Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek) [LWN.net]

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 1:32 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek) by Zhohar
Parent article: Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

You need to work on your reading comprehension.

The Dell guy is saying that companies are rejecting Vista and moving back to XP. That doesn't contradict your claim that XP works well; it does for the most part.

And then for you to accuse him of being a liar based on your misreading really lacks class.

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Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 7:15 UTC (Fri) by edschofield (subscriber, #39993) [Link]

"You need to work on your reading comprehension."

This is patronizing and rude. Such comments don't belong on LWN.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 7:18 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

But `blatant, fanboyish lie' does?

Sorry, but `you need to work on your reading comprehension' is
condescending and *correct* in this case. (The OP also needs to learn that
the plural of anecdote is not data. In my experience, XP is notably less
prone to rot than earlier Windows releases, and when it *does* rot you're
SOL just as badly as ever: there is *nothing* you can do to diagnose or
fix the problem other than to wipe and reinstall everything.)

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 8:53 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> there is *nothing* you can do to diagnose or
fix the problem other than to wipe and reinstall everything.

Yep..

Every Linux install I've ever used on the desktop has always been salvagable pretty much no matter what. But Windows is always been a black box to me in comparision.. If you take two setups were you have savy administrators in charge of a bunch of Linux machines vs a bunch of Windows machines then the majority of the time the Linux machines are going to take more effort to initially setup but be more stable and less of a PITA in the long run.

This is from personal experiance. Windows machines are always more of a hassle to deal with.

One big example is how Linux uses ~/.filename and ~/.directorynames to store user preferences vs. Windows with it's registry. The Windows registry is fast as it's a pretty much always going to be in memory and is a tight little binary database, with Linux starting applications have to go and check the possible locations of dozens of little text files as they start up.. This is a huge penalty against Linux performance-wise as seek times on harddrives are dreadfull and is a chronic problem for slow starting applications (pay attention to disk I/O vs memory usage vs cpu usage when you start up a big application after a fresh reboot).

However when times go buy and you gradually upgrade your applications and desktops and the OS your using follows one version after another... the registry begins to crap out in Windows.. It gets bigger, and there is no rules about what application can stick what data were. No internal boundries or anything like that. It gets crusty and there is no real way to fix it. Nobody, and I mean _nobody_ can realy go into it and with certainty start editing away at it and fixing problems that have been compounded by time and numerious different installers and upgrades for all your applications.

With Linux...
1. backup your email, bookmarks and whatever else.
2. log out of the GUI and log into the console.
3. make sure your previous session is shutdown completely with all your programs and background services are finished. If that is a problem...
> kill $(ps --no-header --user $USER -o pid)
will take care of it. (Of course that is that nasty GNU syntax, not the perfect BSD or SysV stuff that shouldn't be touched, changed, or challenged.) :)

4. make a backup directory and move preferences to that...
> mkdir ~/backup
> mv ~/.??* ~/backup

5. Fire up midnight commander and begin copying back over any preferences you don't want to loose. Mc makes it actually a fast proccess.

After your finished you can log back in and it'll be just like you had a fresh install. However no loss of data and no re-installation of programs or anything like that is required. If you made a mistake and forgot some preferences or forgot to backup your bookmarks then all that stuff is still there in the ~/backup directory for you to use.

I know it's not simple or easy enough for the average person. But at least it's possible. That's just one example. I can give a dozen others that make Linux easier to use and administrate in the long run.

I know that all software sucks; Linux isn't a exception.. and I don't realy know much of the difference between XP vs Linux on a desktop in terms of performance or fit and finish. I just haven't use XP much personally (although I have spent a great deal of time _fixing_ Windows I try to avoid it in my personal life if I can.) so I don't know. I've had situations were I've installed Linux and have been dissapointed, but other times it's been very fast and very responsive.

My general impression is that if done correctly Linux is a much faster and much more efficient (as in user to machine interaction) then Windows is. It's much easier to tailor to specific requirements and make more efficient use of the hardware resources. Out of the box Linux isn't so great. Either Gnome or KDE or XFCE it doesn't matter; all of them suck until I get it setup the way I want it. This easy customization is another reason that makes Linux a much better OS, IMO.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 9:55 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

One big example is how Linux uses ~/.filename and ~/.directorynames to store user preferences vs. Windows with it's registry. The Windows registry is fast as it's a pretty much always going to be in memory and is a tight little binary database, with Linux starting applications have to go and check the possible locations of dozens of little text files as they start up.. This is a huge penalty against Linux performance-wise as seek times on harddrives are dreadfull and is a chronic problem for slow starting applications (pay attention to disk I/O vs memory usage vs cpu usage when you start up a big application after a fresh reboot).

Sort of. This is never going to be true for big applications (the time taken to page in the app is going to swamp everything else, especially if you haven't prelinked so everything must be relocated too); and small apps generally pull in few enough config files that it doesn't take long and on subsequent runs they'll all be in the cache.

But there are some small apps which look for a huge number of config files in numerous places, many of which don't exist, so you end up with the short negative dentry caching slowing you down again. The thing to do for these apps is what KDE does: read in all plausible config files and write out a cache optimized for rapid reading speed (so one file, or a very few), then keep an inotify watch on the config file directories for as long as the cache exists so that if the config files are changed you can wipe and recreate the cache: then the apps' config-file readers read that cache instead.

(This is pretty much what the `ksycoca' component of KDE does. Unlike the registry, because the cache is transient and its sources are inotify-watched, you can pretty much always ignore the existence of the cache: it's not a fragile all-your-data-belong-to-us binary horror like the Windows registry. Plus we don't have to reinvent all the filesystem permissions and security stuff inside the registry like Windows does.)

Another approach (roughly that used by GNOME) is to read in the config files into a process which then tells interested apps what the value of configuration keys (or whatever) are. This eliminates the need for cache invalidation but adds the need for an IPC protocol and a nastier failure mode (if the inotify-watcher dies, nothing goes immediately wrong and the worst that happens is that configuration updates aren't detected until the cache is manually removed: if the configuration-state-storer dies, nobody can get at *any* configuration, changed or not, until it's restarted).

Of course it is *possible* to smash your Unix desktop in ways that require massive wizardry to recover: but you need to work at it (everyone has horror stories: my personal trial by fire was the time when a remove-obsolete-links script of mine didn't notice that * is left unchanged when it matches nothing, and, well, it ended up removing the contents of a client's /usr/bin/). On a Windows box you don't need to do anything special :(

(Regarding the 'easy customization' stuff: I agree so strongly that I use Emacs. :) I switched from GNOME to KDE when GNOME 2 came out entirely because GNOME's configurability plunged and I was no longer able to make it work the way I wanted to...)

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 15:06 UTC (Fri) by johnkarp (subscriber, #39285) [Link]

No internal boundries or anything like that.

The Windows registry doesn't have fine-grained permissions, but it is composed of several discrete 'hives'. Each user only has access to their own hive, plus system hives that they may or may not have write-access to depending on their priviledges.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 16:42 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well ya I know about the 'hives' and such. Been that way since W2k. And you still can't just go in and edit them with any sort of reliability.

It's still a mess and it's not all Microsoft's fault. When you configure a application were do the changes get saved? Why do lots of Window's program's require administrative rights? The answer, is of course, it depends on the application and what the application developer felt like doing at the time.

This is something they worked on fixing for Vista, but they can't really fix it in a strong way or they break that all important backward compatibility.

Of course this is the sort of bullshit people will start seeing in Linux, with applications being set setuid for the sole reason so they can save configuration stuff to some bizzare location like /usr/var/etc/config once those same proprietary application developers (aka ISVs) start making their applications available on Linux... But I am hoping that people are smart enough and have enough backbone to reject that sort of behavior.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 13, 2007 4:56 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

My memory of the registry on NT derived versions of Windows was that each registry key could have an ACL attached to it, the same as for files.

Of course, the ACLs on registry keys only apply for access via the registry APIs. When accessing the hive on disk, it is only as secure as the file permissions.