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Posted on 05/24/2006 7:15:08 AM PDT by N3WBI3
And so I'm falling a little bit in love with Linux. This is very much a grounded affair and I wouldn't describe myself as giddy with it, but I've changed my opinions about that whole murky side of computing life.
A lot of people ask me about my opinion of that operating system with the penguin logo. It happens with such regularity that I've come up with a stock phrase I immediately fire back: life's too short for Linux. This is a bit flippant, but it's also a distillation of what I've believed, which is that Linux is great and everything, but only if: (a) you have too much time on your hands; (b) you just like tinkering with computers; or (c) you somehow define yourself by an ideological allegiance to a piece of software. If you actually want to get anything done, fire up Windows and get on with it.
Linux, as you probably know, is essentially a version of Unix; they share the same commands and programs, the same X-based client/server windowing system and, most important of all, the same philosophy. This last part is what passes most people by, including myself until recently. Unix/Linux really is as much a philosophy as it is a set of programs forming an operating system. This philosophy basically boils down to the traditional engineering principle of keeping things simple wherever possible.
Note the use of the word "traditional" there. That's important since, in an industry in which nothing endures for longer than a year or two, Unix is nearly 40 years old. The first version was written by Ken Thompson at Bell Laboratories in 1969. This means it predates hard disks and even CRT displays: it ran on a PDP-7 minicomputer using tape for program storage and a mechanical teleprinter for input and output.
This would be just history and intellectual pondering if Unix had gone the way most of us have come to expect old software to go, getting bogged down in gradually increasing complexity, becoming ever more decrepit and irrelevant, and eventually being superseded by a new framework that does the same thing better. But now hop over, as I did this month, to www.damnsmalllinux.org and download its 50MB ISO file. Burn that to a CD. Pop it into the drive of any PC that happens to be around, making sure the PC is set to boot from the optical drive. Restart and wait a minute or two. And there you'll have it: a small, light, fast, compatible operating system that you can start using immediately. The network adaptor has been detected and it's found an IP address: click on that Firefox icon and you're away! You can't do that with Windows, and you never will be able to. DSL isn't the only Linux distribution to do this, although it's one of the smallest. Check out SLAX (www. slax.org), for instance, which is prettier but less minimal, although still only a 180MB download for the largest version.
Of course, the problem with an operating system on CD is that you can't modify it or save your settings. But that's okay, just click on the tool to install it to a USB flash drive. What you then have is a complete, customisable working environment on a stick that you can carry around with you. If you've ever tried moving a Windows XP installation from one PC to another and watched it choke while trying to work out what happened to the hardware it was running on yesterday, you'll appreciate how fascinating this is. DSL, which is based on Debian Linux, is fleet of foot and does all hardware detection on-the-fly at boot time. It seems to know about every piece of hardware there is, but if it finds something new it simply defaults to a generic driver and carries on booting. Within a minute you're up and running.
As you can probably tell, I'm sort of addicted to this whole idea. Bill Gates himself, in various comments surrounding the advent of the UMPC, has referred to the need for - and the difficulty of - getting your working environment to follow you around no matter which device you happen to be sitting at. Microsoft is throwing huge amounts of money at the problem in the usual way. Its solution, if and when it comes, will be an expensive, highly technical and complex system; the first three versions will snap in a stiff breeze. Microsoft does lots of things well, but light weight and simplicity aren't two of them. This is why I think the UMPC is doomed in its current form. But the essential concept - your computer wherever you go - is realisable today for the £20 you'll spend on 256MB USB flash drive.
This isn't the only reason I've become enamoured of the Unix lifestyle of late: I'm getting a tiny bit engrossed in obscure command-line antics too. But that's only relevant here insofar as it's proof that Linux can never overhaul Windows in a standard Desktop environment: for most people, life really is too short for Linux.
-Thanks the Shadow for the post
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Interesting. I have the opposite experience. I gave my kids a sign-on, told them what their password was, and left the room.
They still boot up to Linux to play some of the games on that box. They know how to use it.
I don't know what distro you used, or when. I know some are more difficult than others ot learn. I happen to use Fedora exclusively, and it seems to just work for everyone in my family.
I also like DSL. There is also a slightly larger version called DSL-N.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/
Check out this neat setup!
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Systems/Damn_Small_Machine
That pretty much rocks. If it had wireless, it would be even better.
I had that experience with my grandma just the same with windows or linux, but the lack of problems that are experienced now she'd never go back to windows.
The biggest problems I've had over the past few years have been empty printer cartridges, a loose power cable, and a "I forgot where I saved this file at".
Well, it all depends on the learning curve. Distros like Xandros and Linspire are catered toward the n00b. I've been using both since July 2004...now I mainly use Xandros 3.0 Business Edition. At first I didn't know how to get my modem working, but once I learned how to compile my kernel headers by using the Xandros kernel source, I was off into the stratosphere. These days I rarely use Windows (only time I use Windows is to record TV using my WinTV USB TV tuner and use TMPGEnc DVD Author and DVDshrink and Nero to make video DVDs), but I do have Crossover Office 5.0 Pro so I can use iTunes. Once Linspire open-sources their CNR client, I plan on installing CNR on my Xandros box so I can download and install Lsongs and Lphoto.
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