[Gllug] Linux on Desktop

[Nix]

On 4 Feb 2007, Anthony Newman spake thusly:

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

It is indeed hard to overestimate the crappiness of drivers written by
hardware companies, but my Dell at work has pretty much only
bog-standard hardware (even the video card is an Intel onboard one) yet
it dies all the damn time. Perhaps the hardware is dodgy, but if so,
so was the previous machine's, and the one before that.

(Compare to the times I've had dodgy hardware under Linux: I've
mentioned my travails with boxes with RAM so bad that you couldn't
md5sum a 10Mb file twice and get the same answer --- yet even that box
ran reasonably well. A few processes oopsed and I got an erroneous SMART
warning, and of course I'd not trust any results derived from such a box
and tried not to write to the disk too much --- but there was no FS
corruption and it worked for newsreading, at least.)

> It's the lack of a configurable multi-desktop solution that makes

What does `multi-desktop' mean? Virtual desktopping? Network-
transparency? Something else?

(If you want a *real* multi-desktop, well, I wonder how well Windows
works under QEMU? Not having a copy of Windows I haven't been able to
try it.)

> You can't argue with the basically good user experience of Windows,

I can. XP at work is awful. It can't stop stealing the focus and hitting
me with modal dialogs; it's terribly hard to control from the keyboard;
you can't even set the bloody colour scheme to white-on-black because
half of MS's own apps and bits of the GUI disregard the colour schemes
and render text in black regardless; the menus appear to have been laid
out by a caffeinated spider (*you* try finding a function you haven't
used before in some Office program without a crystal ball and multiple
wrong turns); and, as mentioned above, it's *dog* slow with all of
that. I regularly find myself waiting for thirty seconds for screens to
repaint, and it uses the analogue of saveunders even when there's
demonstrably far too little memory (leading to a mostly-black console
repainting pixel- line-by-pixel-line with agonizing sloth)... just this
morning I had to wait for *twenty-five minutes* until it stopped
thrashing enough that I could actually get some work done. I could have
rebooted and logged in from scratch faster than that.

I don't know what MS is doing to Windows's virtual memory manager, but
they *seriously* need to work on the memory balancing. (Task Manager
tells me that 250Mb or so is filled with app state, 250Mb with weird
SYSTEM-owned tasks and virus scanners and remote network updaters and so
on, all apparently mlock()ed into memory, and the other 512Mb-give-or-
take-a-bit is... often unaccounted for. I hypothesise cache, which is
insane given the level of memory pressure.)

> nor the interoperability, but when you've tried something more
> controllable it's difficult to go back. I can understand why it's
> totally intractable to a n00b though, because of the lack of a
> standard interface, or predictable UI.

KDE and GNOME don't have predictable user interfaces?

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

This is my experience of XP, and 2000 as well. NT wasn't all that
terribly bad: although the UI problems listed above mostly still existed
at least it didn't kill me with boredom while thrashing to death.

-- 
`In the future, company names will be a 32-character hex string.'
  --- Bruce Schneier on the shortage of company names
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