Why Windows > Linux

Well, first off let me apologize for the harshness of my first post. In context, I really had just been through a really crappy day, and it was the fault of Windows (and those who insist upon running Windows on mission-critical servers because they are ignorant). But still, my actions are my own responsibility, and I don't have the right to be a jerk just because I had a bad day. Sorry everyone. :O

But on the Windows vs Linux topic, I still say Linux's difficulty is overrated. At the risk of sounding like a fossil, I remember the days when you had to install an MSCDEX binary just to get a CD-ROM working, and configure your own startup config files completely by hand and with little or no reference on how to get it right. In case you were not using computers back then, this applies on OS'es from MS-DOS all the way up to Windows 95a. And you know what? People learned how to do that stuff, or they got somebody who did to do it for them.

Now, if it doesn't have a shiny GUI, even so-called "technical professionals" don't have the first clue what to do with it. Linux is actually quite user friendly from a CLI-only perspective, especially compared to DOS, AS400, or earlier UNIX implementations. But that said, Linux has a pretty GUI for just about everything; even things like Apache configuration, Samba, and other advanced server features. Hell, my mom got a new HP laptop recently which came with XP Pro pre-installed. She had been using Linux on her older laptop, since it was too slow for Windows. Guess what she asked me to install on her new laptop also... Yeah, it seems that once you already have some Linux experience even a very novice computer user, such as my mom, will typically prefer Linux for most things.

As you said earlier B, it's not about the OS, it's about using your PC as a tool. If you can use Linux, it makes for a sharper tool for most purposes. It's just a matter of having that point of reference to begin with.
 
Anti-Trend said:
Well, first off let me apologize for the harshness of my first post. In context, I really had just been through a really crappy day, and it was the fault of Windows (and those who insist upon running Windows on mission-critical servers because they are ignorant). But still, my actions are my own responsibility, and I don't have the right to be a jerk just because I had a bad day. Sorry everyone. :O
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Understood AT, many a time I've posted something, only to regret sounding harsh the next time I log on. :)

I don't think we have much of a usability problem from GUI-wise in KDE. It's quite intuitive, and although some may disagree, the cases which I've had trouble understanding how to use something have been with GNOME/GTK apps, rarely KDE/Qt.

As of what I can think of now, there are a few hurdles we need to overcome to really push Linux on the desktop. I think if we can fix these there's little stopping rapid adoption.

  • Unified/standardized package management. It would be better if a user could just go to a website/use a CD and install a standard Linux package. Maybe combine the best part of deb and rpm.
  • Unified driver interface/design. Most of our hardware drivers are already included in the kernel, either built straight in or as modules. If there was a way to distribute/build/configure drivers much like the point above then it would be great. Even better would be to have universal kernel modules. This could entice more manufacturers to create Linux drivers, and make installing them easy for users.
  • .NET style API for VS.NET-like rapid application development. At the moment, development is still a bit divided. We need a VS type IDE (monodevelop doesn't seem right somehow) to make building Qt/GTK apps easy and quick. Visual Basic 6 achieved with huge success, despite my hate for it. If we have the applications, we can have more users.
There could be more, but thats what I can think of right now. But I also agree, Linux has come a long, long way and if it continues to improve a this rate, I think the future's bright.
 
Addis said:
Understood AT, many a time I've posted something, only to regret sounding harsh the next time I log on. :)
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I find it hard not to sound harsh half the time... especially when I dont understand what someone has written. Its a shame there is no way to add a "tone" to text! :)
 
Swansen said:
i've only contracted two viruses in my entire use
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just wondering, has anyone here EVER had any form of malware on Linux?

I've only ever managed to crash my system with beta software! (an early GAIM 2 beta), and to date... no malware, whatsoever. (im sure i could find some to install, but i would have to do it with su / sudo :P)
 
Impotence said:
just wondering, has anyone here EVER had any form of malware on Linux?
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Nope. :)

Impotence said:
I've only ever managed to crash my system with beta software!
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Kaffeine player and I have a special relationship. It crashes and I spend the next 20 minutes abusing the living daylights out of it. Other then that all is peachy :D
 
megamaced said:
Nope. :)



Kaffeine player and I have a special relationship. It crashes and I spend the next 20 minutes abusing the living daylights out of it. Other then that all is peachy :D
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aMSN crashes and takes my panels and possibly my windowmanager with it - but it's the only program I can get working for MSN. GAIM opens, connects and then disappears.

Kaffeine crashes randomly, a video will be running fine and then all of a sudden it'll close like I closed it, then the whole "Kaffeine Player - The KDE Crash Handler" dialogue comes up. If I run it again who knows whether it'll crash or run fine!

I can live with those though - it's far less frequent than Windows crashes - plus if aMSN crashes and takes my panels with it, I can log out and log back in again, and all is well - with Kaffeine it's just the player that crashes and it doesn't cause the whole OS to slow to a crawl! All the time when I'm running Windows (which isn't very often as I use Linux 99% of the time) I'm thinking "am I infected with anything, is my Anti-Virus picking everything up?"
 
Impotence said:
How do you abuse a media player... play rap music or something? :P
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Haha, no I make it suffer by playing the Spice Girl's 'Wannabe' over and over again..

Matt555 said:
Kaffeine crashes randomly, a video will be running fine and then all of a sudden it'll close like I closed it, then the whole "Kaffeine Player - The KDE Crash Handler" dialogue comes up.
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That sounds familiar. It's a great application especially for DVB, but the developers need to produce a 'bug fix only' release. Kaffeine is easily the most unstable application in KDE.
 
I've found that using Adobe's Flash Player 9 plugin can make firefox/opera unstable. Opera completely crashes on some sites (like torrentspy.com etc where there are a lot of flash ads), while firefox will stop responding for a very long time. I now have flashblock extension, so I don't have the problem with it any more. Damn Adobe...
 
You would be alot better off with Adblock (and filterset.g updater), then you wont see ANY flash adverts anywhere ever! (well, next to never)
 
Matt555 said:
I can live with those though - it's far less frequent than Windows crashes
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What exactly are u talking about when u say "windows crashes"? An all-out crash of the OS or just an individual program crashing? As far as I remember, since I've started using WinXP, i have not had a SINGLE crash of the OS itself. (that's a span of like 3 years now probably) By that I'm talking about a crash in which the whole system froze up and I had to hit the reset button. Obviously single programs have frozen up and stopped responding but I've always been able to ctrl alt del them out of the way and get windows itself back to normal again. The only exception to this was games, EQ has frozen up on me to the point of no return before. But I think I can blame the game for that, not really Windows? So as far as I can tell, Windows crashes such as the BSoD (which I heartily admit were extremely common in Win98) are history in WinXP... Unless u're talking about just individual programs crashing?
 
well, thats kinda funny, yes i will agree, windows xp doesn't crash and have dumb crap as much as its given, but it does crash more than a $300 peace of software should. Yeah so actually i have had a lot of crashes lately, all of windows locks up and freaks out. Also i have had like 3 or 4 BSoD's. And yes this is only a under a year old installation, even then that shouldn't matter, because you shouldn't have to re-install your OS all the time. Also i would like to add, some really interesting things start happening when you don't reboot windows for a couple days or a week, its kinda sad really
 
Sometimes I need to boot into Windows on my laptop to run torrents where my linux /home partition doesn't have enough disk space. I run uTorrent latest version (only ~170kb which is the whole executable). I run it overnight, and I can guarantee that it will slow to a completely useless halt. The download is still continuing, but clicking Start will take about 3-4 seconds to respond, with the hard disk roaring.

Complete crashes of the system are rare, although they have happened a few times. Windows seems to have extremely bad memory management. Without a redesign, it will never have the robustness Linux has in memory management. I want to know why in the hell my desktop PC's HD starts swapping like crazy when I have 100mb of RAM still left?!!!
 
Addis said:
Sometimes I need to boot into Windows on my laptop to run torrents where my linux /home partition doesn't have enough disk space. I run uTorrent latest version (only ~170kb which is the whole executable). I run it overnight, and I can guarantee that it will slow to a completely useless halt. The download is still continuing, but clicking Start will take about 3-4 seconds to respond, with the hard disk roaring.

Complete crashes of the system are rare, although they have happened a few times. Windows seems to have extremely bad memory management. Without a redesign, it will never have the robustness Linux has in memory management. I want to know why in the hell my desktop PC's HD starts swapping like crazy when I have 100mb of RAM still left?!!!
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Totally agree - most of the time when Windows is lagging for me is when the HDD light is blinking like mad!

Use of the swap should be a last thing, it uses your HDD when it's totally not neccessary - thus it reduces the life of your drive, makes it run hotter, reduces battery life as the HDD is in use etc etc (in Linux I can rest my hands on the edge of my laptop and type, in Windows it's hot and can be uncomfortable after a while.

I've had Windows slow to a near standstill many many times - if I left my desktop running for more than 12 hours it'd grind to a halt and clicking anything would take a fair amount of time.

On my laptop it's not so much of a problem but it still happens, I've also had problems with device management, like my phone, I connect it to my laptop (under Windows) and it goes through the process of annoying little pop-ups telling me it's installing the new hardware only to tell me that it's failed and the device can't be recognised at the end. In Linux the phone is totally recognised and there's no stupid little pop-ups telling me what's going on it just works.
DaRuSsIaMaN said:
What exactly are u talking about when u say "windows crashes"? An all-out crash of the OS or just an individual program crashing? As far as I remember, since I've started using WinXP, i have not had a SINGLE crash of the OS itself. (that's a span of like 3 years now probably) By that I'm talking about a crash in which the whole system froze up and I had to hit the reset button. Obviously single programs have frozen up and stopped responding but I've always been able to ctrl alt del them out of the way and get windows itself back to normal again. The only exception to this was games, EQ has frozen up on me to the point of no return before. But I think I can blame the game for that, not really Windows? So as far as I can tell, Windows crashes such as the BSoD (which I heartily admit were extremely common in Win98) are history in WinXP... Unless u're talking about just individual programs crashing?
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Lets remind ourselves of the "Error Report" pop-up thing telling you an app has crashed and asking you to send an error report to M$ - well that happens quite a lot, and what annoys me is when an app crashes when it seemed like it was working fine - it'd be doing it's job (or idling in some cases) and then all of a sudden, out of no-where the little window would pop up asking you to send an error message. When to you there was no reason that the app should crash...

Sometimes it just gets to a stage where you give up - I know I have, the only time I will boot Windows is to encode and transfer stuff to my PSP (The Sony Media Manager software for PSP is pretty damn slick I must say) or Phone (as in Linux I can't get Write permissions, probably due to the file-system of the devices) or to play games (as I never thought I'd be using Linux full time and haven't tried games in Linux yet - I only assigned 8GB to Linux and it's getting full with documents and apps)
 
you could run windows in VMware and use your PSP software that way... its alot faster restarting windows in a VM than it is for real :P
 
True, although I don't have a Windows disk - I have backup discs that were made when you get the laptop, you ahve to go through configuring things and then make the backups (images of things on HDD)...

Damn laptop companies :P
 
You know, I think I would add one more thing to the reasons behind the firmly embedded popularity of windows, which i think has been missed: Microsoft Office. We can all agree that windows has problems, but it seems to me that MS Office is truly good software (maybe not stellar but good), and not just by microsoft standards. I don't have too much experience with alternatives -- I use Open Office to an extent and also tried the Corel office suite since it came on my laptop. However, I have the centuries-old MS Office 97 lol, and I still find it a bit more comfortable to use than Open Office in some cases (just some small things mostly). AND, my MS Office 97 has templates for making resumes, which are pretty cool, whereas Open Office does not. That's actually kind of a big deal. So, the fact that I see even a couple advantages in my MS Office 97 over a brand new Open Office kind of says a lot, imo. And the new MS Office is on all the computers at my university, and when I get to use it there, it feels even more nice. So I think that there may be a lot of people out there who do lots of work with MS Office and grow very comfortable with it. To them the idea of switching their entire OS and therefore overhauling their entire experience with MS Office and learning a new suite (which may be inferior anyway) just wouldn't seem very reasonable, I would assume. What do u guys think?
 
Ever head of crossover office? or wine? (there's also cedega)... there all programs which allow you run run windows code on a Linux box!
 
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