Is Linux or Windows Easier To Install?

Mark Cappel writes: "Joe Barr, a LinuxWorld.com columnist, compares Linux and Windows installations. He expected Windows to be faster and easier since Microsoft has been at it for 21 years. (DOS 1.0 was released 21 years ago today.) It turns out Red Hat is quicker and less manually intensive."

Re:Comparison not fair

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! The Sony Recovery CDs (note plural) are not supplied by Microsoft.

Microsoft's standard install does not prompt you to install the plethora of third party utilities (like the virus utility mentioned), etc, that Sony ships on multiple CDs as a value-add.

Linux wins

[iamdrscience]

I'm not very much surprised by this at all. About two months ago I installed Windows 2000 and Mandrake Linux on my brother's laptop, the Linux installation was rediculously easy while the Windows 2000 was a pain because (1) it took longer and (2) I had to download a couple of drivers (Linux worked fine!). Also once I had Windows installed I had to run Windows update like 8 times and restart like 3 before I was even REALLY done.

I know the Mandrake installer now is much easier than most the distributions, but I believe that other distributions will be similarly easy soon. I know that the Debian installer is/was supposed to get a revamp so that it would be way easier, which is good because Debian is sexy.

However, an easier installer doesn't mean much because hardly any of the regular computer users of the world actually installed their OS. If Linux really wants to crack into "the regular user" (does it?) what really needs to happen is they need to infiltrate the companies selling ready-to-run systems.

Another redundant "unfair comparison" claim

[erat]

I dislike MS as much as anyone else, but come on! This installation competition thing is like comparing apples to BMWs...

First off, a Linux newbie would have absolutely NO clue about half of the stuff Mr. Barr did for the Red Hat installation. Clearly Mr. Barr is a seasoned Linux guy and can breeze through partitioning, network configuration, boot manager selection, package selection, etc. Try any of that on a Linux newbie ("...What's DHCP? And what the hell is this GRUB thing it's asking me about? I'm calling tech support...").

I agree that the Windows installation is slow, has too many reboots, and is not fool-proof as far as hardware detection goes. However, the installation of all Windows products except for the so called "enterprise" editions is set up for people who don't know all that much about hardware. The old 80-20 rule kicks in here: if 80% of the folks are covered by the installation, that can justify the remaining 20% who need hand holding. I still have not encountered a Linux installation that does not assume prior knowledge of technical acronyms, Linux-isms, and common package names (how many new Linux users do you think have any clue that Samba offers Windows network connectivity? How many Linux installations present Samba as a "Windows networking" option and not as "Samba"? None that I know of, that's how many).

As a pro-Linux, pro-BSD, pro-open-source guy, I'm giving this comparison two thumbs down. Sorry, Joe...

I use Windows 2000 at work and I promise it's not

[BoomerSooner]

2 or 3 reboots to install (from scratch MSDN disks). It takes about 3 hours to get all the patches so your computer doesn't get rooted and give someone a backdoor to all your corporate info. I got them to let me setup a demo box running RedHat 7.3 and it's been working flawlessly. Our CIO (new hire) comes down tomorrow to check out our systems. I cannot wait to see the look on his face, our office is a piece of sheit.

Now at my personal company I run Linux on all the servers and run Windows XP (Games), OS X (& 9), Linux, Solaris (which is the most confusing in my opinion), Win95 (for my ancient dos games) and FreeBSD (Qmail server). I've found OS X to be my favorite GUI by far and once more games start migrating to the Mac I may be able to kill the Windows altogether (doubtful unless the IBM PowerPC is real and not hype).

Re:Technically...

[tacocat]

I have a single disk for Debian

I also have a single disk for Gentoo

Perhaps your Red Hat is too big for you

Re:Comparison not fair

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's standard install also does not include MS Word, which was listed as a pro.

Re:Technically...

[esarjeant]

You know what, when you reboot {n} times, that's {n} times that something can go wrong. Think about it from a users perspective; your machine is now rebooting with very little real feedback other than a notice that this is something Windows needs to do.

Now what? Do you remove the CD from the drive? Should you insert another CD? Maybe Windows needs a floppy to get the system started again ... but you opted to skip that step.

It's silly. There's no reason for upteen zillion reboots when a modern operating system like Linux can perform the same task in a single step.

Another interesting quandry for Windows users is what to do when their media stops working. My Win98 CD no longer functions properly, can I just send this to Redmond and get a new copy in the mail? Seriously, what happens when MS stops supports W2K and your original media has a defect. You're not left with many options; once again, open source proves itself.

When your RedHat CD stops working, you can actually download and burn a new copy to get your install going again as quickly as possible. Try that with a W2K coaster. TBPH, I haven't yet gotten a RH coaster from any copy purchased; my only coasters have resulted from a flaky CDRW drive.

Incidentally, the same can be said for any new Windows CD. While my older discs are getting flaky, new copies of Win98, WinNT, W2K and XP have all been flawless - I've only ever seen people have problems with pirated copies of Windows.

Re:Bad Reviewer!

[Qrlx]

YOu don't have to reboot windows after every patch either. I just installed 28 patches on a new box. After it was done I had to do one reboot.

All in all, if you do a clean install of 2000 here's how it goes:

Pop in CD, choose your stuff like disk partitioning, reboot.
Setup copies some stuff, reboots again
GUI Setup asks for the product key, and basic setup stuff (date time, network), and reboots
After that reboot the computer is ready to use. However you will probably want to apply SP2, which will take a reboot.
After that there are about 35 things in Windows Update you'll want, but you can roll about 30 of them into one d/l and reboot when it's done
A few updates must be installed separately, like SP2SRP1 and IE5.x SP2.

Altogether, it takes about an hour and a half and it requires like nine reboots (I didn't count them all).

Most things, though, aside from new HW drivers, don't need a reboot. Like installing office, that doesn't require a reboot.

What's the big deal about rebooting anyway? Yeah, its a pain to set up computers manually, that's why they invented RIS and all that stuff. RIS notwithstanding, computers actually reboot in like under a minute these days. It's the copyingn files and setting up plug and play devices which takes like an hour in Win 2000 setup.

I can't believe, though, that the reviewer is comparing the redhat install to the use of the Product Recovery CD. That's like comparing the time to drive to the gas station and fill the tank with unleaded with the time for the tow truck to come and tow you to the nearest gas station and fill it up.

I love analogies, they're like metaphors only less so.

Win2k and RH7.3

[pjt48108]

I have installed both Win2k and RH 7.3, and RH required only three disks (all CDs), and Win2k required three floppies PLUS the CD, which makes FOUR disks required, and two separate drives. Both installations were from scratch--no OEM disks, on reformatted drives (meaning a totally clean install)

Additionally, Win2k refused to install recently via a CD-RW drive, which may, of course, be due to Win2K not recognizing the CD-RW.

Re:Fdisk? you gotta be kidding

[El]

Dual-boot is much more complex to configure. If he was willing to let Linux take over the whole hard drive, it prompt him once, then repartition the drive automaticially. Note that Linux is much more friendly to dual boot than Windows. You MUST install Windows first; if you install Linux first, then the Windows installation will render Linux unbootable. Hard to say whether this is by design or just laziness, but it does point out a certain arrogance on the part of the Microsoft programmers.

Re:Comparison not fair

[Anonymous Coward]

And what a shock - Red Had supports 1/10th the hardware that Windows supports. Sorry red hat!

Re:Comparison not fair

[FyRE666]

I agree it's not fair. The guy was obviously using at least a cable modem/DSL to download updates for one thing. I recently reinstalled W2K on a machine for a friend whose machine had contracted a virus (there's a surprise). After all the normal reboots I had to go search for drivers (he'd lost the original driver disks from various upgrades) and then take on the HUGE amount of security patches.

How on earth they expect a modem user to download at least 50MB of patches is beyond me! Luckily I have ADSL so it only took a few hours to finish the reinstall, on a modem, I doubt I'd have bothered with "SP3".

Another thing the tester didn't mention was the problems involved in setting up a non-admin user account to work with 3rd party software. Flash, Fireworks and many other apps were throwing up all kinds of errors due to the user acct not having enough access to the registry, directory permission problems etc. Sort these last points out took at least another hour and would probably cause most people to just say "the hell with it" and run as administrator (with the inevitable re-infection at some point)...

Re:Technically...

[davie]

You're comparing the install of an OS with a couple of cheesy little editors, a browser, a broken mail client and a couple handfuls of system management utils with the install of a complete Linux distribution including professional-class programmer's editors, development tools, multiple browsers, multiple shells, RDBMSs, the Apache Web Server, Perl, Tcl, Tcl/Tk, Python, X, the GIMP, Office apps, etc.

Most distributions allow you to select a default install that doesn't require selecting any packages, if that's what you prefer.

Re:Not that this was a fair review to begin with..

[scrytch]

And rebooting after installing drivers...are you telling me you can compile and add modules to the linux kernel at runtime?

Well, um... yes. With linux, you often have to have a kernel compiled with module support for that class of device -- I imagine pretty much everything is compiled with module support in redhat -- but once you do, then you can insert modules with impunity (removing them is often a trick). Not that NT doesn't have a modular kernel either. I've been able to install sound and video drivers numerous times in win2k without rebooting.

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[account_deleted]

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The questions isn't how fast, but does it work?

[King Dick]

Whether the install is faster or not is immaterial if the final product doesn't work (in either case). I won't go into detail here, but I tried to install Slackware 8.0, Red Hat 7.0 and 7.2, freeBSD and Mandrake on two different computers before finally getting Red Hat 7.3 to install. I enlisted the help of two different long-time linux users, two full books on linux, and several web sites. I poured hours upon hours into the problem. The most humerous part is when the Red Hat boot floppy kept telling me that my computer didn't have any hard drives, and the Red Hat disk one in my CD-Rom wasn't a Red Hat disk! Once Red Hat 7.3 instaled, it was like pulling teeth to get X-windows to work. Even though my Video Card and Monitor were both in the list and selected, they didn't work. Had to try combinations of other monitors and cards before finding something to work. On the other hand, I've installed every version on Windows on various computers. I agree, have something else to do while it installs. I also agree that win 98 is buggy, ME is useless, and while I love XP, it's a resource hog and full of security holes. But you know what, they all WORK! I have never had a failed install of any Windows OS in probably 40+ installs. And I can use my computer without HOURS of configuration. My point is that the speed of install is only part of the equasion. If you want a solid secure system, get a Linux CD and set aside a week. If you need to use the computer before then, Windows is probably the better choice.