steve uurtamo wrote: >> That's the real problem with Windows. I need a double boot, place >> the OS on a FAT32 partition and have a copy of every file + an >> image of the installed partition. Every day I fight against the >> operating system I have paid for and if the OS doesn't let me >> change it the nice way I have to do it the hard way. If I was >> starting now, I would be a Linux user. >> > > There's another way, and it's not too bad, depending upon how > often you want to switch operating systems. > > Get a second drive. > This is my recommendation for anyone wanting to switch as a way to transition away from windows. Earlier I mentioned that I bought a laptop for my wife. I also bought a very compact external 160 GB USB drive. It fits in my shirt pocket. I installed linux on that drive. Now I have a laptop that is totally unchanged for windows, but if I plug the USB drive and boot, it comes up in linux. I rarely ever actually use the laptop but when we go on trips my wife likes to shop and I don't, so I could stay at the hotel (or sometimes in the car) and hack away happily.
The drive of course also works on my desktop machine, so I am considering to leave it plugged in to my desktop, and put the home directory on that drive. It's probably not as fast as my SATA drive on the desktop, but that is just not an issue. In this way I would actually have the same environment on BOTH machines (but not at the same time.) Since both machines are core 2 duo's and both have the same version of linux installed, it would pretty convenient. The hard drive on my desktop could become a backup of everything in /home. As a bonus I can access the windows partitions and I use this to backup things my wife wants to preserve. I don't know if I can write to her drive, but I don't care about that. Of course the external drive is not readable from windows but I have heard there are drivers for that, but I don't really care about that either. > I have been burnt by windows more times than I care to have > been (twice), so I decided to do the safest thing possible -- > I don't even cross the streams. I just separate the OSes onto > physically distinct drives, and in my case on different controller > types, which makes it super-easy to switch between them. > In my opinion that is the best way. It's no longer painful to switch to Linux because almost every application you could ever want has a high quality Linux equivalent that is usually already part of the distribution (you don't have to buy it.) There is no problem reading and writing Microsoft office files which are commonly seen in email attachments. And it's very rare to buy a piece of hardware that doesn't work in linux. There is a movement to get away from Office and the proprietary formats that it entails, I hope that takes hold but even if it doesn't you can read and write doc files and the other office formats. If it's all about buying commercial software and that's mainly what you are in to, then Linux is probably not your best choice. No matter what OS you choose, you will gain something and lose something in the trade. It's a matter of what is important to you and for some people it's a matter of personal freedom, with MS you always feel a little locked in, constrained and controlled. For instance you don't really own your copy of the OS like you do a book you might buy, you basically lease it. A friend of mine recently switched over to Linux because as he puts it, "I'm tired of buying the OS over and over again" which basically you do every time you buy a new computer. Linux users are upset because it's difficult to even buy a computer without paying Microsoft. Unix people call this the "microsoft tax." Only once was I able to buy a computer without MS pre-installed. The retailer always told me it was "free" and came as part of the computer, but of course that is nonsense, they have to pay MS for the OS and it's just built into the price. They were slapped on the wrist at one time for this, but as you see it didn't really stick. Those are the kind of reasons that I don't even want to deal with them. I no longer buy machines from retailers, I have to build my own just to bypass the Microsoft tax. That is grossly unfair because they report number of sales which include all the computers that people buy with MS on it, but then immediately reformat the hard drive to install a more serious OS and I refuse to pay them or support them. In the case of the laptop, not a problem. It was an honest purchase, not coerced. > Yes, you can modify the boot loader on the main (windows) drive > so that it recognizes the second drive, but I do something even > less error-prone -- I just swap which drive is considered the boot > drive in my BIOS at boot time. This takes about 2 seconds and > does the obvious thing that I want -- if I'm spending weeks in > FreeBSD, I don't have to do a thing until for some crazy reason > I want to switch back to windows (usually to play a game of some > kind, or to use some esoteric feature of my peripherals that > nobody has bothered to reverse-engineer yet). > > Most windows-esque tasks are handleable in a modern unix > system: abiword and openoffice do a reasonable job at emulating > word and office, respectively (and openoffice is about as bloated > a chunk of code as you might expect as a result) can read and > save files from/into the relevant formats, and have about the > same ease/unease of use. Gimp is a reasonable clone of > photoshop, although if you're a serious designer you already > have a mac and over $1200 worth of adobe software and are > doing it the right way. > > Open office has the further advantage of using an "open" and not proprietary standard. Unfortunately, MS has convinced most non technical people that their proprietary format is "standard." So if you send someone a document in the open format, they will complain, "why didn't you just send me a 'regular' file." Microsoft has indicated that they will support this format too, but they haven't. They have absolutely no reason to until it actually starts causing users enough trouble that they will switch. By the way, a nearby office in my town upgraded all their computers and the owners got quite upset when I told them they could have downloaded open office for free. They shelled out hundreds of dollars to get office on all the computers. One of the owners downloaded it for their own home upgrade and commented that it would have been perfect for their usage. Microsoft is treading on thin Ice. What they will WANT to do, and what is typical of them, is to make some incompatible changes to the format to nullify open office, but on the other hand this will cause their users trouble and could backfire, so this is a conundrum for them. The same with VISTA, it's my understanding that their original plan was to charge a yearly fee for using VISTA, but they have a real fear of Linux which is gaining momentum (although slowly) but they didn't want to push their luck too much. This would clearly be the straw that would break the camels back for many Windows users. This could be a rumor so don't quote me, but I read this somewhere and I did not check the source or accuracy of it. > There isn't, and this is actually a fortunate thing, yet any way to > use unix without at some point needing to use a command-line > tool. This is what will keep it out of the hands of consumers for > a long time to come, but I think that it's an inherent fact of a > secure operating system. > To me this is what a computer is all about. You cannot dumb it down too much without it just being a cool toy, which is what it is to most users. For instance you cannot write a program without an editor, which is only one step removed from the command line. Early editors were basically command line driven as you can see with VI, or edlin in dos. And I agree with you. Linux probably is too sophisticated for every user, but recent developments (such as the creation of open office) has dumbed down the interface so that grandpa can use it too. But even though grandpa might be able to use Linux now, I cannot deny that Microsoft is better suited for non-sophisticated users. When non-technical friends ask me what to buy, I don't sales pitch linux, I give them the brutal facts. I tell them enough for them to make an informed choice. Adventurous types go for Linux, but most people are conservative and will take the "safe" route because frankly new users are motivated very strongly by fear of the unknown. > Anything that runs in the same way that vmware runs is pretty > cool, although I'm not aware of anything mature and free that > does the same thing as well as it does (i'm sure that someone will > correct me on this point.) If the company you work for will pay for > it, just tell them that you need a copy to get work done. As of a few > years ago, it was working really well (vmware, that is -- the tactic is > timeless). > > The reason that NetBSD is so good is for a similar reason to the > reason that you like Windows95. It is tiny. Extremely tiny. Moreso, > I've not tried BSD yet, perhaps I will give it a go. > it will run on just about any hardware that you can still get to power > up. Unfortunately, it comes with just enough tools to *compile* > everything that you need to use it. So it's a fantastic way to learn > about unix, but not practical for people who want something that > has, say, a beautiful looking window system with knobs to control > everything about their operating system right out of the box (not > having these things is a good thing in my mind, though). > I think of windows computers more as "appliances" that every home has, but in reality this is an artificial distinction. Even though I personally don't like windows as an OS, my real beef is with MIcrosoft and their predatory practices. Usually, when you write about this someone will respond in defense and admiration of MS, the same kind of respect accorded to the mafia in my opinion, admiration for their strength and power and "they are just doing what everyone else would do if they could" type of argument. Kind of a ugly justification for being the head bully. Those arguments make me sad to hear. There is a school of thought that Linux is being ruined by the continued trend to look and feel more and more like windows. This doesn't bother me a bit. Like I say, I don't have a beef with Windows as an OS, other than my general opinion that there are superior alternatives - it's still an OS and let's you access the power of the CPU which is what it is all about anyway. I'm not a fanatical OS purist. I would switch away from Linux in the blink of an eye if something significantly superior (with reasonable support and price) came along. I would even pay for it if I felt it was an "honest" transaction. People sometimes argue that buying MS is an honest transaction, but only in the strictest sense, even if you know exactly what you are getting into. For instance, if you were dying of thirst in a dessert you would probably buy a glass of water for a million dollars if you had a million dollars. But it would be far from an "honest" transaction in my opinion although it might be considered "fair and honest" to the strictest capitalist sense. > The reason that it isn't practical for most people is because you're > going to need to compile that window system, and there will be a > large and painfully recursive tree of dependencies that will need to > be compiled first. If you enjoy this kind of one-time masochism in the > pursuit of knowledge, then it's well worth your time. > As I get older, I am less interested in this kind of experience. I'm not the type that is happy taking my computer apart, installing and removing hardware, spending hours monkeying around with installations and setup and configuration files. Some people eat that up. I am competent enough to do all of these things pretty well, but I derive much more joy building software. > Linux is starting to be a good compromise for most folks, and ubuntu > is pretty popular these days, but I still think that FreeBSD > has the best compromise between features and kernel sanity for > someone moderately comfortable with unix. > I may very well play with this, I have a computer free for experimentation. I am not a big fan of featuritis and I use ubuntu because it's no hassle, but I don't think I would miss the fancy features too much. > I've seem windows users semi-easily switch to ubuntu without regret > or too much of a learning curve, but they will eventually find something > that doesn't work and/or is extremely difficult to do without using > windows. It's just an issue of compromise -- people are so used to > rebooting their broken operating systems that they've forgotten > that it's not something that you're supposed to have to do! Unix > boxes can brag about 10+ year uptimes, for crying out loud. > Except ubuntu updates are frequent enough that sooner or later a kernel change update requires a reboot. If it were not for that, my computer (which is UPS backed) would would have been up for about 10 months (we had a half day power outage almost a year ago and I shut it down.) At this moment it's only been up for 31 days but it's my understanding that windows machines require a reboot just to install software. It's also amazing when you watch windows people (like my wife.) Whenever ANYTHING goes wrong, they immediately reboot as a fix. This is like standard operating procedure and it's like it's programmed into every windows user and it's not even considered "wrong" or ugly. And amazingly the reboot almost always fixes the problem. I heard that if you boot up windows 98 and don't touch it, it will crash in a few days. Is that true? It's some kind of counter overflow. None of these things inspire any confidence, but windows users happily accept these situations. - Don > s. > _______________________________________________ > computer-go mailing list > computer-go@computer-go.org > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ > > _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
