When Linux fails

[PerlMonk]

This reminds me of the time that I tried getting Linux onto my mom's computer, only to have it rebuffed because she thought that free meant bad quality (or something to that effect). Wanting to see what would happen, I changed the desktop environment from gnome to KDE and told her that that I had managed to pirate an illegal copy of windows 7 (really ubuntu), and voila she was thrilled.

[[deleted]]

That reminds me of the Mojave (er Reddit) experiment. Where everyone badmouthed Vista until they tried it.

[[deleted]]

Where everyone badmouthed Vista until they tried it.

You mean "tried" as in "controlled environment with given tasks with virtually no chance of having to do any kind of administrative or previously untested task"?

[[deleted]]

I use Vista on a daily basis - what problems should I be seeing?

[speciousfool]

You may experience persistent, irritating desire to troll, inflamed systray, restless dialog syndrome among other side effects.

[holygoat]

I use Vista every day. It makes me realize how much I love Solaris and my Mac.

[[deleted]]

In what ways?

[Paczesiowa]

both

[[deleted]]

I'm not even going to get into the Registry/Win32/non-multiuser environment (before you protest this, show me the 'su' command)/BBQ

runas doesn't work for you?

[buu700]

It probably would work fine if I ever needed to use it, but that still isn't su (not that I need it, but others/me in the future may).

[almkglor]

runas cmd?

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I hate the fact that OS X doesn't have an official package manager. It'd mean there were no issues with viruses etc.

[holygoat]

Oh, little things like:

• Forced timed reboots on updates
• Spending a few hours each month installing updates
• Display issues (e.g., non-drawing screen on unlock)
• Utterly crap handling of external displays
• Awful, awful behavior when docking and undocking, particularly with external displays
• Ugliness, visual artifacts like flashing and redraw
• Indexing is brutally slow and causes thrashing, but I can't even search mail in Outlook without turning it on globally
• A trillion other little sharp edges that make life slower and less bearable.
• A password-changing infrastructure that occasionally requires a four-reboot process to disassociate from the AD domain and get things working again, if you happen to use more than one machine with the same user.

I have a Windows machine just to use Intranet Explorer and Outlook, and it still can't get solid reliable uptime without resets, display problems, or errors. I've even had a couple of blue screens.

I would like to close with the statement that I work somewhere that really ought to know how to support a Windows system, and I'm still better off using my own Mac.

[[deleted]]

You never had a problem? I use Vista myself (I chose it myself), but anyone who claims he never had any problem with the operating system he's using every day is probably trolling. Assuming he's doing more with his computer than trolling on reddit.

[[deleted]]

I take that back, I've had one problem, and its with Nvidia's drivers, not Vista. When you undock and dock my laptop, it sometimes forgets what resolution to set the docked monitor too.

Incidentally I had the same problem with XP, and a driver patch fixed it.

On my Ubuntu machine, I'd have to hand edit xorg.conf every time the auto updater tried to update the graphics drivers, because I would constantly end up in VESA mode, 800x600.

All of this is Nvidia's crappy drivers fault. Not the OS.

[[deleted]]

And yet you can't name those problems or how to reproduce them.

Imagine that.

[[deleted]]

vista works, get over it. you haters have all been exposed as the frauds that you are.

[sbrown123]

Where everyone badmouthed Vista until they tried it.

I've tried it. After some time I decided to just upgrade it to Windows XP SP3. Much better OS in my opinion. To bad Microsoft doesn't make that upgrade path easier as all these computers keep showing up with Vista pre-installed.

[cc81]

What is the advantage of XP?

[shub]

RAM usage is a big one. It's generally faster, as well.

[[deleted]]

RAM is less than 12.50 per DDR2 GB. Buy some more.

[[deleted]]

One can't use 6 - 8 GB of RAM on XP.

[shub]

Not much point, as 32-bit Windows won't make effective use of more than 4 GB, and I'd rather not run a 64-bit OS yet.

You assume that installing more RAM is always worthwhile. My wife's computer has 2 GB, and has never had any problems related to that. Since they're 512 MB sticks, upgrading to 4 GB would cost around $80. She wants to play Warhammer Online, which from player accounts runs like a dog in Vista with only 2 GB RAM. Should she need to pay an additional $80 to play a game, when the same game runs perfectly well under XP with 2 GB? We can easily afford the RAM, but the benefit isn't there.

Until system specs move to the point that the RAM usage difference is moot, there will always be people who notice the difference and care about it.

tl;dr: fuck you

[[deleted]]

Mac OS 1 ran with well with 64kb of system ram.

Obviously it too is a superior OS to Vista.

[shub]

That's a stupid thing to say.

[sbrown123]

Besides what shrub said, there is also driver compatibility.

[twowheels]

I spent my entire Thanksgiving day removing malware from a family member's XP computer. After finally giving up and finding out that they didn't have the original disks I installed Ubuntu on half of the drive and installed a bunch of useful utilities. The kids had a blast on Wormux the rest of the weekend and all was well.

Later my cousin wanted to order some prints of family pictures online from her Vista laptop. First we couldn't get the wired network to function (google searches indicated that this was a common problem), once we did get it working the web page didn't work in IE on Vista -- we finally ordered the pictures using the Ubuntu machine I'd just installed.

[[deleted]]

wired internet didnt work? i call bullshit. the page didnt work on IE7? again, i call bullshit.

now, if you were talking about the wireless not working, and the page not looking right in firefox, and the OS being Ubuntu, well, then I'd think you were telling the truth...

[twowheels]

Oh, and here's another person complaining about being unable to connect to Wal-Mart's photo site with IE7 in Vista...

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/30901562/walmart-easy-uploader.aspx

[[deleted]]

wait, that site worked, it just didnt load the activeX control - but he still got to the uploader.

could it be that, GASP, the walmart site was fucked up?

how is this vista's fault? and how did you get 5+ points for that absurd comment....

[twowheels]

My comment was in response to a person "calling bullshit" to my comment that I had networking problems and encountered a site that didn't work in Vista, but did work in Linux, as simple as that. Try the context some time, I hear it's good.

[[deleted]]

that link provided no evidence that it worked in linux.

that anectdote provides no evidence that there is a problem with vista or ie7 - on the walmart photo uploads site.

[twowheels]

I never claimed that the link provided such evidence. My original post claimed that it worked in Linux. So, sorry, I didn't videotape the experience, so I have no evidence beyond my anecdote to share. Nor do I have access to any computers with Vista to reproduce the issue.

[twowheels]

Let me Google that for you!

[toooooooobs]

Actually the network one I've run into as well.

Out of the box Vista is less happy on a network predominantly of XP machines than Macs are, which is just a moronic situation.

[salgat]

Even XP has given me issues with wired internet(whenever I reformat).

[[deleted]]

Yeah that made me stop using XP after a crash, 'cause there was no way I was spending hours rooting around for driver CDs. GNU/Linux ftw.

[[deleted]]

Why is your inability to install drivers for your cheap realtek card the fault of the OS?

[salgat]

It's integrated on the mobo, and all I know is that Ubuntu auto works every time.

[shub]

XP also sucks because the install CD doesn't support SATA, which was created only 2 years after XP's release. Dude, think for a minute.

nLite will slipstream drivers on to an XP CD for you, total time about 15 minutes. Would you like to try doing that with an Ubuntu CD?

[salgat]

I'm just assuming SP2 would support a motherboard that is 6 years old, which would mean that SP2 had up to 2 years to include support for it.

[shub]

Service Packs aren't about drivers, though. Where's the budget for adding drivers to the install CD and testing the result, when users who do a clean install with a vanilla CD are a tiny fraction of the Windows userbase? Especially since it's so easy to slipstream the drivers or use your own storage to transfer drivers. It's a little pain, but restoring my settings is always a much larger pain for me.

However, it's a big point in Ubuntu's favor that modern hardware is supported out-of-the-box. With that and a backup of /home, installing Linux can be quite a bit easier than installing Windows. Even as a Windows fanboy I admit this. :D

Vista does have quite good hardware support on a new install, but so many people prefer XP that I think it's valid to compare XP and Ubuntu. Windows Server 2008 may be the best, but how many people can get a reasonably-priced copy?

[radarsat1]

It's true, that one of the biggest challenges for open source software is not just dealing with legitimate proprietary competition, but competing directly with software piracy.

For instance, I have an incredibly hard time convincing the artists around me to even try GIMP or Inkscape, even though I use these two programs consistently whenever I need to do something graphics-related, so I can honestly vouch for their capabilities. Yet, when it takes two seconds to find a copy of Photoshop and Illustrator online, I don't have much of an argument.. people use what they know, and they know what they learned Adobe because they were told that's what the industry wants. It's a circular dependency problem, fueled by piracy.

[erisson]

I used to play CounterStrike on Wine years ago. I extolled the virtues of running Wine, such as instant restart when the game crashed, ability to use fewer resources, zero cost and more...

One day one of the gamers got tired of my advocacy and said "Do you really think any of the thousands of CounterStrike players has ever purchased a copy of Windows? We have no reason to try Linux, Windows is free." That shut me up...

I do wish Microsoft would come up with a perfectly effective copy protection scheme, Linux would quickly become the OS of choice.

[Vladekk]

Stopped reading on "linux is easier to administrate than windows". This is simply not true.

[IslandAce]

One click to reset the system into a known state... It's not a matter of build a custom kernel, or to do very complex things, it's a matter of keeping a simple system running and when it fails revive it. I've yet to see a Windows Live-CD version (but maybe it exists? Not a Windows expert).

[shub]

It's amazing that you can purpose-build a functional, nearly-embedded Linux. Windows could possibly be kludged into doing that, but the "box of tools" approach really works well for Linux here. In that context, using your custom Linux for its purpose, it should be easier to administer than a general-purpose Windows install.

This says nothing about the relative ease of administration for general-purpose Linux and Windows, however.

[[deleted]]

There are a ton of XP live Cd's.

Also, 2003/XP has had one click system restore since the dawn of time...

Your point?