the anti-linux args (from AWT thread)

Miscellaneous Topics
#21

[quote]JasonB wrote:
Maybe Windoze users find it difficult, but there’s evidence the same isn’t true for computer newbies
[/quote]
Sure - but non-tech newbies don’t actually USE computers. They simply repeat what someone shows them. They don’t understand a thing they are doing most of the time and if one step is different they are completely stuck. I can see how Linux is no worse in that case. It’s when you actually have to do anything even slightly different that it all goes to hell.

[quote]JB: I’d like to know what distributions of Linux you’ve tried…
[/quote]
RedHat 9, SuSe 9 are the most recent, Also RedHat 7,8, and WAY back, slackware something.

[quote]JB: Windows XP is a hideous monstrosity compared with KDE.
[/quote]
KDE looks ‘ok’ if you don’t touch anything, actually do something and it crashes, flickers like mad, and feels dog slow. Windows is slightly better, Mac is a lot better. Gnome flickers less, crashes less, looks a bit worse.

[quote]JB: I estimate my productivity has gone up about threefold since getting away from Windows.
[/quote]
For me it plummets drastically. Mainly because of the lack of UIs. I have to search tons of config files with bizarre acronyms for names… read through tons of man pages to try to learn how to change something. With windows - you browse - you see what you want, use select a different option… MUCH faster/easier/etc. Mac is the same.

[quote]Where do the icons go when you’ve installed the application?

JB:Into the menu structure, in most cases. In a few cases, not.
[/quote]
Duh, easy to say - but how do you do it? I’ve tried and got permission errors… apparently I can only change the menus as/for the root user? (using Gnome)… this was very irritating.

[quote]Why is it that when I go to try and use someone else’s Linux machine it behaves so radically differently that it’s like another operating system?
JB:…Because you can tweak the desktop/gui so it behaves exactly as you want.
[/quote]
Tweaking colours and customizing toolbars etc. is one thing… Radical differences are not that helpful. Similarity is a “good thing”.

[quote]What I would like to see is the Linux community abandoning X and Gnome completely and moving towards a proper client desktop
JB:You cannot be serious.
[/quote]
An excellent SERIOUS proposal. X is crap, EVERY UI I’ve seen on top of X seems to suck… though they have got better recently. Note also the troubles that X caused the Java AWT guys with fullscreen, acceleration, etc… X is good for dump X-terminals, nothing more. That’s why the good GUIs like Mac OS X, BeOS,etc. don’t run on X (though you can run X on them if you have to).

[quote]blahblahblahh: I have, on average, more crashes with linux on the desktop than with windows
[/quote]
Yep, same here. I have one machine that can’t stay up for 24 hours because the Adaptec drivers on Linux consume all the resources and die. If I reboot daily I can run Linux… fun. That’s with RH9. You would think they could get something like a SCSI driver working by now… (though I’ve seen Adaptecs own driver code and it does suck :slight_smile: )

[quote]blahblahblahh: you can’t always kill processes.
[/quote]
Same holds for Windows NT/2k/XP

[quote]DrBizzar0:My experience is that most people don’t know how to even install programs on windows.
[/quote]
True, but these same people would be worse off try on Linux where installations of simple packages often fail. Or in some cases installation is only available by downloading and compiling source code.

[quote]Cas wrote:
Whatever your take on the security issue it’s a usability nightmare on both Windows and Linux. I have a feeling MacOS might be similar.
[/quote]
Mac OS X is much better here. You run as a restricted user (not root) but when something root-like needs to happen the system asks you for YOUR password (because even though you aren’t running as root it is YOUR personal computer). For some tasks you can simply tell the system the the application is allowed to access your keychain to get passwords for network share access, emails, IM clients, etc. The GUI for password management is decent.

In general though, I agree with Cas in that on a PERSONAL computer running as root is no big deal. If I’m running as ME, a trojan can STILL delete all my stuff that is hard to replace (between backups - if you do them - most users don’t). The OS and Apps can be re-installed anyway. It is the user created data that is valuable. rm -r doesn’t warn unless you run it as root anyway !

Note that I don’t like the thread title as it is either - I’m not anti-linux in the slightest… I WANT it to be good and take market share from the corrupt monopolists at MS that have HELD BACK progress in the desktop OS area… I can only observe that Linux still has a long way to go to reach that goal for consumers. Corporations that have IT depts. and standard installs can get away with Linux, personal users - no even close.

[quote]AndersDahlberg: he is now, in pseudo his own words, totally convinced that linux is a lot easier to use and definitely more stable than any windows os he has used.
[/quote]
Likely because he ran Win 3.1/95/98… the versions of windows know to suck extremely. Win NT/2k/XP have always been sooo much better… and yet I will agree that they still could be improved a lot. (If only I could have BeOS… Mac OS X will have to do… I liked AmigaDOS in it’s day… but it could never compete today)… Make no mistake… Windows sucks too, but that doesn’t fix Linux :).

#22

[quote]KDE looks ‘ok’ if you don’t touch anything, actually do something and it crashes, flickers like mad, and feels dog slow. Windows is slightly better, Mac is a lot better. Gnome flickers less, crashes less, looks a bit worse.
[/quote]
Huh? I must be inhabiting a slightly different universe to you, because I’ve never seen kde flicker, nor does it feel slow. I’m on a 1.4Ghz laptop, so hardly top of the range (nor bottom either).

I’ll buy that Windows XP sometimes feels snappier, but in other ways it seems gungier to me, kind of primitive – which, for me, is worse than ‘feeling’ slightly slower. I’ve had to use a colleague’s XP laptop on occasion, and noticed things like one browser window in download-slowdown affecting another browser window.

Performance is subjective anyway. I wouldn’t notice any performance difference unless I was constantly jumping from Windows to Linux. And I’m not, so no prob.

[quote]Similarity is a “good thing”.
[/quote]
Okay, yes it is… -in a way-. A new PC coming out of the factory with Linux on it, should behave just like any other PC coming out of another factory with Linux on it (or another operating system for that matter). I’ll give you that. And a ‘standard’ Linux desktop CD distribution should be the same.
But that’s where the similarity argument should end. After that, if I’m nuts enough want to hack around with my config so that my mouse moves backward, the X button minimises the window, and the maximise button closes it, then I should be able to. For that matter the original argument about going to use someone else’s Linux machine and finding it completely different doesn’t hold up either. I seem to recall that you can hack around in windows as well. Replace the taskbar with an Apple style dock, etc. So there’s no guarantee you’ll go to another Windows machine and find it behaving the same either.

#23

[quote]Sure - but non-tech newbies don’t actually USE computers. They simply repeat what someone shows them. They don’t understand a thing they are doing most of the time and if one step is different they are completely stuck. I can see how Linux is no worse in that case. It’s when you actually have to do anything even slightly different that it all goes to hell.
[/quote]
Everyone here used a computer for the first time (ages ago). The statement basically says, that if you start using a computer for the first time Windows and Linux are similar difficult.

[quote]KDE looks ‘ok’ if you don’t touch anything, actually do something and it crashes, flickers like mad, and feels dog slow. Windows is slightly better, Mac is a lot better. Gnome flickers less, crashes less, looks a bit worse.
[/quote]
KDE isn’t known to be rock stable, but it’s OK. Almost everything can be configured to fit your needs. Speed depends entirely on the number of effects and eyecandy you enabled. Appearance is a matter of personal preference, but can be configured in almost every way one can imagine.

[quote][topic: icons in the menu]Duh, easy to say - but how do you do it? I’ve tried and got permission errors… apparently I can only change the menus as/for the root user? (using Gnome)… this was very irritating.
[/quote]
Once again: If you use packages the menu is updated automatically. If you want to modfiy it in KDE right click on the big “K” (or any other symbol) in the lower-left corner and select menu-editor. You don’t have to be root to do this.

[quote][topic: remove X and Gnome]An excellent SERIOUS proposal. X is crap, EVERY UI I’ve seen on top of X seems to suck… though they have got better recently. Note also the troubles that X caused the Java AWT guys with fullscreen, acceleration, etc… X is good for dump X-terminals, nothing more. That’s why the good GUIs like Mac OS X, BeOS,etc. don’t run on X (though you can run X on them if you have to).
[/quote]
Gnome, KDE and other desktops need X to run on, so you cannot simply remove it. I can’t comment on the quality of X, because I never looked deeply at the sourcecode and documentation (did you, that you can judge it?), but it almost never causes problems. Virtually every graphical application for Linux runs on X, so you basically say that every of them is crap.(?) What do you mean by saying “they have gotten better recently”? What did get better?

[quote]Yep, same here. I have one machine that can’t stay up for 24 hours because the Adaptec drivers on Linux consume all the resources and die. If I reboot daily I can run Linux… fun. That’s with RH9. You would think they could get something like a SCSI driver working by now… (though I’ve seen Adaptecs own driver code and it does suck :slight_smile: )
[/quote]
Don’t know anything about the Adaptec driver, but Linux does support SCSI.

[quote]True, but these same people would be worse off try on Linux where installations of simple packages often fail. Or in some cases installation is only available by downloading and compiling source code.
[/quote]
That’s simply not true. I use it for quite some time and installed thousands of packages and they almost never fail. There are probably no statistics about this, but probably 99,9…% of the package installs are succesful. Maybe you tried to install Suse RPMs in Redhat or something like this?

[quote]Mac OS X is much better here. You run as a restricted user (not root) but when something root-like needs to happen the system asks you for YOUR password (because even though you aren’t running as root it is YOUR personal computer).
[/quote]
Linux desktops work the same way.

[quote]Note that I don’t like the thread title as it is either - I’m not anti-linux in the slightest… I WANT it to be good and take market share from the corrupt monopolists at MS that have HELD BACK progress in the desktop OS area…
[/quote]
MS sometimes tries to establish their own proprietary “standards” to drive competitors out of the market. Their marketing policy alone is a good reason to have a look at alternatives.

#24

[quote]Everyone here used a computer for the first time (ages ago). The statement basically says, that if you start using a computer for the first time Windows and Linux are similar difficult.
[/quote]
ok… sure… But to illustrate my perspective… I’ve used many computer sysetms, C64 (and before),Amiga, Atari, Mac Classic, Mac OS X, BeOS, QNX, HPUX, etc… Linux is the one that sticks out as being low quality, inconsistent, and generally difficult to work with.

[quote]KDE isn’t known to be rock stable, but it’s OK.
[/quote]
My experience has been that it is not OK. My SuSE 9 linux install running KDE tends to crash (the apps I run or KDE) in such a way that the UI is locked up - very frequently compared to any other system I’ve used.

[quote]Once again: If you use packages the menu is updated automatically. If you want to modfiy it in KDE right click on…
[/quote]
As I stated I was using Gnome (RH 8/9) when I had that problem. All this “use packages” is fine, except that finding a package built for your distribution isn’t always easy, in some cases (frequently) ‘packages’ are simply not available at all and then it is back to CVS/GZip ./configure, make, etc… and the many dependancy issues that come with it.

[quote]Gnome, KDE and other desktops need X to run on, so you cannot simply remove it…
[/quote]
Yet what I find to be GOOD windowing systems don’t use X at all - that is my point that X seems to bring with it a significant level of suckage. Remeber the original point of X - to support X Terminals… the equivalent of a graphical VT100 dumb terminal. I think it makes no sense at all to use X on a local display… or rather it didn’t… X keeps changing… it is likely better about that now… though I wonder what it’s point is since it seems that you need so much else to make X functional (Gnome, KDE, various window managers, etc.). I think it makes a lot more sense to do what Apple did with Quartz - use a hardware abstraction like OpenGL (or equivalent like DirectX) and code the window server/manager to it without something like X getting in the way at the wrong level. That’s what I don’t like about how X is used on unix systems in general.

[quote]What do you mean by saying “they have gotten better recently”? What did get better?
[/quote]
Part of this is that the window managers are getting better at disguising the fact that under the hood is a obsolete API for displaying graphics over a network.

[quote]That’s simply not true. I use it for quite some time and installed thousands of packages and they almost never fail. There are probably no statistics about this, but probably 99,9…%
[/quote]
My personal stats are much lower… not counting of course the packages that are included with the distribution which have been tuned by experts to actually work. My success rate for packages that I want to install that aren’t included… i.e. newer versions that I require or simply software that didn’t come with the distro… is around 50%… half the time it fails because of the dreaded tree of dependencies problem… you need to update glibc, and asound, and some other frame work - but you can’t because it is incompatible somehow with the packages already installed… or you simply can’t find the dependancies at all… this for me is the typical experience for installing software AFTER the distro and the packages that come with it are installed.

[quote]Maybe you tried to install Suse RPMs in Redhat or something like this?
[/quote]
Yet another of the significant problems with Linux - I can bundle a single installer that runs on “Windows” that includes Win95/99, Me, NT, 2k, XP … hmm note that I don’t need 6 different installers… just one… for “Windows”… (Mac OS X is generally the same, but Macs have a massive advantage of being controlled by a single hardware vendor - the same guys that make the OS. You just have to pay extra to get that advantage.) Try to find a “package” for “Linux” it doesn’t work that way, and that sucks. The only time you get the single “Linux” version, you have to compile it yourself… if you are lucky enough to get ./configure + make to run successfully… chances of failure at this point are very high.

[quote] (re:asking for root password) Linux desktops work the same way.
[/quote]
No they don’t - they ask for the ROOT password, not YOUR password. And for some of the configuration stuff the UI doesn’t ask you - you need to log in as root. The GUIs (Gnome/KDE) are getting much better at this though. On Windows you simply have to give your self administrator privileges - everything breaks down otherwise. With the MS security track record as it is, is it any wonder? (They were in the news again today with the worst security hole reported yet… they are just soooo bad at security.)

#25

Love to know what it is exactly about your setup to cause so many problems. I had about 2 crashes of KDE under Mandrake in a year of use. If you’ve got the patience, you could try Gentoo (everything, ormost things, built from source, so -mostly- avoids rpmhell). A different experience really.

#26

I am still waiting patiently for a consumer version of the Java Desktop.

The linux kernel and FS and user stuff and permissions and drivers should all be neatly hidden away. Preferably in flash ROM. The desktop should be replaced by a JDesktop and everything would run nicely in Webstart. All it needs is a few high quality productivity applications :slight_smile:

Cas :slight_smile:

#27

[quote]I am still waiting patiently for a consumer version of the Java Desktop.

The linux kernel and FS and user stuff and permissions and drivers should all be neatly hidden away.
[/quote]
Well, just use the old and well known SUSE Enterprise Linux edition and you know how SUN’s “Java desktop” is like exactly.
(Just replace all SUSE icons with SUN logos in your head and there you are.)

When I used Staroffice and then switched to Openoffice all has been the same - except the startup logo. Btw Staroffice/Openoffice is a great application.

#28

What did someone in the other thread say: “It’s unfortunate that the distibution with the easiest package management (Debian) has the most god-awful installation process, while the easier installations (Mandrake et al) have the user messing around with make and configure.”

Personally I don’t think that Suse and Redhat are that bad and for almost every user the packages offered by the distribution suffices, but there’s truth in the sentence above. Debian uses a different strategy: You have a central list of sources for packages. Most of them are officially maintained by the Debian project (its maintainers), but you can add other sources as well (a source can be on a CD, on an HTTP-Server, on an FTP-Server and more) . So for searching a package you just enter the name of the package and if it’s found you can install it. There’s no need to search half of the web for it. Because Debian is community driven the chances that you will find your package are extremely high, if it’s opensource and depends only on opensource. (If you’d like to test it, tell me the name of some opensource programs and I’ll tell you, if they are maintained by Debian.) Another advantage of this is that you get security updates automatically for your stable Debian release (other distros have similar mechanisms for security/recommended updates).

[quote]Part of this is that the window managers are getting better at disguising the fact that under the hood is a obsolete API for displaying graphics over a network.
[/quote]
I’ve just read some pages of X/XFree86 history and I found no evidence that it was intended to display X-Terminals only. If this ever was the case it probably has changed. People are still actively working to improve XFree. The client-server structure isn’t that bad either. You can have a single X-Server and several clients using it. I can use it to open a graphical application (for instance an editor) at my space at university and work with it from my home PC. (The other way round works, too. I can also open files over SSH in a text editor on my PC.)

[quote]Try to find a “package” for “Linux” it doesn’t work that way, and that sucks.
[/quote]
After all the distributions are different operating systems, so you cannot expect a single package to work on every distribution. (There is a chance to be succesful, because of the filesystem standard, but I don’t recommend trying it.)

[quote]No they don’t - they ask for the ROOT password, not YOUR password. And for some of the configuration stuff the UI doesn’t ask you - you need to log in as root. The GUIs (Gnome/KDE) are getting much better at this though.
[/quote]
Ok, I understood this wrong. But the way the Linux desktops handle it, makes perfect sense, too. I think this is not a showstopper for Linux on the desktop.

#29

Some observations:

[] Many of the people who are most extreme in dislike of windows come from a 9x background rather than NT. Many of the worst sins of 9x were already fixed in the equivalent NT of the day
[] Most arguments about increased / decreased stability are specious (); the issue is nearly always hardware. My comments on instability of linux were (although I haven’t explained this clearly enough) purely to provide factual evidence where many linux advocates are silent, to back up my claim that both OS’s are as instable as each other (very approximately).
[] Some here (e.g. Jens, I think) seem to believe Linux is considerably better than windows, period. No offence intended, but most of what they say on this topic is either experience from one distro (Debian) or philosophical (things are theoretically better when you theoretically have the freedom to customize your system, etc.). This is true, but largely irrelevant if you’re looking at the situation today, for typical users - e.g. in practice no-one has the skills or the time needed to change their apps by learning the app architecture, reading the source, planning a change, and compiling/making it. And I’m only thinking of config changes here! If you’re interested in major kernel modification it takes orders of magniture more…
[]Linux packaging today is pretty much FUBAR (I say this as somoene who knows and uses all the resources for finding packages, e.g. PBONE, RPMFIND, etc etc). Yes, if you have Debian, and you don’t care about being 12 to 24 months behind the rest of the world, and you don’t want esoteric apps, and you only want open-source apps, it’s fine. Bear in mind that today MOST open-source software (thankfully, this is not true of most major software) is NOT PACKAGED AT ALL, or else is badly pacakged for a specific version of Redhat, and works properly on few machines. One of the reasons I love developing with java is the “single binary package (JAR)”. Every time some die-hard C++ developer tells me “C++ is write-once-run-anywhere too!” I smile kindly, and ask them about deployment, distribution, debugging, customer-support, and 3rd party DLL’s?
[]When I said I couldn’t alwasy kill linux processes, but had never had the same problem on NT, I should have made clear that I know the same could/should happen on NT, but that I just happened to have been lucky never to have had that problem in many years (and again this is probably due to hardware!)
[*] X sucks as a modern desktop windowing system. It was NOT designed for this! It designed to do other cool stuff, like previously described. Realistically, there is no organization that can afford (time / money) to replace X from scratch. The latest incarnations of X are moving it more and more towards a modern desktop windows - lots of fundamental architectural changes, and if this continues many of the fundamental problems will disappear.

I’ve used, typically for 1-2 years each, DOS-3,4,5,6,7, OS2 and Warp, Windows 2,3,3.1,3.11,95,98,NT-4,2k and XP, Linux RH5,6,7 Suse 7(?),8,9 Mandrake 7,8.0,8.1,8.2,9, and several “micro” linuxes (not counting the various Unixes, like Solaris etc, and the non-intel hardware OS’s).

At the end of all that, my strong personal feeling is that there’s not much to choose between most of those; many of the early linux distros are actually very similar to DOS-5 and above (if you were using the autodesk apps etc) - unreliable, hard to use, GUI’s not worth writing home about; win3.0 to win98 (and ME, from my limited experience) are very similar in terms of robustness, although 32-bit had a major effect on performance; late linux distros and NT-derivateives (NT, 2k, XP) are pretty close. Certainly, MS now overcharges if you pay retail prices for XP, compared to what you could get with linux (corporates etc pay much much less!).

FYI, I’ve never seen an OS GUI as fast as two in particular - NT-4 with 512 Mb RAM (or more), and any linux/unix running a basic window manager (e.g. one which runs in black-and-white). The latter is fast for obvious reasons, the former - dunno; but a 200Mhz CPU with 0.5Gb Ram is much much more responsive than any of the XP machines I’ve seen with 10x faster CPU’s and the same amount of RAM. It feels pretty amazing (everything is sort of “snappy”, just happens instantly :)). KDE is the nearest I’ve seen in recent years, but not as fast as either of those two. Just an interesting observation :slight_smile: and I’m sure there are people with different experiences (e.g. a very fast win98 install, perhaps?)

(*) - I use that word so rarely, I thought I’d check the meaning. It fits exactly :slight_smile:

  1. Having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious.
  2. Deceptively attractive.
#30

AIUI, there was a lot of political manouevring between the major Unix vendors to make sure X sucked - this was back when they were more interested in infighting than anything else, and didn’t see Windows as a competitor (even though their MBA’s may have known the probable impact of someone crawling up the value chain…eventually, MS was bound to leverage dominance in home-user market into corporate sales).

I’ve only used BeOS a little, but RISC OS a lot, and was never too impressed by BeOS’s GUI. I think most people agree that RISC OS had a fantastic GUI, let down by an underlying OS that was stuck in the dark ages of non-pre-emption, and in many ways utterly pants. I still really miss lots of RISC OS features, like being able to dynamically allocate RAM in realtime to the font cache / video memory / etc just by dragging barcharts (!). And most linux window managers / etc could benefit from looking more closely at RISC OS’s interpretation of a “start bar” rather than windows’s.

Me, for one. And it is - in most cases. Just because you can cite lots of counter examples doesn’t change this - there’s hundreds of thousands of crud apps (e.g. just by looking at sf.net), and perhaps a thousand good ones (I’d guess, off the top of my head, there are considerably fewer than 500 high-quality open source apps…perhaps even only than 200).

#31

Replace “sometimes” with “virtually always”.

What you said is really the main point. Plus one of the biggest pro-Linux and pro-Any_other_alternative_to_windows point at all, including pro-Opensource.

#32

How true. RISC OS (from a user’s point of view: its GUI) has provided the most responsive and fast GUI I’ve ever used, and of course the first one to feature real time window dragging with pure CPU power (that british CPU named ARM has been and still is great).
Well, the taskmanager has been a dream, too.

[quote]Me, for one. And it is - in most cases. Just because you can cite lots of counter examples doesn’t change this - there’s hundreds of thousands of crud apps (e.g. just by looking at sf.net), and perhaps a thousand good ones (I’d guess, off the top of my head, there are considerably fewer than 500 high-quality open source apps…perhaps even only than 200).
[/quote]
I see, with “most of the Opensource software” you mean the pure amount, not the ones which are being used mostly and well known.
If you count all closed-sourced software (including commercial/Shareware currency calculators, and the majority of industry software projects which never reaches the public): an analogous picture would be drawn for closed-source software, isn’t it?

#33

Well, that’s not quite what I meant, but it’s a fair point that it’s very difficult to not to accidentally include such when trying to summarise en masse (who has time to review even 100 apps, let alone 1000?).

I only meant to include apps of non-trivial size - so a currency calc would be out, but a POP + SMTP email client would be in.

#34

[quote]Some observations:
[list]
[*] Many of the people who are most extreme in dislike of windows come from a 9x background rather than NT. Many of the worst sins of 9x were already fixed in the equivalent NT of the day
[/quote]
Absolutely.

[quote]the issue is nearly always hardware
[/quote]
And yet for me Linux crashes more often on the SAME hardware. My example system sitting beside me right now crashes with 100% reliability JUST SITTING THERE… (SCSI driver issue mentioned above) It must be rebooted daily to work… yet if I boot to Windows it works fine.

I agree that a lot of the arguments are messed up (I don’t like big words :)). Those that run linux without problems think it is stable and wonderful. But that doesn’t discount the fact that there are significant problems - I’m proof :). I haven’t heard many complaints from Windows NT (and above) users… though I know it too has issues, my ‘gut feeling’ is that it has less issues… which makes sense when you think about it - hardware vendors depend on Windows compatibility, they don’t NEED Linux at all. Therefore more work goes into making stuff work with Windows.

[quote][*]Linux packaging today is pretty much FUBAR (I say this as somoene who knows and uses all the resources for finding packages, e.g. PBONE, RPMFIND, etc etc). Yes, if you have Debian, and you don’t care about being 12 to 24 months behind the rest of the world, and you don’t want esoteric apps, and you only want open-source apps, it’s fine. Bear in mind that today MOST open-source software (thankfully, this is not true of most major software) is NOT PACKAGED AT ALL…
[/quote]
Exactly. This is the biggest problem I’ve had with trying to “use” Linux (unix in general) as compared to Windows/Mac OS X. When it all comes down to it, they all crash sometimes, but only Linux is such a nightmare to simply install working software. What comes with the Distro counts less because experts have already done the hellish configuration for you. That’s equivalent to installing Windows and having Notepad work… big deal. It’s the apps I get after the fact that have problems. Yes, Linux has an advantage in that the distro include tons more apps than any other OS. I fully accept that as a Linux advantage and I think it is one reason that people don’t notice the problems with Linux in a more general sense.

[quote][*] X sucks as a modern desktop windowing system. It was NOT designed for this! It designed to do other cool stuff, like previously described. Realistically, there is no organization that can afford (time / money) to replace X from scratch. The latest incarnations of X are moving it more and more towards a modern desktop windows - lots of fundamental architectural changes, and if this continues many of the fundamental problems will disappear.
[/quote]
Again, I’m in total agreement. Yet I love to see the alternative GUIs that are used on unix-based systems like BeOS and OS X… So clearly replacing X with something else can be done. Then you run an X-server on top of a reasonable desktop GUI to get the best of both worlds.

#35

[quote]Many of the people who are most extreme in dislike of windows come from a 9x background rather than NT. Many of the worst sins of 9x were already fixed in the equivalent NT of the day
[/quote]
At least for me that’s not true. I used 3.11/95/98/2000/XP.

[quote] Some here (e.g. Jens, I think) seem to believe Linux is considerably better than windows, period.
[/quote]
I hereby admit that I believe Linux is considerably better than Windows. :slight_smile: And I spend considerable effort to explain my point of view, so that neutral readers can form their own opionion.

[quote]No offence intended, but most of what they say on this topic is either experience from one distro (Debian)
[/quote]
I used Suse, Redhat and Debian. The reason why I’m often talking about Debian is, that I think it’s in some ways better than Suse and Redhat, for instance the package management. The make/compile arguments comes up quite often, and Debian is a good counterargument for this.

[quote]Yes, if you have Debian, and you don’t care about being 12 to 24 months behind the rest of the world, and you don’t want esoteric apps, and you only want open-source apps, it’s fine.
[/quote]
Yes, the stable releases have pretty old software and that’s sometimes a weakness of Debian for desktop users (the advantage is that it is very stable). However you can always use Debian testing or unstable, if you need current software like I do.

[quote] X sucks as a modern desktop windowing system. It was NOT designed for this!
[/quote]
What was it designed for and what does suck? I read quite a lot about the problems Linux users have, but I can’t remember reading that X sucks, so there must be a reason why you say this.

[quote]I’ve used, typically for 1-2 years each, DOS-3,4,5,6,7, OS2 and Warp, Windows 2,3,3.1,3.11,95,98,NT-4,2k and XP, Linux RH5,6,7 Suse 7(?),8,9 Mandrake 7,8.0,8.1,8.2,9, and several “micro” linuxes (not counting the various Unixes, like Solaris etc, and the non-intel hardware OS’s).
[/quote]
I think it also depends on which OS you used as your favourite desktop at home. Lots of people use Linux for servers, but just do something on it once every three months or so. I work remotely on SunOS sometimes, but this is not enough to be able to evaluate it.

#36

To add to the comments on Risc Os , we had an A3000 and later a Risc PC as the family computer when I was young and I have to say I had no idea how good it was until I had to try and use windows 3.1, which felt like a step back to the kind of Atari ST era.

The important thing about Risc Os was of course that it had the best version of Elite ever created for it. Maybe I’m rose-tinting somewhat but I don’t recall having played a game with better AI.

#37

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you sometimes counter arguments “linux does X badly” with “no, linux does X well” when actually you mean “debian does X well (linux in general does X badly)”. That’s cheating ;).

Fundamental architecture. The hoops that X still has to jump through to support the whole “x-server” crud, and the idea of popping up remote apps on the local x-server etc etc etc. There has been much discussion of dropping these features, in order to simplify the X architecture, and much discussion of the pros and cons of this. IIRC, the current majority opinion is “don’t remove those features”.

FYI I was only mentioning ones i used as a desktop OS on a daily basis. I have tried very hard to improve my general OS experience over the years, so far without much success. NB: NT-4 is still my benchmark, and that’s depressing :(. NB also, I did NOT include Mac OS X in that list, and several friends who’ve had similar experience to myself (i.e. many many OS’s) have said some very good things about it (sadly, they’ve also had some very bad things to say too :frowning: ).

PS …and NT4 wasn’t even that great. It could still crash quite easily (although much much less than win9x, and slightly less than most desktop linuxes I’ve used), had MAJOR bugs in all MS apps (e.g. windows networking would sometimes cache a password you’d changed…indefinitely!!! Also networking timeouts in excess of 15 minutes could be a VERY big pain!), and only had DirectX 5 - which was a problem with playing games :(.

#38

Fun though it is, I really have to bow out and escape this thread now :-*

Cas :slight_smile:

#39

[quote]Not to put too fine a point on it, but you sometimes counter arguments “linux does X badly” with “no, linux does X well” when actually you mean “debian does X well (linux in general does X badly)”. That’s cheating ;).
[/quote]
I tried to make it explicit when I meant Debian (probably forgot it in in some places). That’s kind of a problem in this thread: Some Linux distributions have more conceptual differences than different versions of Windows. To make a really good comparision we had to name specific versions of Windows and Linux and the target group (e.g. newbie, expert, long-time-win-only-user, latest-feature-junkie) or even specific tasks. The study I linked to somewhere at the beginning of this thread, did exactly that.

[quote]Fundamental architecture. The hoops that X still has to jump through to support the whole “x-server” crud, and the idea of popping up remote apps on the local x-server etc etc etc. There has been much discussion of dropping these features, in order to simplify the X architecture, and much discussion of the pros and cons of this. IIRC, the current majority opinion is “don’t remove those features”.
[/quote]
Don’t the current ATI/NVidia drivers avoid this overhead anyway?

#40

[quote]Me, for one. And it is - in most cases. Just because you can cite lots of counter examples doesn’t change this - there’s hundreds of thousands of crud apps (e.g. just by looking at sf.net), and perhaps a thousand good ones (I’d guess, off the top of my head, there are considerably fewer than 500 high-quality open source apps…perhaps even only than 200).
[/quote]
I think you’ve let that “God” label below your name go to your head. :wink:
I’m amazed that you can just look at Sourceforge and immediately tell that hundreds of thousands of the apps are crud.

Very impressive!

Can you now point that same omnipotent intellect at all the commercial applications in the world and tell us what the percentage of crud is to ‘quality’? About the same right?

;D