On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:10:47 -0600, Bill
I worked for most of the day with Windows XP on my dual boot machine.
One of the first things I noticed was that my movies did not look
anywhere near as sharp and clear, as they do when I use PCLINUXOS. I
tried three different movie viewers and they all suffered from the same
lack of clarity.
That may be commercial malware built into Vista itself, i.e. DRM-style
crippling of hi-quality content to benefit Blu-Ray et al. The fact
that the effect pervades all players suggests this, unless it's just a
duff codec that applies to all players.
Wait a moment - you did say "XP', didn't you?
None of the Windows movie viewers would read a corrupt
AVI file, while I have several movie viewers in Linus which will read them.
That may not be something to boast about - perhaps Windows is doing
some extra sanity-checking to avoid buffer overruns, which Linux isn't
doing as the result of "can't happen here" denial
I usually have ten or 12 movie viewers ready to use in Linux for
different purposes.
It's good to have multiple players, especially when it comes to broken
files you want to play, but these days I'd consider "media" as an
exploitable edge-facing surface, and be careful with "found" content.
I was also frustrated by the lack of desktops in Windows. You can
use the powertoy which will give you 4 desktops, but I am use to
working with 10 desktops and switching between them rather than
switching between programs on one desktop.
Oh, OK... strokes/folks, I guess. I've had several virtual desktop
tools for Windows past and present, and didn't really use them as I'm
not doing the sort of things where they'd be useful. I expect there's
a few add-ons that don't limit you to 4 desktops, unless there are
some sort of device driver or scalability reasons why not?
I also noticed that my wireless wasnt working at full potential. I get
better throughput with the built-in driver in Linux.
This is usually a matter of how different WiFi standards are allowed
to interoperate, and can usually be controlled via settings. I avoid
wireless altogether, but I recall reading about this... let's see...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11
It doesn't seem to cover it there, but 802.11b and 802.11g use the
same frequency band and can crowd each other out, or you can end up
with a slower "b" connection being negotiated instead of "g".
I also had to be careful what websites I visited.
Well, duh.
According to
www.stopbadware.org, there are now 23,816 sites
which can dump malware, viruses, and spyware on your computer, if you use
windows. Normally, in Linux, I can go wherever I want, without any
worries, but in Windows, you always have to wonder, if you go to a new
site, if you will leave it with an infested OS.
Enjoy your age of innocence while it lasts ;-)
I was also irritated by all the system pop-ups in Windows. The antivirus
announced that it was updating, the system constantly harrassed me that I
had my automatic updates turned off (Microsoft has again decided that IE7
is a critical update, after leaving it for a couple of weeks in the
optional updates.
I'd never go back to IE 6, being very happy with IE 7. Also, IE 7 is
structurally more resistant to exploits, so if it's suddenly re-rated
up the "you need this" ladder, you can guess why.
We saw the same sort of thing with XP SP2; new exploits discovered
after SP2 was released, that didn't affect SP2 at all because of the
rather deep re-engineering that went on there. I'm half-expecting
similar mileage with IE 7 compared to IE 6.
I have seen too many disasters that people have
experienced after upgrading to that piece of c__p)
Details to back up that assertion, please?
Meanwhile I am trying to get some work done. Finally, in disgust, I
announced to myself that I really didnt need to be working in XP, and
reboot my system into the relatively peace and quiet of my PCLINUXOS.
All you're really telling us is that what you know best, works best
for you. I could give you a tale of starting up Ubuntu and getting
pissed off with automatic dial-up that can't be cancelled, and requies
scratching around with command line tools... same thing with its Grub
boot loader, requiring more command line fiddling to change the
defaults and timeouts.
You'd prolly fix those within minutes of installing Ubuntu without
giving it a second thought, whereas I'd prolly clean up those
"annoying pop-ups" etc. in similar time.
Unsurprisingly, I'm more productive in an OS where I have most of my
experience than one I visit for a day. Does that mean I consider
Linux to be "worse than" Windows? Nope; just that right now, it
doesn't suit me as well... to really compare them objectively, I'd
want to be equally experienced in both, as well as used to operating
both from their respective native philosophies (rather than trying
Windows tactics in Linux or vice versa).
It's not easy to find folks equally experienced in multiple
contemporary platforms. That's why these debates get so shrill.
No, but his experience may no longer fit today's reality.
Most folks with multi-platform experience do so after moving from one
platform to another, which means the experience is not with
contemporary versions of the platform. My own experience with Linux
has been in fits and starts over some years; in the case of Ubuntu,
prolly about a year or two ago.
So maybe I can compare Ubuntu with XP as contemporary OSs, but it
would be unfair to compare that dated Ubuntu experience with Vista.
--------------- ---- --- -- - - - -
Saws are too hard to use.
Be easier to use!
)