Switching from Ubuntu

[Dan Honeycutt]

disabling all of the unnecessary services ..."

If, like me, you don't know what's necessary and what's not go to:

http://www.blackviper.com/

My first stop whenever I get a new computer.

Best
Dan H.

[bob]

I have not seen anyone switch with zero pain - especially anyone who really was entrenched in Windows - so I can only assume your wife is very open and flexible about learning new things.

In my experience it is zero pain when someone knowledgeable installs
it and takes care of the minor initial problems that plague any fresh
Linux install.

Of course I am talking Gnome 2 here. The story for Unity and Gnome 3
is quite different. Everyone I know wanted to get rid of those as quickly as possible.

I just had to do a fresh windows 7 install, and the Fedora installation was no more difficult. And, of course, after installing fedora one does not have to spend more money to install anti-virus software and such windows nonsense...

Once installed, I don't see it as being any different from windows at all in terms of usability, if you ignore the virus safety and such that is a moot point with Unix. So at worst, it is just as easily usable, and in reality is actually easier as once installed, it is ready to use, no more stuff to buy.

Gnome 3 simply sucks with 2 (or more) straws, IMHO.

Yes. I remember the first time I thought, "this might be interesting" and as soon as it was installed I was bitterly disappointed. But I thought, "let's give it a chance" and I did try to use it for a few days. But it would pretty obvious after the first hour that it was no good to a power user.

I don't mind incremental improvements to anything. But if (a) something works (gnome 2 worked, and works, I am using it right now in fact) and (b) there is not some absolutely overwhelming reason why the basic user interface needs to be completely reorganized, then (c) I see no reason to chance something so dramatically that it requires a significant amount of time to get up to speed and reach a point of similar productivity as you were enjoying with the original. That is simply software engineering 101.

I may experiment again after some more maturity, but my last attempt simple left me uninterested...

[bob]

disabling all of the unnecessary services ..."

If, like me, you don't know what's necessary and what's not go to:

http://www.blackviper.com/

My first stop whenever I get a new computer.

Best
Dan H.

If you buy a dell or HP (or probably others) computer, buying a clean windows 7 will be the best $200 you ever spend. Format the disk and install windows 7, period. No crapware from Dell, HP, etc. My wife's windows 7 system boots quickly and shuts down quickly. Where it used to take a couple of minutes to boot with all the HP crapware that is included on systems they sell.

I'm not a windows fan, but I am certainly a bigger fan of something that works reasonably well as opposed to something that seems like molasses.

[lucasart]

I have not seen anyone switch with zero pain - especially anyone who really was entrenched in Windows - so I can only assume your wife is very open and flexible about learning new things.

In my experience it is zero pain when someone knowledgeable installs
it and takes care of the minor initial problems that plague any fresh
Linux install.

Of course I am talking Gnome 2 here. The story for Unity and Gnome 3
is quite different. Everyone I know wanted to get rid of those as quickly as possible.

I just had to do a fresh windows 7 install, and the Fedora installation was no more difficult. And, of course, after installing fedora one does not have to spend more money to install anti-virus software and such windows nonsense...

Once installed, I don't see it as being any different from windows at all in terms of usability, if you ignore the virus safety and such that is a moot point with Unix. So at worst, it is just as easily usable, and in reality is actually easier as once installed, it is ready to use, no more stuff to buy.

Gnome 3 simply sucks with 2 (or more) straws, IMHO.

Yes. I remember the first time I thought, "this might be interesting" and as soon as it was installed I was bitterly disappointed. But I thought, "let's give it a chance" and I did try to use it for a few days. But it would pretty obvious after the first hour that it was no good to a power user.

Are you talking about GNOME 3, or Unity ?

* Unity is horrible, especially to power users. And I even tried to force myself to use it for a while, thinking maybe I'll get used to it, but my hatred for it grew bigger every day! I could go on for pages long of all that is wrong with Unity, but I suppose that is unnecessary.

* GNOME 3 (a.k.a. GNOME Shell) is quite different from GNOME 2 in terms of "user experience" which is why many people are frustrated because they can't find things where they used to be. But after learning how to use it properly, I realized the true beauty of it. Things are so much better organized, and everything is accessible in 2 or 3 keystrokes (I'm very lazy and the least I have to use the mouse the better). As an ayatollah of the clean desktop policy, I think it is *right* that the desktop should not be managed by Nautilus (although the option is available if that bohers you). Workspaces are managed dynamically which is much easier than through some gadget that you have to manually configure on the taskbar. Generally there are much fewer gadgets, and everything that is useful has been integrated properly into the interface, and all the useless crap is gone (3D cube and all the compiz BS, good riddance). Besides, and contrary to popular belief, GNOME 3 is very effecient in terms of ressources, even XFCE uses more ressources! Though for minimal ressources use, I would recommend LXDE not GNOME.

Ultimately you still have a terminal, whatever distro you're using. And power users do many things with a terminal anyway.

[abulmo]

C99 support is an issue but recent Visual C++ versions are reasonably C++ compliant, including parts of C++11. It is compliant with the 2003 ISO standard, minus a quite short list of exceptions (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 10%29.aspx).

Sure, but the latest standard are C11 and C++11, and are already supported by GNU C/C++, Intel C/C++ & clang C/C++, minus a quite short list of exceptions.
http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html
http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx0x.html
http://software.intel.com/en-us/article ... -compiler/

[rreagan]

That is probably the phrase I would use to describe the difference more than anything, a lack of flexibility.

Thanks for everyone's feedback.

You make a good point about lack of flexibility. I think it's especially good, because I think it's actually a benefit in some areas of business, specifically small business. It's a clear contrast with Linux, which is highly customizable.

When I look at a Windows server for the fist time, I know it's going to be one of 2-3 versions. With Linux, it might be any of 100's of distros, each of which may have a custom kernel, is probably running a bunch of hacked together scripts to keep things going, probably hasn't been backed up in years, if ever, and probably no one has touched it or updated it in years since the guy who set it up is long gone. At least this has been my experience.

From the point of view of small businesses, inflexibility is a great thing. It means that when their computer breaks, they can walk to the street corner, throw a rock, and hit someone who knows how to work on their Windows computer.

My advice to the business owner is, let's get this Linux box out of the picture ASAP, because if a problem arises with it (or its hardware) it's going to be difficult or impossible to fix. Sure, I know how to work with Linux, but I may not be around a year from now.

It's the same reason why Windows stayed alive early on. Sure it may not stay running for more than 3 hours at a time, but it's an easy fix, just reboot. It's not the best solution, but it's predictable, and that is valuable to the business owner.

For a development machine that we would use, I agree, Linux is better. Obviously if a business develops Windows apps, they will need Windows. I've been doing most of my chess programming on Windows recently, and it's just okay. I'm using gcc and gvim and Windows PowerShell. PowerShell is better than cmd, but still not anything close to any Linux shell. I once tried to compile a 64-bit version using gcc on Windows. I won't be trying that again anytime soon.

[Don]

That is probably the phrase I would use to describe the difference more than anything, a lack of flexibility.

Thanks for everyone's feedback.

You make a good point about lack of flexibility. I think it's especially good, because I think it's actually a benefit in some areas of business, specifically small business. It's a clear contrast with Linux, which is highly customizable.

When I look at a Windows server for the fist time, I know it's going to be one of 2-3 versions. With Linux, it might be any of 100's of distros, each of which may have a custom kernel, is probably running a bunch of hacked together scripts to keep things going, probably hasn't been backed up in years, if ever, and probably no one has touched it or updated it in years since the guy who set it up is long gone. At least this has been my experience.

Actually, you have it pretty much backwards. Each version of Linux is more compatible with each other than Windows is with other versions of itself. The continuously deprecate their software - for example if you have really old doc files you probably cannot even read them. That is not true of latex (the rough equivalent of doc files for Linux) for example.

Where did you get the idea that Linux isn't backed up? Nothing could be further from the truth and I believe there are more backup options in Unix than in windows. I use a backup program called rsnapshot - which means that not only is it backed up every day but I can go back to any point in time - and do it live. 15 years ago I was backing up Unix systems at the Lab at MIT and they were being backed up 25 years before that.

Remember, Unix was designed from the ground up to be multi-user and backups were always a very important part of multi-user systems. If windows goes down without a backup chances are that only 1 person is affected unless it's serving files. But ANY OS serving files is going to be backed up religiously unless they are just poorly administered.

From the point of view of small businesses, inflexibility is a great thing. It means that when their computer breaks, they can walk to the street corner, throw a rock, and hit someone who knows how to work on their Windows computer.

My advice to the business owner is, let's get this Linux box out of the picture ASAP, because if a problem arises with it (or its hardware) it's going to be difficult or impossible to fix. Sure, I know how to work with Linux, but I may not be around a year from now.

That's pure nonsense. First of all, almost every company puts Windows machines on the desktops of their employees even if they are running Unix servers. There are exceptions but that's not the general rule. If they are of any serious size they will likely be using Linux servers. Windows also has servers but it's harder to administer, less capable, and way more expensive and any company of any real size is going to use the far more economical and superior Unix for their servers. Some companies have a mix of Unix and Linux servers to accommodate some Windows services.

Microsoft has tried hard to penetrate the server market by producing their own private studies to "prove" that it's better, but the fact of the matter is that for a company of any size, Linux is a FAR more economical solution. I you have top people to administer your computers I doubt that the Microsoft personnel work as cheap as you think. You pay people what they are worth and if they are good you are going to have to pay them whether they are Windows or Linux.

It's the same reason why Windows stayed alive early on. Sure it may not stay running for more than 3 hours at a time, but it's an easy fix, just reboot. It's not the best solution, but it's predictable, and that is valuable to the business owner.

The primary reason Windows stayed alive is conservatism, fear and ignorance. I'm not being ugly, this is the plain truth. It's difficult for a computer professional to convince his non-technical superiors to go with Linux over Windows despite the superiority. As soon as they hear it's free the fear and ignorance kicks in. Windows is the big name and the "safe" choice. If something goes badly wrong you don't get into trouble for choosing Windows, but if something goes wrong and you chose Linux you get fired. So it's an emotional decision based on the illusion that you have played it safe and the reassuring hand of Bill Gates on your shoulder telling you that you did the right thing.

The same thing happens on a personal level. Very few people who were weaned on Windows will move over to Linux - most people are going to do what everyone else is doing because they feel they are part of something and don't want to be different. Their gut instinct (which is wrong) is that they are safe and secure with Windows.

I don't have any problem with that myself. I'm happy for them. In fact I like windows now more than I ever did because I feel that Windows 7 is starting to at least be a real operating system - but it's just not Unix. I have dreams that something much better than both will someday come out. Maybe plan 9? I have not looked at it so I have no idea if it's any different but there is more than just Windows and Linux out there.

For a development machine that we would use, I agree, Linux is better. Obviously if a business develops Windows apps, they will need Windows. I've been doing most of my chess programming on Windows recently, and it's just okay. I'm using gcc and gvim and Windows PowerShell. PowerShell is better than cmd, but still not anything close to any Linux shell. I once tried to compile a 64-bit version using gcc on Windows. I won't be trying that again anytime soon.

I have heard about power shell and I did try it - I must support windows for Komodo development and thus I have to "dirty my hands" with it from time to time. But I just do not do enough in Windows to justify learning it. I can see that it's probably far more powerful but it kept getting in my way - probably because I did not understand it.

[Michel]

The primary reason Windows stayed alive is conservatism, fear and ignorance. I'm not being ugly, this is the plain truth. It's difficult for a computer professional to convince his non-technical superiors to go with Linux over Windows despite the superiority.

Sadly the Gnome developers shot themselves in the foot with this one. Replacing a Windows desktop with a Gnome desktop had become almost a no brainer. Rather than capitalizing on this and fixing the few remaining annoyances of Gnome they threw it all out of the window (sic) with Gnome 3 which replaces something that was working fine in the first place by something far less functional.

[Don]

The primary reason Windows stayed alive is conservatism, fear and ignorance. I'm not being ugly, this is the plain truth. It's difficult for a computer professional to convince his non-technical superiors to go with Linux over Windows despite the superiority.

Sadly the Gnome developers shot themselves in the foot with this one. Replacing a Windows desktop with a Gnome desktop had become almost a no brainer. Rather than capitalizing on this and fixing the few remaining annoyances of Gnome they threw it all out of the window (sic) with Gnome 3 which replaces something that was working fine in the first place by something far less functional.

I agree with you. They violated the rule, "if it isn't broken, don't fix it."

Unix has always been about pragmatism, keeping it simple and substance over style but someone must have forgotten that. Trying too hard to keep up with the latest fad and fads are here today and gone tomorrow.

[jshriver]

If you like working the command line look up the command "screen" it's one of my favorite apps.