Now, it's all well and good to say 'Use Wine' or 'Theres a free equivalent' but that doesn't help Joe if he doesn't know where to get these things or how to use them.
Then, what would you suggest? Give up?
I'd be glad to hear any suggestions for a better way to make Linux accessible to mom & pop.
I've never understood why Linux fans always push for every mom and pop to use Linux
Because if every mom and pop used Linux, we'd have more applications and drivers developed for Linux (or cross-platform), and we'd be free of the Microsoft upgrade treadmill, and we'd likely be more secure.
Good luck explaining to the average user how to find software to run on Linux,
Click on "Add and remove software". Done.
they're much too used to the model of going to the store and picking up what you want to buy.
I must not know many "average users", because I almost never see this, except very occasionally for games.
I see people going online and purchasing either a digital download, or software in the mail. Much more often, though, I see people lending CDs to each other, or burning them.
* nor will the sound work correctly (instead of playing the nice digitized alert sound, Ubuntu 9.04 seems to prefer using the PC Speaker to emit a 120 dB deafening BEEEEEEEEP on every error. This is the reason I went back to Vista.)
Let me preface this with: You shouldn't have to do this, and your other reasons may well be enough reason to go back. However...
sudo rmmod pcspkr
There is now no driver for the PC Speaker.
Want it permanently disabled? Add that line to/etc/rc.local. A less hackish way might be found in the modprobe settings.
For the record, my wifi works out of the box, as do most of the media keys. Those that don't already have a function can be mapped arbitrarily. And for things which have no media key (or if the media key is simply out of reach), I can map pretty much any keystroke I want to serve that purpose.
Look at all the other distros Pick Ubuntu out of all the others
Pretty well solved. Dell ships Ubuntu. Everyone on Slashdot, even if they use other Distros, will immeditately tell you Ubuntu. Chances are, they may hear about Ubuntu without even hearing about Linux.
Wait and wait and wait for the download
As if you never waited for any other download?
Read a book. Watch TV. Browse the web, check email, or otherwise use your computer.
Or you can double-click on the Windows installer. It's called Wubi.
Ok my desktop is back No I didn't get a message asking me to boot from the disc I have to hit what when the computer is beeping?.........
The vast majority of new computers are shipped set to boot from the CD, by default.
Ok my internet doesn't work, do I need to get a new email now? Yeah, it's wireless.
Most wireless now just works.
The wireless that doesn't, can still be made to work -- granted, no user should ever have to know about firmware, but it's still quite possible.
This is somewhat easier on Windows, but still way beyond most users' threshold. That's why they buy a new computer that's already set up for wireless. Let's compare apples to apples.
What about my printer? That's not working.
Really?
I tend to plug in a printer and have it detected and ready to go. If not, it's about as easy to set up as it is on Windows -- System Settings -> Advanced -> Printer configuration, follow the instructions on the screen.
That goes double for cameras. I have yet to see a digital camera that, when I plug it in, doesn't automatically appear, either as a mass storage device (so all your pictures are there), or a photo application.
Linux is NOT for regular people and it NEVER will be.
Based on your knowledge of modern Linux, if it ever is ready for regular people, you'll never notice -- just keep dragging out these arguments that were old in 2005.
The reason that Vista is so much slower than XP is because of all the protection that has been implemented to make it harder to get a malware infection.
Great! Which makes it useless to me.
You see, XP is plenty secure against malware, if you know what you're doing. If you don't, nothing will save you -- certainly not Vista.
Furthermore, Linux and BSD have historically been both faster and more secure than Vista. What is it about Vista's security that requires it to be slower?
And don't give me that "linux is immune to viruses" bullshit. The only reason Linux is any better with viruses is Linux's relative obscurity. It's not a mainstream OS at the moment, and most of its users tend to be power/advanced computer users at that.
And also because unlike Windows, we've been running as non-root for decades. There's still tons of Windows software that requires Administrator, while you couldn't ship a Linux app that couldn't be run as a normal user.
And also because it takes several conscious decisions to download and run a program. You can't just click an EXE, click "open", and done -- you'd have to save it somewhere, make it executable, then run it.
And also because the process for installing new software, or getting upgrades, typically does not revolve around downloading a random executable file from the web. It all comes through a package manager, signed by trusted authorities.
And also because said package manager keeps the entire system up to date -- everything from drivers to IM clients -- and not just the OS and the web browser.
And also because, as the majority of the software is open source, we're not going to get a trojan attached to some little piece of freeware.
And also because the default browser tends to be Firefox or Konqueror, and not Internet Explorer.
And also because there's no ActiveX.
And also because there's no Autorun. When I pop in a CD or a USB drive, I don't have to hold shift, or tweak a registry setting, to make sure it doesn't just automatically run whatever's there.
And also because of initiatives like SELinux and AppArmor.
Now, if you know what you're doing, XP is plenty secure -- although you're still taking far more risks than with Linux. For instance, you're still downloading drivers -- yes, hardware drivers, bits of software that run in ring fucking zero -- from random places on the Internet, or installing them from a CD, with nearly no verification. You pretty much have to do this, or you run the risk of hardware not working, or even that an outdated driver might have a vulnerability of its own.
All that aside, you haven't said a word about BSD. Or Solaris.
Use basic social engineering. Make something enticing for users to open up, some executable or flash video or something. User opens it, gets his 5s of reward, closes it, deletes the e-mail. Meanwhile, the program
FAIL.
You see, a flash video is not an executable. And no email attachment will be automatically executable on my system -- nor will it, by default, be associated with something that will run it as an executable.
Contrast this with Windows, where I'd likely have exactly one "are you sure" message standing between me and running that emailed.txt.exe file on my machine.
And, just because I feel like being an ass:
has added a silent keylogger to ~/.xinitrc, which watches ps for sudo and gksudo threads...
FAIL, these are called processes.
when those are running, it logs all input until a mouseclick or [enter] is pressed. Now it's got your root password
DOUBLE FAIL. Mouseclicks and enter are not the only thing that could happen here, and other actions are possible. Moreover, this would be a truly stupid approach, when it could simply run sudo (or gksu) afterwards, given they cache credentia
Quick question: Did you install Ubuntu, or Kubuntu?
I've never had any sort of issue like that with Kubuntu. Granted, I've had them break other things -- I'm still pissed about Kubuntu 8.10 just dropping Bluetooth support for a few months -- but sound pretty much just worked.
It's a different argument, but this is a weakness that Ubuntu is unlikely to overcome -- new, DRM'd crap tends not to work until the DRM itself is thoroughly cracked. (Netflix Watch Now won't work, either.) That's why, until Blu-Ray is compromised the way DVD is now, I'll stick with torrents for my HD fix.
To me, this isn't the fault of Ubuntu, so much as it's the fault of yet another pathetic attempt at DRM. One that was years in the making, too -- how fucking hard would it have been to just throw an ogm (or mkv) with vorbis and theora or dirac on a UDF-formatted disc, and pay no royalties? Everything could play it either out of the box or with one download of VLC, it'd take less than a netbook worth of logic for an embedded player to read the format...
Hey, I'd even settle for mpeg-based stuff -- just h264 and aac/aac+ in an mp4. Done.
Not that you care, but I'd say there's a good chance at least one of those standalone blu-ray players is a Linux box. I know a few of the HD-DVD players were.
Reasonable except for a few places where iTunes has a monopoly we can't easily touch -- for example, can't buy anything off the iTunes store via Amarok. However, I can buy stuff from Amazon MP3. It plugs into last.fm and Magnatune out of the box. It's got scripts and plugins of all kinds...
I guess I'd have to know just what isn't "reasonable" about Amarok.
Because those 5 hours, I'm just going to be sitting there staring at a download. Backing up old stuff, nothing I love more than to watch a backup process for 2 hours...
Never mind that Ubuntu comes on a livecd, so even if "average" Joe the apparently hardcore gamer has nothing better to do, he can sit there and browse the web, or check out some of the stuff he's getting.
Oh, never mind: Dual-boot, virtual machines, and Wine. All still options for playing that game. And hey, you lag a lot less when your Windows installation is only used for games.
Or you buy a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu for $699, plug it in, turn it on, and it will work resaonably well. And if it doesn't work with his hardware, he calls support, just as he would with Windows.
How about we compare apples to apples?
Or this way: You can pick up your new PC, and a copy of Windows on a CD at the store (XP Home? Pro? Media? Vista Home Basic? Home Premium? Business? Media? Ultimate? Any of 1000 Windows variants, all with different advantages and disadvantages...)
Then hope you've entered everything right, including the CD key, and if this license has ever been used before, prepare to talk on the phone to either a machine or a person in India, typing in an even longer "activation key"...
Then install drivers one by one -- whoops, gotta use your old computer to download the network drivers, those aren't included out of the box -- easy enough, once you know the manufacturer, just go to their website, unless you happen to have one of those laptops for which nvidia refuses to distribute drivers -- then you have to go to Dell, and find the driver, unless you were unfortunate enough to buy XP instead of Vista, in which case you need to find an XP driver for an entirely different laptop that Dell support happens to know will work...
Oh, and some drivers might not work on a 64-bit Windows...
Or you can use the old computer to download and burn an Ubuntu CD, or order one for free in the mail, pop it in the drive, click next a bunch of times, and you're installed. With all the drivers ready to go.
Oh, and pretty much all the drivers and software will either already be 64-bit, or be packaged with everything needed to run that 32-bit app (or browser plugin!) in a 64-bit OS (or browser!)
Any way you slice it, Ubuntu is easier to install than Windows. Whether you have other issues is just playing anecdote wars. Since both can be had pre-installed, it's truly moronic to suggest that we compare a pre-installed Windows with a do-it-yourself-Linux.
Now, which way is Joe gonna go? He's gonna go whichever way the person in the store tells him to. That, or someone he trusts -- his tech-savvy son, cousin, friend, etc. He's gonna end up with Windows. That doesn't mean it's the best or easiest choice, though -- sometimes it is, sometimes it's not.
Windows 7 could run faster than anything Linux could dream of, and be more usable than a Mac, and have built-in support for apps from every single OS ever, -AND- be released as open source, and you nimrods would still mindlessly trash it.
Actually, if it did that -- under a reasonable open source license, mind you, not some "shared source" license which requires a noncompete and a firstborn son -- I'd applaud it.
I might still use Linux, for the moment. There are actually plenty of advantages that have nothing to do with speed or open-ness. But I'd also seriously consider it.
Even if I didn't, it'd be a good thing -- depending on the license, it could be a huge win for things like Wine, as well.
I'm not sure if I agree with GP -- Win 7 appears to be doing some things right, but as usual, they are the kind of things that really just seem obvious, that others have done already, so the sense I get isn't "Cool, new stuff!", it's "Oh, they finally did that. Great."
XP in a VM, for instance, I suggested back when Vista was still called Longhorn. I can't really claim credit, though -- this was pretty much exactly how Apple handled the OS9-OSX transition.
By the way, this part:
Now mod me down, fanbois. I've got karma to burn.
Whenever I have mod points, I deliberately moderate down posts like this. It's an irritating, cheap bit of reverse psychology -- "I'm saying something that's against the groupthink, so I might be modded down. Please mod me up to protect me from the evil, evil groupthink."
Of course, you don't need there to actually be any anti-MS groupthink. You just need some moderators to buy your anti-groupthink groupthink.
They will *not* ever learn to do it right, as long as they have a choice. So if you want users to use your software in the correct way, you have to make it the only way to use the program.
That is impossible.
The only thing that would really work is making users liable for the damage they cause by doing things the wrong way.
ultimately people will do what they always do when it comes to learning for degrees or licenses that doesn't interest them in the least: Learn it word by word by heart, do the test, forget it immediately after and shrug it off.
While people often do this with a driver's license, there's at least the chance (combined with state-sponsored driver's education) to get it right.
No. You know what's the way? If you contribute to the problem, you're held liable for it.
Much like a driver's license. Not just a fine, though, but the very real chance to lose your license.
And antivirus is not sufficient to protect "click-happy" users from themselves.
Look, there have been tons of ads about drugs and smoking, and plenty of morons still do those in large quantities. But it's still justified to try, because that's really the only thing that will work. Outlawing them really doesn't do a thing.
To abuse an analogy, suggesting antivirus is a bit like suggesting that everyone equip their mouths with a special "health detector", which beeps loudly and induces vomiting whenever it sees anything it thinks is a drug or a cigarette -- which also isn't able to detect meth, yet is able to detect pharmaceuticals, and must therefore be disabled frequently.
Educating people not to smoke may not be effective, but it's a hell of a lot more effective than telling them to cripple themselves that way in an effort to protect them from not smoking, which is ridiculously easy for them to do on their own.
I live in Fairfield, Iowa, a town of ten thousand people in the middle of nowhere, and we have 100 mbit (full duplex) fiber to the home for $65/mo.
Granted, it's capped at 20 gigs/mo, though I have no idea to what extent this is enforced. But when I put that speed and that price in my Slashdot sig, it seemed like every third post, someone would reply to me asking where I live.
Seems most places are stuck with Comcast and friends...
What would have actually transpired if you had attempted to do what you did with XP would be install some ancient version of Ubuntu, lets say 6.10
First, that's not entirely accurate -- XP is old, but it has been continually patched. SP3 was released in 2008.
So, actually, an LTS release might be a better choice. 6.04 (Dapper Drake), or maybe 8.04.
Second, while it would not have been included out of the box, I could certainly go to nvidia.com and download a working driver. For the latest nvidia driver:
Minimum kernel version is 2.4.7. Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper) is on 2.4.27. Minimum X.org is 4.0.1/6.7, while Dapper is on 7.0. Minimum modutils is 2.1.121; Dapper has 2.4.27. Minimum binutils is 2.9.5; Dapper has 2.16. Minimum make is 3.77; Dapper has 3.80. Minimum gcc is 2.91.66; Dapper has 3.3, 3.4, and the default is 4.0. Minimum glibc is 2.0; Dapper has 2.3.6.
In other words, the experiment you suggested would work, and would not require me to compile a kernel. It would require me to download and compile parts of the new nvidia driver, but nvidia makes that dirt simple with their current installers.
I'm not willing to actually run this experiment just to prove you wrong, but I do strongly suspect that it would work, and better than XP.
Now, is it Windows' fault? Actually, in this case, it's nvidia's, for signing some retarded licensing deal with Dell. I will never understand why Dell wanted to be the exclusive distributor of video drivers for my laptop.
But I think it neatly demonstrates the point: nVidia's Linux drivers are on par with, or better than, their Windows drivers, in that I can actually download a driver for an old version of Linux (despite that everyone's upgraded by now), but I can't download it for an old version of Windows (despite that many people deliberately downgrade from Vista to XP).
I guess in this case, the status quo I felt more like tackling was that of the larger MMOs, rather than that of OSes.
This is a small, 2D MMO with emphasis on roleplay and community, yet actually has surprisingly fun gameplay, more so than most WoW-type games I've tried.
With the ASCII-only filter, the weirdest writing we have to put up with is 1337 |-|4X0r 5P33|<, and that's bad enough.
With the moderation system, I never see that.
In fact, frankly, the way to address your other concerns is via the moderation system. And for any decent software, these days, turning on Unicode should be like flipping a switch. With UTF8, there isn't even a loss of efficiency for those of us who stick to Latin1.
while Epic can afford to implement two rendering paths, many smaller game shops cannot.
Can smaller game shops afford to implement even one rendering path, when they could just license something which has done the work for them? And once they do that licensing, be it something expensive (Unreal, IdTech, etc) or something free (CrystalSpace, etc), it really shouldn't be much more difficult to choose an engine with multiple rendering paths, or with just an OpenGL path.
This laptop is sold with either Vista or Ubuntu. I bought it with Ubuntu, and then bought a copy of XP.
Because of some bizarre licensing issue, nvidia was not allowed to distribute drivers for it. Only Dell was.
And because Dell only sells this laptop with Vista, they only had a Vista driver.
After finally breaking down and calling support, I was given links to an XP driver for a different model in the same series. In fact, it seemed almost random which models contained a compatible driver for which piece of hardware I had...
Contrast this with Linux. They gave me a 32-bit Ubuntu, which I replaced with a 64-bit Kubuntu. Pretty much out of the fucking box.
Now, as a Linux user, I absolutely will take the time to make sure every piece of hardware is well supported. But nothing I care about as a gamer won't be well-supported.
Oh, and all of this is leaving out the casual / budget gamers. I tend to buy video hardware somewhat behind the curve, mostly because it ends up costing half as much and being maybe 80% as good.
Slashdot Mirror
Cedega is occasionally nice, when a game works in Cedega but not Wine.
However, when something works in Wine, it works better in Wine, pretty much across the board.
Now, it's all well and good to say 'Use Wine' or 'Theres a free equivalent' but that doesn't help Joe if he doesn't know where to get these things or how to use them.
Then, what would you suggest? Give up?
I'd be glad to hear any suggestions for a better way to make Linux accessible to mom & pop.
I've never understood why Linux fans always push for every mom and pop to use Linux
Because if every mom and pop used Linux, we'd have more applications and drivers developed for Linux (or cross-platform), and we'd be free of the Microsoft upgrade treadmill, and we'd likely be more secure.
Good luck explaining to the average user how to find software to run on Linux,
Click on "Add and remove software". Done.
they're much too used to the model of going to the store and picking up what you want to buy.
I must not know many "average users", because I almost never see this, except very occasionally for games.
I see people going online and purchasing either a digital download, or software in the mail. Much more often, though, I see people lending CDs to each other, or burning them.
* nor will the sound work correctly (instead of playing the nice digitized alert sound, Ubuntu 9.04 seems to prefer using the PC Speaker to emit a 120 dB deafening BEEEEEEEEP on every error. This is the reason I went back to Vista.)
Let me preface this with: You shouldn't have to do this, and your other reasons may well be enough reason to go back. However...
sudo rmmod pcspkr
There is now no driver for the PC Speaker.
Want it permanently disabled? Add that line to /etc/rc.local. A less hackish way might be found in the modprobe settings.
For the record, my wifi works out of the box, as do most of the media keys. Those that don't already have a function can be mapped arbitrarily. And for things which have no media key (or if the media key is simply out of reach), I can map pretty much any keystroke I want to serve that purpose.
Look at all the other distros
Pick Ubuntu out of all the others
Pretty well solved. Dell ships Ubuntu. Everyone on Slashdot, even if they use other Distros, will immeditately tell you Ubuntu. Chances are, they may hear about Ubuntu without even hearing about Linux.
Wait and wait and wait for the download
As if you never waited for any other download?
Read a book. Watch TV. Browse the web, check email, or otherwise use your computer.
Or http://shipit.ubuntu.com/
Burn it to a disc
Wait let me find a disc
Because regular people have never burned Music CDs. Right.
How do I burn it?
Right there on the download page is a great big header that says "Need help?"
The very first item there links to instructions on burning it.
Ok so I reboot and put the cd in?
Or you can double-click on the Windows installer. It's called Wubi.
Ok my desktop is back ... ... ...
No I didn't get a message asking me to boot from the disc
I have to hit what when the computer is beeping?
The vast majority of new computers are shipped set to boot from the CD, by default.
Ok my internet doesn't work, do I need to get a new email now?
Yeah, it's wireless.
Most wireless now just works.
The wireless that doesn't, can still be made to work -- granted, no user should ever have to know about firmware, but it's still quite possible.
This is somewhat easier on Windows, but still way beyond most users' threshold. That's why they buy a new computer that's already set up for wireless. Let's compare apples to apples.
What about my printer? That's not working.
Really?
I tend to plug in a printer and have it detected and ready to go. If not, it's about as easy to set up as it is on Windows -- System Settings -> Advanced -> Printer configuration, follow the instructions on the screen.
That goes double for cameras. I have yet to see a digital camera that, when I plug it in, doesn't automatically appear, either as a mass storage device (so all your pictures are there), or a photo application.
Linux is NOT for regular people and it NEVER will be.
Based on your knowledge of modern Linux, if it ever is ready for regular people, you'll never notice -- just keep dragging out these arguments that were old in 2005.
The reason that Vista is so much slower than XP is because of all the protection that has been implemented to make it harder to get a malware infection.
Great! Which makes it useless to me.
You see, XP is plenty secure against malware, if you know what you're doing. If you don't, nothing will save you -- certainly not Vista.
Furthermore, Linux and BSD have historically been both faster and more secure than Vista. What is it about Vista's security that requires it to be slower?
And don't give me that "linux is immune to viruses" bullshit. The only reason Linux is any better with viruses is Linux's relative obscurity. It's not a mainstream OS at the moment, and most of its users tend to be power/advanced computer users at that.
And also because unlike Windows, we've been running as non-root for decades. There's still tons of Windows software that requires Administrator, while you couldn't ship a Linux app that couldn't be run as a normal user.
And also because it takes several conscious decisions to download and run a program. You can't just click an EXE, click "open", and done -- you'd have to save it somewhere, make it executable, then run it.
And also because the process for installing new software, or getting upgrades, typically does not revolve around downloading a random executable file from the web. It all comes through a package manager, signed by trusted authorities.
And also because said package manager keeps the entire system up to date -- everything from drivers to IM clients -- and not just the OS and the web browser.
And also because, as the majority of the software is open source, we're not going to get a trojan attached to some little piece of freeware.
And also because the default browser tends to be Firefox or Konqueror, and not Internet Explorer.
And also because there's no ActiveX.
And also because there's no Autorun. When I pop in a CD or a USB drive, I don't have to hold shift, or tweak a registry setting, to make sure it doesn't just automatically run whatever's there.
And also because of initiatives like SELinux and AppArmor.
Now, if you know what you're doing, XP is plenty secure -- although you're still taking far more risks than with Linux. For instance, you're still downloading drivers -- yes, hardware drivers, bits of software that run in ring fucking zero -- from random places on the Internet, or installing them from a CD, with nearly no verification. You pretty much have to do this, or you run the risk of hardware not working, or even that an outdated driver might have a vulnerability of its own.
All that aside, you haven't said a word about BSD. Or Solaris.
Use basic social engineering. Make something enticing for users to open up, some executable or flash video or something. User opens it, gets his 5s of reward, closes it, deletes the e-mail. Meanwhile, the program
FAIL.
You see, a flash video is not an executable. And no email attachment will be automatically executable on my system -- nor will it, by default, be associated with something that will run it as an executable.
Contrast this with Windows, where I'd likely have exactly one "are you sure" message standing between me and running that emailed .txt.exe file on my machine.
And, just because I feel like being an ass:
has added a silent keylogger to ~/.xinitrc, which watches ps for sudo and gksudo threads...
FAIL, these are called processes.
when those are running, it logs all input until a mouseclick or [enter] is pressed. Now it's got your root password
DOUBLE FAIL. Mouseclicks and enter are not the only thing that could happen here, and other actions are possible. Moreover, this would be a truly stupid approach, when it could simply run sudo (or gksu) afterwards, given they cache credentia
Quick question: Did you install Ubuntu, or Kubuntu?
I've never had any sort of issue like that with Kubuntu. Granted, I've had them break other things -- I'm still pissed about Kubuntu 8.10 just dropping Bluetooth support for a few months -- but sound pretty much just worked.
It's a different argument, but this is a weakness that Ubuntu is unlikely to overcome -- new, DRM'd crap tends not to work until the DRM itself is thoroughly cracked. (Netflix Watch Now won't work, either.) That's why, until Blu-Ray is compromised the way DVD is now, I'll stick with torrents for my HD fix.
To me, this isn't the fault of Ubuntu, so much as it's the fault of yet another pathetic attempt at DRM. One that was years in the making, too -- how fucking hard would it have been to just throw an ogm (or mkv) with vorbis and theora or dirac on a UDF-formatted disc, and pay no royalties? Everything could play it either out of the box or with one download of VLC, it'd take less than a netbook worth of logic for an embedded player to read the format...
Hey, I'd even settle for mpeg-based stuff -- just h264 and aac/aac+ in an mp4. Done.
Not that you care, but I'd say there's a good chance at least one of those standalone blu-ray players is a Linux box. I know a few of the HD-DVD players were.
Don't even start on the "it will run under Wine" argument because who is going to set that up for him?
sudo apt-get install wine
Done. Now he can double-click on an EXE, and it will work.
For that matter, who is going to tell him about it in the first place?
Probably the same person who told him about Linux in the first place.
Amarok.
Reasonable except for a few places where iTunes has a monopoly we can't easily touch -- for example, can't buy anything off the iTunes store via Amarok. However, I can buy stuff from Amazon MP3. It plugs into last.fm and Magnatune out of the box. It's got scripts and plugins of all kinds...
I guess I'd have to know just what isn't "reasonable" about Amarok.
Because those 5 hours, I'm just going to be sitting there staring at a download. Backing up old stuff, nothing I love more than to watch a backup process for 2 hours...
Never mind that Ubuntu comes on a livecd, so even if "average" Joe the apparently hardcore gamer has nothing better to do, he can sit there and browse the web, or check out some of the stuff he's getting.
Oh, never mind: Dual-boot, virtual machines, and Wine. All still options for playing that game. And hey, you lag a lot less when your Windows installation is only used for games.
Or you buy a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu for $699, plug it in, turn it on, and it will work resaonably well. And if it doesn't work with his hardware, he calls support, just as he would with Windows.
How about we compare apples to apples?
Or this way: You can pick up your new PC, and a copy of Windows on a CD at the store (XP Home? Pro? Media? Vista Home Basic? Home Premium? Business? Media? Ultimate? Any of 1000 Windows variants, all with different advantages and disadvantages...)
Then hope you've entered everything right, including the CD key, and if this license has ever been used before, prepare to talk on the phone to either a machine or a person in India, typing in an even longer "activation key"...
Then install drivers one by one -- whoops, gotta use your old computer to download the network drivers, those aren't included out of the box -- easy enough, once you know the manufacturer, just go to their website, unless you happen to have one of those laptops for which nvidia refuses to distribute drivers -- then you have to go to Dell, and find the driver, unless you were unfortunate enough to buy XP instead of Vista, in which case you need to find an XP driver for an entirely different laptop that Dell support happens to know will work...
Oh, and some drivers might not work on a 64-bit Windows...
Or you can use the old computer to download and burn an Ubuntu CD, or order one for free in the mail, pop it in the drive, click next a bunch of times, and you're installed. With all the drivers ready to go.
Oh, and pretty much all the drivers and software will either already be 64-bit, or be packaged with everything needed to run that 32-bit app (or browser plugin!) in a 64-bit OS (or browser!)
Any way you slice it, Ubuntu is easier to install than Windows. Whether you have other issues is just playing anecdote wars. Since both can be had pre-installed, it's truly moronic to suggest that we compare a pre-installed Windows with a do-it-yourself-Linux.
Now, which way is Joe gonna go? He's gonna go whichever way the person in the store tells him to. That, or someone he trusts -- his tech-savvy son, cousin, friend, etc. He's gonna end up with Windows. That doesn't mean it's the best or easiest choice, though -- sometimes it is, sometimes it's not.
Windows 7 could run faster than anything Linux could dream of, and be more usable than a Mac, and have built-in support for apps from every single OS ever, -AND- be released as open source, and you nimrods would still mindlessly trash it.
Actually, if it did that -- under a reasonable open source license, mind you, not some "shared source" license which requires a noncompete and a firstborn son -- I'd applaud it.
I might still use Linux, for the moment. There are actually plenty of advantages that have nothing to do with speed or open-ness. But I'd also seriously consider it.
Even if I didn't, it'd be a good thing -- depending on the license, it could be a huge win for things like Wine, as well.
I'm not sure if I agree with GP -- Win 7 appears to be doing some things right, but as usual, they are the kind of things that really just seem obvious, that others have done already, so the sense I get isn't "Cool, new stuff!", it's "Oh, they finally did that. Great."
XP in a VM, for instance, I suggested back when Vista was still called Longhorn. I can't really claim credit, though -- this was pretty much exactly how Apple handled the OS9-OSX transition.
By the way, this part:
Now mod me down, fanbois. I've got karma to burn.
Whenever I have mod points, I deliberately moderate down posts like this. It's an irritating, cheap bit of reverse psychology -- "I'm saying something that's against the groupthink, so I might be modded down. Please mod me up to protect me from the evil, evil groupthink."
Of course, you don't need there to actually be any anti-MS groupthink. You just need some moderators to buy your anti-groupthink groupthink.
It has never worked.
It has never really been tried.
They will *not* ever learn to do it right, as long as they have a choice. So if you want users to use your software in the correct way, you have to make it the only way to use the program.
That is impossible.
The only thing that would really work is making users liable for the damage they cause by doing things the wrong way.
he has to know, he has to do...
Much like a driver's license.
ultimately people will do what they always do when it comes to learning for degrees or licenses that doesn't interest them in the least: Learn it word by word by heart, do the test, forget it immediately after and shrug it off.
While people often do this with a driver's license, there's at least the chance (combined with state-sponsored driver's education) to get it right.
No. You know what's the way? If you contribute to the problem, you're held liable for it.
Much like a driver's license. Not just a fine, though, but the very real chance to lose your license.
And antivirus is not sufficient to protect "click-happy" users from themselves.
Look, there have been tons of ads about drugs and smoking, and plenty of morons still do those in large quantities. But it's still justified to try, because that's really the only thing that will work. Outlawing them really doesn't do a thing.
To abuse an analogy, suggesting antivirus is a bit like suggesting that everyone equip their mouths with a special "health detector", which beeps loudly and induces vomiting whenever it sees anything it thinks is a drug or a cigarette -- which also isn't able to detect meth, yet is able to detect pharmaceuticals, and must therefore be disabled frequently.
Educating people not to smoke may not be effective, but it's a hell of a lot more effective than telling them to cripple themselves that way in an effort to protect them from not smoking, which is ridiculously easy for them to do on their own.
Unless, of course, it ends up being capped.
I live in Fairfield, Iowa, a town of ten thousand people in the middle of nowhere, and we have 100 mbit (full duplex) fiber to the home for $65/mo.
Granted, it's capped at 20 gigs/mo, though I have no idea to what extent this is enforced. But when I put that speed and that price in my Slashdot sig, it seemed like every third post, someone would reply to me asking where I live.
Seems most places are stuck with Comcast and friends...
Given the way the UK has become Oceana lately, it's unfortunately not obvious that it's a joke.
PHP itself is one giant bad language decision.
What would have actually transpired if you had attempted to do what you did with XP would be install some ancient version of Ubuntu, lets say 6.10
First, that's not entirely accurate -- XP is old, but it has been continually patched. SP3 was released in 2008.
So, actually, an LTS release might be a better choice. 6.04 (Dapper Drake), or maybe 8.04.
Second, while it would not have been included out of the box, I could certainly go to nvidia.com and download a working driver. For the latest nvidia driver:
Minimum kernel version is 2.4.7. Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper) is on 2.4.27.
Minimum X.org is 4.0.1/6.7, while Dapper is on 7.0.
Minimum modutils is 2.1.121; Dapper has 2.4.27.
Minimum binutils is 2.9.5; Dapper has 2.16.
Minimum make is 3.77; Dapper has 3.80.
Minimum gcc is 2.91.66; Dapper has 3.3, 3.4, and the default is 4.0.
Minimum glibc is 2.0; Dapper has 2.3.6.
In other words, the experiment you suggested would work, and would not require me to compile a kernel. It would require me to download and compile parts of the new nvidia driver, but nvidia makes that dirt simple with their current installers.
I'm not willing to actually run this experiment just to prove you wrong, but I do strongly suspect that it would work, and better than XP.
Now, is it Windows' fault? Actually, in this case, it's nvidia's, for signing some retarded licensing deal with Dell. I will never understand why Dell wanted to be the exclusive distributor of video drivers for my laptop.
But I think it neatly demonstrates the point: nVidia's Linux drivers are on par with, or better than, their Windows drivers, in that I can actually download a driver for an old version of Linux (despite that everyone's upgraded by now), but I can't download it for an old version of Windows (despite that many people deliberately downgrade from Vista to XP).
I guess in this case, the status quo I felt more like tackling was that of the larger MMOs, rather than that of OSes.
This is a small, 2D MMO with emphasis on roleplay and community, yet actually has surprisingly fun gameplay, more so than most WoW-type games I've tried.
And it does work nearly perfectly under Wine.
With the ASCII-only filter, the weirdest writing we have to put up with is 1337 |-|4X0r 5P33|<, and that's bad enough.
With the moderation system, I never see that.
In fact, frankly, the way to address your other concerns is via the moderation system. And for any decent software, these days, turning on Unicode should be like flipping a switch. With UTF8, there isn't even a loss of efficiency for those of us who stick to Latin1.
It just feels... amateurish.
while Epic can afford to implement two rendering paths, many smaller game shops cannot.
Can smaller game shops afford to implement even one rendering path, when they could just license something which has done the work for them? And once they do that licensing, be it something expensive (Unreal, IdTech, etc) or something free (CrystalSpace, etc), it really shouldn't be much more difficult to choose an engine with multiple rendering paths, or with just an OpenGL path.
For what it's worth, I do play an MMO, and I play it on Linux.
But I play it under Wine.
In my case, significantly better.
This laptop is sold with either Vista or Ubuntu. I bought it with Ubuntu, and then bought a copy of XP.
Because of some bizarre licensing issue, nvidia was not allowed to distribute drivers for it. Only Dell was.
And because Dell only sells this laptop with Vista, they only had a Vista driver.
After finally breaking down and calling support, I was given links to an XP driver for a different model in the same series. In fact, it seemed almost random which models contained a compatible driver for which piece of hardware I had...
Contrast this with Linux. They gave me a 32-bit Ubuntu, which I replaced with a 64-bit Kubuntu. Pretty much out of the fucking box.
Now, as a Linux user, I absolutely will take the time to make sure every piece of hardware is well supported. But nothing I care about as a gamer won't be well-supported.
Oh, and all of this is leaving out the casual / budget gamers. I tend to buy video hardware somewhat behind the curve, mostly because it ends up costing half as much and being maybe 80% as good.