If you are running a server, be it a web server, file server, print server or what have you, Linux is a tremendously powerful and flexible operating system with hundreds if not thousands of tools you can use to get the best performance, the tightest security and the lowest cost all in one. But on the desktop Linux has proved to be one of my least favorites.
I first learned computing on an Apple ][ and later worked in DOS on a hand-me-down PC clone in college, so I'm no stranger to command lines and plain text interfaces. I even rather enjoyed DOS once I got familiar with its commands. At the time I considered Macintosh and Windows (3.1 in those days) to be toys with lots of ambiguous little pictures to click on that didn't really tell you what they did. I later went on to work in Windows 3.1 (mainly because of the advent of the World Wide Web and graphical browsers) and OS/2 (where I gave a good eight years of my life to promoting and developing for the platform) and finally Windows 2000 which, though it seems hollow compared to even the 1994 version of OS/2, has been surprisingly stable and acceptably fast on >500MHz machines.
I've installed/tried Linux five times since 1999. The first was Corel Linux 1.1 which came with WordPerfect Office 2000. At the time I was very interested in WordPerfect, having used it on DOS and Windows since the early 90's, and I was hoping to hop from OS/2 to Linux rather than reliving the horrors I knew from my previous Windows experience. I didn't really know what I was doing when I got into Corel Linux. It was pretty and all, but I had no good understanding of why I would choose grub over lilo or whether I wanted lilo in the master boot record or in the boot partition. I just couldn't get the hang of it, so I deleted it.
My next Linux experience was Mandrake 7.1. After successfully installing the system, complete with the GNOME interface with the goofy footprint-G logo, I started to investigate some of the programs it had put into my desktop menu. Apparently something didn't like something else because the task bar/application bar/whatever you want to call it at the bottom of the screen vanished and so did the text of the desktop menu bar across the top -- the bar was still there, it was just empty. I had no idea how to get them back, so I rebooted. The missing elements were still gone. Now even in Windows 2000, when I somehow lose the task bar, a reboot always brings it back, no questions asked. So I deleted it.
I waited a couple of versions to let things settle and hopefully improve. I installed RedHat 9 next, and all seemed well. But after a few days I found I could no longer connect to the RedHat Network to get system updates and the Konqueror browser would not connect to any websites. None. Nada. Using the text-based lynx browser (thankfully I had learned of this earlier when I took a class in UNIX administration) I found this was a known issue and RedHat had a fix I could download for it. They even included instructions on how to install the fix. It didn't work. I don't recall exactly anymore, but either the package would not decompress (unzip, for the Windows wienies) or it did unzip but didn't make any difference. Konqueror was still dead in the water and so was my RedHat Network connection. So I deleted it.
I then installed Mandrake 9.2. I figured 2 full versions and one minor revision should have made quite a difference since my previous 7.1 fiasco. Well yes and no. The specific problems I'd had with 7.1 were gone, but new ones appeared. For the record, this was the Linux install that I kept and used for the longest time. Shortly after install and reboot, I found that my "K menu" (like the Start menu in Windows) had lost more than half of its contents. They were simply gone. Determined to find a working solution, I scoured the web and found this was, like my RedHat problem, a known issue and there was a fix (thankfully one that could be downloaded through Mandrake's automated software update tool) but it would only help for any new user accounts I created. For my existing user account, I had to open a terminal (command line), become root (administrator) and type a specific command. This had the effect, as I recall, of simply opening one of the preference panes for the control panel and allowing me to essentially reset the "K menu". Good enough, and it worked. Some time later, however, I found that anytime I tried to play audio in my system I got an error message and no sound. I eventually got through that, with the help of some more seasoned Linux users, by unchecking an option whose description suggested it was good to have it checked.
As I say, the Mandrake 9.2 install was the one I kept the longest. I even took the time to try installing an updated Mozilla web browser (version 1.4 at the time, I think) but failed miserably with it. First, I was advised I had to use the proper RPM package for my version of Mandrake (RPM is used for many Linux distributions and apparently one RPM cannot do the job for all of them, they each must have their own). Finding and installing from it, rather than overwriting/upgrading the existing version of Mozilla on the system, it installed to a new location. It also did not create an icon on my desktop nor on the K menu. Having come from the OS/2 and Windows worlds where installers actually did useful things like give the user an icon to click on to run the program, I was not only disheartened but disturbed by this behavior.
Okay, so I found a way to first locate the directory/folder where the new version had been installed and drag and drop a copy of the program onto my desktop so I could use it without having to open a terminal (command line) to run my graphical web browser. But now I wanted to add the Macromedia Flash plugin (for Linux, mind you) and had no end of troubles with that. First of all, the Flash installer was a command line script with no graphical interface. Second, it installed into the plugins folder for the old Mozilla version, not the new one I had just installed. Copying the files over did not work. Mozilla 1.4 would not acknowledge the plugin existed in its own plugins folder. More disheartening, disturbing news.
Mandrake 9.2 also had frequent problems with forgetting my network settings, which took sometimes 4, 5 or even 10 tries to get them to stick before I was allowed to connect to my DSL Router.
On the plus side, Mandrake 9.2 had properly detected and configured my sound (initially, at any rate), my USB printer and my GeForce 4 video card. I was able to "print" directly to the Adobe PDF format from any program which had printing capability, but I had known the same luxury under OS/2 thanks to a helpful 3rd party add-on tool I'd found on the web, so this was nothing new. I now also know that luxury under Windows 2000, again thanks to a 3rd party add-on tool, and it's a built-in feature of MacOS X which I run on a second system. For me, the few positives in Mandrake 9.2 were overshadowed by the quirky problems and the lack of decent installers for the programs I used. To be fair to Mandrake, that last part wasn't their fault because Macromedia wrote the install script for the Flash plugin and someone involved with the Mozilla browser project wrote the installer for the web browser. Nonetheless, it tarnished my view of Linux as a desktop operating system. So I deleted it.
And finally, I tried the so-called live demo CD of SuSE Linux 9.1. This is a bootable CD which runs a fully installed, graphical Linux directly from the CD. It needs to put a couple of files onto an available FAT or FAT32 (DOS and Windows format) partition on your hard drive in order to speed up some operations (very much like Windows itself uses a swap file), but otherwise requires no installation. This sounded like a great way to try out SuSE Linux -- I'd heard so many good things about it over the years -- with minimal risk and effort. It worked well for the first two times I booted from the CD. It was dog slow, but that's to be expected; CD-ROM drives are nowhere near as fast as modern hard drives. The third time I booted the CD, it complained it could not find or could not read the files it had put on my solitary FAT32 drive, and would not boot further. Well I saw (after booting into Windows 2000) that the files were definitely there, and I even ran Norton Disk Doctor to be sure the drive itself hadn't gone bad. The SuSE demo CD was just dead to me now. A fan of Seinfeld might have said "No SuSE for you!" So I deleted that, too.
So I ask again, why Linux? To hell with Linux. Like I said, for a server it's a great product. Most servers don't need or don't even have a graphical interface. It's actually wise not to install the graphical interface on a server (which has always been bad news for Windows Server because you cannot choose to not install the graphical interface on Windows). For a desktop user, even one who has experience in command lines and shoddy, half-hearted user interfaces *cough* Windows *cough* Linux is just not "there" yet. If you enjoy spending as much time administering the system as you spend actually using it, then Linux may be right up your alley. And yes, you can do just about anything at all in Linux... if you know how or are willing to spend all your free time learning. Users with a strong UNIX background may find Linux to be refreshing because they can still run all their shell scripts, they can grep, awk and sed to their hearts' content, and they don't even need to install the graphical interface if they don't want to.
So where do I go from here? Windows 2000 felt like a step backward after using OS/2 for so long, but there's lots more multimedia and generally more variety of internet programs available for Windows, which are the two reasons I started using it in late 2001 (yes, after XP was already on the market).
What I have been seeking is a true replacement for the OS/2 that got me hooked in 1995 (yes, after Windows 95 was already on the market). At the time, OS/2 had the perfect combination of technical prowess and user-friendly design. Windows 95 faked the ease of use by dumbing things down and had no technical prowess whatsoever. Macintosh was still a toy in my mind and (thankfully) I hadn't even heard of Linux yet back then.
I tried the marvelous BeOS (version 4.5) in 1999 and fell in love with it. It had the best file system I have ever seen (even to date in 2004), it was both visually attractive and technically powerful. The whole graphical system could boot in under 15 seconds on a 166MHz Pentium-compatible PC and there were strong ties between the command line and the user interface so that all objects on the desktop were represented in the file system and could be acted upon from the command line. It was an incredible piece of engineering. Sadly Be, Inc. chose to chase the now infamous Internet Appliance market and paid the ultimate price.
In this day and age, the best thing I can find is MacOS X. Macintosh has undergone a revolution in design since 2000. While Macintosh Systems 1 through 9 were more or less based on the same code base (with changes, of course, when Apple switched from Motorolla 68K processors to IBM PowerPC processors in the mid 1990's), MacOS X is an entirely different animal. Based on a strong and proven UNIX core (BSD to be exact) it is more like Linux when viewed from the command line than Windows or OS/2 will ever be. However the default is, as always with Macintosh systems, the graphical user interface which Apple has been doing to high praise for many years. Remember that Apple, not Microsoft, popularized the graphical user interface when Macintosh was introduced in 1984. Apple always had many of the best and brightest design engineers and Macintosh was considered a user friendly system which even grandma and grandpa (or a semi-legendary child of seven) could use.
The current MacOS X user interface is based on another proven technology, which Apple acquired when they bought out NeXT (one of the companies founded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs after he left Apple in the mid 1980's and before he returned to Apple in the late 1990's). The so-called Quartz engine (the core technology of the MacOS X user interface) is based on Adobe PDF. Everything you see is rendered in PDF and any program which can print can also "print" into a PDF file. And unlike the print-to-PDF solutions I have seen on OS/2, Linux and Windows which all use a 3rd party PDF impersonator, I do believe that Apple's is 100% true Adobe PDF, ensuring maximum compatibility and feature support.
Recent versions of MacOS X (10.3 and later) use this to great effect in a feature called Exposé. Unlike traditional window switchers, Exposé reduces the size of all open windows so they can appear on the screen, all together, without overlapping. You can glance and see the window you want to switch to, rather than the traditional way of only seeing the program name and icon pop up in the middle of your screen. Once selected, all windows return to their normal size and position with your selected window now on top. All contents of the windows update in real-time while in the shrunken mode (if you have a QuickTime window open playing a video, it continues to play, in reduced size) so you can always see what is currently being displayed in each window. With keyboard shortcuts, you can alter Exposé to only show all windows of the current program (like if you have 3 different windows of MS Word 2004, it will shrink-and-show all three of them without bothering you with windows belonging to other programs). Not only can that make it easier to quickly find the window you're seeking, but with potentially fewer shrunken windows being displayed, their size may be a bit larger so you can see them in more detail.
So here we have a powerful and proven UNIX core (technical prowess above and beyond that of even Windows Server 2003), with perhaps the best graphical user interface currently on the market (in many ways it surpasses my beloved OS/2's WorkPlace Shell which is based on old-school Windows-style design with no functionality for things such as Exposé) and a raft of name brand software developers supporting the platform including Adobe, Apple, ATI, Macromedia, Microsoft (many say that MS Office for MacOS X is far superior to MS Office on Windows), nVidia, Roxio and IBM. Being UNIX based, the system would be well at home working as a server, and being Macintosh it has been tailored for ease of use even by non-technical users. What more can a power user, who wants to spend more time using his system than he spends administering it, want in 2004?
Linux is still too immature and fragmented. Perhaps when/if the KDE and GNOME camps come together to design a unified and consistent user interface things will improve rapidly for Linux on the desktop.
BeOS, my beloved BeOS, is no more. It lives on in a handful of pre-release products which may or may not restore BeOS's good name in time, but which will have to fight not only Windows and Mac, but also a Linux community which has grown rapidly since BeOS's last stab at fame, for resources and hardware support.
Windows is becoming too much of a Stalinist regime with intentional security holes and system administration options taken away from the system administrator with each release. As it exists now, by default Microsoft enables automatic software updates -- so the user/administrator may not even be aware when a software update is being installed -- and in my experience with Win2K every software update carries an End User License Agreement, which means Microsoft could be changing the terms of users' Windows licenses without the user even knowing about it. At the very best, one well-publicized EULA gives Microsoft the right to quietly install programs and patches on a user's system which Microsoft and Microsoft alone feels are necessary. So much for the concept of My Computer.
OS/2 lives on in the form of eComStation, a 3rd party branded and enhanced OS/2 Warp 4.5 offering. However it still lacks official (legal) DVD playback, lacks any particularly good video capture or video editing tools (or drivers for video capture cards, for that matter) and supports only a handful of USB devices. It is also unlikely that, beyond new bundled programs, drivers and installation tools, OS/2 itself will evolve, because IBM still owns the code and long ago lost interest in improving it more than incrementally. It was a great system in 1995 -- even in 1999 -- but without some fundamental changes to the core (kernel) and the graphical environment (I'm talking more than eye candy) it's falling farther and farther behind systems such as MacOS X which are rushing full speed forward.
So yes, I bought a PowerMac. I bought a dual processor PowerMac. I paid through the bloody nose for it. But I've also been talking with Mac users who are successfully running the latest MacOS X (10.3) on what would be considered decrepit machines in the Windows world: 400 and 500MHz systems with no USB 2.0, no support for gigabytes of memory, and pokey old ATI Rage 128 video cards. By that measure, my dual PowerMac should last me a good 3 or 4 years before it needs to be upgraded, and perhaps 5 before it needs to be replaced. By contrast, I've upgraded my PC every 2 years like clockwork. Programs like iMovie, iDVD and yes even Virtual PC (so I can run the few Windows programs for which I have not yet found Mac equivalents) should run quite well.
I used to be a die-hard WordPerfect fan. There is simply no better tool than Reveal Codes. Sorry, but "show non-printing characters" is NOT the same thing at all. I have become enamored of the OpenOffice.org office suite, in part because it's free and open source but also because it can read in my existing WordPerfect files and can both read and write MS Office files for when I feel the need to exchange documents with someone who doesn't understand that plain text is just fine for text documents. OpenOffice.org is available on MacOS X -- 2 versions in fact; one a bit more "OS X like" than the other but both free for use -- so all of my documents can be carried over with no hassle.
The popular web browser Mozilla, and the newer Mozilla Firefox, is available for virtually every computing platform in existence. I got used to it under OS/2, use it extensively now in Windows and will be using it on MacOS X. Again, no pain at all when converting.
I haven't the financial resources to pay for serious video editing and DVD authoring packages such as Adobe Premiere or Apple DVD Studio Pro, so I've come to grudgingly accept the template based tools that came bundled with my DVD recorder. iMovie and iDVD, which are included with MacOS X 10.3, are similar tools with similar interfaces. However they seem like they might even be a step or two ahead, as iMovie, for instance, appears to support multiple streams of video and audio along with a timeline so you can bring in an audio clip at a specific point during the video or vice versa. Most of the low-cost Windows based ones I've used (like PowerDirector Pro) don't give the timeline and support only one stream for video and one for audio.
iDVD also has a lot of available template packs and effects/menu transitions packs, which I've not found to be available for most Windows authoring tools where you get one set of themes, one set of effects, and you're on your own. I was reading recently about an award winning film at the Cannes film festival in 2004 which was put together using iDVD. iDVD is part of the $50 Apple iLife package. I'd say you can't beat that price for something that can produce professional quality movies.
My PowerMac came with the traditional Apple 1-button mouse (yuck) but my existing Logitech Trackman Marble+, which I've used successfully in OS/2, Windows and Linux, is also Mac compatible with an inexpensive PS/2 to USB adapter, so I get to keep my scroll wheel and three buttons.
I had just purchased a Serial-ATA hard drive for my PC. I found an inexpensive Serial-ATA card for my PowerMac so I was able to keep my 160GB of new storage space in the Mac. I even bought a new 16X DVD+/-RW recorder which is MacOS X compatible, so I can choose to keep it alongside the (4X) Apple SuperDrive DVD-R recorder in the PowerMac. And best of all, my Hewlett Packard PSC750 all-in-one USB printer/scanner/copier has official HP MacOS X support! I was never able to use it under OS/2, and I always like official support when I can get it.
And for the few programs I currently use in Windows that don't have (or for which I have not yet found) Macintosh equivalents, I can always run VirtualPC. Heck, I may even be able to get OS/2 to install into VirtualPC on my Macintosh, but knowing Microsoft's tactics over the years to specifically derail OS/2, I have to wonder what they may have done to VirtualPC since buying it off Connectix in 2003.
©1996, 2008 by Don K. Eitner