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raven
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Linux/Unix on the desktop?
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Oct 6 05:59 UTC 2000 |
With Linux distributions becoming easier to install and the coming of Mac
OSX, will we be seeing more Unix/Linux on the desktop? I do think Linux
is becoming easy enough to install for mainstram users, my Mandrake 7.1
install went like a breeze with only minor problems configuring the
soundcard , it was no harder than installing Windoze 98.
Will Linux/Unix change the way people use their home computers with easier
internet access in than Windows, and more powerful server software
available, etc?
Tell your experiences with using KDE, Gnome, OSX, installing DSL on Linux
boxen, etc in this item.
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| 85 responses total. |
bdh3
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response 1 of 85:
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Oct 6 07:52 UTC 2000 |
It really sucks, man. Used to be you used to have to practically be a
computer genius/unix nerd to get everything working under linux. Now
any idiot can do it and there is no longer a 'cache' from running linux.
It really sucks. Even FreeBSD has become 'idiot friendly'. Whats a
nerd to do? Its a lot like when OS/2 went mainstream. Ah, thats the
ticket, run OS/2 again....
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raven
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response 2 of 85:
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Oct 6 08:07 UTC 2000 |
As long as the system is secure, big if I know isn't that the important thing,
not status? How is Unix/Linux going to over throw Micro$oft if it isn;t easy
to use?
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scott
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response 3 of 85:
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Oct 6 11:22 UTC 2000 |
I'm running Linux.... and I love it! :)
Actually what I like is that I don't have to deal with the truly awful
software that comes bundled with hardware items. HP is one of my main
complaint targets in this regard; buy a CD burner and you get tons of crappy
software which might not even be able to successfully burn a CD. Linux takes
a bit more thought (right now I'm trying to get USB running... not for the
faint-of-heart), but you usually end up with something solid and reliable.
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jazz
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response 4 of 85:
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Oct 6 13:53 UTC 2000 |
Take heart, Beady. Linux still has less-than-perfect hardware
compatibility (try getting a General Instruments SurfBoard SB1000 to run under
a modern kernel, ferinstnace) and there'll always be a market for people who
can fix the things that Linux can *theoretically* do but nobody's written a
GUI for.
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drew
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response 5 of 85:
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Oct 6 15:10 UTC 2000 |
I have yet to get my CDROM burner to write out a single byte using anything
other than some 32-bit Windoze.
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jp2
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response 6 of 85:
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Oct 6 17:23 UTC 2000 |
This response has been erased.
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raven
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response 7 of 85:
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Oct 6 19:39 UTC 2000 |
re #6 BSD? GNU Hurd kernel? Plan9? There are quite a few hacker OSs out
there not to mention BeOS for video graphics hackers. Is nayone still running
VMS?
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mdw
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response 8 of 85:
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Oct 6 20:15 UTC 2000 |
I got RSTS/E running the other day. It was surprisingly painless,
although I have yet to figure out a use for having done this.
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mwg
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response 9 of 85:
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Oct 6 20:29 UTC 2000 |
I make use of GIMP as a graphics scaning/editing application. Linux is my
internet connection at home. Such CD burning as I need to do I can, and
unlike even a very fast Windows machine, I can burn discs while doing
other things, Grexing for example. I'm fiddling with Gnucash to see if it
can keep my checkbook in some semblance of order (I'd prefer something not
GUI-hobbled, but Microsoft did that part of the job so well that the
damage will likely outlast thier corporate existence) and I have a DOS
virtual machine program that I can use my not-yet-replaceable tools with.
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twinkie
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response 10 of 85:
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Oct 6 20:46 UTC 2000 |
I use both operating systems at work. (And I'm the only person here who has
*NIX on their desktop) Linux is great for network monitoring and diagnosis,
but I haven't found it to be very useful for other things.
Originally, I was going to turn my new home system in to a dual-boot
Mandrake/Windows ME machine. Problem is, Linux doesn't seem to like the
newness of my computer, and the USB support is nil. Sure, if you're running
a plain vanilla workstation, Linux is fine. But, when you have seven USB
devices, Linux absolutely blows. (The 7 devices are: printer, scanner, net
cam, compact flash reader, Visor cradle, mouse, ethernet)
Secondly, the software still isn't there. Sure, GIMP is a very robust (and
very free) graphics program, but it's nothing compared to Photoshop, when it
comes to ease of use. XBurn is nice, but it doesn't hold a candle to Easy CD
Creator, Corel Office and Star Office are both functional, but they're not
nearly as nice as MS Office.
There's just no way Linux is going to dominate, until the various distributors
get their collective shit together. There should be no inherent difference
between Mandrake 7.1 and RedHat 6.2, yet, there are so many issues trying to
cross-install RPM's, it hurts just thinking about it. And let's get real...Joe
Sixpack doesn't want to deal with compiling something out of a tarball.
Compared to Windows programs that autorun/autoinstall (thank the stars you
can turn that "feature" off!), typing "rpm -i <packagename>" is quite a
stretch. Believing Joe Sixpack is going to tar xcvf <packagename>, make, make
install, and check the symlinks is absurd.
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danr
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response 11 of 85:
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Oct 6 21:07 UTC 2000 |
Linux won't really be mainstream until I can go to Office Max and pick up a
computer with LInux already installed.
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jazz
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response 12 of 85:
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Oct 6 21:10 UTC 2000 |
One of several critical differences between Mandrake and Red Hat is
which C library the core componets (which are different) are compiled with.
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jp2
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response 13 of 85:
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Oct 6 22:18 UTC 2000 |
This response has been erased.
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scg
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response 14 of 85:
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Oct 7 00:25 UTC 2000 |
I think I've found that the OS I like best is generally just what I'm used
to. I'd been a Linux user exclusively for several years, but when I moved
to California my Linux box was in the posession of the movers for a while,
and my new employer gave me an NT based notebook computer, which I've been
using for everything both at home and at work. I now have my Linux box
unpacked and set up, but I've been using it only when the notebook is in the
bag and I want to do something quick without setting it up. Otherwise, I'm
finding that I'm quite comfortable in NT at the moment. Part of that I'm sure
is also that my Linux box is old and slow, and this notebook is really nice
and fast, and part of it is that I've gotten very used to the trackpoint think
in the middle of the keyboard, and having to lift my hands off the keyboard
to use the mouse in my X Windows setup is annoying.
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ball
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response 15 of 85:
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Oct 7 04:12 UTC 2000 |
I think Linux and BSD can be good for server-side stuff, and
even for some client-side stuff if you can lock it down
enough to keep the users from screwing it up. For stand-
alone and home machines I imagine it depends a lot on the
user, but in my experience it's a long way from being
suited to the general consumer.
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pfv
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response 16 of 85:
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Oct 7 04:21 UTC 2000 |
The "general consumer" is typically incapable of making up his mind,
voting sensibly, cooking at home, or changing his oil and filter.
it's not improving.
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bdh3
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response 17 of 85:
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Oct 7 04:26 UTC 2000 |
So Micro$oft is the ideal platform then.
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mdw
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response 18 of 85:
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Oct 7 06:47 UTC 2000 |
In my very brief exposure to photoshop, I found it to be
counter-intuitive and surprisingly unpleasant to use. It was a long
time ago, and things may have improved since, but I'd be real surprised
to find that even the modern version is as "friendly" as gimp.
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scott
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response 19 of 85:
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Oct 7 12:29 UTC 2000 |
I found gimp to be pretty unfriendly at first. YMMV.
NT 4.0 is a pretty good platform, although slightly hobbled by the lack of
a bundled compiler or scripting language (aside from batch files). If you
can afford to buy all the software you can get a lot of work done on NT! And
Win2k isn't that bad either, although so far I've just been using to run
things I can't run on Linux like USB devices.
One area I really hate windows is in doing backups. Windows and windows apps
seem to randomly diffuse use data over the whole disk, rather than in easily
predictable places. So if you want a solid backup you have to back up
everything. *nix, by comparison, tends to put all user data into the home
directory, and system config into a few other known places. Backups can just
be of a few directories, which saves both time and money (I backup home
directories and a few other spots for a grand total of about 600Mb saved, and
the entire rest of the disk came from a vanilla install of the Caldera CD).
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jp2
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response 20 of 85:
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Oct 7 17:17 UTC 2000 |
This response has been erased.
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drew
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response 21 of 85:
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Oct 7 18:36 UTC 2000 |
Re #19:
Not only that, but I had found Windoze NT to be *impossible* to back up
in any meaningful way fro quite a while. Attempting to copy the files over
someplace generally resulted in some files not being copied because they were
"open". Any tape backup, let alone any better backup media, generally required
that NT already be installed in order to use it, thus defeating the purpose
of having the backup. Downloading and using Ghost managed finally to mitigate
that problem. I can now at least store the whole partition as a DOS file and
recover it later.
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jazz
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response 22 of 85:
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Oct 7 21:28 UTC 2000 |
NT's file locking methods do leave a lot to be desired; you *can*
access open files, but the methods to do so aren't really pretty. I'm not
happy about NT's requirment of using iexplore or a handfull of other utilities
as the only method to examine a currently-open logfile.
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gull
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response 23 of 85:
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Oct 8 21:46 UTC 2000 |
In my experience it's impossible to fully backup and restore any version of
Windows from 95 on. The problem is you can't restore the backup without
Win95 running, and with Win95 running you're not allowed to overwrite open
files, so a full restore doesn't work. Win95 also scatters lots of files
marked Hidden and System across the drive for no apparent reason.
Linux won't become a mainstream desktop OS as-is, because there are several
problems that the average user just doesn't want to deal with:
- There's no consistant user interface. This is improving, but it's still
generally true that knowledge you learn on one X app won't translate to
another. And don't even get me started on the various window managers.
- X Windows cripples the video performance, making the system often "feel"
slower than other OS's.
- Upgrades are extremely painful. Installing a new version of an app often
fails because of library incompatibilities. Installing a newer library
often breaks dozens of other applications. The only reasonable
alternative is to upgrade the whole OS en masse, but that tends to
wipe out any special configuration you've done.
- Adding new hardware often requires a kernel recompile. This is expecting
the average user to know a *lot* about how their machine works.
- A lot of hardware doesn't work, even hardware that's supposed to. My
scanner is supported but attempting to use it locks the system up
solid every time.
- New kernel releases often break hardware that used to work. If the
hardware is old enough, no one will be interested enough to fix it.
A friend of mine has a stack of SCSI cards that haven't worked with
any Linux kernel since they started the 2.x.x series.
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twinkie
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response 24 of 85:
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Oct 8 22:38 UTC 2000 |
re: Windows backup problems -- The Backup program that ships with Windows
sucks. It's kind of like using Paintbrush for something you should use
Photoshop for. That's why virtually every backup drive sold ships with backup
software. (Most drives ship with Veritas BackupExec these days, which is very
nice. It can back up open system files.)
The best way to run a backup on an NT server, is to close all the network
connections before running the backup. This ensures that there aren't any
unnecessary files open. And as I mentioned above, a decent backup program will
alleviate "open file" problems.
Restoring the backup is a painless procedure, if you read the documentation
for your software and backup drive. Usually, all you need is a boot disk to
restore a system from tape. The only real exception that I'm aware of is ADSM,
which I doubt any of you would ever use anyway.
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