Actually I've been using Linux off and on for 5+ years, and it's always been to incredibly frustrating to switch completely. I keep hearing about these alleged superiorities to Windows, and they never pan out. In fact, in my experience, it's been the polar opposite. I shrug and reboot when the whole thing kernel panics, not just when one single program stops responding.
Yours is much more polite than others, but why do people insist on attacking me any time I post about my real experiences with Linux? Disclaimer, I'm not a complete newb, I've used many distros, I didn't sabotage any config files, I didn't use cheap hardware, I use things with OPEN SOURCE DRIVERS FROM THE VENDOR AND THEY STILL DON'T USUALLY WORK.
Perhaps the Linux community would do a better job of shutting people like me up by fixing the REAL issues instead of making wild assumptions and blaming me for clicking 'install' and then shortly after having issues. Did I click install wrong? Am I suppose to be flipping off my XP CD while I click it? Do I have to chant "Windows sucks" while I install Linux?
Yeah, my issues were almost exclusively with pre-installed programs on Mandrake, RH, Fedora, and SuSE. My current Mandrake install refuses to shut off my computer, hanging at 'power down system.'
...is so 1998. XP and 2K aren't unstable, as much as you'd like to believe they are. I've tried a slew of Linux distros, I spend about 10% of my time in them vs. Windows, and I 'shrug and reboot' more times in Linux.
Richard Dreyfuss got all the free publicity he could hope for with those who are all too willing to ignore any past sins in order to villify Bush and his administration. I mean, it's not like it's all that hard to make him look bad, why make stuff up?
Maybe when more hardware vendors get on board and release open drivers....
As I've posted before, it's often not the vendors that are the problem. Hint, hint. See the discussion about "Linux's Achilles Heel." Soundblaster drivers were released by Creative. Even completely open source ones. Support is intermittent at best, even with new, current distros. Pushing the problem off onto the vendors not releasing drivers is no excuse for a lot of Linux's problems - modern, newbie-oriented distros tend to junk up the sound detection anyways, even with very common and not even cutting edge released yesterday stuff - good Intel mobo, not too many peripherals, stuff that should (and generally does, but still far less than 100%) work.
The latest post-Community version of MDK 10.0 (Standard?) caught my card correctly this time, which is rare lately. It used to work more often, then it quit for years....now it seems to work. My sound card hasn't changed. The drivers were released open source.
I'm rooting (no pun intended) for Linux, but it's still flaky to install, and the corrective actions for a newbie are rather convoluted and unfriendly. They're still a lot of work (as you point out) for someone who sort of knows what they're doing.
If you had bothered to read my fucking summary of the/. articles, you would see that I correctly and accurately summarized his unrealized predictions.
He's got a knack for predicting the future. You can rest assured that MS really is getting *DESPERATE* now, especially now that they're obsolete and their monopoly had collapsed years ago.:)
OF COURSE THEY SELL LINUX ON THE SUB $350 MACHINES. That was going to be the trigger that made Windows obsolete....has it happened? Judging by your poor reading comprehension skills and combattive nature, trying to argue with points I didn't make, I'd better answer that for you. No. Windows is not obsolete.
Try reading for comprehension before you get snippy and abusive with people.
He's got a knack for predicting the future. You can rest assured that MS really is getting *DESPERATE* now, especially now that they're obsolete and their monopoly had collapsed years ago.:)
First off, let me say that I love Firefox, and it's my main browser - has been for a while now. That said, this may be the only thing on the planet that IE is slower at. Everything else that I've seen is a tad to waaaaay faster in IE.
Firebird is great. Speed is not one of its strongest points, though - unless you're loading up a page full of random site icons.
Thanks, yes, RTFM. The odd thing is that it seems to have to do with inheriting subdirectory permissions, and it's not consistent. Sometimes I can read/write in a directory, and sometimes not. It's giving the username and password of the remote system, I own the mount point. Name and ID look correct in the shared directory (owner/group is 'public,' which is the name I gave it), I "force" the user on the shared box, then when I go into a pre-existing subdir, the owner/group is 502/502.
I know people hate this phrase, but "it works fine in Windows." I couldn't get it to work AT ALL on a Fedora Core 2 box trying to access it, but it seemed to be more of a local permissions issue, even though I thought I went through the same rigamarole. I can access, read, write, move in Windows just fine, but my Linux mounting of the same directory imposes inconsistent and odd restrictions. The "502/502" owner issue instead of the name of the owner makes me think it may be a bug, but I use it rarely enough that I sort of gave up. Now I just clean up the mess in Windows after rebooting since it doesn't complain about permissions then.
I think I finally got a config file working, and it was a tremendous pain in the ass. I've been using Linux for years, though I usually mostly stick with Windows for some strange reason. Oh....like for Samba. It's very difficult to read through a variety of articles, with 400 different ways to do it, some several years old, all of them conflicting, and virtually none of them well explained. I'm sure it gets old answering newbie questions, and believe me, it comes through in most any answer how tired the 'expert' is.
Even when I set up the share, which finally worked pretty well in Windows, I still can't use it correctly while mounting it in another Linux box. I suppose I still might have something misconfigured, but it keeps telling me the owner is '502,' which is the ID# (user #? whatever you call it) of the actual owner, but not the name of the owner. It sorta works, but not for subdirectories where I still lose ownership of what is supposed to be a full control subdir and files. It's just too much hassle, and I think somethings broken based on how it identifies the owner and permissions. Back to Windows. Hey, everything works. *shrug*
Exactly - and it's the wrong attitude. Why not leave it an option to have the tree menu off to the side and have a single active window for whichever folder you selected? It's not that hard. Heck, it's already done.
That's one of the reasons I love the Firefox browser - it's often valuded for its tabbed browsing, and I *hate* tabbed browsing. But there's an easy way to add a few lines of user prefs and make even the references to tabbed browsing go away.
They also improved the handling of mismarked MIME-type files, and instead of taking the "user is a luser" attitude, left an OPTION for people to enable this other way of doing things.
You're really limiting your options if you're going to enforce some rigid methodology on users that are often used to a different way of doing things, particularly when you're the underdog - especially for something as trivial and inconsequential as file/folder depth and organization.
All this regressive protectionism is a throwback to the nativist movement and the failed policies of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.
Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.
If you look at the visualization and customization stuff you can do on both, you can customize Windows quite a bit, cutting out all the cutesy visual animations that slow down machines without a good video card to take up the slack. That's as much as 99% of desktop users (everyone, not just current Linux users) might ever do with Linux.
I'll have to look when I get home tonight, but KDE and Gnome don't seem to have the same bloat-reducing checkboxes for dummies who don't like to spend hours waiting for their latest hack to recompile as Windows does. They also start out much more sluggish to begin with. It's tolerable on a fast machine, and painful on a slow one, compared to Windows.
The most recent releases from RH and MDK, however, boot much more quickly and do seem more responsive - but they're still lagging significantly behind Windows on my machines, even with all the eye candy turned on in Windows. Yes, I know, I could run some stripped down window manager, but most people don't want to do that.
KDE and Gnome are bloated and sluggish compared to WinXP. Instead of dumping on people who point this out, I suggest that people who CAN program and haxor the interface get cracking on making something pretty AND responsive.
You'll see that this is a substandard ogg vorbis playback with only fixed point arithmetic. I guess it technically can play OV files, just not correctly decoded with full floating point quality.
Golly, I dunno. Had you RTFA, you'd see that the Rio Karma uses a different model from the same line of processsors from Portal Player, so he might know something about their processor's capabilities. I'm just speculating on that.;)
About twice a day.....reboot from Windows into Linux, play with it for a bit, then reboot back into Windows. I usually keep my machine at home off when I'm not home, so I have one additional boot at the start.
It's certainly not a stability issue - my work machines stay on 24/7, and Win2K, XP, and NT4.0 see uptimes of over a month regularly.
I hope some of these speed-ups you mention start to make their way into mainstream Linux distros. I spend a small enough time "being productive" in Linux that I don't have the patience to recompile, tweak, twist, prod, poke, and otherwise go through a lot of hassle to get the machine to be reasonably responsive and fast to boot.
Wow. Sounds like OS-X is starting to approach the stability of NT-based Windows OSes. You must be so proud.:)
Rebooting is exceedingly rare for me too, unless I'm switching from Windows to Linux. I keep my desktop machine at home off most of the time, since it's a waste of power to leave it on when I'm not using it. It's certainly not the stability issue that you're trying to imply.
I guess "generally regarded as recreatable" varies from user to user. I've heard the same experience as mine repeatedly - 2K is very slow to boot, and the UI is not noticably any faster. The only dissent I hear is at/., which is an veritable fountain of accurate and unbiased information on MS.;) YMMV, of course - I hear that all my Linux problems are imaginary all the time here too.
The 'usability' is not faster, I just get 'to usability' faster - to a point where I can use the computer instead of waiting for it to boot/start services/whatever more quickly with XP than I do with 2K (or even 2.6 Linux, for that matter).
I'm not going to give the BIOS over to Linux, since I still use XP primarily - mostly EE stuff (circuit design, analog/digital simulation, PCB layout, etc.), web, and some games. Linux is really hurting for some decent EE tools.
Actually, I explained that. I'm not being tricked, I get to *use* my computer ~25 seconds or more faster from turn on than I did with 2K. It could have been low hanging fruit optimization on startup, but MS OSes boot up significantly faster than OS-X and any Linux I have tried recently, and that's not stacking the deck with lots of extraneous services. 2.6 kernel stuff lately has sped things up A HUGE amount, but even 2K is still faster to USABILITY, and XP is even faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, you beat me to it.
Actually I've been using Linux off and on for 5+ years, and it's always been to incredibly frustrating to switch completely. I keep hearing about these alleged superiorities to Windows, and they never pan out. In fact, in my experience, it's been the polar opposite. I shrug and reboot when the whole thing kernel panics, not just when one single program stops responding.
Yours is much more polite than others, but why do people insist on attacking me any time I post about my real experiences with Linux? Disclaimer, I'm not a complete newb, I've used many distros, I didn't sabotage any config files, I didn't use cheap hardware, I use things with OPEN SOURCE DRIVERS FROM THE VENDOR AND THEY STILL DON'T USUALLY WORK.
Perhaps the Linux community would do a better job of shutting people like me up by fixing the REAL issues instead of making wild assumptions and blaming me for clicking 'install' and then shortly after having issues. Did I click install wrong? Am I suppose to be flipping off my XP CD while I click it? Do I have to chant "Windows sucks" while I install Linux?
Yeah, my issues were almost exclusively with pre-installed programs on Mandrake, RH, Fedora, and SuSE. My current Mandrake install refuses to shut off my computer, hanging at 'power down system.'
...is so 1998. XP and 2K aren't unstable, as much as you'd like to believe they are. I've tried a slew of Linux distros, I spend about 10% of my time in them vs. Windows, and I 'shrug and reboot' more times in Linux.
...for Powell to finally surpass the record indecency fines levied by (Clinton's early FCC chair) Reed Hundt - even without adjusting for inflation.
s px ?aid=239&sid=200
http://www.publicintegrity.org/telecom/report.a
Richard Dreyfuss got all the free publicity he could hope for with those who are all too willing to ignore any past sins in order to villify Bush and his administration. I mean, it's not like it's all that hard to make him look bad, why make stuff up?
Maybe when more hardware vendors get on board and release open drivers....
As I've posted before, it's often not the vendors that are the problem. Hint, hint. See the discussion about "Linux's Achilles Heel." Soundblaster drivers were released by Creative. Even completely open source ones. Support is intermittent at best, even with new, current distros. Pushing the problem off onto the vendors not releasing drivers is no excuse for a lot of Linux's problems - modern, newbie-oriented distros tend to junk up the sound detection anyways, even with very common and not even cutting edge released yesterday stuff - good Intel mobo, not too many peripherals, stuff that should (and generally does, but still far less than 100%) work.
The latest post-Community version of MDK 10.0 (Standard?) caught my card correctly this time, which is rare lately. It used to work more often, then it quit for years....now it seems to work. My sound card hasn't changed. The drivers were released open source.
I'm rooting (no pun intended) for Linux, but it's still flaky to install, and the corrective actions for a newbie are rather convoluted and unfriendly. They're still a lot of work (as you point out) for someone who sort of knows what they're doing.
If you had bothered to read my fucking summary of the /. articles, you would see that I correctly and accurately summarized his unrealized predictions.
:)
He's got a knack for predicting the future. You can rest assured that MS really is getting *DESPERATE* now, especially now that they're obsolete and their monopoly had collapsed years ago.
OF COURSE THEY SELL LINUX ON THE SUB $350 MACHINES. That was going to be the trigger that made Windows obsolete....has it happened? Judging by your poor reading comprehension skills and combattive nature, trying to argue with points I didn't make, I'd better answer that for you. No. Windows is not obsolete.
Try reading for comprehension before you get snippy and abusive with people.
I forgot the close sarcasm tag. ;) ;) ;)
I'm an EE, and I don't want my wife to inherit a lawsuit for patent infringement. ;)
What has ESR brought to the Open Source community?
2 37 &mode=thread&tid=99p l?sid=02/02/28/132424 8&mode=thread&tid=163
:)
Stunningly accurate predictions, like MS's monopoly collapsing in 2001, and Windows becoming obsolete when computer prices dipped below $350.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/12/13/216
http://slashdot.org/article.
He's got a knack for predicting the future. You can rest assured that MS really is getting *DESPERATE* now, especially now that they're obsolete and their monopoly had collapsed years ago.
First off, let me say that I love Firefox, and it's my main browser - has been for a while now. That said, this may be the only thing on the planet that IE is slower at. Everything else that I've seen is a tad to waaaaay faster in IE.
Firebird is great. Speed is not one of its strongest points, though - unless you're loading up a page full of random site icons.
Thanks, yes, RTFM. The odd thing is that it seems to have to do with inheriting subdirectory permissions, and it's not consistent. Sometimes I can read/write in a directory, and sometimes not. It's giving the username and password of the remote system, I own the mount point. Name and ID look correct in the shared directory (owner/group is 'public,' which is the name I gave it), I "force" the user on the shared box, then when I go into a pre-existing subdir, the owner/group is 502/502.
I know people hate this phrase, but "it works fine in Windows." I couldn't get it to work AT ALL on a Fedora Core 2 box trying to access it, but it seemed to be more of a local permissions issue, even though I thought I went through the same rigamarole. I can access, read, write, move in Windows just fine, but my Linux mounting of the same directory imposes inconsistent and odd restrictions. The "502/502" owner issue instead of the name of the owner makes me think it may be a bug, but I use it rarely enough that I sort of gave up. Now I just clean up the mess in Windows after rebooting since it doesn't complain about permissions then.
I think I finally got a config file working, and it was a tremendous pain in the ass. I've been using Linux for years, though I usually mostly stick with Windows for some strange reason. Oh....like for Samba. It's very difficult to read through a variety of articles, with 400 different ways to do it, some several years old, all of them conflicting, and virtually none of them well explained. I'm sure it gets old answering newbie questions, and believe me, it comes through in most any answer how tired the 'expert' is.
Even when I set up the share, which finally worked pretty well in Windows, I still can't use it correctly while mounting it in another Linux box. I suppose I still might have something misconfigured, but it keeps telling me the owner is '502,' which is the ID# (user #? whatever you call it) of the actual owner, but not the name of the owner. It sorta works, but not for subdirectories where I still lose ownership of what is supposed to be a full control subdir and files. It's just too much hassle, and I think somethings broken based on how it identifies the owner and permissions. Back to Windows. Hey, everything works. *shrug*
Exactly - and it's the wrong attitude. Why not leave it an option to have the tree menu off to the side and have a single active window for whichever folder you selected? It's not that hard. Heck, it's already done.
That's one of the reasons I love the Firefox browser - it's often valuded for its tabbed browsing, and I *hate* tabbed browsing. But there's an easy way to add a few lines of user prefs and make even the references to tabbed browsing go away.
They also improved the handling of mismarked MIME-type files, and instead of taking the "user is a luser" attitude, left an OPTION for people to enable this other way of doing things.
You're really limiting your options if you're going to enforce some rigid methodology on users that are often used to a different way of doing things, particularly when you're the underdog - especially for something as trivial and inconsequential as file/folder depth and organization.
Wikipedia didn't catch the IMDB page that lent more meaning to what I was getting at.
;)
I agree, it's just that I don't often hear people talking about the Smoot-Hawley Tarriff.
All this regressive protectionism is a throwback to the nativist movement and the failed policies of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.
Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.
If you look at the visualization and customization stuff you can do on both, you can customize Windows quite a bit, cutting out all the cutesy visual animations that slow down machines without a good video card to take up the slack. That's as much as 99% of desktop users (everyone, not just current Linux users) might ever do with Linux.
I'll have to look when I get home tonight, but KDE and Gnome don't seem to have the same bloat-reducing checkboxes for dummies who don't like to spend hours waiting for their latest hack to recompile as Windows does. They also start out much more sluggish to begin with. It's tolerable on a fast machine, and painful on a slow one, compared to Windows.
The most recent releases from RH and MDK, however, boot much more quickly and do seem more responsive - but they're still lagging significantly behind Windows on my machines, even with all the eye candy turned on in Windows. Yes, I know, I could run some stripped down window manager, but most people don't want to do that.
KDE and Gnome are bloated and sluggish compared to WinXP. Instead of dumping on people who point this out, I suggest that people who CAN program and haxor the interface get cracking on making something pretty AND responsive.
Ah. You're right. :)
It's only running at 80% real time (at least for now), so you couldn't do it without pauses between songs and a decent buffer size.
You'll see that this is a substandard ogg vorbis playback with only fixed point arithmetic. I guess it technically can play OV files, just not correctly decoded with full floating point quality.
Golly, I dunno. Had you RTFA, you'd see that the Rio Karma uses a different model from the same line of processsors from Portal Player, so he might know something about their processor's capabilities. I'm just speculating on that. ;)
I have to ask, do you really reboot that often?
About twice a day.....reboot from Windows into Linux, play with it for a bit, then reboot back into Windows. I usually keep my machine at home off when I'm not home, so I have one additional boot at the start.
It's certainly not a stability issue - my work machines stay on 24/7, and Win2K, XP, and NT4.0 see uptimes of over a month regularly.
I hope some of these speed-ups you mention start to make their way into mainstream Linux distros. I spend a small enough time "being productive" in Linux that I don't have the patience to recompile, tweak, twist, prod, poke, and otherwise go through a lot of hassle to get the machine to be reasonably responsive and fast to boot.
Wow. Sounds like OS-X is starting to approach the stability of NT-based Windows OSes. You must be so proud. :)
Rebooting is exceedingly rare for me too, unless I'm switching from Windows to Linux. I keep my desktop machine at home off most of the time, since it's a waste of power to leave it on when I'm not using it. It's certainly not the stability issue that you're trying to imply.
I guess "generally regarded as recreatable" varies from user to user. I've heard the same experience as mine repeatedly - 2K is very slow to boot, and the UI is not noticably any faster. The only dissent I hear is at /., which is an veritable fountain of accurate and unbiased information on MS. ;) YMMV, of course - I hear that all my Linux problems are imaginary all the time here too.
The 'usability' is not faster, I just get 'to usability' faster - to a point where I can use the computer instead of waiting for it to boot/start services/whatever more quickly with XP than I do with 2K (or even 2.6 Linux, for that matter).
I'm not going to give the BIOS over to Linux, since I still use XP primarily - mostly EE stuff (circuit design, analog/digital simulation, PCB layout, etc.), web, and some games. Linux is really hurting for some decent EE tools.
Actually, I explained that. I'm not being tricked, I get to *use* my computer ~25 seconds or more faster from turn on than I did with 2K. It could have been low hanging fruit optimization on startup, but MS OSes boot up significantly faster than OS-X and any Linux I have tried recently, and that's not stacking the deck with lots of extraneous services. 2.6 kernel stuff lately has sped things up A HUGE amount, but even 2K is still faster to USABILITY, and XP is even faster.