Linux vs Windows

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m considering making the switch from Win2k, which I’ve used for many years and am quite comfortable with, a Linux OS. My question is which flavor of Linux is the most similar to Windows in terms of ease of use (which granted isn’t saying terribly much). I’m looking for as little shell based comands as possible. Does Linux utilize wizard style install tools?

Related question: how do the Linux variants of popular Windows programs compare to the originals, particularly: Photoshop, Office, IE, Winamp, Outlook, AIM, and p2p apps?

2

Major distros such as SuSE and Mandrake make installation pretty much as easy as with Windows. That is, provided they recognise your hardware. Do your research, and check how the componenets of your system correspond to their supported hardware - much of the information is easily available on their webpages.

You can try out the Office and Photoshop equivalents on Windows, at www.openoffice.org and http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/ . You’re mad to be worrying about IE anyway, Mozilla being far superior and fully supported on both OSes.

Hope this helps - I’m still struggling to get my ADSL modem working under Linux, and I far prefer Office to OpenOffice.

3

First of all: Consider what you’re doing with Windows. If you’re playing the latest games, don’t expect to be able to play all of them with Linux. WINE and WineX attempt to emulate Windows programs (the latter isn’t free, but does add DirextX support), but don’t count on any of them working. That being said, Half-Life apparently runs under WINE (I don’t know, and I don’t want to saddle this poor little P3 450 with it). Q3A, UT, and some other games have been ported, including I believe UT2K3.

If you still want to switch over, SuSE does an admirable job of autodetecting and autoconfiguring all of your hardware. SuSE is the first version of Linux I’ve run that I could actually get my sound card to run under. It also runs KDE, which is quite Windows-like, only prettier and faster.

Photoshop: There’s the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), which I have found to be more than adequate for my image manipulation needs.

Office: There’s StarOffice and OpenOffice, and there are commercial plugins (CrossOver from Codeweavers) to support MS Office.

IE: Get Mozilla Firebird. Hell, get it even if you stick with Windows. It’s fast, highly configurable, and the little search bar next to the address bar can be configured to search on engines other than Google. I currently have the Cambridge Dictionary, Webtender, and FOLDOC (Free Online Dictionary of Computing) on mine.

Winamp: xmms is about the same as Winamp 2. It might not (yet) have the super-fancy skins, but it handles a wide range of audio file formats from the get-go, and many more can be added via plugins.

Outlook: Mozilla Thunderbird. 'nuff said.

AIM: There’s gaim, kopete, and everybuddy. All of these support more than just the AIM protocol, including Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, IRC, and Jabber.

p2p apps: Bittorrent, eDonkey, and gnutella are all well supported. Freshmeat.net is a good source of these programs.

One caveat with SuSE: Many programs are not included in the default install (but are on the CD’s) that you may need when compiling programs distributed by source code. These include gcc, make, and nasm. SuSE uses RPM files on its CDs and FTP sites. Think of these as auto-installers. You have only to open one of these files under KDE and click on “Install with YAST” (Yet Another Setup Tool) and it’ll either install or tell you about the conflicts, which are usually other packages you need.

A General Linux Caveat: Learn the basic commands for use with the command-line, just in case something goes wrong and you can’t get into the X Window System. SuSE installs w3m, a text-based browser, by default, so you can figure out what the hell you did and get your desktop back.

Hope that helps.

4

The install tools are usually not as nice as Windows wizards.

In the best case software is installed by downloading a .rpm file and doubling-clicking it. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of worse cases, and they happen quite a lot. To me, at least.

Here’s an example. I was trying to install a particular package on Mandrake 9.2 via a .rpm. Let’s call it package 1. I double click it, and it tells me it cannot install until I install package 2.

I download and double-click package 2, and it needs package 3. Package 3 needs package 4. 4 need 5.

I try to install package 5. It need package 3.

WTF? I’m in catch-22 land. I can’t install 3 until I install 4, but 4 needs 5 which won’t install until I install 3.

The solution was to install all simultaneously via a command-line rpm command. Not a big deal once you figure it out, but I think this demonstrates how Linux can be less user-friendly than Windows still.

Winamp has a good Linux equivalent called XMMS.

GAIM (which has version for both Windows and Linux) connects to all the major instant messaging services.

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      • The best way is not to use your current PC for it–and not use a dual-boot either–because you can’t get online and look for Linux help if you’ve only got one PC and you have found out that Linux can’t run your modem or networking card, and switching back and forth between OS’s gets tiring fast. So get a whole different PC: find an older/cheaper one, 3-4+ years old, because the older hardware is more likely to be supported. If/when you install and find that some hardware part isn’t supported, then you go online and ask around what (cheap) choices are, and just replace it, reboot and be done with it. Don’t spend your time struggling with packages, command lines and whatever, this and that. Buy something that is known to work in Linux and spend your time using Linux instead of trying to get hardware to work.
        ~
6

Mandrake, SuSE, Red Hat, Fedora and several others have wonderful installation tools. Pretty, professional, easy to follow. From experience, I can say that Mandrake has an installation tool that is just as easy as Windows XP.

As for dependency hell when installing packages, Mandrake, SuSE, Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Knoppix, Gentoo, *BSD and several others have wonderful tools that can be used to automatically work out the dependencies and conflicts. For Debian, you can use apt-get. For Mandrake, urpmi. Define a source on the network (a url), open the package tool (rpmdrake for Mandrake) and choose from the pretty GUI which package you want.

For package management, Linux is actually far ahead of Windows. That’s right. I said it.

If you have no Linux experience, though, SuSE and Mandrake are wonderful starter distributions. In fact, they are wonderful for whatever experience level. Debian is making strides toward being friendly to new users, but it can be daunting at first.

Linux can be a little confusing if you have no Unix background. Don’t panic. If there isn’t an answer at the distribution’s home page forums, simply google for the problem you are having and the answer is out there.

Also, If you have the space, dual-boot for a bit. You’ll use Windows less and less, but have it for the transitionary period.

Welcome to Linux. I know you’ll like it.

7

Also, about hardware. For the most part, the hardware support is wonderful. The problem areas I’ve seen are wireless networking (Intel Centrino laptops as a prime example), winmodems (though this has mostly been solved, I think), and the latest/greatest graphics cards (quickly sorted out, but there is a lag between card release and driver availability).

Linux can do wireless networking. Intel just hasn’t decided how to make drivers available and still keep it proprietary. Winmodems are a hardware kludge that assume Windows runs on all computers and Nvidia can make its nut without giving the Open Source community a whole lot of love.

8

if youre going to switch to linux, i would reccomend debian its not as outwordly user friendly, but once you figure out some basic commands and learn to use some of the tools you wont switch back. IMHO. slight hijack, the deb package system is much more usable than the rpm package system. Infact unless no available package exists, the apt-get will install all package dependencies that are listed in its database.

9

That’s why apt-get is far superior to RPM.

10

I am using Debian Linux, though I didn’t install it myself. For the install (and general maintenance), I defer to my Linux guru - my SO. But that is because I am REALLY REALLY bad at learning command lines and my interest isn’t all that high when I can just have him do things a billion times faster than I could manage it!

For general use, though, once everything is up and running, I love it. I use Mozilla Firebird, and love the search tool to the point where even if I’m ON a google page, I tend to use the build-in search bar!

XMMS is good too - using it right now. There are a few skins out there, but nothing too fancy, but I’ve never been one to make a big deal out of the look of my programs.

I haven’t used Mozilla Thunderbird for email - I use Ximian Evolution instead. I find it to be quite intuitive.

Open Office is OK. I don’t mind using it for word processing, or even spreadsheets, though there is a definite learning curve for finding the new button locations (and appearances!) and keyboard shortcuts are also somewhat different. I do find that the Excel equivalent (Calc) isn’t as good as Excel, particularly in the graphing department. Gnumeric is a bit better, but not much - though I have to admit that it has improved over the past couple years. I dual boot Win98 with Linux, and I just tended to boot into Windows when I had lab reports to generate, although that also had something to do with the fact that I tended to start things at the last minute, and I am still more familiar with MSOffice.

I use KDE, but I have also used Gnome, which is looking fairly pretty these days. Themes, background image, colours are all really easy to play with. There are also a frighteningly large amount of screensavers out there. Most are good, some are great, the rest leave you saying WTF??

And as others have pointed out, the apt-get system is GREAT! Although a lot of the administration stuff in linux is totally beyond me, I am not afraid to apt-get myself some new programs! I use it mostly to get new games :smiley:

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      • Heh–I am typing this on Fedora/Mozilla 1.4, because my usual computer–>Win98SE with IE (updated) and Netscape 7.1 (yea I know there’s a newer one I ain’t got yet) will not connect to the SDMB site at all–I get a real slow connection of about half the front forum page (I have cable internet by the way) and then about that point, BOTH browsers error out and close. Fedora/Mozilla 1.4 takes a while to connect, but does, or just says “connection timed out” - but lets me try again…
  • I would warn against trying to comit yourself to Linux right off; there are lots of sites I find that are nearly illegible in anything but IE, and I have not yet found a fully-enabled Windows Media player or Quicktime player… Using it on a second computer is definitely the way to go.
    ~
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My favorite quote:

“Linux is only free, if your time is worthless”

MtM