First, I want to note that I agree with the spirit of this story. I use Linux. I like Linux. But I don't think Linux is ready for just anybody to sit down and install it, so I'm going to play a little Devil's Advocate (and if ever there were a fitting moniker for the major opponent here, this is certainly it! ;). > I find it intersting that everyone seems to go out of their way to note > "how complicated" Linux is. I personally haven't heard this from that many people, but I generally am around computer-savvy people, so I wouldn't. But, are these people wrong? Isn't Linux more complicated? One of the great things about Linux is that it is so open to customization. This is inherently more complicated than an OS like Windows, which greatly limits your ability to customize the interface. Sure, you can get distros of Linux which set up with barely any input from the user, but to modify that setup if it's not just what you need is certainly no simpler than it is in Windows, in the best of cases. (And no, it's no more *complex* to perform interface changes by editing a text file than it is to use graphical tools in either Linux or Windows, but the graphical interface, at least if well-designed, *is* more *intuitive* for people who don't live and breathe computer code. > She designs web sites and uses photoshop so she had to have windows > which cost me more than the PC. I decided > on win98 cause I'm just not ready for XP. No argument here. Product activation is the worst idea Microsoft has had in a long time, if not the worst ever. (And *that* is really saying something...) > When I installed windows I had to install drivers for both the graphics > card and the ethernet card. > It certainly wasn't automatic. And I suppose the graphics card and ethernet card models existed when Win98 was released, so that Win98 should have had the exact drivers for them.... > Windows got its registry screwed up > because of an attached zip > drive so it couldn't locate the drivers. (It was looking in the wrong > place) I'm certain any windows > "newbie" would not have known what to do. The ethernet card had > separate folders for each winOS > so windows couldn't find those either. Sounds like extremely cheap ethernet card. IMO, any network card worth having has a driver disk with root level .inf files so Windows installs for them are the next thing to painless. > Windows never even suggested I > might want to set up my > network connection although IE tried to help me set up a dial connection > even though I have no modem. > Silly me, how could I be so stupid about clicking the wrong option. First, Win98 was a home-user targeted OS from ~4 years ago, and network cards in home computers were not the norm. I agree the Internet Connection Wizard, particularly in its early forms, was at best an extreme annoyance to anyone who knows anything about networking. However, it sounds like someone was in a bit too big of a hurry, and a little too conceited to read what was on the screen before clicking the wrong button. > And in the end my new 1.4 gig cpu > was running like a pentium 66. Finally discoverd that a sound mixer > application was being started > automatically and was hogging all the system resources. I just end task > on boot cause I haven't bothered > to find out where windows buried the startup for it. And was that sound mixer a *Microsoft* *Windows* product, or some cheap 3rd party software that didn't include well-tested drivers and software? Windows 98, to the best of my knowledge, never had any kind of mixer beyond the very basic one that you get from the Multimedia Accessories (or by double-clicking the speaker in the taskbar). Linux isn't always a walk in the park when it comes to driver issues, either. The difference and benefit with Linux is that anyone has some way to address poor drivers, through modifying the ones that don't work or by writing new ones. However, Microsoft and Windows should not be blamed because some third party company didn't write decent drivers or include bug-free software. I'm all for beating on Microsoft's faults, but I'd rather not create them where they don't exist. > I still have't got > the CD player to work under windows. > Guess I never will. Though you don't have many details, this sounds to me more like a hardware glitch than a software, i.e. Windows, issue. Assuming the CD player works with Linux, it seems probably that checking that master and slave jumpers are set absolutely correctly, since an older OS like Win98, might not play so nice as the shiny new Redhat 7.2. > As for Linux. It did ask me to verify my mouse and keyboard and monitor > and video card. I suppose > those extra four clicks were a tremendous nusance. Now you're getting petty. > I also had to fill > in an IP address, gateway, and > DNS address.This is a toughone since I had to get it from the network > admin (that's me). Hmmm. What if you weren't the network admin? What if you didn't know what an IP address, gateway, or DNS address was, and furthermore, didn't care to know? Many people don't. I don't get along well with those people well either, but Lord knows there are a lot of them out there. And while Windows' method to deal with this, by assigning a random address from private IP address space, isn't exactly ideal, it is a method which gives a *lot* of people what they want, in that when they reboot because the Internet didn't work, and the DHCP server that wasn't responding before now is, so that the Internet works, and all they had to do was reboot, and they still don't know or care what an IP address, gateway, or DNS server is. > I also had > to enter that pesky root password. Typing its not so bad but you got > to think one up. Too many old > fashions and you may never know what you ended up with. Then they gave > me this incredible array of > CHOICES. workstation, server, laptop, custom. Whats a custom anyway? > And of course I had to > insert a second CD and click OK. The nerve of those people giving me > more stuff than they can fit on > a single CD. This is a lot more pettiness. I don't disagree that typing a password is not a big deal. All of my systems require passwords, and I live alone, with absolutely no reason to need or want a password on my desktop. Yet I set up computers for non-technical users all the time, and the question is always, "Why do I need a password?" And, since these aren't kids, I don't really feel right telling them, "Because I say so," when there really is no good reason I could give them for why they need a password. Thus, I usually end up setting up their Windows to login automatically on boot, whether through TweakUI or via the Passwords control panel. And sure, it's nice to get a lot of extra software on the CDs, but if you don't know the first thing about using any of it, and aren't interested in learning it (*many* people are not) then what is the use? > So I went off to wrap some presents and before I can get > back my son, he's 8, wants to > know what the password is so he can check out the new games. So I go > back to wrapping presents. > He plays the games. And if it doesn't run the latest and greatest games that you can buy at Best Buy, how happy are most people going to be with it? I for one will not be getting rid of my Windows box any time soon, even though I would really like to, for exactly this reason. The games shipped with Linux are fun, sure, but they don't compete head to head with commercially-available ones. > Of course I skipped the part about the four hours I spent trying to get > the partition table set up correctly > so both windows and Linux were satisfied. But that is the point. Linux > gets tough when you try to do > things windows won't allow you to do. Try installing windows over > Linux for a dual boot system. > Hope you don't waste too much of your time. 4 hours to set up the partition table for a clean install. Sounds like someone's wasting his time, all right. Agreed (and stated near the beginning of this e-mail in a slightly different way) that Linux is tougher to use when doing things that Windows doesn't allow. As for installing Windows over Linux for dual-boot, just make sure you have the Linux boot disk you created during that extremely simple Linux install process (you *did* create it, didn't you). Boot to the Win98 boot disk, run fdisk and create a primary partition (assuming you left space for it during the Linux install, and only if you don't already have a FAT partition in place), reboot, run format c:, run setup and install Windows. Reboot to your Linux rescue disk, and run lilo. Not that much pain, but gee, you have to know what you're doing...where have we heard of that being necessary when doing things Windows users don't usually do? > Oh and I almost forgot. Linux never asked me to type in that 5000 digit > license code. What a relief? No one's arguing against the benefits of free code. I'll just point out that many commercial Linux programs (not that there are all that many, comparatively) also require a license code not less than 5000 digits long. So, now that I have undoubtedly done the equivalent of casting 8th level wizard spell "Incendiary Cloud" upon myself, I just want to make one more point before countering with 3rd level "Protection from Fire".... I am a Linux user. I am proud to be a Linux user. But not when other people who profess themselves to be advocates to the unconverted take it upon themselves to whine and cry about how unfair everyone is towards Linux, just because they had a bad experience installing a 4 year old Windows operating system on brand-spanking new (and quite frequently cheap, in the most negative sense of the word) hardware, and then comparing that to a wonderful experience installing a brand spanking new Linux OS on that same system, and saying how much better Linux is because of it. Frankly, I'm glad you posted this to *this* list, because virtually all of the people here know what Linux is and is not, and won't be put off by the unprofessional, childlike whining. If all that effort went into the development of better tools for Linux, the whining would still be going on, but it would be a decidely different group of people doing it. Okay. I'm done. Have at me, y'all. I fully expect to be burned to a crisp, despite the Protection from Fire spell....it only lasts for a few rounds, you know. *Sincerely,* Dan Churchill