Change that to "can anyone cite a successful installed long-term instance of a day-to-day desktop XXXXX system used by a non-techie, other than the one that came pre-installed (and pre-paid) on their system?".

Non-techies just use what's already on the box, and MS forces h/w sellers to pre-install MS products.

Cheers

True. But every once in a while, you get a non-techie asking a question, such as in an online forum, wondering if they should try Linux.

I'm waiting for the Linux crowd to make liveUSB versions a *simple* reality.
LiveCDs are not good enough- you can't make any changes and they are slow.
LiveUSB is a reality, but there are several hoops to jump through. Perhaps the hoops are easy for someone familiar with it all, but it doesn't look easy yet to me.
Still, I might be game to have a go at those hoops in a couple weeks when the new Ubuntu version is released.

Okay... that's cool, then. There's definitely room for different opinions based on experience. You generally come across as a pretty damn knowledgeable guy, so it seemed like a bit of a departure to read something from you that, while I'd have agreed with it in the past whole heartedly, it didn't seem to be current. Part of the reason I was asking is because, in addition to using Linux at home, for the last 7 years I've been working at large companies (300+ employees) that successfully use Linux on the desktop. Sure, there's some kvetching due to unfamiliarity, but for the most part, from the seasoned unix folks down to the complete computer newbie, things are pretty smooth.

Yeah, there are always going to be examples of something that can be done better, but like you suggested in a previous post, Windows and OS X aren't immune from those, either. The last time I tried to help my parents with a computer problem, a fresh install of the OS still left me searching out, and downloading drivers. So really, I'd still be pretty hesitant to suggest that Microsoft's OOtB experience is any better. Apple, yeah... I won't argue, there.

Quick update: Latest Ubuntu distro fails the same basic test as gOS did.

I simply tried to set the time clock to update automatically from the internet. It told me a I had to install NTP support to do so. I pressed the "Install NTP support" button.

This one did slightly better than gOS did: It actually prompted me for the administrator password to install NTP support. It worked, downloaded the NTP support package, and installed it. Underneath a "DETAILS" button, I could open a little window and see the command-line shell output from the thingy that installed and started the NTP support. I could clearly see it saying "NTP started". So far so good!

After closing that window, I tried to set it to get internet time automatically, and...

"NTP Support is not installed. You must install NTP support..."

Ad infinitum.

Keeping in mind that this is a a Microsoft contractor (employee?)..

IMHO it's nothing to do with "techie"

I think it is how 'investigative' you are and how 'closed' you are to change and learning.

If you're older and you've become a little conservative (as we are biologically predisposed to do) you can get to the point where you are too worried to push a button on a VCR.

OTOH, if you take things to bits to see how they work you probably already have linux.

My father-in-law got into linux on his own in his 60's
He occasionally asks me for help.

His profession was in forestry and he was so "not bothered" by technology that he wouldn't have a TV in the house until they retired.

Linux still isn't totally easy-to-use, but the main problem that people have (as someone said) is that it's different.

Linux (like the other OSes) isn't a buy-and-forget. It's a way of life; it will take time to get comfortable. I still curse my linux boxes regularly!!


Oh, for LiveUSB, try Unetbootin http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

(sorry, I've not actually seen if this properly runs from the usb stick)

Who? Tony? I was pretty sure he left that dark period in his life a long time ago

Former. I haven't worked there for a year and have no ties to them.

And yes, I'll always admit that Microsoft's and Apple's own OS's have their problems, some of them requiring pretty arcane fixes. I scream at them all the time.

I'm just saying that, for a desktop OS, the fit and finish is better on Windows and OSX. Out of the box, there's less little "weird stuff" like that NTP issue I cited above, and fewer things that need fixing and adjusting.

I adore Linux for what it has always done well. I would personally never put a Windows server outside of a firewall. But despite the strides that Linux desktops have made, I still maintain a non-techie would be happier with OSX or Windows than Linux.

That Ubuntu distro still looks pretty nice, though. It did a Windows-style "automatic updates" thing right off the bat, quite smoothly. I intend to play with it some more.

Recently set up a CentOS server at work, CUPS found all the available printers on the network and actually had drivers for them, all I had to do was hit the "add printer" (or similar) button. Quite a shock for me.

Oh, excellent then. My apologies!

Meanwhile, I have a 12 year old Windows glitch that I've yet to solve: when I dual boot (rarely, but once or twice a year) one of the machines at home into MS WXP (or even W98SE), the clock is always off by either 5 or 8 hours from EST.

Oh, and sometimes the MS WXP "helpfully" adjusts the time by 1 hour (+/-) for daylight savings, which then screws up the time by that same amount when I later boot back into the native OS (Linux).

Peculiar that.

Cheers

Ah!
Starting from the Wikipedia Ubuntu#LiveUSB section, I only checked into the first two options listed. Your suggestion (third listing) seems quite a tidy package. Thanks!

Not true. Microsoft did have very shady deals and requirements back in the early to mid 90s with hardware vendors, but the legal cases that started in 93 helped to bring an end to this. Any hardware vendor can (and many do) offer multiple operating systems on hardware. Unfortunately the practices Microsoft used in the past helped kill off any foothold OS/2, BeOS and others could have made in the 90s to avoid the situation today.

This is clearly a situation where the Linux community cannot try and play as the victim and expect things to get better. More effort is clearly needed to ensure Linux is in a state that the big OEMs are willing to bundle, sell, and support Linux in the desktop market in a broader way then they currently are.


Windows by default will read the system time as local time instead of UTC. There is some code in the NT kernel back from the RISC days to try and set Windows to use UTC time, but it is buggy. More info on the issue here. It pretty much comes from the IBM PC legacy Windows was born from, where all IBM PCs stored real time in the BIOS and not UTC.

I've used Linux on and off for 10 years now and I still get a kick out of it when it 'just works'. The zealot in me just thinks that it's another kick in Microsoft's pants.

So what you're saying is that the problem in his case isn't necessarily that Windows has a time clock issue. It's that he's dual booting with a different OS which reads the time clock differently (UTC versus local). So the problem is caused by the act of dual booting with another OS, not by either of the OS's per se.

Am I reading that right?

And FUD like mine isn't helping, right?

Yes, but it's insane in this global world that Windows doesn't even offer an option for time to be stored in the BIOS as UTC. The way MS deals with time is awful.

Only if both conventions -- interpreting the clock as UTC, and as local time -- made equal sense. As Drakino's link explains, that's not the case. There's a right way and a wrong way, and DOS and Windows do it the wrong way.

Peter

You are reading it right. MSDOS, really old versions of OS/2 and Windows though have been the only mainstream OSes to do this, and POSIX standards actually state this is the wrong way to do it. All variants of Unix, BeOS, 32 bit versions of OS/2, OS X, Linux, and so on all follow POSIX standards that the real time clock should be set to UTC and never adjusted to local time zone/daylight settings. Dealing with time zone and daylight savings calculations should be a function of the OS or application, and not the RTC.

Ooh. That's a good link. I'd skipped over it before, as Tom's context implied it was just a listing of problems Windows had with its vestigial UTC support, but it's much more than that.

I guess that explains why my Media Center box tends to mess up the start times of series when they cross in/out of DST.

It dawned on me that nobody, so far as I could see, addressed this stated interest.

If you are truly keen, then I think Linux is your man, so to speak. At the present time, I can't think of a more efficient way to exercise a certain degree of computing keenness than Linux (warts and all).

As others have said, Live CDs mean it can be just dating, not an expensive wedding. Partitioning and dual boot may be worth considering, but why not see if your BIOS will let you boot from an outboard USB hard drive and set up Linux on that?

I am Fedora and Redhat-focused due to employment, but Ubuntu/Kubuntu certainly win the prize today for not-so-painful general-purpose Linux. Kubuntu for me.

What are the things that bug me?;

- wireless support not so fantastic

- support for USB scanners needs to be better, SANE or no.

It's been a couple years since I actively tried Linux.

Knoppix live CD being the exception. It worked well on this laptop even getting the Wi-Fi working with only setting the necessary prefs.

I'm kind of guessing though that new, newer, newest, machines will be the ones most likely to be missing support for various bits of hardware. True?

Good point! Agreed.

Not sure. Anything with a pure Intel chipset will just work on Linux, either at release or within 6 months (Ubuntu release cycle).

In the past, Toshiba and Compaq branded machines seem to have given the most difficulties, and Dell and (especially) Lenovo machines generally work without issues (unless one has last week's latest ATI video chips.. but that's apparently also now much better).

Cheers

Okay, I'll admit it. I don't know very many non-techies who also happen to own computers.

So it took a while to think through this one, but then I realized that two of our non-techie friends do indeed own/use exclusively Linux notebooks and prefer to leave them exactly the way they came from the store. ASUS EeePCs, of course. One for the teacher, and another for the sales dude.

Cheers

OEM's tend to offer Windows because they can bundle other stuff with it, like 90-day trials of AV products, Everquest (or whatever the current thing is), etc. They get paid to do this by the software vendors, actually meaning that Linux costs them more to include, even though it's free...

I think I first used Linux in either '94 or '95. It was back when Slackware was the defacto distribution, the kernel was at something like 0.74 (I think) and the only way to install it was following the guide by Matt (Welsch or something?). Some things are (or were) just easier in Linux. Some things are not. There is a level of frustration that can be had with any operating system. When things just work, it is awesome. When things don't just work, it is the exact opposite of awesome If you are lucky, you can fix it in Linux faster/easier than in Windows. As a member of this community, we are extremely lucky to have the membership we do.

Right now, my biggest complaint about Linux is the lack of direction. You have all these people doing great things, but they are just scattered all over the map. There seems to be massive steps backwards in some releases. One of the big things people promote about Linux is the security, then somebody goes and makes it so in Fedora 9 you can't hide the list of users from the login screen. Something like that is just baffling. Reading on the forums it looks like it was a personal agenda thing, preparing for 10 instead of keeping security in mind all the way through.

I have a few simulation packages that only run on Linux. Since a few of them are only provided with binaries, I can't just do a simple recompile to match my system. That would be too easy. Instead, I have to do all kinds of goofy stuff to try to get them to run on the distribution the others are using.

I've had more problems with lib hell than I ever had with dll hell. Go figure.

Some of the things in Linux are phenomenal though. The file command has saved me so many times, the latest when a new version of a sim wouldn't run because it couldn't execute a file. Turns out the file was a tar, just without the extension so it looked like the executable.

I suggest you do try it. While it isn't all funs and grins, it can be really useful. Just a piece of advice, when you do try it - never, ever use your hard drive as a decoding device for a mp3

Good point. I'd forgotten about the EeePCs thingys.

The only ones of those I've ever seen were owned by techies, but I could envision them being owned by non techies.

Given the variety of free virtualization products might that not be easier then dual booting? Plus one can download pre-build Linux virtual machines - not quite marriage, but more then dating