My friend, you and I live in different worlds. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I can’t imagine a computer without the apps you described. This isn’t intended to be insulting, but what do you use the computer for?
Are you mainly a gamer? I don’t play games myself, but I understand Windows is much better for that as well.
Graphics? There’s another one to add to my list. Gimp is reasonable, but it’s no PaintShopPro or PhotoShop.
Coder? I do a modest amount of coding, and in my younger days did alot. Here there’s a big advantage to Linux (at least for vi kinds of guys like myself).
You leave your laptop running all the time? Why do you consider power management stupid?
Yeah, printer setup generally sucks. Or used to anyway; I just recently moved from RedHat to Debian. Using the kprinter utility worked without a hitch for my Epson 860. But don’t get me wrong…I feel your pain.
Since no one has mentioned it yet, have you given an Ubuntu live-cd a spin? I’m guessing you know about it at least, but thought I’d bring it up anyway. No need to install anything for a trial run, and I’ve found that of all the live-cd distros I’ve tried it does the best job of recognizing hardware and just working.
I don’t know why I put myself through so much pain in each of these episodes. I’m back on Windows, and though I have no control over the inner engine (the big reason I want to switch), I’m so much happier with the flesh and skin.
No offense taken at all! I realize I’m a pretty atypical computer user. I’m a pretty hardcore geek. I don’t do any gaming any more, and very minimal graphics, and I almost never print anything - paper is evil. At work it’s all database and web-based coding, mostly MySQL databse stuff with PHP, but there’s a fair amount of system/network admin thrown in. The servers here all run Linux. At home my computers are mostly tools for accessing the internet (web browsing, e-mail, IM), some coding-for-fun type stuff, some digital photography stuff (I do very little editing of the pictures I take, though - GIMP is sufficient), playing/writing various media (movies, music, CD, DVD), and a whole lot of general tinkering for fun and learning. I modified my XBox so it can run XBox Media Center, accessing all my movies and music on a Linux file server running Samba. I have a Linksys WRT54GS wireless router running Linux, too.
I’m starting to do more electronics work, too, especially with Atmel AVR microcontrollers, and the Linux tools for this are pretty cool. I can use my preferred editor, Kate, to edit AVR assembler with context highlighting and all that fun stuff, then compile with a free assembler like tavrasm or avra, or even program in C using avr-gcc. And while it’s not open source, the Eagle schematic and circuit board layout is free (for my hobbyist uses, anyway) and runs on Linux. Granted, I don’t get AVR Studio in all this, but if I need it, my laptop with WinXP is always handy.
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You leave your laptop running all the time? Why do you consider power management stupid?
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Again, I’m fairly atypical. I consider the 2-hour battery life of my laptop next to useless, so I almost never run my laptop on battery power. I can run it in my car with an inverter, or plug it into a wall any other place I happen to be. My laptop is more of a highly portable desktop machine for me than anything.
I think my attitude of power management being stupid probably stems from my first exposure to it. When machines with power management started hitting the market, I worked for a computer support department at a university. This was back in the days of Windows 95/98. I spent countless hours disabling APM in people’s BIOS setup because it would invariably do nothing useful, but cause the machines to crash. If I had a dollar for every machine I “fixed” that locked up when left alone for 10 minutes, I’d be a rich man right now. I never once saw power management do anything other than cause crashes. I know, it’s 10 years later, ACPI has replaced APM, everything’s far more mature, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth.
Power management on a desktop machine is stupid, in my opinion, unless you’re really worried about your electric bill, the heat generated by computers, are extremely environmentally conscious, or some other odd little thing. For laptops I can see where it’d be a serious issue if you run on battery power a lot, but I just don’t, so it’s not really an issue for me.
I went all-out Linux, though, because I just got sick of the commercial software world. I’m not a total fanatic - I’m not above resorting to commercial software when there’s absolutely no other alternative - but I got sick of things like bloated “do-everything” software, spyware/malware (including ostensibly legitimate software bundled with extra “phone-home” crap, or ads), crippled software designed to make you buy the “pro” version, software that tries too hard to be smart and do what it thinks you want, rather than what you really do want… The list goes on and on. I knew I was in for a lot of little hassles, and a few big ones, by choosing a Linux desktop. But I figured my time was better spent learning more about Linux and the apps available to me, and supporting open source software, than by being “owned” by software vendors who don’t give a rat’s ass about me, and whose attitude is reflected in their software and their business practices. And in the end, my technical skill-set has expanded and I have a system that’s far closer to what I want my computer to be and do for me than it ever was with Windows.
Odd. I found myself in the same situation a earlier this year, except I was installing XP, and I was pissed that I had to manually download vim, sed, grep, tar, the integrated weather applet on my taskbar, virtual desktops, ogg vorbis support, an ssh client, nmap, and a decent scripting language.
I’m not trying to be snotty about it, and I’m sorry that it isn’t working out for you. I’ve still got a Win2K box sitting on my KVM switch at work to run the firewall administration GUI that I’ve gotta use and the dumb EDI mapping IDE that was supplied by our VAN. I’d like to be able to run 'em in qemu or WINE, but so far, it’s not working out.
You’ll probably like working with Samba better if you mount the shares as a filesystem, instead of using your file manager as a front end to smbclient. For example, here’s a line from my fstab:
Unless the original doc has been formatted to either txt or RTF , then its gonna looked choppy at best. OO on the other hand does not have that paper clip guy constantly buggin ya.
For an all in one suite , look for Kontact
You should have been able to open up a konq with midnite commander , almost identical to the norton commander back in the nineties.
Kviirc is your app
Look , its really no use beating your head against a brick wall , trying to bolt on a new OS to your existing computer , you would be far better off investing your money , instead of your time and picking up a Mac with OSX.
If you can’t leave microsoft , you can at least get a system that supports derivatives built for it.
I’m no expert on XML—in fact, i’m a complete novice—but i’ve been reading recently about the Open Document standard, and the articles i was reading gave me the impression that Microsoft’s XML has a bunch of proprietary language (or something) that will make it incompatible with the Open Document standards that Open Office and other software will be using. In fact, a couple of the articles specifically said that the Open Document format will not be supported by the next version of MS Office.
It could be that i’m getting confused here. The articles i’ve been reading have been mainly related to the decision by the state of Massachusetts to switch to Open Document in 2007.
True, but disabling it is easy as pie. The first time it runs, it puts a big “disable” button in obvious view. Actually, I don’t think I know a single person who actually leaves it enabled.
Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately, to my taste, each of these are sorely lacking in what I consider the most basic features.
I’ve got an opinion on Macs, but it’s best if I don’t share it here.
You know, i’ve seen a lot of people in discussions about MS Office directing a whole lot of vitriol towards the paper clip. I’ve often wondered whether these folks really don’t know how to turn it off, or if they prefer to have it there just so they can complain about it.
I’m with RJ. I’ll battle Windows at the office all day every day, but for personal use, it’s Linux on the fileserver and an iBook for my front-end.
If by toaster you mean: put bread in and get toast out…every single time? I’ll agree with you.
But my toast is IDS logs and some heavy duty data processing. It does all the linuxy things with the same headaches as Linux causes (dependency hell, etc.) But poke your head above the covers and all the other stuff just works. Including the stuff the OP finds so frustrating with Linux.
Windows pays the bills, Linux secures the Windows network and my mac keeps me sane.
In my experience, it is a more effective way of searching the online help (something I do a lot; from a standing start, I taught myself to use Access - including writing multi-form business applications - using only the online help) - it’s context-sensitive and it seems to respond more sensibly to search phrases than simply using the find function in the help index.
Bill H, I would still recommend installing dual-boot - that way, you have the opportunity to potter around with Linux and possibly find your feet, while still being able to do whatever you need to do in Windows.
For years, I’ve stridently refrained from participating in Windows vs Linux debates because I’ve always been solidly pro-windows and tried to distance myself from working with linux as much as possible. I could work my way around the lab machines and write code using a text editor and then compile using gcc, but whenever I came up against an incredible boneheaded piece of code or some stupid error that stopped me from going forward, I always assumed that it was me the user who lacked a certain piece of knowledge. “Fair enough, its an OS designed for power users who like memorising arcane commands. I have no desire to be a power user so I’ll let it be”.
Well, now, I’m here full time in a CS department at one of the premier research institutes in Australia in probably one of the most pro-linux lab in the department. Two of our developers are board members of prominent developers for major open source projects and the entire lab is all hardcore linux(Ubuntu) all the time and theres just no excuse for some of the things that I’m seeing anymore.
Quite frankly, in the 21st century, there are some things which I consider as just unacceptable in a production level OS. It’s not a matter of comparing to windows or whether there are workarounds, if such things don’t work, then you’ve failed to fulfil the bare minimum required to be considered a functioning OS.
When a developer needs to spend 5 hours figuring out a workaround for why CD’s randomly stop ejecting, then the OS is not ready for prime time.
When a unexpected power outage corrupts the video card driver and puts an entire machine out of production for an entire weekend until someone with root access can come and reinstall the driver, then the OS is not ready for prime time.
When your main windowing system is 16M lines of spaghetti code and yet still doesn’t have a unified way to do hardware acceleration, then your OS is not ready for prime time.
When your Premier internet browser encounters a massive memory leak when put together with one of the webs most popular plugins and can only be fixed by drilling into obscure settings, then your OS is not ready for prime time (especially when the other fix is to suggest your a pansy for wanting flash to work).
When even your Biggest advocates say that your OS is not ready for prime time, then your OS is NOT ready for prime time.
It still continues to amaze me just what things these linux users consider to be “not a big problem”. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if I wen’t in tomorrow and heard:
“Yeah, the file system occasionally corrupts your data, it’s not that big a problem, you have backups right?”
“Yeah, the graphics card will occasionally dump the red data on the green channel and vice versa, it’s not a big problem, stuff just looks a bit purple”
“Yeah, occasionally, linux tries to download 600MB images from remote servers, it’s not a big problem, you can always get fatter pipes right?”
“Yeah, OpenOffice doesn’t actually support doing histograms, it’s not a big problem, what would you need histograms for anyway?”
Shalmanese I agree with EVERY SINGLE POINT you’ve made. Further I’ll add:
-Linux isn’t Linux isn’t Linux. Learn how Redhat runlevel scripts work and you have no idea how Debian, Mandrake, or SuSE handles scripting. Why are there 35 different ways to have an OS wrapped around the same kernel?
-Need to change your networking? Well that’s different across all major flavors, and all conf scripts. Doubly so if it’s wireless networking.
-Linux is a series of ‘learned events’, I know how to do it THIS way in THIS distro, so Linux is easy and you’re stupid.
-If you can’t get A to work, perhaps its your choice of distro?
“Dependencies? They’re a necessary evil, get used to 'em.” I’m sorry, I don’t WANT or NEED to get used to 'em. It either works right, the first time, using the package manager, or I get to spend a morning running
./configure (need gd)
get gd (configure make make install)
./configure (need libpng)
get libpng (configure make, troubleshoot - need zlib)
Get zlib (configure, make, make install)
figure out why it’s installed, but libpng can’t see it.
./configure (need MagicGnorfFooLibrary)
Look for MagicGnorfFooLibrary, but the college student writing it for his thesis got a job and stopped developing it. 1.6 is on his website, but you application needs 1.7.304
Give up.
I LOVE linux because if you shovel through the manure and manage to get a system up and running stable, it STAYS up and running stable. There’s a finite number of problems to solve for any given job you want performed…but it takes a helluva lot of stamina to get there.
And those obscure settings don’t even fix the problem.
It’s somewhat unfair to blame the OS for Firefox’s problems, though. It has the same leak on Windows too. If I write a shitty program for Windows, does that make Windows a worse OS?
Wheee! This looks like fun. Since I haven’t used Windows since Win98, I’m no longer familiar with its eccentricities and can’t really say too much about it. Let me try:
When you can’t simply install your chosen OS with no hassle on a replacement computer, then the OS is not ready for prime time.
When your premier browser hasn’t progressed in six years and is only doing so because of the availability of more usable browsers, the manufacturer is taking advantage of its user base (which has nothing to do with the OS).
When your OS only recognizes a single file system, it is not ready for prime time.
When you need a third-party tool to run multiple OSes, your OS is not ready for prime time.
When there is a single point of failure (otherwise known as the Registry) that can corrupt the entire computer, your OS is not ready for prime time.
Obviously, I’m not trying to say that Windows is “not ready for prime time”. All I’m pointing out is that criteria differ. (And I certainly acknowledge, as before and in deference to your ESR link, that printing on UNIX has always been horrible.)
