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blog (coffee shop)
by I wanted to pose this question on an intellectual forum not solely devoted to technology to see the various responses from the tech geek and non-tech geek alike.
Have you ever considered switching to Linux? Have you switched? If not, what is holding you back?
I also would like to know what are perceived as the true advantages (adaptation, low/zero cost, free software, etc) verses the disadvantages (compatibility, lack of familiarity, lack of warranty, etc)of Linux/OS of choice.
Although this debate is old among IT geeks, it seems it is becoming fairly more common, even to the extent of the BBC calling people to discuss their views on their Operating System of choice. Unfortunately, this seemed to still illicit responses from zealots who were more than willing to continue the typical flame war in a more public venue. I hope to hear see more sensible debate from a more sensible crowd.
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I have never been much of a "camp" man in terms of operating systems. I work (as a vendor...didn't drink the kool-aide yet :) for Microsoft, and of course, I have to use EVERY product that they ever created everyday. Their life here, really depends on the integration of every single office widget they ever dogfooded out the door. That gets annoying.
Then of course, since thats who keeps the rain off my head, my linux friends DRILL me all the time for being satan's sexxual playtoy and my Mac frieds espouse the brilliance of OSX and such, and how much the vista beta's look JUST LIKE IT.
And honestly, I don't really get the argument. Any of it. I have a mac at home, and run it and vista in parallels, works fine. I have a older box that I use as a local and test server for small projects that runs linux / apache, and my paid for server is all apache. But I run sites at work on IIS. Which is not always that fun. And I've never even tried to take a site off IIS and run it on an apache, (that probably would work out okay, but no the other way around! Whack!)
Anymore though, procs are powerful enough, ram CAN BE numerous enough and disk space, forget about it. there is no reason why any decent nerd can not run all three...or throw Ubuntu on there, cause its free in the above criteria. Sometimes, some things are better than others...depends on the task. Good luck getting after a 3/4 inch lug nut with a solder sucker.
What I mean by right tool for the job, really has to do with the solution you are trying to create or provide. If someone comes to you with a chunk of money and a SQL array, you can kiss that cash goodbye if you say, "sorry dude, its Oracle, or you are a gay."
Some clients have bulky legacy systems that require bulky legacy hacks. It might suck, but the omni nerd gets stuff done!
Some might say it would be such a huge hassle to learn and use the top 3-5 OSs, but they really arent; THAT different, and with a few o'reilly e-books on hard type languages, their forms and functions become very similar, its just a small difference of syntax (dialects) and getting used to the layout of the GUIs. It is hard...still, can be very daunting.
But I think getting everyone thinking about ALL the features of the main OSs is the only real way to work towards a global, or at least communal consensus on OS standards, or even a standard OS, that fits most everyone's needs! Only if we can remove ourselves from the polemics of debate, and "hooray for our side" mentality that has governed to OS debate will we really be able to positively move towards the ultimate, and correct answer to the big OS problem in the future.
I agree with you - I have never seen MS as evil, and I think it serves very well for enterprise level applications (I am writing this from work on my MS computer).
I was a little more interested in people's personal use, since I can go to slashdot for IT professionals' [evangelical] Linux opinions. :-)
And I more than agree with you that the OS zealots are shooting themselves in the foot. I think Linux has a reputation as the user base being nerdy acne ridden nut jobs because of those that cry that MS is the evil empire and only through Linux can you find salvation. The Linux community needs normal, moderately tech-savvy people showing people the benefits that lay therein.
Just for the fun of it, about a year ago I downloaded Ubuntu Linux, put it on a bootable CD and ran it on several different computers with the thought in mind that maybe I would “learn Linux”. I played with it a few weeks off and on; enough to realize that for a general user who wanted to word process, do simple spreadsheet operations, internet and email, it seemed more than adequate for that. Unfortunately for me, my work requires using CAD/CAM software such as Solidworks and Surfcam, and programs like these will not run on Linux or Mac. So my operating system is mostly determined by the applications that I need to run.
Honestly I haven’t had much of a problem with Windows XP crashing or hanging up at all, as some people always claim. I do find that it is getting extremely bulky for 90 percent of what I use it for though. Also it has the Windows registry problem of getting filled up and confused and slowing down over time. At home I’m running XP on the cheesiest eMachines AMD Athalon 64 you can buy, and I can’t even tell you when the last time this computer was rebooted because of a hang-up.
It would be nice to be able have a completely stripped down version of Windows that only contained what was necessary to me.
I feel the same way as some other posters do in that all these computer operating systems and software are just tools, and if the particular tool you are using is working for you comfortably, then keep using it.
I used to work for a decent sized company until about 15 years ago and can remember we had the rabidly die-hard Mac people, the IBM compat’s and the UNIX people all under one roof. Anyone ever use Windows version 2.0? I did. It fit on a couple of 5-1/4 floppys I think.
CAD/CAM has actually been a sticking point for many people that would like to try it out, and has been the focus of much development over the past few years - so your point is very valid. If I lived in CAD, I would still be running MS at home so I could bring work home with me when needed. Depending on your needs, there are programs that import export common CAD files to Linux programs, but I don't know much about Solidworks or Surfcam, they may have very proprietary formats.
As for a stripped down version of Windows, they do sell it - Windows CE. Your cell phone might run it. :-) As for one you can install on PC architecture, I wouldn't hold my breath.
I also agree with you about my computer being a tool. To be frank, I really don't care that much about free-as-in-speech software. I prefer the free-as-in-beer aspect to it much more.
I have extensively used all Microsoft OSs since DOS 5, Linux since 2001, and Mac OS X since 2003. I use Mac OS X as my primary desktop computer and development center. I use Linux for my server, e.g., OmniNerd. I use Windows at work. Here's my very brief pros/cons list:
Windows
Pros - seems to be running any and everywhere. You're pretty much guaranteed that if you have something that works on Windows, you can find a system to run it on.
Cons - I have truly grown to hate Microsoft's OS products. And please don't take this as an MS bash because I love their office tools, which are brilliant and true market leaders. Windows however makes me throw up a little in my mouth for one simple reason: stability. Find me a person who hasn't experienced the blue screen of death, a system lock up, or anything of that nature and I'll be surprised. Some will argue it's a hardware issue, but I don't care. It supports that crappy hardware so I expect it to work. I left MS operating systems for personal use in 2003 and have never looked back, though I still use them (with a great deal of angst) at work.
Mac OS X
Pros - Beautiful, *nix under the hood, very stable, and extremely user friendly. I've only had OS X crash on me once and it was because I didn't plug a card in all the way when I installed it. I am never forced to reboot. I've never had a virus. I just use the system. I code OmniNerd from it. I control servers from it. I make movies from it. And about 95% of the software I use on it is out-of-the-box. In my humble opinion, OS X is the best overall OS available, bar none.
Cons - Gaming is still behind (though I don't particularly care). Sometimes apps are made for Windows and not for Mac (though this is a dying theme ... I have some software like TextMate that's only available on Mac).
Linux
Pros - Totally free, production-grade, server. If you know how to run it, you can't beat the free/quality combo. You also get a lot of choices with Linux since "Linux" is really just the kernel and groups have wrapped several operating systems around it. Linux comes in flavors like Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc. I've played with those 3, and used Gentoo for a while as my primary OS (I later switched to OS X because it's user interface is just more pleasant ... no other reason really). OmniNerd is running on Fedora and hasn't needed a reboot ... ever (though we have done controlled reboots to install kernel updates). So whether it's your laptop opening a document, or a production server handling 100K hits in a day, it's the same OS. Quite flexible.
The Gnome and KDE desktops are both great (I prefer Gnome) and most flavors have nice installer software that will get them up and running for you so that you never have to touch a command line or screw around with drivers if you don't want to. I'd say it's just as good of a generic desktop environment as Windows if you have no special apps that you need to run.
My favorite aspect of Linux is the quality software that's available from your system and not a web page. If I want an office suite, I run one command and it's installed. Video apps, games, you name it, one command each. Example, if I want to install Firefox: yum install firefox ... that's it. (yum is the program that manages installing other programs.) yum goes out on the net, finds it on a server, downloads it and installs it all in that one command.
Lastly, if you're a Geek, Linux is by far the most customizable. Go to any Linux site and look for screen shots and you'll see the wide variety of setups. You can truly customize most every aspect of the interface to your liking.
Cons - Linux is built to do dirty work and because of this the desktop environment isn't quite as polished as something like OS X. You'll find a lot of low-level stuff readily available from the desktop that gets (purposely) hidden in OSes like OS X. Like any *nix system, to get full use of it, you're going to need to know a shell environment pretty well.
The old argument that it's too hard to install is really invalid these days. If you have an extra PC, download Ubuntu or Fedora and boot the install CD. I think you'll be amazed.
Recommendations
If you're a weak to medium computer user, get a Mac. If you're a gamer or need common business software, get a PC with Windows. If you're power user, broke, or need a server, get Linux (if you're not broke, a Mac works too).
Running Windows or Mac? Try Linux (or any other PC-compatible OS) in a Virtual PC
Microsoft was cool enough to make Virtual PC 2004 free to download. When you install this program, it acts as if it were a separate computer. You can download copies of the Linux CDs and have VPC open the files you downloaded as if they were CDs in a disk drive. By doing this, you can fully install Linux and try it out without worries of harming your current system. If you hate it, delete it and it'll be like nothing ever happened. One thing to note is that VPC is much slower than a real PC so don't think Linux runs that slow. Linux is lightning fast. It's just a side effect of VPC.
I actually have Windows XP running in a virtual machine on my Mac so that I can test OmniNerd in MSIE 7. It's painfully slow, but it does the trick.
I have used Linux, Mac, and Windows extensively. I have developed software for all three.
But let me just say that:
I bought my 73 yr old mother a mac because she kept getting infected by spyware and adware.
I convinced my older sister to get a mac - she is a creative, artistic type. Macs really shine in this area.
I bought my daughter a mac. It is what she uses in school. It is easy for kids.
Of all three, I use mac at work the most...mostly for rails web development work.
At home I use the mac for building a cross-platform 3d game in c++ using xcode.
On the basis of usability, security, and "design taste" the mac is superior - there is simply no doubt.
Anyone who tells you otherwise simply hasn't looked in depth at the three platforms.
The only reason Windows is used is due to monopolistic exploitation of the market. It has absolutely nothing to do with product features or quality.
After spending years (12) working in IT primarily doing Windows server and desktop support, I decided to try Linux at home. At first I dual-booted to Windows 2000, but soon gave that up and now run strictly Linux. This works for me mainly because I am not much of a gamer. I am interested in the technology, and found that running Linux at home reinvigorated my depeleted passion for computing. Spending years supporting Windows products can do that to a guy.
I suppose for me it was easier to embrace Linux because I did not start out as a Microsoft fanboy in the first place. I have spent so much time with MS products by necessity, being an IT worker and all. But my beginnings with computers started back in '82 with the Commodore 64, and my passion was the Amiga, not the Mac (which I also used) or, especially, the ever-lame IBM PCs. It was not until the 90s that PCs really became interesting at all.
I prefer open file formats, but thankfully have the ability to use MP3 files (which are so prolific). DVD John is a hero of mine. I use the win32codecs to play those damnable WMA and other proprietary formats, though I would rather not have to. The people who think they should get money from me for them are, IMHO, vultures feeding off the ignorance of the masses. An enlightened populace would shun them, but - sadly, Microsoft's OS ubiquity makes so many associated proprietary formats def-facto. Given a choice, you can guess I would always choose a free (libre) format. And I don't know whether to be grateful to folks such as Adobe for finally releasing Flash 9 or resentful that they only release a 32-bit version. I have an AMD64 processor that is underutilized so that I can view web media. If there weren't so much FLASH on the web I would just scrap it all together. But it is, like so many proprietary audio formats, all too ubuquitous. (Warm thoughts and karma to the free flash substitute programmers, though they have so much catch-up yet to do).
ATI (now AMD) is another thorn in my libre side. Even with my technical background, I still find it difficult to maintain 3D accelleration on my Radeon 9800 while managing multi-head operation. You would think a video card being dated as it is would have been opened up by now, but sadly it is not.
Even with my gripes, I thoroughly enjoy running Linux at home and find that there is very little if anything that I truly miss from Windowsland.
Peace
I am still using my Tandy Color 3 with a cassette tape drive, love this basic language! I am saving up for a used Packard Hell, I mean Bell 286 with a video card. God, this computer technology is just changing so fast I can't keep up. I heard a rumor you can get one with spell check now, wow can't wait. Using the POWER! Luke
Another reason to use Linux... apparently, the speech control features in Windows Vista could be harnessed maliciously by crackers. There's even a bounty involved: a reader on DailyDave, where apparently the "vulnerability" first surfaced, has offered $500 to the first guy who successfully attacks the concourse at an airport through the "white courtesy phone"...
A big "selling point" (kind of an oxymoron with open-source, I guess) for Linux has been that it's less vulnerable to attack than MS: it's fundamentally more secure, and there's not one single widespread distro for everyone to crack on. Now, I suppose another one is that even if you have speech recognition software on your Linux box, your soundcard probably doesn't work right anyway.
I think that one reason that Linux and Mac are not having the same vulnerability problems as MS might be due to the fact that most hacks and crackers spend all their time attacking Windows and not other operating systems. I'm sure if everybody in the world adopted either Mac or Linux and Windows didn't exist, vulnerabilities would begin to surface in these systems also. This happened to Firefox once it's browser began to become more mainstream.
This is somewhat true, but the open nature of the community works assuming that there is an overwhelming number of 'white hats' compared to 'black hats' reviewing the code. Provided that the user base of the open software reviews/appends the code, most holes that could be exploited will be closed more quickly. In closed source solutions, vulnerabilities get fixed after an attack [thanks to plausible denial], in open source, they are often fixed before the problem occurs.
Believe it or not, all 3 Packard Bell’s I own still work. They have actually outlasted any computer I’ve ever used at work or home. Original parts too. We have one that is over 12 years old in a dirty machine shop environment we use as a serial downloader to a machine.
I prefer my Commodore 64 though. Boots up faster. I might even dig out my Timex Sinclair I built from a kit when I want a real computer. It came standard with 1k of memory!
<i>". . .this seemed to still illicit responses. . ."</i>
That should be "elicit", not "illicit", unless they were doing something to quiet down people responding illegally. ;-)
Great blog, btw.
Thanks, everyone, for your input. Although I have enjoyed shooting the bull about OS's and software in general, it seems to me that most/all of the posters in this coffee shop forum are / could be in the tech field. Anyway, there is a good bit of news for the Linux community: Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced an initiative to offer NDA covered driver development free of charge to hardware manufacturers. Hopefully this will improve the 'just works' status of Linux.
-Guy
As a Linux user at home, I was floored when the company I work for, Lowe's Home Improvement, switched all of their in-store terminals nation-wide (about 40 or so in each store) to Linux. I'm sure most of the employees have no idea they are using Linux though. There are only a few applications on it and a very rudimentary desktop environment. I hear many employees commonly refer to it as Windows.
I can see why the company chose Linux though. They wanted to convert many of the day-to-day tasks from a text-only, menu-driven terminal program to a web-based environment, but there are security and stability concerns. Since the computers can access customers' personal information and are located in a public environment, security is a huge issue. By using a stripped-down, customized Linux operating system, they could make it secure and also put Mozilla on there for the new web-based tools. Also, it boots straight from the network to a ramdisk, so none of the terminals need harddrives.
I've tried to convince a few people to try out Linux at home by telling them that they already use it everyday at work, so why be scared of it? That approach hasn't worked too well though.
RSS
I switched to Mac OS X instead by Brandon :: NR9 :: on 25 January 2007
I taught myself pretty much everything I know about computers, which includes years of experience of right-clicking on things in Windows and restarting computers. I've often heard of Linux and it's security, but it always seemed like it would be a big hassle. Would my software work? How frustrating would it be to learn to do everything from a terminal?
I've since switched to a Mac, so I've thought about making an OS change even less. With the security and reliability of Mac OS X, what would Linux offer me?
RE: I switched to Mac OS X instead by guyvia :: NR5 :: on 26 January 2007
Well, your current software wouldn't work, just as you cannot install Office for Windows on a Mac. You can buy Office for Mac, because MS has decided it is an appealing segment. In Linux, there are programmed alternatives (like Firefox is to IE). For Office, you use Open Office, which can open and save to MS documents just fine.
As for the terminal, thats a fairly infrequent thing in the major distros as of late, if you would like to avoid it (and are not a power user).
Now, I certainly understand the why you are content with Mac (it is, after all, a BSD variant). The only thing I can see encouraging a switch from mac is a wider hardware base and lower cost - neither of which may be a factor.
Thanks for your comments though, I should have reference Mac in my original post...
RE: I switched to Mac OS X instead by nickfranklin :: NR5 :: on 28 January 2007
as an aside: you can actually run openoffice.org on the mac, too. just gotta install x11 first, but that's not such a big deal...