Things that make Linux awesome:
Back in the early 2000s, the whole “Linux is free” (zero dollars) thing really got me excited. I was a broke high-school student, and I had thought that nearly all free software for computers was either a demo or pirated. I hated stealing from geeks like me, and I hated not having functionality. To find out that people were giving Linux away was a big draw, so I started using it. I rapidly discovered that I had to get far deeper into the structure of Linux to use it. I had to learn how and why things worked in my computer, and that was fun. I spent a hell of a lot of time learning about how my computer worked, what different things worked together, and what the command line was really for. Having the ability to control your computer with text commands means that your actions are unambiguous and clear.
Linux was really awesome for an unemployed kid who wanted to learn about computers. My PC was a hand-me-down, and really couldn’t run any games, but I could use it to email, watch YouTube, and chat on the internet. I hopped on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and started learning more about Linux. I tried a bunch of different distributions: Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, and Red Hat all ended up installed at various points. Gentoo lasted the longest, I think in part because it was such a pain in the ass to install. I switched randomly back to Windows XP for a few games, but always came back to Linux.
Back then, Linux was simpler. Gentoo required you to wait hours or days for packages to build, but it was still easier to manage updates for than Windows. Windows needed updates all the time, and you had to reboot to install most of them. You needed antivirus software to keep you safe, and that often didn’t work. You needed to install drivers by hand all the time. On Linux, most of my hardware just worked because of the Kernel, and updates only required a reboot once a month or so. No extra crap to download, and way less downtime.
The Good Times:
I was pretty dedicated to using Linux when Windows Vista came out. I had been using XP now and then, but it just wasn’t good enough for me to switch to: It still needed lots of reboots for updates and wasn’t as fast as Linux. Vista had some more eye candy, but I was getting Beryl/Compiz running and that blew Aero out of the water.
I almost always had one Windows computer running for games, but most of my time was spent using Linux. I could watch YouTube and browse the web and not worry about viruses. IRSSI was my chat client of choice, and it ran over ssh with screen: I could connect to my computer at home from anywhere and chat, without ever having to sign off. I filed a few bug reports here and there. Most things were fixed in the next release of whatever software I was running, and the distributions quickly picked that release up. Some of the bugs I filed would be marked as “Fix Released” because an early Alpha of the next version fixed the problem. This worried me, but not enough to do anything drastic.
The Decline:
I got a new laptop with an ATI video card. The ATI drivers for Linux were awful: I couldn’t run compiz or beryl very well. 3d stuff in general was slow. I swapped it for an NVIDIA card, but discovered that my screen would randomly go black while running compiz. I couldn’t really file bugs for these issues because the drivers were closed source, and therefore technically unsupported. Many of the problems were not consistent across distributions, so it probably wasn’t the graphics drivers that were the real problem anyhow.
I could watch YouTube and play some of my older PC games, but I was using my Vista PC more and more. It just ran smoother (despite all the crap Windows Vista was getting). Linux needed almost as many updates and reboots as Vista. I had to pay $60 for software to run some of my games because WINE didn’t cut it anymore. I bought a few different netbooks, but was never able to get any of them 100% working under Linux, no matter what distribution I used. Wireless N and Sleep/Suspend seemed to be a particular problem.
In February of 2010, I started filing bugs about things like screen brightness controls not working correctly, and posting about my problems with the ATI drivers. I dug through some source code and ran some tests. I found where the problem with the brightness was, but I had no fucking idea how to fix it, and the bug report was triaged as low priority. The last update was in March, by me. It’s nearly July, and there has been a full release of Ubuntu since then, but the bug has not been touched.
The Windows Revolution:
Windows 7 was at RTM, and I got my hands on it via Technet to try out. It was clean, simple, and functional. It had nice little features like snapping windows and a new, cleaner taskbar. The Vista instant-search feature had been refined and was awesome. A lot of my hardware just worked without installing drivers, just like in my early Linux days. The rest of my hardware was easy to install. My netbook’s touchscreen worked perfectly. When I gave that netbook to my mom and bought one with better battery life, I discovered that the new one had a touch pad with multi-finger scrolling in Windows, but not in Linux. Sleep worked in Windows, but was very broken in Linux. I got nearly twice as much battery life in Windows as I did in Linux when running normally. Both my laptops would drain the battery in sleep mode in Linux, but in Windows they would automatically switch to hibernate after a few hours to save the battery. I tenaciously hung on to Linux, but I was already getting ready to jump ship.
The Death of Linux:
I dropped my old laptop while fixing a printer, and it was broken enough that Dell replaced it under my Complete Care. I tried to get an NVidia card, because the new NVIDIA drivers for Linux are pretty darn good, but that was not an option. I ended up with a monster laptop with a 1080p screen, an i7, wireless N, and an ATI Mobility Radeon 4570.
I fired up Ubuntu right away, but quickly noticed my wireless N card was flaky. Sometimes it would work fine, but after waking from sleep or rebooting, it simply would not work. It wouldn’t connect, and the network management utilities acted like I didn’t have a wireless card. There was already a bug filed for this issue, so I plugged in my wired Ethernet connection and tried various troubleshooting steps to no avail. My netbook had the same model of card, and had the same issue in Linux.
My graphics drivers were a mess too: I tried the open source graphics driver, but discovered that my laptop fan ran full speed when the laptop was on. The card was new enough that power management wasn’t fully supported on Linux’s open source drivers, so the card just ran full tilt and hot all the time. ATI’s official driver got the fans and power management working correctly, but the actual graphics performance was slow and terrible, and made my laptop crash occasionally. I tried the open-source graphics driver in development, but using it meant compiling the fairly new 2.6.34 Linux Kernel, which Ubuntu didn’t have support for yet. I got some graphics power management, and fixed my wireless issues, but I lost the use of my eject key and the fans still ran at almost full speed. Every time the graphics card changed power modes, the screen would get graphics bugs.
I thought about filing some bugs over at Ubuntu’s bugzilla and a few other places. Some of the bugs I had filed during previous releases had been marked as “Fix Released” because the Alpha (pre-release software, still months from being ready) fixed the problem. Others had languished, quietly ignored or swept under the rug as “low priority”. I knew I was pretty screwed for for months if I stayed with Linux.
All that open source freedom was nice when I started using Linux. Now it seems like Linux and its maintainers are quietly telling me “We support freedom. Feel free to go fuck yourself.”
From the Ashes of Vista, Windows 7:
Tired of the bullshit, I installed Windows 7 exclusively on my desktop and laptops. Now my computers can share files faster and more easily. I can play videos over the network between all of my machines. My laptops suddenly have full multi-touch support on the touch pads. Games run without 3rd party support layers, and without crashing all the time. Office 2010 has been released, fixing most of my gripes with Office 2007 and all of my gripes with Office 2003. Outlook 2010 made managing more than one e-mail account easy again. Microsoft Security Essentials had made antivirus software free and unobtrusive. UAC (those “Cancel Or Allow” windows everyone hated) has been streamlined so it pops up less often than you have to type in your password on Linux or OS X. PowerShell has rapidly become an extremely powerful shell, on par with, if not better than any BASH or CSH clones. Microsoft isn’t fucking around: Windows 7 really is a great piece of software, and worth a bit of money to use.
Conclusion:
Linux is awesome if you have hardware that is supported in Linux, and you don’t game very much. It’s awesome if you want to run a super fast server. It’s awesome if you want to surf the web and not worry too much about viruses (for now). It’s awesome if you want to force yourself to learn more about how your computer works.
Windows 7 is awesome when Linux fails to meet your criteria, which won’t take long with the way Linux development seems to be going. Microsoft has finally got their shit together in the OS department, the application department, and the security department. Here’s hoping they don’t fuck it all up.
I’m still hoping Google Chrome OS is as good as their web browser. I’ve always been the unpopular “supporter” of Microsoft in my family, and I know they’re getting their act together but…
I really hate that goddamn ribbon. I hate it so bad, it is the epitome of form over function to placate moronic users. My fury is unending in regards to the ribbon from Hell.
Which Ribbon? The one in Office? I think Office 2010 did alright with that. Office 2007 was the Vista of the Office series. It had a lot of strange changes made, but those changes were all towards the progress of Office 2010, just as all the strange changes made to Vista were progress towards Windows 7.
Chrome OS is Linux based. I’m willing to bet it’ll be excellent on the hardware supports Chrome OS. I suspect that anyone trying to run it on a random laptop they have lying around will get burned by drivers just like I did.
ANY OS CAN BE ATTACKED. Although I feel that OSX is better than Windows, even Apple is secretly sneaking malware protection into their operating system and there are virus-scanners on Linux and OSX. With that said, a side by side comparison of OSX and UNIX vs. any Windows, from a security standpoint, is pretty revealing. Microsoft is still the worst. Perhaps that will change some day, but security isn’t the only reason to use, or not use a platform, since most security is based on the education of the user anyway.
Education is the best tool, and as 013 already pointed out, GNU/Linux was one of the best educational tools he used to learn about computing in general. I should note that most distros of Linux have become a lot easier to install over the years as well. Overall that’s all a computer is, a tool. Used properly it will give you good results. Used poorly, it can be dangerous. Keep in mind that 013 is a very advanced user as well, and the demands that any of us here at BHM will put on a computer exceed the needs of most average users who would still benefit from having a more secure platform like Linux, not having to pay for software, enhanced backward compatibility, and being able to download solutions immediately without any BS like codes ,etc. to use their software. This is a nice feature for all users, not just the poor. I use Bluefish and the GIMP on Ubuntu. I was able to decide to use these after being able to easily compare many programs side by side for extended periods without having any features locked out, and without feeling like I had to use a program because I paid for it.
While the industry dumbs itself down to meet the demands of morons, with more resource consuming crap and hardware that is totally undependable, in trade for shiny things, quality is all but a total joke. YES EVEN THE APPLE STUFF IS WAY LESS RELIABLE THAN IT USED TO BE, I’ll just wait for the unresearched, angry comments from Apple guys on that one. Anyway, allow me to make my final point about the real reasons to use GNU/Linx.
Most users use applications. If those applications run well, the OS isn’t much of a consideration for them as long as they can share the files with others that use similar applications. More and more the OS isn’t that important from a functionality standpoint. What is imortant is not getting screwed. Apple screws people on hardware and Pro-Apps; Windows screws you on software. Sometimes they both put out decent stuff, often they don’t, and no matter what they’re doing at the time, the user gets to pay for their BS. GNU/Linux allows us the freedom from their BS, it gives us real control of our computers back from both the hardware and software sides, and if more people used it, then the main-stream third party manfacturers like ATI would stop screwing the Linux community on drivers, support, etc. and just start producing good ones for the platform, open-source ones if necessary, so that they could keep selling their products. The software guys would start making your favorite titles for Linux, and you could use whatever hardware you wanted, with whatever software you wanted and not have to bend over for Microsoft or Apple who are just starting to use open source stuff and refine it in tons of their software. Just look at OSX, it’s basically hyped up NetBSD. Yes CrApple-tards, you have an open source system at the heart of your computer. So yeah, Linux is the most flexible system, and the arguments against it just support the current climate of rewarding corporate greed and pretending that the big guys are making something worth paying for, and not just “stealing” from the Linux community anyway. I put “stealing” in quotes because if you look deep in the OSX code, for example, you can at least see where they got lots of the stuff from. Of course most of their users think that they’re not getting open-source stuff, and many demand that they don’t “get that open-source, free garbage”, but buy an Apple anyway… Idiots! I wonder if you can say the same for the Windows 7 registry, perhaps they just ripped concepts off instead of directly taking code and trying to hide it like Apple.
Yeah the ribbon on the Office apps, it was sickening see it get rolled out at CCSU. I use to be able to insert a section break (important for digital documents) by doing “Insert > Break > Section Break”. And it all made sense: I wanted to Insert a Break.
Now I’m not too sure where it is, maybe under “Page”…
That said, it also hogged up the memory on all those CCSU machines that would’ve run fine and fast had they kept with ’04. About the best improvement to MS Office was the addition of a searchable Dictionary as part of the Thesaurus function, long ago was it needed. And I know OpenOffice.org is free and all, but it’s also a bunch of crap if you ask me.
I wrote a resume on OO.o and then I converted it to a .doc to be “accessible” to the largest number of employers. When I viewed this .doc with OO.o it looked perfect, when someone running a Windows machine printed it out everything was eff’d up. EVERYTHING. It made me look unprofessional and childish. OO.o cost me one job that I know of, and likely was the cause of many turning my resume away.
OO.o shouldn’t tote around the fact that they can open and save in .doc; it’s a bald faced lie. The software readjust the document around proving it’s not making a .doc, but its own crazy interpretation. This is dangerously stupid for important files like Resumes which rely on margins, spacing, breaks, and indents.
Yeah, I tend to go with PDF because it’s easy to read on a bunch of platforms. Like it or not, it’s a good, consistent format across platforms. Everyone can read it. The other nice thing is that Open Office can “print” to PDF. I think Office 2010 addresses some of the problem with the Ribbon, though it’ll still take some getting used to. I think Microsoft made the right move going towards it. Finding all those options in menus was a real pain in the ass.
I wanted to fire off an update on my Linux misadventures. Thinking perhaps I was too critical of Linux, I tried to run Ubuntu 10.04 again. Yes, Intel wireless N is still broken in the default kernel. I managed to fix my hotkey problems by manually patching bits of the kernel. Compiling the kernel with the patches I needed requires much song and dance on Ubuntu (but not Gentoo!), including editing a script for the kernel build. I tried the latest drm-radeon-testing kernel and was impressed by the improvements made in power management, but was disappointed to discover that it still keeps my fans running _much_ faster than in Windows or with the fglrx drivers.
I can’t fix the fglrx tearing in compiz issue, and from what I’ve seen, all the ubuntu/compiz devs are burying their heads in the sand and pointing at fglrx for the bug. Even if it is an fgrlx bug, 1) KDE’s kwin effects aren’t harmed by it and 2) It still has problems with multiple sync rates on different screens.
The Wobbly Windows effect in compiz is also marred by graphics glitches on every card. This is a result of the Window Decorations being separate from the window itself. Using Emerald fixes this issue, but requires you to use non-standard window borders, and adding a bunch of out-of-date, no longer supported software.
I /hate/ trying to run Linux. Every time I get excited over something being fixed, something else breaks. I really wish that developers would make more of an effort to prevent regression, because it seems like every Linux install is two steps forward and three steps back.
But who knows! Maybe Ubuntu 10.10 will magically fix all these issues my October. I’m not holding my breath.
007: Ok, I confess. I’m already back on Linux. I’m going to be writing a new article soon about what caused this change of heart, and how I fixed the issues I encountered in Ubuntu 10.04. It honestly wasn’t that hard.
I’m a little pissed that I missed the solutions to the problems I had. The problem with my wireless was resolved by using a different network configuration tool: wicd instead of network-manager. FGLRX still sucks, and there isn’t much that can change that other than ATI making new releases, but turning off Wobbly Windows and forcing most of the graphics settings to high has made the system usable.
Some of the bugs (including the double brightness events on my Mini 1012) are still there, but are either minor and easily ignored, or in the process of being fixed. I think one of the maintainers of my bug may have noticed my article, because suddenly there has been activity, including patches, posted to the bug report. No matter how satisfied I /feel/ I am with Windows, I always end up going “Man, I really wish I had ssh and screen and irssi back.” or “Man, I really wish the clock for the LCD on my Logitech’s G15 worked when the screen was locked.”
I was really, genuinely pissed off that I had so many problems with Linux, but once again the features I gained were far more important than the hassle I encountered. My jump has been large: The next article from me will explain the reasons for my return.
[...] out, but I realized my mistake! Will you take me back? Why am I back on Linux so rapidly after announcing my departure? How could I go from hating Linux to embracing it again so quickly? The answer is pretty [...]