A Linux User Goes Back 1852
An anonymous reader says "A friend of mine recently switched to using Windows XP after three and a half years of Linux. I thought the community might benefit from reading his story. Even as a dedicated Linux user, I agree with many of his points. 'Unix on the desktop" has come along way in recent years, yet could still stand much improvement. It is no longer an issue of having a fancy GUI (KDE can't get much better), but rather the real problems lie in the foundation.' Some of his points are wrong, but it's a reasonable article.
As a Windows user I'm a bit surprised. (Score:4, Informative)
OS X (Score:2, Informative)
Re:the other direction? (Score:2, Informative)
Another direction (Score:4, Informative)
In any case, if you want UNIX on your desktop, your best bet by far is to get a Mac [apple.com].
Re:He's right about the fonts (Score:5, Informative)
They're something Microsoft got right, and you're free to use them, even on linux! I haven't looked at an ugly bitmapped font in over two years.
Re:He's right about the fonts (Score:4, Informative)
It is a royal pain in the ass to install a ttf under linux, it's not just copy it to the directory, you have to do all other retarded things, add it to config files, etc. Maybe that's because I don't have xfstt installed, and rely on X11's built in ttf support.
If you use the debian mozilla, it gives you the option to turn on antialiasing on install of mozilla... ahhhh much better, it's not too overdone, thank goodness...
Re:This applies to business users also (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why I use Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed. But you can have this in windows too. A simple registry change will enable this functionality on win2k for example by changing the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Command Processor/CompletionCharacter
Set this to 9 and you'll be be command completion heaven.
Re:the other direction? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't know about your sound problems, but will make my standard printing suggestion, in the absence of real knowledge about your problems:
CUPS + gimp-print (which has actually evolved into an all-around printing support package for a goodly number of printers).
CUPS replaces the standard Unix-style print spooling-management. As a Red Hat user, you probably are using GNOME. I don't know how well GNOME+CUPS interoperate, but I suspect they do just fine. Using CUPS with KDE makes printing very Windows-like, complete with a print dialog that allows you to set any of your printing options on a per-job basis.
gimp-print is available at sourceforge.net.
Fair warning: requires compilation. Not difficult, but read the directions carefully and march steadily forward.
I use Linux at work but Windows XP at home because (Score:2, Informative)
but at home I don't do that. I come home, play and mp3, watch a divx movie, etc...and I do that on XP. Why? Because there isn't any filesharing app that runs on Linux that has as much content as Kazaa. Where else can I find every MP3 I am loking for as well as hundred of movies. Then if I want to listen to an mp3 or watch a divx, its much easier for me to install winamp or the latest divx codec. I just double click and go. With linux I'd have to download it, install the rpm or compile the source, setup the kde file manager to open that filetype with that application, download and compile xine, get the divx codec for linux (which usually lags behind), etc...
And another big point, alot of the movies are slightly over 700M so I have to recompress them to a hair under 700M so I can burn them to cd. I haven't found a linux divx reconder that is as good as virtualdub.
To put it simply, Windows has better media apps, filesharing utils, video encoders, and codec releases then Linux.
Re:He's right about the fonts (Score:2, Informative)
Font handling is a real mess: you have the paths in XF86Config, then Xfs' own paths and now there's Xft's (very recent versions read an XML file in
Re:He's right about the fonts (Score:3, Informative)
#open office
deb ftp://ftp.vpn-junkies.de/openoffice unstable main contrib
then "apt-get install openoffice.org" I think it is..., if you have the msttcorefonts then openoffice should use those fonts if they're installed properly or so it seems. I can select and use Arial, etc.
RTFM (Score:5, Informative)
Elitism drives people away, as does saying "RTFM" or belittling people who choose a different distro from yourself.
I totally agree. I sat in a meeting with a cocky systems administrator wearing an RTFM t-shirt. When it came to deciding who got layed off, he was the first to go. He may have been very good with UNIX and Linux systems, but speaking in a condescending tone made people who worked with him feel small. He had to go.
Re:He's right about the fonts (Score:3, Informative)
It is a royal pain in the ass to install a ttf under linux, it's not just copy it to the directory, you have to do all other retarded things, add it to config files, etc. Maybe that's because I don't have xfstt installed, and rely on X11's built in ttf support.
Recent KDEs have a font installer in the control center, where you can add fonts easily and it will generate a good
Re:OSX not the answer... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't expect it to ever work nearly as well as anything running on Apple hardware, though. One of the main reasons OS X works so well is that they're not trying to support every computer ever made.
Re:Backwards (Score:5, Informative)
Uhm, yeah. So, tell me, do you own a car?
Do you like to configure the ignition curves for your engine?
Do you like to machine your own oil-filter base plate?
Do you like to plumb your air intake exactly the way you want it?
Do you like to adjust the exhaust pipe lengths to change the resonant frequency?
Most people want to just get in the car and drive. Heck, they want to NOT know the gory little details.
Re:He's right about the fonts (Score:2, Informative)
That's that font that looks kinda like Helvetica [ms-studio.com], right? [Maybe off-topic, but a neat article anyway.]
Re:RTFM (Score:3, Informative)
It's ostensibly about the Perl community, but it speaks to the rest of Open Source as well.
Re:Why I use Linux (Score:1, Informative)
Never heard of Windows Scripting Host? It supports a number of scripting languages.
Learn something before mouthing off.
Re:He's right about the fonts (Score:2, Informative)
Try this link:
- http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/fontguide.html [openoffice.org]
and scroll down to the section "Adding fonts".For me though, that still seemed like too much effort. If you download the Installation Guide located at
- http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/source/browse/wh
i teboard/doc/SETUP_GUIDE [openoffice.org]
it will tell you how to add TrueType fonts using the spadmin utility which makes things very easy.Re:ummmm... (Score:2, Informative)
LOL, Slashdot's Mac fanbois are simply the best. Saying something as brutally ignorant as "People just don't understand that macs tend to outperform PC stuff" does _not_ automaticly make you the elitist you are so desperatly trying to be.
Next time bring along some benchmarks or numbers PLEASE. anything.
An older benchmark [macspeedzone.com], I see no ass whipping here, and this is from a mac site, so you know the numbers have been skewed in apples favor.
Sorry to be off topic, but trying to rush this guy off to OSX as a alternitive to Linux really just strikes a bad chord with me. Your not his desktop savior, your just a fanboy trying to score browny points for being as "difrent" as apples comercials want you to be. Mac "stuff" is nowhere near supirior, and from hands on experience its not even that good. If I had to pick anything as a speed demon I would advocate PA-RISC, but I live in the real world, and in the real world you will get alot more done, with a lot less headache, and for a lot cheaper with a Single or Dual TBird / P4 then you ever will with a Mac.
Re:the other direction? (Score:2, Informative)
TWW
Running remote applications (Score:4, Informative)
I used this capability routinely while traveling on business, proxying the terminal services session over SSH running on my OpenBSD gateway. It actually performed usably when dialed up to an ISP from a hotel room halfway across the country. And by usable, I don't mean "it could be used if you're a masochist". I mean, I used it to send / receive home e-mail and do Quicken regularly. Although X has it's strengths, working well over high-lag, low-bandwidth connections is not one of them.
WinXP vs Win2K (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed. My old box was a Win2K machine, which worked fine for everything I needed to do. Last week I had the dubious honour of setting up a new WinXP box. While there are certainly things to like about XP (it's almost worth it just to lock the toolbars so you can't accidentally drag them around), I have seen plenty of irritating niggles.
I have other reservations as well, but the poor UI work and lack of performance/stability are enough to rule it out as an advance over 2K as far as I'm concerned, before you even get into the whole IE/Media Player/DRM/M$ 0wnz U thing.
I'm about to get a new top-of-the-range box, and I'm looking seriously at what type of system and what OS I install. Right about now, the options under consideration are Win2K, Linux and MacOS X. After my experiences at work, WinXP isn't a contender.
StarOffice/OpenOffice fonts not a problem... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:the other direction? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I haven't tried a scanner, but I have been installing Plextor CDRWs in the Ultra10s at work and they wok just fine under Solaris 8. No configuration necessary. They even automount under vold and ask if I want to format the blank floppy in
Re:Mostly reasonable and hardly insightful... (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe they've never complained because it's not true?
If the driver is written correctly (as is everything I've ever tried), and your kernel supports modules (which is every distro I've ever seen) then you _don't_ have to recompile your kernel, you compile the module, do a depmod -a, and modprobe.
Re:Kinda (Score:3, Informative)
Title of parent post is:
Re:Kinda (Score:3)
Is this a bug? Since it's been moderated, shouldn't it be Interesting or Informative or Troll or something?
Re:God would I love to... (Score:3, Informative)
Like most other things in life, the decision is a tradeoff. Here's the thing to think about: how much is your time worth?
I ran Linux. I like linux. I still choose Linux for my web hosting (thinking about OpenBSD, tho'). I bought a Powerbook Laptop 2 years ago, though. A few months later, I picked up a copy of the OS X public beta. Inside of a month I was sold. Even factoring the extra amount of time I sometimes had to futz to get not-quite-totally-makefile-ported software over, I spent so much less time trying to get things to go my way that there was no contest. When I want the command line and UNIX goodness, it's there. When I don't want to think about it, I don't have to. That savings was easily worth $500. Maybe more.
As for affordability.... I'm typing this on that same Powerbook G3/333 Mhz. I had to put 384 MB RAM in the thing to keep it usable, but usable it is. You can probably find something nearly twice that Mhz for under $600.
Worth it to me.
Re:The problems: fonts and X (Score:5, Informative)
The first thing to realize is that the "slowness" is not actually slowness but blinking and flashing of intermediate displays before the final one is shown. If when you moved a window it jumped every second to follow the mouse, but jumped exactly and cleanly with all the underlaying windows appearing fully-drawn instantly, it would probably be more preferrable to the way X works now.
The problem is primarily due to the seperate window manager. This guarantees that windows will move and resize at a different time than their contents are redrawn. This is because the window manager moves the window, but then exposure or resize events must be delivered to a different application which then generates the drawing. If the same program could deliver the move and drawing instructions in a single block it would look way smoother. Unlike what a lot of people think, latency is NOT an issue, what is important is that all the instructions come from the same program and can be delivered as one block. This in particular makes resizing terrible on X, window dragging is about equal on X and Windows nowadays.
Another problem was "visuals" which produced annoying color flashing. Fortunately XFree86 has pretty much gotten rid of these on Linux, but if you try an Irix or Sun machine you will see this lovely stupidity in action. This is just BAD design, a proper design would consider the visual part of the "paint" so you don't change a pixel's visual until it is drawn.
Another problem is background clearing, which made sense on older slow machines but produces annoying flashes nowadays, as when you expose an area it is changed twice, first to the background, then to the final display. Windows does not do this (it does do some kind of timeout and clear to white so that dead programs don't end up with garbage in them, but in normal use this does not happen).
Re:WinXP vs Win2K (Score:2, Informative)
Cleartype is overrated. I was looking forward to it, but the standard anti-aliasing actually looks much better on the 19" Trinitron box I've got.
It sucks on the CRTs I've tried too; it's not designed for them. On TFTs it looks fantastic - takes away all of the pixelly sharpness and smoothes everything wonderfully. It's like going from dot matrix to 600dpi laser prints.
Cleartype alone was worth the upgrade on my laptop. Everything else (themes, start menu, etc) were promptly set back to the old style, and with lots of the visual effects turned off (System Properties > Advanced > Performance Settings) it's really snappy. Tried it on a PII-350/256mb and it was still really quick. Shame it isn't so nice out of the box really :)
Re:Linux needs games (Score:2, Informative)
That's true, but tuxgames.com has it in stock.
Re:the other direction? (Score:3, Informative)
Out of curiousity, have you looked into MKS Toolkit or the UWin tools?
http://www.mkssoftware.com/
http://www.researc
I long ago abandoned Unix, and now find myself more productive using the built in Windows tools, especially the scripting languages. But we've brought in MKS tools for certain situations and they work pretty well and are native.
The MKS tools I think are also included with Microsoft's Services for Unix, along with some other utilities like NFS software, etc.
As far as a Unix like environment, I've found UWin to be much better solution than cygwin. I've never been impressed with the cygwin tools and cringe whenever I hear them mentioned.
Re:OSX (Score:3, Informative)
Really? A friend of mine bought a G4 (400 or 450, cant remember) a couple years ago. Since then, he's upgraded the CPU to a faster G4 (500?), upgraded the video card to a ATI Radeon, added a second NIC, added additional firewire ports, and replaced the CD-RW. Not to mention that he's used a 3rd-party mouse and keyboard since he bought it. Having owned a PC for several years, I can safely say I've done far less upgrades to my PC (only a faster CD-RW, more RAM, and firewire ports). Just based on my experiences, I'd have to say the G4 machines are just as modular and upgradeable as any PC you could build or buy.
Re:his X11 claims are completely bogus (Score:3, Informative)
Just yesterday, Mozilla 1.0.0 hosed X 4.2.0 on ATI (Radeon) hardware. It was font-related, I think. First, xfs began consuming 98% of CPU, and X bloated up to 350MB. I have a physical 256 MB in the machine. Then, xfs crashed, mozilla crashed, etc.
switch to terminal,
So, yeah, this was pretty much an X problem.
The whole multi-window application thing bothers me on X. On Windows or Mac, a dialog for an app stays in from of the app. If I focus the app, the dialog comes to the front. On X, it doesn't. I have to hunt for the dialog. This is annyoing, for instance, with The Gimp. Or pop-up dialog boxes in Nautilus.
I think the best solution is MacOSX's slide-down "dialog sheets" (or whatever they're called).
Re:responses to OS X difficulties.... (Score:1, Informative)
Actually you can do this. Under View, choose 'as Icons'. Click the oval shaped button on the top right hand side of a Finder window, and see what happens to a folder when you open it.
Re: Mozilla workaround... (Score:2, Informative)
This problem is listed in the the install notes [mozilla.org]. For more information, see the Bugzilla report [mozilla.org].
Our Experience (Score:2, Informative)
We have (about) a 50 person company. Half (development and development-related teams, including some "less technical" users) are on Linux. The other half are on Win2K.
On the Linux side we strictly enforce RedHat (currently 7.2). Mail client is Ximian Evolution, using the Connector in conjunction with our main Exchange/2k server. Exchange/2k is a disaster, generally, but sales absolutely needs the diary functions.
WP etc. for the Linux community is StarOffice/OpenOffice. Absolutely no problems with document interoperability (presentations, documents and spreadsheets). Some minor functions are missing from OO - notable minor irritation is that in presentations it doesn't let me have a different background for a title page. On the other hand, the XML storage mechanisms have allowed us to integrate our internal doc handling with CVS, far better than we could have with Word.
Some people on the "Linux side of the house" are still on Windows, by reason of applications support. Notably our docs person uses FrameMaker, and usability/graphics use a bunch of Adobe stuff (even if they just used Photoshop, Gimp is still distressingly behind).
Biggest issues that I can see:
- font handling, as the guy mentioned. It's better than it used to be, since if you can get xfs to recognise your TT fonts StarOffice will pick it up. Linux lacks the Adobe Type Manager kind of interface Windows had back in 3.1.
- Games, which are the only reason I use Windows at home
- Sysadmins. Windows sysadmins are cheaper, basically because they know less. They don't need to know less, in reality, but windows still leaves you with the feeling that it's simpler to set up and configure, even when it isn't. Linux could do with better, more integrated systems management tools for the server side.
- Evolution should be able to handle offline stuff better.
- Lack of certain apps. There are fewer than you think though. Most of our business apps are web based
That's it though. Maybe 2 years ago you would have said lack of integrated email clients and decent office productivity were insurmountable obstacles. All the obstacles around now are easily surmountable. At some stage a very large (and probably public sector) organisation will realise that it's cheaper to commission open source fixes to problems, and maybe new applicaitons, than to go with large scale windows licensing. I expect that to be the big next step forward on the business desktop side.Solved for years (Score:2, Informative)
Re:MS Evil Empire marketing is at work (Score:2, Informative)
Re:the other direction? (Score:3, Informative)
That's rather surprising. At this stage, had you ever heard of Latex?
Re:That should keep you guys.. (Score:3, Informative)
As for windows XP, I can't say drivers are any easier than linux, as even relatively recent hardware, such as a HP 3400c scanner, just doesn't work properly.
Re:the other direction? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't have any huge problems with the NT line of kernels (NT, 2k, XP). They're a bit slow, and the VM subsystem sucks in performance compared to Linux. They also lack a lot of cool functionality that the Linux kernel has (uber-powerful packet filtering and routing, low latency/realtime extensions). OTOH, they have very finely grained protection schemes, which is nice.
However, the 2k kernel is not what bothers me -- it's the software that comes with the kernel -- the file browser, the file search utility, the web browser, the dock. They suck. The dock isn't anywhere near as flexible as any but the worst of the UNIX docks. The file browser isn't very flexibile, keeps forgetting saved views on me, is slow and RAM hungry, and has security problems out the wazoo. The file search utility is incredibly slow and weak (combine locate, find, and grep and you have a far faster, more powerful system). I don't like the networking subsystem -- trying to get NT to have two configurations to switch between (where I have a PPP connection at home and an Ethernet connection at school) without uninstalling drivers was a pain -- disabling interfaces resulted in screwy routing. I dislike the lack of symlinks. I think the command shell sucks, lacking basic functionality and running extremely slowly. I'm unhappy with network file system performance -- SMB from Windows box to Windows box is sloooowwwww. I think the ACL system has some bad design decisions. I can't figure out why MS has never updated some of the truly ancient, lame software (Solitaire, Notepad (a bit better in 2k), the Calculator) that comes with the OS. I *really* don't like the file locking scheme -- an open file cannot be moved or renamed or deleted, unlike UNIX. I also think that it's really dumb that there's no concept of "limited right drivers" that can't barf all over your kernel (granted, Linux lacks this too).
I will say that the NT kernel is pretty stable, and that it's better than the truly horrific 9x line. But as for "hard pressed to find a better OS"? Nah.