Ten Reasons To Dump Windows [II]
[ Monday, 2 October 2006, michuk ]
This is the second part of the article about top ten Windows annoyances which made me switch from XP to GNU/Linux and stick with it. I hope my thoughts will be informative and somewhat useful to all of you wondering whether to give up MS Windows.
Author: Borys Musielak
Correction: Mariusz Czyż
Short summary of part I
If you haven’t read the first part of this article, we strongly encourage you to do so, since this is a simple continuation of it. In part I we have covered the following issues:
- MS Windows default security settings,
- general desktop usability,
- and software installation process.
Short summary of part II
Today we’re going to step further and present another three issues which can be a real pain for anyone using Windows, but nothing to worry about for users of the GNU/Linux.
- system upgrades whole system upgrade (including system and all installed applications),
- system failures coping with system failures and other errors we encounter every day using an OS,
- and system performance for usual desktop activities.
Instead of intro
A word of warning first. I am not going to repeat the intro from part I, but I just would like to emphasize once again that this article is not supposed to be an objective view on either MS Windows or GNU/Linux. We talk about the top 10 MS Windows annoyances and this approach sort of narrows our choices 
After this, a bit lengthy introduction, let’s finally come back to the article itself…
4. System upgrades
Programs have bugs and security holes that occur every now and then and are patched with a different frequency. Every operating systems needs to be updated regularly to keep you secure, uninfected, and not vulnerable to whose risks. Also any additional software (browsers, office suites, messaging apps, etc) that you have installed in your OS needs to be updated on a regular basis, for exactly the same reasons. We’re going to take a look at the way Windows handles such updates and compare it with the approach adopted by GNU/Linux.
Everyone is familiar with the Windows Update feature (well, lucky you if you are hearing the term for the first time in your life). It’s hard not to notice the annoying pop-up which shows up every now and then, usually while I am trying get some work done. Apart from that, it works really great — all the latest security updates are downloaded automatically for me by my great Windows OS. A few clicks, a reboot (oh where is the document I forgot to save?) and I am again secure and up-to-date, at least until the next update. Well… am I, really?
I have to disappoint you. What I’ve just downloaded are only some security patches for the kernel of the Windows OS, plus updates of a few core Windows components. If you don’t use Internet Explorer, Outlook Express or Windows Media Player (and probably you don’t since I hope you’re an aware Windows user, the actual target of this article) all this hassle does not concern you a lot, actually. In such case, Windows Update gives you only a feeling of security. If you want to have a really secure OS, you need to manually upgrade all the applications you frequently use, including a firewall, a web browser, all instant messengers, P2P programs and all other apps accessing the Internet. But when is the right time to do the update? Continually! If you really want to stay secure in Windows, you should read the security-watch websites like Secunia daily and follow the instructions given by them. When a security hole is found in some software you use, you need to apply the given patch or upgrade to the latest version of the application (if such is already published). You probably wonder — how one can find time to do all these things? Well, almost nobody does, really. Most of the computers around the world run unpatched and insecure software, sometimes because of lack of knowledge, sometimes due to lack of time…
OK, but how come this problem hasn’t been solved yet? Wouldn’t it be far easier if the operating system manufacturer (Microsoft in this case) provided us with a tool for automatic upgrade of all programs installed on our computer, not just the Microsoft ones? Unfortunately, such things only exist in the world of GNU/Linux.
Pic.1 System upgrade in Ubuntu Linux. All packages with security
issues or bugs found are updated.
Why is that the case? Does Microsoft want you to run unpatched programs and stay permanently insecure? Probably not. However, the problem is more complex.
The majority of software you install in GNU/Linux is provided in packages built by the creators of your operating system. Upgrade of these packages is as easy and automatic as their installation or removal. A package manager like APT or yum takes care of those tasks without problems. It can check whether there are any new patches for any of the installed applications, and if so, download them from a public repository and apply changes to your system. All done automatically, almost without your interaction!
This scenario is a bit different in every major distro, but the idea is the same. In Ubuntu, for instance, a nice and not disturbing alert is shown in the system notification area (system tray) when the patches are ready to install. It’s enough to accept the changes with a mouse click (giving the user password before, for security reasons) and they are installed in your system within minutes.
There have been many attempts to provide a similar framework for Windows. Google, for example, has its own package called Google Pack. It’s a collection of free (as in beer, not as in freedom) software made by Google and a few affiliated vendors. The updates are performed by the Google Updater, but of course they concern only those few supported apps. There are lots of programs which have their own upgrade mechanisms. Firefox has one, most firewalls and anti-virus software do. However, it’s almost impossible to ensure that all software installed on your Windows computer is secure and up-to-date (meaning: there are no known security holes that affect it) without doing the manual work mentioned before.
It is so hard to implement such an updater in Windows due to the fact that most software that Windows users run are not free (neither as in beer nor as in freedom). They are usually freeware, shareware, adware or totally commercial apps produced by independent vendors who do not allow others to take a look at their code and provide custom packages. To be precise, this problem exists in GNU/Linux as well, to a minimal extent. But there, you only need to manually take care of those apps which have been installed without using the package manager (i.e. proprietary software like Picasa or Crossover Office) and free software compiled from sources — the latter is rarely needed anymore due to large repositories maintained by common distros’ providers). In such case, a package manager cannot upgrade the software for you, since it doesn’t know anything about the apps installed in a non-standard way and the only one who can take care of the security of those apps is you or the program itself.
Most of the programs shipped with GNU/Linux distributions are free as in freedom and as in beer which except all other things mean that you get instant access to any security patches automatically, when using a smart software manager. And in Windows… you still need to use hammers and anvils.
5. System failures — coping with bugs and crashes
Every desktop operating system crashes. Nobody can avoid it while using software with such high level of complexity, even Microsoft. There may be hundreds of cases — wireless network stops working without an apparent reason, another time the hibernated computer doesn’t want to wake up. Drivers cause instability, as well, if badly written or applied to unsupported hardware. Installed programs overwrite settings of other applications, causing them to behave abnormally, etc. There are plenty of reasons for such incidents. I’m sure everyone of you at least once has encountered a strange message box with some completely out-of-scope information that “something did not succeed” or even some blank pop-up windows appearing during your system’s start-up process.
This happens in GNU/Linux, MS Windows, MacOS, Haiku, Syllabe and others. The operating system has nothing to do with it. What the operating systems can do however is to provide the means to cope with those problems in a standard way. I will be frank here. MS Windows is the only OS in which I simply cannot diagnose most of the errors. I’m sorry but I don’t have a slightest idea where I should look for when my driver crashes or some software works in an unstable manner. Really. And here is why.
Full automation
Windows systems have been designed with “normal” users in mind. It does its best to hide most of the low-level operations like mounting file systems, running daemons (programs running in background) or even installing hardware drivers (the famous “plug & play”). The Windows OS always attempts to do things automatically. Another Microsoft rule states that it is not the user who should make decisions in matters he or she is not competent enough. This concerns things like choosing a file system (NTFS is the a de facto standard), sound system, preferred desktop environment, default applications or settings, etc. And this is all very thoughtful (no irony here!). Full automation is what the desktop operating systems should enable. So, the Microsoft system does a pretty good job in making decisions for its users and taking actions without their knowledge and acceptance. This approach (in most cases) makes lives of many unaware users much easier — they have one extra problem solved for them for no cost. Unfortunately (yes, there’s always a ‘but’), there is one major issue with this approach. When the magic fails, detecting the reason of the failure and fixing it manually may be hell. Used to automation, we trust the OS blissfully. We don’t know what kind of operations our system performs and thus, we can hardly do something reasonable when things go wrong. Indeed, it is not easy to find a cause when we don’t even know where to look at!
Most of the GNU/Linux distributions work in a somewhat different manner. Most of the magic is still there, but this is the user who decides whether to use it or not. This way, most of the operations usually performed by wizards and background processes can be performed manually without a problem (provided that one possesses the knowledge required for such tasks) by editing configuration files or using some lower level console based helper apps. This way, the user who needs automation still gets it… but he’s not condemned to using it! Hope the difference is clear enough.
Pic.2 MS Access error. Here we have a slight chance — the app
returned an error code!
System logs
Trying to examine a cause of error in MS Windows is somewhat like searching for a needle in a hay stack. The main reason for this is a lack of detailed system logging, for registering all the incidents that occur while running the OS. On the contrary, in GNU/Linux, every time the OS detects some incompatible video driver, corrupted networking configuration, or references to some non-existent/protected files, an appropriate message is stored in a special log explaining what happened. Thus, it is much easier to analyze the cause or errors and prepare the plan of recovery. And even if the error message does not mean anything to you, there is always a fair chance that they can be understood by a specialist (and you can contact them through forums, IRC and such). Even the creators of first UNIX systems back in 70’s understood that appropriate logging is the key factor in the OS. Unfortunately, MS Windows still lacks this basic functionality and the seldom-helpful event logging system available in XP puts a smile on the faces of UNIX experts around the world.
Verbose and debug mode
Most Windows programs (even as simple as Notepad or Paint) have a closed source code which more or less eliminates the possibility to perform any serious code debugging and error analysis. Proprietary applications are just supposed to work. If they don’t, the manufacturer needs to correct those errors, which obviously can take months or even never happen. Open source programs, on the other hand, are written with community in mind. They usually allow for running an application in verbose or debug mode, this way enabling user to see all operations the program is performing at the moment.
Pic.3 Internet Explorer critical error. When we encounter this
the only thing we can do is call Bill the Great
Console mode recovery
The console is a powerful feature of GNU/Linux and UNIX in general and I’m going to cover its role in detail in part III of this article. For now, I just want to mention that it’s irreplaceable in case of major system crashes.
It happens every now and then that the GUI stops responding to any mouse gestures or key strokes. Usually the problem is that some single program (process) took the whole processor activity making all other processes unresponsive for a while. If the problem is more severe, for instance the program enters an infinite loop or tries to use a corrupted driver, the only option may simply be to kill it (force close). In Windows you usually do it by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL and manually closing the program from the Task Manager window. Unfortunately, if the Task Manager doesn’t respond, we can hardly do anything but wait.
Not anymore, if you’re using GNU/Linux. In Linux you can always drop the graphical mode and switch to console mode by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1. It often works even if the GUI seems unresponsive. When you are already logged into the console, you can easily check which program is causing the instability (top, ps, and lsof commands are useful here) and kill it manually (kill -9 process_id). Moreover, even if the console doesn’t want to show up or works extremely slowly (this may happen in case of very severe accidents) you can still connect to your computer remotely from another machine (of course you need another machine in your network to do so :P) and execute the same kill command over a remote SSH connection. This works just fine and in majority of cases, can rescue you from forcing the manual reboot and thus, risking your precious data. It always surprises me that after the nasty app is killed, the desktop comes back just as if nothing happened and I can get back to normal work immediately.
Nice thing, right? Status in MS Windows: not yet implemented.
Error logging and debugging give us – the users – a chance to detect almost any unwanted system behavior and fix it manually or ask someone to fix it for us (e.g. on the Usenet, IRC or online forums). It’s way easier to find errors when we know what has failed. In case of a Windows black-box, we can only guess what might have gone wrong and try to find the possible cause. You can choose the approach that sounds more sane to you.
6. Performance
Performance… this is a tricky one. Your mileage may vary a lot here, so I’m going to talk only about my personal experience with using Windows and Linux system on my own hardware. I always test the hardware I’m about to buy for compatibility with Linux (Windows compatibility is provided by default anyway).
One thing strikes me about Windows XP on the boxes I tried using it. It is really slow! Even on a computer like Pentium III with 256 MB RAM. And this is not an ancient configuration! On older hardware it’s even worse, usually unusable. If you want to use Windows operating system with 128 MB (or less) of RAM, the only “reasonable” choice is to use one of the older and unsupported versions (like Windows 98). This makes you immediately vulnerable to hundreds of worms and malware if you connect to the Internet. Actually, connecting to the Internet from a Windows 98 box is a domain of extreme sports enthusiasts and declared suiciders.
Pic.4 Gkrellm
So, why is Windows XP so slow? There are many good reasons, actually. First of all, if you want to securely connect it to the Internet, you need an anti-virus and a custom firewall (the default one is a sorry-one-direction-only-firewall-like toy) and some anti-spyware tools. This slows things down a lot, especially when the on-access scan is enabled and you do not have a fast enough hard drive and tons of unused RAM to spare. Secondly, there is really no sensible way to use a window manager lighter than the default one in Windows. Microsoft has decided for us which windowing system is the best to use and made it very hard (if not impossible) to run the alternatives (and no, Litestep is no real alternative). Specialized GNU/Linux distros can work even on a PC with a 486 processor and 8MB of RAM — and this is a configuration from 15 years ago! You need a smart distro for that (like Damn Small Linux or DeLi Linux), but it’s still possible, usable and (what is very important in terms of security) supported. What is more, a Pentium II computer with 128 MB of RAM can handle any modern Linux distribution without losing much performance (with a sensible choice of desktop and applications, of course). Sure that your desktop won’t be as trendy as XP with its peaceful desktop theme, yet you’ll be able to use it for real tasks without the continuous “swapping” (in case of XP and 2000), or blue screens and data loss in case of some earlier editions. You can find more information about Linux and old PCs in the article GNU/Linux on old hardware on our vortal.
The latest version of Redmond OS, Windows Vista, will be completely unusable on older PCs. That is, older then 1GHz processor with 512 MB of RAM. GNU/Linux, thanks to the exchangeable desktop and system components, will work on such a configuration for a very long time. Thus, the owners of older PCs that use Windows XP or 2000 will need to make an important decision soon: whether to buy new hardware or use an unsupported OS, with no security patches. Perhaps, migrating to GNU/Linux will be the best (the only reasonable) option then…
To be continued…
This is the end of the second part of this article. I’m sorry that it took me so long to translate it from Polish, but I hope you still liked it and will wait for the last part in which we’re going to cover the following issues:
- working in console mode,
- remote desktop access,
- ideological differences between MS Windows and GNU/Linux,
- the price and the TCO of both systems.
- the conclusion (I hope I manage to write one :P)
Read also:
- Ten Reasons To Dump Windows [part I] (security, desktop usability, installing software)
- Ten Reasons To Dump Windows [part III] (power of console, remote access, philosophy, cost & TCO)
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Very usefull article! Thanks a lot!
XP is slow with 128MB Ram? Who would have known… BTW, have you ever tried running a Ubuntu Live CD on PC with 128MB Ram? Time from clicking the Firefox icon until Firefox starts: 3min.
Good article.
In the past I have been trying Ubuntu and I agree with your points of view.
Sure Microsoft have a lot of good things, but the freedom in Linux is by far bigger, and definitely in apps that you talk in these article Linux in ahead of Windows, I’m only sorry that Linux don’t have more software available, like 3D CAD software.
Chris, try to compare Ubuntu install in the disk with XP, not the Live CD (CD mode is always slow than run the Operating System from the disk, because the velocity of the hard disk is a lot bigger than the CD velocity). You definitely will see who is the inner.
“I’m only sorry that Linux don’t have more software available, like 3D CAD software.”
Take a look at qcad.
Linux has software for just about every task you can think of.
although quite superficial and for that too long, it’s a nice article. well, generally speaking everyone who manages to switch to linux will never come back to windows except for games, but time is required to make the change — one needs to get used to apps and find his way around. the funny thing is, except for games, any linux distro has everything that windows has and windows at that lacks every major feature of linux, and those it has redmond stolen from mac, which is a unix
and still all windows users will cry out how great their system is although have never tried anything else… out of ignorance and stupidity — I would not think out of love to ms.
@chris — you do not a slightest idea how live cd’s technically work — a full system with all apps works from memory and a cd (and if swap partition is available, it will use it). now imaging windows live cd with an average default windows boot (no apps) taking 200Mb and no swap available (it is a windows live cd, don’t forget, and there is no such thing as swap partition) — how this things is going to start at all, it will crash before even coming to loading drivers? you cannot compare an installed os (any) to a live cd (any)
@chris — XP on 128Mb — it will work, but if and only if, you tune the system. the default installs from dell, ibm, toshiba, acer, and worst of all sony load a bunch of useless apps pushing your _empty_ XP memory usage to 220Mb. if you kill those, terminate about 15 services (daemons), disable windows networking (serer, workstation, computer browser) — then and only then it will work on 128Mb consuming about 70. but just add at least a firewall (like kerio or spf) and those will take 10 more. if at this stage you feel unsafe (and most people do), add an antivirus — your 128Mb XP box is dead!
@Urbano, @salparadise — the unfortunate truth about the open source community is that in many cases the community dismisses (and thus does not support at all) all and any non-open-source software. this is unfortunate and as Urbano writes, there is really a lack of commercial software for any Linux distro in general. although this is not impossible (Google Earth, Xara) it will take time, but more importantly — larger user base — to make companies produce their software linux compatible. in many case though you can find quite good open source counterparts, but still there are too many specialized applications written specifically for windows to dismiss and forget the problem, and some of those are just genious, like coreldraw or archicad. but the things will change with time as more people (and more importantly — businesses) adopt linux thus forcing vendors to write corresponding soft
“I always test the hardware I’m about to buy for compatibility with Linux”
Linux is incompatible with 90% of Hardware)))
That’s just pure nonsense. Linux is in fact compatible with much more hardware Windows is. It’s just that Windows is being sold on compatible computers always, whereas Linux is usually installed on the same computers, which haven’t been checked for compatibility.
Hi to everybody reading this comment!
Todays night I’ve read all two articles and was actually impressed.. at first.
For about 5 years I used Linux on my desktop. That was different distributions: Red Hat 5 and 9, ASP Linux 7 and 9, Slackware 9 and X, LFS 4 and 5, Debian Sarge, Ubuntu 5.4, 5.10, and than finally got my decision MS Windows XP. And for two years I almost forgot about Linux. Until todays night.
Your article sounded very nice for me, be cause of several bugs in iexplorer, Media Player and Windows I had yesterday. So I took a shot at installing Kubuntu 6 as second OS on my laptop (HP Pavilion dv2035us). Choosing Kubuntu I thought about KDE, Amarok, Konqueror, Picassa (I didn’t knew that it works only through Wine).. and “developing something on the top of Linux using qt 4.2″:) Also I wanted to make it looks more like Mac OS.
I made all of this stuff, but… in the morning I am with Windows again. And this is why:
1. My cardreader and my webcam doesn’t work. Sound level is too low. I just don’t want to spend one more night for stupid customisations, kernel compiling and other stuff that bother me…
2. KDE - sux! Do you know why? Cause qt4 was released in the end of 2005 and KDE4 will only in 2007.
3. I hate all this default programs that shipped with Desktop Env. They are totally useless! But they located in the second level of menu.
4. If somebody saying that OO is cool office suit, please don’t believe him. He saying that because KOffice is a total shit and there is no cooler office in Linux.
5. I started Amarok and tried to play my mp3’s. It doesn’t work and I don’t care why.
6. Konqueror is ok, but it doesn’t work correct with gmail. And I still think that Web Browser and File Manager are not the same.
7. Kaffeine is bad. MPlayer is cool.
8. I used baghira theme. It still has bugs…
…
12056. There is no good PDF reader in Linux.
…
n
So I changed my mind in 20 minutes.
But I want you to understand me in correct way.
OS Linux is great but not on desktop! It has the classical philosophy of Unix and excellent kernel. But it has very good problems with GUI. BTW the only program I really liked was katapult+konsole.
There is no central GUI library. And XOrg is too old project to be quite good for now days. GUI (KDE or GNOME) works slow! Much slower than Windows.
You are saying that you can do eye candy from your Linux Desktop. I don’t believe you! Why? Because I saw tons of this Hackers-like super screenshots. Almost all of them super shit. And I did the same shit.
Somebody sad that windows is too heavy. It is not problem and it is not true also. Default installation is only 500MB. In Linux terms 500Mb is only console background with no GUI. You’ll say but this is only Windows without software. And I’ll say that it is better than all default shit of KDE or GNOME.
GUI rating:
1. Mac OS X
2. Windows XP
3. KDE or GNOME (other DE or WMs for IBM486)
So, dude, don’t tell me 10 reasons why I shoud begin sex with Linux! I know 1 million why I shoudn’t.
@Sasha Kravets: Yes, you are right about the speed of Xorg + either KDE or Gnome and yes, you are right about the stability of certain apps shipped with them by default (amaroK for example), especially on some of the more “experimental” distros (Gentoo, SuSE Community Edition, Fedora). But you forget one thing:
T h e y a r e f r e e
whereas most of the tools you would need as a replacement/substitute under Windows are not (Office costs money, OO does not). OO is worse than MS Office in some parts (speed, memory footprint for example) but better in others (and I have been using it since it was names Star Office (concurrently with MS Office)).
The default installation of Linux + apps can be cut down to much less if you decide to click more than three times during installation (i.e. selecting packages).
Concerning the PDF Reader: Just install Acrobat? It is virtually the same as under Windows -or am I missing something here? XPDF based apps have some limitations and the default PDF readers are based on this mostly, so…
The interface is still not as polished or commercial looking as Windows or Mac OS X, but –> see above. I am using Gnome, and except for some missing apps it does not feel buggy at all.
Some of the default apps are very usable (Totem, gthumb on Fedora for example).
Some of the codecs required to play certain filetypes can not be shipped because of licensing limitations, which are not the fault of Linux or the distro-makers. A mp3-codec must be bought/downloaded and installed on Windows externally as well -do the same on Linux and it will work.
I agree, that installing a default music-player which does not play music is really stupid and should not happen. Same goes for video (you need to postinstall codecs to make most of them usable (i.e. for mpeg and wmf-support).
Sorry, may be I was a kind of bow-wow style…
It’s because I was disappointed. Believe me, I know all about selecting packages… And I should say it take a lot of time just to see programs and choose one that suites your needs. And then make the same with libraries and their dependences.
I used linux only in console mode for a long time (I had low speed system): vim, mutt, links, mc, bash.
Then I tried GUI. I saw a lot of combinations WindowMaker, IceWM, FVWM and others, but I still used xterm, aterm … and other terms in combination with old console tools.
Old computer made me very exigent with software distribution. When I bought a new one I began to experiment with KDE and GNOME. And I disappointed in both of them. KDE seems stupid. When I used GNOME, it has a lot of bugs. May be now it’s different, but it’s still based on C and this is previous century…
I also saw Star Office and actually used it for some time on the top of Windows 98.. As for Office I am not against OO. Quite the contrary, I’m for the open and free documents standards. But this fucking docs tooo popular.
Acrobat Reader is toooo heavy program. And I don’t know why. I even afraid of running it under Linux:) In Windows I’m using Foxit Reader. Maybe it has less set of functions but it 3x faster!
Xpdf uses very old motif library. Everything that based on it is too buggy.
I’m just waiting for some innovative desktop env for linux, that will be as user friendly (but not stupid) as possible. Something like Apple did, not only GUI, but the philosophy of Desktop. The ideas are in the air, but…
If Microsoft will be first who finished DBFS idea. Linux as desktop will die, and MacOS will be hardly bitten.
“Performance… this is a tricky one.” Yup. That’s why you left out anything that puts a pixel on the screen in X. Oh yes I have seen XGL/Compiz. It’s nice, fairly fast, and packs a lot of ooh and ahh. But really isn’t that complex of rendering. It’s a simple cube. I’ve yet to see a full featured game that preforms better in Linux than windows. And that’s not comparing DirectX to OpenGL. OpenGL games on Windows preform better than OpenGL games on Linux in my experience.
But in general if it’s not about rendering things to the screen, yes performance is better. However that isn’t a really big selling point for most Windows users. But then most Windows users aren’t going to read this article anyway. They seldom stray far from Yahoo, MSN, Myspace, YouTube, and Photo Bucket. Articles like this are pointless outside of that context. Word of mouth and media attention, in my experience are what grows Linux amongst the average person.
On my computer I got Ubuntu 6.06 installed together with win XP. Why the f* do you think I am keeping XP????
To tell you the truth I was surprised how much more responsive and faster Windows is after I came from Ubuntu trip.
You guys know that, you just can’t reconcile yourself with it.
The second reason one *might* use leenucks is because it’s ‘open source’. No it f* isn’t. It’s GPLed and that means it is useless if you want to make any money out of it.
Your f* ego don’t allow you to use real ‘open source’ software. And that software just happens to be the most secure OS ever. It is OpenBSD. It’s million times safer than bug ridden leenucks world. You don’t use (and develop) it just because of your EGO!
Linux = Cancer
BSD > Linux
Thank you.
Theo? You got drunk again?
This article has been slightly helpful to me, as I am currently looking around for a Linux to possibly put on a partition.
I have considered switching to Linux, but, being an avid gamer, I hoped to find something SOMEwhere that could provide me with a way to play games like CounterStrike, Civilization, and Empire Earth, among others, on Linux.
I understand that the fundamental problem is that developers don’t make money off games that don’t run on Windows, but there must be some way to run such games on Linux without serious performance hikes, and I intend to keep an eye out for one.
@Nortthan Bassanese
Try Cedega for gaming (lots of work to get it done) or buy a commercial version at Transgaming (I think it’s $5 a month to play nearly all popular Windows games under Linux)
Sasha Kravets, your blasting of GNU/Linux can only convincing to anyone who’s never used it.
You said:
“So I changed my mind in 20 minutes.”
You know what, any possible sympathy just goes out of the window (sic).
20 minutes :-))))))))))))))))))))
@michuk
Why dontch’ya use some decent spellchecker? OOo would do. I like yr translation very much; it is grammatically and idiomatically almost perfect, but why d’ya not smooth it out with a spellchecking program of some kind is a deep mystery to me.
@sasha.kravets
You’d better install SUSE Linux (or SLED) — it hast got all you need; no hassle with packages, aso. Just tell’em what kind of system d’ya want, and in 30′ flat you’ve got it installed and running.
StarOffice on W98 is not a good idea. Maybe you’d like to read a little about systems and software. BTW, you have paid for yr StarOffice, haven’t you? Good boy. So pick your phone and give Sun a call.
Foxit is small and buggy. Fed with legitimate PDF code it usually dies. If you are a hoobyist you can use it; if you have to work with PDF data you’d be crazy to even touch it.
The DBFS died six years ago. If you knew Cairo, you’d know what I am writing about. Your ranting about it here shows that you’re nothing but a stupid troll. I wish you the best for you future way thru IT, but you’d better not try to be smarter than you are.
@ecadre
You are right - Sasha is a troll. I am afraid we are feeding him.
Oops. I just noticed that. I always check spelling with
aspell -c -l en_US filename. Must have forgotten this time but it’s fixed already. Thanks.I continue to use Windows XP as (sorry…) I play Everquest 2. I have found nothing to allow me to run it in Linux as of yet. No Caleda doesn’t work…been there done that. So I set up another box to do the linux. Its fine. It does the job, and I login in SSH and such and do all kinds of work from home and work. Although , when the day comes and someone gets it right I will switch to Linux so I can play my Everquest 2 there.
Sasha is quite right: the Linux desktop is inadequate.
I am a student photographer who happens to know a good bit about unix and linux boxes; I manage my photo work on my own linux fileservers and do network administration at a large University. I have long been frustrated with the instability and stupidity of Windows and turned to Linux early (I tried Suse version 2 in ‘95). Unfortunately I’ve never found any Linux desktop configuration to be full-featured enough, nor quick enough, to compete with Windows XP. Further, the Linux desktop (xorg + a stable version of whatever desktop env. or window manager one chooses) has nearly always been less stable than a Windows XP box. Consider my current situation that disproves point five in the ten-point list.
I was stuck with a Mac at work because the world’s dumbest computer users think my taking pretty photographs entails a preference for apple’s stuff and so my well-meaning boss bought me a machine he thought I’d like. He wasn’t doing me a favor. Mac OS X’s interface is pitifully slow so I’m ditching it for ppc64 linux which, despite its shortcomings, is worlds better than the Mac OS.
I’ve got my base system configured just the way I like it and am now building a my window manager of choice, fluxbox. Xorg has proven to be pretty unstable and I’m having some trouble working out the quirks in the ati xorg server (Windows users read: display drivers). I ssh’d in to “kill -9 {x}” to get back to the command line and try some different settings. I killed the X process but the box didn’t return to the command line. I checked the processes again in top and ps and found that X’s process has become a zombie. Linux desktop proponents don’t want you Windows people to know this, but such processes — marked with a ‘D’ in ps — necessitate a reboot to be rid of them. Haha, sounds familiar, huh? I starting writing this just after I issued the shutdown command and just now (10 minutes later) the box is finally rebooting. Fantastic!
This sort of thing is pretty common in the Linux desktop world. To be sure, there are scads and scads of bulletin boards on the net filled with posts about these kinds of problems and possible fixes. My experience is by no means isolated and, for the most part, I know what I’m doing in *nix land.
As previously mentioned by Sasha, the Linux desktop provides few applications that match Windows equivalents in features and performance. My pro photo work requires the use of Photoshop; programs like the Gimp are primitive in comparison.
Koffice and Open Office lack essential features (like track changes) that my professors use when evaluating my student papers. Simple windows apps that make life easy — trillian, winamp, nero, powedvd, etc. — are equally superior to Linux counterparts (gaim or kopete, xmms, K3b or cdrecord, mplayer or Xine or Ogle). Back when I fancied myself an anti-windows freedom fighter, I’d argue that one could get around the differences between Windows and Linux programs with a bit of ingenuity and that the “stability” environment (which is largely a phantasm) made up for applications’ shortcomings. These days I am more interested in getting my work done, messing with Linux apps just wastes my time.
mike: and which distribution did you use? probably some fancy new one like FC6 or openSUSE 10.1, right? Or perhaps even Arch or Gentoo?
Try a STABLE Linux distro like Debian Sarge or even Ubuntu Dapper and you won’t have those problems anymore. Experimental distros are for those who don’t mind a crash every now and then. Stable ones are for the ones who want their work done.
About the apps — how come haven’t you noticed that OpenOffice.org has EXACTLY the same changes tracking as MS Office? If your professor used OO, as well, you wouldn’t have any problems with cooperation.
K3B or Gimp not comparable with Nero or Photoshop? Give me a break. Name any essential features you lack and it will probably turn out that they are available as plugins or in standard version.
What I’m saying is not that Linux has no failures and Windows is crap. They are comparable in most of the cases (maybe except the price, freedom, configurability and commercial vendors’ support) but saying that Linux on desktop “just wastes time” is totally false. If you could not make use of it, it doesn’t mean it’s not useful for lots of others (including me).
Mike again (I posed #21).
The purpose of my original post was to deter folks from ditching Windows for the Linux desktop. This post might add some more details that help my previous argument, but its main purpose is to refute Michuk and his erroneous rebuttle.
First, my experience with Linux is extensive enough to encompass the use of all major distributions. Remember, Michuk, I’m a sysadmin. Here is a list of linux distributions and versions I can recall having used on desktop boxes: Redhat; RHEL; Suse; Slackware; Debian potato, woody, and sarge; Mandrake; Caldera (before SCO); LFS; Crux; and Gentoo. Some distributions are far less stable than others — Mandrake is the worst I think, Debian might be the best — but even the most stable desktop configurations I’ve tried are no more stable than XP.
A reason for this is that rock-solid *nix yields to the instability of Xorg itself and xorg-server problems (my box’s hard crash while running X shows that X can hose things so bad that the console is inaccessible). A lot of companies, for instance ATI, won’t give Linux driver developers (kernel or Xorg people) hardware specifications so the developers have to reverse engineer compatibility for that stuff. Sometimes, as is the case with ATI, the company will provide closed-source drivers for Linux. But neither the closed-source handout, nor the reverse engineered drivers are as stable as the Windows XP version. Graphics card companies (ATI, nvidia) have their interests almost completely tied up in providing optimized products for Windows machines. They can’t stay competitive and provide quality support for multiple platforms because that just costs too much money. So the Linux community scabs together compatibility that is second-rate when compared to what the company itself offers for the XP platform.
As I alluded to previously, the instability of graphics drivers and Xorg itself mitigates the stability of the rest of the system. Even the most stable collections of core OS tools can’t withstand a good X crash, so the problem I’ve outlined can’t really be escaped by using Debian Sarge as Michuk suggests.
The greater game of Linux desktop stability really becomes looking for hardware that is fully supported and applying kernel patches and configuration tweaks to get the system working properly. Even if one checks compatibility before purchasing hardware it’s still possible to get burned. I recently bought a DFI lanparty RDX200, a respectable socket 939 motherboard with a lot of good features. Unfortunately, the sky2 driver for one of its onboard gigabit lan cards is buggy; sometimes the box just locks up. For experienced people like me this is just a pain in the butt (I’ll swap this board out or buy another lan card), but for newcomers problems like these are likely to be insurmountable.
I’d like to say something more about apps. Michuk suggests that Open Office is a worthy replacement for MS Office, he even says that it has the same track changes feature. That’s fantastic except that they’re incompatible! I suppose he thought of this (he suggests that my professor use OO so that we can have compatibility). I really like the idea of championing the cause for OO in order to switch to it. Perhaps I’ll start petitioning university departments to change and hold anti-MS rallies so that OO can gain enough popularity to make it usable for me. I’ll start work on the e-propaganda.
The Photoshop v. Gimp contention is ridiculous. I use photoshop for professional work so its stability and features are essential: they make me more efficient and thus more profitable. Suggesting the Gimp to a pro photographer as a worthy replacement is like telling a Computer Scientist to use pascal instead of C++ to code up real apps. How ludicrous! Does the gimp have a camera raw plugin up to par with Photoshop CS2’s? No, “ufraw” is awful AND slow. Color range selection tools, color profile compatibility, etc. are missing from the GIMP. The GIMP also does not include anything like Adobe Bridge, a tool invaluable to photographers. Finally, the GIMP is clunky and slow. I spent over $3,000 on computing equipment and over $10,000 on photo equipment to do professional digital photography, I’m not going to let a second-rate, unsupported app rule over my digital workflow and waste my efforts.
Finally, Michuk misquoted me. My closing statement was “.. messing with Linux apps just wastes my time.” Michuk changed that to “[using Linux] just wastes time”, attributing to me a general claim something like “using a Linux desktop is a waste of time for anyone.” He then refutes this bogus claim. Nice work, tool; it’s too bad this is erroneous reasoning. It even has a name! (see “the straw man fallacy”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man).
Of course Michuk finds the Linux desktop sufficient, he’s a programmer! Insofar as programming tools are concerned, the Linux desktop is rad; remember, I am currently building a Linux desktop box at work where I will do nothing but web development. However, I find that for my pro photo work, university writing assignments, and more general computing needs (burning DVDs, home video editing, watching movies, etc.) Linux cannot cut it. Hopefully someday this’ll change and I can break free from MS slavery; however, the Linux desktop just can’t compete.
I always buy PC hardware that is Linux compatile with high quality open source drivers. I don’t need NVidia or ATI — I use Intel cards that are 100% Linux compatible. Same goes for WiFi support and other hardware that may cause problems due to lack of quality OSS drivers. And this is what I recommend everyone to do. If more and more people support the manufacturers taht care for the users (by providing FOSS drivers), more and more manufacturers are going to go open source.
Mike, it looks like we just have completely different requirements from a desktop PC and as you say — at the moment Linux is not a choice for you due to specific software requirements.
For special requirements, there will always be cases that only one OS is the real choice. I.e. for astronomists, physics and lots of other scientists, Linux is the best option due to the number of tools it provides. For graphics people, Windows is still the only choice, and so on.
However, from my observations, it seems that very few people have such requirements. Most regular users (I’d guess that it’s 60-70%) just need a stable machine that is capable of doing office, multimedia and web browsing. Linux is a great choice for those needs.
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