Philoking.com

I keep myself up to date on what’s going on with Linux, I think it’s a topic I should be knowledgeable on. When I popped open the latest Ubuntu build I had to ask myself the same exact question I have been asking for years. People want the OS to look sleek and sexy. When is orange-brown ever going to be sexy? I say never.

First, read this:

HP Exploring Shift to Linux in Order to Bypass Vista, Compete With Apple [Hp]

By Sean Fallon on Vista

According to Businesweek, HP has been quietly working on two projects aimed at bypassing unpopular features in Vista and possibly competing with Apple down the line. The first involves developing software that modifies Vista to make it easier to use. That much has been confirmed. However, rumor has it that a second "Skunk Works" operation has been going on behind closed doors that has a much loftier goal—building a customized replacement OS based on the Linux platform.

HP denies funding such an operation, but Phil McKinney, the chief technology officer in HP’s PC division, acknowledged that such conversations may have taken place below senior management levels. Still, he noted that such a project "makes no sense. For us it’s about innovating on top of Vista."

So why do it? Well, it would obviously make HP less dependent on Windows, and if executed properly, a custom OS would make things a little easier on mainstream users. However, HP may have another motive: competition from Apple. HP fears that Apple might eventually make a budget MacBook—cutting deeply into their business. By moving to an open source operating system, they could drastically cut costs. Again, nothing has been confirmed at this point and Microsoft is working hard on updates and spending lots of money on advertising in an attempt to create a more positive impression with consumers. So, we will just have to wait and see what develops. [Businesweek via Electronista]

Ok, now, seriously? Really folks? Easier on customers? Why don’t you go back and ask Steve Jobs how hard it was to get hardware and software support in the last 20 years. So now “customers” have to figure out what software will work and more likely what won’t and hardware? Forget it… nobody is going to waste their time writing and much less supporting drivers for such a mess. The LAST thing we need is another operating system.

Sighs….

Got your attention? Yea, it got mine too. I read this on an article I found on Digg today. I have seen this so many times before and I thought it was a good time to debunk some myths about things like wine and virtualization. As a matter of fact, we can also discuss another Linux myth in the course of explaining why you would want or need to run Windows applications in linux.

Myth #1: There Are Free Applications For Every Pay Application And They Are Just As Good.

I am one of those guys that goes and gets the latest cool gadgets when they come out. Lets say that for now that latest gadget is the new 2G iPod Touch. Now when I do run linux, I run Fedora, and it works very well for me. Your options in Fedora for using this iPod Touch would be tricky. You could get past the USB Driver issue relatively easily, that’s the simple part. The more complex part is iTunes. Now many a linux advocate will tell you that you don’t need iTunes, all you need is Amarok or one of the other linux based music management Apps. And sure with that app, some hackery to get songs loaded and most likely and entirely illegal music and video collection, you could get a piece, and only a piece, of the iPod Touch/iTunes ecosystem experience.

The problem is that you can’t update it to the latest firmware, you can’t download music, movies, TV shows or games, and you will have a hard time getting use out of contacts, mail, etc. iTunes handles all of that for you.

So your option becomes running iTunes in either a wine instance or via VMWare or another type of virtual machine running a full install (and hopefully legal) of Windows XP of Vista. Now I would ask you why you would not bother to install Windows as your native OS and just skip the linux stuff, but I am sure it’s important to you, and I actually do the same thing in OS X so I can use Windows Live Writer. So you are where you want to be, but you still need Windows.

Myth #2: You Can Run Windows 100% Seamlessly On Linux

The myth comes in the 100% seamlessly thing. You are going to have some seams buddy…

• Forget high end gaming, isn’t going to happen.
• Apps need close integration to hardware are probably going to struggle.
• Automatic updating software is probably not going to work.
• Apps that integrate with other applications might bug out.
• Sometimes, or possibly many times, it’s just going to bomb. (and good luck finding out why or getting help)

Now those are just some of the technical issues. Now lets talk about the reality of it. I wanted to install World of Warcraft on wine to test it out. Forget just popping in a disk to install.

Step 1: Download the latest source code for wine, install the wow specific wine patches and patch wine and recompile it. (WHAT!?)

Step 2: Find all the dlls and the Mozilla active x control required and configure wine.

Step 3: Copy all of the files off the CD and start the installer.

Step 4: Modify the WoW config file.

Are you serious? And what will I be limited to by recompiling wine to work with WoW? This is crazy stuff folks. I know it’s possible, but could anyone who is not an IT geek do this? I doubt it. I have friends that toast their computers installing updates to IM clients, how in the world could they be expected to compile an application?

I know, I am venting, but I am so tired of the “linux is so easy” sentiment, and saying it can do anything and everything, and it’s free, just as good, and all the software is free and just as good. If that was the case, businesses wouldn’t be paying for hundreds of licenses for Photoshop if gimp is just as good. Get real. Linux is cool if you are quite literate in the OS and have the time, patience and lack of mission critical needs to deal with. Anyone who uses it in a corporate environment has an army of IT guys to keep it running. I don’t dislike it, I am just tired of all this witless pro linux media spin.

I recently read this article, posted on Digg.com, and really just want to post my own experience in this exact situation…

Picture this, you just bought built a brand new computer and want to install the brand spankin’ new Windows Vista Ultimate, you plop down $300, and away you go! What does $300 get you? A bare minimum operating system with nothing but MS Paint and Media Player.
So you spend the next 45 minutes installing your bare minimum operating system, it takes 45 minutes because the initial install is 15gb, so by bare minimum I mean feature set, not file size. So after you get installed you try to use the Internet and realize that it didn’t detect any of your hardware (video, audio, network), so you spend the next 2 hours spidering through multiple vendor’s websites who all have their downloads/driver section in different areas.

I hate to tell you, but this is just pure crap. I did just this a few weeks ago. I had a computer that was on it’s last legs, so I went to newegg.com and ordered a new motherboard, video card, ram and hard disk.

The Price

So I can get Vista cheaper cause I work for Microsoft, fine, but I can also find it a lot cheaper than $300, I found it for $222 just looking at newegg. So, first lets break down the cost of software that’s not Linux.

OS X is $129. If you go to Windows Marketplace you can get the Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 Upgrade for $129, but I know, you pesky Linux users are complaining because the Windows machine you DO have probably has a pirated copy of XP on it anyway, it’s ok, you don’t have to admit it, we all know it’s true

So you have to buy retail, I can dig it, so it looks like again, at their full retail, it’s $209 for buy and ship…that’s at Microsoft’s own marketplace (pointing you to Amazon ironically), I am not making it up..look.

So we have shaved $90 off the price lie, and I agree $200 is still no insignificant amount of money, but lets get real, how many people in the REAL world actually build their own computers, odds are that the PC they bought had the price inflated $50-70 and they got it included. I am betting upwards of 95% of Vista users did not build their own PC. But you did, I gotcha, so let’s talk about that.

What’s in the Box

Just MS Paint and Media Player eh? Maybe you should look at that Program Menu just a “little” more closely. Let’s do that shall we? (And since you were mentioning accessories, and not applications, we’ll add those in too.

That sure seems like more than the Linux fanboy listed, and that’s just a cursory glance at my start menu, that’s not including all of the new goodies under the hood. Something tells me that my mom and dad could make do with a Vista machine and not have to buy anything at all besides a good virus program.

45 Minute Install?

What kinda crap hardware are you putting this on man? My install took 20 minutes, another 25 for all the updates. And it was closer to 6GB, not 15GB. Again, out and out lie bro.

No Drivers Detected

So I bought an ASUS motherboard, nVidia Video card and Vista auto detected everything the first time. I spent no time downloading drivers I HAD to install. I did update the video driver to the latest reference driver. But I had a total working system the minute it was done. You sure you weren’t trying to install this on a Circa 1995 486? Just because you can run Linux on garbage doesn’t mean Windows has to run at the dump too.

Sorry to sound so negative, but geeze man, talk about beating a dead horse. I am not a Windows fanboy, sure I work for Microsoft, but I own two Macs, I have used about every flavor of Linux in the mainstream, I know my way around a shell and I spent 3 of the last 4 years developing java code to run on Tomcat and BEA Weblogic on Linux, I am not disillusioned by my new employer. I just get tired of the negative press that just lies out and out to make Vista look bad. When I built the new box I mention here, I officially retired XP, and I have had not ONE single issue with this machine. Beside it I have an HP that I upgraded to Vista 64 bit, changed the video card, it has a TV tuner, I run games on it, again, no issues. I know people have issues, I am not dumb, but usually you can say “what did you install it on?” and have a pretty good idea why.

Read the comments for a good laugh, Linux evangelists really are delusional.

Yea yea, I work for Microsoft and I have been writing a lot about Vista lately. That also means I have been using Vista a lot lately. I have been using it on two work machines (32-bit Enterprise on desktop and 32-bit Enterprise on Tablet Laptop) and two home machines (32-bit Business on home server and 64-bit Ultimate on my new home desktop.)

That is a whole lot of Vista going on. So in that I have had my fair share of Vista issues for sure. Pretty much the only machine that hasn’t had some specific problem is the Business machine, a Dell Optiplex that loaded all drivers the first time with no issues and has ran perfect since the install.

My other three machines have suffered from:

• Misidentified or inability to locate drivers (especially 64-bit)
• Aero taking a hike and not coming back
• Software that wouldn’t install

Beyond that, Vista itself has stumped me with things like:

• Control panel navigation is changed so much it’s difficult to find things
• Incredibly long shut down times
• UAC, what can I say.

That being said…. Windows Vista has been a freaking DREAM compared to Linux in my experience. First, let’s take a second to outline what that experience is.

I have been toying with Linux since probably 1998. I have been playing with it since they began selling it in stores, back when you could get Corel, Mandrake, SuSe or any of another half dozen variants on a CD or two that was nearly impossible to install.

For someone who is tech savvy, the frustration with Linux was the exact opposite of the regular Vista complaints, in Vista they say no old hardware works, in Linux ONLY older hardware works unless you have some technical know-how.

Sure, within a few weeks/months the packages are caught up and some usually not so stable drivers are available for you to use.

I guess I am one of those on the tech-edge kind of people who usually have really current hardware, so I don’t spend my days and nights whining that I can’t get my Circa 1999 Logitech Hand Scanner working in Windows Vista 64-bit edition (mostly cause it doesn’t even HAVE a serial port, but I digress)

I guess I always go back to my old standby question:

If you aren’t running a really current computer, why are you trying to run Windows Vista anyway? Shouldn’t you keep something that is more in line with your computer’s capability?

Technology progresses folks. When DVD finally gives up the ghost, you aren’t going to complain that your DVD player won’t play Blu-Ray are you? It’s really the same thing, if your computer is 5 years old, why do you expect it to not only run Windows Vista, but run it well? Ironically, my 6 year old Pentium 4 with 2 GB of ram will run Windows Vista Basic quite well. But that’s a topic for another day.

So the root of this blog is from an article I found on Digg that got over 1000 diggs about a Linux user who has switched to Vista for un-stated reasons.

Ryan goes into depth with Windows Vista’s weaknesses and preaches how Linux is so much better.

So I would like to hit up his points real quick, and just shed my opinion…

1. The UI is hard to customize: Have you heard of the 80/20 rule? In the case of Windows it’s made to support a very broad user base. The goal was for Aero to be the nice GUI and not for power users to be able to tweak the UI so it looks like something off of a Hollywood hacker movie. I can see the point on some key commands, but those are pretty nit picky things, resizing and moving windows is a very easy task, I would sincerely hope that’s not hindering productivity
2. Drivers in Windows Vista are too difficult: I kind of have to refer to my previous semi-rant, what are you putting this on? We all know the woes with Vista-Capable, but if your hardware is relatively current, a quick install of the chipset and video card should leapfrog the rest of the hardware being identified correctly. Of course if you have some really unusual advanced audio devices or capture cards, etc, this could be a bear, but the basic services of video, network and sound should be pretty easy to solve. If you can’t find the drivers, your hardware is most likely a bit too old.
3. Backwards Compatibility: Read previous and apply the same to software. Sometimes you just have to let things go, technology marches on and eventually things are deprecated, when you don’t you end up with a mess like Linux. I totally dig that you can have an awesome Linux setup that is gorgeous and easy to use, but a novice user can bring a Linux box down to a retarded blinking cursor just by trying to install a video driver, I have seen it happen. In that case, how do you tell a novice to go into vi, edit the xorg.conf file and pray it works.
4. Absolutely no package management: I am sure Microsoft would love to have solid package management. It’s a pretty difficult task when you have a million applications being written for it. It’s about scale, and when you get as large as Windows, it’s just not practical.  On that note, when you aren’t using no name Taiwanese hardware, it actually does a pretty good job of keeping most drivers up to date.
5. Personal User Experience: Lack of good command line tools and a good SSH client? I would call this just being lazy, download PowerShell and Putty and move on. I know they aren’t included, but dang, 99% of users don’t need them and they are really easy to get your hands on. Ryan may not be able to get by on Putty, but MANY do, and do well.

So Ryan ends telling us how he is leaving Vista, how he is home sick for KDE. I can’t say I am surprised by this, I would expect with the attitude going in and throughout that he wasn’t really willing to understand that a different operating system is just that, different. That’s why there are Windows Users, Mac Users and Linux Users. Each one has different needs and preferences and will always lean in a particular direction. I would expect a Linux user would be more likely to turn to OS X given the Unix roots of the operating system. I can’t imagine for the life of me why anyone would be married to a window manager like KDE or Gnome, sure they are sufficient and flexible but they are hardly polished or stable when you really tweak them.

My experience in Vista has been fantastic and my hiccups expected and easily dealt with. I don’t consider myself a novice user by any stretch, but I have no concern with my parents or non tech-savvy friends picking up and using Vista with great regularity. It’s a solid OS on current hardware and software, something that I just don’t think is an unfair requirement for a next-Gen operating system.