Linux future

[Havin_it]

I know you weren't trolling ilia.

 

Trolling is when you say Adriano has a stupid beard and paul likes wearing women's clothing and iphitus can't make a peanut butter and condensed milk sandwich to save his life.

 

My (not very educated) point of view on making life easy for yourself when installing Linux, is start with generic kit. My laptop has a bog-standard Intel graphics card, AC'97 audio, everything's integrated, Realtek 8139 NIC, even the Wifi card I bought was the cheapest generic effort on the market. And it just worked. Notice how many people have headaches with hi-end stuff like Nvidia/ATI cards, Gigabit NICs, TV cards, yaddayadda? I believe the cheapo whiteboxen is Linux's greatest friend. (Maybe that's why Dell buys Redhat shares...)

 

BTW to guys mentioned above - J/K!!!! I can flamebait way better than that when I want to, I used to be on a warezboard.

[Guest Adriano1]

Off-topic'ing this, but no. What you talk about is a particular form of trolling: "insulting". But anything written explicitly to elicit angry responses is trolling, be it about my beard or cross dressing, or about the state of the Linux Desktop.

[arctic]

We're cool by me. And I notice that the people of the board have turned what could have been a (short lived, we do have mods) flamewar into a useful account of experiences. A cheer to you all :)

 

now i want to add something, concerning speed. take e.g. my old box that ran on win98 and win-me. after a clean install, it booted relatively fast. but then i had to add the graphics driver, sound driver, virus protection, networking drivers, firewall, registry cleaner, etc. the result was that after installing all those necessary applications, the systems boot-time decreased. it took almost double to triple time until everything was loaded and ready for work.

now take a look at a linux-system: you boot the system and everything important (all drivers) will be loaded immediately instead of piece for piece. so, when you get to the desktop, it IS ready for work. no big need to wait for dozens of drivers to load.

you might have the impression that windows boots faster because you already see the desktop, but this is only an impression. in reality, linux boots as fast or faster than windows. (at least on my boxes)

 

oh... and then in a linux-os, there is not the continuous pop-up "your virus-guard is older than XX days, please update it". that is the thing that always annoyed me in windows.

[ilia_kr]

Off-topic'ing this, but no. What you talk about is a particular form of trolling: "insulting". But anything written explicitly to elicit angry responses is trolling, be it about my beard or cross dressing, or about the state of the Linux Desktop.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

The line "prove that i'm wrong" was written to ecourage you do discuss the topic, not to offend, in a matter of a fact it was sort of humor not insult.

 

P.S. read my edited topic from today :D

[arctic]

The line "prove that i'm wrong" was written to ecourage you do discuss the topic, not to offend.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

i believe most users know that you only wanted to encourage a discussion. otherwise we wouldn't have that many answers right now. :)

 

so... my dear community, please stop that "trolling" discussion, which is somehow but concentrate on the linux vs. other os's discussion.

[arctic]

oh, i just stumbled upon these articles from tux-magazine that i nearly had forgotten. maybe they will be of any interest to you.

part one of the story http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000133

part two of the story http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000134

 

happy reading

[linux_learner]

heres a post i wrote at another forum.

 

But that's what I mean, I just never need to dive that deeply into the matter to fumble with the registry, I just use it and for what I need the computer it's enough.

 

 

Security is a big issue for me, I get daily updates for my antivirus program and I also have a firewall installed. When I say virus, it's the kind that come with emails which I delete immediately, I didn't mean to say that I ever had my system infected, sorry for the misunderstanding.

 

It's just my two cents as a Windows user who is not euphoric about this system, but also not in desperate need for a change. I'm going to see if Linux will be able to convince me or not, at least I can access the internet in Linux now, so that helps. Also thank god I found a forum where I get my answers answered, I don't know really many in real life who uses Linux and specifically Suse. The only person I actually know who uses Suse and who I can bug with questions is a penpal (and damn it, that was him who said Suse is so easy :lol: I should have known it, every time he says it's easy he's talking from the point of view of someone who studied computer technology and who's working with robots, not from someone who doesn't even know what the Windows registry really is about. Serves him right I'm killing him with trivial questions now. :lol:)

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

currious, i never made images. so in that respect, your more "geekish" than i.

 

you talk about how you dont have to dive deeply, but then mention the registry. i gave several examples, the registry being only one. now what about "the complete idiots guide to windows--" and "windows-- for dummies"? millions of users have blought those books. learning how to maximize, restore, minimize and close windows.

 

your avoiding the point. the point is, you still have to take time to learn the OS. in windows there are things that you have to learn in order just to run the system, that you do not need to know in linux.

 

you say security is a big issue, yet you get viruses.the verry fact that you get viruses is indicative of some bad habbits. i am quite aware of what kind of virus you get. viruses usually come in email attachments. viruses have to be downloaded and opened. you doing this tells me that you have some bad habbits.

 

when i started my transition to linux, i didnt know alot about linux. i barely knew what ntfs was. i was certainly no geek. at that time, all linux was, was just kind of a toy to me. something i'd never heard of, so i was currious about. this was back in the day before apt, urpmi, swaret, or emerge. dependancy hell ruled the land. for those of yo familiar with linux, slack 7.1 is when i started.

 

i can remember having to compile my first driver to get my winmodem working. hal? whats a hal? how do i find that? whats a chipset? so i can relate to "at least I can access the internet in Linux now".

 

i've had to slowly unlearn my windows habbits. like reboot, to fix a problem. or if its real bad, format and reinstall.

 

i mentioned earlier about images and that i didnt know about them, at least until about a year and a half ago (my work uses images. that where i first saw them). linux also does images. partimage. its quite similar to norton ghost.

 

now before you go and think that linux is to hard, my 7 year old girl and my wife use linux. neither are geeks. both are less knowledgable about computers then you. my wife has managed to successfully fix a couple problems on her own.

 

its not that linux is anymore hard, its that linux is different. this is one of my pet peives about windows users comming over to linux. saying that linux should be easier, more like windows. there are reasons why we consider linux anyway. to make linux like windows defeats that purpose. try suse 7.0 or before to get a feel of the way things were 5 years ago. no hotplugger, no apt. i guess this would be like having to edit *.init files in windows (which i can remember doing).

 

when i first installed slack 7.0, i ended up calling tech support to get it installed. only to find out i had over complicated things. back then, i didnt have forums, and the support i got from the net was irc. in which their typical responce was RTFM.

 

what i know about windows, i've had to teach myself. listen to me here. i've had to teach myself. learning windows, took a long time and was just as frightening and frustrating. in the end, it was that i cant go fix things to the extent i can in linux. in windows you are limited as to what you can and can not do.

 

for example, i can make windows extremely secure. almost as secure as linux, where viruses become a non issue, but doing this has huge consequences.

 

i have also trashed linux. i have trashed it to what i thought was the point where i had to reinstall. when you trash about 300 packages, then your in a position to either reinstall, or learn a hell of a lot. technically, i could fix that. as long as i have the kernel, its fixable. since i've been in suse (about a year and a half now. since 9.0), i've never had to reinstall.

 

when you run into the ntfs.drv problem, there is no solution but to reinstall windows. the recovery console will not see the partition. there are other problems with windows where reinstall is the only solution.

 

when i first got XP, i was euphoric. people mistook me for an XP salesman :blink: i beta tested XP, then liked it so much i bought it. then the tide turned with sp1. i saw how M$ sat on a vulnerability and told people not to disclose it to the world (uplddrvinfo.htm in the pchealth directory). they sat on that and squelched that info for 11 months. i wrote M$ and told them "never again". i told them, i'd never buy another M$ product again. this was only one of many reasons why i dropped M$. alot of it had to do with stability. when you spend all day, fixing and maintaining your system, thats no fun. thats exactly what i had to do with windows. ME was nigtmarish. XP at least i could work with.

[tyme]

[Ghil Vertefeuille]

I was talking about that with a friend the other day. He said how "easy" his XP was, how speedy and powerful. Then...half an hour later, he was there, still on his computer, fixing yet another problem that had come up during updates. When I talked about Linux, he just gave me the eternal answer: "Linux is for geeks, I don't have the time to be playing around all day just to get something working" and then I answered: "what are you doing, again?"

 

It's there he understood. It wasn't because Linux wasn't easy...it was because it was different. People tend to fear what they don't know...unfortunately.

 

I was reinstalling my system last week. I had to double boot XP/Mandriva, because fo my family. It took me 4 hours to get XP installed, I always had problems. Hardware, drivers, updates not working, virus (12 minutes to get a virus after installing the system... wow o_0) and one or two corrupted files, I had it all. It took me...half an hour to get Mandy working? with updates, and every programs installed, you can count 2 hours. and after that, I took 2 hours to get every programs my family wanted on Windows. what a long night it was o_0

 

So when I got my friend on the phone, the day after, I told him "You know what? XP isn't for me...I played around all night trying to get this thing working o_0 how can you work with that?"

 

he laughed :P

[ianw1974]

I actually prefer Linux now, since I've spent a lot more time on it, persevered, and learnt more. Learnt being the key word here.

 

In addition to this there is the speed, and a number of things factor this. First, EXT3, ReiserFS and XFS are faster than NTFS as a file system. So obviously, accessing your disk is faster. In terms of booting, I'm not sure, I've not bothered to time it. I've dropped Windows altogether now, other than I need it for VPN as I've not figured this out in Linux yet.

 

Some other things that contribute to speed, or probably usability is that you don't need to virus-scan, nor do you have to worry about spyware. So, instead of scanning for these, plus defragmenting the hard disk, which you have to do regularly in Windows anyway, I've got more time for productivity, than messing around with maintenance tasks such as these.

 

How much time do I save? Probably about an hour with scanning for viruses, if not longer. Plus perhaps 20 minutes with scanning for spyware, and about 30 minutes to an hour with defragmenting. So that's two hours of maintenance tasks in Windows, that I can say, maybe watch a movie, send emails and browsing the web, etc, when using Linux :P (and probably lots more things too!). Not that you could do this with Windows! You've got your maintenance to complete.....

[foot]

Though Mandriva is faster to install (by a mile) and rebooting is extremely rare in a session, I do find the initial booting up slower than Windows. Nothing fails to load during the booting sequence :unsure: and everything runs fine.

 

Ironically enough, it struck me that the problems I had during the last install of Windows were exactly the sort of things that linux distros gets criticised for i.e. horrible font rendering, drivers not being recognised (REALLY annoying when you've lost the disk) and misconfiguring hardware. I guess I could live with the scanning, but the idea of having to manually pick out spyware because two spyware programs missed it puts me right off.

 

I guess, to be fair, its a lot about the age of Windows XP, but as Longhorn is a long way off and threatening everyone with the whole Trusted Computing palaver, the choice is very much of a no-brainer.

 

edit: Thanks for the tip re: systray

Edited June 13, 2005 by foot

[phunni]

I far prefer Linux for several reasons but I still use windows as my main OS for several reasons - the main one being that it (mostly) just works.

 

A fully working Linux system would be far prefereable to me, but I simply don't have the time to tweak all the things that don't work out of the box... I'm going to have even less time soon as my first child is on the way...

 

I used Linux exclusively for about 2 years and then chose to go back to windows. Maybe one day I'll go back. I've had no problems with viruses or spyware and I only accept certain updates so I've had no problems there either. Perhaps I've been lucky and maybe I'll be driven back to Linux in frustration one day - although I use my home PC less & less so I can't see it happening any time soon.

 

I still use Linux on my home server though - wouldn't put anything else on a server...

 

I do also have an install of arch on my desktop which I occasionally boot into - but I don't have the time to play so much these days...

[DragonMage]

As far as stability and flexibility, Linux has Windows beat.

 

Here is something I experienced a few weeks back. There was a donation of five old computers (Compaq Deskpro, P3-500, 128 MB RAM, 10 GB HD). I was tasked to make them work so that means installing OS, Office, etc.

 

Now, as usual, Compaqs that old usually have a sticker "Built for Windows 98" in the casing. Based on my experience with old Compaqs, they were not kidding when the computers are built for Windows 98. Everything should be detected with no additional drivers needed. So I installed Win98SE. The installation goes smoothly enough, but during the first run, it basically hangs whenever I tried to read the CD-ROM (in order to install additional software of course).

 

I thought to myself, "What the?!" and then I tried installing Mandrake 10.1 in those computers. The installation, as usual, is smooth, but it again experienced random lockup. At least it goes longer than Windows 98, but it locks up during heavy use such Updates, running OO.o, etc.

So I figured there has to be something wrong in the hardware configuration, but why does the installation run smoothly for both cases?

 

After an hour or so of tweaking, I found a combination in Mandrake that doesn't cause any lockup. It seems that I have to use Vesa driver for X.org instead of the S3Trio64 driver. With that knowledge, even though the screen is a bit horrible (stuck at 60 Hz), I can run that computer for hours without lockup, running OpenOffice, video, audio, and stuffs. KDE is a bit slow for my taste, but hey.. what do you expect for 128 MB of RAM?

 

Windows just doesn't have the flexibility to tweak until you find something that works.

[ilia_kr]

Look, i've worked with win95/98SE/ME/2000/XP at home and at work and i've never encountered serious problems with the drivers. I used only that drivers that were shipped by a hardware supplier, with the hardware you can find at any PC shop.

 

About installing windows: i had several probles indeed, but only when i installed 'warez' versions, not the genuine ones.

 

Installing time: i've set a dual boot system on my pentium ll (MDK10.1 & winXP).

It took me about a hour to install windows and the same for MDK(3 discs set).

 

Anyway, the topic isn't about Windows' advantages on Linux, its about spesific one: most people that i know prefer windows beause its easyness. To use it, you should not be computer geek or something. Moreover, i agree with what phunni said: you do not alwais have enough time to 'play' with linux, it is for professionals. Unless Linux will be more appealing to an average user - it won't be a number one OS.

 

:D

[Ghil Vertefeuille]

This isn't true...at all.

 

I made some friends switch just because I showed them how easy it was to use Linux, when you know a little about it. (Is there any easiest way to install something then Urpmi? seriously?)

 

The thing is, everyone is tending to say it's more difficult because it is different. Change is always hard to accept, and even more when it's a big change like passing from Windows to Linux.

 

Yes, there are drawbacks to using linux, like some CLI things to know, wich you don't have to know in Windows. but in Windows, you have to learn somethings that you don't have to use on Linux, like getting rid of those spywares, wich can be complicated at times (I remember having to play in regedit like an hour to remove one that even Ad-aware and Spybot couldn't get rid of)

 

So what is the main disadvantage of Linux over windows to me? it's different. that's all there is to it. Mandriva installs like a charm, is easy to use/maintain, the only thing that required absolutely to go in CLI was updating my nVidia driver...the others things I had to do or do today have a GUI, and a pretty good gui at that...

 

Edit: Oh and while I'm at it, I precise: When I had a ton of problem to install XP, it was a genuine version ;)

Edited June 13, 2005 by Ghil Vertefeuille