Convert me to the cult of Linux!

[Stark]

Windows 7 runs fine on netbook hardware. As a matter of fact it often runs better than XP.

Yeah, and it boots faster on a netbook than it does on my desktop. Damn.

[Channel72]

Of course, if Channel72 has some specific examples to give weight to his arguments I'd like to hear them, because it sounds like he's just throwing out the same stock arguments that have been repeated ad nauseum since the 1990s, and haven't been true for quite some time.

What are you talking about? I gave a very specific example one post after the one you quoted.

You can use Ubuntu without having to use the shell, IF

1) You don't need to compile drivers for any hardware
2) You limit yourself to using packaged software through the apt-get framework.

The problem is that the Linux community/culture itself tends to favor distributing source-code rather than binaries, due to the whole GNU "free software" philosophy. Therefore, most programs are distributed as source tarballs rather than binaries. This means that if you ever want to install software on Ubuntu that isn't part of the apt framework, you basically need to use the make utility, which means you need the shell.

[Pu-239]

I think it has to do how Ubuntu saves the password: it transforms it into a hexadeciamal something. Why does it do this and is there a painless way to disable this? I keep trying to remove the profile I entered trough Network Connections but it keeps popping back up with the wrong password!

EDIT: Disabled and then enabled networking. No change. Rebooting now to see any difference, but I doubt it.
EDIT2: Yup, rebooting has no effect. Still insists on using a hexadecimal keycode instead of actual password.

I believe all WPA(2) passwords, are interpreted as hex before being sent off to the router. http://www.xs4all.nl/~rjoris/wpapsk.html

I think Windows XP stored passwords in hex as well; Vista and above stored it verbatim as the original passphrase

I've had problems connecting to hidden wireless points before- try just making it visible. You have WPA2 on anyway, and anybody serious about cracking it and guessing WPA passwords can detect it easily even if hidden. I've gotten hidden wireless to work somehow using the GUI only, but don't really remember and I don't run into those very often.

Windows 7 runs fine on netbook hardware. As a matter of fact it often runs better than XP.

Yeah, and it boots faster on a netbook than it does on my desktop. Damn.

Maybe it's because the netbook uses an SSD? *shrug*

Ever notice that these sorts of objections never give specific examples?

I'll give a specific example. I have never been able to get any sort of hardware accelerated graphics working on Linux without hours of fucking about with dodgy drivers, binary blobs and the labyrinthine horror that is Xfree86/Xorg. I've tried this on many, many computers over the years, Nvidia, ATI, integrated graphics it never works on a fresh install. Which is not to say that it works properly after I've crowbared it with copious console sessions, rebuilds and config file edits either; at best X kinda sorta displays OpenGL stuff with hardware acceleration, when it feels like it, with random glitches. This almost always comes at the price of fucking up the normal 2D graphics, making several display modes unavailable, inexplicably locking the refresh rate, randomly blacking the screen / crashing X / locking the system at roughly 30 minute intervals etc. The perfect shitstorm of the X Windows concept, design and implementation is primarily to blame, though the LOL NO BINARIES FREE SOFTWARE ONLY zealots certainly fuck things up further where they can.

I've heard of people having problems with ATI card in Linux, which is why I don't buy that brand (while Linux is certainly ready for the desktop, not all desktops are ready for Linux, unfortunately.) However, I've never had the slightest difficulty getting an Nvidia card working in Linux. You have to download their proprietary drivers, sure, but even that's pretty easy in most modern distributions. They can be installed in Ubuntu with just a couple of clicks, for instance.

Same here- Fedora is more strict about "free software", but even then it's fairly easy and can be done w/ the GUI. The hard part sadly is knowing what RPMFusion is etc etc. But that's just part of what the user has to know to get stuff working. Slipstreaming drivers into install discs for Windows isn't obvious to the n00b either.

[Pu-239]

Of course, if Channel72 has some specific examples to give weight to his arguments I'd like to hear them, because it sounds like he's just throwing out the same stock arguments that have been repeated ad nauseum since the 1990s, and haven't been true for quite some time.

What are you talking about? I gave a very specific example one post after the one you quoted.

You can use Ubuntu without having to use the shell, IF

1) You don't need to compile drivers for any hardware
2) You limit yourself to using packaged software through the apt-get framework.

The problem is that the Linux community/culture itself tends to favor distributing source-code rather than binaries, due to the whole GNU "free software" philosophy. Therefore, most programs are distributed as source tarballs rather than binaries. This means that if you ever want to install software on Ubuntu that isn't part of the apt framework, you basically need to use the make utility, which means you need the shell.

Name a package that you use that isn't available in some precompiled form.


That's changed a bit, I can find standalone RPMs/DEBs and/or yum/apt repos for most things (I still install via command line instead of doubleclicking the package out of habit though). I haven't compiled stuff for a long time - if it's not precompiled, I can't be bothered to install all the dev libraries and compile it myself. Usually the stuff that I care to use that lack precompiled stuff are command line tools or specialized
stuff the average user won't use anyway.

For Xilinx ISE, I've had to use the command line to install (not compile), but that's also specialized engineering software. Same w/ JDK/Eclipse (new versions), but if you're programming something and you don't know the command line... well...

Something that *is* somewhat problematic is desktop java apps distributed as .jars - you can't doubleclick on them since they get opened up as a zip (which it is).


Drivers for stuff, I can see having to drop into the command line- I've done it to get the GUI scanner frontend to recognize and use a Dell networked scanner. But most people don't use networked scanners. I suppose there's the long tail problem though, where Linux works for 95% of the cases and fails for the remaining 5 percent, which is different for each person...

[Stark]

I've never found a package for a game precompiled for any distro I've ever used; but then I've never used ubuntu.

[Dominus Atheos]

A good graphical front, because I have no intention of learning command lines.

Then you should just forget about using Linux, because you won't be able to use Linux for long without using the shell.
...
But despite claims from the fanatics, it's not ready for the Desktop yet, and driver support for many peripherals is spotty at best. Granted, Linux has made great strides towards becoming a true Desktop OS with Ubuntu, but really, if all you want is a nice, intuitive GUI front-end then go with Windows 7 or Mac OS.

Really? That's all news to me, which is a surprise since I work in a store that sells and gives out Linux-based desktops and notebooks. In fact I even work in the tech support dept, and I can tell you that everything you just said is wrong. All of our customers manage just fine without ever having to go into the CLI. The only driver problem we regularly encounter is for WWAN adapters, and that's only because we put Ubuntu 8.04 LTS onto our computers; we just tell those customers to upgrade and everything works fine.

[Pu-239]

I've never found a package for a game precompiled for any distro I've ever used; but then I've never used ubuntu.

Hm, good point.

Most free games *are* precompiled in distro packages... however, *real* games (from iD - there are few other Linux commercial games *sigh*) like ET:QW come in self extracting executables which honestly are less than user friendly since generally you can't just doubleclick them (executables must first be marked executable).

*Then* you must install it somewhere, and as most of the installers must be run as root if installing to system directories already in the path, and won't request root, so it must be done via su/sudo via command line . Oh, and it won't menu shortcuts of any kind, so you'll have to run the command line to run said game. Oh, and alt-tabbing doesn't work.

Gaming on Linux is in a sorry state . I don't even try anymore, I just reboot to Vista and/or run games on the XBox360.

Although, technically that's not really compiling


That said, there's nothing keeping commercial developers from creating proper RPM/DEB packages (or just deb, since Ubuntu is King) , it's just for some reason they don't.

A few like Opera, Adobe, and Skype do properly package their stuff though (Although in the case of skype, that's only a sort-of, since that package doesn't specify dependencies and has issues running on a 64-bit Fedora machine if those aren't manually installed).

[Dominus Atheos]

I've never found a package for a game precompiled for any distro I've ever used; but then I've never used ubuntu.

Hm, good point.

Most free games *are* precompiled in distro packages... however, *real* games (from iD - there are few other Linux commercial games *sigh*) like ET:QW come in self extracting executables which honestly are less than user friendly since generally you can't just doubleclick them (executables must first be marked executable).

*Then* you must install it somewhere, and as most of the installers must be run as root if installing to system directories already in the path, and won't request root, so it must be done via su/sudo via command line . Oh, and it won't menu shortcuts of any kind, so you'll have to run the command line to run said game. Oh, and alt-tabbing doesn't work.

Gaming on Linux is in a sorry state . I don't even try anymore, I just reboot to Vista and/or run games on the XBox360.

Supposedly Steam is coming to Linux sometime soon. I would imagine installing games from that is about the same as installing them on Windows Steam.

[General Zod]

Supposedly Steam is coming to Linux sometime soon. I would imagine installing games from that is about the same as installing them on Windows Steam.

I thought Steam on Linux was still in the "might be a rumor" stage? Even then, this is Valve you're talking about. For them soon is "lol we know we said April but it'll really be in May".

[Channel72]

Name a package that you use that isn't available in some precompiled form.

Most commonly used packages are available through the apt framework, but your point about the remaining 5% is really on target. In the last year alone, I can't tell you how many chipset or network card drivers I've had to (re)compile in order to get Ubuntu or Debian running smoothly.

I admit that if you have mostly standard hardware, and all you want to do is browse the web and do basic word processing, then Ubuntu usually works fine out-of-the-box.

Drivers for stuff, I can see having to drop into the command line- I've done it to get the GUI scanner frontend to recognize and use a Dell networked scanner. But most people don't use networked scanners. I suppose there's the long tail problem though, where Linux works for 95% of the cases and fails for the remaining 5 percent, which is different for each person...

Exactly. And this problem is excacerbated by the Linux culture/community itself, which values transparency and source-code over "just getting it to work." Another issue to remember is that in general, most Linux/UNIX programmers aren't interested in creating GUIs anyway. A large number of Linux tools are command line utilities with no graphical front-end. For example, a utility as common as bmon, which monitors network activity, doesn't come with a GUI out-of-the-box; so if you ever want to simply monitor network activity you need to drop to the command line.

[Channel72]

Really? That's all news to me, which is a surprise since I work in a store that sells and gives out Linux-based desktops and notebooks. In fact I even work in the tech support dept, and I can tell you that everything you just said is wrong. All of our customers manage just fine without ever having to go into the CLI. The only driver problem we regularly encounter is for WWAN adapters, and that's only because we put Ubuntu 8.04 LTS onto our computers; we just tell those customers to upgrade and everything works fine.

Obviously it's all going to work fine if you're selling Desktops/notebooks with hardware explicitly configured to run Linux. What kind of absurd point is that? The point is that if you own a system which wasn't explicitly configured to run Linux, which uses various third-party peripherals, you're likely to have a difficult time getting everything running smoothly if you ever decide to install Linux on it.

[Zixinus]

My experiences with Ubuntu is really that what is echoed here: it basically does work out of the box, but not much more.

I am thinking I will go back to WinXP just because of my favourate text-writing software: Jarte, which is essentially Wordpad on steroids and yWriter. yWriter may have Linux support in the future, but not so right now.

Essentially, Ubuntu gives you a selection of programs that you can use for whatever. But for me, as a netbook user, that is a bit of a problem because you are limited to that software alone.

The way I see it, most deskup-level users don't use Linux because there is no support for their favourite/needed programs. And the creators of those programs don't create a Linux version because most deskup users don't use Linux.
A deadly cycle that I am sure Microsoft approves of.

I've had problems connecting to hidden wireless points before- try just making it visible.

Did it. Worked like fucking charm.

Strangely, I did not have this problem on EasyPeasy.

Maybe it's because the netbook uses an SSD? *shrug*

Unlikely actually. Very few netbooks nowadays use SSDs.

I recall that there is a youtube video that shows two EEEs, booting right next to eachother. One had XP and the other had win7. Win7 does boot up faster.

[Drooling Iguana]

Gaming on Linux is in a sorry state . I don't even try anymore, I just reboot to Vista and/or run games on the XBox360.

Personally, I find it easier to run the Windows versions of games via WINE than to try to install the Linux ports natively. A game with good WINE support can be installed simply by double-clicking an executable and automatically created a menu entry so you can run it easily afterwards. It's also sandboxed away from the rest of the system so you don't have to worry about it cluttering things up.

Of course, the best way would still be to simply have .deb packages for the programs you intend to run, but most of the game companies still haven't caught on to that.

Seriously, though, WINE has been getting pretty awesome lately, and is a very nice way to sidestep the whole chicken/egg problem with Linux. Not every program runs properly in it at the moment, but a surprising number do.

[phongn]

But hey, it WorksForMe(TM).

Sound on Linux? OSS ALSA PulseAudio?

Really? That's all news to me, which is a surprise since I work in a store that sells and gives out Linux-based desktops and notebooks. In fact I even work in the tech support dept, and I can tell you that everything you just said is wrong. All of our customers manage just fine without ever having to go into the CLI. The only driver problem we regularly encounter is for WWAN adapters, and that's only because we put Ubuntu 8.04 LTS onto our computers; we just tell those customers to upgrade and everything works fine.

Are you serious? You're telling someone to upgrade to a non-LTS release?

I've had problems connecting to hidden wireless points before- try just making it visible.

Did it. Worked like fucking charm.

Hidden SSIDs are a bad idea. Hiding them can break wireless functionality and provides no security improvement whatsoever.

I recall that there is a youtube video that shows two EEEs, booting right next to eachother. One had XP and the other had win7. Win7 does boot up faster.

Windows 7 has many more optimizations than Windows XP. Boot-time speedup is one of them.

Exactly. And this problem is excacerbated by the Linux culture/community itself, which values transparency and source-code over "just getting it to work." Another issue to remember is that in general, most Linux/UNIX programmers aren't interested in creating GUIs anyway. A large number of Linux tools are command line utilities with no graphical front-end. For example, a utility as common as bmon, which monitors network activity, doesn't come with a GUI out-of-the-box; so if you ever want to simply monitor network activity you need to drop to the command line.

Worse, not only are most of them uninterested in GUI programming, they're completely incompetent at user interface design. It's a tremendously challenging field and requires extensive amounts of user testing. Furthermore, most software developer types like choice between many options and like "customizability" and then assume that everyone else does too (GUI design 101: choice is bad).

[Zixinus]

Finally figured managed to get yWriter back up.

Now to see what I can do with audio (I think it works) and looking for a Jarte replacement.

I might be staying with Ubuntu after all.

I have to ask: there are no cute security-circumventing tricks like in Windows where you can get around password-protection of the OS simply by entering safe mode?

[Dominus Atheos]

Really? That's all news to me, which is a surprise since I work in a store that sells and gives out Linux-based desktops and notebooks. In fact I even work in the tech support dept, and I can tell you that everything you just said is wrong. All of our customers manage just fine without ever having to go into the CLI. The only driver problem we regularly encounter is for WWAN adapters, and that's only because we put Ubuntu 8.04 LTS onto our computers; we just tell those customers to upgrade and everything works fine.

Are you serious? You're telling someone to upgrade to a non-LTS release?

When it's the only way to get their computers to work, then yes; although right now we are in the process of pushing out messages to all of our customers telling them to upgrade to our custom 10.04 LTS version, including the ones whose computers we upgraded to one of the intermediate versions.

[Dominus Atheos]

Really? That's all news to me, which is a surprise since I work in a store that sells and gives out Linux-based desktops and notebooks. In fact I even work in the tech support dept, and I can tell you that everything you just said is wrong. All of our customers manage just fine without ever having to go into the CLI. The only driver problem we regularly encounter is for WWAN adapters, and that's only because we put Ubuntu 8.04 LTS onto our computers; we just tell those customers to upgrade and everything works fine.

Obviously it's all going to work fine if you're selling Desktops/notebooks with hardware explicitly configured to run Linux. What kind of absurd point is that? The point is that if you own a system which wasn't explicitly configured to run Linux, which uses various third-party peripherals, you're likely to have a difficult time getting everything running smoothly if you ever decide to install Linux on it.

Wrong again. The shop I work at recycles old computers and then donates them to non-profits/schools or gives them to our volunteers or sells them to people who need a cheap computer. So in other words just about every possible hardware configuration passes through our shop and gets Ubuntu installed on it.

[Pu-239]

Gaming on Linux is in a sorry state . I don't even try anymore, I just reboot to Vista and/or run games on the XBox360.

Personally, I find it easier to run the Windows versions of games via WINE than to try to install the Linux ports natively. A game with good WINE support can be installed simply by double-clicking an executable and automatically created a menu entry so you can run it easily afterwards. It's also sandboxed away from the rest of the system so you don't have to worry about it cluttering things up.

Of course, the best way would still be to simply have .deb packages for the programs you intend to run, but most of the game companies still haven't caught on to that.

Seriously, though, WINE has been getting pretty awesome lately, and is a very nice way to sidestep the whole chicken/egg problem with Linux. Not every program runs properly in it at the moment, but a surprising number do.

Unfortunately DRM necessitates a crack which kills multiplayer and potentially brings along malware. Haven't tried running any steam games yet.

[Drooling Iguana]

That's the beauty of WINE. If you get infected with malware you can just delete your .wine directory and the rest of your computer will still be fine. If you need to back up any files before hand you can just make sure that WINE isn't running and copy them out without having to worry about the malware impeding the process the way it could if you were running straight Windows.

[Stark]

Does WINE handle demanding DX stuff yet? If not, it's worthless for gaming.

[Starglider]

The way I see it, most deskup-level users don't use Linux because there is no support for their favourite/needed programs. And the creators of those programs don't create a Linux version because most deskup users don't use Linux.
A deadly cycle that I am sure Microsoft approves of.

It's not just that, developing desktop apps for Linux is a hideous experience. The libraries are fragmented, the UI is fragmented (two major window managers and literally hundreds of minor ones), the install system is fragmented (self-extractors don't work, many many packaging systems) and 50% of the distro people hate you and will refuse to deal with you on principle if you're not open source FREE SOFTWARE. Finally there's the support nightmare. Good luck finding cheap tech support people or writing a call center script that can deal with all the bizarre problems Linux users might have.

On Windows, you write the software, you wrap it in an installer, you test it on Windows 7, Vista and XP, and then you ship it. If it has 3D, you write to DirectX 10 and test on a reasonably modern ATI card, a reasonably modern Nvidia card and maybe if you're feeling generous a couple of Intel integrated chipsets. You can assume everyone has the same, reasonably modern drivers.

On Linux you struggle to cobble the software together from the witches brew of festering constantly-shifting crap (actually only 50% of it is crap, but you have no way of knowing which half). Then you leave the software industry and take up organic farming after contemplating the prospect of testing on three hundred and eighteen billion different combinations of distro, kernel revision, library versions, X.org version, driver vendor/version, build environment, window manager, packaging system etc etc etc. Even if you somehow managed to do all that, roughly five people would buy the game/app while five thousand bitch and whine on their blogs about how it is evil because it isn't open source.

Basically, the 'serious' Linux desktop users do not want or deserve commercial apps and games. The OS is good for two things; puttering around on netbooks, and servers (the differences in attitude between the Linux-desktop crowd and the Linux-server crowd are stark and would take an essay to detail).

[phongn]

Even if you somehow managed to do all that, roughly five people would buy the game/app while five thousand bitch and whine on their blogs about how it is evil because it isn't open source.

Do what the sane people did and target RHEL and tell everyone else they're SOL?

[Starglider]

Do what the sane people did and target RHEL and tell everyone else they're SOL?

Exactly. Which works great for server-side apps. All those Debian / Ubuntu / Gentoo / etc users should shut up and accept that if it isn't an ideologically pure piece of FREE SOFTWARE approved and anointed by your distro maintainer, you aren't meant to have it.

[Marcus Aurelius]

On Linux you struggle to cobble the software together from the witches brew of festering constantly-shifting crap (actually only 50% of it is crap, but you have no way of knowing which half). Then you leave the software industry and take up organic farming after contemplating the prospect of testing on three hundred and eighteen billion different combinations of distro, kernel revision, library versions, X.org version, driver vendor/version, build environment, window manager, packaging system etc etc etc. Even if you somehow managed to do all that, roughly five people would buy the game/app while five thousand bitch and whine on their blogs about how it is evil because it isn't open source.

Basically, the 'serious' Linux desktop users do not want or deserve commercial apps and games. The OS is good for two things; puttering around on netbooks, and servers (the differences in attitude between the Linux-desktop crowd and the Linux-server crowd are stark and would take an essay to detail).

Well, basically no one expects any commercial vendor to support anything else than Gnome or KDE for desktops and rpm and deb for packages, since those have about 95% of the Linux desktop market share. Taking all the minor window managers and such into account is like saying that Windows developers should still support Windows 9x if they wanted to sell their Windows apps. It is still more work than with Windows, but it isn't quite as bad in real life as you make it sound.

The real reason that there are no commercial desktop apps for Linux is that the desktop market share of Linux is just not worth the effort. It might be, if there was just one Linux distribution, I give you that much. Apple shows well how it's done: Mac OS apps often do not support anything else except the current and and previous major version of Mac OS X. That makes things easy enough that making Mac OS apps is relatively painless, and of course Mac has a larger desktop market share than Linux to begin with.

Since we are talking about open source software, it's pretty clear that there will never be just one Linux desktop distribution. On the other hand its even clearer that if Linux had not been open source from the day one, it would not exist. Yet another commercial Unix was exactly what the 1990s did not need, even if we assume that the funding to develop one could have been magically obtained.

Even if you somehow managed to do all that, roughly five people would buy the game/app while five thousand bitch and whine on their blogs about how it is evil because it isn't open source.

Do what the sane people did and target RHEL and tell everyone else they're SOL?

You can't really do that with desktop apps since RHEL does not have a commanding desktop market share and it's not even very well optimized for desktop use.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Well, basically no one expects any commercial vendor to support anything else than Gnome or KDE for desktops and rpm and deb for packages, since those have about 95% of the Linux desktop market share.

That's still 4 versions. It's outrageous.

Actually its three, since that's a XOR between Gnome and KDE. Both are available for all major distributions and you can run apps from the other environment just fine while running the other as your desktop. There is actually a lot more co-operation between Gnome and KDE developers than most of the "OMG Linux desktop is terribly fragmented" people realize. It isn't perfect for sure, but it's more like a friendly rivalry nowadays than trying to do things "our way" and refusing to compromise with the other team. It used to be like that, but that was nearly 10 years ago.