My computer has a Win98 and a Debian Linux 2.whatever.its.at.now.16 (I don’t know - my SO is the guy who does everything to my computer!) and I really like Linux. Its not too tough to use for what I need- basically internet and word processing, although I can’t WAIT for OpenOffice to get decent chart/graphs because that’s the only reason I ever boot into Windows nowadays. Oh, and to use a chemical structure drawing program which I can’t use in Linux yet.
But I LOVE not getting the BSOD every 10 minutes, and not worrying about if I misspell a word is the whole OS going to come crashing down in a blaze of non-glory. I know WIn98 is particularly bad for crashing, but its all I got, and I have no intention of paying for anything else.
I am learning Linux slowly, although I was never a big computer geek - I know my way around Windows even less. I figure, though, that if I can use it, so can most people. My SO is running a Linux install fest (RH 8.0 actually) at his school - I might go along to get a better sense of the basics.
I’ve never seen Lindows, but an ability to emulate the popular Windows environment is a good thing. I don’t think Unix users ought to be STUCK in that environment, and maybe Lindows does a too-effective job of hiding the exit doors. Having a copy of WINE would seem like a good thing, though. (A copy of Basilisk wouldn’t hurt either. Run some Mac on your Linux PC ).
I must say, I like WindowMaker better than KDE or Gnome.
AHunter: You and me both. The NeXT had one really good thing going for it: The UI. Anything that can bring a NeXT-like interface to the stability of Linux is going to garner my support.
But I’ve played the field in Linux UIs.
[ul]
[li]I started out in KDE, because I was not comfortable with a non-DOS command line and I didn’t know my way around any interface that didn’t have a resemblence to Windows. It was in KDE that I configured my machine to begin with, and I learned the command line through the Konsole. (KDE-native programs tend to start with K. It’s enough to make one hope they never go into local area networks (LANs).) I clicked around, I left it on, I setup my screensaver, and I was merry. :)[/li][li]I also fell deeply, madly in love with the command line. I realized that I was layering my screen with different command-line prompts, all full-size, and I wasn’t seeing much of my desktop. My minimalist nature rebelled: Desktops? We don’t need no steenkeeng desktops! At the same time, I knew that I really, really wanted to have more than one console going at a time. (I was young and foolish and didn’t know that Alt-Fn accomplished that job without having to launch X to do it.) So I switched from the Windows-like bulk of KDE to the slim, trim ugliness of twm, the tab window manager. twm does one thing and one thing only: Moves windows around on a screen. If you want to open another program, you can bloody well do it yourself, it thinks, and it isn’t looking pretty for nobody. I learned how to get twm to launch programs from a primitive task bar, I learned how it handled windows (‘No, I don’t have a button to make something full-size. It’s up to you to decide how big it’s gonna get.’), and I learned how to better use the command line.[/li][li]Experimenting one night, I stumbled on the Alt-Fn command. I realized that I was free from the tyrrany of the GUI! FREE, I SAY! Alt-F2 my way to command-line multitasking! It was like having a room full of consoles all hooked up to a central mainframe! By then, I was well into the command line way: I was running emacs as my One True Text Editor, I was playing around with command-line utilities, and I was even doing word processing with LaTeX. (LaTeX is the programmer’s answer to word processing. You create a LaTeX document much like you create a web page: Writing a mixture of code and text in a text editor, not being able to see the finished product immediately but being able to use something as great as emacs to create the document. Then you run the code through the program latex, which creates a dvi file for you to view in xdvi or ship off directly to your printer. LaTeX was one of the first Linux utilities I ever got excited about. :)) That phase lasted a little while, and I gained complete confidence in my abilities to function without a pretty interface.[/li][li]Then I got bored, and I looked around my system for something new. Something that looked good, but wouldn’t be quite as oppressively complex as KDE or GNOME. I found WindowMaker, and I found happiness: Intelligent, unobtrusive UI design in a package that was pretty but basically stayed out of my way. I love WindowMaker.[/li][/ul]I couldn’t have had that UI experience in any non-*nix OS.
I have a Linux machine at work, and a dual-boot Linux/Windows machine at home. I adore Linux. It is magnificent. However, until people start making consumer applications, most notably games, for Linux, I’ll probably always run a dual-boot machine. The only reason for me to use Windows is its market share.
I think you have to be a bit computer savvy to run Linux. Not a lot – newer distributions like Redhat make setup and maintenance very simple. But you at least have to be interested in figuring things out and playing around. Linux is still far from the user-friendliness of Windows, in terms of standardized hardware and software installation. Some people need the Fisher-Price aspects of Windows and Mac machines far more than they need the flexibility and power of Linux.
MacOS X is a good environment in which to get your feet wet in Unix while still having access to a wide range of commercial apps. I deploy WindowMaker under DarwinX (the XFree86 package for OS X), and use it quite a bit. Also play around a bit on the command line, although CLI’s do frustrate me. Once you get into piped-modified commands and colon-redirected this and that, I’m screaming for a GUI. But I do like knowing that it’s there, and I do like being able to AppleScript the Terminal talk about your portable batch commands!
I ssh into a Linux box pretty often at work and inherit its GUI and command line. The command line is nearly identical to the BSD command line I have in OS X, but the KDE GUI is a different animal from the WindowMaker GUI, and also very different from the Aqua GUI of mainstream OS X.
Heh - I’m not going to be able to top Derleth’s homage to the penguin, but I do have to say I appreciate Linux’s flexibility in terms of HOW you want to install, WHERE you want to install it, WHAT you want on it and WHAT it will run on.
I run a dual-boot with up-to-date Slackware at 2.2.15 and Win95, because both meet my needs. I can run games in Windows and do all my other activities in Slack (graphics editing, updating palm pilot data, downloading pics from the digicam, browsing, chatting, web design, data entry, you name it). When I finally get wineX installed I may remove the windows partition.
The only problem at the moment is that I have a damaged modem that will not dial up properly in Linux - but will in Windows (this is a first in my 6 years of using Windows and 5 years of using Linux.) Something to do with the serial driver, I believe. Therefore I’m stuck browsing from windows until I can get a new modem. Bleh
For anyone interested in Linux, OS X isn’t a good first option because:
It requires Apple hardware instead of any old x86 box.
While some portions of Darwin are open source, they are not free software. You can not tweak Darwin and redistribute the software. That might not affect the average user, but it prevents good-intentioned coders from bug fixings and contributing to the community.
Darwin’s GUI isn’t based on XFree86, so moving to Linux one would have to get acquainted with a whole different configuation system.
For anyone interested in Linux, OS X isn’t a good first option because:
It requires Apple hardware instead of any old x86 box.
While some portions of Darwin are open source, they are not free software. You can not tweak Darwin and redistribute the software. That might not affect the average user, but it prevents good-intentioned coders from bug fixings and contributing to the community.
Darwin’s GUI isn’t based on XFree86, so moving to Linux one would have to get acquainted with a whole different configuation system.
Until Linux can break into the business market, I think it’s going to remaina little niche player. Can any of you Linux guys out there explain simply why I as a business user should switch? not looking to bust chops, but what’s the basic business arguement. We all know that Linux ain’t free, unless your time is free that is
Not strictly true. MacOS X isn’t based on XFree86, it uses the proprietary Aqua, but Darwin itself can use XFree86. XDarwin is free and in conjunction with Fink lets you build and install XFree86 and run it alongside of Aqua. Within the XFree86 environment it doesn’t make much difference if you’re in Linux, Darwin, or some other *nix. WindowMaker is WindowMaker, TWM is TWM.
You sure about this? It’s certainly true of MacOS X, many portions of which are most definitely not open source, but the underlying Darwin Unix? I thought it was open source and has in fact been tweaked and ported and played with quite a bit already.
That being said, your first point is certainly relevant. If your hardware is PC and not Mac, MacOS X isn’t going to do you much good.
I read that the Palm people chose LINUX workstaions instead of Windows for their developers, and saved buttloads of money. I don’t remember the figures (and don’t feel like Googling right now), but it was something like $3,000 instead of $20,000 per workstation.
Of course, these are professional developers (i.e. geeks) so that might not work for everybody.
Do you think it would make sense for schools (some of which are paying around £30,000 annually for the windows user licenses - and that’s just the small ones) to have every machine dual-bootable with Linux and Windows?? China Guy’s point about time is true enough, but if kids grow up learning both, then there would be far less hassle for future businesses to switch between the two. After all, the only thing people ever see in schools is Windows and that sodding paperclip, so it’s unsurprising that there is hostility as regards switching. If people learn both as they grow up, then it won’t matter quite so much as it does now.
Incidentally, I have partitioned my hard drive into three; one 40gig for Windows, one 40gig storage chunk, and one 40gig for Linux. But I don’t have a copy of Linux because whenever I ask anyone, I get a barrel full of suggestions but no further on the issue. Instead of asking which is best, I’ll try a different tack and go with which version of Linux is most userfriendly for someone who hasn’t used it before?? And is there a way of getting it without downloading it??
Oh, and why do bookstores charge £60 for RedHat Linux?!
Of course, the most obvious is cost: Even if you buy the boxed RedHat distro, one of the most expensive ways to go, you’re still saving yourself a chunk of cash depending on who you buy it from and what kind of discounts you can get. Even if you have to pay full retail and get no discounts, you won’t spend $200 for it (the cost of WinXP Home).
A collary to the cost of the OS is the cost of Linux software: Most of it is free. With a reasonably good Internet connection, you can get hundreds of dollars worth of software (based on MS-equivalent pricing, of course) for the cost of your connectivity. RedHat in particular ships with a full office suite (KOffice), an email client or three, two good browsers (Konqueror and Mozilla), and quite a few games (including a variant of Civilization, plus buttloads of simpler games that will make you forget Solitaire). All of that is bundled with the distro: You don’t need to download anything to get those programs, you just need to install the OS.
Secondly, but probably more important, is the security aspect: None of the email worms endemic to the Outlook email client will work on Linux, and those worms form the biggest threat to online security the business user faces today. If someone emails you Klez, or CodeRed, or any other of the thousand insults Windows is heir to, nothing will happen. You can open those attachments all day and all night without risking a single thing. There are a few worms that do work in Linux, but they are rather rare in the wild and are unlikely to affect the average business user.
Linux also implements something only now are Windows OSes catching up to: Different users with different permission levels. There is an administrative account, called root, that can do everything, but you’ll use it maybe once or twice a month, if that often. You’ll use a normal user account with limited permissions, so that all programs you install will inherit those permissions and won’t be able to ruin your system. A virus can’t work if it doesn’t have the ability to modify system files, and that is what Linux enforces.
Third, and most striking, is stability: You can leave the Linux machine running all the time, performing automatic tasks at various intervals, making your life easy, and it won’t crash. As I said numerous times in my first post to this thread, applications run and crash, but Linux abideth for ever.
Zenpea: If you’re completely new to Linux, I’d recommend starting with Mandrake. Most more serious Linux users tend to be contemptuous of Mandrake, because it’s trying to be as Windows-like as possible, and especially because it tries to hide most of Linux’s really good features behind graphical configuration tools - and they’re right to be conteptuous of this, since the advanced features of Linux are pretty much the second major selling point (the first is “no punitive licensing”). However, for someone who’s an acknowledged newbie, Mandrake is a good introduction. It even has one really serious selling point that has resulted in this power user, at least, keeping his Mandrake CDs around: in order to pull of the “Windows-like” environment, Mandrake has some pretty powerful (and proprietary) hardware-detection and configuration built in. If you’re like most people, and you haven’t got a clue what chips are on your motherboard or video card, Mandrake is much more likely to successfully configure itself than most other distibutions. I’ve used Mandrake as a preparatory tool to install better versions of Linux for a few friends, and I even started with Mandrake myself (believe it or not) -once you want to see what Linux is really like, it’s pretty trivial to get a better distribution, and much easier to install it if you have a working Linux box to tinker with, even if you intend to overwrite it completely.
I read somewhere that the cost of software to a business is typically 3-5% of the IT spend. That if you factor in the total cost of ownership (for a business), that Microsoft is measurably “cheaper.” Is there some basis to this arguement or can someone debunk it for me?
Microsoft itself used to make those claims, backing them up with Microsoft-funded ‘studies’. It has since changed tactics, saying it ‘cannot compete with Linux in price’ and saying that it will try to compete with Linux in the area of user support: Microsoft-hired experts trying to help customers without being end-users themselves.
Why would Microsoft make those claims? Because support’s one of Linux’s great strengths and always has been. Linux users the world over help each other and fix problems others have, from giving advice to distributing bugfixed source code. Microsoft has never been able to match it (nor has any other proprietary software maker), and is now catching on that it might be a good thing, this free help.
No kidding, Brian. Any moron who can write a simple VisualBasic script can access my computer remotely if Outlook decides it’s a good idea to run it. And that ain’t the whole of it. BackOrifice, a rather simple program, can get full access to a Microsoft box and then jam the door open, so to speak, for a remote user to do anything he damn well pleases.
Microsoft isn’t too good about fixing problems, either: It still has Outlook running those damn VisualBasic programs, despite ample evidence that it should not have anywhere near that power on a system as fundamentally unprotected as MS-Windows.
How is MS-Windows fundamentally unprotected? It allows any program to access any part of the system at any time. There is no concept of user privileges in Microsoftland: Everyone, and, by extension, every program, gets the equivalent of full administrative access to the machine. Microsoft has tried to remedy this, first in NT (a UNIX clone known for its instability), then in XP (the first userland MS-OS based on NT instead of MS-DOS). I don’t know how well XP handles the concept. It’s fairly new for Microsoft, and the company doesn’t have a good track record when it tries to crib software (ref. CP/M-86 vs. MS-DOS)*. For the good of us all, I hope MS does better this time, but ‘All Sources Point to No’.
CP/M-86 is a version of Kildall’s Control Program/Microcomputers operating system that ran on Intel’s 8086 CPU. It was stolen hook, line, and sinker by Microsoft when it wrote MS-DOS. Thing is, CP/M-86 is generally recognized as the better of the two: It is more stable, and has a more consistent interface. (As a side note, Digital Research, the corporation Kildall founded to sell his software, developed the CP/M line up to CP/M 2.2, at which point it called its next release DR-DOS. DR-DOS was once a serious competitor to MS-DOS until MS-DOS crippled MS-Windows 3 to only work in MS-DOS. And people wonder why Microsoft is so unpopular today… )
talk about your portable batch commands!