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On March 10 2010 20:06 Manit0u wrote:
(...) and not bash Windows.
But why shouldn't we, when it obviously is stupid?
The next major difference is that after a quick and easy process of system installation you're logging in into a fully operational OS with multimedia players, advanced graphic manipulation tools, pdf readers, games, torrent support, browser, cd/dvd burning tools, rss feed reader, discussion group reader, full office suite, mail client etc. right away. Basically, all the things a typical user might want, are already in there.
I'd like to add that, unlike Windows' starting set of programs (Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player etc, overall much smaller than in Linux), Linux' one actually contains very good programs, some of the best available, not some garbage that you will want to replace ASAP.
edit: blah, smileys appearing out of nowhere
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On March 10 2010 22:46 deconduo wrote:
-Nvidia drivers. Complete mess.
Huh?
Go to nVidia website, choose if you're running 32bit or 64bit Linux and your card type, download, su, init 3, sh nvidia-file-name.run, click next, next, next, done, reboot, login as root, sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia, init 5, TADA!
There are of course easier ways to do this, but that's probably the best one I've ever used.
Edit: And you only need that for gaming really... Otherwise you're good from the get go.
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On March 10 2010 20:19 Manit0u wrote:Show nested quote +On March 10 2010 20:15 Alphonsse wrote:
Nice writeup. I have a question though, I've read about running windows inside of linux using virtual machines like virtualbox. I'm curious if there are any limitations to what you can do inside of windows.. for example, how about bw and iccup? Did you mean inside of Linux? I don't have any experience with virtualbox or anything like that, but I've been using WINE quite extensively and right now it runs A LOT of windows apps (read: games) without much effort/problems. You can check out what runs and to what extent here: http://www.winehq.org/Note: some of the stuff there wasn't updated. I've run into things with silver down to garbage rating which run super fine on my machine and I didn't experience any of the problems people who provided the review did.
Wine:
The version of wine maintained by most distributions does not run the anti-hack launcher, but will let you use a modded gateway for Bnet. The Bnet interface in wine fails miserably as well because of lacking pixel shader support, and while this issue has been known and reported gazillions of times, the developers at wine never bothered to do anything about it. Thus, you often need to do stupid things like "rub" your mouse all around the screen to get the graphics to update and use hotkeys (or blindly click) to find where buttons are. In game, since you're not using the launcher, you won't have lan latency so it sucks.
Vanilla BW, however works great in wine.
VirtualBox/VMWare Player:
Neither of these free virtualization engines do a great job with 2d/3d graphics acceleration, furthermore, there is a significant delay in the event buffer for when you press a key, move your mouse. For most games, this does not present many issues, but for a game as apm intensive as BW, these limitations make the game virtually unplayable.
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On March 11 2010 00:21 Manit0u wrote:Huh? Go to nVidia website, choose if you're running 32bit or 64bit Linux and your card type, download, su, init 3, sh nvidia-file-name.run, click next, next, next, done, reboot, login as root, sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia, init 5, TADA! There are of course easier ways to do this, but that's probably the best one I've ever used. Edit: And you only need that for gaming really... Otherwise you're good from the get go.
Yes I found a guide which showed me how to do this eventually. But you're saying that a typical new user should know how to do this?
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On March 11 2010 00:30 deconduo wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2010 00:21 Manit0u wrote:On March 10 2010 22:46 deconduo wrote:
-Nvidia drivers. Complete mess.
Huh? Go to nVidia website, choose if you're running 32bit or 64bit Linux and your card type, download, su, init 3, sh nvidia-file-name.run, click next, next, next, done, reboot, login as root, sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia, init 5, TADA! There are of course easier ways to do this, but that's probably the best one I've ever used. Edit: And you only need that for gaming really... Otherwise you're good from the get go. Yes I found a guide which showed me how to do this eventually. But you're saying that a typical new user should know how to do this?
The typical user I mentioned in the OP does not install the proprietary drivers and even if he does, he does not update them.
Under Linux you don't really need to install the GPU drivers anyway. It only enables some really advanced stuff and unlike in Windows (don't know how does it look like in w7) you have access to all the resolution/refresh rate settings right of the bat. You really don't need full 3D acceleration to run office and browse the web, do you?
Edit: Oh, this also reminds me about the person who mentioned that OpenOffice sucks compared to MSO. OpenOffice has worse calc (excel) but better everything else (which was proven many times over), in addition, it can read/edit most of the .docx files (being the only non-MS software that does that) which doesn't mean much as MSO 2007 is illegal and they have to revert back to their old formatting.
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What distribution are you guys using? The newest stable GPU driver from nVidia afaik is 193. If you're using ubuntu, you should be able to get that from Universe... otherwise, nVidia website is pretty straightforward download.
To install, what package manager are you using? apt? yums? The commands for each are slightly different, but the guis for the package managers are totally straightforward.
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On March 11 2010 00:38 love1another wrote:
What distribution are you guys using? The newest stable GPU driver from nVidia afaik is 193. If you're using ubuntu, you should be able to get that from Universe... otherwise, nVidia website is pretty straightforward download.
To install, what package manager are you using? apt? yums? The commands for each are slightly different, but the guis for the package managers are totally straightforward.
openSUSE and YaSt/zypper.
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On March 11 2010 00:27 love1another wrote:
Wine:
The version of wine maintained by most distributions does not run the anti-hack launcher, but will let you use a modded gateway for Bnet. The Bnet interface in wine fails miserably as well because of lacking pixel shader support, and while this issue has been known and reported gazillions of times, the developers at wine never bothered to do anything about it. Thus, you often need to do stupid things like "rub" your mouse all around the screen to get the graphics to update and use hotkeys (or blindly click) to find where buttons are. In game, since you're not using the launcher, you won't have lan latency so it sucks.
You're somewhat wrong with the bnet interface. It's not pixel shader support that's lacking (Starcraft doesn't need any shaders, and wine supports shaders reasonably well), but something called a Device-Independent Bitmap engine. The trouble with this thing is that it requires a huge change to parts of the architecture of WINE, and so trying to merge any fix into it in a way that doesn't break dozens of applications is tricksy, to say the least. Far from the developers 'never bothering' to fix things, there HAVE been people trying to write patches to create a DIB-engine for wine, but the guy in charge has so far vetoed them being merged into the codebase, which tends to discourage them from trying. But yes, to the end user, Starcraft bnet does suck under wine.
Also the antihack launcher works for me - I use unmodded wine that I compiled myself from the winehq site, and not the version 'maintained by most distributions' (presumably 1.0.1, the last 'stable' version - if you're on Ubuntu, get the one in the package misnamed wine1.2 for a newer version).
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On March 11 2010 01:11 Aim Here wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2010 00:27 love1another wrote:
Wine:
The version of wine maintained by most distributions does not run the anti-hack launcher, but will let you use a modded gateway for Bnet. The Bnet interface in wine fails miserably as well because of lacking pixel shader support, and while this issue has been known and reported gazillions of times, the developers at wine never bothered to do anything about it. Thus, you often need to do stupid things like "rub" your mouse all around the screen to get the graphics to update and use hotkeys (or blindly click) to find where buttons are. In game, since you're not using the launcher, you won't have lan latency so it sucks.
You're somewhat wrong with the bnet interface. It's not pixel shader support that's lacking (Starcraft doesn't need any shaders, and wine supports shaders reasonably well), but something called a Device-Independent Bitmap engine. The trouble with this thing is that it requires a huge change to parts of the architecture of WINE, and so trying to merge any fix into it in a way that doesn't break dozens of applications is tricksy, to say the least. Far from the developers 'never bothering' to fix things, there HAVE been people trying to write patches to create a DIB-engine for wine, but the guy in charge has so far vetoed them being merged into the codebase, which tends to discourage them from trying. But yes, to the end user, Starcraft bnet does suck under wine. Also the antihack launcher works for me - I use unmodded wine that I compiled myself from the winehq site, and not the version 'maintained by most distributions' (presumably 1.0.1, the last 'stable' version - if you're on Ubuntu, get the one in the package misnamed wine1.2 for a newer version).
Sorry :p It's been a while since I read the wine bug reports page. But this is 100% correct.
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things that are next to impossible on Linux unless you put in MANY hours of work (add PPAs, edit configuration files manually, learn how to work with crude GUIs etc.):
use Flash (Youtube etc.) (they work, but video is choppy and performance in general is much worse than in Windows), some pages like livestream.com don't work at all for me.
video editing
screen capturing
getting hardware to work as well as it does in Windows (my printer Canon MP550 doesn't work as well (doesn't scan), neither does my Webcam Logitech Pro 9000 (it works, but in Windows the quality in Skype is much better)
fancy stuff: Desktop effects (configuring these is a pain), Gnome DO, Docky, everything else
and, of course, games (most work, but, again, performance is much worse)
and seriously, do you think procedures like Go to nVidia website, choose if you're running 32bit or 64bit Linux and your card type, download, su, init 3, sh nvidia-file-name.run, click next, next, next, done, reboot, login as root, sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia, init 5, TADA! will help people convert to linux?
on the other hand you're right about average users. I installed Ubuntu on my girlfriend's computer. she doesn't play games, she doesn't use hardware that isn't supported, she just wants a word processor and a browser. Not having to worry about viruses is a huge plus. She never asked me to give her her Windows back.
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On March 11 2010 00:27 love1another wrote:
VirtualBox/VMWare Player:
Neither of these free virtualization engines do a great job with 2d/3d graphics acceleration, furthermore, there is a significant delay in the event buffer for when you press a key, move your mouse. For most games, this does not present many issues, but for a game as apm intensive as BW, these limitations make the game virtually unplayable.
use Xen, it's way better than these two
On March 11 2010 02:20 distant_voice wrote:
things that are next to impossible on Linux unless you put in MANY hours of work (add PPAs, edit configuration files manually, learn how to work with crude GUIs etc.):
use Flash (Youtube etc.) (they work, but video is choppy and performance in general is much worse than in Windows), some pages like livestream.com don't work at all for me.
From what I know, flash works quite bad in Ubuntu and similar distros. If you are particularily interested in flash, perhaps switch to some other, preferably non-Debian based distro. Should be better. Also, I assume you don't have PulseAudio sound driver enabled, right? 'Cause it really fucks flash up.
Still, I have no idea why would you be unable to use livestream. Even on my Xubuntu with quite bad comp specs and net speed it works fine.
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I love Linux but I can't figure out for the entire time why internet is so slow on my ubuntu (karmic)  I tried everything but nothing works. now I use Windows for using the internet and linux for programming and stuff.
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@distant_voice:
use Flash (Youtube etc.) (they work, but video is choppy and performance in general is much worse than in Windows), some pages like livestream.com don't work at all for me.
- with openSUSE 11.2 I had no problems at all, it even automatically installed flash and java for me when I first launched the browser (had to agree to the license though)
video editing - I don't do that so can't say anything
screen capturing - as above (unless you mean taking screenshots which is a lot easier than in MSW)
getting hardware to work as well as it does in Windows (my printer Canon MP550 doesn't work as well (doesn't scan), neither does my Webcam Logitech Pro 9000 (it works, but in Windows the quality in Skype is much better) - depends on the hardware, perhaps it's because I choose my stuff carefully but like I mentioned, I didn't have any problems with that
fancy stuff: Desktop effects (configuring these is a pain), Gnome DO, Docky, everything else
and, of course, games (most work, but, again, performance is much worse) - can't speak for Gnome as I'm an avid KDE user and desktop effects are easy to set up there, especially that currently some parts of compiz have been made an integral part of KDE (window decoration, on-screen effects, window behaviour etc. etc.).
Edit: And I don't want to convert anyone. Just wanted to show my view on the case.
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On March 11 2010 03:27 imDerek wrote:I love Linux but I can't figure out for the entire time why internet is so slow on my ubuntu (karmic) I tried everything but nothing works. now I use Windows for using the internet and linux for programming and stuff.
That's strange, usually it's the other way around.
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so you're saying if users build their systems having in mind that they'll want to use Linux Linux is great? Well so is Windows...
if you only want to use all the features Linux has out of the box you'll have a great experience (but that's the same as in Windows). the problems begin once you want to do something that hasn't been smoothed out yet. then you're in trouble.
video editing: I tried to use a lot of programs, and finally stumbled upon Cinerella. it's a very powerful program I'm sure, but the GUI is so obscure it's nearly unusable compared to Adobe products.
And by screen capturing I mean recording videos of your screen. there are some tools for that too, but none of them record 30fps in a good quality out of the box. Fraps on the other hand does an awesome job for me in Windows.
I hate how lots of Linux discussions here revolve around how you should configure Wine. I don't use Wine anymore even though I think it's a wonderful project. If you really want to make the switch to Linux you should look for programs that do what you want them to do and that run natively. There are undoubtedly many great programs out there, e.g. GIMP, Songbird, Amarok, VLC, Evolution, Gnome DO and its plugins, Tomboy...
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You know what, Linux is great. I use it all the time as a software developer; the one issue that I have with Linux is that a lot of drivers aren't fully developed yet. I had to compile a driver for my Realtek wireless card on Linux and I'd have really frequent disconnects. It got to the point where Linux was almost impossible to use. Now, I run Linux through virtualization (vmware) and Windows 7 and network bridging solves this problem beautifully, as the Realtek drivers for Windows are much better.
Linux is great because it is very stable and fast. I have give Microsoft some credit because Windows 7 has come a long way since the clunky feeling of Vista, but in the end, aside from gaming and some applications, almost anything you can do on Windows, you can do on Linux.
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On March 11 2010 03:42 distant_voice wrote:
And by screen capturing I mean recording videos of your screen. there are some tools for that too, but none of them record 30fps in a good quality out of the box. Fraps on the other hand does an awesome job for me in Windows.
For screen capture you could take a look at 'recordMyDesktop', a nice little piece of software with many cool features.
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The title is pretty misleading.. why is this called 'Linux vs Windows' when all you've done is sum up some of the nicer parts of Linux?
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On March 11 2010 04:57 Espers wrote:
The title is pretty misleading.. why is this called 'Linux vs Windows' when all you've done is sum up some of the nicer parts of Linux?
Some people like to call it 'marketing' 
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The only thing windows is, is a game loader.
else you can do most things well enough with a little effort on linux
but windows i just let's face it friendlier to people as most linux builds don't have defaults already set for known file types.
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EPT
