you will go back to windows , now i believe fair is fair ,ok.

so a lot of ppl keep saying linux is better and stuff, so i tried linux : mandriva , mandriva powerpack , ubuntu 7.04 , ubuntu 8.04, linux xp 2006 , linux xp 2008 , and mandrake sumting , Knoppix 5.3.. and also debian .

now in comparison to xp and even vista this open source distro two main advantages (1) no need for an AV (2) GUI was really cool .... and thats where it stops !!

Linux have proven to me to be the most unstable OS i have ever used !! And , to top it off the simplest thing u need to buss yuh brain to get done e.g intenet radio , youtube etc.. the closest thing to a go distro ive used so far is ubuntu 8.04 the freeset of them all .. All the rest is either my video drivers stop working , or sum random lockups or some DOS type mode that i cant use

Is it just me or do any of you guys get problems with your linux distro's

NOTE : ive used these on 3 different pc's over the yrs !!

I have both Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows XP Professional installed on my laptop. I almost always use Windows as that is what I'm used to. However, when I need an eye-candy fix or when I feel like using the CLI I hop over to linux, as it's purty (totally beats vista. sorry.) and has an infinitely better command line environment. If you aren't used to using the command line, then linux might be a bit more intimidating. The thing about linux is that, despite what its hard-core fans claim, it's still not entirely designed for the average user. There is a certain amount of stuff that isn't obvious from the start, and you need to be willing to get your hands dirty every once in a while. I had a heck of a time getting my wireless card to work, but that was more Broadcom's fault than Ubuntu's. My wifi card uses proprietary drivers and a proprietary firmware loaded by the driver, which means that there's no open source driver for it. You end up having to use some strange method to use the windows driver in linux. In the end it works, but it's kind of a pain. Installing things like flash take more effort than they should, but some things are much easier to install, thanks to the easy package managers, such as apt-get for the command line and synaptics for the gui.

I haven't seen these stability issues you report, but it will vary from computer to computer. Linux in general can't be that unstable, since a large percentage of the web is hosted by linux servers running apache. A computer whose developers didn't make drivers for linux (or didn't make specs available for OSS developers to write their own drivers) is less likely to be stable than one whose developers are cooperative with the open source crowd. Dell is relatively linux-friendly, which may be why I don't have many problems. Intel is also fairly linux-friendly, and having an intel chipset, graphics and processor means that everything works more or less OK. I don't know much about AMD, it may work better or worse for them.

So I guess the bottom line is that if you're happy with Windows, stick with it. If you're happy with linux, stick with it. And if you're unsure about what you like, try them both out and use what works best for you.

i can relate !!
i find ubuntu 8.04 to be quite good actually , the only time this gave me problem is when i open a backdoor for udates i think it was ..... and to imagines ubuntu is free and is working better than linux xp and mandriva powerpack .. SHAME !!

I completely disagree on all but point 2. I don't use an AV on Windows either -- a little common sense goes a VERY long way. Linux has a LOT of advantages over Windows, but not needing a AV isn't really a big point at all.


Like any OS, the OS can only be as stable as the drivers for it. I've had extremely stable linux boxes before (intel chipset, intel video, etc), and very unstable ones...


I had no issues with those, but if you want a list of unnecessarily complicated things that are trivial in windows, I can elaborate.


8.04 was a step back from 7.10 as far as I'm concerned. Things worked a LOT better in the previous one, and I'm hardly the only one saying that.


Eye candy wise, Compiz Fusion truly puts Vista's Aero Glass stuff to shame. "Totally beats" is a HUGE understatement here. Aero Glass isn't really pretty (I kind of dislike it actually), doesn't really have much useful features (5% of what Compiz Fusion has perhaps?), isn't very customizable, etc.


Not true at all. People keep repeating that a lot, but it's just not the case. People usually say that merely because they don't know about the countless command line utils Windows has (e.g. net, netsh, wmic, reg, sc, tasklist, taskkill, icacls, takeown, diskpart, netstat, fsutil, mklink, powercfg, etc), mainly because they're used to click around for everything. The very few extra command line utils Linux has by default can mostly be added to Windows too (e.g. sed). And with PowerShell, Windows just might have the lead. I'll grant you that Windows badly needs a built-in SSH daemon though (CopSSH works fine for that).


Servers not even running any kind of GUI or anything, on very plain (and high quality) hardware means very little in terms of how stable a desktop is going to work, with a full GUI, so-so drivers for fancy sound & video cards and all that. Apples and oranges.

Besides, I think you (D_block) fail to bring up any of the most important issues that actually makes Linux a pain, like the totally screwed-up sound system on linux (over a dozen different systems, none of which really works great). A picture is worth a thousand words:

Ubuntu 8.04 switched from alsa to pulse audio, and that made things quite horrible as far as I'm concerned.

This post has been edited by crahak: Aug 3 2008, 08:13 PM

i dont like to make long threads !!

As i stated b4 " I " this is lil problems i was getting ... i just reinstalled ubuntu 8.04 here and having a lil better idea of how to handle this distro , i got everything working up to mark ... not bad at all

The point is , i can handle my self pretty well on a windows system, now imagine standard users who just want to browse and check mail an click pretty flashy banners that spam windows ( unknowingly to them ) using the simplest linux distro . As i remember Xp was built so a 4 yr old can operate it , who can guess the age on linux



how much other ppl use your pc either in your presence or not !! when you are the only user for your machine its different from when anone can use it

This post has been edited by D_block: Aug 3 2008, 08:41 PM

Then you were lucky or something. 8.04 is quite bad compared even to its predecessor.

I've had issues with grub (not finding ntldr or bootmgr on some NTFS partitions, complaining about disk geometry sometimes, etc), having to wget the source for alsa-driver & alsa-lib & alsa-util, decompress them, compile them, copy them over, chmod them, and then editing the alsa-base config file by hand, trying values one by one and rebooting hoping it works, and also unmuting the IEC 958 from alsa mixer in a terminal to even have sound working (all it takes in windows is checking one checkbox to get working over spdif), to having audio working only half the time (yay for pulse audio), various lockups (yay for aiglx) and heavy flickering on games (like supertux), ACPI not working as as good as it did in the previous version (which was already working worse than in XP).

A lot of the new stuff in 8.04 sucks compared to 7.10. The network manager is quite bad, the update manager saying its up to date when sometimes it isn't, they removed the tools to create network shares from the default install (install nautilus-share, then reboot, and to change workgroup name, you again have to edit the samba config file by hand), the most interesting features of compiz fusion aren't enabled by default and the app to configure it isn't installed by default either, still having to edit the x.org config file by hand (fun!) to have a nice resolution on the login screen and such, having to make use of apps like autocutsel for copy/paste in VNC to work at all between windows and linux boxes, wireless sucks (they've gotten rid of some drivers for worse ones, and it has several bugs and issues with keys), etc.

The distro upgrade likes to break a lot of things too (it broke my perfectly good openldap install, and it tends to break things like apache if it's not running). And some of the choices they made weren't so great at the time it came out, like the choice of a beta web browser (Fx 3) for which almost no extension worked (nevermind Flash crashing a lot)...

I could go on... And that's ignoring the fact it won't run Windows apps in the first place (no need to mention WINE). Since none of this is an issue on Windows, so you can guess what OS we use. I really want the Compiz Fusion eye candy and all that, but it's just not worth the time and hassle to try to get everything working, and then have it break again with the next distro upgrade. Windows "Just Works™"

As for the AV thing, my daughters had several PCs so far, and they've always been using it as local admins, without an AV and all that. No firewall either. And so far, the total virus count is of zero, and as for the spyware, also zero. The thing is:

1. they're not using IE
2. the box is patched
3. they're not blindly running any old .exe from strange places

And that's really all it takes. People who can't manage to handle point #3 on their own should have their admin rights revoked, to protect them from themselves.

Although you are right that windows has many command line tools that people are not used to using (although I have used most of those tools before), linux still feels more "natural" when it comes to the command prompt (or as they call it, the terminal). In windows (well, at least NT variants of windows), there is always some GUI there. You cannot boot Windows XP into single-user mode and get a root prompt and nothing else. The closest it comes to is Safe mode with command prompt, which still loads the GUI, just loads cmd.exe as the shell instead of explorer.exe. Also, the terminal itself feels much smoother. In GUI mode, the terminal supports copying and pasting with keyboard shortcuts (cmd.exe you can copy but there's no shortcut to paste), there are tabs, tab-completion works much better, etc. I have yet to learn PowerShell, so maybe I'll take some of this back if/when I do, but compared to linux's terminal, cmd.exe isn't very good. There are plenty of utilities for windows, but the way in which you interact with the utilities is what makes the difference.

It is true that one doesn't expressly need AV for windows, although just due to the massively larger quantity of viruses for Windows, it makes more sense to have it for windows than for linux. I have AV installed because for one, my friends send me programs they write and such which are not always as benign as they claim (we have contests to see who can pwn whose computer...) and my brothers use it, and they don't have as good of discretion when it comes to what websites to visit, etc. Not running as an admin all the time helps a lot, I have found.

So I guess I'd say linux is for some people and not for everyone. It's not 100% ready for wide-spread mainstream use, but it's getting there. And for a GUI-less server it rocks.

ATI gpu? I had my fun with that.


I really wish windows had a "one thing to rule them all" package/update manager ala APT, RPM ... you name it.


I still dont get why they had to push PULSE into 8.04. Ok, its not really a big deal to set up 2 config files by copying values from a wiki to get ALSA apps working again (skype...). But for a windows user that knows nothing more than point and click it can be an annoyance, however digging into the registry with regedit.exe is even as much of an annoyance.

That about sums it up yeah.


How did you guess? Yep, ATI x800 card...


Yeah, definitely. And even if it didn't have some kind of central repository to install apps in the first place (install, and it'll ask for serial/license on first run if required), an updater that would work for all your apps (not just Microsoft apps) would be a great start for sure. Updating all your software in 2 clicks is definitely nice.

to demistyfy the myths abt linux read my sig.
as u can see windows != Linux
the wat's the point in saying i can do somting easily in windows but not in linux

wen opting for an os u must learn how it works (at least tha basics)

Actually linux is not for so called noobs (atleast nw ubuntu and other few distros making it possible) its an enthusiast OS,

Actually, Linux is mainly for linux geeks and also for n00bs: n00bs do little more than web browsing and checking email, so it'll do those things just as good as any other platform really (it just costs less -- mind you most n00bs buy Dells or such, which already come with Windows, so no money saved there).

The people it isn't so much for, is everyone in-between both extremes i.e. power users and such. Everything you know about Windows (it's architecture, memory management, where stuff is at, etc) is irrelevant. All the administration/maintenance/deployment stuff you know is useless. All your debugging techniques? Useless. All them l33t commands and tricks you know don't work there. The hundreds of scripts (vbscript, jscript, powershell, autoit, etc) and batch files you wrote don't work. All your own windows apps don't work (and often aren't portable, or not easily at least), and the dev tools/toolchain is drastically different, and your knowledge of the Win32 API or the .NET framework is also useless (yes, I know about mono).

Basically, everything you know about computers, that you spent the last 20 years or so to learn (a LOT of hard work), all of a sudden is completely irrelevant and entirely useless. Yes, just re-learn EVERYTHING from scratch, but the Linux way instead (not that it will do you any good when you're working on Windows, which is still 99% of the time or so). Hopefully it doesn't take you 20 years to get there again! I know I can make anything I want happen on Windows quite easily, whereas when I boot on Linux, I suddenly become a n00b (feels like it anyhow), struggling to make stuff work (google, read man pages, mess with config files, etc). When something doesn't work, then I'm just SOL e.g. your Linux box crashes hard. Alright, just enable minidumps errrr wait! None of those, and no WinDbg! What do I do now? -- You know that feeling? Advanced & power users go from feeling confident and being able to do almost anything, to feeling nearly desperate/helpless at times, and struggling to make some basic stuff work. Can't say it's not frustrating.

Plus, non-n00bs tend to use more than just IE, and this is where Linux fails hard: the lack of any equivalents to most commercial apps, and where there are any apps to do a job, the "equivalents" are often pale imitations (no, OOo isn't MS Office, and that "The GIMP" junk surely isn't Photoshop!) They may cost less, but in most cases they also SUCK HARD. Support is another issue.

P.S. That "article" in your sig about Vista is plain wrong and has been thoroughly debunked.

This post has been edited by crahak: Aug 5 2008, 08:21 PM

Agreed there....I've tried Linux three times, ran back to Windows on all of them (latest Ubuntu 7.03 I think) for their poor quality. Numerous reasons, but all proved to either flaky parts of the OS or stupid problems that should never be (not being able to run certain "Linux" programs).

The sound drivers are a perfect illustration of why it's so bad...the weakness of open source development is illustrated well in Linux, and most of the other applications that are not tightly controlled. You have a bunch of developers, each going in their own direction. There's always the fear of not reining them in, because they are volunteers and might bolt. You end up with a complete mess which may or may not work together. And no one willing to upset the others to do what is right. For example, the sound driver platforms need to be cleaned up and standardized, as well as most of Linux past the kernel. Yet no one will standardize because of the very nature of OSS - it means some work gets tossed on the scrap heap where it belongs.

Most of what plagues Linux and will make it so it will never become a viable platform is exactly because it is OSS:
Agreed standardization needs to happen, and all efforts need to focus on making those parts work. When Linux isn't Linux (i.e. apps that work on one distro but not another), there's a problem. And beyond that, OSS development happens at the pleasure of the developers, not the market - there are no market forces (i.e. sales, profit considerations) at hand, so there is no effort or willingness to improve. Basically you get the OSS developers programming to suit themselves, and much worse, you get a bunch of religious zealots that believe that their software could never have failures (the first time I had Slackware blow out my CD-R's flash ROM and they claimed that "it could never happen" - I know full well it did because it DOA'ed the drive and flashing the ROM on it fixed it).

OSS is a complete failure as a software development process for most part in creating software and supporting it to high standards, and that is illustrated in Linux - you will never get a competitive product of high quality out of Linux, or other similarly developed OSS software where groups of people are involved. Why? The buck stops nowhere with them - no command or control.

Indeed.

Something sucks (e.g. a sou