It hurts so much ya just have to grin (painfully). Bill Gates touches briefly (in a looooong email) on a few of the reasons why I have mostly avoided using Windows XP much, myself. Heck, I went through things like he details when folks called me up confused, distressed or simply royally ticked off at XP.
And then came Vista, which has managed to make XP look really, really good.
*heh*
Go, read. Bill Gates on his XP experience.
It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so painful.
Come to think of it, since much of the pain was Bill’s, maybe that’s not such a detraction.
😉
Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, Allie is Wired, McCain Blogs, Adam’s Blog, The World According to Carl, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Democrat=Socialist, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
I read that article yesterday and passed it around to my colleagues at work. He wasn’t really talking about XP so much as the horrible experience using Windows Update. Still, the problems he described were, and still are in some cases, real. And my computer goes through that crap just about every week picking up the latest “patches” on an OS that Microsoft claims will be dead in a couple of days. Fortunately it works “unattended” now. I wouldn’t even let it do that if it weren’t possible to roll back the changes if they break something.
“And then came Vista, which has managed to make XP look really, really good.”
— altogether too true. And worse, soon we’ll be forced to use it at work.
I’m following your Linux story closely… but I’m not quite ready to take the plunge myself. Maybe in virtual environments like Virtual PC but not as my primary OS. Keep letting us know about the trials, tribulations, and successes you have there.
“He wasn’t really talking about XP so much as the horrible experience using Windows Update.”
Well, yes. Still, the WindowsUpdate fiasco is so unalterably joined at the hip with XP, and his attempt to download Windows MovieMaker such a typical XP tale that I short-cut the connection.
Want tales of how Windows Update has trashed XP installs? Certainly an XP woe, given that some trashed installs were compulsory updates to SP1 or SP2 on machines unfortunately configured to allow updates “automagically” and on machines where the owners simply took Me$$y$oft’s assurances that they NEEDED the update, oh yes they did!
As to differences in the Linux experience… so far, this has been my roughest, toughest, wild-and-wooly Linux install, ever. Probably because I intend this machine as my main box and want every single solitary thing to be perfect, perfect, I say! *heh*
Still iffy: DVD functions: playing DVDs, writing DVDs. Some do, some don’t. *sigh* If it were consistent, I’d have pegged it by now. I’m beginning to think hardware, and for a mere $60 I could replace both the DVDRW and the plain vanilla DVDR with two very nice DVDRAM/RW drives, so I may just go that route eventually and see how these other drives do or don’t work in other boxes.
Or I could just void out onr of the bays, close it off, and buy one Plextor DVDRAM?RW drive. Surely that’d be enough?
Other niggling things: Getting GVox’s Encore working in WINE. (Speaking of which, one of the bugs I submitted may or may not be valid: I’ve had mixed results with MIDI overall. But it works well in a virtual Windows environment and almost all the time (one instance not, apart from Encore/WINE) otherwise.
Putting new vidcard and 3GiB more memory in the box next week. Will see how THAT goes. *heh*
All-in-all, so far there are fewer things of any substance bugging me than were bugging me on most of my Windows boxes over the past few years. Updates, for example. I don’t know how many times Windows Updates failed utterlky to install an update, then griped at me about needing to install the same #$%^# update over and over and over until I finally got fed upo with it and ran down WU’s problem (was never on my end, of course *heh*) and slopped through another kludgy manual installation of the “critical update” that continued to fail to install.
*UGH!* Really ugly process, over and over and over again–and not just on one or two of my boxes, either.
The Ubuntu update process?
“Updates are ready to install. Click here.”
That’s it, except for an ocassional, “You need to reboot” notice.
Oh, yeh, once after an update the nVidia drivers Ubuntu had itself installed stopped working. That’s when I had to do my magic of discovering how to fix that. What was amazing to me was that, as unecessarily convoluted and obscurantist as that process was, it wasn’t a patch (*heh*) on fixing non-installing Me$$y$oft patches for Win2K/XP.
Some of the poaradigms are widely divergent, necessitating a wee learning curve. No more Device Manager (or anything that comes remotely close, no matter what Linux gurus say :-)). Similar things are managed in widely divergent ways (video driver and monitor specs/drivers–not easily managed from same place, although there are add-ons that can do much of that… add ons that don’t necessarily tell the OTHER, built-in managemewnt tools what they’ve done *sigh*).
Navigating the file system is a trip. I have to keep reminding myself what I’ve only half-learned over the years about Linux file systems.
When I stumbled across (for the nth time, although this time I saved it and printed it out, both) a nice, compact list on Windows/DOS/Linux command line and other equivalents, I began feeling much more at home. I need to dig out that old book on Unix I have squirreled away. Probably much more there. Oh, heck, my DOS command line stuff is even rusty, so it’s been fun brushing up on actually typing my way around the file system/commands, etc. (Point and click HAS made me dumber. Just keeping a copy of the directory/file structure in my head while moving around on the hard drive has done me some good. Kind of like when I used to play “blindfolded” chess [not really: a chess-playing friend and I worked at a restaurant/hangout during college and we’d call our moves out to each other as we passed, things like that] :-))
I’d like to tweak some GUI settings when I get everything else going like I want (hidden toolbars pop up too slowly for my taste, for one thing), and I really, really want to have Encore working properly–next trial is installing another Windows in VirtualBox and Encore as the ONLY additional app in that VBox. Maybe that’ll do it. Can always connect a Roland external synth via a USB-to-MIDI cable I’ve been salivating over, and my MIDI controller to the synth, IF I can get it working right otherwise.
Still, for a box that’s only cost me–with additional hardware for best use–nearly $500, putting up with finagles, tweaks, workarounds and such while getting an OS that the base box was NOT designed for installed and working as I want it to work, this is working oput much, much better and more quickly than I had hoped.
And a large part of any lag is due to the fact that, while I have played around dipping my toe in the Linux waters for some years now, this is my first box where it’s Linux something-or-other do or die. Makes it a different ball game than just using a box to surf, check mail and use some office apps, etc. All of that (and interfacing with my mp3 player and more) this Ubuntu install could do fresh from install. But naturally, since I’m eliminating several computers to put this one in place of all of ’em, this is proving to be more fun than I had hoped, too. 🙂
So what sort of developer tools are available for working under Linux? I suppose I could go back to doing C/C++ code after having been spoiled with C#. I tried that not too long ago with some success, trying to get a .NET app that I wrote to run without the .NET framework. http://perrinelson.com/EMS/ElectromechanicalComputerSimulation.zip
I ultimately re-wrote the entire thing in C/C++ and straight WIN32 APIs. Obviously .NET isn’t going to be running on a Linux box, and I’m sure that the APIs I did use could be used with WINE. Then again, what Linux user would want it to?
Or have I totally lost it?
C++ skills are definitely portable *heh* to the Linux platform. Most Linux distros come with development tools of various kinds/flavors built in, so your best bet might just be to take an old box and install a Linux distro, start poking around for things that might be of interest and play with ’em.
I know you and many of your regular readers are “savy” when it comes to operating systems and can run circles around most of us who simply use computers. All the same, last year when some dirt bag stole a lap top out of my work truck I was forced to purchase a replacement.
Most all the new stuff came with Vista and would not be compatible with some of the specialty programs I use for locksmith work. The alternative was to find a new lap top which came with XP so I wouldn’t have to purchase the Vista upgrades. Dell came to the rescue and I got to learn a bit; mostly how Vista required considerable more “umph” just to get it running, nearly twice what XP needed. Little things like that along with complaints from almost anyone who’d used Vista made me glad I went with XP, even if it is a dinosaur.
“…mostly how Vista required considerable more “umph” just to get it running, nearly twice what XP needed…”
Indeed, TF. Of course, the story’s a bit broader than that and is in fact the basis of a class action lawsuit against Me$$y$oft. One can indeed run “Vista” on a computer with the same specs as a decent XP machine, but the “Vista” one has to run is Vista BASIC, which is NOT the computing experience Me$$y$oft advertizes by one huge honking long shot.
And even gthen, using V ista Basic can walk folks slap up against the software and hardware (primarily peripherals) incompatibilities Vista has such a well-earned reputation for suffering.
XP? Had little trouble getting XP to run under Ubuntu in a VirtualBox. Don’t know I’d want to try that with Vista until my memory upgrade AND video upgrades were installed. Notice the “were” in that sentence. Implying a subjunctive mood. *heh* I very much view the installation of Vista on this machine as an impossibility–not so much because of hardware restrictions (cos this is ending up being a pretty hefty, up-to-date machine) but because of sanity restrictions: I refuse to risk my sanity on that OS after my experiences with other folks’ use of it. *heh*
The choices are getting slimmer though. XP won’t be around (in distribution) much longer, although low-end laptops get a break. There are so many hardware and software incompatibilities though that a lot of people will wait to upgrade until the absolutely must.
Personally, as a former Microsoft SDE it really irks me that Microsoft expects me not only to upgrade my computer every couple of years just to run their latest OS bloatware, but they also expect me to upgrade my peripherals too. My scanner is no longer manufactured — the company that made it got out of that business. It worked beautifully for many years. There are no drivers for Vista and none planned. The same for my TV tuner card and a few other of my peripherals.
I know that technology must advance, but some things are ridiculous.
“I know that technology must advance, but some things are ridiculous.”
Indeed. Your issue with OSes not having drivers for older peripherals is one reason that, despite having located and downloaded a driver that is supposed to work with XP, along with my dad’s new computer, I’m taking him a new scanner I KNOW works with XP, because his 10-year-old scanner just might not despite assurances to the contrary.
His printer I’m not so concrned about, since it’s only a couple of years old.
And that brings me back to my own new computer. As much as I had not desired to lear quite as much about Linux as I may have to, I’ve begun looking into what it takes to write Linux drivers for a couple of peripherals. Of course, it might end up being a better use of my time and resource to just buy new peripherals to sub in (just an IR receiver/transmitter combo–not an expensive purchase, while the time investment in learning to write drivers might not be worth the effort, financially–who knows?).
But upgrading my comp every couple of yeas for an OS… not on for me. This newest one will likely be my last “main” box for a while. With its current BIOS, it can only handle 8GiB of memory, but that ought to do well, along with a 2.6Ghz processor for a while, at least–as long as I complete the installation of a more capable graphics subsystem.
But keeping up with Me$$y$oft’s plans to drain my bank account just isn’t in my playbook, anymore.