using computers". They should have left this bit out of both sides, IMO. Windows is good to newbies because they can get help more easily from friends, but it is not easier to use than Ubuntu. Just the idea of the software center like ubuntu's goes miles ahead for those who are new to computers
-- dnl
I would argue with the "new to using computers" bullet. If you're new to computing, exactly why would it be easier to learn Windows than Ubuntu? Both have their arcane peculiarities and unique paradigms you'd have to get accustomed to.
Hell, if you are totally new to computers and have no interest in learning much of anything about how they work, I'd suggest getting a Mac. Then you need never worry yourself about the internals, it "just works," as they say.
I say this as someone who doesn't use a Mac. Apple built their reputation on being idiot-proof, and as far as I can tell, they live up.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I'm an advanced user and I don't every want to know what a repository is. My mom definitely doesn't give a shit.
So call it an "app store", except all the apps are free. Your mom will eat it up.
That's a terrible parallel to Ubuntu vs. Windows. For what it's worth, I'm a long time user of Linux - started off with an early SuSE then moved to Slackware. These days, I use either Gentoo (preferred) or Ubuntu (anything other than my main dev box I can't be bothered setting up Gentoo on). And you know what? I'd recommend Windows 7 to most people. I have it on my laptop and though I personally sometimes run into limitations on it, they're not limitations most people will encounter. I can't see my mother complaining that she can't open a bash shell for example.
Ubuntu is probably the easiest Linux out there, but it's not as easy as Windows 7. Some of that results from the world in general being set up for Windows, rather than for Linux, and some of it is due to Ubuntu not being as slick or hassle-free as Windows 7. If you want security, then people are less likely to hack your Linux box than they are a Windows one, that's for sure, and you're not very likely to pick up a virus or be tricked into running some trojan. So as the summary states, there are arguments for and against. But it's pretty far from the truth to start talking about people who don't know enough to remove their clothes before ironing. I need a lot from my OS so I use Linux. But if I just wanted to surf, write emails and do some light word-processing, I have to say Windows 7 would be fine for me. My laptop which is primarily used for those things, has Windows 7 on it for this reason. If I need to do anything more on it, I just open a remote shell to my main system and use Screens and that's good enough for me.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The question is, if you have no idea what Ubuntu is, then why did you choose it?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
From my perspective, if all you need to do is surf, write emails and do some light word processing, then Ubuntu is far and away a better choice than windows 7.
I chose to dual boot ubuntu and windows 7 for the following reasons:
It cost me nothing because I had 10 win7 licenses from an MSDN subscription paid for by my previous employer.
I like to play video games, windows has more of them, and wine is generally a painful experience when it does work.
I need to keep my Visual Studio/C#/ASP.net skills fresh in case I need to find a new job and can't find a local java position quickly enough.
That is the exact point here. Dell is telling customers which OS they should choose so they are capable to make the choice. Personally I'm a little bit surprised they didn't note the games, but casual people buying a computer don't necessarily know that they need Windows for their apps to work. Dell is just helping these casual users.
The only problem I have with Dell's EU page is that it's been so oversimplified it loses any meaning.
I find it curious that Ubuntu has two bullet points and yet from Dell's page on Ubuntu they have several positive caveats about Ubuntu that don't even get mentioned here. For example:
6) Ubuntu is secure
According to industry reports, Ubuntu is unaffected by the vast majority of viruses and spyware.
Why isn't there a bullet point for using Ubuntu if you just want a machine to browse the internet? Could Dell at least toss Ubuntu a bone and say "Linux currently suffers from less viruses than Windows"?
On top of that, why can I only pick two laptops with Ubuntu on them?
Why do you even have a page for Windows 7 vs Ubuntu when I have to buying one of these two machines in the first place?
Dell is telling customers which OS they should choose so they are capable to make the choice.
Wrong. Dell is telling people not to use Ubuntu. Walk down the street and pick out a hundred random people and ask them if they are interested in programming open source. They don't even say "if you are interested in free open source software" they say "open source programming." Do you think you'd even find one person interested in actually programming open source? That's basically what Dell's "comprehensive" Ubuntu list amounted to.
My work here is dung.
Eh? What exactly is harder in Ubuntu than it is on Windows?
I mean, just consider this problem I had: I was trying to run STALKER: Shadow of Cernobyl on my Windows desktop. It refused to work; my monitor would just pop up an error message saying that the refresh rate was higher than it could display when I tried to run the game. How could I fix that? There were no Windows monitor "drivers" for the monitor (it's old and shitty), so there didn't seem to be any way to force Windows to use a lower maximum refresh rate. I couldn't find an option that would force STALKER to use a lower refresh rate, either.
Eventually I had to download a sketchy third-party program named Reforce that, despite being written for Windows 2000/XP, managed to do its job in Windows 7; I used it to manually set the highest refresh rate to something my monitor could handle, and STALKER finally respected that.
That's not "just works"; other people completely gave up on the problem (STALKER had just been on sale on Steam, so there was a thread about this in the forums). Sure, it was due to a combination of old hardware and missing drivers, but it still stumped quite a few people who otherwise use Windows.
Of course, in Ubuntu this just isn't a problem because there's no games at all, but that's another issue entirely.
It would be stupid and bad service not to tell that to users, especially those who like things just to work and want to play games too.
You seem to agree with Dell. From TFS: People should choose Windows, argues Dell, if: they are already using Windows, are familiar with Windows, or are new to computers
Which would be everybody not using a Mac, and I say poppycock. KDE is very similar to Windows and has a tiny learning curve; it's trivial to switch. As to new users, I've had friends who never had computers before, and wound up infecting them over and over (despite Norton). After getting tired of reinstalling Windows for them I'd install Linux dual-boot and disable networking in Windows and not install Norton. Every single one liked Mandriva better, and they never got another virus.
As to games, there have been games on Linux for a long, long time. Most people don't play anything much more demanding than Solitaire. And guess what? The Megatouch game machines you see in bars use Linux for an OS, and you can buy those games, but they're Apple and Linux only, as they've been written for *nix. They'll run on your iPhone but not your Windows PC.
Most users would feel the same way when they thought that all their programs and games would work.
There are free alternatives to almost all Windows programs. Plus, you can run most Windows programs in Linux through Wine or similar emulators, but you can't run Linux programs in Windows at all, unless you have a Windows compiler to compile the (open) source files with.
I can't think of a single thing that would make Windows superior to Linux. Yes, it would be dishonest to make people think you can run WoW or IE in Linux, but why would anybody tell them that unless they just wanted them to hate Linux?
Free Martian Whores!
Like Windows!=newbie-friendly. The windows taskbar lacks discoverabilty, because practically everything is jammed into one menu (the start menu), or indecipherable little icons (system tray). Ubuntu's menus say what they are, by giving textual clues. For a newbie, it's actually better to have more on the screen with actual writing than a lot of icons.
Many aspects of the Windows interface are a kludge to differentiate it from the classic Mac OS, with many inconsistencies and non-intuitive behaviours. Linux distros should not copy it for the sake of usability.
If you look at it functionally, the iTunes app store is little more than a repo, and Linux has repos to beat all. I'm so horribly spoiled by tools like yum that I'm personally very remiss to EVER leave what's available at a click...
Most of good salesmanship in business is in positioning - how you compare your products to others out there can leave a very strong impression as it lets potential users immediately grasp many of the capabilities (and limitations) of your product immediately without them actually having to learn what those capabilities are.
Now that Apple has everybody understanding what a repo is, we should just rename repos to "App Stores" (or whatever Apple hasn't trademarked) so that people immediately get just how easy and capable it is to use. More so, because Linux' "app stores" are open-ended - anybody can add whatever App Repos they want!
The only thing I'd (STRONGLY!) suggest is some way to filter out all the libraries and stuff that only developers care about so that end users can avoid getting confused by 7,000 libraries that they wouldn't understand anyway. My thoughts are that packages need to describe themselves as two-stage categories: EG: Libraries, ProgrammingTools, Applications and divide each of these categories further, EG: Libraries/Graphics, Applications/Office, Applications/Games, etc. with a default of "Applications" showing.
Lastly, building in a SIMPLE payment tool so that applications can be purchased (and licenses tracked) with yum/apt...
Put all this together, and suddenly Linux has an EXCELLENT commercial alternative to the Apple "App Store".
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I don't get it.
If you want security, then people are less likely to hack your Linux box than they are a Windows one, that's for sure, and you're not very likely to pick up a virus or be tricked into running some trojan... if I just wanted to surf, write emails and do some light word-processing, I have to say Windows 7 would be fine for me.
If that's all you wanted to do, any flavor of Linux/KDE would be fine for anybody, without having to worry about your machine being infected like you would with Windows.
Free Martian Whores!
A simple link to whylinuxisbetter.net would have done the job (truth and all).
You typically don't really "choose" Windows when you buy a PC. It's just there unless you ask otherwise (and even know that you can so ask).
I disagree too with the assertion that one should use windows if "You are new to using computers." Gnome on Linux as applied by the Ubuntu distribution is so user-friendly and functional that my very computer-challenged wife picked it up with no problem. If you're new starting out, Ubuntu may in fact be the easiest to learn and effectively employ, since it comes with such a rich application environment. Also, I put 3 daughters through the college with new PC's, and after the 3rd or 4th time I had to reload Windows in their Freshman year, because their machines got corrupted/owned/trashed from the college network environment, Windows would give me crap trying to reload from the OEM disk (probably a run-counter to thwart piracy, but not applicable in my case). So rather than repurchase Windows, I just loaded Ubuntu. All finished college just fine on Ubuntu with no further crashes. The interesting side-effect is that when they graduated, none of my daughters bought a Windows PC, instead going for Macs, the slicker *nix option, but *nix nonetheless. Also, "You are interested in open source programming" should be modified to say "You are interested in open source applications or programming."
Well, there's a difference between a regular newbie and a complete newbie. Lots of people rote-learn Windows; then, anything different, no matter how well designed, is "too complicated".
Circumcision is child abuse.
...but even for that relatively simple job there are big problems with Ubuntu.
I've never had a problem surfing the web using any Linux distro, much less Ubuntu. This includes my days as a linux n00b when I had no understanding of the structure of the filesystem, didn't realize the advantages of a package manager, and feared the terminal. Browsing the web is NOT an issue for Ubuntu, and when compared to the heightened risk of malware/virus infection on a comparable Windows machine I find this to be an odd statement.
When I first visited Linux Hater, I thought I was dealing with extreme ignorance.
My first exposure to Linux Hater was your link, which led to a page where a lunatic is ranting about a font and declaring ogg sucks because it isn't mp3. I think your initial thoughts about that blog were correct.
users still need to have in-depth knowledge to do basic stuff, like install new applications
You consider clicking the 'Applications' menu and scrolling to and clicking 'Ubuntu Software Center' in-depth knowledge?
Dell is right.
Wrong. You've failed to measurably quantify what makes Ubuntu unsuitable for web browsing other than pointing to a blog with an anti-Linux agenda and making weird assertions about the level of expertise it takes to read and use a menu. Ubuntu is perfectly suitable for a wide variety of tasks, and surfing the web is certainly among them.