Maybe One Day Linux will be OK...rant

[LeanPudLou]

OK...I'll give Linux a go.
Purchase SUSE 9.1 Pro for a hundred bucks. Everything seems ok ...at first.
But I can't burn CD's because of some legal crap going on. Same with Nvida FX video card (legal crap so no drivers-must use generic 2D). Printer works (but scanner won't). Get on the net and find that my cable connection is slower than dial-up. YAST will update but always reports "conflicts". And the list of problems goes on and on until...give-up, boot windows. Sell SUSE on Ebay.
But...what the heck. I'll try other Distros. Download to date: Slackware 10.1,
Ubunto, Kubunto, Mephis, Xandros, Knoppix, Mandrake, Fedora 3. And NONE of them will work properly on my machine (Athlon xp, ASUS MB, etc...pretty much a standard up-to-date clone). Windows XP...no problems at all (except that XP doesn't like NERO 6 ultra...but that's ok...I burn MP3's with Windows 2K pro and NERO with no problems).
And the poor souls on all of the Linux Forums are begging for help (me included). Bill Gates probably enjoys looking at Linuxquestions.org ---what a scream!
Heck...It took me three days of asking the same question over and over and getting esoteric/ incomplete -off the wall- answer(s) to find out how to install FireFox on SUSE.
Man!...I don't have time for this. I have a Contractor/Carpentry business to run...Linux is a hassle. I have neither the time, nor the inclination, to spend hours-days-weeks-months-----years trying to find out how to get Linux to work on my machine.
Maybe one day Linux will be able to compete with windows....but not yet.
OH...and BTW...Linspire doesn't work on my standard clone either.
So...it's Windows XP for now.

[jlreich]

Sorry to hear your Linux experience was not good. If you don't have the time or inclination to learn and deal with the problems of Linux, then it is not for you. And that's OK. It is not for everyone.

I have the inclination, but not that much time. I have SuSe and Mandrake on a second HDD, but don't have that time right now to mess with it that much, but I do when I find the time. Still haven't been able to get Java installed properly on either one.

Linux is definitely not plug and play. But if you do learn how to deal with it, it is worth the effort.

[pop pop]

I wonder where Pave is right now?

It certainly sounds as though you've given it a fair try. Linux will test your patience. For me it's like a relationship with an ex that you just can't quite give up on--love/hate. You love something about her too much to give up completely but you hate things about her too much to devote yourself full time.

I've gone through several distros too (guess the women analogy holds there too). I've settled on dual booting with Mandrake. It seems I've overcome most of the issues you describe. I can print, network, internet is fast, program installations (Firefox) are not an issue, I use the OpenOffice suite, updates on all but the Mandrake 10.2 beta 2 go fine ... just about everything is OK. Well, to be honest, I haven't tried burning CDs but with the plethora of free stuff out there if there was a problem with the resident burning app I don't see how I couldn't get it done. Graphics drivers? Well, we're kind of screwed there if you are nVidea based. As far as I know they haven't open sourced and have no plans to do so. However, the driver installed by default for my nVidea card works tolerably.

Linux has come a long way. It has a long way to go but I'm amazed at how good it is now and I'm just glad there is an alternative to the dominatrix Windoze. You can stay with her if you want. As Billy Joel said in one of his songs, "She'll promise you more than the Garden of Eden. Then carelessly cut you and laugh while you're bleedin'".

Me...I'd rather have some strange and exciting...at least once in a while.

[malcore]

The pains of Linux can be many. The boon and bane of open source is choice. With more choice there comes greater customization and refined power, but there also comes greater confusion and coarser support. So many different distros, so many different install/update methods, Yast, rpm, portage, apt-get,different x-servers and desktop environments, etc, etc.

I have tried many of the distributions also. I don't have a favourite, but I do think Debian and apt-get is a much simpler and smarter way to help ease the change from Windows to Linux.

I now recommend, hands down, for first time users to go with the most recent release of Simply Mepis (3.3). Based on Debian it is a 690MB ISO download. With the iso, one creates a bootable "live-cd", which can be easily installed to the hard drive by clicking on a desktop icon labelled "Install Me". Can't get much easier than that.

I just put it on a box for someone (AthlonXP, nForce board, Radeon graphics, Audigy2 sound, TV-Tuner card, SATA drive, DVD, DVD R/RW). Everything worked from the start, sound, video, internet, burning, dvds, printing, networking, even TV!! Comes with all the usual KDE apps, plus Open Office, Firefox and a few extras. Can easily add/remove programs due to the beauty of Debian's apt-get system.

There isn't a distro available right now that comes as close to plug and play as Mepis. Try Mepis again, and once installed, use apt-get in either Synaptic or KPackage and head to the Mepis apt- pool and update to the latest Kernel and meauto files. Great improvement on hardware detection.

I still use Mepis as one of my distros, and am watching its development closely, as I feel this is one distro that has finally started to really move Linux towards becoming a more viable alternative to the average user.

http://www.mepis.org/node/1462

[jlreich]

I wonder where Pave is right now?

Military, little over a month ago.

Mepis, cool. Adding it to my library right now. Thanks Malcore.

[LeanPudLou]

Okay MalCore...I'll give Mephis a go...
I really do want to get away from Windows and, as you said, Linux has come a long way...and I agree that a lot of companies refuse to provide Linux drivers for their hardware.
I believe that if THAT happened, then a lot of non-technical computer users (like me...I'm a carpenter) would drop Windows immediately.
I'm still a little hot about the ninety bucks I spent on SUSE.

[Paleo Pete]

LINUX is NOT for eveybody...

We have always tried to make sure people realize that, even/especially when they ask us about how to get started. Personally, I think Linux is great, I'm using Mandrake and have tried SUSE and Knoppix along with a couple of small distros in the 50MB range like Feather Linux. I use the small distros sometimes for removing stubborn files on windows machines too. When it's set Read Only even in Safe Mode and you still can't change it, Knoppix or Feather will access and delete the file, at least on FAT32 systems. I'll be really glad when they get Linux to write NTFS...

I'm almost entirely switched over to Mandrake for my primary machine, scanner and webcam are about the only two things that won't work. some hardware companies are very sluggish about writing Linux drivers or releasing information sp others can, so that hardware has limited support. Otherwise, it works great. Install it, get it running right, never touch it again...no BSOD, no illegal operation errors or invalid page faults, if an application locks up, kill it and restart it, no need to reboot. I've left this machine running for 3 months without a reboot and without any problems.

If you had trouble getting that many distributions to run Linux I'm wondering about BIOS settings...I always set BIOS to NO PnP Operating System, usually all default settings otherwise, that lets BIOS assign hardware resources instead of the OS. AGP Aperture I always leave at 64MB, and I don't even think about tweaking memory settings. Very little you do in BIOS will improve performance much to begin with, but I don't tinker with BIOS settings on a Linux machine, it usually seems to run great set at defaults and the no PnP OS enabled. Also watch what services are loaded at startup, many are not needed and some can open up security issues like Webmin.

I'm also wondering if you used automatic installations for all those or if you tried a few manual (expert) installs. I always use the Expert option so I can specify partition sizes and what apps want to have available.

In general, Linux is not for everybody, it might simply not be your cup of tea. But if you ever do/did get it running right, it's solid and stable as it gets, once up and running it's mostly trouble free and low maintanence. And outperforms anything M$ ever built...right now I have two web browsers open, 7 tabs on one and 5 or so on the other, a download manager, image viewer, system monitor, file browser, small game, couple of small toolbar goodies like Moonphase running, it's using 366 out of 384MB memory (a third of that is cache and buffer) and 6.3MB swap file, CPU sitting dead on zero. Check your XP resources with just one application open, I've never seen smaller than 35MB used for a swap file and usually it's hogging all the RAM you can throw at it. Most of the machines I work on the CPU idles at 3-9%, rarely ever dropping to zero for more than second or two.

You may not care for Linux, but from your comments it looks like you certainly gave it a fair chance, a lot of people won't bother with it any further than one flaky install. My first Mandrake install took 4 or 5 tries before I got it running and stable. If you decide at some time you'd like to give it another try, do some reading first, especially on partitioning and installing whatever distribution you want to try out. I read up on it for over a month before trying to actually install Mandrake 8.1...and still had problems...

[pop pop]

Just FYI, this is not a hijack....

Tried Mepis 3.3 last night and had a major problem. I burned the iso and all seemed well but the thing begins the boot, has all kinds of trouble (I'm at work, don't recall the errors). Eventually declares itself unstable and the screen goes fuzzy...can only power down. Maybe the download or iso burn got corrupted.

I'll try again. Such is the nature of Linux.

[malcore]

Always check your MD5Sum and verify your burn. Same thing happened to me with a download of Ubuntu, corrupt d/l or bad burn. Never had a problem with Mepis like that and have tried it on many, many system configurations.

I agree with a lot of what Pete said about Linux not being everyone's cup of tea. It can certainly cause brain pain at times. When it works, it works, but not entirely without its own brand of quirks.

As for memory, CPU, and page file usage in XP, I have never seen an XP machine in an idle state constantly using 3%-9% unless infected with malware or infected with bloatware such as Symantec's offerings. On this XP machine, I can open exactly what Pete has open and my cpu idles at 0% also. I have also had this machine on for over a month, no crashes, no problems.

Comparing the swap file usage of Linux to the page file usage of XP is really comparing apples and oranges. Very different beasts. Even if one completely removes the page file in XP (ie, sets it to none or 0), XP will still report the page file being used. And yes, XP will use as much memory as it can.

"Windows will always try to find some use for all of RAM — even a trivial one. If nothing else it will retain code of programs in RAM after they exit, in case they are needed again. Anything left over will be used to cache further files — just in case they are needed. But these uses will be dropped instantly should some other use come along. Thus there should rarely be any significant amount of RAM ‘free’. That term is a misnomer — it ought to be ‘RAM for which Windows can currently find no possible use’. The adage is: ‘Free RAM is wasted RAM’. Programs that purport to ‘manage’ or ‘free up’ RAM are pandering to a delusion that only such ‘Free’ RAM is available for fresh uses. That is not true, and these programs often result in reduced performance and may result in run-away growth of the page file." -source: http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php
RAM usage in XP is a deeply misunderstood area.

That said, I have a gig of RAM on this machine, 780 MB free, or 780MB of RAM "which Windows can find no use for". My page file usage is at 154MB, but because Windows' page file is so different than the swap file of Linux, it is NOT the same as Linux using 154MB of the swap. Apples and oranges.

Linux is great, yes. Great because it is so darn customizable and so darn free. I do not feel it is that much more stable than a properly configured 2k/XP machine. Both OSes can give headaches, but the causes are very different.

[pave_spectre]

I wonder where Pave is right now?

I'm a little slow on the keeping up these days, little under a month to go here.

For now all I have time for is to add my agreement that Linux isn't for everyone however much I might like it to be. A lot more people would use it if they had the patience to find the right distro that suited them IMHO, but that can take up a lot of time.

I switched to Linux for everything except the rare game that i will never like have time for after this and never looked back. Chances are,I won't be going back to windows ever.

Patience is the key.

[pop pop]

Pave, nice to hear from you! The Linux section has just not been the same.

How's your military experience so far? Patience is the key there too. Just like with Linux, you have to work at it. If you do, you'll get back much more than you put in.

I have to disagree with you on one thing:

the rare game that i will never like have time for after this

There will be time for fun.

[yawningdog]

Couple of questions, LeanPudLou.

Did you try using Linux for any of the things it is good for? Did you build a web server? How about an FTP server? Did you maybe use it to proxy your internet? Set up your access list? You know you never see a windows machine set up to secure a Linux/Unix network, but you almost always need to secure your windows domain with something other than M$. While you had it running, did you do any IDS with it? Maybe scan your network for open and/or exploitable ports and holes? And to top them all, why on earth did you lay out a hundred bones for something you could have downloaded for free, especially when it is clear that you had absolutely no need for it?

I bought a new car last month. I had heard a lot of good things about backhoes, but that doesn't mean I bought one to drive back and forth to work. And even if I had, I wouldn't write into a forum that it sucked because I didn't know how to drive it, and got only esoteric/incomplete, off-the-wall help from the folks who normally drive those things.

You're not ready for Linux. Stick with windows.