Linux article - Windows is Free

[stockhausen]

Nah, if you can get 98 or ME to work on it then you can get Linux running too... might not get the full eye candy but the kernel itself takes hardly any resources, and then you can add stuff on top to make it as useable as you want.

Quite true, you can run DSL on pretty well anything, likewise you could install a non-graphical Linux and then go on to load up other bits and pieces. I am not suggesting that there aren't a great many Linux powered devices with very low spec CPUs and next to no RAM.

However, why would the average user want to go down that route? Linux loaded from a typical distro onto a desktop is slower than Windows - unless you strip out unwanted processes and tweak it extensively.

 

[SiriusB]

Linux loaded from a typical distro onto a desktop is slower than Windows

Have you got any data that shows this? As in my own experience Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty have been far more responsive and quicker overall than Windows on both my main PC and my laptop.

 

[Edward78]

Did you check it wasnt muted? Some disto's have sound output's muted by default, that use to get me all the time in the RH7.x days.

It is not muted, the mixer icon in the tray says "Mixer can not be found" when my pointer is over it.

Linux loaded from a typical distro onto a desktop is slower than Windows - unless you strip out unwanted processes and tweak it extensively.

I disagree, my win2kpro install not even a year old yet is so slow starting up apps that I do a control alt delete sometimes thinking it froze. Plus, Ut2004 Ballistic Weapons maps take 10-25 secs to load up. Yes I only have 512 meg of ram, but even that doesn't seem like it should make it so slow. I wish there was a site where you could build your own distro by questionare & they would put it together for you.

 

[deadite66]

Have you got any data that shows this? As in my own experience Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty have been far more responsive and quicker overall than Windows on both my main PC and my laptop.

its certainly faster from switch on to usable.
on windows its a rush to display the desktop so MS can brag how fast it loads but still the drive is thrashing away loading the rest of it.
linux on the otherhand soon as i log in it's usable.

 

[Caged]

Mrs Miggins might not see the point in changing her OS unless she has to, but there'll come a time when she does have to.

Why?

 

[GarethDW]

Because her version of Windows is no longer supported by Microsoft... or because her PC breaks so she buys a new one but the OEM version of Windows she had on her old machine can't be transferred on to her new machine, so she's forced to buy a copy of Windows.

 

[stockhausen]

Because her version of Windows is no longer supported by Microsoft... or because her PC breaks so she buys a new one but the OEM version of Windows she had on her old machine can't be transferred on to her new machine, so she's forced to buy a copy of Windows.

Why would Mrs Miggins care that "her version of Windows is no longer supported by Microsoft"? She probably doesn't even bother to update her anti-virus signatures.

When she buys a new PC, there is pretty well a 100% chance that it is going to come with Windows Vista pre-installed. I don't think that she is going to tell the spotty faced youth at her high street electrical retailer that she wants it reemoved so that she can install Ubuntu instead, do you?

 

[GarethDW]

Why would Mrs Miggins care that "her version of Windows is no longer supported by Microsoft"? She probably doesn't even bother to update her anti-virus signatures.

When she buys a new PC, there is pretty well a 100% chance that it is going to come with Windows Vista pre-installed. I don't think that she is going to tell the spotty faced youth at her high street electrical retailer that she wants it reemoved so that she can install Ubuntu instead, do you?

Yeah, you're right, she's probably not aware... but as we're talking hypothetical situations, let's assume she goes to that high street retailer to buy a webcam to be able to communicate with her family that has moved to Australia. The spotty faced oik shows her a webcam and she asks if it will work with her current computer, which she's had for a number of years now. The spotty faced oik then frowns and suggests she considers upgrading the operating system, because it's so out of date that Microsoft don't even support it any more.

Now, you and I both know that it's pretty much irrelevant if Microsoft support it. The spotty faced oiks that work on a commission basis in those high street retailers, though, very rarely have the customers' best interests at heart - sadly.

As for her asking to have Windows removed so she can install an open source alternative, I also agree that it ain't gonna happen... but that's largely because she's already paid for Windows and the price of her new PC isn't gonna change if she has it removed - assuming she even knew of the existance of alternative operating systems. Let's imagine for a second, though, that things were different... Mrs Miggins goes to the high street retailer to buy a new PC, and the friendly sales guy shows her 2 systems... one which costs £x because it includes Windows, and one which has exactly the same components on the inside but costs considerably less, only £y, because it includes this free operating system which works almost exactly like Windows, has all the same software available, is compatible with her internet connection, printer, webcam, etc...

Now, I'd say that Mrs Miggins may well choose to pay the extra £100 for Windows, but there's also the possibility that she'd take the cheaper PC and put the £100 she's saved into buying something else. Given the choice, she may choose to go open source... but at the moment, she's not given the choice.

Does this make sense...? It's kinda clear in my head, but I've got a headache so trying to explain what I mean is proving painful.

 

[Caged]

No, she's going to see the start button and a name (Windows) she's familiar with and buy the system that lets her run Office.

 

[Shoseki]

OpenOffice runs just as well as Office, not to mention stores file sizes that measure in a hundredth of the size. Oh, and can auto convert to pdf.

Its not going to happen, because business makes money from windows, and makes squat from linux, thats why. Its a hassle, and it doesn't bring in the moolah.

 

[allllec]

With the Car analogy i think a big difference is

Average Joe who drives: Cares about the car, there spending lots on it.
Average Joe who browses the web, checks email etc etc: Doesn't (to an extent). and its reality inexpensive either way.


unfortuntly for average Joe there are ample features on Windows so it does everything that they can realistically expect from a PC.

Personally a windows user, and after experimenting i've chosen to be, despite the difference in price between windows and linux.

 

[arachnoid]

The biggest single thing here IMO is the comfort zone.

We are all slightly geeky or we wouldn't be members of the OCUK forum. I would say with huge confidence that almost everyone here has disassembled something that was working perfectly well just to see how it worked. Linux is great for many of us, regular new updates, interchangeable window managers and other components, all the things that we love to play with. Equally if i want a bullet proof DNS Server i'm not about to shell out for a Windows licence, especially if i want it fail over clustered etc. I love my kubuntu laptop install. My NSLU2 NAS device running debian is brilliant. Linux is fantastic for me and initially(too long ago) I loved the challenge of getting RH6.2 to run on my satelitte pro laptop.

Most PC users, however, aren't in that category. They want something to work in the way that they expect it to work and they don't want to have to even understand what's happening. They see the phrases "I can use a computer" and "I know how to surf the web" as identical. While these users are sitting happy in their comfort zone they have no interest in moving to Linux as that would take them way outside the bounds of what they know. Just because something might be easier to achieve in Linux or is better or more stable doesn't help if they don't know how to do it.

I think a lot of the install / UAC issues are largely irrelevant for most of these users. Mrs miggins almost certainly has a nephew, let's call him Wee Jock who does all the installation on her PC and when she needs a new app installed she gets on the phone or messenger if she's discovered it yet and bakes Wee Jock a tasty pie as a thankyou.

The only things that makes me consider moving my Father's PC to linux during the next install is whether the difference between his current OS (Win 2K) and Vista is any greater than the difference between his current OS and Kubuntu and whether I will have an easier experience supporting his PC with one OS or the other. I'll also have to consider whether Open Office is too much of a change for him from Office 2k compared to moving to office 2008 or 2009.

anyway my 2c i'd better get back to work

Russell

 

[thelonecrouton]

The only things that makes me consider moving my Father's PC to linux during the next install is whether the difference between his current OS (Win 2K) and Vista is any greater than the difference between his current OS and Kubuntu and whether I will have an easier experience supporting his PC with one OS or the other. I'll also have to consider whether Open Office is too much of a change for him from Office 2k compared to moving to office 2008 or 2009.



Russell

For what it's worth, I moved both my parents' laptops to Ubuntu about 18 months ago and they've never been happier. No more of the crap that people just expect from Windows, everything just works, and keeps on working.

And none of the weekly phone calls to me to talk them through cleaning the crap out of their Windows installs so they'd work again.

Neither had any problems switching to either Ubuntu or OpenOffice etc. and they are both about as technically minded as a treestump.

Except that most 'current' versions of Linux either wouldn't run on it or would be incredibly slow.

As has been suggested earlier, Linux is not yet really a desktop product. On a server, it is hard to beat. However, Linux really does need quite a lot of performance tuning in order to be viable on a typical user's desktop.

This is complete nonsense.

The only instance I have ever seen of Windows being faster at anything than linux is needing a reboot. Oh, and IE7 does render pages noticeably faster than Firefox, even running in WMware. It often fails miserably at rendering them correctly, and the UI is bloody awful, but it's fast, I'll give it that.

 

[arachnoid]

For what it's worth, I moved both my parents' laptops to Ubuntu about 18 months ago and they've never been happier. No more of the crap that people just expect from Windows, everything just works, and keeps on working.

And none of the weekly phone calls to me to talk them through cleaning the crap out of their Windows installs so they'd work again.

Neither had any problems switching to either Ubuntu or OpenOffice etc. and they are both about as technically minded as a treestump.

I reckon that your parents, Mrs Miggins and my dad are probably in a group of users who are always going to have their PCs administered for them and therefore don't care less whether they are running on M$ or OSS as long as it works. The geeks will always enjoy hacking stuff so OSS will always be good for them. I guess those are the 10 and 90 percentiles leaving 80% muddling through on their own and occassionally asking their mate to give them a hand when the going gets tough, that mate probably uses windows too so it makes sense for them to stick with it.

We are stuck in a position where windows continues to have users because it already has users so the manufacturers continue to write their drivers for windows. The linux community generally have more IT skills than the wider community and either hack something to get it to work or find someone who has hacked it. At the moment they don't seem to make up a big enough chunk of the consumer market for many manufacturers to be bothered. How many games manufacturers do you think test on Cedega before releasing code?

 

[Smurfy]

Why is software and hardware installation in linux so horribly complex when compared to Windows and the mac OS's? It appears to largely be caused by dependencies. Which i guess would be a common issue when you rely on another developers software but cannot directly distrbute it.

 

[Shoseki]

Why is software and hardware installation in linux so horribly complex when compared to Windows and the mac OS's? It appears to largely be caused by dependencies. Which i guess would be a common issue when you rely on another developers software but cannot directly distrbute it.

Insert Ubuntu disk. Reboot machine. Install.

Doesn't sound hard to me...

 

[GarethDW]

Why is software and hardware installation in linux so horribly complex when compared to Windows and the mac OS's? It appears to largely be caused by dependencies. Which i guess would be a common issue when you rely on another developers software but cannot directly distrbute it.

Yeah, this used to be a real problem, but seems way better these days than it used to be. Which distro have you been using? I've not been in dependency hell for a long long time.

The Windows application installation seems easy to you because you're used to it. However, if you look at it, it could be said to be more complicated than under Linux.

You need to download setup.exe from a web site (first question... which web site to use?). Then you have to work out where the browser saved setup.exe. When you've found it, you're asked during the installation where you want to install it - experienced users would know that you're supposed to just chuck everything in C:\Program Files\ but inexperienced users don't know that. Lastly, you've got to remember to delete setup.exe cause you shouldn't need it again and it's taking up disk space.

Compare that with Synaptic, for example. You launch Synaptic, select the application you want to install, click the install button. Synaptic does the rest - downloads the installer, runs it, installs the app where it belongs and tidies up after itself.

 

[marscay]

yep Ubuntu has made it incredibly easy to now have a powerful linux setup without having to worry about issues such as dependancy.

although whilst trying to install the latest CUPS from source i ran into dep-hell with zlib1g-dev but that's another story which i eventually got around another way.

apart from gaming i'm now 100% under linux desktop again and it it's just so much nicer than windows.

now i'm thinking of starting a arch/gentoo or a LFS install to get my head around some of the guts of linux i'd forgotten about.

 

[Smurfy]

I was trying to get a MYTH TV setup installed on a Fedora 6 installation around 6-8 months ago now, literally spent a week trying to get the damn thing setup both software and hardware but was just way out of my depth unfortunately, dependency issues everywhere and literally no idea where to start doing things i had no idea how to reverse and therefore enedup starting frsh around 7 or 8 times, il admit the whole thing has become a lot better and while you can rely on package managers for the most part stray from it and your average noob is screwed.

Iv used a number of distro's since with OpenSUSE and Ubuntu impressing me the most. I think your right in saying that it appears complex but actually when you understand the steps involved its pretty straight forwards but then its the learning curve for those steps that make it user friendly or not.

 

[yoda]

The fact that Linux runs on a lot of servers and not on a lot of home pc's says as much about it as needs to be - the benefits of it aren't found by the average Joe. Even if it is free.

Your forgetting the fact that Microsoft hides behind Linux proxy servers because they had enough of fixing the holes in their IIS servers...

Go read this, it not the full artical I read a few years ago but you get the gist... http://digg.com/linux_unix/Surprise_Microsoft_Windows_Live_is_protected_by_Linux

The fact that linux is on something like 95% of internet web servers SHOULD tell the home user that Microsoft is a security NIGHTMARE, everything to do with SSL is limited to 128bit encryption because of US LAW. It is illegal to use anything higher that 128bit encryption in the US because the FBI can't decrypt it... if the FBI can do it, I can too... would you like me to steal your credit card info at work, at home or while I'm on the pull on Friday night? How long do you think it'll take me to empty your bank accounts and max out your cards? 60 seconds? 30 seconds? 10 seconds? 1 second? or less than 1 second?

Scared yet? you should be... and I'm not by any means a security or encryption expert!

I create point to point encrypted links the likes of which will take the worlds fastest supercomputers a hundred decades to decrypt... were not talking single layer encryption... linux crypto loop allows 8 loops by default, so lets sent it around 8 encryption loops with 8 different hashed passcodes before we send it over the internet...

How fast would you like to go today???? - stuff that!
How secure would you like to be today!

Luckerly, my own morals and ethics mean that I don't break British law, but not everyone shares my morals...