Recently, I stumbled upon a this article, and from there went on to reading this, and I thought, how about giving Linux another try.
I installed debian on a spare 30 GB partition on my notebook, just to try it out; turns out all my complaints from previous endeavours (Ubuntu 9.04, Fedora, Mandrake) are now void. Anything I need is available and works, flawlessly even:

• wireless

• internet connection through my cellphone

• firefox with all my favourite plugins

• netbeans (with C/C++, java, and php platforms)

• mysql, php, apache, and the whole unix stack

• mercurial (for my newer projects) and subversion (for the older ones that I'm too lazy to migrate)

• connecting to the VPN at work and RDP-ing into my development workstation (running vista :-P)

• standby

I don't have Visual Studio, obviously, but I don't use it much for personal projects anyway.

And apparently, even my US122L audio interface is now supported, although I haven't tried it out yet.

Except a few minor roadblocks, everything went surprisingly smooth.

As a result, I hardly ever boot into windows now - I think I may have spent about 15 minutes in windows grand total during the last two weeks. Windows feels very dirty now, and at work, I get frustrated more easily when Vista decides it is time to have me waiting... again.

What laptop do you have?

What about your graphics driver? Did you have to risk installing nvidias junk and have that awful feeling when you cant boot into your OS. I had that happen on fedora and could not figure out a way to "unblacklist" my nouveau driver, hence could not start my OS. I reinstalled everything just for kicks, yay!

I was liking xubuntu^[1] up to the point where some random update to some random package destroyed /etc/sudoers without prior warning. I fucking love linux.

I tried to update to fedora 13 and during the installation the whole thing stalled and became unresponsive. I tried to reboot, the OS went nogo at the last screen so I tried fsck which ruined my directories even further, so I lost all my data (no backups) and reinstalled fedora 13. I didnt lose anything important though.

I'm going the other way. I just popped into the Salvation Army looking for an old monitor, they didn't have any, but they did have an old computer with a floppy drive and no USB ports. The lady said it was $6, so I bought it. Upon getting it home, it turns out I should have looked harder, as the keyboard connector is the huge kind from the '80's, and they had several keyboards for sale. Plugging the 1.7Gb hdd into the current computer revealed no games, no diaries or anything fun at all. Just a couple of abortive doc files, along with the knowledge that they used ICQ, AOL 6.0 and CompuServe. I didn't look at the hardware much, but the autoexec.bat says it's a SoundBlaster! Also, even if the rest of it is trash, I got a PCI ethernet card for $6, along with lots of screws and jumpers.

TL;DR I bought an old piece of shit for $6.

I've been using Ubuntu 10 ever since my NVIDIA RAID died on Windows. (Actually I think one of my drives is bad, because I get scary messages on boot-up with my Linux RAID.)

The only thing I miss from Windows is flawless Flash support, but Ubuntu's is good enough. Okay, I also miss MSVC, but I rarely write in C/C++, so I don't really care about that.

But for my world of non-stop !@#$#@!$ web development, Ubuntu is way nicer than Windows.

Ubuntu 10 has been my first positive experience with Linux. Up until now, some vital piece of hardware has never worked, but this time everything works perfectly. Plus, I think even my parents could use it as a home desktop system.

You might enjoy kdevelop4. I've loathed IDEs for a long time, but kdevelop4 is the first one I don't hate. It has some bugs, but nothing serious, it just makes the auto complete "intelicrap" stuff a little finicky sometimes. At most its a little annoying, but it works more often than not, and saves me a heck of a lot of typing.

Also welcome to the wonderful world of "Shit that just works"(tm) and Debian.

A piece of advice wrt debian though. Stay away from sid/unstable unless you want to fight with the package manager from time to time. Sometimes all you can do is wait for problems to sort themselves out, and others, you have to force remove a package you think you need, just to convince apt-get/aptitude to un-bork itself. (just install it again after the updates its trying to do)

I use linux on my desktop, however my room is so stifling this time of year I stay out as much as possible. I've had to install nvidia drivers and ALSA in the past, but the Fedora I use now has everything. I tried installing a network printer on the Windohs drive last summer but due to the heat, I was unsucessful. Fedora had no problems though. I would say its more tolerant of the environment, however Bug Buddy pops up often to tell me something crashed after startup. I never did figure out how to get my Palm Pilot working in Linux either.

So, how is ALGOL 68 treating you?

Well linux's power management stuff has gotten a LOT better than it used to. It has automatic cpu freq clocking support built in. On windows you usually need some stupid app like SpeedFan or what ever to get it working at all.

ALGOL doesn't come with the default install (for my favorite distro anyway). Just C, C++, Java, Python, Clisp, Jscript, several assemblers, on and on and on. How many of those come with the Windows installation disk again?

I'm now running Fedora 13 at j0rb (Windows 7 in a VM). It's lovely to have a real UNIX-like environment instead of Cygwin, which does a good enough job, but just isn't the same.

With Fedora at j0rb, I was able to get Allegro installed again (Allegro doesn't support Cygwin, AFAIK). That got me excited about Allegro 5 again so I reinstalled Fedora 13 at home. The x86 version is working much more smoothly than the amd64 version that I originally installed was. I don't know what the differences are performance-wise, but it's nice to just have a simpler system that everything works with.

I really like that Google and Adobe install their own YUM repositories so that you can install and update Google Chrome and the Flash player with little fuss. Everybody should do it that way (albeit, it's a little bit wasteful connecting to so many repositories everytime you search for software).

It seems games have been crashing more and more consistently in Windows, probably mostly due to overheating issues (or possibly my video card being defective), so I have little reason to spend time in Windows until I buy a replacement. Hopefully I can get some personal codez written in my time in Linux.

Does kdevelop4 support code refactoring (at least identifier renaming)? I use C::B right now and I lack this ability. Also the autocomplete is a little finicky as well. On the other hand I'm quite satisfied. I've also seen latest NetBeans and it looks they've managed to get rid of that horrid Java widget look so now it blends better with the environment. Something one can't say about KDE4 look, which looks amateur and uncanny in my opinion.

All in all I'm quite satisfied with Ubuntu 10.04 at the moment. Two thing still bug me:

• Suspend/hibernate issues - tree suspends in a row = need for a hard reset.

• ATI driver issues - OpenGL apps randomly kill driver which then takes whole system as a consequence. I was quite pleased to see it crash in the same manner even under Windows Vista during Call of Duty 2.

I use Fedora 12 and pretty much everything works. Except I can't update to Fedora 13 because apparently my /var partition is too small (the updater downloads a whole lot of stuff and then complains it requires 2 gigs on /var) and there's no way I can make it bigger! That's the last time I listen to linux gurus who say you should put everything on separate partitions!

I guess I'll have to download and burn the DVD. Or wait for Fedora 14...

I'd wait for 14. I remember netbeans giving me trouble just before I tried to upgrade 12->13 and I basically typed some command to skip them.

ORLY?

http://partedmagic.com/

I should have said there's no practical way for me to make it bigger the way my disk is organized. I'd have to move a lot of stuff around or do some weird voodoo magic or something...

Yes. And lots more. It has a pretty sophisticated C++ parser that it uses to tie things together. Tell it to rename a member, and it'll rename it everywhere.

Really? When was the last time you looked? Sure the first theme, the all black one was a bit odd, but the latest one is pretty.

If you're interested in figuring that out, you could look for bugs on your distro's bug tracker. The kernel guys are really good about fixing suspend issues (its a huge can of worms, almost every machine wants to do it slightly differently). Though it could be caused by using the closed source ATI video driver. could be. The only problem is the opensource radeon driver isn't as fast as the fglrx driver.

Parted will do all the work for you if you let it. Though I always feel antsy when doing a big parition move. what if the power went out in the middle? Fried disk layout.

I felt antsy between the time the old uninterruptible power supply died and the day I saved enough to buy a new one. Of course, disks themselves can fail, but that's possible anytime.

Yeah, I have a ups too, but its just for my server. Don't have one for my desktop, or media box.

I'll probably look into that, because that's the thing C::B lacks and it's one hell of a pain in the...

While I'm using Gnome for quite a long time I prefer to use Kate for large text editing and small programming projects. Besides I use Amarok and for my taste it doesn't look nice (it's also on the screenshots from kdevelop4). I can't tell exactly but the weird roundness of the boxes and buttons etc is what really bothers me. It's probably more irrational hence I say it's my opinion. Sure Gnome isn't really super, but even my Vista installation is switched to W2k look.

Yep, I know. Unfortunatelly I don't have time to fiddle with the kernel code. Anyway I know that it happened during transition from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 so I think a diff of the suspend code between kernels used in those respective distros could provide some clues.

Don't even tell me I hate that stupid driver, but I need it. I own Mobile Radeon HD3430, I need working 3D accel with GLSL1.1. Last time I checked the OSS radeon driver it was w/o 3D acceleration. At least judging from the inability to run desktop effects^[1] and framerate in glxgears.

I'm aware of the fact that the closed source driver could be source of various issues and hence I'm not whining on Linux forums. All in all it tends to lock up system on random occasions when some OpenGL application is running (kind of a fun to debug my semestral project...)

There are several choices to pick from for widget and window deco themes.

That must have been quite a while ago then. Netbeans has been looking pretty polished for the last few releases (I started using it at 6.4 IIRC, they're at 6.9 now). IMO, Netbeans does a much better job at autocomplete than other IDEs I've used (Visual Studio mainly); they seem to have sorted out the whole multithreaded thing quite thoroughly - everything that can run in the background does, and the IDE remains responsive all the time. There's autocomplete in everything, even PHP and SQL, and obviously a good "rename" function which highlights the word you're changing everywhere as you type the new name. It'll even rename Java class files for you when you rename the class itself.

Somehow I get the impression that the Ubuntu team includes new versions of things more aggressively than the debian folks with their two-distros-ahead scheme (you know, testing becomes unstable becomes stable). Ubuntu seems to have a more marketing-aligned agenda too; their logo is more polished and a lot of work goes into rebranding and extending the look-and-feel of the desktop. Which probably fits their mission of bringing linux to the masses.

That's one of the nice things about laptops. They have a UPS built-in, sorta kinda.

Some time ago I was thinking about switching to Mint (which is basically tweaked Ubuntu) or even to Debian. That was during 9.10 era - I have updated like month before 10.04 went out and I was getting really pissed by sudden influx of broken things even after five months from the release.

And bringing Linux to the masses, well that's one thing I'm not sure whether it's good or not. I think they should accept the difference and stop focusing it towards the average Joe crowd who thinks Windows is the computer and the big blue E is the Internet. But that's just my opinion and feel free to ignore it.

There's two sides to the story, as usual.
Obviously one can argue that the de facto monopoly that Microsoft still holds on the consumer desktop OS market is a bad thing, I won't even go into the long list of "why"s. The mere existence of a popular linux distribution aimed at non-technical end-users has proven to be an incentive for Microsoft to get their act together - I think there's a pattern to the Vista release, Ubuntu's rise in popularity, and the subsequent release of 7. A monopolist getting away with selling mediocre products at ridiculous prices is never a good thing.
However, thinking that Linux, or Open Source in general, has any kind of "obligation" is a common misconception. I hear people say things like "Linux should become more user-friendly", "The Linux folks should work on their marketing", etc. etc. This is nonsense, because the open source community is not a company and has no traditional commercial interests. Open source is seldom fuelled by philantropy, more often by a nonchalant "I don't care what happens with this code, I'm not making any money off it anyway" attitude or the more selfish "I have this code that solves my problem, if I open source it, others might help me improve it for free". Also, I'm pretty certain that ideology makes for bad software, because people think in terms of "Software should be like...", instead of "Wouldn't it be cool if my software could...", i.e., the pragmatic approach goes well with incremental software development, the only viable way of producing software in a decentralized, chaotically organized ad-hoc team.

Linux is not something or someone that should do things that you want it to do. If you want Linux to have better marketing or better usability then it's up to YOU to get it done. You either do it yourself or you pay someone to do it. Don't expect anyone else to do it just because you want them to.

I found Mint to be better. It's essentially ubuntu but with all the commercial stuff added like codecs, video drivers, etc.

I stopped using it when NetBeans failed miserably with the UI so switched back to Windows NetBeans, that and I code in c# nowadays

I think Mint switched back to being a debian based distro. Almost all of the Ubuntu derivatives have switched to Debian. Probably because even debian unstable tends to be more reliable, or less of a moving target than Ubuntu.

Probably has something to do with delay times too. Ubuntu only syncs from Debian sid on 6 month release schedules iirc, so after the release it will not generally pick up new/changed packages from debian, bug fixes only. And distros that sit on top of that, will just have to wait.

Somebody at work was playing with MeeGo and it looks quite bonny as a linux front-end for a kiddie.

Nope. EDIT: Or rather, there are thoughts of switching in the future. Anyway, how can you switch back when they were originally started from Ubuntu

I could only find two that did that, gNewSense and Eeebuntu. Hardly most. The former because their goals align closer to Debian's, and the latter because they want to make a rolling distribution.

Ah, sorry. I misunderstood their "About" page. I didn't read past the "a Debian based distro" and assumed that meant they switched.

I thought there was only a few distros based on ubuntu anyhow, at least ones that aren't just the same distro with a new theme pre packaged.

Yeah... while I was looking them up, I found quite a large number of dead ones. I think a few new ones are popping up from time to time though.

The point is that Linux doesn't need any market share, because it isn't competing. That's what a lot of people just don't get. When you download and install a linux distro, nobody is getting any richer (in fact, since bandwidth isn't free, people are actually losing money), and the world isn't getting any better because of it. The reason they provide it for you anyway is that they hope that their software will attract a large user base, and within that user base, people who submit useful bug reports and people who are able to fix bugs or otherwise enhance the code.

Well, I'll just say from my experience Fedora has been ok, on par with XP but a little more generic and I might move over to Ubantu because there are too many bugs with fedora. And no I don't submit those bugs to fedora because of the difficulty in setting up the error reports.

That's how they all start out, look at RedHat...

Every so often I get some new version of Linux to try out to see how things have progressed. I currently have Ubuntu 10 running on VirtualBox. — Things have definitely progressed... it's a decent OS. But there are stacks of little things that I dislike about it. The general theme of my complaints would be that the UI needs more polish, and the bottom line is that if I was to buy another computer tomorrow I'd still buy a copy of Windows 7 to go with it. I think it's worth the money.

I find that Windows is only worth having because I have to have it for both games (sadly, many indy games as well) and Microsoft Office (since Open Office can't open all Microsoft Office documents correctly and I have to open certain documents that originate from other people...)

I happen to like windows 7 too. Or at least I don't hate it. But I don't think its worth the $300 or whatever they charge for the retail copy of Pro or Ultimate. NOT WORTH IT.

And before you suggest going the OEM route, MS changed their EULA with w7. You're not technically allowed to use an OEM copy for yourself. According to the agreement, you have to be installing it on a machine you are selling to someone else.

That said, I don't even think its really worth the $150 they want for the OEM copy $50-$80 maybe. $100 would be my absolute limit.

If it were $50, I'd go out and buy a couple copies right now

Just go OEM. I can guarantee they aren't going to do anything to you.

And from anything I've heard, they only removed the text that explicitly allows home builders to use it. I don't see anything prohibiting you from using it yourself - you are the system builder, and (most importantly) you are the one providing support for it, not Microsoft.

And anyway, since when do people read and follow the EULA?

Well that sucks. I guess that means my copy of Windows isn't as legit as I thought. Please don't tell Microsoft.

(actually, I bought my computer from one place an my OEM version of Windows from a different place, so I suspect it was shady right from the start. I was under the impression that they weren't meant to sell OEM Windows to me unless I was buying a computer from them...)

Anyway, when I said it was worth it, the OEM price was the price I had in mind. I'd probably still buy the full price version if I had to, but somewhat begrudgingly.

And since when was not following an agreement you made a good idea?

Does this sound retarded to anyone else?

It made me laugh.

The limitation in XP times was that you had to be buying it WITH a new computer you're building for it. Except that legally all you needed to do was buy ONE component with it. Most times a store would include a mouse or keyboard with it and it'd be legit.

While I do find these limitations retarded, it doesn't mean I shouldn't follow them.

I suppose you read and follow every EULA to the letter then?

The point is, nobody is going to care if you use an OEM license yourself. At all. Unless you're selling them without providing support or something like that.

If I bothered reading them I would try.

As it is, I try and not do things that are against any agreement I have knowingly made.

The point is its against the contract you made with Microsoft, and that is litigable.

If you wish to take the risk, especially for a business, that is up to you.

Certainly. When I make an agreement, I intend to keep to it. But when someone offers me a retarded agreement, I'm likely to not agree at all and look for alternatives.

The main reason for me to have even tried linux was my first desktop computer came with a preinstalled OEM copy of windows 95. I upgraded the motherboard and harddrive and the install disk would no longer work.

So I told MS to take a long walk off a short pier.

The whole activation process usually takes me longer than installing a basic linux system from scratch.
Hell, even booting into Vista for the first time probably took longer than downloading and installing my current debian system.

There's a few different ways of looking at the Windows 7 OEM license:

• Do what Microsoft wants: buy a retail license if you build your own PC. They explicitly state that's what you should do.

  
  

• Do what the license says: it simply states you must sell the hardware to a "third party" (without defining what that means) and provide support. So if you wanted to be legal, sell the PC to your cat. Note that Microsoft says outside of the license that it must be an "unrelated" party, but they cannot make up new, legally binding terms outside of the OEM license.

  
  

• Do what you feel is morally acceptable and not going to get you into any trouble whatsoever: buy the OEM for yourself and happily use it.

If you were running a business and you wanted to purchase OEM software, what you'd do is set up a sub-company that handled the tech support.

A cat is not a person, legally speaking.

Enough of one for the court to allow people to make pets beneficiaries of wills.

Microsoft doesn't care enough to check if the person installing (err, opening the packaging of) Windows OEM is old enough to enter a legally binding contract, so I don't think they would mind much about the cat.

This whole discussion is silly anyway, because they aren't going to care if you buy OEM for personal use. It is just another lame argument against the use of Windows. If you were going to actually purchase and use it, you'd just grab an OEM license and be done with it.

If they didn't care, it wouldn't be in the EULA. Period.

http://oem.microsoft.com/script/contentpage.aspx?pageid=563841

Again, that last line isn't necessarily legally binding as it doesn't exist in the license.

So they definitely care, because the retail version makes them more money.

Now are they going to do anything about somebody building himself a PC? No. But it's not because they don't care... it's because it's not worth it and impossible to police. (They do, of course, perform business audits.)

By "don't care" I was meaning that they aren't going to bother trying to prosecute you or not activate your copy of Windows. I've transferred OEM copies of Vista and 7 between machines without issue as well. It required a phone call in both cases - Vista required me to talk to someone and just tell them I wanted to transfer it (and then they activated it), and Windows 7 had an automated system that asked me how many machines it was currently installed on, then activated it for me.

By "don't care" you basically mean that Microsoft doesn't consider it economically feasible to assign an agent to personally moniter every individuals' actions. If you openly reveal yourself as violating their license you bet your ass they'll make an example of you.

Essentially, what you're saying is to violate their license terms because you are extremely unlikely to get caught, and even less likely to be taken to court, in which case you're basically paying $150 too much. You're just as illegitimate as if you had copied the software without expense in the first place, which makes paying the $150 about as intelligent as playing golf in a lightning storm with iron clubs.

I have a retail license for Windows 7 Ultimate, and it's purely for games. When I'm not playing games, I benefit absolutely nothing from Windows. A free Linux distribution provides me more reliable functionality and more features. I hope to never deem another Microsoft purchase relevant ever-a-fucking-gain.

Windows 7 Home Premium is about $100 at my local Best Buy. That's not much more than a new game. And Home Premium has been able to do everything I need it to do over the last year. All in all, it seems like a decent deal.

EDIT:

My point being, why go to trouble to get around the license? Just buy the durn thing.

My understanding is that if you get a computer with OEM software, then the person who sold you the computer (with the software) is meant to provide you with tech support. ie. Microsoft is not obliged to provide tech support for OEM software. Also, the OEM software is only to be used on the computer that it came with. Retail copies of Windows can be reused on different computers (but only on one computer at a time), whereas OEM Windows is not meant to be reused.

As far as I know, those two points are the main difference between the OEM licence and the retail licence. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) I think it's worth pointing out that both of those differences have the potential to save Microsoft some money — they don't have to provide support, and the software is meant to be repurchased for every new computer.

With that in mind, my interpretation of this:

Is that they don't want to recommend the supportless OEM software for do-it-yourself PC hobbyists; such a recommendation could later cause problems for Microsoft and for the hobbyists — so Microsoft recommend the retail software licenses instead.

No, they insist that doing anything else is illegal.

If I'm not mistaken, the retail version comes with something like three licenses, so you can have it on three computers at a time. Or at least it used to be this way.

However, what really pisses me off are the various versions of Windows 7. Apparently all features are installed, but only some are activated depending on your license. You have a Win 7 Home and want to use Win XP mode? Sorry sir, you have to pay more or shut the hell up...

My retail copy of Windows 7 Ultimate says "for use on one computer" on the side (IIRC, something like CAD$350).

Those versions are essentially to save the average broke consumer that isn't even likely to ever realize such a feature exists a little bit of money, which is more likely to result in a sale instead of piracy. For a computer professional, you might as well just accept that if you're going to buy a Windows license then you might as well get the entire package.

Bollocks. They exist because it allows them to sell the full version for a higher price.
What, you think Microsoft develops a simple version, then spends extra time and resources on making a professional version with more options? Of course they don't. You think they have #ifdef WINDOWS_PRO_ULTIMATE_GOLD_ENTERPRISE in their source code to disable certain options in the cheaper version? I bet you they don't even have that.
Now, having a simplified option for the average user, who would just get confused otherwise (fewer options = simpler = better) is probably a good thing. But it has nothing to do with saving the average consumer some money.

And I'm sure Microsoft gets very upset whenever one of those really broke and poor consumers pirates a copy of Windows instead of opting for a freely available alternative.

Thank you very much indeed, my desire is to spend 350$ (I just tried to convert the retail price here and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it actually makes 350USD) to get all the features that are already present in the Home edition but aren't active Gee, and I've always wondered why it consumes so much disk space...

Hell, I don't even have the intention to download Win 7 Ultimate from MSDN AA because I was ripped off when I bought a new laptop. I didn't want Windows Vista, and got them because the configuration I've wanted wasn't sold w/o an OS.

I could swear I saw retail Windows XP package that permitted installation on three computers.

EDIT:

Agreed. It's just a way of making more money from a complete product by blocking certain functionality and selling keys for these locks.

Like I said, Windows is only worthwhile for gaming right now, and only if you want to play modern games like the Half-Life and Call of Duty series'. And only if you aren't satisfied with playing said games on a game console. For computer professionals, Linux has so much more to offer, and most of it is free is every sense of the word (and I'm sure I don't need to tell you this).

AFAIK, Microsoft does sell volume licensing packages, which would allow you to install on multiple machines, but it's more expensive (maybe you save the $1 for packaging materials ).

Yep, that's what my Vista is for right now - a bootloader for games. Well, I have tested my semestral project there as well, but that doesn't count

What concerns me is whether or not the human race will still be making computers at all in say 200 years time given the way things are going with global warming.

...but then I do have a psychiatric diagnosis

If you're not going to use all the features of Windows, and only use it for games, why spend all that money on Ultimate? Just get Home Premium, it's all you need. Now if you have need for those extra features (meaning you will use it for more than just playing games), I can see spending that extra money (if you're in a position that you have to pay for Windows anyway).

Of course. The Vista I have are Home Basic, or how it's called. However, if I ever was to buy Windows 7, I'd really like to buy at least the Professional edition simply because of the Windows XP mode. It's a sort of virtual machine that provides environment for the program you want to run.

What programs do you want to run in XP mode?

So far I don't have any incentive of running anything on Windows. However, I want to be on the safe side for having the capability to run them. I would not really want to find myself in the situation that I'd need to run such a program and realise that I can't do it because I've bought stripped down version of extremely overpriced software. Mind you, even some 220$ or 230$ isn't really a price I'd like to pay.

Actually, they seem to get upset when you go for ANY alternative other than buying a retail copy of their OS, preferably Ultimate.

They've been known to claim that linux is illegal or imoral. When they couldn't prove it, they decided to help fund SCO's highly dubious legal battle.

Note: 90% of the people who would benifit from having XP mode have XP now (maybe even downgraded from Vista to XP because some software they want to run is broke with Vista)

If you're already running Vista, and everything you want to run on Windows works with Vista, then there's no point in getting XP mode.

With my made up stats, the other 10% don't need pro as they can just use this as they're most likely web developers.

Perhaps you are thinking of the Windows 7 "family pack" which let you upgrade three PCs for $149.99.

There are also various OEM 3-packs.

ML: that would probably be the case.

They even tried to somehow have it so that selling computers without windows would be illegal. Their reasoning went something like this:

• A computer needs an OS to function

• The only 'real' OS for the PC platform is Windows

• A user who buys a PC without buying Windows still needs an OS

• Hence, the user will use an illegal copy of windows

And in fact, seeing how hard it is to buy a complete consumer PC system without paying for the windows licence (as in, pick the system you really want, and see if you can get it any cheaper by demanding it without any OS installed), they practically succeeded.

Or perhaps there is simply not enough demand for systems without an OS to warrant the expense. The OEMs are free to sell bare metal systems... in fact, I think Dell has some such systems (or ones with Linux). If you're that upset about it and think that it's such a huge market segment, why don't you start your own company and sell cheaper computers to the world?

They are now. After MS was fined for anti-competitive practices.

Microsoft is in decline, don't worry about them anymore. Once they throw Ballmer out, they'll find they don't have anybody at least as treacherous good to replace him.

And I don't see anyone doing it. Smells like a money-pit product to me.

One of the reasons is places like Dell get paid to preload your system with crap. Even MS will discount the OS license if they preload Office Starter or that other thing, the one that you can't really use, except to purchase a license.

So they'd rather not sell a clean machine when they make money from putting crap on it.

Yeah, and recently I read the news that MS wants to compete against the Ipad now even though they're market isn't even related to Apples anymore and instead they compete more against adobe and oracle.

EDIT: and google.

IIRC, it's a 30 or 60 day trial. If you want office, you can either buy it at that point, use your existing license if you have one, or use one of the even crappier free alternatives

So if you think people really care that much, why don't you start selling clean systems then? With the exception of laptops, anyone who feels that strongly about the bundling is free to build their own system.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I bought this computer with no software at all — and bought Windows from somewhere else. It's not hard to buy a computer without an OS.

If you were to buy Windows, I'd recommend that you don't buy Ultimate for that reason. It's highly unlikely that you'd ever need to use XP mode, especially if you don't already have software that is XP exclusive. If it turns out that you do need XP mode or some other feature, then you can get the features you need using "Anytime Upgrade", so you don't need to buy the expensive version 'just in case'.

This computer I'm using now was built from parts based on BAF's suggestions.

Probably isn't running an OS based on my suggestion.

It does have XP on the first partition. I might have booted it 5 times or so since it was installed in January.

XP no longer carries my blessing. Upward and onward!

I haven't booted windows in 3 years now.

Hmm, maybe a few times on that old machine I had... Just for some really old data I still had lingering there... But I haven't actually done anything in Windows on a machine I own since I installed my first Ubuntu.

I still run windows vista on a laptop and windows ME on an old 64meg RAM HP that I keep around because it is the only box with a 9-pin serial port that I need to use as a serial terminal.

Also Having a 9x version of windows on that old box which now has a s3 virge dx in it allows me to test that things still run on a low spec box.

I run Windows XP in a virtual machine.

Or perhaps MS has been 'educating' the masses for decades now, to the effect that the average customer doesn't know any better than PC == windows, and that virtually all well-known (a.k.a. commercially or semi-commercially funded and thus advertised) software is written for the Windows platform. These things don't just wear off in a year or two, even when better or cheaper alternatives are available. People like what they're used to, so much that most consumers would prefer a mediocre windows full of bugs and security flaws over a (hypothetical) OS that is completely bug free, makes your computer twice as fast, costs nothing at all, but requires you to re-learn everything you know about computers.
I'm not saying Linux is better (it is for me, for most use cases). I'm not saying Microsoft must die either. What I'm saying is that some real competition in the OS market would be healthier (the short rise of linux-based netbooks and the increased popularity of Ubuntu already provided enough pressure for Microsoft to make sure 7 shipped fast and was substantially better than Vista), and that some of the things Microsoft did and does in terms of marketing and PR are morally wrong.

Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_win7_ws&num=1

But in the real world the windows machine would require some malware/antivirus engine running in the background too. If it was Mcafee's junk then you'd seen a huge difference there also.

Yeah, also phonix's benchmarks are crap. They mean less than nothing.

For once though they seem to show an edge for linux. probably because that test didn't do anything that tested the graphics. shitty as graphics drivers

Linux isn't faster for me because comparable code runs faster. It's faster because it allows me to optimize my workflow for developer performance, that is, it offers me more ways of automating myself. In windows, you never really get past the clicking; on *nix systems, virtually everything is scriptable, so no matter how complex things get or how many individual programs are involved, I can arrange things so that I can fire it with a single command.
Also, windows makes me wait. A lot. Not because it's inefficient in what it does, but because it does things it assumes I might need while in reality I don't.

Sometimes I think Ubuntu does that too.

But thats what Ubuntu is for.

Tobias, I'm interested to know what kind of scripts you find useful in *nix but can't do in Windows. I think it's widely agreed that *nix has a superior set of terminal commands, but I don't really miss that in Windows.

Some examples.

• I have a number of programming projects I work on, and most of them are under version control. The mercurial ones have copies on two machines and a backup on an external HDD. I have a script that pushes them all from one machine to the other and to the hdd.

• I have a few web projects on a shared host, with no shell access (just FTP). The local development versions use a slightly different folder structure, different configuration files, and contain a lot of files I don't want on the web server (version control files, unused graphics, code documentation, helper code like code generators, etc.). I have written a simple deployment script that prepares a 'publish' folder holding the web project in the exact structure I want on the web server, and then copies it through FTP. I have done the same in windows, sans the FTP upload, and then used filezilla to do the copying. It works, but it requires 4 extra actions (fire up filezilla, navigate to the correct folders, start transfer, quite filezilla), and manually navigating to the correct folders introduces a possible source of errors.

• To connect to my machine at work, I need to select the correct VPN settings, connect to the VPN, and then open an RDP session. When I'm done, I want the VPN connection to be closed and the VPN settings reset. Again, one command. Windows equivalent: Start a virtual machine (because the VPN client apparently f*cks up my windows install, making it reboot randomly), inside the VM start VPN client, connect to VPN through GUI, enter VPN password, wait for VPN to connect, double-click RDP icon on desktop.

It's not that these things are completely impossible in Windows. It's just that I can shape my Linux install to make them much more convenient.

Of course it does, provided you use the tools that try to be like windows. Those aren't any better than the windows equivalents; in fact, I've noticed that they're often less efficient at doing the things I don't need.
I use apt-get rather than aptitude or synaptic - not because it's prettier, and neither because it does a better job at installing programs (it doesn't, since it uses the exact same back-end), but because it does exactly what I tell it to (install a program and its dependencies) and not a thing more (load and display a sorted list of all available and installed packages, graphically tagged with an icon indicating their status, etc. etc.).
To move files around, I usually use the command line. I don't need a file browser that gives me preview icons and other eye candy but makes me wait a second or more when I step into a large folder - windows explorer does it, but nautilus is no better. It becomes even worse when deleting large amounts of files. Yesterday at work, I deleted ~10k files, and windows had me waiting several minutes before even starting to delete stuff.

Just last week I had to delete about 45k files from c:\windows\temp using explorer. I think it took at least 15 minutes for explorer just to count the files. I wonder if typing del * in cmd works any faster...

I'd assume del *.* to be faster, just like rm -r is faster than nautilus.

Did it show a dialog for how many files?

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I'm not a Debian expert, but I think you might be confusing aptitude with something else. AFAIK, aptitude is just another command interface and I don't think it wastes too much time. I was under the impression that it is just a front-end over apt-get and I think it's supposed to be "smarter" when resolving dependencies, etc. I could be wrong.

It does. I use the command line for most things in Windows too because the GUI is slow (and that's when it doesn't hang). `del` and `rmdir /s /q` are a lot faster than Windows Explorer. Cygwin is even faster still, but it doesn't work so well with network shares so I don't recommend you interact with those using Cygwin. MSYS might have similar performance improvements over the Windows equivalents without conflicting with network shares. I'm not sure.

aptitude is indeed smarter. a lot smarter. And it may confuse some people when it's dependency resolution stuff pops up problems. also people might not expect or want it to install "recommended" or "suggested" packages either, but thankfully that bit is optional.

If you use sid, you absolutely NEED aptitude though. apt-get is just too dumb to work day to day.

I have not had issues with the speed of the Windows GUI, deleting/moving/browsing files, for as long as I remember. So it's somewhat surprising to me that there are a couple of you talking about it.
Well, now that I think about it, if I want to know the size of a big directory, such as the Windows directory then it takes a little while to add up all the files. But that's only a few seconds — certainly not minutes. (The Windows directory has 67,438 files on this computer.)

He mentioned synaptic, which is a graphical package manager.
Just started it up here, it sure takes a while to start.

It's not like Ubuntu has removed aptitude or apt-get. And even synaptic isn't aimed for the less technical people.
I think what Ubuntu wants people to use first is their Software center where you get applications and games. I don't think the software center lists all the little packages that a programmer would be interested in.

OK, I was mainly aiming at synaptic. Aptitude is overkill for my needs right now, but I'd probably use it over synaptic when the need arises.
And I'd take either over the windows way of doing things.

You should try deleting 20 gigabytes of data spread over 100k files in a folder hierarchy 4 levels deep with 50 folders at the top level over a network share. I'm not making this up, this is a real-world example.

This week was Me vs a bootable software RAID5. I finally prevailed.

Now I can finally reinstall Windows 7 on my spare 1TB drives. It's not like I have any reason to boot up into it. I never thought I'd see that day. I think it means I'm officially an old fart.

It means you're a Linux hippie.

/leaves humming "Join us now and share the software, you'll beee freee hackers..."

There are plenty of things that I hate about Linux, but I suppose I hate most things about most things.

One thing that I really like is that I can reinstall a Linux system and be up and running within 15 minutes. (Super thought: I should export the list of installed packages the next time I reinstall, and then paste that back into one big apt-get install line...)

In Windows it's a pain in the butt to reinstall all the software, one slow install wizard at a time.

That's true. But I never bother reinstalling windows. My Vista box has been running the same vista install for years now. And it's still running perfectly, not slow and bogged down as some people seem to experience with Windows. It's actually my first Windows box, because I used to be a huge Linux zealot after using DOS for a while. It's nice to have Linux around too, though I mainly use it on my server. I don't want to choose between Linux, Windows, and OS X. I want them all (and I have all 3 on my macbook, which is very convenient).

The more you uninstall, the slower Windows can get.

Also installing crap. That's very easy to do on Windows.

Matthew's statement that he'd like to save a list of installed packages got me thinking.

You don't want a list of ALL the installed packages, just the ones that were manually installed (ie: not installed as a pre-requisite to some other package).

So I googled and found this little tid-bit:

aptitude search '~i!~E' | egrep -v "(i A|id)" | cut -d " " -f 4

That'll list only manually installed packages that aren't about to be removed. If you want to include those too, just change the egrep to `grep -v "i A"`.

Do what I do, and never use aptitude's curses interface. I use the CLI interface.

aptitude update
aptitude dist-upgrade
aptitude install foo

Thats about it for most of my uses

Yes. Because there's such a metric fuckload of it.

Dammit, I didn't even know aptitude had a CLI interface. I always assumed it were a curses front-end over apt-get and apt-cache. Silly me.

For a long time, so did I. Once I found it, I was like "hallelujah".

It actually re-implements a lot of what apt-get does. But it does what apt-get does, better. At least if you can figure out the conflict resolution prompts. Many times the first option is what you want, but if the first option it gives happens to remove half your system to do it, I suggest doing one of two things:

1. look ahead at the next few possibilities it gives, if you see one that just keeps a few packages as their current version, thats typically the way you want to go.

2. cancel whatever it was you were doing and wait till the problem clears up.

That's what I always do:
apt-get install `cat packages`

I have also tried the command Thomas found, but it has the disadvantage of showing all installed packages, possibly leading to unwanted package installations (or incompatibilities) when you try to install the exported package list on a new version of Ubuntu/Debian. Right now I maintain my own package file manually, entering every application into it myself.

It doesn't though. It ONLY shows manually installed packages.