Gosh. Technology

[andrewducker]

So I downloaded VMWare Player and the Ubuntu image.

And I booted up Linux, running under Windows on my computer.

Gosh, I though, I'm running Linux.

And I have access to all sorts of programs, like a web browser, and a text editor, and a paint program.

Um.  Um.  Now what?

I can't think of a single good reason to switch to running it generally.  I haven't had a virus in about 8 years (and I've only ever had one, that having been caught from accidentally booting off a floppy someone had handed me).  I don't have any spyware (at least not that my spyware detectors can detect).  I have numerous bits of software that only run on Windows.

Anyone?  Someone?  Anyone?

(And the first person to suggest that Linux is inherently more moral than Windows will get a kicking)

Comments

[nosrialleon.livejournal.com]

Having recently half-switched to Mac, I can't really answer that question either. I pretty much just said "this computer is going to be for my web stuff" and let it go at that. Not that it's particularly superior, just more that it's nice to be able to get all the internet stuff (which is generally messing around) segregated from the music-making stuff so that I'm either doing one or the other and not trying to do BOTH. But my Mac-head friends keep asking me if I've become one of them yet, and the answer is pretty much "No; it's just another computer..."

[draconid.livejournal.com]

When I first saw a Mac in action I thought "oooo, pretty". I then borrowed a work Mac laptop for a week. And I sat there not knowing what the hell to do with it (I couldn't even surf on it because I couldn't attach it to our network). About all I did with it was set up logins for the people who would likely be using it at work.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I don't think you get many immediate gains. It's when you get into it and start using it a lot that you get more efficient as you learn the 'unix-way' of doing things which tends to be faster / more powerful.

You also stop thinking in terms of 'server' and 'desktop' as of course there is no artificial divide with nix. Over time as well you get closer to all the techy stuff about what is going on (in every area pretty much) which doesn't lead to you spending more time tinkering (although that does happen at first) but rather to a deeper understanding that makes you more productive and more capable.

That and you get a special 'geek' aura which the chicks really go for.

[andrewducker]

the 'unix-way' of doing things which tends to be faster / more powerful.

Really? How?

You also stop thinking in terms of 'server' and 'desktop' as of course there is no artificial divide with nix

I'm not sure there's much of a divide in Windows either - except for some applications which insist they have to be installed on version X or Y. I've run FTP and Web servers off of this box I'm sitting at right now...

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Really? How?
It's going to be really hard for me to justify that... I knew that when I wrote it... It's hard to explain, the culture is just so different...

Doing little scripts / one liners / using sed / pipes / etc... all these things (which can be done in windows of course) are just part of the culture you learn, and you look at problems in a different way.

I'm not sure there's much of a divide in Windows either - except for some applications which insist they have to be installed on version X or Y. I've run FTP and Web servers off of this box I'm sitting at right now...
Yeah... but most of the server stuff you get for windows is either ported and doesn't work as well (e.g. apache / postgres / etc) or is some crappy shareware thing (I don't consider either IIS or SQL Server to be 'good' btw - I've used both...).

[andrewducker]

I think that the problem here is that the number of admin tasks I need to do on my PC is pretty much zero.

And when I'm dealing with databases, it's either a work thing (in which case it's all DB2 running on Z/OS on the mainfram) or it's on my hosted domain (MySQL on a unix box somewhere in the US).

Maybe once I start playing around with web stuff I'll find it more useful to run linux to test stuff out on.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

You just start doing these things though... you think "ooh a wiki on my pc to organise my thoughts would be nice" and bam there it is.

[andrewducker]

I have one of those - only I stuck it on my hosted domain instead :->

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Fair enough... My example was a real one. I wanted a Wiki and wanted to be able to access it all the time so I put it on my nix laptop.

Oooh - another point... My experience of Windows versus Linux is that Linux performs much better on equivalent hardware...

Also another one - the amount of customisability of Linux is greater. You can just go with something default (like using Gnome for instance) if you want, and later you can customise it and use more advanced (ie more productive for geeks prepared to learn new things or think in a different way) programs and window managers and the like.

If you compare Linux and Windows from a perspective of how Windows does things Linux is goign to come up short. It's when you've invested time in Linux that you realise how much better it is. I made the switch 2 years ago now, and there 'aint no way I'm going back :-)

[andrewducker]

There are wikis that run under Windows perfectly well, but I wanted one I could get to all the time, so I put it on my domain.

You can install different shells in Windows too, should you want to. It's just that very few people do.

I'm not at all convinced that the Linux way is better, although it certainly has advantages. If I was a sysadmin I could probably be tempted (although sysadminning a Windows network wasn't actually hard for me when I did that), but for day-to-day usage it does everything I want pretty much instantly.

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

Doing little scripts / one liners / using sed / pipes / etc... all these things (which can be done in windows of course) are just part of the culture you learn, and you look at problems in a different way.

I'm still holding my breath for MSH Shell.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

You can get the beta :-P

It does look interesting. I haven't had time to play with it yet though.

OO is falling out of favour in my mind though... when they first announced it I was well hyped. Now less so.

[andrewducker]

I wouldn't even dream of writing an app using a non-OO language nowadays, it just makes so many things much easier.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

The kind of things you do with a shell script are very different from an app though.

Have you ever used a purely functional language like Haskell?

[andrewducker]

I've used Miranda, which was a purely functional language. I seem to remember it as dead good for maths stuff, but I never tried to use it for anything else.

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

I can't type out a full reply to your post at the moment, but hey...

Unix: machine: ~user$ cat /private/var/log/* | sort -b | grep -i "syslogd" | vim -q

Windows: Find log.log. Open it in notepad. Ctrl-f a lot. Find what you're looking for, read it, go away, and deal with it. The come back and ctrl-f a lot.....

Bash: machine: ~user$ ls -l /Library | less (giving you a nice ncurses interface, press '/' to start searching, and arrow-key-working-ness to go up and down, also possibly with scroll bars )

Dos: C:\WINDOWS\>dir /p /w (giving you a screenful of files that you can't go back up to....)


I just find working on 'nix is like having my computer to trust me. And robhu is right; the culture is different. Installing a prog on windows? Put gunk into the registry after finding (and/or buying) the installer, and so on. Linux: emerge/apt-get/slapt-get firefox, or emerge ut2k4, or emerge quake-4, or emerge apache, or emerge.....

[andrewducker]

What is this "log.log" you speak of? When I need to check out system stuff I use the Event Viewer, which has all sorts of filtering built in.

And who on earth searches for files using the command line? If you want to find a file, hit Windows-E and then when you start typing the name of the file you want it goes straight to it!

As for installation, typing 'emerge...' is faster than going to the apps website and clicking on the file you want to download, but only marginally, and it only helps if someone has created a package and added it to the global list on your machine.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

OK, let's say you want Event viewer to email you whenever 'foo' occurs in the logs, and to send you a jabber message... Is that easy to do in windows? I can do it in one line in about 30 seconds on Nix.

The *nix way is the command line. Most things are done there because when you go beyond the most simple of tasks it is more efficient / powerful to chain a whole load of simple utilities together than to use a GUI interface and hope the creator mae a feature for what you want to do.

(I use Debian so I won't be using Emerge)... apt-get install firefox is a hell of a lot faster than going to their website yes... and it's not just that there are tens of thousands of packages covering pretty much everything you would want in the packages collection of a modern distro. All free, all with great communities sitting behind them.

http://www.linuxlots.com/~dunne/unix-philosophy.html

[andrewducker]

I know what the unix philosophy is :-P I used it for a few years at Uni and then ran away.

The equivalent in Windows would be scripting, and it hasn't been as good, although it's getting better. I've written short programs to do things like you've said, and it's usually fairly easy, so long as there's a programmatic interface available for (for instance) jabber messages.

Presumably you haven't memorised all 10,000 packages - how do you find the name for whatever it is you want?

[robhu.livejournal.com]

apt-cache search thingy

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

There are also perfectly good graphical front ends for package managers, too. Ubuntu uses Synaptic, which is pretty popular. Actually it also has an even simpler one under "Add programs" or some such thing on the menu that just lists the most popular applications by category and is dead easy to use.

[kellibunny.livejournal.com]

The last part. So true. And i can't even explain it :)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

*Geeks in your general direction* ;-)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I've just done the opposite btw... put Debian on my previously XP work computer... I'm going to run XP inside VMWare player.

In terms of distros I think Ubuntu is a good choice... I've played with a few over the years but didn't make the switch until Ubuntu made it very easy... I wouldn't stay with Ubuntu though... eventually you want to move onto pure Debian to really get into it IMO.

[wychwood]

I have numerous bits of software that only run on Windows.

That's the biggest reason I know for sticking with Windows :)

Personally I use Linux because I like it. I like the controllability, I like the community and collaborative nature of it, and I like the free software you can run on it. If what you mostly do is web-browsing, graphics work and text-editing, then you may as well be running Linux - but if you're doing something specialist that requires specific software, then you may well be better off not changing over. I've just had to set up my desktop with Windows so I can use the programs I need for my course.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

The best graphics stuff (Photoshop, Quark, etc...) do not run on Linux.

[wychwood]

I don't know about Quark, although I thought that was more desktop publishing - but from everything I've heard and seen, The GIMP is at least comparable to Photoshop, if not as good. I've been using it for a couple of years, and I'm yet to find more than one or two things that Photoshop can do and I can't.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

A number of the people at my work place use Photoshop, and they've tried the GIMP as well.. Their opinion is that the GIMP doesn't even begin to approach the modern versions of Photoshop... maybe a really old version of Photoshop.

[wychwood]

That's interesting, then - doesn't match what I've heard from people on LJ. Of course, it feels quite different - you'd have to use both for some time to be able to get a proper feel for which was better for you. Still, I've no complaints about the GIMP. Well, maybe some very small ones.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

GIMP doesn't do CMYK output AFAIK, which is a big limitation if you're wanting to do graphics for press output.

[mirukux.livejournal.com]

and its gui sucks ;)

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

and its gui sucks

Gui? Who needs a gui! Real *nix users edit images from the commandline!

Okay, maybe not so much...

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

I work part time as a graphic designer, and I can tell you that InDesign (is currently better than Quark, but that's another debate entirely...) and Photoshop, and the rest of the CS2 suite have no comparable open source equivalent. The gimp, or rather gimp-shop-pro, which is the only version I was able to use without pulling hair out in frustration, seems to be about the same as photoshop five; for most people, it's fine. For us sad gits who actually use lots of filters, plugins, weird layer masks and process channels, output to lots of strange file formats, use many (custom) spot inks, and that sort of thing, if the gimp can do them, it's not obvious....


Also, in terms of user interface, photoshop + os x + me = productive. I know where everything is. I've memorised all the shortcuts in all the applications; if I want to do x, I just think I'll do y, z, and q, and x will be the result. Using the gimp's UI afterwards is slightly like performing matrix transforms on the pixels to me! I know it's not fair to say that, and I'm subject to the monopoly argument, but really....

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Actually, that's not accurate. I have Photoshop 7 running flawlessly on Linux under WINE.

Of course, WINE still doesn't quite manage to make iTunes work, which would basically stick the nail in Windows' coffin for me.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

What about using XP until VMWare Player in your Linux X11 environment?

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Because I was under the impression that Player would only let me run existng configurations, and that because of Windows' licensing, finding a pre-built configuration would be impossible.

I should really have a look at it though to see if that's true...

[robhu.livejournal.com]

You can use qemu-img to create a new partition, then boot up the XP install DVD into VMWare and badabing.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

My personal reason is that I get so bored of the "desktop". Probably once a year I'll change windows manager so I get a different look and feel. But then I'm fickle. I also find it more fun to solve problems I have in Linux than I do when I have problems in Windows - although that may be because I'm more familiar with Linux as I only use Windows when I have to (ie. for games or at work).

A colleague of mine had pretty much the same opinion as you. Why bother? The only answer I could really give him was "it's fun and it's different". But unless it's something you find fun, then it's probably not worth it.

Hmmm.. that said.. on a technical note... you may not have viruses but that's not the only advantage of Linux: no blue screen of death and, if something crashes (such as the equivalent of explorer) you don't need to reboot..

[andrewducker]

I haven't seen a BSOD in about 5 years :->

And I haven't needed to reboot this machine because software crashed in about that long.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

Then I think I need to steal your windows machine... ;) I don't think I've used one that hasn't done something like that in the past year. But then, I do have a habit of breaking things...

[andrewducker]

Ooh - I do tell a lie. This machine kept rebooting itself (the equivalent of a BSOD) about 18 months ago. But that turned out to be down to a faulty memory stick.

Seriously, I know several people running windows machines, and so long as they don't run out of memory or hard disk space, or get hit by a virus, they tend to run just fine. Bad drivers are about the worst thing I tend to see.

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a coincidence. I downloaded VMWare Server last night, and I installed it tonight, and I'm intending to run Ubuntu or something hosted on WinXP.
Main reason for doing it is to be able to run a couple of old programs (mud client and Usenet newsreader) which don't seem to come in Win32 versions (not too surprisingly). I realise there are newer and shinier programs in both categories, but the old ones are what I'm used to, and they're quite small and efficient.
When we were in Melbourne, I had the luxury of having two PCs for a while, so I could leave one running Linux all the time, and the other in Windows most of the time for quick access to games. These days, I seem to be spending more time either reading LJ or playing Windows-only games, and I ... just can't be bothered fiddling much with Linux, sadly. So, it's time to see if VMWare fills the final gaps.

[perceval.livejournal.com]

personally, i love me some shell scripting to get work done efficiently

[andrewducker]

This seems to be the sticking point. If I was a sysadmin then I'd probably appreciate Linux (although I managed just fine on Windows for a year), but as a plain user I'm fine without it.

[jccw.livejournal.com]

I have been using linux since 1995. At that time it was dramatically more stable, more controllable, and more suitable for programming (coursework and side jobs) than Windows. In this time, linux has crashed on me maybe once (apart from hardware failure). So for me, it's loyalty.

I don't see any reason to change a setup you're happy with.

[avatar.livejournal.com]

I found exactly the same problem when I started using linux - but I didn't look into it any further. I got a bit jaded on unix when I had it installed on my machine for a year or so taking up 1GB for no reason, since it seemed windows could do more, easier.