Long-time OSNews reader Kaiwai has written down his experiences with his Acer Aspire One, Linux, and Windows. He concludes: "After a hectic few weeks trying to get Linux to work, I am back to square one again - a netbook running Windows XP SP3 as it was provided by Acer when I purchased it. I gave three different distributions a chance to prove themselves. I expected all three distributions to wipe the floor with Windows XP - after all, these are the latest and greatest distributions the Linux world have to offer. There has been at least 7 years since the release of Windows XP for Linux to catch up to Windows XP and from my experience with Linux on this said device - it has failed to step up to the plate when it was needed."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2007-02-17
Oh yeah. Spot on.
There is no "paste-on-middle-click", text files don't have proper line terminators, security is poor, the filesystem has no built-in support for execute permission, to run many programs one must run as root, there is no central repository of independently-vetted programs, no-one (other than the authors) can tell what the programs actually do, it isn't written with end-users rights in mind, it is very old and full of cruft to try to maintain ages-old binary compatibility, it is constrained to a very limited number of CPU architectures, it is expensive, it includes a lot of stuff that requires royalty payments to be made (your money ... gone for jam), even though you pay for jam you DON'T get any actual useful applications with it, it doesn't comply with open standards, it doesn't publish file formats and keeps other bits secret so that YOU will be locked in to one supplier, it is often compromised by external attacks, it is the source of the world's spam, it is used via botnets for criminal ventures, it requires performance-sapping antivirus and other security afterthoughts, it allows itself to be compromised via "autorun", it has no one update mechanism and so requires as many update deamons as it has programs ...
...
I could go on forever.
Member since:2007-02-17
Oh yeah ... I forgot to mention the actual point.
What I meant to point out was: Talking about a lack of polish, in Windows we have a winner! By a mile.
Member since:2009-03-01
I agree with your points. I wanted to add a perspective through from my 30 years in computing though. I still remember clearly the DOS wars of the late 80's and early 90's between DR-DOS and MS-DOS. I used DR-DOS just because of the way in easily handled expanded (with a 286 memory card) or extended memory. Foxpro, dBase III+ and Paradox ran great on it. Windows 286 didn't do what I wanted, Windows 3.0 was close (grrr...UAEs) then Windows 3.1 seemed to get it right (for the early 90's). The problem was, Microsoft deliberately made Windows 3.1 not work in DR-DOS; a DOS that was superior to MS-DOS. They also forced agreements on OEMs that if they installed DR-DOS (and later, OS/2 as well), the OEM still owed Microsoft licensing money for each computer sold.
Of course, there is much more to the story than that but using their products brings back that bad memory of using the products from a company that would do such things. Yes, they were convicted in 2000 but let's face it, they were let off the hook by the previous administration. Actions such as this is what drove me to first, the OS/2 world, then to SLS and the Linux world. I moved then to Slackware, then RedHat 3.0.3 and Caldera. I use Fedora, CentOS and Mandriva now and will probably experiment with Puppy. I do maintain bootable Vista, XP and Win98SE (even OS/2 4.5 and DR-DOS) partitions however. I still believe that Microsoft leverages monopolistic power over the industry to this day. Until I see computer systems widely available in big box stores that boot into GNOME, KDE, XFCE or any other desktop envirionment included in a Linux or BSD-based distribution, I will continue to feel that way.
Off topic, I've read this site for 10+ years and it took an article like this to finally make me register and post. Funny...
Member since:2009-03-04
you know nothing about linux
I'm sorry, but this is what we call "Freetard behavior" on the Linux haters blog. Don't blame the user or imply they are the problem for having problems with Linux.
There are PBCAK issues (issues caused by the end-user's lack of computer clue), but the truth is most of Linux's problems are not PBCAK problems.
My issue is not that Linux doesn't work like Windows. I'm a big fan of FVWM1 (I never liked FVWM2, since it's "focus follows mouse" was broken, and I don't like how they changed the configuration file format) and love using FVWM1 with Xclock in the corner and a bunch of xterms and a browser window across virtual screens for my development environment.
there aren't virtual desktops
No virtual desktops? Windows has a "show desktop" icon on the taskbar that makes working around this easier.
he console doesn't work properly
Horrible CLI? I agree; this is why, on Windows computers I work with, I install MSYS (part of MinGW), which gives a reasonable subset of *NIX (bash, gawk, etc.) in a small package. If I want more of *NIX than that (such as "du" and "perl"), there is always Cygwin.
The issue with Linux is that the drivers are a mess. There is no stable API/ABI for drivers. This forces me to use either a stable kernel that doesn't support my hardware, or an unstable kernel that may or may not support my hardware.
I'm sorry, but with Windows, I don't have to upgrade from Windows XP to Vista to get, say, my sound card to work. Why should I have to upgrade from a perfectly stable Linux (CentOS 5.2) to an unstable Linux (Ubuntu 8.10, which was so bad I reinstalled XP again after a month) just to get all my hardware to work? Why can't a seven-year-old version of Linux work with new hardware, yet a seven-year-old version of Windows works fine with all of my hardware.
Right now, I use Windows XP for most of my work, and have a VMware virtual machine with CentOS 5.2 (with FVWM) for my open-source development work.
Member since:
2005-07-14
Always the same old rant: you know nothing about linux, rant that it doesn't work like windows, then whine about you having to go back to windows. Mind it I always have the same kind of infuriating experience everytime I touch a windows machine (rarely, fortunately); nothing works as expected:
there aren't virtual desktops (how on earth can you work without virtual desktops is beyond me), there aren't any window collapsing options, there isn't active-follow-mouse option available as default, the console doesn't work properly and miss most of the most basic features (like syntax coloring, middle-click copy and paste, programs options completion, etc), programs are in ridiculous complex directory hierarchy instead of /usr/bin, installing programs demands you to dig through countless spywares-and-adds-ridden websites instead of "apt-get install whatever", etc etc.
Windows is a complete mess, I'm back to linux