Hello all. I currently run a 1.6ghz, 256mb ram computer using Windows XP Pro. I recently read an article on MSNBC.COM about the ‘new’ cheap PC’s at WALMART using the Lindows operating system. That got me investigating into Lindows, and eventually looking into all the Linux hoopla I’ve been hearing about. Can any of my fellow dopers help with analizing the pros and cons of these OS’s?
Respectfully,
Karpy
OS Flamewar in 3…2…1…
Lindows is a “Linux” company often mocked by the Linux community (take a look at most of the responses of any Slashdot article on Lindows). Basically, Lindows uses WINE, which is a Windows compatibility layer allowing one to run some Windows programs on Linux. That means Windows programs run relatively slow. Lindows has no interest in supporting the wide array of Linux software that is just as good as its Windows counterparts, preferring people run Windows programs in a slow, buggy interface which defeats the purpose of using another OS in the first place.
You can buy one of those cheap PCs, and afterwards install a real Linux on there. I recommend Red Hat, which I switched over to last March. It’s free, you just have to have a CD burner to burn the disc images you download from Red Hat’s site. It’s got pretty much everything you’d ever need, including a Microsoft Office equivalent (OpenOffice, which can open and save in MS Word format just fine), plenty of nice games, and software for really just anything you can imagine.
Linux pros: the software is 100% free, both free as in beer (you can download it and install it from souce for no charge) and free as in speech (should you want to, you can make changes and improvements to software and redistribute it to anyone who wants it).
You never have to worry about costly upgrades to new versions of Windows, 'cause upgrading is as simple as downloading the new version of an individual program or entire distribution as soon as it comes out.
What are the cons of Linux? While it only takes about three weeks of occasionally pecking at the keyboard, you have to learn how to use a shell (a command-line interface) if you want to really tweak the system, although with Red Hat 8.0 you can actually avoid that for the most part. There’s no voice recognition like in Windows XP Pro I never used it when I had XP, it slowed the computer down too much, but other may swear by it. Finally, America Online doesn’t run on Linux (though it runs on Lindows), so if you use that for Internet connectivity, you’ll have to stick with Windows.
As far as trying out Linux goes, I’d recommend just downloading it and installing it on your hard drive side by side with Windows. That way, you can see if you like it without having to totally replace your current setup.
UnuMondo
I’ll try to do this in the frame of GQ, you’ll get a lot of different answers in IMHO.
con: it grew out of a very simple single user bare bones operating system (DOS). The entire os has been pretty much re-written, so you have a choice between backwards compatibilty (the win 9.x line) or windows with a decent structure from the ground up (the NT line, which is NT, 2000, and XP). You cannot get backwards compatibility and a good OS structure in one package currently. Microsoft intentionally breaks backwards compatibility whenever they think they can make the OS “better” which means that software for windows computers is often very version specific.
Windows is expensive, and getting more and more expensive with each version.
con: Linux is based on unix, and unix is notorious for being very un-user friendly (the old joke is “unix is very user friendly, it’s just particular about who its friends are”). The command shell for linux is very difficult and un-intuitive for most people (what’s a grep? is that some kind of fruit?). The shell commands date back to the 70’s, and in all fairness they are much easier to work with than say the commands for RSX-11, but we’re still talking ancient and cryptic here. Linux is getting easier and easier to configure, and runs graphical interfaces that are very similar to windows, but it is still much more difficult to use than windows if you’re not a computer weenie (if you are a computer weenie these same characteristics get listed under the pro section!).
Linux gets a lot more software support than any other non-windows operating system, but still does not get a majority of the applications that are available for the PC.
Is there a program for Linux that runs Windows software? I think I heard rumor of one out there…hmmmm
btw…thanks for your help!
Karp
Kard2381: There are a couple.
I fyou just want to run DOS programs specifically, you can use dosemu. This requires you to also have some version of DOS (there are freeware versions out there, check the page for details), but then allows near-perfect running of DOS programs under Linux (It’s better than Windows XP’s DOS, for example).
If you want to run more recent Windows software, the answer is WINE. This is still considered “pre-release” software, because it doesn’t handle every single Windows API from every single version of Windows - in particular, a fair amount of NT stuff is not supported because Linux has less ability to deal with NT files than it does with 9x (Win XP is based on NT).
If you want to be able to communicate with Windows machines as a file server, you can use SAMBA, which supports networking with Windows machines.
If you just want to be able to read Windows partitions on your HD, or floppies or CDs with Windows files on them, you’re in luck - any distribution you get will include the ability to read and write these with no additional software necessary. However, support for ntfs (the standard that Windows NT uses to save and load files, available as an option in XP) is currently experimental -you may be able to read data, but the kernel you get with your distribution probably won’t be able to write to them, at least in the very near future.
Yeah, I’m a Linux geek. Is it that obvious?
Karp2381, you should consider what software you want to run. If it’s important to you to play all the latest PC games, then Windows is really your only choice. They simply will not run well, or at all, with WINE layer interpreting instead of running native code.
If you just need browsing, email, and office tools, you probably can’t go wrong with LINUX.
Karp2381, you should consider what software you want to run. If it’s important to you to play all the latest PC games, then Windows is really your only choice. They simply will not run well, or at all, with WINE layer interpreting instead of running native code.
If you just need browsing, email, and office tools, you probably can’t go wrong with LINUX.
Speaking of Red Hat LINUX, UnuMondo, have you actually been able to download 8.0? All the sites are still completely hammered every time I check.
Plex86
I just finished the download of the three ISO files AND the one doc file. :):)
I am buring CDs as I type. I subscribe to rhn, btw.
NotMrKnowItAll, I thought was RH 8.0 was 5 Cds. Is there a way to determine if the need the last two disks or not?
OK, never mind, I see that the web site instructions only mention the three files. I suppose if I dig some more, I’ll find out what the other two files I see on the web sites are for, but I’m not sure I care enough.
There Are 3 O/S CDs - For actually installing the thing.
2 Source Code CDs - never had much use for those
1 Documentation CD - Honestly don’t really use that much either, downloaded it for father-in-law
I got into a French mirror after the new RPMS were uploaded and before the public announcement was out. I upgraded from RPM Having already kept up with the RawHide packages, I didn’t have to download many RPMS, just those that had changed since the last RawHide release (30AUG02). Most of the people who can’t get to a mirror are trying to download 650MB ISO’s, which eat up a lot more bandwith than the relatively tiny RPMS I was getting.
UnuMondo
I got into a French mirror after the new RPMS were uploaded and before the public announcement was out. I upgraded from RPM and not from ISOs. Having already kept up with the RawHide packages, I didn’t have to download many RPMS, just those that had changed since the last RawHide release (30AUG02). Most of the people who can’t get to a mirror are trying to download 650MB ISO’s, which eat up a lot more bandwith than the relatively tiny RPMS I was getting.
UnuMondo
Off to IMHO.
Thanks, folks, for playing nice on this one. I appreciate it.
I’m actually having better luck downloading the images from a P2P network that probably shouldn’t be named. Hey, legitimate use! Woohoo!
Now that we’re away from manny’s Gravity Bong Police, we can let loose!
Hoo-eee!
Hoo- hey, Slashdot’s loaded now.
Seriously, now that we’re in IMHO, maybe we can get more of the testimonial-type reasons in this thread.
I used to be a Microsoft-only guy. From Windows 3.11 to Windows ME, going through Windows 95 in the process. By the time I was using ME, however, two things were happening:
[ul]
[li]I was gaining a better awareness of what kind of software was out there for Intel-like machines. I wasn’t really aware of much beyond the MS/Mac dichotomy, and I knew that Windows was the lesser of the two evils. I could put up with the crashes and expense as long as I didn’t know alternatives existed, but around then I became aware.[/li][li]Microsoft dumped MS-DOS mode. All of a sudden, I didn’t have a way to run software I had run for years in 95. All of a sudden I couldn’t use stuff I’d paid money for. They still had all of the headaches of 16-bit code (which persisted until XP), but they didn’t give me any way to take advantage of the upsides to it. I’m a proponent of using something until it breaks: MS-DOS programs still work, and there are some really good programs from the 16-bit era, but all of a sudden Microsoft decided not to include decent MS-DOS emulation anymore, and so my programs were broken. Not acceptable.[/li][/ul]
So I looked around online, following up leads on this really interesting OS I’d heard of: Based on UNIX, it was Intel-native but really stable and secure despite that notable handicap. And it was cheap. Really, really cheap. So I bought the Red Hat Linux 7.1 Bible from Barnes&Noble, 20% off, downloaded some files on the minutia of using fdisk to partition my hard disk, and over a weekend I installed and customised a dual-boot Linux/Windows ME system.
Linux was a wake-up call: Hello, ignorant one, OSes shouldn’t crash! Ever. Even if the moon is in Leo. Even if the office suite falls to the ground, clutching its gut and moaning. Even if the browser drops of heart failure. All of the above have happened to me numerous times in Linux, and the little OS simply kept going its way, picking its way around the bloodied corpses of applications that stumbled over their own feet in an alligator pit.
(I should lay off the metaphors.)
Aside from the non-crashing part, Linux let me do things I didn’t even know I wanted to do. Microsoft asks you ‘Where do you want to go today?’, then refuses to take you there unless it has already made the travel arrangments. Linux doesn’t ask any stupid questions and takes you wherever you tell it to go. ‘You wanna winch yourself up that tree there? Ok, boss. Up we go!’ and pretty soon you’re looking down on a bunch of really surprised geese.
Case in point: I no longer have to worry about the format of a disk if I just want to copy it. Linux contains a program called dd, which reads a file and copies what it’s read somewhere else. What it reads and where it copies it is completely up to you. Since everything hooked up to the computer looks like a file to Linux, you can have dd copy a floppy right into your speakers if you want. (It sounds like patterned noise if the disk’s formatted.) dd doesn’t even care about formatting: It just reads raw binary directly from the input file and writes raw binary directly to the output file.
dd shows a kind of raw mechanical idiocy that’s damned refreshing in this age of SmartQuotes and Clippy, the Hell-Beast.
Anyway, I ran Linux exclusively for months after I’d installed it. I learned how to mount my Windows partitions and read from them and write to them. I downloaded dosemu and I played Wolfenstein 3D in an environment it couldn’t tell from MS-DOS 3 running on a 386. I learned Vim first, then I was utterly seduced by emacs (Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift forever, baby!).
Then I rebooted and booted up ME.
It was like going from a Porsche to a Model T. Worse, even, because Model Ts could at least be serviced by their owners. I opened a command line and was confronted by the poor excuse for a shell that is MS-DOS. I tried to customise the interface and it wouldn’t let me. The OS was like a police state Homeland Defense Officer: ‘No, I can’t let you do that. No, you cannot be allowed in there. No, that tool is not to be used in that manner, put it down now or I shall issue a nonsensical error message and bring this whole thing crashing down like a gutshot elk.’ It wasn’t long before I got claustrophobic: I had been walled into an ugly, Formica-and-fake-plant prison with paranoid guards and psychotic inmates. It was the Fischer-Price Penitentiary, as dreamed up by Franz Kafka: Blunted scissors that still managed to jab you square in the crotch at the worst moment.
I ran back to Linux, like a political prisoner across an embassy’s threshold.
I still have ME on my desktop. Sadly, there are some programs that don’t exist on Linux in a stable form yet. But damned few.
Derleth, Linux user and metaphor junkie.