Blue Eyed OS
Ah, I'll look into that. :-D
rlfrost: Spoken like a person who has never owned or booted a Linux distro.
Ah... Spoken like a person who thinks if you think Linux is too complicated, it's because you're lazy.
I've tried 8 of them, on four different hardware platforms. Some installed in ten minutes, others took days of digging through online documentation.
Five of them had dedicated hardware acceleration for my graphics card, and all five were slow as dirt (or roughly about the same speed as Mac GUI graphics on the same hardware). People who think X Windows is speedy probably don't have much experience with Windows graphics. Windows does a crap job with multimedia-in-window graphics, but window refreshes are insanely fast. I haven't tried XWindows with multimedia either because I couldn't get it to work, or because Linux couldn't hold my interest long enough. I have, however, given EACH distribution of Linux I've tried at least two weeks to make an impression. None of them lasted longer than that, though.
It's possible that threre's problems with how Linux distros support my hardware, but like I said, I've had four computers that ran Linux with XWindows, and all of them were unacceptably slow.
And don't get me started about switching graphics drivers with Linux. I tried that before, and gave up after a couple hours. RedHat 7 allowed me to use a partially installed driver, and left me with a system that was unusable so I had to re-install using the rescue disk. Even Windows95 OSR1 never put me in that situation! It's easy to revert to a vanilla VGA driver in Windows, even without going into safe mode.
Oh, and if XWindows supports a "safe mode" equivalent, I have yet to find any documentation that says how to use it. Free distros are notorious for not giving you enough documentation.
Paul_Gadd: Windows 2000 pro is the best version of Windows imo, rockstable, if a program does crash the whole thing does not come tumbling down like a stack of cards, i blame the programs people install, not the OS.
True to a point. I use Win2000 and I think it's the best Windows ever. I've gotten one Blue Screen of Death in two years. (Well, two, if you consider the time I swapped my motherboard).
The problem is that it's very easy to bypass the security and memory protection of Windows. I can name a few apps that will reduce a Win2000 system to rubble, without requiring any special drivers or hacks on bootup. They just waltz right into the core system as soon as you run them. NT4 was even worse. The OS is very stable, but allows programmers to do all sorts of nasty things. Through normal usage, an NT4 system I have at work can run for weeks withougt issue. But, when I run a few certain applications, I get 10 BSOD's a day. Win32 is very stable, but it allows programs to take serious shortcuts that affect stability, which is the equivalent of diabling memory protection altogether. No OS should allow that.
GreggBZ: Most people that speak of why they don't use linux, have never used linux.
I get the same from Mac users and UNIX freaks. They slam Windows like crazy, but they have never used it. I never used Win3.1, but I have used Windows ever since Win95 came out. A *LOT* of people cannot make fair comparrisons between Windows and Linux and Macs. I've used all three.
I might be misguided and jump to conclusions now and then, but everyone has to speak from their experiences. At least I have SOME experience. You should log onto a Mac forum and ask people why their Macs are better than PCs. The responses they give will leaver you utterly shocked at how few people have even bothered to look at a Windows system.
My stance is, I *HATE* Macintoshes. I don't hate Linux, but it doesn't do anything I need (or does it very badly). I've never tried BeOS (although I've been meaning to), but I'd prefer an OS with an actual corporate backing, and BeOS doesn't have that, anymore.
8 distros of Linux all left a foul taste in my mouth, and it's obvious that Linux developers are aiming for non-Windows people. Thus, Linux doesn't offer me anything I need. Macs, of course, are really designed for people who need Windows functionality, but don't want a PC. I've used five models of Macs over the years, and was even a Mac sysadmin years ago, and I hate them. Period.
Iamaboringperson: TBH: linux is certainly not for beginers, but its not imposible to learn
It depends how much they have to learn, and how available the correct information is. If you think "megabyte" is a scary word, you shouldn't own ANY computer. Buy an electronic typewriter!
Linux distros have been getting better over the years. Installing most of them is as easy as tapping the Enter key, and it installs in ten minutes! Isn't that easy?! Wow! Yeah, but wait until you have to upgrade or start switching drivers and stuff. Boy, it gets pretty messy very quickly!
Windows developers are [usually] courteous enough to have stuff like install directions with their software, and provide installers with names like "Setup.exe". I don't know why Linux developers don't do more of that. "Oh, this is the binary release for RedHat 7 x86", they say, so they have already pre-compiled everything specifically for your machine. But, when you want to insall it, you have to unzip the files into all the correct places using gunzip. Why not make an auto-installer, if it's designed to be installed only on one type of distro for one type of hardware? RPM's are an improvement, but not really a solution. Linux needs a good installer standard, like Install Sheild on the PC. (Hopefully, though, it would be better than Install Sheild. Install Sheild and Windows Installer are certainly not without plenty of flaws).
Also, when Windows runs into an installer problem, it gives you an error. When I had to install stuff on my Linux distros, often the files would install with no errors, and then when I tried to use it, I'd get all sorts of problems.
Windows developers (to a point) are more interested in decoding gibberish. So, you've just changed your config with XConfigurator, and everything went OK. Now XWindows is giving you Signal 11 when you try to start it. What the hell is a signal 11?! I dug through Linux documentation for two hours and never saw anything related to Signal 11. I was none too pleased about that. Well, if you go on the Internet and search for it, you'll find out it basicly means, "a general problem occured". Ah, thanks for the info!
Nowadays, of course, the trend is to withhold information, so Windows apps are now giving error messages that are too vague. Linux distros are following that trend, unfortunately. "Sorry, an error occured. Please reboot." (God, do I hate that Mac error!!!)
I'd prefer not to have to search the Internet for five hours to figure out how to install something, when I can just run "Setup.exe" on a Windows machine, instead. My time is valuable. It's not that I don't WANT to learn, it's that I don't have time to bother with niggling details.
And that's why free software will never topple commercial software. It's kind of hard to RTFM, when your "manual" is essentially Internet forums, and the documentation that comes on your CD is essentially a collection of license agreements.
Installing Red Hat 7 was very easy for me. But, when I started running into problems later on, getting the information I needed involved hours and hours of web browsing. Sorry, but I have better things to do with my time! Besides, when you're looking for info online, you have to worry about the trustworthiness of the information. There's a lot of people out there who don't have any more of a clue than you do, but for some reason they have a help page. Who ever knew that in the information age, it would be so hard to get information? At least the RIGHT information...
Linux people need a good lesson in interface design. Then, more people will use it, and fewer Windows people will laugh at it. I criticise Linux because I've used EIGHT versions of it, and they all drove me crazy.
