Re: Why I dumped Linux and Went Back to Windows.
From: Tom Shelton (tom_at_YOUKNOWTHEDRILLmtogden.com)
Date: 02/24/05
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Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 23:50:55 GMT
In article <pan.2005.02.23.23.13.19.493472@NOSPAM.liamslider.com>, Liam Slider wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 21:33:01 +0000, Tom Shelton wrote:
>
>> In article <pan.2005.02.23.18.21.15.318891@NOSPAM.liamslider.com>, Liam
>> Slider wrote:
>>> On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 22:06:07 -0500, narrows_whitefish wrote:
>>>
>>>> Linux sounded great on paper as well as listening to posts in various
>>>> newsgroups. So what could a person find wrong with a ton of free
>>>> software?
>>>> The short answer is it depends
>>>> The long answer is, most of the free software needs a lot of work to
>>>> become usable.
>>>
>>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>
>>>> Odd since all I did was plug the printer in with Windows XP and it
>>>> worked.
>>>
>>> This is an outright lie, after all...Windows XP requires drivers for
>>> hardware too.
>>>
>>>
>> Yes, windows xp requires drivers - but many drivers are built in. For
>> instance, my HP932c. I plug it into XP - bing, it just works. I'm not
>> saying this isn't the case for Linux as well, I'm just pointing out you
>> don't always have to install something for them to "just work" under
>> windows.
>
> I have never heard of hardware for Windows that you didn't need to install
> drivers for first.
>
> Except *maybe* USB.
You mean USB hardware? I have an old parallel Iomega Zip drive - I plug
it in and it works. I also have a USB zip drive, it also just works.
I mentioned my printer above (which also works on Gentoo after I
installed cups, hpijs, and cups). My USB scanner (hp 5370C) also, just
works - though I usually install the scanner software anyway (not a
driver, just the interface) because it works better then the built in
windows scanner wizard. My Kodak camera (I forget which model of the
top of my head - I think its the eashshare 4900), it just works without
drivers as well, again I do install the additional software for this
because it has more options then the default xp cammera software. My
Creative MuVo Tx just works as well. My video and sound card are too
new, so they have to have drivers installed to get the full use of them
- but once I do, they get updated from the windows update site... I
don't have to do anything with my U.S. Robotics internal PCI modem (this
is actually a hardware modem - it works fine under linux as well)
I'm sure most of these would work under linux as well. In fact, I know
they do since I've set up most of them up (except for the parallel zip
drive). Except for the scanner. It can't be made to work without
purchasing a commercial driver - at least I haven't found any way to
make it work. I've read of people getting partial success, using sane -
but none of the suggestions have worked for me. I'm not complaining, I
just scan in windows. I bought the scanner before I started using
Linux. When I need to replace it, I'll buy one that I'm sure will be
supported.
>>>> How about web browsing?
>>>> I used konqueror which I found out sucks.
>>>
>>> Another lie. Konqueror is very feature rich, and if you are running
>>> KDE, it's no system hog, running light on the resources and is very
>>> peppy. That's why Apple chose it to base their Safari web browser on.
>>>
>>>
>> I personally don't like Konq all that much. It's great for browsing man
>> pages and stuff - but I prefer firefox.
>
> Matter of preferences I suppose.
>
>
Yeah, this is subjective.
>>>> So I tried firefox. I quickly discovered that browsing was so slow it
>>>> was pathetic. A little research showed I needed to turn off IPV6.
>>>
>>> Firefox, while not as peppy as Konqueror, is certainly a nice web
>>> browser, and while light on features, they are easy to add-on. And
>>> while I used it I certainly didn't find that *browsing* was slow.
>>>
>>>
>> It seems fine for me on Gentoo. Of course, I disabled IPV6 on
>> everything. I have no use for it.
>>
>>
>>>> Funny, I didn't have to do that with Windows. Same firefox and it
>>>> works great with Windows.
>>>
>>> Uh, yeah, sure.
>>>
>>>
>> Liam - I know you aren't going to believe this. I'm sure you'll call me
>> a liar - but I'm going to say it anyway... Firefox works much, much
>> better on XP then it does on Linux - at least in my experience.
>
> I can't possibly imagine how.
1. It crashes on Linux, not often but every couple of days it will just
disappear. I have never once had it crash on XP, and I'm running it on
at least 5 XP installations. I suppose this could be a result of the
compiler optimizations I have set... Hmmm, maybe I'll try and emerge it
again with slightly toned down optimizations (not that I have them set
wild or anything - but this has been known to help with other packages).
2. It loads faster on XP. It also seems to render somewhat faster - but
that could be my imagination.
3. It doesn't have all the strange input anomolies on XP (like not
gaining focus on an alt-tab, grabbing on to the mouse sometimes when
crossing a text field, refusing to give up focus on an alt-tab, etc).
All of the above have gotten much better since I installed the final 1.0
release, but the still persist.
>>
>>>> I also noticed that I could not play CD's until I created a /mnt
>>>> directory in which xmms would mount my audio cds.
>>>
>>> Funny how I've never had to do that. Ever. I've never once had to
>>> *mount* an audio CD to play it.
>>>
>>>
>> I didn't have to create the mount point either, mostly because I already
>> had created a /mnt/cdrom for other uses. But, I did have to tell xmms
>> about it. I'm on Gentoo, so I expect this sort of thing - but I would
>> immagine that SuSE would set this up in the default installation?
>
> Likely, did on my older version of SuSE before I switched back to
> Mandrake. And on Mandrake I never had any problem with audio. Just put
> them in, and they work. DVD works similarly, didn't have to tinker with
> mountpoints or other garbage, just put them in and they work.
>
I did to use xine - but, again, I'm on gentoo so you sometimes have to
do this stuff. I would expect that commercial or more user oriented
distro's would be more automated about this. I don't know, because I
never used one long enough to care. I won't lie, I wasn't impressed by
my brief stint with SuSE, Mandrake wouldn't install properly, Lycoris
fsckd my system (thank goodnes for Knoppix), and Red Hat 7.2 and 9.0 were
so pathetically slow that I gave up on them. Gentoo has been the only
distro I've tried were I've been able to get everything I wanted to work
(except scanner) to work and wasn't slow compared to XP on the same hardware.
I know you won't believe that, but that has been my experience. I'm not
trying to knock linux here, just relating my personal experience so far.
>
>> <snip>
>>
>>>> I tried Openoffice, which seems to take an eternity to load even on a
>>>> P4 machine.
>>>> What a dog!!
>>>> It seems to work ok once it loads.
>>>
>>> Certainly not slow here, but then Open Office is now considered tightly
>>> integrated into GNOME, and I run GNOME....so it has much more pep than
>>> if I was running KDE as my DE.
>>>
>>>
>> Hmmm... It doesn't seem to load any faster in Gnome for me - that's why
>> for general word processing I've switched to Abiword. OO is just to
>> slow - I still use it to open office documents on Linux though. Besides,
>> I thought OO2 was going to integrate into both KDE and Gnome natively.
>
>
> Hmmm, maybe the newer OO is just faster than the old one I was using
> before...but it certainly seems to work better in GNOME than KDE though.
> Maybe it's my imagination.
>
I don't know what version your using, but I'm on 1.1.4 I believe...
Don't get me wrong, there was significant improvement from 1.0 to 1.1,
but it still loads slowly compared to Abiword.
>
>> By the way... Do you really like Gnome?
>
> Yeah. I was using SuSE 8.2 (which didn't include GNOME and I wasn't going
> to go to the hassle, especially given my prior experience) before
> switching back to Mandrake which I had used before, and my experience on
> Mandrake had been entirely pre-2.0 GNOME. Coming back to Mandrake (10.1) I
> gave it a try and....it's nice.
>
I guess I'm a little soured on Gnome... It won't stop displaying my
KDE desktop icons and it does it some ugly icon. When I delete them
from gnome, it deletes them in KDE. Basically, they don't seem to play
nice on the same system - well, at least Gnome doesn't seem to play nice
with KDE.
Gnome though looks nice...
>> Have you tried xfce4? Why do
>> you choose Gnome over something like xfce? I'm just curious.
>
>
> Mainly tried it out again because it was included in Mandrake 10.1 and
> when I saw it I instantly though, "woah, this looks rather Mac like..."
> And the more I've played around with it the more I like it. It's very
> polished, very smooth.
I like xfce because, it looks like Gnome (it's GTK based) and can use
the Gnome themes. But it seems to load faster and actually have a
little more configurability. I could be wrong, but I always find
something wrong with Gnome that pisses me off. Of course, desktop
environemnt preferences is another one of those subjective things...
-- Tom Shelton
- Next message: houghi: "Re: Linux and viruses, worms, etc (newbie)"
- Previous message: Michael Soibelman: "Re: Dvorak Online: Killing Linux?"
- In reply to: Liam Slider: "Re: Why I dumped Linux and Went Back to Windows."
- Next in thread: Liam Slider: "Re: Why I dumped Linux and Went Back to Windows."
- Reply: Liam Slider: "Re: Why I dumped Linux and Went Back to Windows."
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