Windows Vista

[dougal85]

Sxooter wrote:

That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. As long as people keep using windows and not demanding software be ported to linux, you'll need to run windows to use your favorite software.[...]

People just cant be bothered. Windows is hassle free, to an extent at least.

[Sxooter]

dougal85 wrote:

People just cant be bothered. Windows is hassle free, to an extent at least.

How can you say that with a straight face? My roommate keeps all our machines at work happy. We have about 10 linux servers, one windows server, 40 linux workstations, and about 10 windows laptops.

Can you guess which of those OSes take up about 90% of his time? I'll give you a hint. It's the one that's constantly letting itself get taken over by adware and viruses.

[dougal85]

People know windows. It's familiar, its easy.

Computers come with windows.

People can't be bothered changing and learning something new.

Afterall, with windows, your pretty much guarentteed to get every driver you need easily. Infact it usually comes with whatever you have.

It's all really easy.

Thats what I had meant. However, I have made this point before, linux is good for IT professionals. Windows is good for the public masses. I'm assuming your flat mate is an IT professional or atleast a hobbyist.

[Sxooter]

dougal85 wrote:

People know windows. It's familiar, its easy.

Thats what I had meant. However, I have made this point before, linux is good for IT professionals. Windows is good for the public masses. I'm assuming your flat mate is an IT professional or atleast a hobbyist.

Some of your reply removed for brevity...

Windows might be perceived as easier because people are more familiar with it, but it eats up a lot more of your time than you probably think it does. When's the last time you had to defrag your hard drive, or boot into safe mode, or reinstall some driver that got corrupted for no apparent reason. While these activities may seem easy to you, they sure aren't easy for grandma. Which brings me to my next point, how many friends does the average self trained windows expert have who rely on them to give them free support? I know that when I was a windows sysadmin (think windows 95/NT/98 Era) I had a lot of friends who I helped out.

While there was a time when linux was considerably more difficult to install and maintain, I have to say that with distros like ubuntu and knoppix, it's gotten ridiculously easy to keep happy. And, I can help out a lot more friends who are having linux / unix problems than I ever could with windows, cause once their machine is up and running, it's pretty much idiot proof.

The main point I was trying to make in my first response in this thread is that MS leaves windows users hanging. If they really cared about making your life easier, your OS would have a package manager. The fact that most windows users don't even know what they're missing is forgivable. The fact that Microsoft doesn't seem to know they need to build an OS around package management is unforgivable.

[Sxooter]

Afterall, with windows, your pretty much guarentteed to get every driver you need easily. Infact it usually comes with whatever you have.

Just had to comment on this. Drivers in Linux versus windows are just a whole different philosophy.

In Windows, drivers are something you load separately. They sometimes overwrite system dlls and make your system unstable. Sometimes you have to load them in a certain order or your machine will not run properly. The OS lives over here, drivers live over here, and trying to get them to get along can be a day long affair. Or not. It's like russian roulette. And since you don't have package management, it's quite possible to wedge your machine into a state where reloading the OS is the only way to be sure you've got it right.

With Windows, the range of age for hardware being easy to use is generally things that are 1 to 3 years old. If the hardware is too new, then it's likely the drivers will make your machine unstable. If the hardware is too old, there may not be a driver for it anymore and you're stuck with a paperweight in the shape of a formerly useful piece of hardware.

With Linux distros (they ain't all the same...) the philosophy is quite different. First of all, drivers generally come with the distro / kernel.Secondly old hardware tends to stay supported. This is because the base design of the interface for hardware is more stable from one linux kernel version to the next, and if it does change, the driver is open source and some interested party can migrate the driver to the newer kernel.

Because many more eyes examine and work on drivers in linux, they tend to be more stable and reliable than windows drivers.

About the drivers being on a disk. How many drivers on your system are straight off the manufacturer's disk, and how many are downloaded off of their support site? Anything new and shiny will require you to go to their site and download a new driver to make it work. This actually makes things worse, since many newbies get a disk with a driver and load that, only to find the driver is buggy and doesn't work.

With linux, the majority of the drivers are updated in the kernel. update your kernel, update most of your drivers. Except for X, which has it's own drivers. Update X, update your drivers.

I think the driver issue is a bit of a wash. Each OS has it's own style. Linux is generally a little harder to install drivers to, but harder to mess up with a bad driver install.

Finally, you can often fix linux driver problems by just updating your distro. Fedora Core puts out a new version every 6 to 12 months. Installed WinXP SP2 on brand new hardware in the last year? It takes almost as long to get all the drivers in place and working as the OS itself.

[piersk]

Ok, I'm going to try an experiment.

For the next month I'm going to run Linux as my primary OS on my laptop. Since the arguement here seems to be basically that Windows is an easier OS to use I'm not going to go bleeding edgelike Gentoo but I'm going to try ones aimed at the more basic Linux user, such as Ubuntu.

See you on the other side

[Sxooter]

I've been running that experiment with Fedora Core (2 through 4, soon to be 6) for about 2 years now. Seems to be working for me. But I will be setting my machine up as dual boot next update to be able to run Microsoft Project. urg.

[piersk]

Well, I've been running Ubuntu for the past couple of hours. Thats about 45 minutes to install Ubuntu properly and the rest to figure out how to configure Ubuntu to let my wireless card connect to the network here at home... I haven't actually done any development yet, but that can come soon...

[dougal85]

I've heard wireless cards can be a nightmare. I know my flatmate had an rather long and tedious process of getting his working. Even then it was unreliable, this was in ubuntu as well BTW. I'm not sure what make his adaptor is.

Also, I think you may be miss-understanding me. I don't think that Linux is a bad operating, I respect it. However, I think IT people don't give windows the respect it sometimes deserves. We all love to hate Microsoft don't we?

I've not had any problems with windows for a long time. I cant remember ever having to re-install programs because of drivers going faulty or the other problems mentioned by Sxooter. The only problem I've had lately is hard discs dying on me and by that i mean when the computer turns on they make a clicking sound. This hard disc was about 3 years old and its the one uTorrent downloads to 24/7 (pretty much) so reading writing all the time doesn't surprise me it burst eventually.

I maybe have been lucky with windows and I know people do have problems but I'm sure people have problems with Linux too. (IE. my flatmate).

Also, people know Linux, people are too lazy to change. What is it they say? "we are creatures of habit" ... or something like that.

I cant see it changing any time soon, nut unless Linux is distributed in more places like schools and universities. My university has a computing centre with about 600 computers. about 570 are windows XP and the other 30 are macs. There are Linux labs but you need to be a computing student to have access to them.

The mass public probably don't even know what Linux is, in fact I'm sure some people don't even know there is a different operating system. They probably think its windows for PCs and Mac OS for macs. Also, they don't care. It works as well as they need.

One major player for Home PC users is games I think. I'm pretty sure most games cant be played under Linux. I realise some will. Anyway, there are hundreds of arguments on each side. Windows has got in so deep, its hard to change.

This thread is majorly going off the beaten tack to a Linux Vs windows debate. One that wont end. Both seem to have there place in the computing industry. What would be a better thing to do is appreciate the benefits of both.

.........................................

Back to the point of the thread 😛 I'm interested to try out Vista and see what its like. I will wait a while, because as always there will be glitches for the first 6months or so. I wonder how many developers Microsoft has standing by waiting for problems. Well, they will already be fixing some but I wonder how big there list is growing.

[Weedpacket]

dougal85 wrote:

Goodness, but you must admit XP is a better operating system than windows 95? Surely?

Only in the senses that much of the stuff I use now (both software and hardware) won't run on 95, and in the sense that the computer is now more powerful than when I was running 95 - and that's nothing to do with the OS.

Say 0.5% of the time it's more convenient (when the installer/uninstaller works). The other 98.5% - meh. Supposedly more stable but I don't see any perceptible difference. Is it faster? No (not even on a chip that's 20x faster). Is it prettier? Yes. User management may be easier (in the sense that XP has some) and Vista may be easier still (I understand it recognises the Un*x principle that root should NOT be the default user account), but aside from service accounts this is a single-user machine anyway so I haven't got a comment on that.

Anyhow, gotta go. Have to work out why the network connection keeps dropping out every few minutes (ethereal says that it's hammering the DNS server for an IP that it already knows and not waiting for a reply).

[Sxooter]

And let's face it, the move from .ini files to putting that stuff into the registry was a huge mistake, from the point of view of user maintainability and ease of use.

Now, if the registry was a REAL hierchical or relational database, where one could say "show me all the keys created by dreamweaver" and back them up then it would be a useful piece of gear, but it's not. No one know WHAT made any of the entries in your registry, and having to edit it by hand always carries the disclaimer from MS that it may scram your machine and require a reinstall.

The is NOT userfriendly.

[Sxooter]

It just keeps getting worse. Did anyone see this article in zdnet?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=414

You really can't install upgrade vista without installing your previous os first? That's just insane...

[Piranha]

It have been said before in this thread, and I'm going to say it again:

We all like to hate Microsoft.

[vaaaska]

We hate MS because they are a company with a malevolent business plan.

[Sxooter]

I really don't hate Microsoft anymore. I'm too divorced from that world. My only recent experience was watching my 15 year old install XP on his new machine at Xmas.

But I do think they (MS) make some phenomonally stupid decisions, and this upgrade requiring a previous install is one of them.

And get this, they retire your previous XP key when you upgrade, so it's not like you could have used your old XP on one machine and Vista on another. And, if they retire your XP key, will you even be able to install Vista a second time should your drive crash? I mean, would a un-registered XP installation be good enough for vista that second time? I don't know. Seriously though, this whole thing sounds a little messed up.

[Weedpacket]

I see all this as Microsoft trying to keep control of its market share by any means possible (apart from producing quality products that are just plain better than the competition's). They're in defence mode.

It smells of a very deep feeling of insecurity in the company. Perhaps a segment of the decision makers are still living in the early 90s, when Microsoft basically had two products: Windows (or rather, the graphical shell over MS-DOS) and Office, and if they weren't selling one then they had better be selling the other or they wouldn't be selling anything.

David Brin, "Kil'n People" wrote:

It's one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation. That's part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father. Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows '09.

[Roger_Ramjet]

dougal85 wrote:

People just cant be bothered. Windows is hassle free, to an extent at least.

Oh yeah, 3-4 years ago I could not go see anyone without getting trapped into fixing their XP crash, usually after some enthusiastic amateur had made things worse.

For most people winders is all hassle and they just put up with it cos they don't know any better.

[dalecosp]

Weedpacket wrote:

I see all this as Microsoft trying to keep control of its market share by any means possible (apart from producing quality products that are just plain better than the competition's). They're in defence mode.

It smells of a very deep feeling of insecurity in the company. Perhaps a segment of the decision makers are still living in the early 90s, when Microsoft basically had two products: Windows (or rather, the graphical shell over MS-DOS) and Office, and if they weren't selling one then they had better be selling the other or they wouldn't be selling anything.

Add the XBox, and you've got M$ in a nutshell, methinks.

Two very interesting things about Microsoft these days: one, they failed to deliver on some lofty promises regarding "Longhorn" [coughwinFS cough]; two, most of the "eye candy" and some concepts they've delivered (transparency, "dock"/pane/whatever, tabbed browser, and to some extent, the 3d look) are taken straight from various F/OSS applications and environments. Their creativity is being stifled somehow - swallowed by the size of the codebase, perhaps? Does the size of a corporation and the size of its product have any relationship?

It's kinda interesting to read the employees themselves blogging about Linux as a competitor. And, they went through a lot of in-house squabbling with all the delay announcements during the last year. I think they need an OS-X like epiphany, or they may well fall from their high perch. Only problem; who else is ready to take their spot?

[Roger_Ramjet]

Dale, nothing MS has ever done has been original; they ripped UNIX to produce the original DOS and Xerox and Commodore for the desktop and window format and they've carried on like that ever since. The only good products they ever had were the ones they bought, like Excel which they ported from MAC no less. So I don't see what 'creativity' they had to stiffle in the first place. This rip-off approach to their business is why many of us 'hate' MS in the first place.

As to who can take their place? Why should anyone have to? With their strangle-hold released then all the companies that already produce excelent software would soon fill the space opened up.

[bpat1434]

As to who can take their place? Why should anyone have to? With their strangle-hold released then all the companies that already produce excelent software would soon fill the space opened up.

Except what OS would emerge? Would the government finally go to a cost free linux environment? Maybe. Would they just keep Windows crap until the hardware fails? Most likely.

Then you have to look on the flip side: If Windows were to bow out of the market, and a new OS took the reigns, wouldn't that just fall prey to the same issues Windows has faced? Consider Ubuntu (as I hear it's all the rage). Windows leaves and Ubuntu rises in popularity until it fills most of the void Windows left taking 51% of the market share (through donations 😉). Now you have an operating system that is very popular. Most everyone uses it. So wouldn't hackers, low-lives, and other scum just turn their attention to the linux community? Wouldn't Ubuntu start having security issues, much like Microsoft?

Then you also have to look at ease of use. It's sometimes easier to get a program onto Windows than it is in LInux. Depending upon the brand (using Suse this time) you have to find the rpm, download it, run it, make sure there are no "dependencies", run it again, allow the item to run as an administrator for a second, allow it to finish. Once it's done, where does it go? Is there a shortcut for it? Is it in the Launch menu? Can you just type "suexec command" and have the program start? Not from my experience. But in Windows you get that ease of use. You know (for the most part) that most programs install to the Start Menu. Windows does make it easier.

I'm not arguing for Windows. Believe me, if I had the time to learn Linux from the ground up (which maybe will happen this summer, or maybe I'll go after my MS certs 😉) I'd take the time to switch my desktop to linux, and keep windows on the laptop (as I'm not the only one that uses it, plus Trillian Astra doesn't work on Linux natively (¿yet?)). But I can see some silver lining in the Windows cloud, although Linux is a good strong breeze in the OS community....