Those anoying web adds (the ones that the Firefox adblock extension doesn't catch because you haven't updated the filter) that look like a window, but aren't, look stupid and are dead wrong, as they refer to stuff that your system doesn know about.
What I personally like most is seeing that things can be done differently, whilst some concepts stay the same. The upcoming new windows version promises to be quite impressive, with a lot of eye-candy as well (hence boosting the system requirements sky-high). It'll even enable the use of small screens on the outside of your laptop, making it like a flip-phone (see your agenda on the outside, no need to waste power on booting) - which undoubtedly will make the hardware popular and give vendors something to sell. Yet, it gets released slightly slower than the speed at which your computer becomes obsolete. Linux is somewhat more dynamic. It comes in more flavours, releases aren't that spectacular, yet happen far more frequently. It can also adapt to low end as well as high end computers. And leaves room for choice, lots of choice. As example - if you want a graphical environment you need an X-server, of which there are two main implementations, on top of that there is a window manager (wide variety) or a desktop suite (includes things like a file manager, application launcher etc) of which GNOME and KDE are the most common. Within those, the appearance of all the items is again very customisable. Lots of things to play with. If you want to play with linux a little bit yourself - the most accessable distribution, Ubuntu offers live CDs (from which you can boot your computer into linux without changing or having to install anything, just remove the CD and reboot to go back to your old system).
Anyway, I'll stop ranting. I got the new kernel working and with it the touchpad, so on it goes!
What I personally like most is seeing that things can be done differently, whilst some concepts stay the same. The upcoming new windows version promises to be quite impressive, with a lot of eye-candy as well (hence boosting the system requirements sky-high). It'll even enable the use of small screens on the outside of your laptop, making it like a flip-phone (see your agenda on the outside, no need to waste power on booting) - which undoubtedly will make the hardware popular and give vendors something to sell. Yet, it gets released slightly slower than the speed at which your computer becomes obsolete. Linux is somewhat more dynamic. It comes in more flavours, releases aren't that spectacular, yet happen far more frequently. It can also adapt to low end as well as high end computers. And leaves room for choice, lots of choice. As example - if you want a graphical environment you need an X-server, of which there are two main implementations, on top of that there is a window manager (wide variety) or a desktop suite (includes things like a file manager, application launcher etc) of which GNOME and KDE are the most common. Within those, the appearance of all the items is again very customisable. Lots of things to play with. If you want to play with linux a little bit yourself - the most accessable distribution, Ubuntu offers live CDs (from which you can boot your computer into linux without changing or having to install anything, just remove the CD and reboot to go back to your old system).
Anyway, I'll stop ranting. I got the new kernel working and with it the touchpad, so on it goes!
3 comments:
I've been really thinking about the whole OSS & GNU/Linux thing. I am a fairly average computer user with some knowledge, but not a ton. I'm the guy at work that knows how to work with the software we have, but you wouldn't come to me to fix the network.
To warily stick my toes in the OSS ocean, I started using Open Office in my Windows XP environment the other night. Obviously, I use Firefox -- who doesn't?
My next step might be playing around with Ubuntu. Here is the question: will Ubuntu eat up all of my space & make my computer run super slow?
There's no sure way to predict how an OS runs on a particular system. I have a system that refuses to run windows 2000 for an unknown reason, crashes very frequently if Win ME is used, but runs Linux without complaints. I can imagine that the other way round can also happen.
Ubuntu is said to need 32Mb RAM for install, and require 1.8 Gb for a desktop installation, which does include a number of applications such as Open Office. I've tested it on a 900 Mhz system with 128 Mb RAM and this worked fine. Maybe the live-CD (available from downloads on Ubuntu.com) is a good place to start - it won't modify your system. If you want to test an installation, there are also some good guides out there on how to set up a dual-boot system. This would allow you to choose between the different operating systems on your system at start-up.
To be very honest, I've moved to Gentoo linux quite quickly. There are some things in Gentoo that I like more, but it isn't as user friendly as Ubuntu (there is no installer, basically, you have setup the entire system manually).
One note on the side: Ubuntu already made quite a number of choices for you - it'll use the GNOME desktop environment. Optionally there's Kubunutu, which runs KDE. It limits your choices, but is nice to get a feel of what you may want.
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