Mixed Signals
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Monday 22 October 2007, 1:43 AM
Vista versus The Gutsy Gibbon - Ubuntu 7.10
Of those seven, three run XP, one runs Ubuntu 6.06, two are now on Ubuntu 7.10, and one is Vista. Apple has invited me along to the Festival of the Leopard, so I have high hopes that I'll soon be adding OS X to the mix (I do have a Mac OS 8 box in the bedroom, but I only use that for Crystal Quest, so it doesn't count).
My XP systems, I like. Everything works with them, the one in the office lets me use the office Windows-only software (gnash) that controls the phones, and the two at home get loaded up with other bits of hardware and software that i can't be bothered to (or just can't) shoehorn into Linux.
My Ubuntu boxes, I love. The 6.06 computer is an ancient Compaq Armada with a 500 MHz PIII, a smear of memory, a shagged battery, and an unusually large hard disk that got transplanted in from a dead Windows laptop. It does various server tasks perfectly well, I VNC into it from around the planet to keep it on its toes, and I last reset it after around 190 days uptime. It's the heart of the Goodwinsian computer matrix.
Then there's the work Ubuntu computer, on which I do just about everything when I'm in the office. On Friday, I decided to update it from 7.04 to 7.10. That took a single click - no, honestly - in the system software manager, and about ten minutes downtime, most of which was me playing about. While most of the software was downloading and installing itself, I could carry on working.
And 7.10 is really rather nice; I find myself enjoying the various windows animation gimmicks more than I expected. I particularly enjoyed installing some new Firefox add-ins that needed a browser restart: as the old instance closed, the window shrank into the distance, and a second later the new instance sprang into life as if it was being thrown onto the screen from behind me. The tabs I had open were carried across the restart - stylish, fun and minimally invasive. Oh, and 7.10 found the ZDNet editorial printer on the network and installed the correct driver, without fuss. Superb.
The upgrade at home has not been so splendid. There, the computer has two partitions, and for historical reasons the ubuntu system lives on a small 3GB sliver of a much larger disk (I mounted the major partition as my home directory). This was deemed too small by the automatic upgrade, and for reasons that eluded me like an eel on crystal meth, every time I tried to free up space, the amount by which I fell short got larger.
So I decided to reinstall from scratch, which means that certain problems I solved for 7.04 are now back again (in particular, a stubborn refusal by the system to set the resolution of the screen properly. XORG.CONF editing? Not want. It looks like a problem in the unholy empire of ATI chipsettery, and I've lost men there before.)
But again, the experience was mostly fine. Having used Ubuntu for the best part of a year, I'm a fan. I can (and will) go into the bipolar experience thereof - but for every ounce of frustration in trying to track down the answer to a problem through the jungle of forums and dubious advice, there's half a pound of pleasure when I can just install an application that does something I want done.
Which leaves my Vista machine. This is a Sony laptop that I've borrowed from the review pile while my lovely Dell X1 is up on bricks, and it's been my first serious encounter with the OS. And it's not been a good experience. There are plenty of specific problems that may be Vista or may be Sony. The wireless networking is vastly unreliable when switching between different access points, for example, and I've traced this down to a habit it has of creating new profiles and populating them with incorrect DNS addresses.
But mostly: it's slow, it's intrusive, and it's arbitrarily different. It takes minutes to wake up from various sleep states or from a restart; minutes in which parts of the system seem to get going only to lapse into an unresponsive state where you're not at all sure whether your mouse clicks are registering. When you're going through a lot of restarts (as in, say, when you're trying to diagnose a wireless network problem), that adds up to a lot of pain.
Elsewhere, it behaves like XP behaves on a 256MB computer, only it's running in 2GB. Everything is just... slow.
It's intrusive when it comes to downloading and running new software. I know why, and I know it's an old complaint, but it remains a real problem.
As for arbitrary differences: I know tons of useful short cuts through the XP interface. These don't work any more. Not because there's some fundamental new philosophy at work that I can learn to my advantage, but because things have been moved around. I know that I can close down XP by pressing the Windows key and 'U' twice. Not with Vista. Now, even the power switch icon in the start menu doesn't have an option to turn the computer off.
That wouldn't be so frustrating, if Vista wasn't so like XP in so many ways that the changes are so obviously change for change's sake. As it is, I still know enough about what's going on to correctly diagnose problems. I'm just prevented from finding the place to fix them.
(I won't mention the dead laptop at work that's dead because the Windows Genuine Advantage system has decided that its copy of Vista is illegitimate. It came in as a review machine, without the usual documentation, so we don't have the OEM's licence key. We do have the OEM's Vista still installed, but that's Not Good Enough.)
So here's the funny thing. I've used Windows since 1.0. I've lived through the bad times of Windows/386 and ME, and the good times of NT 3.51 and 2K. I know XP if not backwards, then with a degree of familiarity that only middle-aged co-dependents can afford each other. Along the way, I've dallied with many other operating systems on many other platforms - but never with Unix and only lately with Linux.
Then how come I'm so much more at home with Ubuntu than Vista? It boils down to one abiding impression: Ubuntu goes out of its way to get out of your way, even if it doesn't succeed all the time. Vista goes out of its way to be Vista and enforce the Vista way. You must conform regardless of the implications.
Call me curmudgeonly, call me prejudiced, call me atypical, but isn't computing all about doing what users want?
PreviousComments on this post
I agree with what you say. I hope one day the final barriers that hold ubuntu/linux back will be overcome though. Games (good games) don't run on ubuntu. Popular software that is a must in this era of business computing is not available for use on ubuntu. It is still a pain to setup/use mp3 and other essiential file formats. But hey, linux is just dashing ahead in leaps and bounds faster and faster, so the skys the limmit - AND ITS FREE.
Ah, a Ninja!
I don't play games, so I can't comment on that area - except to say that the technicalities of the operating system are trivial details for games designers, with the exception of the graphics interface. With all new processors having hardware virtualisation support, I can see plenty of theoretical ways to make a game OS independent - although I don't know about the performance implications.
As for the 'popular software that is a must' and the MP3 issue: all I can say is that I've not hit either problem. Best thing is to download that live CD and have a play.
Microsoft's now promoting Vista with a campaign called "100 reasons why everyone's so speechless". I'm not sure whether that's because they're awestruck or mute with frustration. Here's the link if anyone wants to take a look: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/100reasons.mspx (Thanks to Mary-Jo Foley on ZDNet.com blogs for highlighting this.)
Re above comment that 'MP3 is an essential file format', why not try Ogg Vorbis? I find it much better.
Ah, Ogg.
The trouble with Ogg is that it's not MP3. Hasn't got a critical mass of support: technically, it's fine, but if you're going to be listening to digital music online you can't do it by Ogg alone. And if you're ripping your CD collection to Ogg, you can say goodbye to using the most popular portable players.
No, I don't like it. But that's the way it is.
Microsoft's now promoting Vista with a campaign called "100 reasons why everyone's so speechless".
I looked. #23 is "Because it's like a digital candy store."
Puh-leeze. Bring up the Adept Manager in Ubuntu. Now _that's_ a digital candy store. Over 20000 applications for doing almost anything you can imagine, and quite a few things you can't. Running Vista is like being in a candy store that only sells black liquorice (I _hate_ black liquorice) at exorbitant prices. Oh, and you're only allowed to eat the candy in the store. Plus each individual piece is really small and is wrapped in seven layers of cellophane, and the store won't let you throw the wrappers away. You have to take them with you and throw them away at home. Plus they set off a grenade in the chocolate store across the street in the middle of the night and mugged the proprietors of the penny candy stand. Oh, and Microsoft are the ones behind the urban legend that red M&Ms cause cancer. That's the kind of candy store Vista is.
And doesn't candy make you spotty, fat and toothless?
On my computers at home I'm running XP on the desktop, Ubuntu 7.04 on the LAMP server and two laptops, one running OS X and one running Ubuntu 7.10.
I like Ubuntu A LOT, it's so easy to install and configure. OpenOffice, Firefox, Apache and MySQL are the best, or nearly the best in their fields.
In the workplace you have the standard office, mail and web software but you also need the specialist, and almost always rubbish and hard to use, software that enables you to be an accountant or a vet or an engineer or whatever, this software will invariably run only on Windows. WINE is still not able to reliably run any of the software I need.
So most organisations will have to keep Windows until their specialist software works on Linux.
Sadly, I don't think that's going to happen any time soon.
Again, I don't think that's necessarily true. The wild card here is virtualisation: you can easily run Windows in a virtual box under Ubuntu, so you can have quite a lot of your organisation running open source and limit your spending on proprietary licences to just those bits that absolutely need them.
What should change - and is changing, I think - is the notion that you need ubiquitous Windows across an organisation. I've been using Ubuntu since 7.04 on my main work machine, in an overwhelmingly Windows organisation, and it works just fine. File shares, printing, email integration with Exchange, IM and (of course) access to Web-based services are as easy as - if not easier than - doing the same under XP.
7.10 should carry on making things easier.
Wonderful article. I agree on all of the above, Vista is very sluggish, especially on start-up when compared to Ubuntu. I think the problem really lies in all the extra junk Microsoft is trying to shove down your throat while trying to make you have a good time while using their system. I can only hope though that as Linux's popularity grows the same doesn't happen. Due to Adept being around though, I'll just doubt it for the time being.
You are absolutely right about how easy it is to file and print share, and Evolution works perfectly with our exchange server.
The problem I would have here is that the majority, guess 80%, of our PCs have some sort of specialist software, so we'd need to run virtualised, licenced, XP on nearly all of our machines.
If you're dependent on specialist software that will only run on one platform, then there's not much you can do about that - and I'd expect the cost of that software to dwarf any concerns about the Windows tax. There will always be substantial numbers of people who have overriding reasons to stick with this or that operating systems: you can find all sorts of legacy systems dotted around the landscape if you go looking.
Where Linux has got its chance now, I think, is for the rest of us.
Again you're right the cost of the software does cost more than windows + office.
But the point I'm trying to make is that, not just in my job now, but everywhere else I've worked the key bit of software that we were using was windows based, and I suspect that this applies to the majority of workplace PCs.
At the moment, though I do hope this will change, and I know that this is a bit of a generalisation, only people who use their computers for office + web + email will be able to use Ubuntu on their desks at work.
I use Ubuntu at home to run a mail server, a webserver, SQL server, file server and printer server, and on a laptop, in fact I'm using it now and I think it's fantastic, I will never pay for a copy of Windows for home use again.
But at work I don't think we're quite at the tipping point Matt Loney talks of in his article.
I've just realised that in my bitter rant about being stuck with Windows at work I haven't said what I think about 2Vista versus The Gutsy Gibbon"
Gibbon every time Vista is extremely slow, even on computers apparently designed for it.
When I've tried it on computers not designed for Vista it seems to spend its time telling me how bad my hardware is.
XP works, it's got loads of faults, but it works and I see no pressing reason to move to Vista.
A whole menagerie of Gibbons would be good, the more the better.
I started reading those 100 Microsoft reasons. I haven't really been keeping track, but so far it seems that "Windows media center has a remote control!" and "3D window flip areo magic!" are about 8 of the reasons. And I've only read up to #22. I'm glad the windows people aren't running the linux campaign:
20 Reasons You Should Switch to Ubuntu:
1. It's easy
2. It's pretty
3. It's easy
4. It's pretty
5. It's easy....
xmms is very much like winamp, though i use mpg123 to play mp3 on linux
Well for those of you running on Windows platforms (or even MAC's) who are interested in getting your feet wet with Ubuntu to see what all the fuss is about, then I suggest you use a desktop virtualisation solution. Ubuntu it is a GREAT OS and worth the try just to see how much good free open source stuff there is out there. If you are keen to try virtualisation then can I suggest the best bit of Open Source software I have ever seen for this. Forget Microsoft Virtual PC, you have to try VirtualBox from InnoTek. It will just blow you away. Really easy to use, great interface lots of configuration options and performs wayyy faster than Virtual PC (running same benchmark on same machine with a Win2K virtual PC configured on each solution).
This has to be the best free software around. It just works no hassle. It not only runs on Windows, you can download the Binaries for Mac and Ubuntu. My son loaded a Win2k box on a Ubuntu desktop using the Ubuntu Virtualbox code. He ran this on a Celeron chip (no h/w virtualisation supprt) and it ran flawlessly. Truely great code, and the best of all its FREE. The only other product that does that, is VMWare desktop but it cost $200+. Go ahead try it out. I have an XP machine and a full Ubuntu virtual machine to get into all that Ubuntu offers, truly the best of both worlds. Enjoy
Rupert:
What package do you use for Exchange email integration? More specifically, do you have a method of connecting to a M$ Exchange Server (in other words, not pop3 or imap). I've been looking for a way to move away from Outlook in our predominantly Windows network, which to my limited research has proved quite difficult.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
-Mars (a ninja)
Mars (a ninja)
Evolution is the standard e-mail program with Ubuntu I've been using it to connect to the exchange server where I work with no problems.
It picks up mail calendar appointments contacts and tasks, but for some reason not notes.
Wow you are correct! I swear MS Exchange Server wasn't working up until recently. Admittedly, I'm still running 7.04, i don't think the Exchange server worked until i updated (i guess i should keep on those updates huh?)
Thanks for waking me up :)
-Mars
I don't much like Evolution, I have to say. It works, but it's a bit flakey (or at least, the version I was running under 7.04 was). The password authentication box pops up but won't accept input for a moment or two, and a few times the package has gone into a rather peculiar CPU hogging mode where it takes some skill to retrieve a working machine.
I'm going to try it some more under 7.10, and I'm also going to give Thunderbird a pop.
Incidentally, we also have Outlook Web Access at work. That works fine under IE, but not so fine under Firefox - for some reason (which I must investigate), useful features such as search don't appear under Firefox. I can only assume that OWA deliberately withholds such functions from Firefox, which (if true) is v naughty.
I won't defend Vista, but on a Sony laptop? cmon...it would probably run better on your old Compaq. RE: the Vista shutdown lameness, there's a whole story on that:
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
Wow you are correct! I swear MS Exchange Server wasn't working up until recently. Admittedly, I'm still running 7.04, i don't think the Exchange server worked until i updated (i guess i should keep on those updates huh?)
Thanks for waking me up :)
-Mars
Why not use Win+D? It works in Vista and XP, and there's no need to Win+Shift+D to bring your windows back (like Win+Shift+U)!
Win+D - Show Desktop!
Win+D - Give me my windows back!
And of course, Ctr+Alt+D does the same in ubuntu.
:o)
>Ubuntu goes out of its way to get out of your way,
>even if it doesn't succeed all the time.
Right on. Also, Open Office, which I got chummy with the way I never got chummy with Micro$oft Office, works a lot better (particularly with some power fonts like the lovely Gentium) on Ubuntu than it does on XP.
I have to agree - I've been really enjoying Ubuntu since i moved over. It's a bit slower than XP (noticeably, but not irritatingly) at times, but given that my machine won't touch Vista, but is running a system I find to be more powerful, easier to use, and frankly prettier (particularly compiz-fusion on 7.10 - I tended to keep Beryl turned off because it was distracting. Compiz is just gorgeous *and* conducive to working) I can live with that minor setback.
Only downsides?
1) I miss my games - I'm going to suck it up and put an XP partition up for Oblivion and some other XP only programs that don't work under Wine. I'd love to run Shadowrun, but that wasn't an option on this machine anyway.
2) It can be annoying to uninstall stuff from Ubuntu. I loaded a few K-desktop programs in, and other vaguely related stuff was loaded at the same time, and is a pain to uninstall. It's not the space on the HD so much as the space on my menus that irritates me.
Jonnan
Strangely, no one has pointed out that there is one important UI area where Vista is far and away more advanced and capable than either XP, Linux, or even Mac OS: the tablet PC platform. Vista is the only OS for PC's (including Macs) that has pervasive tablet features/robust handwriting recognition built right into the OS. And only Microsoft offers any decent journaling/note-taking software, namely Windows Journal and MS Office Onenote (which is an awesome application for free-form note writing, brainstorming and idea collecting). Sure, there is Xournal (and other similar efforts) for Linux, which is a good start, but it's not practical and lacks many of the very useful features of MS Onenote (note synchronized sound recording with search capability, and handwriting recognition). For example, calibrating the a digital pen under XFree86 requires manual reconfiguration of modelines -- that's just insane for something one needs to do quite often.
And no, I don't work for MS. Neither am I an MS fan. In fact, other than the tablet functions, I don't find that Vista is anything to get excited about (security improvements aside). But the clear fact is that a tablet enabled laptop running Vista is far more flexible and natural to use than even an Apple laptop. After all, the real utility of a computer (for users who are not developers) lies in the quality and *power* of its applications.
I used to work for one of the large Linux companies, have used Linux since '94 (at least, don't remember in detail), even worked on Linux kernel code (looong time ago, network(NAT)/firewall code). I still do all my web development and server side work on Linux and think it has the potential to be the better system in many real-life cases, when you are not forced to use Windows by your special software, simply because there are less layers between you and what really happens on the inside (which is NOT harder to understand - or even debug! - than a system that hides those internals by lots and lots of layers of additional "user friendly" layers of complexity - although, Linux is catching up... I've long given up trying to understand all the services my Linux system starts and what they do).
That said, I'm quite happy with Vista! I recently bought a Dell Vostro 1400, put 2GB in it (and NO extra Nvidia graphics chip please, which only drains power and is useless for anyone not playing games or watching HD/BR DVDs). I decided to get it with Vista and not XP because I wanted to get to know it. I'm running Linux (OpenSuSE 10.3 in my case) in a VMware virtual machine for development, and Adobe Creative Suite CS3 for print- and Flash-development in Vista (I truly wish this would work on Linux some day)
Startup time of Vista, fresh start or from "Hibernation" is VERY fast (way faster than any (regular) Linux distribution, and I always know the latest Ubuntu and OpenSuSE releases).
I have not noticed any performance issues. The disk access - when it does lots of them - even seems to be faster than on my much bigger Dell 9200 desktop system with a supposedly much faster desktop disk drive - although I'm not sure I would attribute this to Vista completely. The "you need to approve this admin level operation" popup dialogs are few and not too intrusive and only happen when I do "system work" anyway and not during normal user level work (i.e. with an application rather than playing with Vista).
The first thing I did of course was turn almost all visual effects off (not that this has any noticeable effect on my new fast laptop, I just think it's utterly useless to do this - but lots of users WANT their systems to spend time doing useless things...) and some services, and I keep my autostart entries clean (like preventing lots of autostart entries from quicktime and adobe and sun etc. that don't add any benefit to *ME* rather than those corporations and are installed by their respective software).
OneNote is a great piece of software. Tablet PCs... well, it's true that MS has the best tablet tech (if you avert your eyes from the way Apple's going with the iPhone/iTouch, and avert them even harder from the Surface). But I'm sitting in a room right now (in Munich): with thirty people, half of whom have laptops. Nobody has a tablet.
I think that tablets are great in their vertical markets, and not so interesting outside. Where they work well, they're unmatched (my mother, who has never learned to type, has written a book in longhand on her tablet). But they're not mainstream.
(more later - gotta listen to a man with a beard tell me how he designed Penryn. The chip, not the town.)
Like you Rupert, I find myself in a mixed environment of various version of Windows (mainly XPs) and Linux (mainly RHELs and Ubuntus). While I agree on your take on Ubuntus ease of use, I have one major issue with it (on my Dell D420 laptop):
I cant' get sleep and hibernation to work properly, which turns out to be a major thing for me. I often close my laptop (or tells it to sleep explicitly), only to find it in a non-responsive state when I open it up again.
Thanks for an excellent article.
Andreas.
A nice article! I find it refreshing due to the fact that I too run many computers with different OS's side-to-side. As far as I'm concerned, there is more than enough objectivity in this article when it comes to how difficult and frustrating it is to use the next generation of Windows operating systems.
Windows is scaring me lately... It used to be the easiest OS to operate, but as users got more informed about technology, we would like to know things like "Why did this program crash" as opposed to "This program crashed, and you can let us know about it, if you really want to". I am so scared of Windows these days, that I would not even consider buying a phone that operates on Windows Mobile, just because I'm scared that it might deliver something that remotely resembles Vista. I don't know what Microsoft tried to do with Vista... all I know is that I had to revert countless desktops back to XP over the last few months - not because I wanted to, but because hardcore Windows users asked me to do so. I find it strange, since Windows users are always so eager to upgrade to the next new version! This really led me to believe that there must be something really awful about Vista's user experience. This article sheds it own bit of lights on a part of that assumption.
After using Linux almost exclusively for about 6 years now (I'm a web developer), I feel like an alien each time I stare at an XP desktop, if I haven't used it for a couple of weeks. When I met Vista I could not take the beating. Talk about a black box with almost no room for user-customization.
Once again I find here in the comments a common question asked by many new-age Linux users: "How do I get started with MP3's, Windows video player codecs, and all those other out-of-the-box stuff?"
Well, in the true Linux spirit of being helpful to other Linux users, I would recommend that you install Automatix as soon as you have finished installing your (K)ubuntu distro. It really helps a lot to make Linux do what you expected fromm an out-of-the-box Windows, as far as multimedia playback is converned, be it XP or Vista. You can get it at http://www.getautomatix.com/.
Finally, when all this Vista stuff is said and done, (and many individuals will still publish countless articles on Vista and Linux) I would like to just add that for me, Linux has one golden advantage over Windows Vista - Choice. You always have a choice when it comes to major desktop software and utilities. Vista succeeds in binding your preferences down to their own choices and preferences much more than any other Windows OS predecessor ever tried to do. That alone is enough for me to avoid it like the plague, but in reality I know that I will meet Vista again, pretty soon, because there are countless individuals using it around me every day.
I used to work in a corporation where I was initially given a Windows 2000 PC. And I was supposed to maintain an application which was "windows-based." I discovered quickly it was mostly made of badly programmed Python scripts that didn't actually require windows, should they had been written correctly at first.
I spent a while "porting" this thing to Linux, and now the whole team is happy using Ubuntu/Debian/[insert your favorite distro here] instead of Windows. Needless to say we saved a lot on software licences :).
I think many engineers keep using windows "for habit's sake" even when they really have the choice to make a change. The "essential in-house piece of software running on windows" is more than often something that can be replaced by something better given a bit of engineering effort. But guess what? We're fricking *paid* to do that engineering. Do your job, guys.
My biggest problem going all in to Linux is that I use a windows mobile smartphone for everything. It syncs to Outlook. I also have Itunes that sync to my IPOD. Are there good alternatives that do the same that are Linux platform? I myself hate windows on both a user and philosophical level.
The thing I love the most about Linux distributions is the fact that pretty much all the software is free and open, and lots of it was written by people in their spare time who just needed to get something done (sure, many are paid by companies to work on open source applications these days). It's great to get into the community side and participate, whether that be programming, graphical design, writing documentation, translating, reporting bugs or just discussion.
A good starting point to find out what's going on in the communities is to subscribe to some of their planets with your RSS reader. A planet is basically a blog aggregator, and with open source projects they usually aggregate the blogs of developers and others involved in that project. While some posts might be quite technical, you do often get to see all sorts of interesting cutting-edge projects, ideas and discussions. A few I recommend are: planet.ubuntu.com, planet.gnome.org, planetkde.org (for those who use KDE or Kubuntu). There are many more though, a partial list of them can be found at planetplanet.org. If profanity doesn't bother you, I also recommend listening to a podcast called lugradio (lugradio.org).
So, I encourage you all to take a look at the community side of things if you haven't already, and I hope that many of you will participate sometime in the future! :D
(Sorry if this is a double post. Commenting after registering seems to not do what it says it does).
Funny to hear someone else complain about the shutdown process in Vista. I occasionally have the fun task of shutting down about 8 laptops running Vista, and it is... painful. That little menu beside the Stand By button is difficult to press, and it is very confusing since they are using the the recognized Power Off symbol for it. What monkey thought it was a good idea to blur the line between actually turning off a computer and putting it into stand by mode?
Now, to make sure you never can stand using another operating system again, go to Preferences -> Appearance -> Fonts and choose whatever you want. Unless Microsoft does something that angers developers even more than Vista did (which seems unlikely for them to attempt on any normal platform -- except maybe with Surface), Windows (and MacOS, for that matter) will never do this.
>"Well, in the true Linux spirit of being helpful to other Linux users, I would recommend that you install Automatix as soon as you have finished installing your (K)ubuntu distro. It really helps a lot to make Linux do what you expected fromm an out-of-the-box Windows, as far as multimedia playback is converned, be it XP or Vista. You can get it at http://www.getautomatix.com/."
Eeek! Before you do that (Automatix has been known to cause serious stability issues that people then go on to blame on Ubuntu), try one of the new features in Gutsy:
In Add / Remove Applications, in the Other section, there is a package you can install called Ubuntu Restricted Extras.
It gives you all the things that are not in by default, for legal / sanity reasons. That is the Adobe Flash plugin (which currently, unfortunately, works better than Gnash), MP3 playback, other non-free audio formats, Microsoft fonts, Java, and DVD playback.
If that still doesn't cut it, then by all means, try Automatix. It's a good idea to stick to the official solutions first, though, since they are very well supported and unlikely to mess up.
Not that I want to rag on Vista too much, but check this out! Swapping a video card? Updating a device driver? You might hit trouble...
Vista is horrible. I recently bought a beautiful new Dell laptop - the XPS M1330 with all the bells and whistles - running Vista (XP was not offered as an option). I had to travel to China with my new laptop and couldn't get online at all - though my old Dell laptop that runs XP, which I fortunately had brought along, worked fine. Then when I got home I was unable to connect to my home wireless network nor the ethernet at work. After hours and hours I sorted it out, but my God the horrible floaty popup windows with their unintelligible language, overabundance of choices and suggestions and useless "diagnostics" had me screaming. I'm not a professional techie but I'm comfortable and reasonably knowledgeable about computers and I'm just furious about the load of crap that is Vista.
I have been testing Vista and various Linux distributions on my 6 PCs/laptops. I agree with your assessment. Here are my experiences.
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgreek/archives/dumping-vista-a-divorce-with-a-happy-ending-19844
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgreek/archives/review-of-linux-distributions-19894
Interesting discussion about the Windows software issue. A lot of enterprise sw is going over to a Java platform these days, which makes it platform-independent. The world does seem to be moving in that direction - and along with virtualisation (as Rupes said), means that Vista may be the last OS of its kind from Redmond that we see.
Me? I run XP for day-to-day apps because it just works and I know my way around it. I wouldn't go near Vista but I do have a RHEL server in the basement that never needs touching from one month to the next - a quick VNC or ssh occasionally is all it takes -- and I've got Ubuntu in a VM on my desktop, and in a second partition on my ThinkPad.
So maybe I should go get a Mac and virtualise both those OSes...
For years I have been skulking around in the shadows - getting Unix-type tools like Cygwin and Perl running on Windows, running copies of Solaris/x86 under VMware and setting up wacky third-party tools so that Windows servers can run batch jobs overnight to use spare CPU cycles. Sounds like I have found some other eejits with the same itch to scratch ;-)
I wasn't aware of innotek virtualbox until someone mentioned it on this thread . Look forward to trying this out, and hopefully have found a worthy OpenSource alternative to the awesome VMware.
Patrick: Outlook Web Access with Firefoxis a lot more pleasant if you get a hold of the nifty IE Tab extension. Microsoft are *very* naughty, and don't play nice with browsers other than IE for many of their tools. IEtab allows Firefox to pretend to the web site that it _is_ IE. I use this for OWA, and it works well.
http://ietab.mozdev.org/
Ah, typical. I'm away for a day, and that's the day I get /,ed and the talkbacks run wild.
OK, taking things in order:
Andreas - "I cant' get sleep and hibernation to work properly, which turns out to be a major thing for me. I often close my laptop (or tells it to sleep explicitly), only to find it in a non-responsive state when I open it up again."
Haven't tried this yet with 7.10. I know that 7.04 worked fine in this respect with my Samsung laptop, but only inasfar as setting it to nod off when on mains. I never used it in anger on batteries (it's a BIG laptop). I do have problems with this Sony on Vista, as one time in ten it comes back from a lid-close with an error message due to Windows shutting down unexpectedly, and I have to reboot.
Sooner - "My biggest problem going all in to Linux is that I use a windows mobile smartphone for everything. It syncs to Outlook. I also have Itunes that sync to my IPOD. Are there good alternatives that do the same that are Linux platform? I myself hate windows on both a user and philosophical level."
I don't think you can do this yet. Again, I don't know - my smartphone syncs over wireless to the work servers, which are WIndows, and while I was impressed when I plugged my iPod into 7.10 and up popped something that let me play all the music, I don't think that supports adding music to the iPod's database. It might - I just haven't explored yet - but I don't think it does. It's high on my list of things to see and do. Last time I tried to do this seriously, it wasn't possible - and it wasn't possible to run iTunes under Wine, mostly because Apple seems to have written that application in a paranoid stylee.
Dylan - "Eeek! Before you do that (Automatix has been known to cause serious stability issues that people then go on to blame on Ubuntu), try one of the new features in Gutsy:"
Yes! What the man says. I was delighted to find Automatix when I first installed 7.04; it solved a lot of problems in one go. And then it caused some. I was far more delighted to find that 7.10 has built in most of what Automatix did, only more reliably. So far, it's worked very well in dealing with most of the non-free media and driver installations that are necessary, and while I'm still having pain over video resolution that really does seem to be down to ATI driver issues.
Sleers - "Then when I got home I was unable to connect to my home wireless network nor the ethernet at work. After hours and hours I sorted it out, but my God the horrible floaty popup windows with their unintelligible language, overabundance of choices and suggestions and useless "diagnostics" had me screaming."
Oh, tell me about it. I've had nothing but hassle trying to connect to hotel, airport and conference systems today. The solution, for want of a better word, is to close everything down you can and then wait for it to start up again in its own time. Otherwise, Vista leaves various bits of state floating around which are misleading at best (my favourite is the "You are connected to network X", which it drags up when you try (and fail) to reconnect to network X, because it seems to have remembered that you once were in that state of grace). Needs fixing.
Ubuntu isn't perfect - in some areas, it's still lagging behind XP. In others, it's easily the equal of Vista (but then, so's XP). But every six months, it gets noticably better. Every five years, Windows - at least, the user experience thereof - gets worse. Amazing what five years and umpteen billion dollars can do.
RE iPod: gtkPod is a free application that allows you to upload songs to your iPod, playlists and the rest of it.
My organization has a Windows infrastructure (mail, authentication, networking), nevertheless I had a dual boot desktop with Ubuntu that happily co-existed with the environment. As a matter of fact I stopped booting into Windows and it was all good.
Then came a laptop rollout, all desktops were taken away to be replaced by matte black laptops. A diktat of Windows only was imposed on the laptops and it was all chaos.
Me and a small group of Linux desktop users fought and lost the battle. Our Linux desktops were eventually taken and it was all frustration.
After much trial and error I installed XUbuntu as a VM, configured it to stay in text mode, installed Xming and directly exported all apps to the windows desktop. Mounted harddisk in XUbuntu using samba and it is all good again.
If viewing an OS and apps as a way to get work done or be entertained; then it is possible to get the best of both worlds. Although it does so at the cost of situational compromise.
Ubuntu is made for noobs, if you want to compare with a real OS try any version of Debian GNU/Linux.
Ubuntu IS Debian and Gnu. What's your point, caller?
R
In reply to the few above that talk of only being able to play games on Windows...
Sure, you won't be able to find many popular games out there being supported by game designers, but the ones you do find are GEMS.
Freespace 2, a popular vote for Sim Game of the Year in 1999, was made open-source a while back, and within a year, a crack team of 6-7 people who knew nothing of the code ported it to OSX and Linux (32/64). If they can do it that fast, then I'm sure the original designers could have done it much faster.
Its a beautiful game now...far beyond what anyone could imagine for something coded back in 1999.
http://tinyurl.com/3bpt23
^ wiki link
And here's a pic from the 64bit linux build:
http://tinyurl.com/38xsr7
^photobucket link
The game can be grabbed at:
www.fsoinstaller.com
I have Windows XP, but I want Ubuntu. What do I do? Do I have to remove Windows XP somehow?
You can run Ubuntu under XP without touching XP - see http://wubi-installer.org/ - but you can also wipe XP off your system kust by installing Ubuntu over it from the live CD.
Got any data you want to keep?
