Quick Boot Linux Hopes To Win Over Windows Users 440
Al writes "A company called Presto hopes to exploit the painful amount of time it takes for Windows computers to start up by offering a streamlined version of Linux that boots in just seconds. Presto's distro comes with Firefox, Skype and other goodies pre-installed and the company has also created an app store so that users can install only what they really need. The software was demonstrated at this year's Demo conference in Palm Desert, CA. Interestingly, the company barely mentions the name Linux on its website. Is this a clever stealth-marketing ploy for converting Windows users to Linux?"
Hibernation? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Here, I've got a small little machine that could be more useful than my phone- only catch, I'd rather txt google with my phone than power up the acer-one, since it's going to take forever to boot.
On my main machines I'll stick with xp and ubuntu. But this might be a great netbook os, finally making a netbook useful..
Re:Hibernation? (Score:5, Interesting)
I really don't get this mentality. My first gen Asus 701 took all of 30 seconds to fully boot. I've since put UbuntuEee on it an it now takes about 40 seconds. IS your life that full that you just can't wait less than a minute?
Netbooks aren't meant to be whipped out for quick searches. They're meant to be an ultra portable that surfs, does email, word processing and other work. Pretty much what you would use a back breaking laptop for.
Re:Hibernation? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hibernation? (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't have anyone willing to use a shovel anymore to do real work.
Here, let me correct that for you:
"We don't have anyone willing to use a shovel anymore to do real work for less than a living wage."
Re:Hibernation? (Score:5, Funny)
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See, the immigrants don't care that much about a living wage, because they aren't citizens and they don't plan to stay.
An immigrant is, by definition of the word [wiktionary.org], someone who plans to stay.
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Every time (Score:3, Insightful)
Every time there is a discussion about boot times, someone very much like yourself comes out with the old chestnut of "are you so important and impatient that you can't wait 30 seconds for a PC to boot". I assume you guys have a secret clubhouse somewhere where you meet to discuss your strategy for defending the indefensible, but anyway...
Could this logic not be applied to any situation? E.g. you double click on an icon to start a program and your computer needlessly pauses for 15-30 seconds - but don't g
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This is why you use Standby + Hibernate.
My Asus EEE - Win XP comes from Standby in 1 sec and Hibernate take 15sec to boot, counting also the bios boot time.
Under battery it goes into Standby in 5 min or when I put down the cover. After 15min in standby it goes into Hibernate, so I don't have to think if I need it in the next minute or the next day.
Linux is not very friendly when it comes to Standby + Hibernate.
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Re:Hibernation? (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't work properly all the time under XP either. I've had some pretty quirky behavior, like the machine not coming back to life every once in a while. I found on my HP notebook that hibernate was sufficiently cranky under Vista that I finally stopped using it.
Re:Hibernation? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've had nothing but good experiences with Ubuntu and the Dell Mini 9 when it comes to standby. Works perfectly. I would guess it's the hardware vendors that aren't very friendly when it comes to standby + hibernate.
Re:Hibernation? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hibernation? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying this is a problem for everyone; just that there's enough issues that I think a lot of people are afraid or unable to use sleep.
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I read that as "Many of my coworkers can't reliably sleep and wake without crashing." I thought sleeping wasn't allowed at work. Can I have their job?
Re:Hibernation? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm much the same way.
No, not my laptop. Me.
Re:Hibernation? (Score:4, Insightful)
As everybody else has said... why bother rebooting it? My XP-based laptop is effectively instant-on and instant-off with sleep mode, and it really only gets rebooted after I've been playing video games all day, or after a system update.
And don't gripe about battery life... sleep mode uses *very* little power. I have, quite literally, put my laptop in sleep mode, gone on vacation, and come back 3 weeks later to a laptop with a battery that still had enough juice to run for 3.5h before it needed to be plugged in. (The laptop in question has a Core 2 Duo T5450 @ 1.66GHz, 2GB of RAM, 120GB 7200rpm HDD, DVD, 15.4" LCD @ 1680x1050).
Even with netbooks, battery life in sleep mode is very long. I have a Dell Mini 9 (64GB SSD, 2GB RAM) running OS/X (thanks to http://gizmodo.com/5156903/how-to-hackintosh-a-dell-mini-9-into-the-ultimate-os-x-netbook [gizmodo.com]), and that one is also pretty much instant-on and instant-off with sleep mode, and hasn't needed to be plugged in in 3 days.
So... why are you actually bothering to power-down and reboot from cold your acer-one?
Re:Hibernation? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hibernation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hibernation/Sleep is also not perfectly flawless. My dual-core WinXP workstation goes to sleep fine, wakes up fine ... but any application that uses 3D will find itself running at exactly half-speed until I do a reboot.
I suspect there's some multi-core weirdness that wasn't accounted for in a driver somewhere.
That goes off the topic. You should be asking "why *not*" rather than "why," under the simple premise that your way may not be The Way.
Re:Hibernation? (Score:5, Funny)
Did you just insinuate that Anonymous Coward is new here? That guy has been here forever!
Oh, wait...
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images of the latest release are here:
http://moblin.org/documentation/getting-started-guides/test-drive-moblin [moblin.org]
Re:Hibernation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps I am the exception to the rule but every machine I have ever used (and I've used a bunch) boots faster than it comes out of hibernation.
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I turn off my laptop because I will not have it running on battery when I move it around.
Is this a hardware-safety thing, or a saving-energy thing? I've carried my Dell XPS m1210 around in a backpack on standby nearly every day for two and a half years now, with no problems. And the amount of juice it takes to maintain standby is completely negligible--maybe 1 or 2 percent of the battery if you standby overnight.
Once you factor in the stress and extra power required to cold boot and reload every app you use, standby may even be safer and cheaper.
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Re:Hibernation? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are several reasons why you shouldn't always hibernate. Hibernate preserves the state of memory. If there is something wrong with the state of the memory such as a program has a bad memory leak, that problem persists. Also for computers with a large amount of memory, hibernation might not be the best alternative. The hibernation file must be at least as large as the RAM. If your computer has a large amount of RAM then it will take longer to backup/restore the state of the memory.
At the very least, occasionally do a full shutdown to get a "clean slate".
Re:Hibernation? (Score:4, Interesting)
1) It's a recipe for data loss on shared partitions if you dual boot.
2) I use an SSD and prefer 4 GB of space over saving ~20 seconds by hibernating instead of booting normally.
3) The OS gets a fresh start. This *shouldn't* matter, but often slightly affects speed and memory consumption.
4) Slowed boot time is an indicator of general performance issues. I might not notice a gradual doubling of application start up time, but boot times are more obvious.
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You turn your computer off?
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Who reboots? (Score:5, Informative)
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It's a joke, laugh
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That i7 sips down more juice than my Lenovo X60 laptop (screen and all,) so what I do is I just sleep my computer and then carry it UPS and all.
Kinda sucks that the battery weighs 20 pounds and only lasts five minutes.
Re:Who reboots? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even Vista boots pretty quickly, at least to the login prompt. The excruciating delay comes from loading all of the apps - virus checker, printer/scanner tools, laptop vendor "helpful tools" that don't seem to do anything, etc. It's ridiculous.
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You must be using Norton/Symantec. Try using a GOOD virus scanner like NOD32 (about the most lightweight one on the market, but also has the highest detection rate) and disabling things like Office Fast Start (and similar).
Re:Who reboots? (Score:5, Interesting)
My XP box that I'm using now at work (2 core 2.33 GHz Xeon) boot Windows REALLY fast. It is under 30 seconds to get to the "Ctrl-Alt-Del to login" screen. It's great.
Then you log in.
Then you wait 5 minutes or so for it to finish loading everything and settle down enough to be usable (the desktop comes up nearly instantly but can't be used). If you open Outlook (as I have to), you're waiting another 5 minutes for that too.
I'm disk limited (a faster disk would help things) but it's just terrible. I can get in quick, but I can't do anything for minutes afterwords (like a simple Firefox open and search).
My Mac (MBP, 2.4GHz) doesn't boot as fast, maybe a minute to get to the desktop? But when the desktop comes up the computer is usable. It feels slow as it finishes loading stuff, but as soon as I get to the desktop I can start issuing commands (open Safari, etc.) and they happen. I doesn't feel "stuck" like XP does just after start-up.
As others have said, there is a simple solution to all this. My Mac is almost never off, it sleeps when I move it. It comes up and ready in like 3 seconds. By the time I finish opening the display, it's ready. My XP box is never turned off or logged off, I lock it. It unlocks in 2-3 seconds. If it were to hibernate, it'd only take a few seconds longer, still light years ahead of a boot.
I can tell you that these kind of things (little fast OSes) can get obnoxious. As soon as you run into a limitation (say you want to access something you don't have setup it in, or a program like Quicken) you have to suffer the full reboot. When you want to transition there is no easy way. You can't take your surfing from the fast-boot environment with you into Windows. All that rebooting gets really annoying. Now that I have a phone that can do a quick look-up on the 'net, I have even less reason to boot into this to see that "one quick thing".
Re:Who reboots? (Score:5, Interesting)
How long does it take your transistor radio to switch on? What about your television? (Unless it is decades old, it is probably two seconds or less.) When you turn on your kitchen tap, how long is it before water starts coming out? What about when you turn the ignition key in your car? Does it churn for 30 seconds before it is ready to drive off? (Well I know some cars do...)
If you think that 30 seconds is fast just because it is a computer, then I think you have really low standards.
(I know this wasn't the main point of your post.)
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How long does it take to get on the highway?
How long does it take to get dressed?
How long does it take to get the shower temperature right?
The questions you ask refer more to delay times in starting applications, and overall responsiveness.
Re:Who reboots? (Score:5, Insightful)
How long does it take your oven to pre-heat? Honestly this is all apples to oranges. Most people simply don't care about the fact that their computers take a bit of time before they're ready to use.
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My answers to some of your questions:
What about your television? (Unless it is decades old, it is probably two seconds or less.)
LG 37LC7D, less than a year old. From hitting the power button to when it shows a picture is about 5-7 seconds for cable TV or composite inputs, and about 5-7 seconds more than that for HDMI input.
What about when you turn the ignition key in your car? Does it churn for 30 seconds before it is ready to drive off? (Well I know some cars do...)
If you have a performance car (or you live in a cold region), you'll want to let it warm up a bit before you move it. One motorcycle owned by a guy I know won't even get in gear (even in a hot climate) unless you've had the engine running for several minutes, so he starts the e
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Re:Who reboots? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure it's the apps. I think what actually happens is that Vista puts up a login prompt well before it has truly finished booting. i.e. before all the services have started.
The result is that you can login but the machine runs like a dog with no legs for the next 5 minutes as it tries to complete the boot process and deal with you trying to use it all at once.
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to a useable state.
That's the key part, I'm sure many people here remember back when windows would "start up" and pretend to be usable, but the start menu would randomly snap shut as programs and services continued to load in the background, and actually getting a program you wanted to use to start meant watching the hourglass for several minutes as windows finished getting ready.
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Which is why I reduced my WinXP install as much as possible. I have an older machine, (P4, 1GB DDR400), but it boots up pretty fast because only three icons come up in the systray: volume control, antivirus, and my wireless card. Although there are plenty of other apps that I start up on almost every boot, I don't have them come up by default in case I want to do something quickly.
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Still about 15 seconds after installing Office and other applications.
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I don't have any issues with boot time in windows 7. It's up and running in about 20 seconds ... of course this is on an i7 proc w/ 6GB or ram and 15k Velocerapter drives
And how many applications are installed? Unless MS does something amazing, once you finish installing Office, windows boot times traditionally go out the window. And every application thereafter makes it worse. Also, keep in mind that what people are perceiving as boot time is from off to a useable state. For a server this means off->services running. For a user PC this means Off-> Fully Logged in and can launch applications.
Actually quite a few - I use it as my main work machine now with an XP laptop as backup. The full office suite, all of my remote admin tools, VMWare Client, Im, etc. using your definition of usable: fully logged in and can launch applications, my machine is usable in about 30-45 seconds from off and this includes the time it takes me to enter my username/password at 9am before i've finished my first cup o joe. I'm actualy working in about 3-5 mins from boot, outlook up, im up and possible a few ssh sessions
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that actually speaks a lot toward the improved boot time in vista. you are saying that it doesn't take much more time to load vista than it takes to read the bits off the disk.
basically, if you have 4gbs of memory in use, you are going to have to wait while that memory writes to disk on hibernate and then reads from disk on resume.
hibernate is fine but why bother in most cases? My laptop will sleep for a day w/ very minimal battery loss, how often are you without power more than 2-3 days and still plan to
What is the big deal? (Score:2)
Just use suspend/resume. Even on my aging windows-XP notebook, it takes just a few seconds to resume from where I left.
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On my XP laptop, it takes long enough to resume (XP) from suspend that I'd rather just hit the power and start up Ubuntu.
Boot Time is the least of the pain. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am fairly sure faster boot times wont cause most people to switch. For most people it comes down to being able to run their apps, and not the sometimes poor GNU replacements of their apps.
Re:Boot Time is the least of the pain. (Score:5, Informative)
If you had looked at the site for about 45 seconds, you could have noticed that the product installs in a dual-boot setup and gives the option to boot into Windows. It's not a new company called PResto, BTW. It's a product called Presto from Xandros, which has been putting out their own Linux distro for years.
Re:Boot Time is the least of the pain. (Score:5, Funny)
"If you had looked at the site for about 45 seconds..."
Who has time for that?... Apparently 30 seconds is too long to boot a computer these days, who has 45 seconds for reading?
Someone should build a site called 'Presume', which strips out 2/3rds of the words, knock the reading time down to 15 seconds.
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You're right, but it's still kind of pointless. The product seems to be somebody who regularly boots up their computer to do one thing, then shuts it down again. Plus when they fire up the computer to run Word, they don't need to access any of the bookmarks they created when they booted it just to check a web site. Not a common use case!
This is kind of similar to those initiatives to allow you to run some apps from the BIOS without booting the OS. Those didn't catch on either.
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The point is that the app most people want to run is likely on the web, so you're dealing with mozilla, not GNU.
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I don't understand why you need a bootloader in the BIOS. It's not enough to have one on the MBR of the primary disk? It'd be a nice feature to have, yes, but hardly a necessary one.
I'd prefer BIOS and motherboard vendors get their act together on reducing the time between powerup and entering the boot loader. My ASUS board takes way too long; it's half my boot time (although some of that may be delays in grub loading itself).
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Almost every BIOS I've seen in the past four years has a key you can press to do just that. Each separate drive does have to have it's own bootloader. Booting off a different partition on the same drive isn't a job for the BIOS IMHO. That is what bootloaders are for.
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typoinsummary (Score:2)
Just a seconds?
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Making Linux Work (Score:5, Insightful)
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But if the app is available on both system (eg. Firefox) then boot time is the determining factor.
My wife now boots into Ubuntu more often than Win XP on her dual boot desktop simply because it's faster.
She still boots into windows to work with her photos though.
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There are certain killer apps that prevent people from running Linux. If the user has to jump through hoops and install emulators or similar to get it to install, or it doesn't work fully, that counts as "doesn't work":
Microsoft Outlook. As long as an average user can't even get the company address book to show in Evolution, it's not a viable replacement.
Adobe Photoshop. Don't even think Gimp -- it's not a substitute for Photoshop users.
World of Warcraft and other popular games. The average Joe won't k
Windows Killer (Score:2)
Wow!! Who would have thunk this would be the killer feature which is going to cause mass
migration to Linux. I have another idea - when Windows boots, the screen is in black &
while & rather dull looking. Maybe Presto could exploit this by offering a version of
Linux which prints boot messages in colour.
Xandros (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Xandros (Score:5, Funny)
Man, the lengths some people will go to to not read the article.
"painful amount of time....." (Score:3, Informative)
Speaking as someone who owns a relatively new PC, XP, Vista, and 7 boot faster than the 'flasghip' Ubuntu. Not that it matters really.
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And Linux/Xorg/Fluxbox boots faster than all of them. The important thing with Linux is, that you can choose how much you system takes to boot up. It's allways a tradeoff between features, bling-bling and speed. You did a nice stab at ignoring that though.
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Likewise, same with Mandriva, OpenSUSE, and RedHat, the only one that I use that comes close, and usually beats Windows is Slackware.
But, like you said, it doesn't matter, as I think all the main Linux distros, and all versions of Windows have Hibernate/Suspend, and what does 25 to 45 seconds matter when you only really need to reboot every couple weeks, or monthly.
Having a cold-boot of a couple seconds, still means you lose the state of all your apps, you'll have to spend the time launching them, loading f
TFA Almost burns. (Score:5, Informative)
One of the main reasons why modern operating systems take so long to boot is that they are very bulky: a huge amount of code needs to be read when a computer is first turned on. Consisting of far fewer lines of code than Windows, Presto needs just a few hundred megabytes of memory, says Jordan Smith, product marketing manager at Xandros. Microsoft's Vista operating system, in contrast, recommends at least 15 gigabytes of free disk space to install.
I don't think the reviewer really understands what's happening here. Recommended amount of hard drive space is not installed space (although I'm aware that Vista is a beast). And the reviewer has apparently compared RAM to HD space.
BIOS (Score:4, Interesting)
Several companies offer such functionality in their computer BIOSes. Sony's stupidly named XrossMediaBar that they install on everything from PS3s to televisions as well as some laptops being a prime example. These people are probably out of luck as if anybody actually wants this kind of feature, it will start to be provided in more and more BIOSes. Sure, the BIOS mini-OSes don't have the "app store" extensibility (although there's no reason why they couldn't), but, well good luck with that. And if (as I suspect) nobody is really interested because suspend/hibernate is plenty fast enough, then they're still buggered.
MacBook Pro? (Score:2)
Odd that they're showing off this new feature on a MacBook Pro front and center on their website. OS X has always been the 'holy grail' of quick starts for me. With SmartSleep [www.jinx.de] I can configure it to do what I want depending on battery level.
For those that haven't had the opportunity to use OS X, it does a 'dual path' of both sleep and hibernation most of the time. Say you close your lid and the machine goes to sleep with 40% battery left. You forget about your laptop for a week and come back to a completely
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it does a 'dual path' of both sleep and hibernation most of the time.
Windows so intelligently will run the battery dead in sleep and then lose everything.
So does Windows Vista. It's called hybrid sleep [microsoft.com].
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Vista and Win 7 does this too by default. Called Hybrid Sleep.
So they are charging $19.95 for... (Score:2)
only fanboys care about boot times (Score:3, Insightful)
This will only impress the type of douchebag who lists his RAM timings in his tweaker forum sig. People aren't using Windows because it boots fast, they use it because it came with their PC, and they can bootleg Office from work, and play Snood.
Fast Boot Time Means Little (Score:2, Interesting)
Web browser? Skype? (Score:2)
Advertising not boot times (Score:2)
Painful? More like PEBKAC. (Score:2)
Anybody browsing this article probably has the technical competence and interest needed to maintain the OS so it never takes any longer than 30 seconds.
Unless you've got McAfee installed, of course, in which case it'll take a significant fraction of your lifespan...
Aside: PEBKAC is tongue in cheek for alliterative goodness.
This is silly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, you could probably somebody an operating system that boots in 2 seconds and does nothing. But, I guarantee you that within a month the vast majority of people will load up their computers with a bunch of crap such that they will still take a minute to boot.
it's not os the boot time ... (Score:2)
It's all the OTHER crap that has to get done before you can use your computer. If you have only windows, no net connection, no 'SlowestNotes', no 'Norton-Nork anitvirius' software etc in your startup folder windows starts pretty quickly.
The problems start when you have a net login script on a bloated server that holds you back, then SlowestNotes starts and takes a few minutes to log you in and open your inbox, even longer to show your first new email. Then Norton-Nork anti-virus takes another few minutes
Why is this even a Marketing factor anymore?!? (Score:2)
Increasing boot times by 300% when the average OS boots in under 3 minutes is about as useful as the average driver discovering that his quarter-mile top speed increased to 115 from 105 when they bought a new car.
In other words, who gives a shit anymore? I've got 5-year old laptops still running XP that I never shut down and always hibernate them. Same goes for my new Macbook.
Want to give me something useful? How about a browser that starts up in 1 second or less. Now THAT is something that we all use e
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Especially now with Sleep mode, which, even for Vista, gets the computer ready to use in less than 2 seconds.
Stealth marketing of Linux (Score:2)
First, and second (Score:3, Insightful)
First: Who gives a shit if it's booting in half the time?
I press power once between standing up and breakfast (on). And once before going to bed (off).
It already boots faster than my brain. ^^
Second: This is very old news. This quick-boot "technique" (aka horrible hack). Exists for a long time now.
Besides: If I wanted to boot fast, I'd do it right, and use hibernation for the power button and long times of inactivity, and sleep for short times. With an optional real reboot (in case of kernel updates) between pressing the power button and going to hibernate (after being booted up again).
Dear Linux Community (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to win over windows users:
Make ONE distro - Part of what make Windows so useful is that i know how to use every windows machine i see. They're all pretty damn similar. Instead of making a bunch of distros that can't compete, make ONE that can. All the flavors are confusing. Windows has 3 basic flavors, home, domain and server. Aim for that.
Make it run Halo, Planetside, MS Office and the games that don't work on consoles. FPS and RTS games just aren't the same with console controls. What this really means is: driver support for video cards. And NO, i don't want OO.o. i use it when i can, but it just isn't a competitor for MSO. So either get OO.o ready for prime time, or work with MS.
i'd love to not pay 100$ to 200$ for the OS, but i'd rather have a system that can DO THINGS. That can run my games and interact with the rest of the world.
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I realize your post wasn't about making it 'the year of the Linux desktop' but I'm going to use your post to illustrate a point.
This sort of little 'silly' crap is one of the problems with normal users adopting Linux. Normal users don't want to have to have a little ingenuity in order to use their computers, they just want them to do what they are told to do, fast, without crashing, and in a way they are used to.
Linux can b
Re:Easier to DIY... (Score:4, Insightful)
What MS Office drawing app are you referring to? Would that be Paint? Paint is a POS, and even MS knows that (they really ought to replace it with Paint.NET)
I can replace all my Office apps with free alternatives:
MS Word = OpenOffice.org Writer
MS Excel = OpenOffice.org Calc
MS Access = OpenOffice.org Base
MS PowerPoint = OpenOffice.org Impress
MS Publisher = Scribus
MS Outlook = Evolution
MS Paint = GIMP or OpenOffice.org Draw
Adobe Illustrator = Inkscape
Adobe Acrobat = (practically any Linux application can create a PDF or PS file)
The list can go on, and others here can easily tell you more applications, I only wanted to harp in on a few that you might be interested in (or didn't even think about.) The days of MS Office being the be-all-end-all of office application suites is over and has been for a while now.
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If they haven't "cracked [microsoft.com]" the protocol by now, they aren't going to.
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