Why Linux?

don't most windoze users go searching for little apps all the time? places like downloads.com etc, exist for the same reason that the linux installs include all those options... so that you can find all sorts of little gadgets and such to try out and make life easier... lol...

you can find em all in one place on the install disks... or you can go hunting on the web... *shrugs* same difference, in my opinion...

~Loki

a piece of wannabe hardware that uses software and the computers main processing power to emulate the function of a hardware modem... lol..

take a look at a fullblown USRobotics or similar modem, and then look at a USRobotics winmodem... or at a pctel modem... you'll see the difference immediately... a winmodem uses the operating system to function, other modems are hardware based, run their own processing, etc...

a side note... you can take an older usrobotics 14.4 or 28.8 modem, either internal or external, and set it to 56k and it works like a charm... for those of you who still have to support older systems... *winks*

~Loki

How can I convince open source advocates to stop overestimating the computer skills and level of interest of the average home Windows user? I don't see this level of respect from those of us who use Windows at the professional level. We know home Windows users are undertrained and uninterested. They don't see computers the same way as a Linux fan or a IT pro. They view the home computer as an entertainment device one step up from TiVo but possibly a step down from an X-box. If I'm not giving the average home Windows user enough credit, feel free to smack me but also please, please point out where I'm wrong.

No, most home Windows users -don't- go searching for little apps all the time. They haven't heard of downloads.com, slash dot, or anywhere else we geeks go for new toys. Most of them aren't interested in trying lots of gadgets. What you and I think of as making life easier they think of as an opportunity to "break" their entertainment device. They don't even know what you're trying to make easier. File management; they don't know what that is. Database; what's that? Web server; their dial-up ISP won't allow that.

They may know a few game sites, but otherwise they go looking for software at Circuit City and CompUSA. They mooch an install CD from their friends. They foolishly open that piece of spam their sister forwarded to them and let it install the "Cute But Basically Useless Utility of the Week That Also Happens to be Adware" program.

Even those who do search the web are doing it after they've already got the system running. They aren't presented with a laundry list of choices at inital startup / OS installation. For better or worse, Windows spares them making those choices about options they don't care about. Loki, go back and look at that list of options Jaqui posted. The average Windows user doesn't know what a "user interface" is; how is he going to pick one? They sure don't know what the rest of those apps are.

Yes, it is the *same difference* if you are interested in choice, but they want what they're comfortable with. The average home user would no more change his OS than most of us geeks would switch engines in our cars, and for the same reason: he just doesn't care

of any description are bad programming.
Who did the programming, was the code incorrectly can be issues.
But the fundamental is allocated memory/resources didn't release it.
There might be reasons for such shoddy code but there are no excuses.

That raises an important point to be made -- the MS business model is based on creating extremely strong markets for a) technical labor b) hardware sales c) 3rd party software applications. The way to do this is to always ship slightly buggy, slightly deficient offerings as widely as possible, always require newer faster processors and bigger hard drives, despite the fact that the state of engineering at hand would allow much higher quality work. The Macintosh OS, which shipped prior to Windows, already had a self-configuring self-managing network stack; Microsoft purposely left features like this out in order to fuel the markets for companies like Novell and 3COM, to create the need for MCSE-certification (to compete with Novell CNE's) etc.

The result of this is that an army of people were able to dedicate their careers to supporting technology, who would not otherwise be employed in the technology field. I began my consulting career supporting PC and Macintosh before PC's ran Windows. There are now more than 1,000,000 MCSE's. The Macintosh professional services industry never materialized.

The net effect of this is to ensure Microsoft's long term success. Because if any one of those 1,000,000 MCSE's begins to argue for an alternative that is reliable, self-configuring, robust, or stable, they are ultimately cutting themselves out of a livelihood.

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have carefully studied the auto industry. It would not be a problem at all for some company to manufacture a car with standard replacable parts, that could be maintained by someone with relatively modest skills, that would be safe and reliable. For example, it would be no problem at all to manufacture a car where the bumper was made out of high resillience rubber, and if it were damaged for any reason you could go to Kragen and buy a new bumper for $30 and put it on yourself using wing nuts.

However, the automobile industry did not evolve this way. Back in the beginning, automobiles were sort of hobbyist pursuits. Most people who owned cars were working on them themselves, or had their own mechanic. People had arguments about the relative virtues of different engineering features. Then Henry Ford came out with the Model T: economical, totally inter compatible parts between model years, somewhat reliable, and cheap.

Now you would think that by virtue of being cheap, secure and reliable, that the Model T would have been a long term success. But what really happened is that Ford abandoned the design philosophy of the Model T after they had been spanked, hard, by General Motors.

GM did not worry about practicality; instead, they worked on selling the public on the concept of the model-year pairing, e.g., the 1957 Chevrolet. Every year every single car model is totally unique and different, requires parts that are not compatible, and requires specialized service and repair techniques. The industry evolved that way for a reason. Consumers like it that way. They spend a lot of money on a car, and they want something that is totally unique. Right or wrong, there are a lot of people -- a massive industry actually -- with a strong vested interest in keeping that way. This industry eventually became strong enough in Washington to lobby for highly complex entry requirements.

A lot of us are angry, a lot of the time, about Microsoft's technical issues. We express this anger by kicking around the idea of a widespread alternative. But it is clear that a lot of the shortcomings of Microsoft engineering are in fact quite deliberate, and are in fact responsible for employing a very large number of people. As much as I like it when technologies work swimmingly well, I also like it when I have enough money in the bank to pay for my kid's school tuition.

With a 165 IQ, I could probably devote the rest of my career to converting people to linux, never be out of a job, and still pay my kid's tuition. But I'd be gradually cutting out the jobs for the 135 IQ folks who run around and troubleshoot printers all day long. Is this moral? Is it a good thing? Does anyone even care about those people? I don't know.

What is interesting about this debate is that the industry IS driven by little decisions like these, what developers want to develop for, what technical people want to support. We are the ultimate influencers.

Thanks for the post, getting my pile of parts to work is getting annoying.

OK - first I wanted to respond to your next message in this thread but the system would not let me as it had reached maximum depth - so I cheated by backing up one level.

You spoke about home users not using donwload.com etc, that is very true as most home users are smucksters who would not have a clue about what is on their systems. They go to the store and buy a computer and have the store load up the software - most are not given software choices. If they are offered PC A with MS software or PC A with Linux and get to save A$700 or so; guess which they will ask the store to load up and then have a good feed on the savings.

The home users who are also IT hobbyists will know about download.com etc and will go to the trouble needed to do it themselves.

Thus concerns about home users being able to load and use Linux are really non-existent as those with the smarts will decide for themselves and act accordingly and the rest will pay to have a tech set up for them either at the store or elsewhere - whichever they use. The real question is education of the home users about options and costs and getting the stores to market them.

I have spoken to people who were buying new computers and they thought that Microsoft Windows was the only operating system in use anywhere in the world today - were shocked to learn of their options and savings. I have also seen stores put Red Hat Linux on their shelves at A$174 when the reccommended retail was A$74 and they were pissed off when I made a loud comment to my friend about it being overpriced by A$100 - reported them to the state consumer affairs and the next week the price was back to A$74. Their excuse was since the cheapest MS Windows version was a A$200 plus academic version they thought the A$74 price was an error, yeah right. Every computer in that store was sold pre loaded with MS software and the store management got very upset when people insisted on taking the genuine software CDs with their systems in case of a later emergency - they got a lot of repeat chargeable business reloading software for people who bought systems and did not have the CDs and needed a rebuild due to a virus etc.

Your arguments from appeal to ridicule might stand up under the close scrutiny of the Church of Microsoft faithful, but some of us have to actually examine the merits and faults of available technologies for use in the real world.

This month, I'm changing jobs. I'm going from being the heterogenous networking expert (among other things) at an IT consultancy, and the datacenter technician for an organization running a top-100 website, to being the network administrator for an aerospace systems research firm. As a result, I'm pretty much seeing it all, in terms of Windows and Linux comparisons.

With the consultancy, I did most of the system administration for the consultancy's network. That network has been migrating steadily toward a more Linux-centric setup. It's now primarily Linux on the server side and Windows on the workstation side. The clients of the consultancy are primarily small businesses. More and more of them are using Linux servers, and those who migrate are universally happier after the migration. Things end up cheaper and easier to maintain, and the consultancy ends up called to do less recovery work on the servers. Meanwhile, on the high-end side, I was also working for the Wikimedia Foundation as its datacenter technician, maintaining a network of about seventy servers (at last count: traffic has been doubling about every three months, and that means impressive need for increased server resources). That entire network is running Linux, with Apache, Squid, and MySQL as the major server workhorses. A similar setup with Windows systems would require about three times as many servers, with prohibitive licensing costs and significantly reduced scalability for coping with growth.

At my new job, we're using both Windows and Linux. There's a processing cluster running Linux for major algorithm testing jobs (currently impossible with Windows), a number of servers running Linux, two running Windows, and desktop systems. The accountants and administrative staff use Windows systems, and the other (roughly) 80% of the desktop/laptop systems are running Linux. Linux is a serious OS for serious purposes. It's stable, secure, and highly capable. I am, and have been, working with Linux systems both in Linux-only environments and side by side with Windows in heterogenous environments, and before that I worked mainly with Windows-only environments. If you're not seeing Linux as being clearly superior in the majority of server implementations, you're doing something wrong.

If you're calling experienced IT professionals with years of first-hand knowledge of the comparative capabilities of Windows and Linux a bunch of religious fanatics simply because they don't agree with your assessment of Windows as the be-all and end-all of operating systems, it's you that has the problem.

You go on extolling the virtues of NTFS, and I'll go on using a filesystem that doesn't require defragmentation (something Microsoft has been promising for a decade, but still hasn't delivered). You go on swearing by the fault-tolerance of NTFS, and I'll still remember the RAID 5 failure I had to deal with under Windows NT 4.0 after a power failure (one of two experiences that taught me the real importance of a good UPS). You go on dismissing anyone that is willing and able to recognize the value of Linux systems as blindly faithful fanatics if that's what makes you happy, but I'm going to continue to work with the tools that are best suited to the jobs at hand and provide the greatest value for the expense, whether that's Linux, Windows, or something else entirely. The fact that it's Linux more often than Windows is a statistical fact, and easily explained when examining the capabilities of each platform. The fact that I'm willing to tell you about it doesn't make me a fanatic. The fact you won't listen, though, certainly makes [b]you[/b] look like one.

Hey, asking why you should push Linux on the average Windows jockey is like asking why you should push an arc welder on a pastry chef. Linux, like all Unix variants, is extremely well suited to a number of network-oriented applications. Many of those applications are institutional, which is to say that if you need a lot of file servers, or rock-solid web servers with database back ends, or name servers . . . and you need to cluster them, perhaps, in a rendering farm . . . well, then, Linux might be just the thing for you. I run a medium-sized network for a financial institution, and if my servers were mostly Linux instead of primarily Windows, my day would be a lot shorter. Or I could be doing a lot more research and development, or getting more continuing education, etc. Instead of being a baby-sitter. Every *nix freak knows that, except for gaming, anything you want to do on a computer can be done on Open Source software. Or nearly so. It's free, it's quite often of superb quality, and, once you're familiar with it, you become as bonded to your favorite apps as any Windows user does to his. So Linux is a horse that takes some balls to ride at first. Once you get it under saddle, you'll know what the commotion is about. Just don't ask your grandma to climb aboard.

Island Boy, This won't help your decision, but if you ever do go the Linux route, I hope you don't become as:
http://www.overclocked.org/OCwhinux.htm

Best wishes; BTW, I served in the bush with some ANZACs. The Best, anywhere. Wouldn't be here without 'em.

I agree with your comments. I too, am looking for the Grandma solution for clients.

The older hardware issue hinges on several things. One is memory. The second is hardware compatibility. I have seen older windows run, (at least as well as it ever does) on 16 to 32 M of RAM. The Linux versions I have been playing with demand 64 to 128 to do anything on the visual side. Command line works with 32 M. I am getting a Pentium 188 to run a couple of newer distros. But until I come up with a little more memory, I cannot evaluate how well they run. Does anyone have any PC100/133 168pin memory gathering dust?

The next CPU version I will try will be a Celeron 300. I will be building something in the 1.6 to 2.6 range that will probably be ok for the new distro versions, at least until 64 bit come of age. There are a lot of folks out there still running W 95 / 98 on old hardware.

I supposedly have a version of Xandros being sent. That is one I want to see how well it works. So far I have looked a Ubunto, Gentoo, Slax, and an old version of Redhat. I have Mandriva 10 waiting for a better system to put it on.

I read through the first 2 of your comments before I stopped and said to myself, "he needs to find a second-hand computer and install a linux distribution on it."

I've been using Linux (Slackware, mainly) since 1997. I started using it because I wanted more control over what software was installed and because I was taking coding classes in college. You can't just compare the two side by side, as they are so different from each other that a direct comparison is useless. I found that I actually had a need to try Linux (as I mentioned before, I consider myself a power user and want control over almost every facet of an OS). You didn't mention a need, so perhaps you don't actually need Linux.

Lastly, I try not to convince anyone to convert. You either are curious about it or you aren't. This isn't something like bungie jumping where someone has to convince you to do something you normally wouldn't do. At the very least, I suggest you try Knoppix or any of the other various live-CD flavors of Linux. Satisfy your own curiosity and don't ask others to entice you to use an OS that you'd ordinarily not use...you're setting yourself up for failure that way and the Linux community doesn't need another disgruntled new user who doesn't want to enlighten him/herself.

One thing that rubs me wrong is when someone asks me why Slackware doesn't have an updated installer interface. Why would it need one? It works fine and even holds newbie's hands (options-wise...the noob will still have to RTFM to get an understanding of things such as LILO MBR installs). You can have a full install in approximately 20 minutes, depending on the specs of your system.

When I ask them why they feel the installer needs a graphical refresh, I never get an objective answer, just things like, "Well, Mandriva's install GUI isn't text-based". The thing about Slackware is that the maintainer keeps it simple but doesn't add resource-intensive GUIs and tools.

IMO, Linux does NOT have to look like MS products to compete with MS products. You can have an intuitive text-based GUI and still have a competent product. The userbase also has to be willing to feed themselves with knowledge (this isn't too much different than Windows, as when installing XP or 2003 Server, I don't see alot of helpful, explanatory information during the installation either) and not complain that the information isn't there, in his/her face.

Just my opinion. There are too many people that are afraid to attempt to answer their own questions. Comparing today to eight years ago, there's a ton of Linux knowledge online (and usually included at the distro's website in a knowledgebase).

The newer term is "Win32"

You usually see the term "Win32" on AV solution websites. For example, Symantec shows a variant of Zotob as "W32.Zotob.J", which hints that the virus affects Microsoft Windows 32-bit operating systems.

Myself, I haven't ever used the term Wintel. Maybe because there were/are other arches that were/are also prominent.

In my current workplace, we use Linux to protect our networks. We also use it to serve web pages. We also use it to crunch raw data into statistical data.

I've the feeling you're talking enduser support. In YOUR profession, yeah, you've a point, but there are MANY MANY other professions. I'll also let you in on a certain secret...not every Windows user knows what he's doing when using a given Windows OS or application. Just because it has a pretty interface doesn't mean its intuitive. For example, MS Office's Exel isn't so intuitive that one can graph and manipulate data without attending some type of course or spending many hours self-training...neither is PowerPoint.

At my place of employment, we fire people equally if they are incompetent, regardless of what OS they use. The most productive people usually know how to use both Linux AND Windows and their respective apps with a decent level of proficiency.

Even if he were using ext2 as a filesystem, he could have done a filesystem check to repair his system. Of course, I've seen Windows choke during filesystem checks also...filesystem checks aren't full-proof solutions. Hard disks are faulty and depending on what the OS is doing when the power goes out will determine what issues one will have later when the power comes back on.

His friend's problem sounds like it happened YEARS ago, when kernels and filesystems were less modern.

He should've been using a UPS in the first place. :o)

As a confirmed Debianista, I'm with you on the notion that a GUI installer is not necessary. In fact, it's something of a hindrance, often enough.

When people compare a text-based install (like the new debian-installer, for instance) to the Windows GUI install, they're forgetting the first few stages of the Windows install, which look surprisingly like ncurses-based console UI. The amount of time and effort it takes to get through the text-based portion of the Windows install is actually fairly comparable with the [b]ENTIRE[/b] Debian installation process with the new debian-installer (not the old one that was standard with Woody/3.0). A good response to the "Windows has a GUI install!" people would be "How would you like to be done installing after the text part of the Windows installation was done? Try Debian Sarge/3.1."

Meanwhile, the hard drive partitioning process under Anaconda (the Fedora GUI installer) or the Windows installation takes about as long as the complete Debian install, from beginning to end, even if you customize partitioning rather than going with the defaults.

Ubuntu works great out of the box for the "monkeys"

Debian based Linux systems have had the reputation of being old, stodgy, and hard to install. While that was true to some extent of the old Debian based systems, they have always been stable, really flexible and easy to modify, and because of that, the Debian project, just over the past two to three years, has spawned several of the most interesting projects and interesting distributions.

Anyone who really follows Linux stuff ought to know by now that Ubuntu has been attracting a great deal of attention, and they have been spending money, literally giving away not just downloads, but groups of CDs, containing both a Live CD and an installable CD, and encouraging people to use them and give them to others.

Ultimately, I am sure that they have a business planned around selling products and services on a platform on top of that system. But the fact is, it's free, it works, and it is gaining rapidly in popularity. Right now it costs ZERO, even if you get a CD.

MEPIS is another company, really a one man show, that is producing similar kinds of efforts. Like Ubuntu, you can get the base softare for free. MEPIS also sells software, services, and updates for a modest cost.

The main difference between MEPIS and Ubuntu is that they use different graphical user interfaces (GUI), different packaging, and a different approach. Both result in an easy to use end product. Both are free or near free, both have quite a following, and either one makes a potentially interesting starting point for anyone wanting to try out Linux desktop software. Both are based on Debian software, so you can see that Debian is no longer just for the geeks, it is usable.

Linspire and Xandros, both easy to use, commercially sold desktop Linux systems, are also based on Debian software.

Between Linspire, Xandros, Ubuntu, and MEPIS, you have four of the easiest systems in the world to install. Only someone with software phobia would have problems installing these distributions. The only reason that they might not work is the fact that not all hardware vendors are open in releasing their hardware specifications so that open developers can write drivers for their hardware. Even then, all four of these vendors provide pretty good support, better than Windows 95 was when it came out, better than XP was when it was first released, but arguably not as good or complete hardware support as XP or 98 have enjoyed during their lifespans.

Pure Debian software definitely has hardware support issues because Debian uses only freely available code in producing its software. The commercial vendors who add on, therefore bring something useful to Debian - more hardware support.

Just use supported hardware, and you won't go wrong. Pretty simple, yes?

Common enough hardware ends up supported by free drivers because before long someone will write a driver for it so they can use it on their own systems with free kernel modules. Thus, Debian ends up supporting all the good hardware.

I use nothing but Debian when I have any choice in the matter, and it doesn't have problems with hardware support, basically because I don't buy crap hardware.

In the enviroment you are trading in there would only be limited opportunities for linux.

At desktop/workstation there would be practically no oportunites for linux deployment as your clients would be set in there ways with regards to applications they run (CAD systems, Accounting packages etc.)

The area where you would possibly be able to offer cost effective solutions would be in the server market. I work for an engineering company in Christchurch that would be typical with the clients you service. The one area my company would be able to deploy linux seamlessly would be to replace our small buisness server with linux.

If you wish to look into where linux could be a viable solution to your clients the server area would be the most likely area.

One additional point. it is disapointing when a proffesional in this industry asks a vaild question some seem only interested in turning a sensible discussion intoo yet another sensless linux - windows flame

You shouldn't. You should want as little hassle as possible to achieve your goals, which are yours to choose, not mine, and decided according to your standards, not mine, which software to employ for that. If you want somebody to "sell" you on the idea of Linux, maybe some of these enthusiasts will be willing to do so, but to me, computers are not that exciting. Might have been [b]before[/b] the dot-com bust, but ...

I realize y'all are trying to help, but IslandBoy's profile shows no activity other than this discussion. He probably hasn't been active since before the site overhaul last fall.

Really, I love any excuse to get the best possible computer. If this means killing all the old ones and robbing the bank to get new ones I'm all for it. At least I was untill I ran out of money.

Some versions of Linux (Mandrake works good and does not do this, along with Red Hat, Fedora, Knoppix, etc. in the versions I've seen) sometimes asks stupid questions of dumb people like myself in the process of instalation, such as "does your computer have a US keyboard?" Then when we answer with the wrong answer we get what? press F1 the keyboard is missing?

By the way, how do I fix this? I actually did it. F1 doesn't work when the keyboard isn't found by the bios?

OK, I have a good sense of humor, but - Windows and ETC. don't seem to do that!

I can see that for many persons a killed computer, say after trying to get rid of a mistake by reinstalling the OS, would be a bad day (it was for me). In any system one not only wants good functionality, but also ease of use for even the stupidest moron.

So too is the bear of upgrading drivers, or even getting drivers to work out of the box.

Here too Windows systems work with most stuff, especially if sold as an integrated system.

And Linux? Well, it's complex to even understand the permissions needed to access the drivers!

I had a fellow, an expert, work 25 minutes to get to a floppy drive! The drivers were there, the computer for some reason would not choose to let me, the user, run them. (It was me - of course - but your customer might not be any smarter than I am!)

This is great in business. It means Joe can't steal from your inventory and change the books; Joe is the new guy and he doesn't have permission to write to a floppy, etc. He can see what is in inventory, he just can't do anything with manipulation that you as the superuser, root or whatever want reserved for executive privilidges. In an emergency, he can access; but you will know. So to with kiddies. The control is better with the Linux because it was a business program tweaked to private use. It is closer to the programs most used by government. Conservative Government stands accused of hacking Windows to shut down Liberals, at least by proxy. Doubt this? Try arguing a Liberal line on the Internet.