My friend just installed Ubuntu on his laptop last night, and we were disappointed to see that it didn’t support TV-out for his video card or WPA for his wireless network. We had to reconfigure the network to use WEP instead.
Right now, the biggest problem with Linux is that it isn’t a gaming machine. Very few games are ported to Linux or are written for Linux to begin with, and practically none of the most hyped titles are. This will change over time, but it is a problem right now.
Linux shines when you want to get work done and don’t want to be bothered with crashes, worms, viruses, and so on. It’s actually a technophobe’s dream: Why worry about the latest virus when you could be surfing the Internet, sending email, and working in a word processor? (OpenOffice.org ships with many Linux disks and it is compatible with Word documents even modern versions of Word won’t open.) In fact, when it comes to malware Windows XP isn’t really ready for the desktop.
The people who say you need to use a command line or learn reams of technical material haven’t used a modern Linux version or haven’t used one of the many user-friendly Linux versions. Ubuntu is very nice in this regard.
It might be a good idea to dual-boot Linux and Windows so you can play all of your games in Windows 98 and get work done and surf the Internet in Linux. There are many online sites that explain in detail how this is done and you can buy books that explain it as well.
[QUOTE=Derleth]
Right now, the biggest problem with Linux is that it isn’t a gaming machine.
[/quote
The biggest problem?! Please tell me you’re not serious.
I’ve done both, and still have found plenty of situations where the command line was the only option. You know, such strange and obscure situations as wanting to installer the newest release of Firefox? (Which in that case hadn’t made it into the supposedly-wonderful-but-actually-hideous labyrinth named Synaptic.) And as for getting Joe Bloggs online with dialup or an ADSL USB modem…
GorillaMan, in practice you experience less hassle in Linux than Windows. Being able to ignore malware is a huge advantage over Windows, and it isn’t one that’s going away.
I’ve used Linux for years now and it does everything I need and more. It doesn’t give me nearly as much trouble as Windows does.
If you want to engage in Windows zealotry, please take it to Great Debates with all the other witnessing.
Derleth, you’re stating facts without proof. That’s what I’m calling you up on - you’ve stated that the biggest problem with Linux is to do with gaming, and I’d like some evidence to back that up. At the same time, I’d like an explanation how, if “in practice you experience less hassle in Linux than Windows” (where I presume you don’t mean you to mean me), you still need to give evidence. I’ve had far more hassle playing around with Linux than I have with seriously putting Windows through its paces. Do a few searches, and you’ll realise I’m a Linux advocate, despite its shortcomings.
For example, I tried mounting my friend’s Windows partition under Ubuntu last night. There seems to be no graphical “mount manager” - I had to open a terminal and manually edit /etc/fstab.
I’ve collected 30 gigs of Linux.
So far my favorites for easy to install (multiple old boxes) and use are College Linux and ELX (everybody’s linux).
Both very easy to install on all three of the crufted together machines I play with.
GorillaMan: You do need to use the command line for a very few tasks with some software, but you can do most administration type stuff from graphical wizards. I know I could set up my dial-up account completely graphically in Red Hat, for example, even though I prefer the command line program wvdial simply because I generally prefer the command line.
As for cites, I don’t think ‘level of hassle’ is amenable to citation. Polls are the only way to deduce it in a large scale, but individual experience is the only thing that really matters here.
And finally, I do experience a greater level of hassle in Windows just doing routine tasks largely because it refuses to adapt itself to my way of doing things. The graphical wizards are intrusive and there is no way around them. I have to worry about malware even when I read email and there are websites I fear going to. And despite claims of how much more stable XP is, I simply don’t see any difference from my Windows Me days.
Those are my experiences. Yours are obviously different.
Firefox as provided at mozilla.org comes with a step-by-step installer taken straight from the Windows version. All you have to do is download, unzip, double click, and hit “next” a couple of times. So I really have no idea what you are talking about here.
Granted, Firefox is a bit of an exception; most software cannot be installed outside the package system without some technical ability. I consider this a feature, not a bug, and hope it stays this way.
You have to be logged into X as root - SUing within a terminal doesn’t let you run the installer. And it took me a fair bit of googling to figure this out. And every linux-for-beginners guide warns against running X as root. That’s what I was mainly thinking about, but didn’t say it clearly. But yes, unzipping does put the process beyond an average user.
When I used SuSE (which was about 5 years ago), all you had to do to install an RPM was download it and double-click it in Konqueror. That’s exactly what you would do in Windows, except you’re more likely to have dependency problems in Linux (unless you use a package manager that automatically downloads dependencies, which is very common nowadays).
As was mentioned, there are graphical dial-up utilities, such as kppp. And again, when I used SuSE, it had a kind of control panel where you could load and unload device drivers. That’s easier than Windows.
Malware in windows isn’t exactly a huge problem either. Run Mozilla, don’t use outlook, keep your patches up to date via auto-update, use the built in windows firewall and don’t click on any suspicious executables. I’ve been running this machine for over 2 years now and neither ad-aware nor spybot has shown a single malware program.
Yes it is.
Sure you can protect yourself, but it’s a hassle and a big problem.
Wow. So, considering that the process for unzipping is no more difficult in Nautilus or Konqueror than in Windows (right-click, choose “extract”), am I to infer that all the Windows applications that come in a .zip are “beyond an average user” as well?
You don’t spend much time introducing non-computer-people to computers, do you? This week I had a good quasi-philosophical moment, trying to explain how files exist on the hard drive, and that they don’t exist within the programme. Yes, a zip file would be beyond such a user.
And, fwiw, I could identify only four staff where I work (total workforce over 20) that would know how to deal with a zip file. So I stand by my statement that this is not something an average user is familiar with.
GorillaMan, the point is that in this respect, Linux and Windows are equivalent. If they have problems with that in Linux they’d have exactly the same problems in Windows.
Thus, it can’t be used as a mark to Linux’s detriment.
Derleth, my experience differs sharply. I’m moderately computer literate and know my way round XP quite well enough to perform most common tasks, and macs I find straightforward too. Installation of (Mandrake) linux was not difficult and I have it up and running, although my default boot is still windows (the linux was just an experiment). Given that I quite liked it, I decided to see if I could find software to duplicate the functions of the chemistry related packages I use under windows. In my various installation attempts (about 5 or 6 programs I would guess), I have succeeded, er, not once. Granted this could equally be a result of my utter incompetence, but the same idiocy has allowed frequent installations under windows. I’m sure I’ll work it out eventually, but I don’t think it’s true to say anyone who has difficulties installing under linux will have the same problems in windows, unless I’ve been particularly unfortunate.
Andy describes what I would also have described. Derleth, no matter how low you pitch your estimation, you’re still going to pitch it over the head of many regular computer users. Microsoft instigated the “insert CD, click ‘OK’ several times, and you’re done” process for a very good reason.
All I’m trying to say here is that ‘average user’ has many meanings, but that many average users could not cope with a zip file, or anything else that doesn’t have an obvious ‘OK’.
Andy: First of all Derleth’s last post was only referring to the use of compressed archives, not to installation as a whole. That process varies greatly and can be very difficult if you run into dependency problems. This is what apt was designed to resolve, and it does so very well.
I hate to be too evangelical, but perhaps you should try Ubuntu? Here is a list of science-related packages it provides; if you find something in there you want, you can install it with a single command and it’s certain to work.
rkts has it. It seemed to me that GorillaMan was using something against Linux that is exactly the same on Windows.