Can Some One tell me the Advantage of Linux over Windows

[Jeff7181]

I've flirted with Linux a few times... I actually have a dual boot setup right now with Windows XP and Mandrake 9.1.

I like Windows. I like Linux. I'm not a software or hardware engineer... I don't know how to program... I know basic html... I know enough to build my own computer, and help other's build theirs based on their needs.

Recently I wanted to host a Web Server for myself and some friends... I got a copy of Windows .NET 2003 Standard Server from MS's CPP... have it installed on my 2nd computer. I absolutely LOVE remote desktop... my monitor on my 2nd computer is an OLD 14 inch monitor that can do 640x480 @ 60 Hz, or 800x600 @ 56 Hz. So I love being able to use my 17 inch monitor in 1024x768 @ 85 Hz. I can't do that with Linux, because this is a family computer, and I can't just tell everyone else to learn to use Linux.

I got started with IIS, had trouble with it cause I don't know what I'm doing and haven't been able to find help yet. But I'm considering using Linux instead... mainly because of the security feature... if I do get a Web Server up and running, I won't be paying for a domain just yet, so my web address will be my IP address.

My biggest complaint about Linux is 3rd party software.
Everything that came with Mandrake 9.1 works flawlessly.
But I installed Yahoo Messenger and the font appeared so insanely small in chat windows that it was unreadable at anything below 20 point font. So I found out how to configure Gaim to connect to Yahoo so I use that.

There's a lot I don't know about Windows, but there's a lot more I don't know about Linux... and that has kept me from using Linux more. Normally I can spend a few hours doing something, and become relatively good at it... not the case with Linux. And although I've kept trying, I don't seem to know any more now than I did a year ago when I first tried Mandrake 7.2. I realize there's helpful people here on the boards... but when I'm trying to do something, I don't like to wait 3 or 4 hours to have a question answered so I can continue.

I may put MDK 9.1 or RH 9.0 on my 2nd computer, and try to get somethin going with Apache.

If anyone has the time... something that would be extremely beneficial to Linux newbies is a step-by-step guide from a clean installation of the OS on how to do things. The How-to's that I find assume I know more than I do, so they're of no use to me. I've yet to find a true Linux newbie help document. That's another area Windows has an advantage over Linux... if you can use a mouse, you can use Windows.

 

[Spyro]

I can't do that with Linux, because this is a family computer, and I can't just tell everyone else to learn to use Linux.

You're just not charismatic enough

I realize there's helpful people here on the boards... but when I'm trying to do something, I don't like to wait 3 or 4 hours to have a qustion answered so I can continue.

How 'bout waiting five minutes or so. Look up some of the Linux threads and check response times.

If anyone has the time... something that would be extremely beneficial to Linux newbies is a step-by-step guide from a clean installation of the OS on how to do things.

The How-to's that I find assume I know more than I do, so they're of no use to me. I've yet to find a true Linux newbie help document.

IMO, Linux has good enough documentation, and if you have any questions that's what the online community is for.

 

[Jeff7181]

What's "good enough" for you, may not be "good enough" for me.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: wizardLRU

IMO, Linux has good enough documentation, and if you have any questions that's what the online community is for.

You are one of the only people I know that believes this. If this were true, a Linux FAQ thread would not be necessary.

 

[drag]

As far as documentation goes.. Linux has the best documentation on the planet... If fact linux documentation probably takes up 10% of the world wide web.. or at least the usefull bits of it. Everything from setting up a modem to designing networking programs to developing code for the kernel. All of it's their if you look chard enough.

Windows puts you in a box. The designers say "well the person using windows will want to do this" and then they make it easy to do that task they think you'll like. From working with different OS's and differnet types of computers I have found out that once a person gets use to a certain way of doing things, doing it differently is insanely difficult.

I know a fellow that is a computer operator/programmer that help runs the ibm mainframe and conrol batch jobs. He's been a programmer for 20 years. Mounting a simple network drive in win95 was a half-hour ordel with him. bitching about crappy ansi code and why don't PC's use ebsidac like everybody else and how the keyboard is all backwards and the enter key is were the shift key is and wtf is the return key labled "tab" and is in the wrong spot and doesn't work right havlf the time, and all that happiness.

In happy IBM land they do things a certain way, all they realy have are realy big hammers, everything that can be fixed by hitting it realy hard is called a "nail" and everything else is nonexistant... "AIM? Netscape?wtf is that?, Why use something like that, it'll increase the addressing sort time by 5%. A waste! All that www traffic does is slow down the ftp transfers"


Windows puts you in a similar mindset. When people who are windows use try out linux for the first time sometimes sound like this "well, mandrake/redhat/etc is getting more like windows (ie getting better), but XP is more like a improved w2k/win98 (dialogs and plug-n-play etc) then linux is, so I'll stick with that".

example of windows vs linux mentality:

In happy linux/unix land, its like this. Ya sure spending 3 days figuring out how to set up the modem is a pain, but by the time your done, you know you got it done the way you'd like it and it'll work every single time automaticly for years! (if you know what your doing of course ). Well all you realy get is your head crammed with more info about modems, ppp, slip, and serial lnes then you ever cared to know, or wanted to know, or even knew their was that much TO know, and a real big headache.

In happy windows land its like: wow it worked! only 20 seconds and it's done whoho! next week.... Why isn't it working? i donno whats going on with it, must be the isp.. ring ring "hello, this is isp suxor land" "my internet's broken" "it's your fault" "ok, sorry"... 2 days later and a new modem... ring ring "hello, this is isp suxor land" "my internet's broken" "its your fault" "Nope I payed MS 50 bucks to tell me it's not" "ok we will check on it"... 3 hours later it's fixed... 3 months later..ring ring "hello this is isp suxor land" "my internet's broken" "it's your fault" "hey F**K you! I blah blah... ..I going back to AOL if you.. ..did all this stuff last time and it WAS YOUR FAULT!" "nope it's your fault, it's the drivers.." 15 minutes later "See? it was your drivers" "oh ok thanks", click... And all you get there is a real big headache and a lighter wallet.

a contrasting mentality:

In happy IBM mainframe land.. "WTF am i going to do with this modem? i'll just get someone to come and install a T1 line.. Better make it 2 T1 lines in case the first one breaks."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All Os's suck. It's just which one sucks in a way which is agreeable with you, or at least pick one that doesn't make you want to through up every 30 seconds... I find linux only makes me want to puke 3-6 times a day and windows makes me want to puke 4-5 times a day, plus when ever it crashes I have to go screaming towards the happy bucket-o-vomit repeatedly every time I hit crtl-alt-del, escpecially if I actually payed for it. If linux crashes, I have been known to turn small desks into unique folding hats within a split second (can't puke, because I probably haven't eaten for several days)

Plus another thing, Who says windows is user-friendly? My grandpa manages to fry a new installation within a couple months from power-cycling it when he freezes it up.. If he was using linux I could set it up so that if he has a problem I could dial into his computer and hit "killall X" and fix pretty much everything, Or i could just leave him a card that has the following writen on it: "hit ctrl-alt-F2, hit ctrl-alt-del".

If only his programs worked with linux..

But for all you guys that are actually USING windows as servers and stuff.. how long have you've been using windows? since 3.11 or 95? was it easy back then? or did it take hours to do anything? Now that you use XP and you have ten years of experiance using windows, it seems so easy to get things you want done. You know how to edit parts of the registry and you know what the .ini files are for. How you find out your hardware configuration? goto control panel, click on the computer-looking icon, and find the device manager window..

simple, eh?

Not realy, what if you were a mac user and had to figure out how to install a old 28.8 modem in XP with no instructions and simple driver diskette with 8 layers of folders labled like: 95only;98/ME;NTonly;NT4/w2k/xp, plus you or none or your freinds have ever seen a windows OS up close. Were would you start?

A window user know instictively what double click is. It's funny to think about people who don't even know what a "right click" means...

A linux/unix user with 10 years of experiance is like: "You don't know how to grep a file? Duh, check out the man file." To them recompiling a patched kernel is the easiest thing to do in the world.

Same difference, just different OS's.

But you want to know the ironic thing? Learning to use linux has made me a better Windows admin. Fundamentally they are the same, if you need to connect to a network or the internet you got to follow a certain framework. You go thru the TCP/IP layers like everyone else, drivers modules whats the difference? The symptoms are pretty much the same it either one breaks. The only difference is is that all that stuff was originally done on unix, NT was created to do unix stuff, just without the whole unix part. The concepts are the same. And now that w2k and XP are starting to get decent multiuser support, and it is getting more and more unix-like every new version of windows.

one good example of computer weirdness I learned:

All w2k's Active Directory is is just LDAP, well actually LDAP v3. Linux can do that too with OpenLDAP and a couple other commercial versions. Plus it works with other directory services, MS made sure active directory wouldn't work with other versions on purpose, it only goes one way at best. Macs can do it too with their LDAP version and netinfo stuff. Novell has better directory services than even w2k, plus they been doing it for years and years, unfortuanatlly like the edsel they released the technology to soon, It was to big of a jump from one novell version to another.. 3 to 4 i think. It was just before it's time and there was no reason for people to switch from just a flat file system sceme to a hierarcicle sceme yet, so instead of going to the expense of retraining the entire computer staff or hiring knowlagble people (read: expensive people) they just switched the networks from Novell to NT when they needed to upgrade. Mistiming almost killed novell, their product outperforms w2k's version by a long shot, it's stable and above all it's very very secure, but nobody saw any use for it, now it's mainly used in places like hospitals and government instututions were security overrides the problems of getting enough novell technicions instead of just getting w2k servers and dipping into the vast reserves of windows techs (who are wiling to work at the fraction of the pay of a experianced novell admin)..


To answer your question:

I use linux because I like computers, I think they are going to be more and more important as time goes on. As a Linux user I have the opertunity to learn and modify how a computer functions down to the most fundamental level. That sort of activity is blatenly illigal when dealing with windows products. If I figure out how to obtain the MS source code and modify it to do something cool, I can go to jail for it, or at least get fined, especially if I had the audacity to tell someone else how to do it. In order to set up servers (legally) like the ones I use for my convence and entertainment set up in my basement using windows instead of using linux, It would cost me thousands of dollars, render half of the hardware I own instantly obsolete and useless, and I would sacrific reliability and maleability. Plus I just realy like using command line, it's just faster and easier on my wrists, then swinging that mouse around all day. (ok tell me how to copy a file from your document directory to another family member's document.. (assuming you have rights to the folders in questions) folder folder. open up your documents, right click the letter, select copy. close widow, click start, click my computer, click c: drive, click mom's folder, click documents, right click background, select paste. not to bad, eh? now me:

cp ~/documents/letter /home/mom/documents *enter*

hehe

edit: I tried to fix it for readability, I doubt I was to successfull though

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag
As far as documentation goes.. Linux has the best documentation on the planet...

Sorry, but I think the BSDs are better.

 

[Flatline]

That depends on whether you are multilingual; a lot of the 'nix documentation that you find is in some obscure dialect (I have a sneaking suspicion that it's Basque)

 

[drag]

could be, could be. Centralization is a good thing sometimes.

You know what has to have the worst documentation though? Mac's...

I mean, how the F**k am i expected to use applescripting? I would of probably bought a book by now if I actually owned a mac, but so far the best thing i have been able to figure out is the "mount volume" command.. the dictionary stuff would be usefull If I could figure out the syntax, but the realy cool scripts I want to edit and play around with are all saved as applications and are uneditable... I've been trying to figure out how to add network printers for a month now, and I am about to give up.. It's just so much easier using bash and with a lot less typing...

 

[HarryAngel]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: drag
As far as documentation goes.. Linux has the best documentation on the planet...

Sorry, but I think the BSDs are better.

I second that!

 

[Nothinman]

You are one of the only people I know that believes this. If this were true, a Linux FAQ thread would not be necessary.

Not really. Most people when starting to use Linux don't read the docs or don't know where to look for them.

Sorry, but I think the BSDs are better.

Possibly, but the fact that all the Debian packages actually work is worth more points to me, I still havn't gotten a snmpd that works properly on OpenBSD/sparc64.

 

[Sunner]

As far as documentation goes, I split it up as follows:

BSD's: Best manpages, you'll get pretty much anything done by reading the manpages
Linux: Biggest community out there, and when you run into wierd problems, the most helpful one, since there are about a gazillion other people who have had the same problem, but happen to be kernel hackers
Windows: Very easy, until you run into something unexpected, that's when you have to aquire some serious Google/MSDN/Technet/Mailinglist skills.
Mac OS X: Don't know, haven't played with it enough to run into any problems, I'll get back to you once Apple gets real about their prices so I can get one.

In the end, I like the BSD's the most(well OpenBSD in particular, but the others are good too, from my experiences with them, just not quite as good).

 

[Tiger]

Linux docs are plentlyful and useful once you have some time under your belt.
I've always thought they could be written better. Some of the most arcane reading I've ever done is some Linux docs.
They could be better from a newbie point of view. I guess it all depends on who the doc writer's intended audience is.
Experienced ops and kernel hacks wouldn't have a problem. Someone fresh from the winders world could have trouble.

 

[lowtech1]

All computer docs can be better than they are currently written in.

Personally I find most MS doc are trivial, because the thousands of pages of Windows book sets can be condense to easy to read layman term in less than a 100 pages.

As for Linux manpages, it to can be improve over of what currently is written, but so far I found that Mandrake & RH docs are among the easiest computer text that I have read up to date. I also find Debian manpages are among the most helpful docs, but too bad that it is not completed fully.

I find Linux docs are some what incompleate, but much more to the point compare to the more completed & overly winded MS docs.

 

[Shamrock]

I read half the posts, and scanned the other half, and one thing no one mentioned about Linux....you DONT have to DEFRAG your hard drive! It makes me nervous and jittery knowing that one of those file fragments "might get lost" permanently. I cant stand defragging once a week, and having my PC slow down because the OS is too dumb to keep the file fragments "glued" together, I get unnecessary slowdown when I use WinXP, why? it fragments :\ The ONLY thing Windows has over Linux is marketing and monopolization, that's why games run on Windows and not Linux, however game comapnies are getting wise and make Linux ports (woohoo!) If ALL game Co's would make Linux compatible I would dump Windows altogether.

Sham

P.S. Just ordered Debian, and I am a RedHat n00b still...Muahahaha

 

[drag]

ya, defragging is funny. It's actually realy nice to have a OS that doesn't struggle to corrupt itself once a week (or whatever you have scedualed) in order to compinsate for a bad filing system design. After comming from win98 hell the concept of a self-healing filing system was heaven, plus it tells you if something is wrong, instead of just grinding itself into the dust if you have a bad cable of a failing HD or something like that...

 

[Saltin]

they just switched the networks from Novell to NT when they needed to upgrade. Mistiming almost killed novell, their product outperforms w2k's version by a long shot, it's stable and above all it's very very secure, but nobody saw any use for it, now it's mainly used in places like hospitals and government instututions were security overrides the problems of getting enough novell technicions instead of just getting w2k servers and dipping into the vast reserves of windows techs (who are wiling to work at the fraction of the pay of a experianced novell admin)..

You're kidding, right? Novell DS is the ugly mother of AD. Sure, MS took the idea and spirit of NDS when they created AD, but they also significantly improved it.

Add to this that most Novell installs run on top of Win2k... and well.....

I think Novell is great. I have a keen interest in Groupwise and have been paying alot of attention to it lately. Newsflash, it isnt inherently secure.

Finally, Novell techs arent inherently smarter than MS techs, as it seems you are implying. It's just that the market for Novell is shrinking and small.

 

[Nothinman]

You're kidding, right? Novell DS is the ugly mother of AD. Sure, MS took the idea and spirit of NDS when they created AD, but they also significantly improved it.

One of the things they forgot to 'improve' upon was the fact that it's a directory, not a flat domain; in AD you can't have 2 of the same username in different OUs, in any other directory you can.

I think Novell is great. I have a keen interest in Groupwise and have been paying alot of attention to it lately

I've never seen Groupwise so I have no idea if it's better than Exchange, but it's the things like NDS and Zenworks that Novell did tons better than MS did with SMS (or whatever produc they're pushing to replace it's ugly ass) and AD.

 

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: wizardLRU

IMO, Linux has good enough documentation, and if you have any questions that's what the online community is for.

You are one of the only people I know that believes this. If this were true, a Linux FAQ thread would not be necessary.

Well, I said good enough........ Its always been "good enough" for me

 

[Saltin]

One of the things they forgot to 'improve' upon was the fact that it's a directory, not a flat domain; in AD you can't have 2 of the same username in different OUs, in any other directory you can.

It depends on how you look at it. The reason you can't have two identical usernames in seperate OU's is a design choice, not a limitation.

In AD, single-sign on limits the use of identical usernames, as only the username@domain.component are passed to DC's for authentication. The downside is what you mentioned. The upside is that I can logon to any machine in the AD forest and immediately be approved, regardless of which domain in the forest I'm actually physically at.

The downside to Novell's ability to allow duplicate usernames in seperate OU's is that you have to define the goddamn OU in the logon (in Netware). What a PITA.

I wouldnt call Ad infrastructure "flat" at all, and I think you know enough about it to know it's hierarchical.


As for SMS, sure, it sucks. 2.0 is supposed to be a bit better I guess, but I use AD to push software and whatnot. The only thing you miss is hardware auditing, which I'm sure will find it's way into AD eventually.
Anyhow, the discussion isnt about applications, it's about OS's.

 

[lowtech1]

Originally posted by: Saltin

they just switched the networks from Novell to NT when they needed to upgrade. Mistiming almost killed novell, their product outperforms w2k's version by a long shot, it's stable and above all it's very very secure, but nobody saw any use for it, now it's mainly used in places like hospitals and government instututions were security overrides the problems of getting enough novell technicions instead of just getting w2k servers and dipping into the vast reserves of windows techs (who are wiling to work at the fraction of the pay of a experianced novell admin)..

You're kidding, right? Novell DS is the ugly mother of AD. Sure, MS took the idea and spirit of NDS when they created AD, but they also significantly improved it.

Add to this that most Novell installs run on top of Win2k... and well.....

I think Novell is great. I have a keen interest in Groupwise and have been paying alot of attention to it lately. Newsflash, it isnt inherently secure.

Finally, Novell techs arent inherently smarter than MS techs, as it seems you are implying. It's just that the market for Novell is shrinking and small.

What are you talking about?
Sure, NDS take a little while to get use to, but user rights & management is way better than Win2k AD. MS did a terrible job of copying the tree view domain, and you can't drag & drop users asign groups & printers among other things. The anoying MS popups for everything also is a caveat, because it make it difficult for me to remember and it require more clicks to do something.

Netware doesn't have much to offer, because it is only good for network user & printer management. I find that Linux/Unix & Samba do just as good a job, and then their is CUPS which is a great bonus. I don't know much regarding Novel Webserver, but I assume that it is not that great, because I haven't seen any intitution that uses it. Border manager in Novel is the worst piece of crap I have ever seen, but I'm sure that it is just as good as or better than MS security management. Security is a no brainer for Linux/Unix, because powerfull light weight LRP to full blown IDS database can be had for free or very little money for the admin that doesn't have the time (or lazy). Zenworks is great compare to MS crapy attempt to distributed software install, but there is such thing as Volution and the alike that is just as good for Linux.

I'm not familiar with NetWare 5.x or 6.x. Howerver, the little time that I worked with 3.x & 4.x was a great experience.

 

[HarryAngel]

What are you talking about?

 

[Nothinman]

It depends on how you look at it. The reason you can't have two identical usernames in seperate OU's is a design choice, not a limitation.

In AD, single-sign on limits the use of identical usernames, as only the username@domain.component are passed to DC's for authentication. The downside is what you mentioned. The upside is that I can logon to any machine in the AD forest and immediately be approved, regardless of which domain in the forest I'm actually physically at.

The downside to Novell's ability to allow duplicate usernames in seperate OU's is that you have to define the goddamn OU in the logon (in Netware). What a PITA.

There is OU completion with NDS, so if you only have 1 username per OU you don't have to worry about it. And you have the ability to have multiple users with the same name in multiple OUs, which we use for testing, one of our usernames has admin privs on the tree and one is a regular user but we have the same username and password.

 

[drag]

If you talk to anyone experianced in setting up a AD and a Novell domain you will find out that Novell pretty much rapes AD in terms of performance and useability. The main advantage of AD over novell is that it does not require experianced administrators to set it up so that it works. MS has very nice help menus and so forth. The concept of having to navigate 2 directory services (one for the OU tree stuff and one for the normal file system we are all familar with) is enough to give most windows users fits. For the cost of one experianced novell Guru you can get 4 regular windows administrators. Of course once that guru gets everything set up it will work amlost effortlessly for years and only require entry level techs to maintain it with proper supervision and guidance. The AD on the other hand will inveriably end up a mess of criss-crossing and conflicting directory structures with most administrators working in almost continual crisis mode jumpin from one problem to another.

AD works fine for what most people want. In that sense it is good "enough". But compared to a properly administrated Novell network it is mickey mouse stuff. I've seen print outs of the directory tree of a Novell network from a large hospital in a medium sized city (million+ people). The damn thing was almost 5 inches think stack of paper using cheap thin line paper (I forget the name of it, the stuff with the holes on the sides, were one sheet is connected to the next). This is a place employing thousands of people and it probable only takes 50 or so people to administrate it properly.

There is a good reason why high security government and private sector instututions almost always pick novell for its directory system.


Now as far as linux goes, I just don't think it's up to the tast of performing wide ranging user, application and permission deployment of either AD or Novell stuff. It is ideal for companies of around a couple hundred people though, (which is most companies.) Although that situation is changing, I think that a medium to small company with the assistance of redhat could set up a effective corporate structure with the majority of the employees only slightly above the average windows tech level of experiance in the respective OS of choice. Anything more than that I think linux probably can be relegated to just the traditional server roles. (web, file, network administration, print etc..)

(although keep in mind that i am a lowly tech geek, this stuff if from what I learned from school about setting up NDS and AD and my own experamentation with linux and unix systems. Novell was much harder to learn that AD, but the natural orginizational ability and depth of thinking that went in to the design of AD and NDS is very apperant from the outset. Novell just oozes some good "this is a serious OS" vibes, Novell can operate very efffectivly from a 486 were w2k is left unstable and slow, on much more powerfull machines NDS just leaves AD in the dust.. especialy when you have to mirror orginizational information over WAN links)

 

[drag]

PS. for anyone having a hard time understanding the NDS and AD stuff I'll try to explain.

Back in when NT first came out most networks had only one or two servers. Most of this stuff was just file and print stuff. Something simple to share files and make printing less expensive. This increased productivity because now instead of having to make floppies or paper copies of everything you could just e-mail information or share a directory.

now with companies having thousands and thousands of users and hundreds of servers they need something more.
AD and NDS are designed to provide NETWORK-centric services instead of SERVER-based services. you log into the network, not the sever. The directory servers take care of the authentification and try to provide services to you that you are authorized to use in a automatic and seemless fasion. Applications, printers, network mounts and other information services are all set up automaticly from one computer to another. In a ideal network centric enviroment each and every computer you use should be set up pretty much identicly, so that users don't have to worry about learning 40 different passwords and learn howto mount volumes and crap like that. They can concitrate on there jobs at hand.

 

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: drag
PS. for anyone having a hard time understanding the NDS and AD stuff I'll try to explain.

Back in when NT first came out most networks had only one or two servers. Most of this stuff was just file and print stuff. Something simple to share files and make printing less expensive. This increased productivity because now instead of having to make floppies or paper copies of everything you could just e-mail information or share a directory.

now with companies having thousands and thousands of users and hundreds of servers they need something more.
AD and NDS are designed to provide NETWORK-centric services instead of SERVER-based services. you log into the network, not the sever. The directory servers take care of the authentification and try to provide services to you that you are authorized to use in a automatic and seemless fasion. Applications, printers, network mounts and other information services are all set up automaticly from one computer to another. In a ideal network centric enviroment each and every computer you use should be set up pretty much identicly, so that users don't have to worry about learning 40 different passwords and learn howto mount volumes and crap like that. They can concitrate on there jobs at hand.

Thanks drag