13 thoughts on “Comparing Software Installation”

  1. Heh. Think of installing Windoze aps as a kind of trial by fire. After that hell, you’re ready for anything.

    Though seriously I was startled to find out how easy it was to install things with Ubuntu. The first time I looked at Synaptic Package Manager I was all like, “aaregh! Too hard!” Then I decided for reals I wanted to install something, and it was so easy. The scariest-easy thing, though, was when I decided to try xfce. All I did was click on the link in the help files where it said “install the program” and suddenly there is was, installing. I was all “oh noes, what did I do” but then it was installed and working, easy as pie.

  2. I’ve never been able to get get Linux to work on my computers though. If it wasn’t the video card it was the wifi, or the power button wouldn’t work. Always something. There’s a whole tutorial on the Ubuntu webpage for my model of laptop on just the hacks necessary to get it semi-working. Say what you will, but Windows “just works.”

    And even Mac has morebetter apps than Linux.

  3. Internet Hearts is automatically installed with many of the latest Windows OS. Although, the point could have still be made, without the sensationalism, by pointing out how difficult it is to install or remove the Windows version of Internet Hearts.

    Certainly, one can go try and find a freeware version of a Hearts game and deal with the pain of freeware.

  4. we always knew that one was much more difficult than the other.

    Barriers to entry are what make it “elite,” after all.

  5. The one thing that vexes me about my Linux netbook is, I have the latest version of Flash installed, but try telling Youtube or Google Street View that. I can’t use either site.

    Well, that and, the last time I traveled with the netbook it couldn’t find the same hotel wifi network that my wife’s Vista — VISTA!!! — laptop found and connected to on the fly.

  7. I posted comment on there: Now show me the screenshot comparisons for installing a wireless network adapter driver on a Dell Latitude D600 notebook.

    I got it to work in Ubuntu eventually. I don’t know exactly what it was that I did to make it work though. After about 20 different things I copied from the Ubuntu forums and pasted into terminal window. The wireless configuration dialogs are junk. You have to use iwconfig after installing ndiswrapper and installing the compatible version of whichever emulated driver that cooperates with everything.

    Dual monitors? Hope you love hacking into xorg.conf. Output to TV? Good luck.

  8. McGehee Says:
    June 3rd, 2009 at 8:23 am

    “The one thing that vexes me about my Linux netbook is, I have the latest version of Flash installed, but try telling Youtube or Google Street View that. I can’t use either site.”

    I think you have to use

    sudo apt-get install libflashsupport

    I might be wrong, that is just off top of my head. I think that fixed a no sound issue in Youtube under Ubuntu. Wget might be your appropriate command versus app-get.

  9. It’s a proto Easy Peasy distro based on Ubuntu, specifically for the Eee. In fact the very next release by the flavor’s makers bears the name Easy Peasy instead of Ubuntu-Eee or whatever it was, and I don’t seem to be able to get hold of the new one by normal channels.

    Josh, I’ll look into that advice, but what’s happening with Youtube isn’t as simple as “no sound.” is that Firefox is showing all Youtube videos as “removed” even though they’re perfectly accessible to Firefox in both XP and Vista. Google Street View puts up a message stating “You must have at least Flash 8.” IIRC (I’m on my XP machine right now) the latest Flash version for Linux is something like 10.

    I certainly will make sure I have libflashsupport, but ISTR that was one of the things I saw I do have when I was trying to troubleshoot this, but that was through the package manager. I’ll look into trying wget instead.

  10. Josh, it’s odd you had the problem with dual monitors. It worked for me out of the box at work, with twin Dell 19″ monitors and a stock Ubuntu installation.

    But anyway, I think the whole comparison is a bit weird. Windows certainly works much better if you order the hardware plus OS as one complete system from a vendor, who, working with MS, bears the entire burden of making sure everything plays together well, so you receive your setup and just push the ON button, bang, you’re done. For a turnkey solution, you definitely want to go Windows.

    On the other hand, if you want to do something odd, not mainstream, or you want to use old hardware, or you want your system to gracefully degrade as it gets older and older, then Linux is far and away the better solution. Try maintaining 10 year old hardware with a Windows solution! Blech. Far easier with Linux.

    Another important metric for some people (e.g. me) is robustness, both security-wise and flaky application wise, and here the difference is strongly on the side of the serious OS derived from big iron. My kids use Windows machines so they can play games, and they just get gronked routinely with spyware, malware, and the like, so I have to reinstall the OS (or spend endless hours tending it carefully). But I can let them log into my Ubuntu laptop and do whatever the hell they want, because it’s flat-out impossible for them to damage the OS, screw with vital services, or even read or touch my files.

    I also appreciate the fact that I can start some large computation — say, a simulation, or a digital rendering — and then feel free to fire up Firefox and visit some horrible web page that interacts unfortunately with Firefox’s half-assed memory model and crashes the Web browser, because the ironclad memory model enforced by Unix means no bad app can bring down another application, or the OS itself.

    The other metric for me is a good network model, and here again Linux shines. I never worry about remembering to bring USB drives or whatnot from home to work and back again, because if I forget something I can ssh in from either place, get the file, run an app and have it display on the other machine, or whatever I like. The transparency of the network is unsurpassed.

    But all of these things simply point to the Diffrent Folks Diffrent Strokes model. There are excellent reasons to prefer Windows, if you have different needs.

  11. Josh, as it turns out I did not have libflashsupport after all, but now that I do Street View says I need Flash 9 or better.

    App-get came back “command not found” and wget came back 404.

  12. Now it turns out I was confused by Josh’s having typed “app-get” and “apt-get” in different places. Apt-get seems to be trying to work.

    Also, I did find a way to upgrade to Easy Peasy 1.1, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. Didn’t fix my Flash problem yet though.

  13. Y’know, Carl, I can do all that with Windows XP as well. Sure, I can leave Firefox pointed to a site that sucks memory (from here it seems to be related to extensive javascript use on a page). After a while, XP tells me it’s enlarging virtual memory, and things still work. Sort of.

    But that’s really a Firefox issue, not a Windows issue, since I can kill my browser, fire it back up, and the resource/memory issue is gone.

    I’ll point out here that the last BSOD I saw was an upgrade from Win95 to Win98, and it was a driver problem which I introduced.

    As for “flat out impossible to … damage the OS” try “rm -rf /” What? You need root access to do that? That’s the difference between design and implementation. Agreed that MS made a terrible decision to allow root (“administrator”) access for the new install/first user of the system, but that isn’t an indictment of Windows, but of MicroSoft’s implementation of Windows. There are at least a few “easy to use” Linux distros that fell into the same trap. Lindows/Linspire comes to mind.

    As for the remark that Windows works better/best as a turnkey system, I’ll say that I’ve been building white box systems for myself since the 80286 was state of the art. I’ve gone from CP/M, to Compaq MS-DOS 2.11, thru DOS 3.x (skipped 4.x) to MS-DOS 5.0. I used Desqview/QEMM on 386/486 systems since it provided the pre-emptive multitasking that Windows lacked until ’95. I’ve upgraded from ’95, to ’98, to SE; played with Win2000, and have used XP extensively since it came out. I have yet to encounter an install or upgrade which failed because of the OS.

    Same drill for “old” hardware. I’m running a fairly ancient MSI KT4 Ultra over here, with an AMD Athlon 2600+ and a Radeon 8500. Absolutely no problems with Windows drivers.

    Now, let’s talk about removable drives, and all the voodoo Linux users used to implement just to plug in a Zip drive, CD/RW, or USB drive. Maybe, now, most major distros feature a painless automount. That didn’t used to be the case.

    Same thing for dependencies while trying to install new applications, although Ubuntu and SuSE made terrific advances in that respect. Now, maybe, every major flavor of Linux has completely pain-free install methods. You know, the same way MS-Windows has for, well, years.

    While we’re at it, let’s not use your kids ignorance while “get[ing] gronked routinely with spyware, malware, and the like” when gee, gosh, I never ever have those problems! But then, I’m an adult who knows how to maintain his hardware and software.

    That said, I still think Linux is a magnificent operating system. It just gets on my nerves when Linuxi-lovers get all weird trying to prove how much “Windoze” SUCKS. Yeah, it must SUCK real bad to still have over 90% of the market. Despite all the huffing and posturing, Linux has pretty much failed as an end-user platform.

    With one exception, which isn’t. Sort of. That’s Apple’s OS X, which is really FreeBSD-based, instead of Linux-based.

    Most of the Linuxi are equivalent to the geeks in high school who sneer at the jocks and social types, because they don’t know who Fermi is, or how to develop proofs for probability & statistics. The jocks and social types, on the other hand, don’t really care about that, any more than they care about the details of electronics or thermodynamics. They want their car to start when they turn the key; they want the CD to play when they insert the disc, and what else matters? (just like Windows) Really? Who cares if Betamax is better than VHS?

    The classy social types will get an Apple, but that’s due more to style than analysis for most of them.

    Folks like me are fairly agnostic. We’re the plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, and car repairmen. The geeks and the jocks ignored us in school ‘cuz we were all in auto shop or woodworking. 🙂 We don’t give a fat rat’s buttocks about who made the tool, whether it’s a Buck knife or a Stanley. We’re not going to beat up on a Black & Decker tool just because a Craftsman tools is “better.”

    So, yeah, I’ll push back against the zealots who drone on (and on, and on….) about how much better Linux is than Windows, but can’t explain why Linux still hasn’t penetrated the end-user (AKA most normal human beings using a computer) market. On the other hand, I’ll push back against Windows zealots who think that holding 99% of the gaming market is a sign of superiority, instead of vulnerability.

    And I’ll keep saying that OS X is what Linux wishes it could be…

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