hi all,

I have been aware of linux for some years, though i've never looked at it, or into why it is considered better, I'm not a techy minded computer user, so have no idea what it can do for me, if anything,

i understand i can partition my disk (1 of 2 in a raid set-up) and run it simultaneously with windows, but why would i want to, or need to?

i'm told the empeg uses linux, and part of it's appeal is the ability for techy minded people to dabble with it's frimware, but why did it use linux over any other kind of OS in the first place?

i'm keen to learn more about computers and OS's in general, for no other reason than i'm getting a little bored with the pc and not being able to remmedy what are probably simple problems when they occur, not to mention it would help me understand what you lot are talking about!!!

i now have a good pc (gigbyte motherboard, Q6600 quad core processors, 3 gig ram, 320gb hd raid drives, nvidea GeForce 8500GT graphics, etc etc, running xp-pro), it does all i need, very quickly, and for the most part, very reliably, but I still have little idea on how to get the best from it.

ta.
Hugh

For you? Probably nothing.

Linux is useful for people who want to have or do these things:

- Stable file servers and web servers (things a non-techy probably doesn't run).

- Extreme configurability and flexibility, right down to the ability to change the operating system by rewriting part of it if needed (again, things a non-techy probably doesn't need).

- Learning about computer programming (again, things a non-techy probably doesn't need, and which can also be learned on other operating systems).

- Extremely powerful network diagnostic and routing tools (again, things a non-techy probably doesn't need).

- The ability to solve your own problems if something goes wrong with your computer system (but which requires the requisite technical knowledge to solve).

- The ability to write your own versions of the operating system, modifying it to your whims to run on just about any kind of device you can imagine. For example, running on a new kind of in-dash car MP3 player that runs on a StrongARM processor.

Non-techies are usually happier with Windows and Mac OS, though, because a lot of the more complicated (and more powerful) stuff is hidden or nonexistent.

However, there's nothing wrong with trying out Linux just to see if you like it. There are even versions of it which will boot from a CD-ROM and run without even needing to partition your hard disk or modify your computer in any way.

Here's a good primer.

eek, i'll stick to making signs and asking dumb questions i think!! :?

thank you!

Hugh (non techy, can ya tell? !!)

It's also quite good at doing tasks extremely well, and with great stability. I had a file server running non-stop for over 5 years. No reboots in all that time. The only reason I rebooted it at all was when the power supply failed and needed to be replaced. My windoze servers like to be rebooted every 2-3 months to work happily.

It also gives the ability to do certain things that windows simply cannot do, although they're getting closer. Symbolic links are a good example.

For example, I currently have a need to share 7 documents from 7 different users with one user. This user does not need any other documents that these 7 people have in their folders. How do you share just 7 docs and nothing else in windows? You don't. Or you have to create 7 folders for 7 people and share all seven folders. But this requires changing the way these people like to sort their documents. In linux, you simply type "ln -s /path/docname /newpath/docname" for all seven docs and magically, the files can all appear in /newpath/ where the overseer can view all 7 docs. It's completely transparent to the users, and it just WORKS. ln -s creates a symbolic link, which is sortof like a shortcut, only better.

For the end user, a typical GNU/Linux system frees one from considerable software costs. No fees for the system, upgrades, future upgrades, add-ons, thousands of apps/tools, etc.

Quite the shift from other systems, where each little gadget costs another $5-$500 or so, even for trivial things.

Those things add up over the years, to rather large numbers.

Cheers

Related to the cost issue, but not quite the same, there's also an issue of trust. When everyone can see the source-code, there's less chance that it contains nasty surprises, and more chance that it was written with your, the user's, best interests at heart, rather than those interests being in conflict with other interests such as the authors' interest in making money from you. Or other, more sinister, interests such as phishing, attacking competing products, or conniving with intelligence agencies.

Which is not, of course, to imply that all providers of closed-source software do those things. But without the source-code, you never know for sure. (Open-source projects, such as Firefox and now Songbird, where you're very strongly encouraged, using trademark law, to use their binary builds, lose much of that trust.)

Peter

Such a shame that you're saying this, because you're really just perpetuating myths that Linux is only good for the nerdly.

For what it's worth, I use Linux at home, and I don't do any of those things with it (though I do love not being stuck with a window manager that won't let you configure it to use focus-follows-mouse). Instead, I use it to surf the web, write email, do photo retouching, listen to music, write my resume, and all the other normal things that people do. My wife, who's a Mac person, uses it for that stuff, too.

So what can it do for you? If you're not a techie person, probably everything you need it to do, and, like a Mac, you don't have to worry about constantly running spyware and virus checkers (and that, right there, is far more than "probably nothing").

Like Mark says, there's plenty of software you can use, for free, that's sometimes better, sometimes worse, than the software you have to pay for and, it's a cinch to install and even un-install.


Uh... have you tried a recent Linux distro, like Ubuntu, or KUbuntu? The last time I did an install, everything was just up and running, with no configuration required on my part.

I'd tend to agree with all of that, but I want to also point out the one prominent thing that you basically can't do with Linux: play modern commercial computer games. Thus the moniker "Wintendo" that some people use for Windows systems.

Oh, and both Windows and MacOS have far more universal GUI homogeneity. That is, they tend to have programs that all look like they were made to look similar to each other. Linux is much more of a mish-mash in this category. But it's a totally aesthetic point.

Yes. But you're a techie person, and you know what to do if things go wrong. Have you ever, on that Linux box, had to drop to a shell prompt and execute a command to get something to work?

I know that people on Windows and Mac have to do that sometimes, too, but my point is that, for a desktop OS, you still need to do that kind of thing more often on Linux than you do on MacOS or Windows. Those OS's were designed for non-techie users, and they're meant for people to never have to use a shell prompt or know anything about the underpinnings of the operating system. Linux still isn't there.

What do you do when something goes wrong in Windows?

Well, durr, nothing ever goes wrong in Windows.

I addressed that point in my post.

Seriously, though. If you wanted to hand your grandma a computer, knowing that you'd get the support calls, which one would you hand her?
- Windows
- OSX
- Linux

Clearly you'd hand grandma an OSX box in a heartbeat. If grandma wanted to play Counter-Strike, she'd get a Windows box. If grandma needed to connect to her corporate network and share files with her coworkers, she'd get a Windows box.

I would actually love to hand my grandmother something like gOS. I would lock it down so nothing could be installed and everything is run from the web.

My grandfather thinks he's a computer whiz, so this is unlikely to happen. He loves screwing up Windows.

I hadn't heard about that one. That looks very interesting.

Assuming she had no preconceived notions about how a computer should work (that is, wasn't already experienced with Windows and moving to a new interface wouldn't confuse her), I'd choose the one with the most stable networking implementation so that I could help her remotely. So Linux.

That said, I got Mom a Windows computer because she'd been using it at the office for years. I intelligently installed a VNC server on her computer so I could do remote help. In the couple of years that she's had it, I've been able to use VNC to fix a problem a total of once, I think, and the rest of the time I have to go over because her networking has gone haywire for no apparent reason.

Like Rob, I have a friend who thinks he's a computer expert. I guess I should more accurately say "had" a friend. I don't ever talk to him anymore because any time I ever talked to him, I got about 3 minutes of conversation and then I had to fix his computer for hours. I got sick of it.

Can anyone cite a successful installed long-term instance of a day-to-day desktop linux system used by a non-techie? (That kept being used and didn't get replaced with Mac or Win after a while?)

Win/Mac, on the other hand, that's their bread and butter business, so there are examples of those all around us. (Defining "successful", well, that's a different question altogether.)

My wife used my Linux computer for a long time ages ago. All she really does is web and email, so it wasn't much of a problem at all.

It occurs to me that you're going to say "yes, but you were using it and fixed problems with it". To which my response is: yes, but no more frequently than I fix her current MacOS machine and far and away less frequently than I fixed her Windows machine.

Right, every OS is going to need support.

So that's 1 cited success example for web+email only.

See, now this is the very thing I'm talking about...

I thought I'd try out gOS because it was easy to just throw it onto a fresh VM. It installed cleanly and quickly, and came up with a very pretty screen full of gadgets just like in the screen shot.

Within 20 seconds, I run into a stumper.

There's a little "Sno-globe" weather applet in the center of the screen. It's showing me the weather for Austin TX in Celsius. I open up its options panel and try to change it to Seattle WA in Fahrenheit. It appears to take the settings OK, I press the OK button. Thing still says Austin, TX, in Celsius. No matter how many times I open up that preferences panel, it's still showing the wrong city and the wrong temperature scale.

Clearly this one thing isn't representative of all-things-linux (it's not even part of the operating system), I'm just saying it's the *sort* of thing that happens all the time every time I try to use a linux distro. It's a tiny little fit-n-finish issue, not a major deal breaker for the OS in general. But I see lots of tiny little inconsistencies like that all the time. It's why a monolithic company like Microsoft or Apple will always do better in the Desktop OS realm, because they have the manpower to do the extra polishing work to iron out that kind of thing.

How many different file open dialogs exist in Windows? Oh, and how many different interfaces in general? Somehow, the manpower at MS isn't enough to keep things unified and updated either. Going between IE7, Office 2008, and Notepad reveals 3 distinct toolbar and menu interfaces.

I will agree the fit and finish part is an issue with desktop Linux, but the same also seems to apply to the commercial Windows OS as well.

Or a better example from the OS itself: Try to adjust the date and time settings of the OS.

I set the time zone (it gives me a map, and Seattle isn't on the map, but that's OK, I click Los Angeles, OK, that's fine).

I try to set it so that it gets its time automatically from the internet instead of setting it manually.

It gives me an error saying that NTP support is not installed.

One of the available buttons is "Install NTP support". I click on the button. The box goes away, but nothing happens. I try to set it to get its time automatically again. Again, I get the "install NTP support" box. Ad infinitum.

The proper way to fix this would be to install NTP support by using the shell. If I knew how.

Agreed.

On my current Linux box, which has been going strong for a few months, now? No, and the only time it's been rebooted was during power outages.

On my previous Linux box, a few times, because I techie enough to resolve the problem without a reboot (I like my uptime), which would also have adequately solved the problem in a non-techie fashion.

But generally... no. The times where I do have to drop to a shell to resolve something technical is because I was doing something technical in a shell to begin with. When I don't tinker with it as a techie, I don't have to do techie fixes.


Seriously... have you used a recent Linux distro like Ubuntu, or KUbuntu?


Sorry, Tony, but you sound like you're parroting the Microsoft line, without having any first-hand knowledge of what you're talking about. Don't get me wrong, Linux isn't without it's problems, but having to drop to a shell to fix things isn't one of them. Please... quit spreading the FUD.

Wrong. I'd hand her a Linux box. If I don't want to get her support calls, I'd hand her an OSX box, because I don't know how to support OSX, and I can tell her to call someone else.

But that's just me.

What'd I do for my dad? I asked what he needed, what he wanted to do, and ended up suggesting an OSX box (so I didn't have to get the support calls), with a parallels install, for the MS-only software he needed for work.

I actually hadn't tried gOS prior to just now. I got the temperature gadget working by inputting my zip code. That's surely annoying, but probably more of a Google Gadget issue than Linux.

Gnome really needs to stop using that ugly, wide font, though. (As seen in the calendar app.)

I wouldn't disagree that Linux apps are a mish-mash what with the GIMPs of the world, but I think the effect is amplified by the number of doo-dad programs that get delivered by default.

Having recently had to deal with a whole slew of vendor-provided and small-3rd-party and shareware Windows programs, I don't think things are much prettier in Windows land. D-Link and Logitech camera configurators, sensor monitors, smart lock/iButton programmers and more. What an impenetrable CUAgmire.

I use Debian with KDE every day (it still doesn't work right, I never got it to function with DHCP, I have to give it a fixed IP every time), Messed about a bit with Knoppix fairly recently, and tried that gOS distro just yesterday. I haven't installed a full Ubuntu distro lately. Perhaps I'll do that just to satisfy your (and my) curiosity. I'll report my experiences with Ubuntu here when I'm done.



I'm talking from experience, not parroting a party line. Every time I touch a Linux desktop, I'm painfully reminded of just how much I would *not* want to use it as my daily driver. And that's *me*, a techie. The idea of a non-techie having to do the same makes me shudder. Here's another example:

I wanted to look up which base distro and build number the gOS thing uses, and accidentally opened up an applet caled "About Me", hoping it would give me info about the operating system. It gave me an error: "There was an error while trying to get the addressbook information Evolution Data Server can't handle the protocol" (bad punctuation was in the error message itself).

That's from a fresh installation of the OS. All I did was install the OS from scratch, open up its program menu, and pick an innocent-looking icon. I'm presented with a cryptic, poorly-worded error message with no hint of how to solve the problem. As a techie type, I can look past the bad English and get a vague idea of what might be wrong, but I still have no clue how to fix something like that.

That's just flat-out a Quality Assurance problem. Microsoft and Apple's OS's might have their issues, but their out of box experience from a fresh install is better than that.

Agreed. My favorite pet peeve is third-party wireless connection utilities. Those are just awful. Once upon a time, they were necessary, back before Windows had that stuff built in. Now, the one built in to Windows is better than any third-party connection manager I've seen.