Windows Tech Writer Looks at Linux 664
An anonymous reader writes "Three days ago I accepted Linux into my life and while I'm not yet a convert, the experience has shaken my faith in Windows. It's hard to reconcile because for nearly 20 years I've mostly stayed on the one true Windows path."
If RMS was dead, he would be spinning in his grave (Score:2, Informative)
Yes.
but by armies of volunteer programmers who "donate" their code to the public domain.
No.
Most Open Source code is not in the public domain, but rather distributed under an exceptionally liberal license.
Re:Defrag? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Defrag? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Windows only path (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lacking in any details (Score:2, Informative)
He seems to concentrate on the revelation that there is a viable alternative to running Microsoft systems. When he is running Linux, browsing the web for answers, maybe asking for help on irc or usenet, that's when he has the chance to start learning everything from GNU philosophy to how his system ticks.
20 yeas of MS-Windows??? (Score:1, Informative)
In 1983, you still could find Apple IIs, some TRS-80s, some Ataris... M$ was not yet the black-hole that sucked the life out of the software industry.
IIRC, Windows 1.0 came out in *1984*. And no-one used it, nor v2.0. Windows started proliferating only with version 3.0, which came out in 1990/91.
Stating he's been a Windows user for 20 years is a sign this guy had an orwelian "bad memory" or is suffering from heat stroke or something...
1097 NZD = ~ 400 USD [nt] (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Lacking in any details (Score:2, Informative)
That line got a raised eyebrow from me, seeing as Quanta Plus and Screem are not web browsers.
Re:Have we not seen this before? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Did anyone notice? (Score:4, Informative)
For example, there is the Colorado Linux Users & Enthusiasts [denver.co.us] group here that did an installfest [denver.co.us] a few months ago.
Do a bit of searching and see if you can find one in your area.
Re:Defrag? (Score:2, Informative)
BTW, I just gave a demo on installing Linux to dual boot with an existing Windows partition.
RedHat does not ship with an NTFS resize utility. You can use the Mandrake 9.1 utility for only the partitioning, then install RedHat (or any other desired distro). The Mandrake utility is particularly simple to use; though if you don't defrag it will destroy the partitiion. You can also use the standalone ntfsresize utility (though you'll need to calculate the offsets by hand) or PartitionMagic to do the same thing. Mandrake is free, though
Re:I want to believe. (Score:5, Informative)
Fast Forward to today.
Most people wouldn't touch DOS anymore (Most Slashdot users exempted from that), and the application base is there now for windows.
On the linux side most modern distros (Redhat 8/9) (Mandrake 9.1) (Suse 8.2) All include more applications than you could ever need. Need a word Processor, You've got 3, same with spreadsheets. File Managers, Got a few of them, Games, Lots of small ones, and If you want the better ones, You can use most of them through wine. and even a few Games have a native linux version Unreal Tournament, UT 2K3, Quake. I Run Warcraft 3 though winex, and it works great.
As for Development, it comes with all the development tools you could need, 2 different SQL Based Databases (mysql, Postgresql), a Very nice IDE (Kdevelop), Photo Editors (The GIMP).
And the list is only getting longer.
You probably remember having trouble getting most hardware to work, That's a thing of the past as well, It's a rare case for me to install Linux, and have to manually configure hardware. Much better than my luck was ever with windows.
All in all, linux has improved a lot over the years, and Is worth a try again.
For something you can try out without committing yourself, Try Knoppix [knoppix.org](mentioned a few times before) It includes an Amazing amount of applications.
Re:I want to believe. (Score:5, Informative)
What did I do next? Not much else to do. None of my apps (read : games) were available at the time for Linux.
All you do with your computer is play games?? Hmmm. True, maybe Linux isn't for you. Although I'm a hardcore Quake3 player so that's my favorite game and it just happens to run great in Linux. I play some Tribes2 and UT2003 in Linux also.
I was unable to find replacements for any of my tools (read : an XTree clone such as ZTree, Office, Visual Studio, Drive Image, etc.)
Xtree? Try "ytree" in Linux. Personally I'd rather use a GUI file explorer or the console though (Konqueror, Nautilus, ROX, etc.).
Office? OpenOffice, Koffice, the GNOME office stuff... What applications do you use? There are many, many word processors besides the "office" suite versions. Same holds for the other applications.
Visual Studio? I do a lot of VS development and agree there is nothing as good for Linux, but there are tools if you're into that kind of thing. Kdevelop, wxPython (VB-like), Eclipse, NetBeans, and many others. There are craploads of development tools on Linux.
Drive Image??? How much time per day do you spend in that app?? There are a ton of backup applications for Linux. I can't comment on any of them because I don't back up as much as I should. Kbackup and others are easy to use.
I mean what really do you spend your time doing on the computer?
Need to web surf? MozillaFirebird, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, Konqueror, Lynx, Nautilus, etc.
E-Mail? Mozilla, Balsa, Kmail, mutt, pine, and all the others I'm forgetting about.
Other popular and useful apps:
The Gimp
VMware
I could just go on and on. It really doesn't sound like you gave Linux a fair shot. Plus that was 5 years ago, that's an eternity in computer terms.
Burn the Knoppix [knopper.net] ISO and you won't even need to do anything to your computer to run a newer Linux. It boots fully off the CD and contains a ton of applications. It will kinda chug because it has to read from the CD so much, but it works good enough and doesn't touch your current system.
Re:The Windows only path (Score:3, Informative)
Or unless he uses the Windows version of OpenOffice.
batch 101 (Score:3, Informative)
dir %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
Re:20 years of windows (Score:2, Informative)
Likewise with DOS and Windows. Remember all the futzing around with CONFIG.SYS that was necessary to do anything serious? When Dave Cutler went to Microsoft more than a decade ago, I was actually hopeful. I should have known better.
Then along came that skinny (then) little Swedish-speaking Finnish guy, and the rest is history.
Re:I believe. (Score:1, Informative)
Well you can't have looked very hard then. Try findstr. As for pipes, you also can't have looked very hard. cmd.exe supports pipes, redirection etc (see below from the Windows 2000 Help):
Combining commands with redirection characters
You can combine filter commands, other commands, and file names to make custom commands. For example, you could use the following command to store the names of files that contain the string "LOG":
dir /b | find "LOG" > loglist.txt
Windows 2000 sends the output of the dir command through the find filter command and stores the file names that contain the string "Log" in the Loglist.txt file. The results are stored as a list of file names (for example, A.log, Logdat.svd, and Mylog.bat).
To use more than one filter in the same command, separate the filters with a pipe (|). For example, the following command searches every directory on drive C, finds the file names that include the string "Log", and displays them one screen at a time:
dir c:\ /s /b | find "LOG" | more
Because you use a pipe (|), Windows 2000 sends the output of the dir command through the find command. The find command selects only file names that contain the string "Log." The more command displays the file names that are selected by the find command, one screen at a time.
Still, don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Re:I believe. (Score:0, Informative)
However if you really want a command line windows isn't for you. But Windows does have more powerful scripting than unix, you just need to learn a bit about it.
Re:I believe. (Score:0, Informative)
This demonstrates just how clueless you are. COMMAND.COM is a 16-bit DOS emulation shell, running in a VDM (virtual DOS machine). CMD.EXE is a real 32-bit console process which happens to accept most of the same commands as DOS (although it extends the syntax considerably). You can do much the same things as traditional UNIX shells, e.g.
for /f %I in (*.txt) do somecommand.exe %I > outdir\%~nI.foo
which runs somecommand on all txt files, writing the results to a directory called outdir and renaming the resulting files to have a .foo extension.
It's not as flexible as UNIX shells, but it's fine for a lot of tasks, and if you really can't live without bash, install cygwin and all your precious UNIX utilities are there, including a reasonably good (and unbeatably cheap) X server. That way you get the best of all worlds; I've made it our standard install for developers - Windows XP + cygwin + CVSNT
Jon
Re:Not Worth Our Time (Score:1, Informative)
[CmdrTaco] Shit, I just looked this up an hour ago. 50% MSIE ish.
Re:Technical Writers Can't Believe - No FrameMaker (Score:4, Informative)
Several years ago, Adobe actually released a beta version of a port, but then decided not to release a final product based on it. Check out this page [adobe.com] for more info. There's even a specific e-mail address for comments.
Re:I believe. (Score:2, Informative)
-Ben
Re:I want to believe. (Score:1, Informative)
Red Hat 5.2 is, surprise surprise, a 32-bit protected OS with pre-emptive multi-tasking. Red Hat 9 is Red Hat 5.2 with newer packages and boot scripts, and GNOME. Red Hat 9 is just a logical continuation of Red Hat 5.x. Windows 2000 is a totally different beast from its predecessors. You could argue that Windows 3.1 isn't even a predecessor to Win2K, since NT is a different tree. The only thing they really have in common are some GUI APIs.
Re:Defrag? (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, nobody deletes things any more, so you no longer need to defrag drives when you install Linux on a formerly Windows-only machine. But the people helping him probably remember the old way.
Re:I believe. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I want to believe. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Have we not seen this before? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I can assure you that Chris Barton is a real person -- a journalist for the New Zealand Herald technical and business pages, (not a "technical writer" as written here) i.e. He is a real person who needs to get real work done irrespective of what operating system he's running. He's a journo, not a techo by trade. That's what's news. More and more, musicians, artists, novelists and soccer moms are flocking to Linux in NZ because of what Chris Barton writes in the newspaper. Particularly his promoting our INSTALLFEST [linux.net.nz] which is what the original article was about.
Now Chris has also written numerous good articles about WETA DIGITAL [wetadigital.com], the people who brought the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the big screen, running linux clusters (at least two generations of them), as well as numerous other commerical linux deployments throughout New Zealand and the rest of Australasia. I was actually quite surprised that he wasn't running Linux on his desktop already, but, then, a lot of us are literally forced to use Windows at work by brain-dead MSCE-infected ITdiots who advise Upper Management. The more of a groundswell towards Linux adoption they see, the better.
Re:batch 101 (Score:3, Informative)
When Windows was DOS...? (Score:2, Informative)
Windows was never called DOS.
That's Like saying a cell phone used to be called a telegraph.
Microsoft could never have made something as stable as DOS.
For a "Technical Writer" following Windows for "20 years" this guy sure doesn't know his history.
meinBobo
Re:Linux still needs apps... (Score:3, Informative)
The latest version of Wine is really coming together. Your GPS software is probably a sticking point, both the hardware and software features aren't going to be duped for linux for awhile, especially to your likeing. Geneology software is going to take awhile also, because not every Grandma is on linux yet and there's not an outcry for it.
As for sound editing, I'm really taking a shine to Audacity. It's not Cool Edit (If you've seen Cool Edit 2, you KNOW there's nothing better) but it does most tasks well. The Windows port is a bit crashy, but the linux version runs stable. I do all of my editing on Audacity, for the above average audio geek it does well. I haven't noticed a feature missing that I really need.
As for 2000 and XP, I must say that MS created a very stable product. The OS itself doesn't crash nearly as much, and it does a better job of containing the system so that when apps crash (Windoze apps will always crash) they don't hurt the fragile OS underneath.
I have to ask, have you played with Cygwin? I run Cygwin on my box at work (Windoze shop) so I have KDE running right next to Windows. No dual booting, and all the goodness of linux on my desktop. If you haven't tried it, you should.
Re:I believe. (Score:3, Informative)
Really, you can test it out in a webpage too if you're happy to click through the warning box. In one line you can create a new word document. You can do stuff to it, then print it bob's your uncle. (new ActiveXObject( "MSWord.Document" ); // if I remember right.
Also, I can list all my emails in my inbox. You can connect via ODBC to outlook, and treat it like a (slow) database. That's just a few examples. Most people flame away at Windows without having a clue that it can do half the shit they complain it cant.
The really neat part comes in my mind two ways:
That shade of puce.... (Score:3, Informative)
Part of the license of Adobe products goes to pay for Pantone compatibility. Until someone creates an open standard for color, free software equivalents will have a very hard time matching utility value.
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Re:Linux still needs apps... (Score:4, Informative)
It's the less mainstream stuff that's still missing. On Windows, I have some excellent topographic map software, nicely integrated with my GPS unit. I have some excellent birding software, with videos and birdsongs. Great genealogical software. Great sound editing software. Etc., etc. I looked pretty hard, but was not able to find Linux equivalents.
This may seem silly, but have you considered asking the software publisher if they would consider releasing a Linux version? Only by hearing from their users will a software publisher consider a new platform.
I've done this several times with software that I like. I've been using Linux at home 100% since 1998 but I still have a dual-boot laptop for work. So I sometimes see software for Windows that I might like to use under Linux. For me, that's mostly games. But this applies to all software, I think. I've written to the software publishers and asked if they have a Linux version. In all cases, the answer was at least "we're thinking about it, but haven't heard from enough Linux users yet". But in a few cases, the answer was "yes, one of our developers is working on that .. want to beta test it?"
I guess my point is that you need to talk to the software publishers if you want to use that software on Linux. They need to know that people want to use their software on Linux, then they'll release for Linux.
-jh
Last Post (Score:4, Informative)
Good luck, Tim, wherever you are.