The Real Andy said:
Get your facts right before you start crapping on.
Have you looked at Vista? The new DRM crap? The WGA? Hardly any old programs
run on it, drivers don't exist. I was lucky enough to be loaned a fairly
high end almost brand new trial laptop (2 GB ram, dual core, widescreen)
from a friend that works for one of the big business class PC vendors about
2 months ago. After waiting for about 2.5 hours for the recovery
installation process to reinstall Vista, so I would have a fresh install to
test, simple web browsing was slow, it took about 15 minutes to install
adobe reader, watching a DVD kept producing a black screen for a second or
two every few minutes, etc. The computer kept having programs crash. The
normal windows folders are not where they used to be and there are a lot
more of them now. The battery life is much shortened due to the constant
processor and hard drive activity for the encryption. There is a bug with
USB hardware and mass storage devices. The Wi Fi won't remain connected.When
I first turned it on, it looked nice, and I started to think that it's not
that bad, it may even be kinda nice, until about 5 minutes of use later. My
same brand name laptop (IBM A22P) from 6 years ago running win 2k, 1000 MHz
P3, and only 128 Mb ram runs circles around it, and the battery still lasts
3 to 5 hours unless watching a movie, since the internal impendence of the
cells is starting to increase a lot (Li ION cells oxidize internally).
Did I mention anything about viruses and other security vulnerabilities? Or
the WGA server that crashed recently, locking people from their legitly
registered operating systems for hours.
Windows 2000 was the last operating system that MS made that was any good,
and is what I still run on about half a dozen computers today. Once that
operating system is no longer useful, I will move on to something else as I
will not be buying any more MS product. I already have Red Hat running on
one computer at work, am setting up a opensuze server, and will be trying
Ubuntu or variant on a desktop in the next month or two. I also have several
computers doing dedicated things, and they are running their original dos
installations from as early as 1993.
I'll also be looking at eCS.
I think Mac is actually the worst of the lot
Although I don't like Mac's, they do "just work". You can sit down and just
get to work and not have a million other problems getting in the way. Why do
you think they are worse?
Linux sits somewhere between Windows and Mac. I could tell you a story
about how much fucking around it took me to get Linux working just
recently but its not worth it.
Linux can be a bit of a pain, however an older version of Xandros installed
on my laptop without issue except for a cheap wireless card which did not
have a Linux driver, Redhat installed correctly on several computers, I had
one fail eventually with random lock ups (I think the MB was dyeing), and in
another case, a conflict with a network card and video card, in which simply
swapping the vid card fixed it. Ubuntu seems to work quite well for most
people, and Dell, HP and Lenevo are now starting or contemplating to offer
Linux. Windows has it's share of install problems also. It took several
months (we were busy with other stuff) to figure out why a newly built
computer would not install all the way - it turns out the ram was not
compatable but worked for the most part. Now we can't buy compatable ram.
Then there's the SATA driver issue that Linux had no problems with, but Win
2K puked on it, with the provided drivers.
Tell me more when they are actually useful for anything other than
training uni students and when I can install them on my PC that i buy
new for next to nothing at the local PC shit shop.
Concidering a PC's typical use is:
- Browsing the internet
- Email/newsgrops
- PDF viewing
- Text and Word documets
- Spread sheets
- Sometimes presintations and editing them
- Picture editing (maybe only screen shots)
- Media playing (less so for business computers)
- Media editing (less popular)
- HTML editing
- Programming utilities and example code (for advanced users)
- Specialized software like database accsess
- Accounting software
- CAD Programs
Home computers:
- Gaming
- Downloading
-IM
So, looking at that, the:
-----------------------
- Internet problem is solved with many browsers, some like Opera and Fire
Fox run on many platforms. Internet explorer is a virus waiting to happen.
Firefox works good and Opera is better, in my opinion.
- For Email, Thunderbird is OK, but a memory hog and after the mail store
file approaches 1 GB, it stops working. I'm trying Evolution soon, and it
runs under Windows and Linux.
- There are a lot of PDF viewers - Foxit works well, but does not support
some menus, but it prints thing that adobe won't. Cutepdf works well at
generating pdf's. Linux has some useful ones, hopefully Foxit will offer a
Linux version
- Linux has some great text editors, and open office is useful for 99.x% of
the stuff we do, and sometimes even better. The spell checker is not as good
as MS office, and some advanced excel features are not the same / don't work
- The Gimp, open source seems to work great as a replacement for Photoshop
- All have their own programming utilities, some being really good.
- Media playing does not seem to be a problem with Linux, unlike windows
which keeps removing codec's when updated.
- I would imagine there are reasonable media editing programs available for
other OS's along with something decent to edit webpage's
- For accounting, and data bases, this is often specialized software, often
custom written for larger companies. The better stuff runs on something
other then windows.
- For the ME/EE, CAD programs are a bit of a problem, but software vendors
are starting to recognize this. Our main (and expensive) CAM program runs on
Linux. There are also some open source projects that could use some refining
(gEDA)
- For downloading, there are many other options for home computers that are
not windows based.
- IM - there are many instant messaging programs, often open source, and
would run all brands of IM services on the same program.
- Video Gaming is the real big disadvantage, but with business, video games
don't belong there unless your business is gaming. I also don't play video
games, unless you consider the odd Vegas solitaire or Free cell.
So other then gaming and some very specialized software and some business
apps, most flavors of Linux would work fine for most people.
ECS would also be a possibility, and RISCOS is interesting, and uses a cheap
ARM processor that boots in seconds and uses little power.
Apparently, some of the other operating systems are much easier to program
for (excluding the visual studio mess)
