November 25, 2007
Promote free software – DUMP VISTA!
The free software foundation has started up a campaign to promote free software and oppose the adoption of Microsoft Windows Vista. Its about time someone thought of this. I would encourage everyone to support the FSF and sign the petition at http://www.badvista.org. So gohead, support a righteous cause.
Comments(3)
You are right on target with this. But the challenge is to find a suitable replacement for it.
I have tried a lot of different Linux distros over the years. and kept hoping/thinking, that finally this is going to be the one… And I have been endlessly frustrated.
The chief complaint about Linux over the years has been the lack of hardware compatibility. I have spent huge amounts of time trying to get systems to work, often it’s with video problems (can’t get all the supported resolutions), and the sound system almost never works right. I won’t name names, but I have tried all of the top 10 on http://www.distrowatch.com (plus others).
Obviously somebody somewhere is getting these to work, but I’ve got access to some pretty generic hardware and seldom if ever did I achieve full hardware functionality/compatibility with the various Linux distros that I tried. I am not exactly unskilled at this, although I am not yet a Linux expert, I have been running and using Linux servers for years (servers are great, it’s the desktop where the problems are), I’m consultant/programmer and generally considered to be Microsoft Windows expert. So for someone with my skill level to not be able to get Linux to work without huge battles and maybe not even then… well, it has just been pretty pathetic — (but now I have found a Linux distro that works!!! keep reading)
The number 2 complaint about Linux is the lack of software compatibility. http://www.openoffice.org has gone a long way toward solving that. In fact I have migrated all of my clients to Open Office, so that compatibility with Microsoft Office is a non-issue. But the problem remains that many websites aren’t viewable, frequently the fundamentals like flash and quicktime don’t work and I have never ever managed (before now…) to play a windows media file inside of a browser on Linux.
Is there an answer, yes!!! I’m getting to it, if you are impatient, just skip to the bottom. But otherwise read on you may find it useful.
By the way, one of the things available on Linux, that works pretty well these days, is called WINE. What it does is that it enables you to run many programs that were written for MS Windows directly on Linux. So don’t assume that you can’t switch to Linux because you are dependent upon program zxy, try it and see if with a little bit of fiddling, perhaps you can get that program to run. You may be pleasantly surprised with the degree of compatibility that has been achieved. Basically, if a program is compatible with Windows 98 it will almost certainly work in WINE and even a lot of programs that are compatible with XP will work.
So here we have Microsoft extolling the virtues of maintaining MS Windows compatibility and they tell you, that’s why you should keep buying MS Windows; and we have the industry as a whole which agrees that compatibility is a good thing and that stuff ought to just work. For instance, you ought to be able to send documents back and forth to a co-worker and be able to open/save them without headaches. And many companies currently specify that you should submit documents to them in Microsoft Word format, because that is what they have standardized on.
But there is one really really huge problem with all of this alleged Microsoft compatibility. It’s a big lie! There is no such thing, and Vista is the proof of this in spades.
Every time that Microsoft comes out with a new version of something, they trample with utter contempt, all over the so-called compatibility, and send designers scrambling to change everything to cope with the new ‘compatibility’ standard. I remember the nightmare of Windows 2000 and how almost nothing worked on it, because Microsoft broke the functionality of Mutexes, plus other problems such as the area of the Registry which was reserved for use by 3rd party programs was inexplicably set to read-only, thus rendering it unusable — this was after convincing programmers to use it instead of using the more traditional and reliable methods.
If you carefully followed the compatibility guidelines that Microsoft published for software development on Windows 98; guidelines that were supposed to ensure that your program would continue to work with future versions of the Microsoft operating system, well, when Windows 2000 came out, you were screwed, Microsoft totally broke compatibility, and now they have done it again with Vista.
You want hardware compatibility? Forget it, Vista does not run on your computer unless you bought it pre-installed. In fact there is a class-action lawsuit about this; remember all of those “made for Vista” computers? The ones where the companies were saying, buy our hardware today and then when Vista becomes available you can install it. Well, guess what, Vista would not run properly on many/most of the so-called compatible computers. So there is now a lawsuit about it and Microsoft is now trying to claim that “made for Vista” never meant that it fully supported Vista. (and for crying out loud, what kind of a lame excuse is that? would any sane person buy a computer that was “made for Vista” if they knew it would not actually run fully functional Vista?).
You want to add a hardware device such as a wireless network card? Well guess what, hardly anything is compatible with Vista, worse yet, this is actually by design, it’s part of the Digital ~Restrictions~ Management (DRM). If the hardware has not been blessed by Microsoft and if the manufacture has not agreed to cripple it from any possible hint of misuse, then Vista simply won’t support it. So much for hardware compatibility, Vista scores far far worse in this department than Linux ever did.
And speaking of DRM, if you are a film/video/music maker, don’t even think about buying Vista. Microsoft’s idea of DRM is that any film/video is assumed to be stolen unless accompanied by a certificate that you have to buy from Microsoft. This means that Vista can not be used for video or music production, because any content that you create will immediately be assumed to be stolen and Vista will lock you out of access to it. I wish I were kidding, but this absurdity is true, a quick search of the internet will turn up plenty of confirming evidence of this.
Do you want software compatibility? Would you like to be able to open your older Word documents, would you like other people who are running older versions of Microsoft Word to be able to open your new documents? Well, forget it, you can’t do it, not with Word 2007. Microsoft, purely for reasons of marketing (personal speculation), are deliberately making it very difficult to be compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word. Their intention seems clear, they want to force everyone to upgrade to Word 2007. If you have a Word 97 document (a very common format), guess what, you can’t open it without installing a special extra program and most people don’t know how to do this. And if you send a Word 2007 document to someone with Word 97 or even Word 2003, guess what? they can’t open it either. So there is NO compatibility and IMHO it is a deliberate attempt to thwart Open Office which is fully compatible with Word 97. Suppose you bite the bullet and decide to upgrade your entire company to Word 2007 and suppose further that you are willing to incur the huge expense of converting all of your documents to Word 2007 format. Then let me ask you, what are you going to do in 2012 when Microsoft does it all over again? Just how long do you want to be able to have access to your documents, before you accept the inevitability that they can not be accessed anymore because the software to support that proprietary format is no longer available?
I used to be in the Microsoft camp, it was my bread and butter. And then one day they decided to abandon the number one most widely used computer programming language, why? Well because they weren’t making enough money from selling it. Millions of lines of code, and thousands of man-years of work, were trashed overnight, because Microsoft decided that it wasn’t profitable enough for them to maintain support for that language and wanted everybody to move to a new language with no viable upgrade path other than a major rewrite of your programs. And this is not the first time that they have abandoned something. They have proven themselves to be arbitrary and capricious and unreliable. It this really someone that you want for your business partner? Should you really design your mission critical systems with a dependency on an infrastructure that may not be there tomorrow, because the company didn’t feel like maintaining it? I personally ended up abandoning 200k lines of code that I had written, over a year of effort trashed. I vowed never again to be tied to a single propitiatory vendor. Now all of my development work is cross-platform and vendor independent, based on open standards.
Sorry if this is sounding a bit preachy, I am trying to make the case of why it is so dangerous to rely on a company as arbitrary and capricious as Microsoft. This has been my personal experience with them.
On the legal front, you should have your lawyers look long and hard at the EULA. I deal with a lot of doctors and they have to conform to HIPAA requirements for the security and privacy of their system. I am not a lawyer, but from my reading of the agreement I believe that Vista is not and never can be compatible with the requirements of the HIPAA. And that to use it in medical applications is in fact a technical violation of the security requirements of HIPAA, namely that all access to the system is controlled. But Microsoft says that you must allow them to run arbitrary programs on your computer and that you have no control over the programs that they run, and that they have the right to monitor any and all activity on your computer. Unless the programs have been HIPAA certified and Microsoft has signed a HIPAA vendor agreement with you, then I do not see how you can use Vista in any medical office.
Okay, so I have told you that Linux on the desktop has/had a lot of serious problems. I have also shown that Microsoft Vista, is even worse, it has even less compatibility both hardware and software then does Linux, plus it has serious issues with security and insurmountable issues legally. But none of the above offers much hope of a solution. There is always the possibility of switching to an Apple Mac, and many people have. But I have some concerns about certain trends that I have seen from Apple, it may be that they are simply a kinder and gentler (for now) version of Microsoft and that ultimately all of the same issues will apply to them as well.
So, what is the solution? Okay, let me make this clear that what I am offering is my own personal experience and personal opinion. But it is the experience of someone who has installed and tired all of the top ten distros of Linux plus others. And it is the experience of someone who has been in the computer industry for a very long time and provided technical support for all versions of Microsoft Windows starting with version 3.0. Let me also say that I reserve the right to change my mind in the future about what I consider to be the current “best version of Linux”
Having said all of that, let me now say that Sabayon Linux is incredible!!!! It is the first version of Linux that has finally achieved that holy grail of hardware compatibility. It is the first version of Linux that I have looked at, which out of the box is fully compatible with every website that I have thrown at it. I’m not too fond of the default color scheme, but it’s easy to change. The thing is just amazing!!!
In terms of hardware compatibility let me say that not only will Sabayon run circles around Vista, but it also ran circles around XP, yes that’s right, Linux now delivers better hardware compatibility then Microsoft XP. This is based on my personal testing of an admittedly small sampling of hardware, but this is the same collection hardware that all previous versions of Linux have flunked in some way or another.
Consider laptops, they are hard to do, the hardware is often non-standard in some way. I’ve tried Sabayon on two very different models of laptop and was amazed to see that it worked on both of them.
Wireless networking has been another bugaboo of Linux. I recently bought a pcmcia wireless network card for my laptop because I wanted the turbo network mode that the internal card did not support. With XP, I fought and fought and fought to get the new card to work, the software that came with it was not compatible with the internal network card in the laptop, the only way I could use the new card was to totally disable the old card; that was on XP. I put in the Sabayon dvd and booted. Based on previous experience with various versions of Linux I did not expect the wireless to work at all, at least not without a bunch of fuss. But Sabayon detected and configured both the internal and the pcmcia wireless cards. It then automatically detected and configured the networks and the security mode that they were in. All I had to do was to tell it which wireless network I wanted to connect to and give it the password for the network. Astonishing!!! especially considering how much time I spent coaxing XP into working with the card and was never totally happy with the result.
This is hugely dramatic, finally after years of frustration I have found a version of Linux that works and works well and does not need a lot of fuss to make it work.
I hope that this does not sound like a bunch of hyperbole. I am not connected with Sabayon in any way at all, they don’t even know that I exist. This is just my personal opinion that Sabayon is the best version of Linux that I have ever encountered (for use on the desktop) and in terms of speed and capabilities it will run circles around Vista. And wait until you see the 3d desktop!
I wrote this because I wanted to save people the frustration of trying a lot of other versions of Linux that never seemed to quite deliver on the promise of a viable replacment for Microsoft Windows.
You can run Sabayon directly from the dvd, you don’t even have to install anything or change anything in order to try it out. Then you can see how well it works and decide if it’s something that you want to keep. And it’s “Free as in Beer” as well as “Free as in Speech”.
You can get it here: http://www.sabayonlinux.org
Enjoy!!!
STOP BEING LAZY AND UPDATE YOUR BLOG!
8 MONTHS SINCE LAST ENTRY. WTF. LAZy!!!!
Vis you are the only dedicated reader i have, who else do i update it for?