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.
That should keep you guys.. (Score:3, Funny)
that should keep you guys posting for days!
Re:That should keep you guys.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Denial? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't the first step denial??
I'm joking, I'm joking.
Actually, I'm surprised
Now everyone else be mature and comment instead of flame, k?
Re:Denial? (Score:3, Funny)
Come on, Josh. We all know maturity = agreesWithMe.
Joking, joking.
Linux Dissent - Sorry, but it's true. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the e-mail I sent to dude:
Hi,
Saw the mention on Slashdot.
While I agree and feel you're 100% right, I'm migrating from Windows 2000 to Linux.
The issues you raised are completely valid, but not being the average home user, they don't bother me that much, especially in the face of the headway Microsoft is making in its (assumed) goal of Internet domination.
I can't say that I blame you:
However, "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty." - Edward R. Murrow.
Despite all these frustrations with Linux, I can't condone your actions. We're 99.98% to the finish line, and the threat of losing is too great. If the Internet is Microsoft's, we're all locked in to one supplier, one philosophy, one vision. One *architecture*. We're too vulnerable, anyone and everyone.
The next Klez, Code Red, or licensing agreement, 5 months or 5 years from now, could shut the Internet down.
Re:Denial? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly reasonable and hardly insightful... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) frustration with graphics in general (both performance and fonts)
2) frustration with hardware support
As far as #1 goes, I'll back him on that one. Fonts have continued to be an amazing pain to deal with. Both MacOS and Windows have systems that make managing fonts trivial. I susppose the source of the complication is that X provides multiple ways to provide fonts which complicates any unified easy means to add fonts.
As for performance of graphics, I find that the performance of Linux is on par with windows. And though admittedly I'm a power user, I find it rather handy every so often to be able to run remote applications so easily (thank heaven for SSH).
Now as for point #2, though his point is true, this should not be attributed to any inherent limitations in Linux itself. The problem is simply a matter of market share. Why support the few percentage points of the market who use Linux when you can just support Windows and cover 90+% of your users.
Personally I find that for 95% of what I do, Linux is as good if not better than Windows for doing it. Evolution is an excellent mail program, both mozilla and konqueror are great browsers. With crossover I'm now able to view a lot more of what's on the Internet. Honestly the only long running grip I have that hasn't been adequately addressed is the font problem.
If you've got problems with hardware support, just make sure to research your purchases before hand to suit your needs. I've only had problems when trying to install on very new hardware that wasn't built with running linux in mind.
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.
his X11 claims are completely bogus (Score:3, Insightful)
I run X11 on NVidia, ATI, 3Dfx, and some handhelds. It is stable like a rock, small, lightning fast, and it doesn't crash, either itself or Linux.
KDE, Mozilla, and Gnome can be slow, and some misbehaved applications that don't use mouse grabs properly can make X11 appear to "crash" (it's really working fine, you just need to kill the application--happens under OSX and Windows as well).
Those are not X11's problems, they are problems with the toolkits that those systems use. Switching to a frame-buffer based system is not going to fix those problems with the applications.
Re:Mostly reasonable and hardly insightful... (Score:3, Insightful)
As well as the font problem, the other long running gripe (also mentioned in the story) is the installer. YaST/RPM/tar.gz/make -- why are their so many different complex methods to perform what should be a simple job that Joe User can perform with a few clicks. Linux Distro's **REALLY** need to get together and create an installer that is easy to use and reliable. (Windows Installer for Linux?)
The desktop environment should have less junk and clutter, with a nice simple clean and efficient interface. KDE is awful IMHO and full of unwanted crapplets, Gnome is slightly better, but there still isn't a single window manager that stands out as being classed as user friendly. Again, quality not quantity.
Linux is my first choice for a server OS, but it will never be my primary desktop OS until the mess that is a Linux desktop becomes an efficient working environment.
To summarise, I think Linux requires "Quality, not Quantity"
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:Mostly reasonable and hardly insightful... (Score:3, Insightful)
You're missing the point. That's still far more difficult than Windows - run the installer and reboot.
Re:Mostly reasonable and hardly insightful... (Score:4, Insightful)
A few weeks later, the manager receives a bill for $2500. Outraged, he demands the bill be itemized so he can see where the money went. The maintenance man replies with the following bill:
So yes, Virginia, typing three commands is indeed harder than clicking through menus. Otherwise, why do you think menus exist?(For the allegorically challenged: hammer = command line interface; where to hit = what command to type.)
the other direction? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:the other direction? (Score:3, Insightful)
MacOSX vs Unix (Score:4, Insightful)
It really depends on what you want to do with it. The people from the fink [sourceforge.net] people have done an excellent job of getting *nix apps working but if you think a *nix person will sit down and be instantly at home, think again.
When I first bought my NeXTStation I thought it would be like sitting down in front of a Solaris box... boy, was I wrong... it took me a while just to get used to NeXT way of configuring stuff, THEN I had to actually make it work for me. You were supposed to use the config app to configure stuff, but it couldn't do everything so you had to drop back to text files. Some of the standard
If you want a usable system that works the way it's supposed to, OSX is great. It's a beautiful system, but it's not "pretty Unix", it's a Mac workstation and selling it to people as anything but isn't telling them the whole story.
God would I love to... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 other direction? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sigh. Unfortunately, the guy's right. Not only that, but it's been true since around 1995. I'll get to MacOS X eventually, but some background and explanation is necessary.
NT3.5 was better as a desktop system than any UNIX variant I've used before or since (and I've used darn near everything you ever heard of, and probably a lot that you haven't). It was reasonably stable, reasonably fast, and run a boatload of software you couldn't get for UNIX no matter how much you wanted to spend.
Back in 1995 I was asked to write an article for SunExpert describing this new NT thing to their audience. I had been working with NT for about a year at that point, and was really liking what I'd seen. As a desktop system it was vastly more usable than any workstation system available at the time ... not as fast as some, but superb for the price point and again with a vast software library to choose from. I said so, and said that they were going to see a lot of them in workstation tasks, but that I didn't think it worked very well as a server.
A few years later SunExpert changed their name to Server/Workstation Expert on account of finding out via a survey that 96% of their readership ran NT in addition to Sun systems. 96%! That's what I call market penetration. And it happened really fast, over the course of just a couple of years.
I gave up running UNIX on my desktop in 1995, pretty much concurrent with picking up Java. I couldn't justify the cost of a Sun workstation to run Java, and it didn't run on BSD UNIX (which was what I was running on PC hardware at the time). Linux was nowhere near production quality at the time, so it wasn't even on my radar screen. NT did the job, and if I wanted/needed UNIX it was just a telnet or X11 connection away. Meanwhile I had access to a wealth of Windows software. That's the way it remained until 1999.
1999 was the year that Java became usable on Linux. Now, I'd been running Linux on my home server for a couple of years by then so I was pretty familiar with it, but I couldn't use it on my workstation systems because I was working with Java. Blackdown's port made Java available and I made the jump to Linux on my desktop almost immediately. Well, part of the jump anyway.
Wordprocessing on Linux was a no-go. Not only couldn't I interoperate with MS Word very effectively, but I couldn't find a single wordprocessor that was both relatively bug-free and produced high quality output. I bought a couple of different packages (Applix, which was horrible all around, WordPerfect 7 which had great printer output but a horribly buggy UI) and tried others (StarOffice, abominably slow and had poor output quality). My publisher did a pretty good job of working with me through various file formats, although we pretty much ended up going back to RTF for most of the different wordprocessors. In the end I ended up just using emacs to produce HTML content, which everyone could read. It was a little bit of a pain, but at least it worked (and was superbly cross-platform readable :-). These days things are looking up, with AbiWord and KOffice coming along -- but both still quite buggy. Luckily StarOffice works decently, although it's still slow.
Now, I never totally gave up my NT box. I couldn't: my finances were in Quicken, my games didn't run on Linux, instant messenger stuff didn't work on Linux, my office's scheduler software didn't work on Linux, my office's VPN didn't support Linux, etc. Still, NT became the secondary OS and I did almost everything on Linux.
I still run Linux as my primary OS, but my newest box runs XP and I've seriously considered making that my primary computer. I don't because I'm more effective as a programmer under a UNIX system (and the cygwin tools, which made NT at least palatable, are really a distant second to native stuff) and, these days, I'm hooked on Ximian's Evolution mail reader. (Still a bit buggy but very, very nice.)
I now give XP a lot more of my time. I still use it for Quicken. IM, at least, I can do on Linux now. But burning CDs? Nero Burning ROM is better than anything on Linux. Same goes for RealOne as both a video display tool and MP3 encoder. So far as I can tell you're SOL if you want to display Windows Media stuff on Linux, and a ton of video content is Windows Media these days. And games ... well, I can run almost everything on XP, and almost nothing on Linux. I used to have a second partition with Win98 on it for nothing more than viewing DVDs on my laptop ... a situation which has thankfully improved recently, but is still much more difficult than it should be. I can't even buy a Linux DVD player!
There are many things I dislike about XP, not the least of which being draconian licensing agreements and software and an interface that is even more saccharine than on the old Macs and the many, many security problems. I have a hard time finding the settings I need for more complicated things. For some reason some of my folders are easily available from the desktop but totally invisible to applications (weird and frustrating). But, overall, it's been rock solid reliable and again it has a lot of software.
Now, about the same time I got the new XP box I bought my wife a new Ti Powerbook running MacOS X. I'd been watching OSX since it looked like it had promise, and indeed it does. In fact, I liked it so much that I picked up an ibook for myself just to run it.
For some things, MacOS X is just superb. It recognizes hardware slick as you please. It has drop-dead-simple wireless networking. Stuff like that. But what it didn't have was applications. If I wanted a decent wordprocessor for it my choice was pretty much Word, and that cost a fortune -- $350 for Word alone at the time, and almost $500 for Office. Crap, I can pretty nearly buy the PC hardware with XP and Word for that much money. That was a huge irritation. (A friend had a promo copy of Office:mac he didn't need, so he gave it to me ... otherwise I think my wife would have tossed the powerbook out the window.) I still don't have a good wordprocessor on mine, I do all my wordprocessing on Linux or Windows. I refuse to use my wife's copy illegally, and I still haven't found anything decent at a realistic price point.
But that was only our first taste of software issues. You couldn't get an OSX version of her Palm software for months (thankfully that eventually got resolved). Running the OS9 version in the compatibility box SUCKED. We got Quicken, but its data format is irritatingly different from the Windows version; not enough to be terminal, just irritating. It has Internet Explorer, but surprisingly enough many pages coded for IE don't actually work on it. Netscape was Netscape -- for better or for worse in the superlative degree of comparison only (that's a literary allusion by which I mean it's pretty mediocre). I can't even get Mozilla to run, it just dies with no error message. Printer support is not so good; I ended up buying a postscript expansion cartridge for my printer (a LaserJet 2000N I think), and even still it has problems. There's no browser for mounting SMB shares or printers; you can do it, you just have to type in the share names exactly (and know where to do it). And e-mail software? Someone please point me at decent e-mail software that supports IMAP. My wife's using Entourage from Office, but the best I can find other than that is Eudora and it still has a horrid interface and bad IMAP support.
But most irritating of all is that the new Mac interface sucks. I mean, they moved stuff all over the place for no apparent reason and that dock thing just drives me nuts. What's with the Explorer windows? Compared to the old Mac interface this new one is very nonintuitive, a huge step backwards. In many cases it's gratuitiously different! Grr. They can't possibly believe that this is an improvement over OS9. Applications go into the spinning ball cursor mode and stay there for long periods of time. The network upgrade process took 28 hours to complete the first time: it kept losing the connection after several hours, requiring a full restart (even though many of the packages had already fully downloaded). The irritations stack up.
My wife has been unable to find replacements for a variety of things she used on Windows. So far she's just dealing with that, but she doesn't like it. On the other hand her Mac has rarely crashed, while her Win98 box required me to reinstall the OS every few months (the original impetus for switching to a Mac). In the sense that I've had to do almost no administration work on her Mac the conversion was a complete success, but our marriage was on rocky ground for a few months while we got her going.
OSX is improving with every new upgrade, and software availability is improving too. But, frankly speaking, I have more software on Linux and that's a pale shadow of what I have on Windows. OSX has a long way to go before I'll call it the best UNIX around. Its got the best administration UIs of any UNIX I've ever seen, and the second best desktop (I still prefer NextStep to OSX), but it needs applications BAD -- both commercial applications and in-the-box applications.
Interestingly enough, I'm still diametrically opposed to running XP on the server. It's not so much the stability anymore, or the performance, as the cost ... it has exploded in the last couple of years (coincidentally (or not) as the last of their commercial competition died out). I just can't afford it. On top of that I'm scared to death to put a Windows box on the net; it seems to be security-hole-of-the-week. Heck, Windows security holes were responsible for my cable company shutting off HTTP ports for all their customers last year. Yuck!
Take this for what it's worth: One more opinion in the mix. But man, XP really is a better desktop system than Linux for the vast majority of users, even if we completely ignore hardware compatibility issues. The applications software alone makes the difference.
responses to OS X difficulties.... (Score:3)
For some things, MacOS X is just superb. It recognizes hardware slick as you please. It has drop-dead-simple wireless networking. Stuff like that. But what it didn't have was applications. If I wanted a decent wordprocessor for it my choice was pretty much Word, and that cost a fortune --
AppleWorks 6. $80 will buy you a word-processing-spreadsheet-database-drawing-pain
package that's well worth using. I've been using it since version 3 (when it was Claris Works). 6.2.4 boasts complete Word/Excel compatibility, which should take care of interop complaints (though when I can get away with it, I send people my "how to send RTFs" document).
I also have Office 98, which runs under Classic. Works fine, and I like using Excel especially.
You couldn't get an OSX version of her Palm software for months (thankfully that eventually got resolved).
In general, I agree the first year has seemed a little rocky in terms of software support. I think if I hadn't been focused on web development I probably would have noticed more. I'm still waiting for my favorite music apps to come out OS X native (SuperCollider and Digital Performer and Pro Tools). I think we're past the worst for everyday use, though.
And e-mail software? Someone please point me at decent e-mail software that supports IMAP. My wife's using Entourage from Office, but the best I can find other than that is Eudora and it still has a horrid interface and bad IMAP support.
On this one, either you got turned off by the beta or you've just been a bit lazy since then. The Mac OS X default mail client (Mail.app) does IMAP and does it very well. It's been one of the best parts of my OS X experience.
It has Internet Explorer, but surprisingly enough many pages coded for IE don't actually work on it. Netscape was Netscape -- for better or for worse in the superlative degree of comparison only (that's a literary allusion by which I mean it's pretty mediocre). I can't even get Mozilla to run
Browsers: Avoid Mozilla... look for Chimera, which is Gecko stuck in a cocoa framework. I'm posting from this. It's a bit unpolished but fast. iCab is great. OmniWeb was... acceptable... with better CSS it might have won me over.
Printer support is not so good; I ended up buying a postscript expansion cartridge for my printer (a LaserJet 2000N I think)
What I'm finding is that printer support gets better as a) newer printers come out and b) newer releases come out. Both my Epson and HP were originally unsupported. Now they're fine.
There's no browser for mounting SMB shares or printers; you can do it, you just have to type in the share names exactly (and know where to do it).
Hmmm.
But most irritating of all is that the new Mac interface sucks . I mean, they moved stuff all over the place for no apparent reason and that dock thing just drives me nuts. What's with the Explorer windows? Compared to the old Mac interface this new one is very nonintuitive, a huge step backwards. In many cases it's gratuitiously different!
I agree they must have been smoking crack. At the very least, it would be great to choose whether you want a "browser" or windows for each folder. The gratuitous differences, however, really aren't that much of a pain compared to the Linux distros. So it's a step backward for the Mac, a step forward for Unix. I can understand the annoyance for some, but mostly, I'm OK.
They can't possibly believe that this is an improvement over OS9. Applications go into the spinning ball cursor mode and stay there for long periods of time.
This is probably my biggest pet peeve. Sometimes I can't even get a terminal window to respond and kill things in this mode. There's some bugs to be fixed for certain.
The network upgrade process took 28 hours to complete the first time: it kept losing the connection after several hours, requiring a full restart (even though many of the packages had already fully downloaded).
And this is absolutely moronic on Apple's part. Why can't Software Update tell how much of a package it has downloaded already?. Stupidity.
Still, I love using OS X from day to day. Unix goodness when I want it. Pretty widgets when I don't. Ah.
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:the other direction? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course MacOS X won't be available for x86. No Mac operating system ever will. Why? Because Apple derives a large majority of its profits from hardware. If you don't give them the hardware sales, they'll die. That's what they do. They sell computers. The only thing you can't really upgrade is your motherboard. Processor upgrades, memory, video cards, hard drives, sound cards... all of these are readily available for Macs, most of them the same pieces of hardware you'd put in your PC. I have two main desktop computers at home - a dual Athlon box running RedHat Linux 7.3 and a dual 800MHz PowerMac running MacOS X 10.1.5. Both of them use standard memory, standard video cards, standard hard drives. The price you pay for the "PC" version is the exact same price you would pay for a "Mac" version. Why? They're the same hardware.
Is the initial cost of the computer a bit more than that of a similarly configured computer from Dell? Probably. I haven't checked. I don't want a computer that maybe works most of the time. I don't want a computer where I have to fuss with drivers to make my video card work right. I don't want a computer made of cheap components. I want something that works just right, every time, with no fuss, that I don't have to worry about. I get that from my PowerMac and iBook. I wish I could say the same of my other computers. This is absurd. First of all, I would submit to you that it's far easier to get work done on a Mac because you can focus on the work instead of the computer. It's out of your way, letting you do your thing. The same thing can hardly be said of Windows or even Linux. Go ahead, plug in your USB scanner to your Linux box and watch it automagically set everything up and work first time. Ha! Plug in your digital camera and watch Linux automatically download the pictures to your hard drive. Not happening. And there's always something going on with Windows to keep you less productive - it needs to reboot, your 512MB of RAM is all in use even though you only have IE open...
Secondly, the Mac line is standardized now - you don't need to pick a color. Maybe you should make some effort to have an idea about that which you are writing?
And finally, if you're only giving Apple credit for a better UI, you haven't spent any significant time using MacOS X. Forget the UI. Look at how everything just works. Set up an Airport base station on MacOS X and then go to a Windows box and set up a WAP. Tell me which platform offered the more direct and simple approach. Or set up Apache on Linux or Windows and then do it on MacOS X. Tell me which one was quicker (hint - it's just a single button click on MacOS X).
There are valid arguments against Apple and MacOS X. You managed to hit exactly none of them.
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:the other direction? (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously it's impossible to install MacOS X on x86 hardware. So the question becomes, can you get the same job done on MacOS X? I imagine that you can.
If someone is actually interested in switching from a Linux/Windows based x86 machine to a Macintosh using MacOS X and, if desired, Linux, I'm entirely willing to help. I know for a fact it can be done - I've done it. And I've helped other people do it.
Now, go back and read the original question to which I replied. There was nothing about keeping the original hardware. If you want a real UNIX based workstation, then you owe it to yourself to check out Apple hardware and software. I just said it with fewer words before.
Have a nice day.
Re:the other direction? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got a UMAX scanner that won't work under Linux because UMAX refuses to release either a driver or the specs. Printers are a hit-or-miss proposition for the same reason. However, I haven't had any problems with IDE CDRW drives or sound cards in a long time.
If you want to run Linux on the desktop, like I've been doing for about 4 years now, you just have to accept the fact that most hardware vendors are, at best, noncomittal about Linux support, and at worst downright hostile to it. So you really need to take more time planning for supported hardware, rather than expecting anything you can get off the shelves at Best Buy to work.
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:the other direction? (Score:4, Funny)
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
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.
Re:the other direction? (Score:3, Insightful)
Almost all the problems are that all of Unix printing was designed for ASCII output. Graphics are an incredible kludge. When X was developed they had no interest in printers as most were still ASCII and the existing Unix stuff worked fine. By the time Windows and Mac were being developed they knew that printers with individaully addressable dots were going to be common and that the the code to draw graphics for the screen could be shared with the printer.
I am still very suprised that printer drivers are needed even on Windows. I would think by now the interface to a printer would be established as well as an IDE or SCSI drive, or a MultiSync monitor. The printer just needs to tell the system it's resolution and color space, and there should be a standard way to dump the pixmap over the USB connection. (yea there will probably be a bunch of extensions to select quality or paper trays, but the fact that neither Windows or Linux can print full-rez on an arbitrary printer using the default paper, without a driver, is really stupid).
Re:the other direction? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the other direction? (Score:5, Insightful)
With *BSD and Linux you generally at least get a clue as to what your problem is and most of the time you can fix it yourself.
As Larry Wall might say: Microsoft and Apple make the easy things very easy and the hard things impossible. *BSD and Linux make the easy things challenging and the hard things difficult but possible.
Re:the other direction? (Score:3, Interesting)
Better quote:
Re:the other direction? (Score:3, Insightful)
This point was driven home to me when I recently sold a CDRW on ebay. The guy frantically emailed me back a week later to tell me the drive was broken. He said the OS had problems booting when it was hooked up, that it froze the system, and that when it he tried reading a CD, it would hang for long periods of time. I had been burning CDs for months with the same burner but I refunded his money and got the drive back.
I retested the drive. The drive was bad. It burned CDs just fine, as always, but if you tried to read certain types of CDs (seemed to be those with Joliet dirs for some reason) it would give CRC errors (or some such). I just hadn't used the thing as a CD reader in so long I didn't notice it.
I'm not sure what Windows OS he was running, but the difference in how a problem manifests itself and the resulting error messages was telling. He was baffled because, as he said, it still said "Working properly" in the driver tab!
Stupid users (Score:4, Funny)
I had to laugh at this...
Stupid users don't doggedly stick at something for three and a half years, trying distribution after distribution in the hope of finding the holy grail of Linux desktops.
Hmmmm.... I don't know about that...
Re:Stupid users (Score:5, Insightful)
I would suggest your linux troubles would vanish if you would just spend a little time learning about what you're doing instead of blindly following instructions in HOWTOs and such.
On the other hand, some of us have this thing called A LIFE. I've done more than my share of changing config files, and like the lounge singer said, "the thrill is gone, baby".
I can just see the Linux advocate on his deathbed. He won't be thinking about his wife, or his children, or his family, he'll be lamenting not being able to read JUST ONE MORE installation guide.
No no no no no (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.apple.com/switch/ [apple.com]
not here:
http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/ [microsoft.com]
Friends don't let friends use XP.
Re:No no no no no (Score:5, Insightful)
MAC's are cool, but so is x86 hardware. It's not as simple of a choice.
Holy Crap, x86 hardware is cool? (Score:5, Funny)
x86 hardware is cool?! Cheap. Ubiquitous. Brutal and Medieval. Hot as an oven with an overclocked Athlon microcontroller in Hell's at 3:00 PM on a sunny August afternoon and sixty miles from the nearest beer cooler. Less hip than your parents telling your girlfriend about your potty training. But cool?! x86 hardware is cool?!??? x86 hardware is about as cool as training wheels on your Edsel, as Pat Boone blairs out of the speakers, with a Latter Day Saints bumpersticker.
If you think x86 hardware is cool, your brain is infected. Have you been watching "Dude, you're getting a Dell" commercials?
Re:Kinda (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
As a Windows user I'm a bit surprised. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:As a Windows user I'm a bit surprised. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not. His last MS OS was Win95. And according to his Linux experience, he seemed to want to go out and get the latest and greatest OS. So when he went to purchase a new MS OS, which one do you think appealed to him? Why, XP of course. If you go to microsoft's website, they have a comparison between XP and Win98 and between XP and Win95, to show you how advanced XP is over their "old" OS offerings. No mention of XP vs Win2k.
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.
Why Not Mac / OSX? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wanted something simple. I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so... well... unstable. I got tired of having to recompile my kernel every time I got new hardware. I got tired of using command line to talk to my PC. It was time for a change.
I wouldn't be surprised if this guy, again, becomes frustrated with his OS because it sounds like he is looking for something that just works, is refined, and has new technology (wanted to use latest unstable Deb, didn't he?). Well, Win XP scores maybe 1/3 of that criteria. However, a Mac seems to fulfill 3/3 IMO. Sounds like a Mac / OSX user.
Re:Why Not Mac / OSX? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there have been about 2-3 hiccups per year, but it is really nothing that someone who can set up RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, and SuSE cannot handle pretty easily. The truth is that Debian unstable is still more stable than most other distros.
I also agree about Mac OS X. I would definitely check it out before going Microsoft. It can run Microsoft Office, and it has an X server (Darwin), and it makes multimedia trivial (especially, for me, simple home digital movies).
Re:Why Not Mac / OSX? (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt it can at the moment, but back whent it was NeXT's DisplayPostScript it definitly could, and did. I use to do the "shooting holes" thing on other people's display at school. Great fun.
Under OSX, if you were to dig deep enough into the frameworks you could probbably get a "MACH port" open to a remote machine's window server (one hopes tunneled over SSH) and there is a good (but not great) chance that it would "just work". Even the old sound APIs were that way. NeXT actually had a way to ask for this though, and Apple doesn't. Of corse so few people did anything at all with it on the NeXT, who blames them for dropping it?
For network transparency, yes. A step forward for anti-aliased text. A step forward in fact for anti-aliased everything. A step forward for using vector based drawing. A step forward for caring about the physical size of rendered objects rather then pixel sizes (rember it's all PostScript inside, even if it is pronounced PDF). Oh, and in gaurenteeing backing store to apps.
That could all be added to X11, but it wouldn't be apps that wanted to use those features would either fail on old X servers, or be six times as complex to write. And adding all that to X11 would take way to long.
Don't beleve me? Well think aobut this, Quartz is what NeXT had in 1990 (1991? 1989?) plus alpha transperency. Why didn't X take the decade and catch up already? Since it didn't, what makes you think Apple should have grabbed X11, and slammed all the wonderful crap the bought from NeXT into it?
(and yes I know about Keith Packards' nice aa extentions to X...but are they done yet? And are they pervasave like they are in Quartz? Oh, and do they solve the other 15 giant gaping voids that X has instead of features?)
If X11 hasn't cought up in a decade, do you think maybe it would be quicker for Apple to be able to make Quartz network transparent then for Apple to help X catch up? Oh....and does Apple's rather expensave "remote desktop" package count?
Sure, on the other hand unlike the other Unix vendors so far they seem to be winning. Sure, for reasons other then the rendering technology (it really isn't that much more then NeXT's DPS, or Sun's NeWS!). However the rendering technology is definitly not hurting them.
I have written a lot of X apps in my life. Ones that used Xlib directly (xtank for example - no I didn't write all of it, but I was one of the lead maintainers for far too long), ones that used toolkits (Xt and Xaw, Xt and Xmw, Xt and other random crap....GTK--, and others). I know just how big that baby is. If you add more to it, the rest of the bathwater will be forced out of the tub. Of corse you risk the tub busting through the floor too.
I don't hate X. But after writing some small OS X Carbon apps, I really can't keep defending X. I mean Quartz does so much more the X11, and it sure seems faster, and simpler to use. And I expect the network transparency could be fixed. Who knows, maybe I'll poke at that sometime.
He's right about the fonts (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine a marketroid given a linux box with email, a browser, and OpenOffice. He's going to absolutely hate it because of the fonts. I am a hard-core techie and I have a hard time looking at OpenOffice. But give the marketroid the same box with great-looking fonts and his tolerance for linux will go way up.
Fix the @#$%ing fonts!
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: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.
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: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
KDE and TrueType (Score:3, Interesting)
btw - I am a marketroid with a linux box, using Kmail, Konq and Open Office
StarOffice/OpenOffice fonts not a problem... (Score:4, Informative)
This applies to business users also (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this different than a business user or someone who works in desktop support (aside from the games part)? It isn't. Until this scenario can be neatly met by Linux, it will forever be a server OS.
If anyone out there is support an installation of over 1000 linux desktops I would like to know their experiences.
Re: This applies to business users also (Score:5, Insightful)
> kNIGits says: "Mr Joe Average is someone who wants to install their OS, boot it up, and it works. He wants to be able to upgrade his PC , and have the hardware work in a few short minutes.
Mr. Joe Average doesn't install his OS, nor does he upgrade his hardware, unless you count plugging in a peripheral as an "upgrade".
> If anyone out there is support an installation of over 1000 linux desktops I would like to know their experiences.
I recently had a very interesting conversation with the person responsible for maintaining around 3000 systems, mostly Linux.
She hates Linux - for the same reason that she hates Windows, Intel, and AMD. She hates commodity stuff because it's always changing. Order a dozen computers and install them; order a dozen more a month later, and they're completely different. Different hardware, different software. So over a few years of stepwise upgrades/replacements in your large farm of servers/desktops, you end up with a mix of small numbers of many variants.
From the maintenance POV, the best experience comes from buying commodity hardware/software combos from Sun or the like, where you can get more of the same when you need to order some more.
But who wants the five year old state of the art on their desktop? There seems to be a direct trade-off between providing the best user experience and providing the best maintainer experience, at least when you're talking about large numbers of boxes.
Re: commodity PCs (Score:4, Interesting)
If you constantly chase down compatibility (EG. Our new systems must be able to boot using the same Norton Ghost drive image we built for the last ones!), you cheat yourself out of better deals for the money spent. Manufacturers don't just change around system specs because they enjoy frustrating the consumer. They do it because they can add new functionality, better performance, or simply because old components they used are no longer in production.
On the other hand, if you don't insist on "nearly identical" hardware - your productivity suffers as your techs have to learn to deal with all those different configurations.
So in effect, it's pretty much a wash. You either save $'s by always getting the best value for the money in new hardware and lose some of the savings in added support costs, or you blow it up front paying premium prices for outdated but compatible hardware, and make your support jobs less taxing.
Given those considerations - I'd typically opt for getting whatever hardware is latest and greatest for the money. Modern OS's generally behave pretty well on modern hardware, and by buying large number of systems at a time (instead of 10 here, and 5 or 10 there a month or two later), you minimize the headaches of multiple system types scattered all over....
Best Point (Score:5, Insightful)
I say, if you are friendly and willing to help newbies, answer their questions. If you want to flame, or send a RTFM, stay silent. If they don't get an answer, they'll eventually look their, anyway.
Elitests are the biggest weakness of Linux.
Re:Best Point (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to spend quite a bit of time in various Linux IRC channels, and when someone had a question, I would answer it. But it gets pretty irritating just sticking their question into google and spitting the answer back out. After a while, I would say 'search google'. Some people went into a frenzy, claiming they did search google, and it didn't have anything - blatant lies, since their answer was invariably within the results on the first page when I searched - and generally getting pissy at me for not spweing out whatever knowledge they requested.
Those people do far more to harm the newbie Linux community than anyone else, since they waste the time of people who could be helping with genuine problems instead of 'how do i install nvidia drivers?' or 'how do i set up ppp?', as well as driving people away from helping newbies. I simply won't help anyone I don't know personally any more, since once you answer one question, people expect you to hold their hand all the way through whatever it is they are trying to do. It ends up frustrating me, as well as them.
Maybe it's just me though, I never did like tech support.
Linux bugs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Best Point (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, when I read this part, I was disgusted- He acts like there's something horribly wrong with actually reading the documentation.. As the documentation [sf.net] manager for the Fluxbox [sf.net] window manager, I can definitely tell you that It's frustrating as hell when someone hops on IRC and asks a question that's answered three times in the documentation, one of which is one of the first three questions in the FAQ, none of which the person in question has bothered to try reading, although the documentation and the faq are pointed to in the irc channel's topic.
What newbies don't realize is that the reason people say RTFM is that The Fucking Manual exists for the sole purpose of being Read. It's there TO HELP YOU. It's NOT there so people can shrug you off; It's there so that you can get a good, solid answer to your question rather than a question another user half-remembers and may even be wrong, but they still answer because they're trying to help. RTFM doesn't mean "Go away, I don't want to answer your question, loser.", it means "There's documentation out there that can answer the question better than I can.".. People put a lot of time into making good, helpful documentation (I know this first-hand), for the benefit of other people, and when those people completely bypass that, it's frustrating.
But maybe I just don't understand it... When I was learning linux 5 or so years ago, I didn't hop on irc channels to ask when I got stuck.. I taught myself most of it with man and apropos, falling back to other forms of documentation. I installed every package my distribution offered so it would all be there when I ran apropos. I also bought a few books.
But nonetheless, nothing will make the people who write the documentation more frustrated with what they do than people ignoring it, or getting upset when they're told the answer is in the FAQ and has an entire page devoted to it. There's a lot of great documentation out there, And the reason it's great is because people put hard work into it so that others can read it.
Re:Best Point (Score:4, Funny)
But with all seriousness (is that even a word?) it is quite true. There is far too much "civil war" between users and their differring distros. People need to grow up and realize that everyone is right, with the exception of all of those Mandrake users. It's just so stupid. Oh, and I can't stand the arrogant Slackwarers. Oh and Mac OS X isn't Unix. So quit pretending you hippie freaks!
A subtle point that is missing (Score:5, Insightful)
Why I use Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Tab completion is one of my favorite interface inventions ever.
Just my opinion.
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:Why I use Linux (Score:3, Funny)
No, Stupid! That's only for writing worms!
Why I shifted to OS X (Score:3, Interesting)
I went to OS X because I wanted the power of Unix - but I didn't want the hassle - I wanted to be able to enter rm por[TAB] and ln -s and all the stuff I'm used to - but if I want to pop in Warcraft III, I want it to run, not try and figure out why Mesa3D isn't configured right for my video card.
But that's me. Like I said, I still like Linux on the server side, but it just drove me crazy on the desktop.
EH (Score:4, Insightful)
The problems: fonts and X (Score:4, Insightful)
X-Windows is an idea that sucked over a decade ago, and it hasn't improved much since. The whole concept, dumb graphics terminals tied to application servers, is obsolete. The problem is that it's marginally good enough that it hasn't been replaced on Linux by a better windowing architecture. More than anything else, X is the boat-anchor of Linux.
Re:The problems: fonts and X (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you seen the new RedHat Beta (supposedly for 8.0)? Since RedHat uses GNOME and GTK for everything, and since they're using gtk2, everything is anti-aliased with really nice TT fonts. Even the GDM greeter. I think they're going to get it right in the next release.
Re:The problems: fonts and X (Score:5, Insightful)
- ssh -XfC -c blowfish workbox.work.com mozilla
The ability to run a fairly responsive browser on my home desktop with access to the internal network without having to have everyone and his brother in on the setup of some overblown VPN solution is not something I can live without.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).
But we want to! (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is an OS for those who want to mess with their computers. It is for those of use who desire the largest amount of control possible and pull our hair out every time they click Start->Settings->Control Panel->Something Simple.
I want to have to recompile my kernel because I like knowing exactly what I'm getting. It isn't enough to just tolerate Linux's differences, you should embrace them! If you don't, Linux probably isn't the OS for you.
My SO has no problem with *nix (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting timing for this story. My GF is just this week moving in, and while she waits for her computer to arrive she's been using my FreeBSD machine. I automated just 'bout everything for her and just two seconds ago phoned to see how she's doing.
Story thus far...she's perfectly happy with the *nix machine and Opera, even in comparison to the handholding she's accustomed to as a WinAOL user. She was perfectly capable of checking her email in Opera, checking the news, etc. This is someone who doesn't come from a technical background, isn't accustomed to tinkering to get things to work, just a Regular User that just needed a little guidance to get her started.
Moral of the story is: don't give up the good fight. For every person that gets frustrated by *nix, there's another convert in the making in the wings we can reach out to.Windows on the desktop, Linux/BSD on the server (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I've never liked any of the X-based desktops. I've always used the command line exclusively with Linux and Unix. The flexibility of the command line with standard Unix stuff like bash, less, sed, awk and perl is something I don't ever see Windows catching up to. I've never seen a scripting language more adept than Perl, a web server more capable than Apache, or a scheduler that makes more sense than cron. Servers are where Linux and Unix make sense.
Conversely on my desktop, when I want to use a graphical IDE to debug programs, or create graphics, or play games, nothing beats a Windows desktop for me. The clincher is that things work the same across most programs - simple things like copy and paste, or Ctrl-F to search. I'm almost always working with 10 or more programs open at once(including a couple of SSH sessions) and I need an environment that doesn't slow me down.
In fact, I really don't know any Linux or BSD users who never rely on a good closed-source OS for at least some things. The most rabid Microsoft hater I know still keeps a Windows partition for games. Lets face it, the only people who use Linux and nothing else do it for ideological reasons. Most of us just want stuff to work right and pick the best tool for the job at hand.
then you don't know me (Score:3, Interesting)
I even play games, native Linux games, and using winex, no need for windows. I use winex because it's easier than rebooting all the time. I don't even bother mounting my winblows partition in Linux, nothing useful there.
IMO, best of both worlds would be Linux and OSX desktop machines, and Linux/*BSD servers, screw windows, it's the only "modern" OS around trying to limit what the user does instead of trying to empower the user. Fuck that, computers are supposed to be general computing devices, not restrictive appliances like DVD players and VCRs.
OSX (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently had grown tired of XP, and Linux still wasn't cutting it, so I bought a PowerMAC G4 and love it. OSX offers the best of both worlds. While it still does not have all the programs XP does, it still has more than Linux. On top of that, all the hardware I was running on XP run under OSX, I can easily and seemlessly run X applications using XFree's rootless X server, and ALSO there is a VMware like program called VirtualPC which allows me to run x86 OS's in VM windows (right now, running XP, OpenBSD and Linux in the VM's).
Also, since the mac processors are just a tad better, I get better performance and my machine never bogs down. (Yes, look for me doing those Mac "switch" commercials in the near future!
I just think this is the best of both worlds.
This is cute... (Score:4, Funny)
Amusing. Every time I say this I get modded down.
It's set-up, not use, that's a pain (Score:4, Insightful)
A friend of mine recently set-up a box for my parents, who have used Windows for the past few years, and freaked when IE crashed on them... the only thing they whined about was the Internet not working, but that's a bug we can fix. Other than that, because it was set-up, they were content, and it didn't crash, and the GIMP was faster than Photoshop.
If a company were to sell vanilla boxes all with the same hardware, one install and ghosting would solve all your problems except for X being sluggish.
My point is that your conclusions are generalised and oversimplistic. Yes, give a CD to a friend and they'll kill you for the stress you give them. But find someone who is able to set-up the box nicely for them, and they're not likely to be *that* miffed. There's still work, but its not like GNU/Linux is a no-go, oh well let's look at Windows and MacOSX... it's just an option. Nobody except the immature slashdotters pretend it matters if certain people prefer one OS to another, just so long as people in the end have the *choice* to go with a more free OS.
We won this one too, don't worry.. (Score:5, Insightful)
When (not if) I go back to Linux, I'll definitely try SuSE again.
So on the long-term, we're still doing something good very well. We don't need or even want a 100% userbase at the moment.
My home server still runs Mandrake, and IPCop on my gateway/firewall. There is no way I'd ever put any form of Windows on my server, nor would I ever connect a Windows PC directly to the internet without a *NIX gateway in between. Microsoft has a history of poor security, so I protect myself the only way I know how; using Linux. I will continue to advocate the use of GNU/Linux in the server arena. This is where its strength lies at the moment.
Tony, when you're back in a couple of years or even a decade, remind me to buy you a beer.
My wife and I use Mozilla for web browsing and email, OpenOffice.org for word processing, and Psi (Jabber client) for instant messaging. All of these are true multi-user win32 programs, and are perfectly interoperable with their Linux counterparts.
And all of these are free software, so when KDE 5.0 and SuSE 12.0 are out, you can use those applications without any of the problems a lot of developers are now working on.
the average user (Score:4, Insightful)
"Mr Joe Average is someone who wants to install their OS, boot it up, and it works. He wants to be able to upgrade his PC , and have the hardware work in a few short minutes. He wants to read email, browse the web, talk to his mates online, and play some games."
That's EXACTLY right.
The biggest problem with Linux on the desktop is that there isn't a standard desktop. Which ironically is also it's best feature.
If you want linux to actually compete on the desktop, you need to have one desktop to represent the linux desktop. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have the freedom to tweak it to your heart's content. But the starting place for everyone should be the same. To convert an average user (ie. a user that doesn't give two cents about programming, but just wants to use the computer), you need to keep the learning curve as flat as possible. It's unfortunate that every distribution seems to have it's own way of doing things. Which means from linux box to linux box the computer will be completely alien to the inexperienced user.
Again, for an experienced user, this is a feature!
But to the average user this is just pure annoyance. They don't care what is happening underneath the desktop. They want to use their computer the way they use their TV. Turn it on, pick a channel, watch, turn off (repeat).
Not only are the distributions different, but versions of a distribution change too dramatically! I've had to change my desktop appearance at least 3-4 times in the last 2 years. And I've stuck to one distribution. From RedHat 6.2 to 7.3, I've seen gmc dissapear for nautilus, linuxconf go bye-bye and I still can't get zip files to open up within the file manager the way they used to. If this were my mother on her computer, she would have traded it in for WinXP the instant that her favorite webpages disappeared. There's no way that you're going to get her to go spelunking for config scripts!
A common desktop would be a nice start. But if you can't get all of the distributions to agree to one, then at least have a very small common "set" of desktops from which to choose. Upon installation you could have a "What OS are you familiar with?" checkbox, and then build the desktop accordingly (similar to KDE). This would also make the learning curve less steep. Win9x, Mac, OS/2, gnome, whatever... but in such a fashion that the average user would know exactly what to expect. Then the expert is free to go in and modify it to whatever he/she would like!
MS users are all in it together (Score:5, Insightful)
Take some other OS, like MacOS: My experience has been that if something breaks, you generally get useless answers like "Well, mine works fine" or "It shouldn't do that" or "I don't know how to help you," largely because normally, the thing works ok. People who can fix really difficult problems on Macs are few and far between in my experience.
Likewise, on Linux, intractible problems are answered with "You're doing something wrong" or "You're stupid" or "You don't want to do that" or "Recompile the kernel." There are lots of experts, many of whom are helpful, and can often help fix the problem, albeit without ever imparting to the naive user what they have to do to dig themselves out the next time. In the mean time, the user just feels stupid.
Windows, on the other hand, breaks and breaks often. Go to your nearby expert, and they'll roll their eyes and say, "Yeah, that happened to me, too" (probably because it did). First off, we have a community being built: users screwed by Windows. The nerd comes over, eats beer and pizza while he fixes your problem, all the while reassuring the user that it isn't because he was stupid, but because Windows sucks. User feels a lot less slighted, and because the tweakability is so limited on Windows, he might even learn to do it himself. Probably not, but at least he won't feel bad about asking for help again, 'cause he knows he won't be blamed.
We're all in it together.
Re:MS users are all in it together (Score:3, Interesting)
However, my experience dictates the inverse of your statement about MacOS. When someone's Mac has a problem, the same tactics will work for fixing most problems with OS 9 on down, because your list of software culprits is relatively short, and nearly all of them live in the system folder. Usually. Anyone who tells you, "Well, it shouldn't do that," or "Mine works fine" probably doesn't have any interest in helping you fix it, anyways.
Meanwhile, I am rendered helpless at the myriad ways Windows finds to screw its users, and its total unwillingness to explain to you why it died. When people ask me why the blue screen o' death appears, I have no other answer than, "It just does that sometimes. Heck, maybe someone else did it to you... there's no way to know." And so I fear that Microsoft is directly responsible for the distrust many people have for computers - they simply don't know that there are ways you can have a computer that isn't frustrating.
And that's too bad.
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:RTFM (Score:3, Informative)
It's ostensibly about the Perl community, but it speaks to the rest of Open Source as well.
Linux needs games (Score:5, Interesting)
I brought my Redhat 7.3 CDs with me (burnt from ISOs) and went to work installing as minimal a workstation setup as I could. These baby boomers aren't going to break out gcc and go to hacking on CVS source any time soon. I left off as much as I could without running into RPM hell with dependencies. An hour later, we were up and running.
We subscribe to a local DSL provider, a telco, and the Internet is just a /usr/sbin/netconfig away.
Went online and downloaded OpenOffice 1.0 and Mozilla 1.0. All that was left was a decent personal finance package. Off we went to grab GnuCash.
Acclamating my folks to OpenOffice and Mozilla was easy, because after all, a web browser is a web browser and a office suite is an office suite (licensing aside, of course). GnuCash was a little tougher to sell to my dad who is a MS Money fanatic. Time will tell if he'll stick with GnuCash long enough for this experiment to pass muster, but I'm optimistic.
So the weekend over, I leave satisfied that I've freed two more human beings, my parents no less, from the confines of proprietary software. The drive home is a beautiful thing.
Then my mom calls. She wants to know if I can reinstall Monopoly (by Infogrames for Windows 95/98). And dad wants me to reinstall SimCity. These are their two favorite things to do with the PC. They've probably etched a couple of deep grooves in their hard drive where these these two programs reside. In short, we're fucked in full.
To make a long story short, I was able to satisfy my mom's Monopoly jones by installing Kapitalist [sourceforge.net], a free Monopoly type game. She missed the animations that the Infrogrames game provided, but she got by. My dad however was SOL. I was hoping to find a copy of SimCity 3000 Unlimited by Loki [lokigames.com], but as most of you know Loki is no more. My dad took it in stride, and explained that he'll just find another game to get hooked on. As you can see my parents are gamers, and I do love them so for that.
Problem. Finding and installing a quality game for Linux that a Linux neophyte or general non-hacker can install is difficult. Remember, my folks were running with AOL before all of this. They don't want to worry about glibc versions and the like.
So my folks were happy that they could get online with one click to Mozilla, happy they could read and compose documents and spreadsheets, and curious about GnuCash's abilities, but they seriously doubted they could have any fun in between.
I would say that a Linux distro, if properly tamed, can be a quality desktop solution provided you're willing to bite the gaming bullet. How many of us dual-boot for this alone? Sorry to hear we lost one to the dark side, especially after 3.5 years of grinding it out.
Similar experiences (Score:4, Insightful)
My reasons for not using Linux on the desktop are similar to this guy's, and I'd be willing to bet that very few of the people reading this are more technically able than I am so maybe it's another interesting data point. I was in the kernel group hacking the guys of a sophisticated SMP UNIX ten years ago and nowadays I write distributed filesystems for a living. I hack all day at work, then I go home and often hack some more. Conventional wisdom says I should love Linux, but it - and XFree86, which for all intents and purposes is part of the same package - has always been a big pain in the ass for me. Some examples:
OK, let's compare how Windows did in these areas.
Pretty stark comparison, isn't it? Now, the point isn't to say that Windows is all that great. As an OS professional I can recognize some of the very serious design mistakes they made, and their business practices deserve plenty of condemnation. It's also not my point that Linux is bad technically, although I have to say it's nowhere near as cutting-edge as its proponents would have you believe. The point is that one OS lets me add capabilities quickly and painlessly, while the other forces me to waste hours on broken builds, broken installs, and general dicking around with stuff that in my own professional life I'd barely even dignify by calling it a prototype.
As a result of all this, I don't consider Linux suitable as a user environment. When I'm doing development I prefer to do it on Linux...by logging into a Linux box remotely from my Windows desktop. It's not because I'm stupid, or lazy; as I said, I love to hack. It's because when I sit down at a computer I have a task in mind other than babysitting my OS. Maybe some people enjoy doing that for its own sake, but I went through that phase a long time ago and I have very little patience for it now. Windows simply wastes less of my time.
nirvana of computing (Score:5, Interesting)
he should have moved to a Mac running OS X.
If you want a platform that has absolutely ALL the benefits of a BSD unix platform, including security by design, stability, reliability, on TOP the ability to use your machine as an everyday desktop operating system to perform any task such as accounting, web surfing, office documents authoring, J2EE web applications development, mess around a tcsh shell, author and run scripts, play with your /etc/hosts file to filter ad servers, mixed-network-protocol networking at both server AND client levels, open any document from any other platform, create PDF documents from any application from which you can print, then OS X is the operating sytem for you.
you don't believe me?
Check out my journal to see my migration story from a win2k laptop to a titanium powerbook. [slashdot.org]
You want to see more gorey details on some of the crazy things you can do with OS X?
Then you might wanna take a look at this journal entry [slashdot.org].
Face it. OS X is by far, and i'm carefuly measuring my words here, the absolute best operating system whether you're a unix geek, a business development drone, an engineer or ... my Mom.
So let's see.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that it's free, and not controlled by any one individual is it's biggest strength but also it's biggest weakness
The reason people bitch and moan about the fact that at the moment, desktop linux is not 100% perfect is simple: they've never seen this development model before. I can guarantee you, if I'd shown this person an early version of Windows (by comparing timescales, current Linux would be Windows 3.1) he'd barf. Ditto for showing people early betas of Mac OS X. I did in fact see some early betas of OS X and they sucked. Font support wasn't there right. Graphics was SLOW! Ditto with Mozilla, ditto with most software in fact.
People tend to forget that you can see Linux in all stages of its development. There is no period of hidden years with developers scurrying away under NDAs, you see it all the time. Yes, I know SuSE is on version 8, and KDE is on 3, but that's not to imply they are "ready" for anything, only that some people want to see them. Pretend the versions have the word beta in front of them. Happy now? Because that's basically the state of play at the moment.
All the problems he raised will be sorted out, and at the current rate of progress soon:
- X: why do people bitch about it so much? I think this guy heard "X is slow dude" and believed it. Seriously, I don't see any serious speed problems with X, maybe this was a problem a few years ago but I wasn't using Linux back then. SHM means communication between the server is basically instant. I would be more impressed if I could see statistics that demonstrate that X is much slower than anything else, not subjective impressions. Fonts are simply a technical issue, they will be fixed in time.
- Drivers: I was under the impression that kernel modules were pretty version independant. Of course this point wil always be valid to some extent, because people can and do make their own kernel versions. Anybody can change it enough so that kernel modules no longer work - I can't see how this point is valid as the majority of users need never recompile their kernel (I never have).
- Hardware setup: Linux doesn't have a few billion dollars lying around like some other platforms I could mention, and hardware vendors don't play ball. I can't see how this is the fault of Linux per se, it's merely an inevitable result of the fact that Linux is an open (non-proprietary) platform without any resources to buy the stuff, and currently without enough market share to make it worth their while. In time, hardware vendors will start producing drivers.
- Software distribution: yep, he's right here. As a side project, I'm working on a solution, as are many other people. This one will be solved in time, and is basically caused by the fact that there is no software management engine powerful enough to deal with the myriad differences between different Linux versions.
- Support: in time, this won't be a problem. Besides, has every Windows techie always been smiles and helpfulness? Most windows users rely on technical friends/family for when things go wrong - you have to rely on a stranger if you're unlucky and don't know any other Linux users. Elitists can be a problem, especially on IRC, but as Linux usage goes up, this will recede into the background.
To be honest, with the difficulties Linux has faced, I'm amazed it's here at all. All it's current problems will be solved given time, and at the end, we'll have an open platform that is available to all on equal terms. I think that's a fair reward for not having a tight hierarchy of leaders/dictators writing platforms for profit with everything under their control. I, for one, am not going back.Pain in the Nix (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, I tried Redhat and Caldera. They are nice, but Apple got it right. Unix stability with a beutiful GUI. Unless there are drastic changes to XP, I have no doubt that my next purchase will be a Mac.
Go buy a Mac. Nix on the desktop is wonderful.
How can a subjective experience be wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
[Some of his points are wrong, but it's a reasonable article.]
I'm a little lost on how any of the author of the linked article's subjective feelings on the suitability of *NIX on the desktop can be "wrong". I think he's done a good job to document his gripes when they deserve it, and I bet he'd be the first to admit that perhaps his $99 (Australian) CD-RW isn't representative of every IDE drive out there.
But you can't fault this guy for not being honest or for not doing his research. Heck, the only point I could find to argue with at all was in this quote:
[When I move a window [in WinXP], it refreshes so fast that I don't miss X11 at all. While not quite as nice as some other operating systems, font support is outstanding compared to XFree86.]
"other operating systems" links to Mac OS X. I hope he meant font support, b/c the Finder's dog slow in Appleland.
Sounds like a reasonable cross-platform guy who's done his research to me. Though his reasons for not using Linux on the desktop might not be the same as someone else's, that doesn't make him wrong. [-1 Troll] Mr. Taco.
for the average user (Score:3, Interesting)
Mr Joe Average is someone who wants to install their OS, boot it up, and it works. He wants to be able to upgrade his PC , and have the hardware work in a few short minutes. He wants to read email, browse the web, talk to his mates online, and play some games. Feel free to disagree with me, this is merely how I see myself. Note: I'm not referring to Grandma using Linux, or even my mum using it. I'm referring to average users who know a little about their computer.
Sounds like you want Mac OS X.
Step forward, not back. It's real, it's powerful, it's easy, and you can sleep at night.
Windows Refugee (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, in your new home you might have to work a little harder, but at least you are free. You can even participate in the local politics if you want. Maybe the food isn't as good as in the motherland, but at least the ingredients are listed on the label.
Good on him for his integrity. (Score:4, Insightful)
I wager it's point number two (Score:3, Insightful)
Macintosh -- spend over a grand and you can try os x. Tough luck if you don't like it.
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:what's with all the mac talk? (Score:3, Interesting)
C'mon, you can't keep upgrading your skanky old p133 forever. At some point you'll have to buy new hardware. At that point switching to the Macintosh seems like a pretty reasonable suggestion. People buy new computers all the time in fact for all kinds of reasons. Even new x86 ones! Go figure! Nobody's suggesting gnawing off one's own leg here. It's buying a computer - a concept everyone here should be familiar with.
Re:Mr. Joe User?! (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, I liked your comment. It's absolutely right on in terms of how the desktop needs to be deployed by the system administrators to the system users. The users need functionality, stability, lack of hassle, and no interaction with the setup of their systems. (in a business setting) This makes the sysadmin job easy, enjoyable, and you get some real work done instead of constantly fixing mistakes.
Secondly, if I was your boss and ever caught you expressing this attitude to Joe User, you'd be on the sidewalk on your ass so fast it'd make your bits spin.
BOFH is funny. Very funny. I absolutely crack on it. It has no practical or applicable place in the industry, however.
I develop software for nursing homes and the nurses that use it. Nurses aren't computer geeks, they're barely computer users. They're nurses, and most of them are very good at it. They don't want to know how their computer and software works and they shouldn't HAVE to. They want to do their nursing job quickly, efficiently, and correctly, that's all.
I don't know about you, but when I walk into the hospital and I need medical attention now, I don't give a flying poke at a 9-track tape if they can hack their computer, I want to be fixed.
My job is to be an excellent computer programmer and admin. Part of that job and responsibility is to have respect for people whose job is not computers. This is the secretary down the hall, this is the pointy-haired boss, this is your father, this is burger-flippin' Jimmy. If you lack that respect and understanding, you are going to go nowhere. That is what probably pisses me off the most about the elitist community, which is probably most often expressed in the Linux and OS communities due to our "rouge" nature. Learn when and when not to express your ego because not everyone's going to bow at your feet to pay homage to your skills if you don't acknowledge theirs.
Re:Compiling Software is soooo hard! (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's say your a typical PC user that doesn't know the difference between a hard drive and a computer case (I can't count how many of my customers tell me the hard drive is making a noise when they mean the case).
You manage to find some neato piece of software and download it via Mozilla to your user folder. Now you've got a file foo.tar.gz. What next? What manual do you read to figure out what to do with it?? You double-click the file for some help, and after a few seconds you get a screen full of seemingly random characters. You then email or call a friend, or post in an on-line support forum to learn that you need to open a shell and type "gunzip -c foo.tar.gz | tar -xvf -". You think "That makes no sense, but okay." and you do it.
Now you get a command prompt back. Nothing that says the task completed successfully. Nothing that tells you what happened. You poke around in your GUI file browser and notice there is a new directory called "foo", so you double click it. You now see a bunch of files, one looks suspisiously useful "README". So you double click it.
The file tells you to type "./configure". Again you don't have a clue what it means so you type it in and the editor obligingly inserts the text at the top of the README document your are viewing. Nothing tells you there is an error, that a task completed, or that you just typed the command in the wrong place.
Another trip to email or posting to the support forum and you find you need to type that command (and all others) in to the shell prompt window. You get done with the "make install" command and again, nothing tells you that it all went well, what went where, or what to do next. Nothing in your home directory looks different so there's nothing new to double-click on.
For kicks you switch back to the shell and type the command "foo" (the name of the program you downloaded), and get back a "command not found" error message. Back to the email/support forum and you learn you must type "rehash" in the shell window, then you can type "startfoo" to actually get the program going.
There is nothing inherent about the filename "INSTALL" that tells a novice user that the installation directions are in that file. Even if the README exists and directs the user to INSTALL, there's still many points where there is no intuitiveness to the installation. A file named "HELP" would probably be the best choice for the "average" user.
Now compare that install to a Mac OS X software install: Download double-click the new icon, stuffit expander launches and expands the archive. (depending on browser config, this step may be optional) A new icon appears Double-click it A window opens with a big icon and text that says "drag to hard disk to install", or an icon named "Foo installer". You either drag or double-click. In either case, a window appears showing you the progress of what is going on. Usually during an actually installer program you get information about what will happen, where files are going, and what to do next. Almost anyone with any level of computer experience can figure this Mac OS X install with no help. Throughout the installation there are new icons and windows appearing as a direct result of user action. During operations they are informed of the status of the operation and the result of it. Until a GNU/Linux desktop can achieve this type of intuative ineraction it will never achieve any significant install base in the home user desktop environment.
Re:If Linux Was a Car.... (Score:3, Interesting)
And here I'd say it was more of a Delorian that looked like the death star as far as not being completed yet. Only nutjobs in black hemlets or old men who like to tinker with flux capacitors really feel at home with it. Lots of people think its cool and build off it, some people just want the brakes to work and leap off in frusteration/terror. Others just look at it and with a strained smile say they're happy where they are.