Idiot's guide to shareware.

[mr endon]

My PC is starting to misbehave. Nothing too dramatic; small quiverings and shudderings in the force, occasional refusals and petty caviling, minor sulks and pouty footstampings - all indicative of a steadily silting up Windows XP. I've been here before.
So this shareware/freeware/linux/ubuntu jag, is there any real merit to it or is it like riding fixed or living in a yurt without plumbing, or eschewing fire and just taking bites out of living animals for sustenance?
Does it confer any real ease of use advantages for the non-geek, or is it just another elitist affectation on the part of the anomie-plagued affluent in search of 'authenticity'?
My flooring? Sustainably sourced bamboo, since you ask.

[border-rider]

Hand-on-heart, it is not easier than XP.  But nor is it necessarily more difficult; it depends what you are doing

Mostly it works slightly better, it is definitely more stable and it is a lot less irritating.  A full Ubuntu installation actually looks remarkably like Windows, and is used similarly.  The applications all look and work the same.

In the last 2 years it has moved from the Realm of the Geek to something quite manageable by mere mortals.  The lovely little EeePC comes with Linux, and even Dell ship Ubuntu machines.  Ready-installed for you, it's a dream. 

The problems that can arise will do so when you install it yourself on an existing machine.  They are to do with hardware support.  Some stuff - some graphics cards, some printers, some wireless cards - works out of the box, and increasingly that is so.  If you are unlucky enough to have unsupported hardware - because the hardware vendor has chosen not to provide Linux drivers - then you end up with your head under the bonnet in a way you rarely have to with XP.

If you download a CD image, you can boot from that and try it out.  That  doesn't change your system any.  If you like it, install as a dual boot so that the XP option is still there if it all goes horribly wrong.

[rogerzilla]

I found:

1) Virtually any Linux distro is much easier to install than XP
2) Fonts can be weird.
3) Installing new stuff may require you to become familiar with deep tech.
4) You learn why "fsck" is used as a swear word.  Older distros prefer the computer to be left on all the time, since, if they screw up, they usually do so when rebooting.
5) If you get a stable version (i.e. not the one (4) relates to) Linux is fine for web browsing and office applications.  Forget gaming.

[border-rider]

2) The fonts issue is now sorted in Ubuntu.

4) I dunno what fsck is

1, 3, 5 I agree with.

[rogerzilla]

2) The fonts issue is now sorted in Ubuntu.

4) I dunno what fsck is

1, 3, 5 I agree with.

According to Linux and Mac users, it's Windows that has the font sizes wrong.

[bobajobrob]

1) Agreed. Hardy Heron is a doddle - and much faster than windows. You just click through a few screens and then it installs in 10 minutes or so.

3) Open the package manager, search and install what you want in Ubuntu. Easier than windows. Ubuntu has a huge repository of software that you can choose from.

4) My laptop stays up most of the time, I just suspend to ram and resume it later. Suspend and resume work well at the moment. No need for many hard reboots, which is when fsck will run.

5) I had Quake III running for a while, it ran pretty nicely but I was still rubbish at it. Doom 3, Quake 4 and Unreal Tournament work too, IIRC.

As for being easier, when you factor in all the time not spent messing around with anti-spyware, anti-virus, rebooting and reinstalling windows, it probably is. It depends what you want to do with it, though. For things like web browsing, email, IM, photo editing and word processing, it's a winner. Just install the apps that you need and off you go. Sometimes things go wrong, or there are driver issues. It's usually a case of googling, and many times someone will have posted instructions to fix the problem.

[pdm]

Mmmmh. Font sizes.
The wonderful thing about the X window system (used in Linux, FreeBSD, etc) is that you can do almost anything you want under the hood if you know what you want to do...
With regard to font sizes, I have found the best solution is simply to specify your actual screen size in mm if, for some reason, it does not auto detect you actual screen size...
For example:
The xorg.conf directive ( in the "Monitor" section) is:
DisplaySize  433 270
(or whatever your screen size actually is...)

[ScumOfTheRoad]

So this shareware/freeware/linux/ubuntu jag, is there any real merit to it or is it like riding fixed or living in a yurt without plumbing, or eschewing fire and just taking bites out of living animals for sustenance?

This is not quite a direct answer to your question, as you are asking about using Linux on a home system (and it is just fine for it by the way).

Have a look at http://www.top500.org/  which is a list of the current 500 fastest supercomputers on the planet. 455 of them run Linux.
If its good enough for NASA and the world's weapons laboratories then its good enough for you   

[ScumOfTheRoad]

Mr Endon, here is a more helpful reply.

The classic way to get help in the first steps with Linux is to go along to a meeting of your local LUG (Linux User Group). Often held in pubs, where there is the inevitable beer drinking to lubricate dry technical topics: http://lug.org.uk/lugs/all


LUGs sometimes organise "install fests" which are specific days to promote Linux and help people to get it up and running.

The second way to try Linux, at absolutely no risk, is to use what's called a Live CD.
This is a CD which you either download, or get shipped to you.
You boot the PC with this CD in the drive, and it comes up running Linux - but not touching the hard drive.
If you like using it, you can opt to install it on the PC at a later date.
Or you can store personal files on a USB pen drive, in conjunction with the live CD.

The granddaddy of Live CDs is Knoppix:
http://www.knoppix.org/

For a desktop PC though, Ubuntu is popular.
you can get Ubunto live CD for free at:
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
or download it from:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

[cc93]

Does it confer any real ease of use advantages for the non-geek, or is it just another elitist affectation on the part of the anomie-plagued affluent in search of 'authenticity'?

A dispassionate reading of the posts so far would suggest No and Yes 

[border-rider]

A dispassionate reading of the posts so far would suggest No and Yes 

But a disinterested one might suggest "Some, maybe" and "Mostly no, unless you use a purposefully-difficult/minimalist distribution"

[cc93]

It's up there with riding fixed 

[border-rider]

Do try to keep up

So what is it with engineers and scientists and fixed gear bikes?

Anyway all my recent miles have been on gears,  and 3 or 5 wheels.  That must be like using a Commodore PET.

[cc93]

Blimey - have you finished modifying your reply yet?

It's like aiming at a fairground duck 

[border-rider]

Work in progress, work in progress.

[cc93]

Do try to keep up

So what is it with engineers and scientists and fixed gear bikes?


/quote
They're often physicists, engineers, Computer Science geeks and they use Linux.
/quote

Well I'm a physicist by training so I'm interested in the concept, but as XP works for me, I don't feel the need to invest (what would be) huge amounts of time mending something which isn't broken (despite being a practising engineer  )

[border-rider]

It depends what you are doing

If you just install Ubuntu on a pretty standard system, you're able to do all the office stuff immediately. In fact it's faster to do a complete Ubuntu install than install all the different bits of Win office software onto an existing OS.  And it's free, of course, which may be of less concern for the corporate user I guess.  It's also (relatively) safe from malware and it's more stable.

Last year, the Guardian's Ask Jack column recommended Ubuntu over Win for a "Granny's computer" on the basis that once set up it's pretty  robust, exactly as easy to use as Win and quite hard to do serious damage to unless you know how to. 

Of course, it's not perfect.  This week I have been mostly doing CAD work and for that I've been using a Vista machine.  And our home media PC runs XP MCE because Myth TV was frankly a nightmare - and at the time Linux didn't support the PVR cards.  And if you have non-standard hardware it can get a bit geeky.  But possibly no more so than XP: the aforementioned Media PC took me weeks to get all the hardware working correctly.

But for a vanilla email/Office/browsing/pdf/youtube/MP3/etc machine, Ubuntu really behaves just like Win.  And of course it tends to be a bit happier where resources are limited - see the eeePC as an example  - although full Ubuntu is getting pretty big itself these days

[bobajobrob]

I don't feel the need to invest (what would be) huge amounts of time mending something which isn't broken (despite being a practising engineer  )

Some would say that windows is pretty broken. Viruses, spyware, security problems, crashes, poor performance, etc. These can all affect Linux too, of course.

I like Linux because it's stable, secure, easy to update, and supports all the programming languages and software I need to use. I also like to work at a decent command line on a unix-like OS. I also appreciate the ethics and ideals of free software. I'd rather support free software than contribute to the bottom line of some corporation.

[cc93]

Some would say that windows is pretty broken. Viruses, spyware, security problems, crashes, poor performance, etc. These can all affect Linux too, of course.

Not in my experience save one incidence of willful stupidity from my elder son - now cured my giving him a Vista machine with no admin rights!

Maybe I don't know enough about PC's to get into trouble - sort of like an IT bumble-bee 

I like Linux because it's stable, secure, easy to update, and supports all the programming languages and software I need to use. I also like to work at a decent command line on a unix-like OS.

I'll take that as confirmation of my initial reply!

I also appreciate the ethics and ideals of free software. I'd rather support free software than contribute to the bottom line of some corporation.

No problem with that, although the concept of 'free' is debatable, especially in work land where surely the cost of a Windows OS is insignificant compared to the benefit of having a universal platform that runs all software packages and which most employees can use without expensive training?

[Hot Flatus]

It's always a delight to watch Mr Endon plant a seed and watch it grow

 

[sas]

I also appreciate the ethics and ideals of free software. I'd rather support free software than contribute to the bottom line of some corporation.

No problem with that, although the concept of 'free' is debatable, especially in work land where surely the cost of a Windows OS is insignificant compared to the benefit of having a universal platform that runs all software packages and which most employees can use without expensive training?

That's only because other people have paid for their training. E.g. parents buying their children Windows, the free time put in by your friend to teach you, past employers, or (perhaps the most significant?) the public through the use of Windows computers in schools.

[border-rider]

That's true, but in an office environment the costs of retraining staff to use a different load of software are not inconsiderable - look at how much is spent on basic Word/Excel/Outlook training - and the cost or retraining and the loss of productivity in the transition have to be balanced against the cost of buying MS stuff.  Which, for corporate customers, isn't that great.  Mrs MV's former IT dept were all Linuxheads, and even they couldn't make an economic case for ditching MS at the corporate level.

The interesting thing  is that, unless you poke under the bonnet, Ubuntu now looks no less like XP than does Vista, and OO looks more like old versions of Office than does Office 2007.  Any SME now making a change from Win2000/XP to Vista probably wouldn't have a much bigger learning curve if they went to Ubuntu instead.

Couple that with the lack of machines sold to the domestic market with Office pre-installed (as was the case) and MS's stricter policy on validation and you see why open source stuff is becoming more common.

[Jaded]

One has to ask if in this day and age it is acceptable to have a slew of software that requires so much training.

[border-rider]

One has to ask if in this day and age it is acceptable to have a slew of software that requires so much training.

I dunno.  Any software seems to "require" training.  My approach has always been to get stuck in and learn as you go, but then people like me aren't  fazed by stuff like that.

[rae]

I used to be a Linux zealot.  Heck, I was even involved in trying to prove that we could roll out a Linux desktop across about 30,000 clients in 2005.   Short answer - we couldn't.

Long answer:

1) Yes, windows is pretty infested with crap, but in a corporate environment, that isn't really a big deal.  Corporate AV works, and "tits'nviruses.com" is blocked at the firewall anyway.   I'm not underestimating the scale of the problem, but it is a solved problem.

2) So how about rolling Linux out for the "kiosk users".   Browser based apps, simple.   Oh, pants, ActiveX.  So you look at emulation solutions (because your apps vendor sure as hell isn't going to change)....and yes you can just about do it, but it is (very) flaky and you can kiss goodbye to any support.

3) OK, office users.  OO is well cool isn't it, and it even does PDFs.  Whoo hoo.   Oh dear, compatability.   90% of the time, it's fine.  10%, it screws up, badly.  Going from Office -> OO -> Office is particularly problematic.   With this, you're buggered.   Most of the world uses MS-Office, and if you can't send them a Powerpoint and expect it to work, then it's over.  Bleating "we haven't implemented that feature" doesn't cut any ice with the Marketing  boys when their latest campaign turns into a mess.

4) Macros.  Like it or not, many corporates are run with VB excel macros.   OO doesn't do this, so it is useless to the finance department.  Whether they should be doing this is the subject of another thread, but they do.

5) Calendaring.  Really robust multi timezone, multi server, multi entity calendaring.   Outlook does it really well.   Ximian was a pile of poo in 2005, and that was the front runner. 

So, out of our target 30K desktops, we might be able to convert a few thousand.  We'd be saving, er, bugger all, as the cost of a site license for 28K users isn't a lot different for one for 30K users.   Then you've got to develop and test the thing, you've got to make rollout industrial (just like Windows), then you've got to do the rollout.  Then you've got to pander to every muppet who "needs" to go on a 2 day course to learn how to drive it.   The sums didn't add up at all. 

So that's why corporates don't switch, and until they do, Linux will always be niche, with poor hardware support and "challenging" set up.   

Don't get me wrong, I'm not keen on letting anything from Microsoft in my data centres.   Too hard to manage, to few enterprise features, too complicated, too many servers, too much power.    For custom code its fine - but for some hacked up package, it is a pain.   Of course, in the data centre, you pitch Linux against some rather better competition, and it still doesn't add up for me. 

Home server - yep, Linux.   Nice little box, runs network services and samba very well, good use of an old box.