[Gllug] Linux on Desktop

[Christopher Hunter]

On Sun, 2007-02-04 at 22:00 +0000, Anthony Newman wrote:
> Christopher Hunter wrote:
> > I saw it happen twice today - entirely unprovoked, running only MS
> > software.  "Word" fell over during a "save" and took XP down to a
> > reboot, and then later "Windows Update" caused a hang and crash.  It's
> > just NOT ready for the desktop!
> 
> /me blames the hardware

It's a brand new Dell box (about 3 weeks old) provided to my wife by her
employer.  I've run all the usual diagnostics on it, and nothing was
found.  A quick text message to her boss for permission, and it now
dual-boots with Mandriva (my choice of poison), and she happily carried
on with her work using KDE and OOo. 

> Compared to the instability of Windows 98, 2000 and XP are remarkably 
> stable; if not it's usually attributable to dodgy drivers IME.

They're definitely better than their predecessors - IME, 2000 was the
best.

> It's the lack of a configurable multi-desktop solution that makes 
> Xorg/Linux more attractive to me; I still go back to Windows on the odd 
> occasion that someone has produced a website that fails to work 
> correctly with Firefox/Iceweasel/whatever your distro calls it now.
> 
> You can't argue with the basically good user experience of Windows, nor 
> the interoperability, but when you've tried something more controllable 
> it's difficult to go back.

The "user experience" I've had with MS products is uniformly slow -
start up and shut down are horribly slow, and general performance is
sluggish even on fast modern hardware.  My "ancient" Mac Classic is
significantly, visibly faster than a >3 GHz Dell XP box at doing basic
word processing functions.  This morning's crashes also suggest that MS
still can't fix their spaghetti code!

>  I can understand why it's totally intractable 
> to a n00b though, because of the lack of a standard interface, or 
> predictable UI.

Granted, but KDE can be made to look and behave much like Windows, and
the training time on migrations I've done has been minimal.  New users
are initially a bit concerned that "it's not Windows", but their worries
disappear when they discover that OOo "Writer" looks much like "Word"
and are often delighted to find the "export as .pdf" button!  They also
like the idea of multiple desktops, and that they can run several
programmes simultaneously with little performance impact!

> Vista, on the other hand, seems to be utterly shit and slow, despite my 
> hardware vastly exceeding the published minimum requirements.

It's truly abysmal.  It breaks compatibility with old programmes
(necessitating re-purchase of existing software), it has serious
security issues (despite the addition of endless "nag" boxes added to
give the illusion of "security"), it runs like treacle on even the
highest specification hardware, and is NOT "completely rewritten" as MS
claim - it's little more than a "skin" for XP with added DRM.  

MS spent about five years exploring various blind alleys, and quietly
dropping all the clever stuff they were supposed to include as they
found that they couldn't achieve them.  They HAD to get something out
into the marketplace, so the last year has been a rush to bolt a few
bits on to XP - hence the rushed, ineffective mess that is "Vista"!

Chris


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