Yesterday the motherboard on one of my servers decided to go belly up. As a quick fix I dismantled both and swapped them. As a result I had no computer to work on as my work virtual machine was sitting in the server. But, I still needed to get some work done. I ended up using Window XP on a laptop as it was the only computer setup for work.
The first thing I missed was the Virtual Desktop. In
Linux we can have multiple virtual desktops. I used them to group tasks. One is for mail, one for web, one for virtual machines, one for terminal windows.... etc. Any program not in that virtual window doesn't show on the window list bar. It can really reduce clutter, especially with the group like windows feature. Also if your missing a program you can just middle-click on the desktop to bring up a window of what's running.Now I'm sure there is a way to hack or add software to get this effect in Windows. But, I'm almost never using my own windows computer. It's always a borrowed, or temporary machine. So customizing it with all these hacks is not always the best option. I prefer Linux as this is all out of the box.
The next feature I miss is the gnome-terminal (bash). Yes Windows has powershell, but powershell doesn't have all the features I used every day in Linux. I'm an old hat when it comes to Linux/Unix systems. I prefer the text windows over a gui screen for most tasks. So I prefer Linux for is powerfull out of the box command line. Not to mention everything in Linux can be done from the command line, and with out the GUI.
Now there's cygwin which basically installs Linux bash on top of Windows. (but I always ask myself, if I have to install Linux/Unix on top of Windows for my regular tasks... why not just use Linux) Same can be said the other way except I find myself always gravitating to using Linux for all those tasks. Not to mention cygwin has a lot of quarks on windows that slow me down. No tabbed windows for starters.
The third annoyance is the text editor. Out of the box we have gedit. It's a powerful text editor with spell checking, colour syntax highlighting, regexpr find and replace, and many more. With Windows we have notepad. Since I write a lot of scripts, SQL for starters, I jump into the text editor regularly. When on windows for a day I was disparately looking for my old copy of UltraEdit for Windows. The notepad was slowing me down considerably. Again I'm talking out of the box here. I'm sure there's new, maybe even better software out there. But if I'm on a foreign computer installing all this software for temporary use is a pain, if they will even let me.
These are just 3 of the frustrations I find when going back to windows. Most is all preference and a lot of windows users would probably not even see my problem. But this is my ranting... and why I prefer Linux. If you prefer Windows, write your own blog.
Powershell is an extremely flexible and powerful shell, with a much more sane interface than the bourne shell derivatives. So your argument is basically "I know bash better than powershell, and so I prefer what I know", which is self-fulfilling.
ReplyDeleteMost linux distributions also need a lot of software to be installed after the initial installation (which, granted, is usually an easy thing through apt-get, emerge, up2date or whatever package management system is on the distro). The point is, there's usually some trivial amount of time/effort needed to be spent to install software, and deriding a platform because it doesn't come default with your personal preference of software is sort of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Here's an example in the other direction: Most Linux distros do not ship with a "complete" set of video codes (since many of the desirable codecs are not legally redistributable). So, one of the first things you typically need to do on Linux to make a functional multimedia environment is to install a Win32 codec pack with some slightly grey area legal stance. Windows, comes with many more of the codecs that people actually want (because Microsoft pays to legally license them).
1. Yes Powershell is very flexible and much better than the dos window of yesteryear. But I still prefer the Linux Gnome-Terminal over powershell and cygwin for many reasons. (like gnome-terminal over xterm too for many reasons)
ReplyDelete2. Out of the box windows (Retail box, like you purchase at futureshop) can do what? browse the internet? Play media files? (not sure, can it play dvd's via mediaplayer?) and as you said with linux sure you can always install more, with a few simple clicks and downloads.
Fedora Linux out of the box has a full office suite, firefox internet, instant messaging, etc? Fedora LiveCD's are rather useless but Fedora 13 is using a DVD now so haven't had a chance to see what's new.
The issue I have is, most of the time I'm working on computers where I'm not allowed to install additional software. So I'm stuck with what's the default. The defaults in Fedora are much more suited to my needs. (ie Gedit/OpenOffice are standard on Fedora, where notepad/wordpad are standard on Windows)
In the rant I made no claims to which is better only to what I prefer. To answer the question of people saying "why do you run Linux over Windows"
3. Have you seen the automatic codec installer started in Fedora 10 (I think)? It even brings up a windows asking if you want to purchase the "grey area" ones. I just have everything converted to ogg so I don't have to worry about it.
I guess that will be my next rant.... PackageKit.
[mcarter@snow-faerie ~]$ ant
Command not found. Install package 'ant' to provide command 'ant'? [N/y]