Andrew, thanks for an interesting post. Of course (standard disclaimer) I'm a satisfied and confirmed Mandrake 10.1 user myself. But it's always interesting to hear the plusses and minuses of someone else's experience with various Linux distros.
In fact, I take the radical viewpoint (radical, at least, in the eyes of some Linux zealots and/or Windows zealots and/or Mac zealots) that an OS which is right for one person may not be right for another person. Depends on your needs and your individual priorities— on your own home computer, only you can be the judge. Best wishes and best of luck in finding the OS that suits you!
I recently tried a CD-only distro of Knoppix. The system boots from the CD, and all applications run from there as well. There are instructions on how to install to the hard drive, but I wanted to give the system a try in advance. I was reasonably pleased with how the system handled. It automatically recognized my sound card, my video card and my DSL modem/router. You might think about giving that system a try.
FYI: the default browswer, Konqueror, displays fonts strangely. Since Mozilla also comes with it, I used that instead. No real problems.
Andrew I tried Red Hat about 5 or 6 years ago. I ran it on the same drive as windows with a dual boot option. It was anything but usser friendly. I could never get it to connect to the internet, and in spite of supplying the requested script file it kept asking me to create one.
Last spring I tried Mandrake on my backup system and let it have the whole hard drive to use. As I have highspeed cable I downloaded the entire 4 CD set overnight. Apparently enough time has passed that Linux is now user friendly.
I gave myself about six months to lean and get used to it. It worked well for most of what I wanted with a few drawbacks that made me give up and re-install windows.
For one I am on staff at an online support group where I use mIRC a lot. The closest Linux software was Xchat which left a lot to be desired in featuresafter using mIRC.
The other drawback that is probably the reason I dumped it. I was never able to network it with my main computer. It kept giving me similar to your HHD01: "You dont have permission," even though I was logged in as root administrator.
Maybe in another five years Linux will be ready for the big time.
On an other note I am still using FireFox most of the time, but it has a lot of isssues to work out too. Like disappearing flashing cursor while editing, crazy quirky highighting that wants to start at the previous cursor position and a text search feature that sucks.
A lot of the problems are what I'd call "tail end" problems, in that we're on the tail end of fixing them.
Fonts, for example, used to be a mess. On really cutting-edge distros, both the font renderer and the fonts themselves are really nice and hassle-free (including decent replacements for the standard fonts). Fedora Core 3 should have had all the new font goodness; the other two may or may not have.
Third-party software installation is still a problem, and people are looking at solving it. I blogged about one system just a few days ago. But that effort is still in its infancy, and the current solutions leave a lot to be desired.
I am still going to ding you, though, for insisting on installing Thunderbird your way. All the up-to-date distros ship Thunderbird. There should have been a software install tool that should have made Thunderbird a search, click, wait, done thing. Did you check? Did the tool work?
I burned a Knoppix CD the other day to try in my creaky old laptop. It looks nice (antialiased fonts at last) and runs ok, especially considering the hardware. I haven't done much beyond simple browsing yet, but I've already had some issues.
It took a bit of research to get my wireless network card working. Even though it was detected and is supported, the system apparently doesn't bother to actually make it work unless you log into the shell and fiddle around. I've created a small partition for my user preferences and told Knoppix to save my configuration, but apparently network stuff isn't saved after all.
The user experience is obviously where things fall apart for Linux. It works almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Windows. When something goes wrong the OS tends to fail in unexpected ways (unexpected to Windows and Mac users) and the error messages are generally pretty horrible. More user testing, please.
A couple tips: If you mount your windows partition, you can easily just copy the contents of your C:\WINDOWS\FONTS\ folder into your Linux installation. You own those fonts, nothing illegal about that.
I've never heard of XandrOS, but Mandrake and Fedora are both RPM-based distros, so your experience is going to be pretty similar on both. YOu should have tried a Debian-based or Slackware-based distro for more variety.
I agree though that Linux isn't quite ready for "prime time". It's definitely going in the right direction though, and fast.
I'm probably echoing what Sandi said earlier. About 2000-2001, I got on a Linux kick. I had a spare PC which I built for Linux from the ground up.
Every negative you mentioned, I encountered then. The desktop, though, has gotten much prettier, and installing the OS is much smoother now.
I disagree with your assessment that Linux is almost ready for prime time. It hasn't really improved from a user standpoint in five years. Because MacOS and Windows keep allowing users to know less and less, I really don't expect Linux to keep up.
I disagree with your assessment that Linux is almost ready for prime time. It hasn't really improved from a user standpoint in five years.
Dude, really now.
I mean, I get that Linux isn't some people's cup of tea, and that there's still work to be done. But "hasn't really improved from a user standpoint in five years"?
I can tell you ten vast improvements that have been made in the last five years, at least a few of them very difficult ones.
The application ugliness you encountered ("Even Firefox looked blockier and uglier than the Windows version") is actually something that the distribution makers should have taken care of. Both the major graphical toolkits on Linux (GTK and Qt) are themeable, meaning that their look can be swapped out for one of any number of themes. Applications like Firefox just use whatever the current GTK theme is, so if the GTK theme is the default (ugly and blocky), then all the applications will look ugly. But replace the GTK theme with a better one, and poof! all your applications look cooler.
The problem is, so many distributions still insist on installing the ugly, blocky, default GTK theme. (The default Qt theme is quite a bit better). So naturally, people's first experience of Linux and Firefox is a negative one from the "looks" point of view. Distributions really should pick a better GTK theme to install...
On Windows, I'm a power user. On Linux, I'm just a user, but I learn a little more each time before running into a problem I can't fix and wiping out the hard drive.
Once in a while I think about Linux. But once you have the base system...
I have tried to install some stuff intended for Linux but having a Windows port. In 9 of ten, I get "of course, to use this you must have" some other thingy. In eight of 10, this turned into thing B requiring C and D and E, each of which had at least two pre-reqs, each of which... I haven't installed many of these.
Bah. All of those things (well, the ones I looked at) are free, and have distribution licenses, so why not include them and have documentation to the effect "you may want to look for updates to stuff included here" and a bunch of links?
I've installed well over a hundred WinTel packages, and as best I can recall only two had a non-MS-base-install pre-req (ONE pre-req), which was included as an (optional in case you already had it) install addon or at least a link (usually to get Adobe Reader).
John, most Linux distros have this ability built in. For instance, a popular Debian-based package called "apt-get" will find, download and install programs, including all dependencies, with the tap of a button. An example would be, if you want to install bittorrent you'd type "apt-get install bittorrent".
In fact, you can even update your entire OS this way -- not only security updates and such, but version upgrades, quickly and easily.
There are many versions of this for virtually any Linux distro, including slapt-get and swaret for slackware.
"stuff intended for Linux but having a Windows port"
Yeah, Chris, that can be a problem sometimes. It took me a while, for example, to find a version of cdrtools for Windows that worked for me. It's the one that doesn't require IDE to pretend it's SCSI.
Linux-designed apps being installed on Linux as part of a Linux distribution are in a different boat, of course.
In fact, I take the radical viewpoint (radical, at least, in the eyes of some Linux zealots
FYI: the default browswer, Konqueror, displays fonts strangely. Since Mozilla also comes with it, I used that instead. No real problems.
Last spring I tried Mandrake on my backup system and let it have the whole hard drive to use. As I have highspeed cable I downloaded the entire 4 CD set overnight. Apparently enough time has passed that Linux is now user friendly.
I gave myself about six months to lean and get used to it. It worked well for most of what I wanted with a few drawbacks that made me give up and re-install windows.
For one I am on staff at an online support group where I use mIRC a lot. The closest Linux software was Xchat which left a lot to be desired in featuresafter using mIRC.
The other drawback that is probably the reason I dumped it. I was never able to network it with my main computer. It kept giving me similar to your HHD01: "You dont have permission," even though I was logged in as root administrator.
Maybe in another five years Linux will be ready for the big time.
On an other note I am still using FireFox most of the time, but it has a lot of isssues to work out too. Like disappearing flashing cursor while editing, crazy quirky highighting that wants to start at the previous cursor position and a text search feature that sucks.
A lot of the problems are what I'd call "tail end" problems, in that we're on the tail end of fixing them.
Fonts, for example, used to be a mess. On really cutting-edge distros, both the font renderer and the fonts themselves are really nice and hassle-free (including decent replacements for the standard fonts). Fedora Core 3 should have had all the new font goodness; the other two may or may not have.
Third-party software installation is still a problem, and people are looking at solving it. I blogged about one system just a few days ago. But that effort is still in its infancy, and the current solutions leave a lot to be desired.
I am still going to ding you, though, for insisting on installing Thunderbird your way. All the up-to-date distros ship Thunderbird. There should have been a software install tool that should have made Thunderbird a search, click, wait, done thing. Did you check? Did the tool work?
It took a bit of research to get my wireless network card working. Even though it was detected and is supported, the system apparently doesn't bother to actually make it work unless you log into the shell and fiddle around. I've created a small partition for my user preferences and told Knoppix to save my configuration, but apparently network stuff isn't saved after all.
The user experience is obviously where things fall apart for Linux. It works almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Windows. When something goes wrong the OS tends to fail in unexpected ways (unexpected to Windows and Mac users) and the error messages are generally pretty horrible. More user testing, please.
I've never heard of XandrOS, but Mandrake and Fedora are both RPM-based distros, so your experience is going to be pretty similar on both. YOu should have tried a Debian-based or Slackware-based distro for more variety.
I agree though that Linux isn't quite ready for "prime time". It's definitely going in the right direction though, and fast.
I'm probably echoing what Sandi said earlier. About 2000-2001, I got on a Linux kick. I had a spare PC which I built for Linux from the ground up.
Every negative you mentioned, I encountered then. The desktop, though, has gotten much prettier, and installing the OS is much smoother now.
I disagree with your assessment that Linux is almost ready for prime time. It hasn't really improved from a user standpoint in five years. Because MacOS and Windows keep allowing users to know less and less, I really don't expect Linux to keep up.
I'm also a much bigger than of FreeBSD than Linux, but FreeBSD needs a whole lot more coaxing to get setup than Linux.
Dude, really now.
I mean, I get that Linux isn't some people's cup of tea, and that there's still work to be done. But "hasn't really improved from a user standpoint in five years"?
I can tell you ten vast improvements that have been made in the last five years, at least a few of them very difficult ones.
The problem is, so many distributions still insist on installing the ugly, blocky, default GTK theme. (The default Qt theme is quite a bit better). So naturally, people's first experience of Linux and Firefox is a negative one from the "looks" point of view. Distributions really should pick a better GTK theme to install...
I have tried to install some stuff intended for Linux but having a Windows port. In 9 of ten, I get "of course, to use this you must have" some other thingy. In eight of 10, this turned into thing B requiring C and D and E, each of which had at least two pre-reqs, each of which... I haven't installed many of these.
Bah. All of those things (well, the ones I looked at) are free, and have distribution licenses, so why not include them and have documentation to the effect "you may want to look for updates to stuff included here" and a bunch of links?
I've installed well over a hundred WinTel packages, and as best I can recall only two had a non-MS-base-install pre-req (ONE pre-req), which was included as an (optional in case you already had it) install addon or at least a link (usually to get Adobe Reader).
In fact, you can even update your entire OS this way -- not only security updates and such, but version upgrades, quickly and easily.
There are many versions of this for virtually any Linux distro, including slapt-get and swaret for slackware.
Yeah, Chris, that can be a problem sometimes. It took me a while, for example, to find a version of cdrtools for Windows that worked for me. It's the one that doesn't require IDE to pretend it's SCSI.
Linux-designed apps being installed on Linux as part of a Linux distribution are in a different boat, of course.