“All of you who are reading
this article right now are doing so with the help of an operating system. Of course, if you’re reading it on paper, then that you may not think that that’s the case, although it had to be printed by a printer that was connected to a computer which was operated by an operating system, right? In a way, it’s like playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. When you get right down to it, operating systems are a major part of our connected lives since something is needed to manage and execute all of the actions that take place on the electronic devices that we love oh so very much.”
What Does Your OS Require of You?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
There’s nothing wrong with older hardware/software, at least if your expectations for that hardware are somewhat realistic.
For example, my main box at home is still a 200MHz PPro running OS/2 Warp 4. It has 192MB of 60ns EDO/ECC RAM, 14GB of SCSI hard disk (2+6+6), a CD burner, a second CD drive, an AWE32 soundcard, and video hardware that was cutting edge ten years ago (4MB Matrox Millenium and 12MB Voodoo2 card).
Stone knives and bearskins, right? 🙂
Fact is, the above box runs Firefox 1.5.0.6 just fine. Google Maps are a little slow, but they work. It runs StarOffice and Lotus SmartSuite, Quicken and Visio, and many other types of programs.
I know it won’t run Doom3 or UT2004, and I don’t care. That isn’t what my main desktop machine is about, and as long as I recognize that, I’m perfectly happy to continue to use the same machine that Micron built for me back in December 1996.
Needless to say, I won’t be upgrading that box to Windows XP. 🙂
Edited 2006-08-09 16:18
And I thought I was the only one to use older hardware.
My ‘main’ machine is a p3/600, 768mb pc133, 40gb ide, 300gb sata (on sale! yay for storage
),dvd burner, just aquired an nvidia 6200 for free, was a voodoo 5, and some various other odds and ends. runs XP perfectly. I slowly buy new stuff for it. been working on this for ~6 years now.
People laugh at my hardware and then whine about how ‘slooow’ their AMD 3200+s are or 2.4ghz p4s…
its rather insane.
I can’t believe people are still seriously using G3’s. I even had one at one point, but I had no intention of using it seriously (it was to play with Mac OS on).
Older G3’s are the rough time equivalent of the Pentium II, the earlier Pentium II’s, or at least the one in the Bondi Blue iMac I had was. Anyone who’s used WinXP on a PII can tell you: It might meet the specs, but you’d better limit the programs you use to the most efficient ones. For example, on my 400 PII I can load up VS2005, but if I try to run the PDA emulator I’m in for a 15 minute wait (I waited once). Microsoft Word, probably, OOo, heck no!
So I can’t imagine people really upset because their 7-9 year old computer won’t work with the latest OS! The PC’s from that era are often plagued with some odd cheap hardware which never had NT driver support (hopefully that piece is easily swapable). Mac users have nothing to complain about. In fact, if one piece of experience is lost to keep G3’s working with OS X Leapord then everyone else should complain!
As for Vista: This is even less important. The Windows users who upgrade OS’s themselves will largely already have the requirements met.
I can’t believe people are still seriously using G3’s.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I get good performance from my G3 500 Pismo under 10.3, and until the power supply died, I got decent wordprocessing and websurfing from an iMac 350.
(The only reason I’m looking at a laptop from System 76 to replace the Pismo is because the DVD drive in it is dying and the screen is starting to go — not because the thing is dog slow. It isn’t. It’s PDQ in both OS X and Xubuntu.)
I think a lot of the reason the average american is 2 paychecks from disaster (so I’ve heard) is that they’ve allowed themselves to be brainwashed that only the latest and greatest will suffice.
And that simply ain’t so.
We’re not talking about the latest and greatest, we’re talking about being almost a decade behind. The later G3’s I can somewhat understand, like your 500. But the earlier G3’s, heck no.
We’re talking about running hardware designed when decent 3d graphics was a new concept and running an OS dependent on good 3d graphics.
I’m not exactly up to date, I’m running an Athlon 1800, but I plan to replace it within a year because it’s getting too far behind.
Some Americans are 2 paychecks from disaster because they can’t wait until they have money to buy things. They go to title loan (car title) outlets for loan money because no creditor will have them so they can pay for things which they won’t die without. Not that there’s anything wrong with credit, but when no one will give you _any_ credit it’s probably not time to risk your car over something you can live without.
Others are because they have credit, lots of it, and they maxed it all out…
We’re not talking about the latest and greatest, we’re talking about being almost a decade behind. The later G3’s I can somewhat understand, like your 500. But the earlier G3’s, heck no.
Up till a year ago, I had an iBook with a G3 800Mhz, and even though that was not the latest and greatest, I found it to be sufficient for everyday stuff, and even for heavier stuff like developing software (and compiling). But that laptop suffered from the logic board problem, and Apple replaced it with a newer G4 iBook 1.33Ghz. I do use mainly linux though (using Gnome or E17). MacOSX is heavier, especially regarding memory requirements.
I’m not exactly up to date, I’m running an Athlon 1800, but I plan to replace it within a year because it’s getting too far behind.
Too far behind regarding what, or for what purpose?
My desktop is a Pentium4 1.7Ghz (768mb ram,geforce4ti 4200 128mb), but it’s a very stable machine and I’m not gonna replace it in the near future. The only reason that I can see for replacing it, is that it can’t run the latest games. I do like computer games, but there’s still a lot of older games which I didn’t play yet, and which run fine on my machine (and well, I only have Win2k, so I’d probably need XP too for those games). For everyday stuff however, it’s plenty fast. Even the heavier stuff like compiling, video encoding, is all still going pretty good. However, now that I think about it, I believe it is struggling with high resolution H.264 encoded trailers.
I know some people really have a need for faster hardware, but I think most everyday computer use (mail, web browsing, word processing) is still possible and working just fine on older hardware. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I do agree though that new developments and technologies shouldn’t be hold back in an attempt to stay compatible with ‘old’ hardware.
Of course you’re right in that users shouldn’t expect the same software experience on a G3 as on an Intel Core Duo. However, you’re argument starts to enter an ethical and strategic grey area when it comes to security. People with old hardware should still be able to get the latest security updates.
It’s difficult and expensive to provide updates for down-version software, but it’s critical to keeping your customers on your platform for when they finally decide to replace their hardware. Some platforms are designed such that newer “kernels” and system libraries can be used (not all features of course) with older and less demanding desktop environments.
That’s what they is all about: it’s the desktop environments that are pushing the system requirements, not the core OS components critical to security. The ability to isolate the desktop environment from the system is critical to providing a long-term security lifecycle to your customers.
Sometimes this isn’t possible. For example, I doubt it would have been feasible for Microsoft to port the NT kernel and libraries to work with the Windows 9x desktop shell. But it should be possible for Apple to ship new versions of XNU that run Panther/Tiger, just as it is possible to run Red Hat 7.1 (released 4/2001) with the recent 2.4.33-rc3 kernel (you can probably run even older distributions, but might require some slight cluebatting on SMP systems).
They would have support until Tiger’s support cycle ended. I don’t see a problem in expecting people to upgrade hardware after half a dozen major operating system releases…
There’s being nice to your customers about legacy equipment, and then there’s being run by your cheapest customers
.
Anyone who’s used WinXP on a PII can tell you: It might meet the specs, but you’d better limit the programs you use to the most efficient ones. For example, on my 400 PII I can load up VS2005, but if I try to run the PDA emulator I’m in for a 15 minute wait (I waited once). Microsoft Word, probably, OOo, heck no!
It’s not the CPU that matters for Windows XP, but how much RAM you have, and how fast your harddrives are.
I ran Windows XP SP2 on a Pentium-II 333 MHz system with 384 MB RAM and a 20 GB 7200 RPM HD. Used Firefox 1.0.x, WordPerfect Office 2000, MS Office 2000 and then XP, OpenOffice 1.x, and a bunch of non-FPS games. Was even able to burn CDs on there (thanks to the BurnProof burner). Nobody in our house complained about the system being slow, except when it was booting.
We didn’t use it for hardcore gaming, or watching movies, or anything like that. Wordprocessing, web browsing, IM, e-mail, listening to music, file downloads, and burning the odd CD.
Earlier this year, we moved up to a dual-AthlonMP 2200+ system and moved the P2 over to FreeBSD to act as a file server with 120 GB RAID1.
No we do some gaming, video editing, and other things like that.
My sister and brother-in-law didnt have the cash for a new pc awhile back and I fixed up their aging tower. It was a p1-233mmx with 256mb of ram and it ran xp pro acceptably (after it was tweaked) for their uses. They could stream music over winamp, use firefox and have msn/aim running with no problems.
Different people have different definitions of bearable speed.
Firefox on a 700MHz Celeron is unbearable for me.
OS should work for me, I should not be struggling to get OS worked. Ease of use is my topmost priority.
As an non-geek user, I will rather pay XP $150 with all the free softwares available, zone alarm, avast, sygate, AVG, ad-aware, prevex, spyblaster, tweaknow, OO, FF, opera, WMP, burnfree, picasa, there are many to name…In short i pay for OS which is WORKING / EASE OF USE. installation of all above takes no more than 5 hrs, and i am SURE EVERY NEW camera, printer i am going to buy will be installed in 10-20 mins. (effective cost OF MY TIME=5HRS=$50)
Now enter linuxworld: considering My time is worth $10/hr
installation time: same as XP
adjusting beautiful fonts 2 hrs
screen resolution edit xorg.conf 1 hr
getting printer working : 1 hrs
getting scanner working : edit sane.conf 2 hrs
alsa and sound : 2 hrs if you are lucky
webcam and chatting : gnomemeeting why to worry about entering IP address? 2 hrs to set
OO install OK but figure cut-paste across 2 hrs
firewall edit iptables : 2 hrs
wireless card working : 4 hrs
TOTAL OF 20 HRS JUST TO SET IT WORKING ADD ANOTHER 20 TO FIND MISSING DEPENDENCIES
SO I AM SPENDING 40 HRS=$400 WORTH OF MY TIME TO GET MY LINUX BOX RUNNING AS GOOD AS XP.
CONCLUSION : FREE OS IS NOT FREE IF YOUR TIME IS VALUABLE.
Edited 2006-08-09 16:46
Sure, but that 40 hours (which seems excessive to me, but maybe I did a better job picking out hardware which was alternative-OS friendly) is just about all the time you will have to spend on the Linux side. No spyware or viruses to worry about, etc.
Why are you configuring a firewall on a desktop machine? If you have more than one machine, a dedicated firewall is almost always a good idea.
On my boxes at home, Linux installation is easy, but I don’t have the requirements you do. I’ve found that all I need is networking and DHCP client support, a web browser, file sharing, music, video, and a smallish collection of applications for text/images and so on.
For that, even a mini-LiveCD like DSL, Feather, or Puppy Linux works for me, and the first two don’t require *any* configuration on my part. Puppy requires that I manually activate the networking by using their networking wizard (a few button clicks), and all three seem to have no problems detecting my video/sound/NIC hardware in their default configuration. So that’s no time spent and no money spent, and no hard drive space used either. That’s pretty darn good in my book.
Experiences vary. For some people, Linux can be a much better value than Windows. For others, the reverse is true. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Edited 2006-08-09 17:03
I know that different people have different experiences (both with Linux and with Windows). I’ll accept that you honestly took 2 hours to to install fonts, if you can accept that I really never had any of these issues that you pointed out. For me, the dollar balance went quite the opposite way.
Oh, and factually speaking, you never added in the costs of downloading and installing all of those apps (OO.o, anti-adware, anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc.) to your Windows equation.
It makes for an unfair and imbalanced comparison.
Now enter linuxworld: considering My time is worth $10/hr
installation time: same as XP
adjusting beautiful fonts 2 hrs
screen resolution edit xorg.conf 1 hr
getting printer working : 1 hrs
getting scanner working : edit sane.conf 2 hrs
alsa and sound : 2 hrs if you are lucky
webcam and chatting : gnomemeeting why to worry about entering IP address? 2 hrs to set
OO install OK but figure cut-paste across 2 hrs
firewall edit iptables : 2 hrs
wireless card working : 4 hrs
TOTAL OF 20 HRS JUST TO SET IT WORKING ADD ANOTHER 20 TO FIND MISSING DEPENDENCIES
SO I AM SPENDING 40 HRS=$400 WORTH OF MY TIME TO GET MY LINUX BOX RUNNING AS GOOD AS XP.
What are you talking about??? — I set up computers to give away here in Alaska – we use SuSE a Linux Distro and before we went to automated installs we were using about 15 to 20 minutes of our time to install a complete system that mostly worked right out of the box and had all its software installed. (Some Compaqs required that we go back in to set up the sound card manually through YaST). Even if you used Open SuSE and followed the instructions to add all the extras you would still come out well under an hour of your actual time used and have a complete system ready to use. I have installed SuSE on well over 100 different computers from many makers and no longer see install problems with all the standard hardware (note: I do not get new cutting edge stuff to give away and so I can not say anything about the new or off the wall hardware).
Windows on the other hand required the same 20 minute or so just to install the OS – and nothing else. Then each program has to be installed. I am also amazed at just how much trouble I can run into in installing hardware. Do anything just a little out of the way that is considered usual way of doing it and you are asking for major problems. It once took me 6 hours to install a networked printer on XP because that model was usually not connected through a networked print server device. Even after I had worked through a method of getting the printers to work – it took about an hour per computer to get them working with that printer. By the way the printer was an HP and an identical set up for a small Linux network took less than 5 minutes a computer to set up.
Yes I could use an automated install of Windows to install both the system and the programs like I now do with SuSE and like SuSE it will require about 5 minutes of my time. However, I do not know of enough good free software to make a truly complete system in Windows and XP is just too resource hungry for many of the computers we give away. So We stick with Linux and yes I keep testing other distros to see if we should consider switching.
May I suggest that you use SuSE, Ubuntu or Linspire Distros rather than some roll your own system or bleeding edge bata distro. Yes, there are a lot of other good distros out there I just mentioned a couple that I have tried and know for certain that they work for average users.
Everyone should be voting this down, it’s off topic.
Linux was mentioned once in the article, in parenthesis. This guy obviously didn’t read the article.
By “this” I mean the parent
.
Edited 2006-08-09 18:12
Nice troll Windows zealot.
I’m going to install Ubuntu, and consider my time worth $10/hr like you.
Installation time (actual time spent with machine. I won’t include downloading, cuz that’s based on connection speed): 20 minutes
Adjusting beautiful fonts: 0 Minutes
Screen resolution: 0 Minutes
Getting printer working: 30 seconds
Getting scanner working: Admittedly I don’t have one
Alsa and Sound: 0 Minutes (autodetected)
Webcam and chatting: 1 minute (I don’t have a webcam though)
OO install: Already done by install
Firewall: Well…let’s see, there’s no services enabled by default, so um…there’s really no need. IIRC, that’s their policy for not including one.
Wireless card working: Auto-detected
Dependencies: Not sure what you’re talking about…
All optional software: About 30 minutes to pick everything out and click “apply”. Again, I won’t count download time.
So, let’s see…we’re looking at less than an hour there to get everything working without any Linux geek guru magic. Now, I don’t know about you, but of the literally hundreds of Windows boxes I’ve set up over the years, it’s never, ever taken me under 3 hours for a base install w/ all patches applied. And usually it takes about a full day’s work to get all the software I want on there. However, with an Ubuntu box, at the end of about an hour, I have a fully up to date, fully loaded machine with all the software I want.
Now, I know you’re trolling, but come ON. At least update your troll manual to a modern Linux distro. Oh yeah…and STOP SHOUTING.
Now enter linuxworld: considering My time is worth $10/hr
installation time: same as XP
adjusting beautiful fonts 2 hrs
screen resolution edit xorg.conf 1 hr
getting printer working : 1 hrs
getting scanner working : edit sane.conf 2 hrs
alsa and sound : 2 hrs if you are lucky
webcam and chatting : gnomemeeting why to worry about entering IP address? 2 hrs to set
OO install OK but figure cut-paste across 2 hrs
firewall edit iptables : 2 hrs
wireless card working : 4 hrs
Funny, next tme instead of installing just Linux try out a distro. I find it very hard to believe that with PCLinuxOS http://www.pclinuxos.com , Mepis http://www.mepis.com , Linspire http://www.linspire.com and even SUSE http://www.novell.com/linux/ to some extent that you had that many problems.
Try one of those and than come back then let us know
Edited 2006-08-09 19:10
There is no way on earth it should take you 40 hours to set up Linux. The only time I have ever come close to even a tiny fraction of that was when I tried out LFS, and most of that time was spent compiling and not actually interacting with the box.
If you have a Debian (tesing/unstable) base system installed (without Xserver), let say using debootstrap via the Internet, and you want to install kdeveloper, apt automatically will resolve dependencies installing xorg, kde, fonts and libraries required without any headache.
It took about 2-4 hours to install Debian, using net install on a 1Mbit connection.
On same way, you can install other Linux distribution using yum on Fedora , yast on Suse.
Edited 2006-08-09 19:54
CONCLUSION : FREE OS IS NOT FREE IF YOUR TIME IS VALUABLE.
No. The conclusion is that for you installation costs of XP is cheaper than installation costs of Linux.
Two more things that you didn’t consider.
1. You are talking about installation cost, but if you wanna do it right, you should also factor in maintenance cost. This involves (a) manually downloading, updating and installing th ‘free’ software you installed, (b) (chance of os getting unstable x time needed for reinstall) and (c) (chance of getting infected with virus/worm or being hacked x time for recovery).
Chances are that a good Linux distro will perform a lot better on maintenance cost. A whole lot. Virtually no time needed to keep your machine up-to-date regarding software and security fixes.
2. You can probably find someone who will do the Linux install for you for less than 200$.
But this looks more like a mental exercise to justify to the world that you’re not running Linux. You don’t need to. You’re free to run whatever you like best.
Chances are that a good Linux distro will perform a lot better on maintenance cost. A whole lot. Virtually no time needed to keep your machine up-to-date regarding software and security fixes.
Before or after downloading hundreds of megabytes of fixes from SUSE (or whatever distribution)? or the need to keep upgrading libraries because APIs change from one release to the next, and newer releases of software use newer, incompatible libraries? are you considering RPM hell? Linux has a lot of good things going for it, but the non-necessity of downloading updates to your software is not one of them, unless you keep your box frozen at one moment in time.
I have experience with Debian, that’s what I had in mind. So, no RPM hell. When I was using Debian stable, I didn’t download “hundreds of megabytes of fixes”. AFAIK, Debian renames (by appending a number to the package name) packages for different, incompatible versions of libraries and they can actually co-exist most of the time. I don’t remember ever having a problem with that either. All I need to do on Debian to keep it uptodate regarding security fixes and software is “apt-get upgrade”, and if you’re running “stable”, then it’s just a matter of running that command. If you’re running “testing”, you could and probably will need more time when major changes need to be done (for example, major X upgrade).
I am not saying that it is not necessary to do updates and download them on linux, I’m saying it’s painless and doesn’t take much time. I contrast “good Linux distro with security updates” with “Windows + lots of separately installed applications”. On linux, it’s just one simple command (apt-get upgrade), while on Windows you need to keep track yourself of the seperately installed software and security alerts (painless windows update, but manual update/install for all non-ms applications).
I did, however, install RedHat on a company laptop before and I remember having to download rpms manually and making sure that I got the right versions and everything (I remember rpmfind.net). However, I believe that nowadays the “yum” tool on Fedora Core for example is providing more or less the same functionality as “apt” in Debian. I think RPM hell is not much of a problem anymore nowadays (though I never used Suse or Fedora Core).
To help clarifying about “RPM hell”, try to use the dpkg command instead of apt-get and you will understand what “dependancy hell” really is. On earlier time, major mistake from most Debian users is compare apt with rpm which looks like a engine with a car.
A Linux distribution for a deadbrain Next->Next->Next->….->Next
http://help.linspire.com/cgi-bin/linspire.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.p…
As an non-geek user, I will rather pay XP $150 with all the free softwares available, zone alarm, avast, sygate, AVG, ad-aware, prevex, spyblaster, tweaknow, OO, FF, opera, WMP, burnfree, picasa, there are many to name…In short i pay for OS which is WORKING / EASE OF USE. installation of all above takes no more than 5 hrs, and i am SURE EVERY NEW camera, printer i am going to buy will be installed in 10-20 mins. (effective cost OF MY TIME=5HRS=$50)
XP does not come bundled with these applications, it does not include a office suite, a image editor other than the basic MSPaint, a multi virtual desktop (not often talked but very useful). It does not allow customization on the installation other than keyboard. Plus you will need to download most of them on different websites which can be cumbersome for “average” users.
Note that for new hardware, manufacturers will provide a CD drivers for Windows XP to make them functional therefore you cannot compare that to most non-Windows system. The biggest plus I have learned in the Linux world is most mainstream distributions come bundled with different local languages while users will have to shell money on the same proprietary OS for different language.
This is a rebuttal to point out the flaws.
rakamaka
(or raja_ka_baja who posted 76 comments on OSNews
(10 voted up, 48 voted down)
http://www.osnews.com/usercomments.php?uid=2518
I don’t simply beleive you’ve ever tried to install any of modern linux distros. Even with Progeny Debian ver.1 (released in 2001. ) you’d spend much less than 40 hours configuring hardware and tweaking GUI.
“TOTAL OF 20 HRS JUST TO SET IT WORKING ADD ANOTHER 20 TO FIND MISSING DEPENDENCIES”
It wasn’t the case even in Linux prehistory era!
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=15217&comment_id=144047
I’d say he’s most definitely a troll. It really shouldn’t take him nearly that long to do things he does every other week
.
What the *$*$*# system are you running?
My SUSE took this to get working:
OS: FREE, install standard…
My time might be worth more than $10 an hour
Fonts: Look great out of the box: No time
Screen Resolution: post install YAST: 1 minute
Printer working: Installed during OS install: No time
Scanner: plugged it in…YAST: 2 minutes Working fine
ALSA and SOUND: Soundblaster…worked out of box: No Time
Webcam: Don’t know…don’t have one: No time
StarOffice (yeah): 10 Minutes, Inclusing product update 3 revision 2
Firewall: Rudimentary done with YAST 5 minutes…I use a configuralble router ahead of it: Already configured
Wireless card: Worked out of the box: No time
Total: 12 minutes=$2.00 at your rate.
LOTS cheaper than Windows XP!
Conclustion…it was pretty free to me!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Absolutely depends on your hardware but than again you don’t expect Xp to run on every piece of hardware (that is non x86).
Judging from my own experience installing Linux actually requires less time but installing lots of apps afterwards might get you into trouble.
I think it’s like this:
very basic needs: Linux wins hands down (install takes half an hour and all basic apps are preinstalled
more programs needed: It then really depends on the programs you use. If you want to program C/C++/Perl/… you’re better off using Linux. If you don’t mind adware you might be better off using Windows in some cases.
lots of programs needed: I think if you don’t mind the costs Windows wins here. Plenty of productivity apps available, strong corporate support, also sometimes a must when your customers use Windows…
I got the parts and assembled it for my Kubuntu desktop.
Sempron 64 bits
512 MB DDR 400
250GB SATA2 HD
Soundblaster
LG DVD writer
Works really well here. But I won’t say my OS requires anything from me. It’s the inverse. I require a lot from my Linux box.
The moment of d’oh! when I realized that I’d forgotten to install OS X first.
(I was setting up a dual boot system.)
—
I’ve seen some cases of install hell with both Linux and Windows, but less and less with Linux these days.
I have a Blue and White G3
Granted, I gave it to my dad, but Panther runs fine on it, office suites run fine, it can go online, do email, IM and all that jazz. It does not need Leopard!
Just because apple releases a new OS does not mean than you have to go buy it and install it. Conversely, just because people still use G3s, it does not mean that Apple should support them! G3s came out between 1997 and 2002 (as far as I remember). We’re almost 10 years past the intro of these machines! 🙂
I got an iBook G3 800Mhz in february 2003… and a bit later, Apple also made an iBook G3 900Mhz and that was their last G3, if I’m not mistaken.
“TOTAL OF 20 HRS JUST TO SET IT WORKING ADD ANOTHER 20 TO FIND MISSING DEPENDENCIES”
And what’s all the SCREAMING about? You’ve been installing Slackware or Gentoo or something? Those distros are *designed* to be tough to install. No, I actually bet you never installed a Linux distro in your life. Or perhaps way back in ’95 or something. That might be why you failed to mention the actual distribution. People don’t install Linux, they install a distro.
And like others have said, pop a Ubuntu Live/install CD or whatever Live Linux distro in the drive and you’ll be running the OS even *before* installing it (!). Everybody knows it’s easier to install Linux than Windows, and it takes maybe an hour at most to install some non-OS software after the fact. So what.
Sort of ironic that you joke he used Linux back in ’95, then you say Slackware and Gentoo are “designed to be tough to install”. Clean fully functional Slackware install = less than 1 hour. I imagine Gentoo with binary packages is a similar timeframe.
Try to keep up with the times before you slam two of the most dedicated distros.
//”Try to keep up with the times before you slam two of the most dedicated distros.”//
Gentoo is BSD-style easy to add software to, but takes a lot of time and preparation to install. And Slackware won’t autoconfigure as much hardware as other distros because it wants to give as much configuration options to the user as possible. So new user, be prepared. They are both great distros, both to the users that love them, and to Linux as a whole. No “slamming” here, I won’t use them but that’s just because I’m not a real geek. I don’t think I hurt any of those Slackware/Gentoo users’ feelings.
To be fair, Linux *can* be a royal pain in the butt to install. Try getting anything Knoppix-based to run on my old Compaq Proliant 2500 with a Matrox video card added, for example — not only will you have the infamous Proliant memory hole to contend with (causing the kernel to only see the first 15MB of RAM), but the exactmap and mem kernel directives that usually solve that particular problem will actually fail utterly. 🙂
Then again, Windows 2000 can also be a pain to install — my wife’s box came with two hard drives, and the one that the previous Windows OS had been installed on was a secondary controller which required drivers that Win2k didn’t come bundled with, so I had to download the drivers for the disk controller so I could feed the diskette to the installation program at the right time. It also had a video card that Win2k didn’t support out of the box, so I had to install the video drivers after the fact. And the first version of the GeForce2 MX400 drivers that I found caused constant lockups — I had to find an older version to work around an apparently known problem with the newest driver release levels and the video BIOS version on my wife’s card.
No, it wasn’t *that* hard, but Joe Consumer would’ve had an issue with it. Maybe a serious issue.
(Added Note: Applying SP4 to that Win2k box causes a nice blue trap screen at boot time. Every time. I never even get to see the sign-on screen. But it’s perfectly stable (as far as we can tell) running without any service applied. Go figure.)
Edited 2006-08-09 19:32
Took me a little over three hours to boot up this gentoo box and that included unpacking, modding and building the box completely from parts
http://fullsack.com/am2.html
Could not have been easier.
I already had the boot disk, about a 50gb iso download which may be cheating a bit. Granted my experience and hourly rate are a bit on the heavier end of the scale but it’s still cheaper than a proprietary license and I actually own it. A full world update to the best and latest everything only took about two hours fired off at bedtime the next night. YMMV
I run a SUSE Linux system at home. I’ve been installing since 9.3, and it has *never* taken me 20 minutes to install a full SUSE distribution; it takes over an hour. How do you guys get 20 minutes; do you not count the time spent sleeping while you wait to change the CDs?
Worse, at 10.0 SUSE dropped support for hardware that I still use (Winmodems and nvidia drivers), so my modem no longer works. SUSE’s CDs install bogus kernel headers, with the result that I can’t compile any drivers like martian or ltmodem or NVidia. (The entertainment in 10.1 comes from the fact that CONFIG_SMP is turned on, but CONFIG_NR_CPUS is not intialized.) They even busted the USB support with the 10.1 release, so badly that I’ve had to switch from KDE to Gnome in order to mount USB devices automatically — and I HATE Gnome. I know at least one other fellow who abandoned SUSE after 10.0 because of things like this, and I’m looking seriously at Debian or Fedora or Ubuntu.
I can’t speak for that fellow, maybe he is a Windows Zealot. However, I HAVE spent over 40 hours trying to get SUSE 10.1 to work, including contacting the maintainers of the software in question, who send me new patches every now and then, and it still doesn’t work. Lots of other people do, too, which is why Linux User Groups all over the world have InstallFests. To deride this guy as some sort of Windows zealot or, worse yet, a liar, makes you look like a fool, not him.
Note that I use Linux rather than Windows. (and an iBook for internet for the time being.) Why? Partly because I need a lot of the software that comes installed without any problems at all (e.g. TeX, Lyx, gcc), partly because I have never found Windows easy to use. I grew up on OS-9, AmigaOS, and Unix, in that order, so Windows has always been a pain. I couldn’t even stand MacOS until OS X came out.
Oh, that iBook is a G3 500 MHz. It’s perfectly serviceable (development, office software, symbolic computation software, internet). It won’t run the latest and greatest games, much to my son’s regret, and I daren’t touch 10.4 with such a small HD which runs like molasses. But it does just fine by me.
An OS is an interface to your applications. At a fundamental level, all OS’s manage I/O. And this is what an OS is, an I/O manager between you and itself, itself and other OS’s, itself and hardware, etc.
Moving beyond this abstract, if your demands are modest, functional I/O is available from [long abandonded] OS’s such as MS-DOS for many applications that will still funciton well (e.g., WP5.1 for DOS comes to mind).
However, as technology has advanced, so has our expectations. Most users now demand very complex desktop and window managers that afford a more elegant and arguably more productive interface to their applications. Yet the work they do essentially remains the same. Examples include KDE, Gnome, OS X, Windows XP, etc. (OK guys, KDE and Gnome are not OS’s but they are the interface and that is what is important here so don’t mod me for this!)
It stands to reason then that OS’s that are more adept at interfaceing with a broader range of devices will enjoy a statistically larger following. Hence the popularity of Windows versus OS X versus Linux (in that order). Windows is simply more capable, all things considered, at interfacing with a larger set of applications and hardware than other populare OS’s.
As a user, you decide what interface you need/desire your OS to provide to the desired applications and devices and then select an OS that provides that interface. Hopefully, there are many options available but that is often not the case. So while you may prefer the interface provide by Gnome over XP, perhaps the Linux OS does not I/O with your wireless card or your preferred printer. So you are forced to compromise. However, a true advantage exists with the opposite. When many options yield the desired interface, e.g., openoffice on SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, etc., then the value of choice and flexibility can be leveraged to accommodate a broader range of needs.
Its the capabilities of the OS to I/O with your desired applicaitons and devices that drive the selection of which OS to use. That independent selection then defines the dependencies, vis-a-vis hardware, memory, display, keyboard, mouse, etc. requirements.
So the rhetorical question posed as the subject of the article probably ought to be stated in reverse fashion “What do you require of your OS?”
One of the things why hardware makers might get to dislike Linux is that you can run it on older stuff. All it takes to revive a P II 433Mhz 128MB RAM is to install a Debian system with one of the many light window managers such as Fluxbox, or the Xfce desktop, or the full distro Vector, or easier, Xubuntu.
Which might not always look/feel as good as Gnome, but unlike Win2k or 98 they are up-to-date systems. Damn Small or Feather Linux revive even older machines.
But why revive older machines? Isn’t hardware so cheap that we’d better dump the old stuff? Computers (producing and getting rid of them) aren’t that friendly to the environment and overconsuming is already our most infamous disease. There is still non-bloated and highly usable software out there to reanimate old PCs for the non-game-addict.
They try selling €1000+ state of the art laptops (with spec.s unthinkable a few years ago) to students that often won’t end up doing more than typing a few papers, browsing the web, chatting the whole weekend where to meet Saturday night, and downloading the occasional mp3. None of which a p3 128MB won’t do.
Edited 2006-08-09 21:35