Seems that Linux is not good for education

Before you start reading please, note that this post could be a little ironic.

After this premise, let’s starts with the facts, we have a video contribute, thanks to Geeks are Sexy

The poor girl, like the other girl in the girlfriend test, could not get things working. You should agree with me that this is a very important point, if the user is not able to do something their pc are going to be just expensive piece of waste.

That story obviously got reactions form the Linux world, but basically the conclusion is always the same: geeks are telling you Linux is easy to work with, noobs trust them and try Linux and a few days later they ask for a Windows operating system, the only they are able to deal with.

That’s why this year will not be the year of Linux.

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When the OS war turn into a religious war

The release of Windows 7 should have woke up something in the Linux talibans who are starting turning the nerdish operating system war in a religious war.

In their opinion Linux and free software are the only way. That isn’t necessarily bad, while they are playing with their pc. The bad things is that they are fudding, and that are also considering ethical spreading incorrect facts, just to hit Microsoft (but I don’t think they are hurting so much since their market share is just a little more than the 1%) .

What is really sad is seeing a part (I hope that this is a little part) of a community live and work not to become better but to fight the enemy. Please try to read this post by Stephen Chapman and work on the points he highlighted.

When the work is done you can bash whatever you want, I promise I won’t come back annoying you. However you might agree that complaining with Miguel de Icaza just because he is actually doing the work for you is not a much clever behavior.

Where are Apple guys in this fight? Without them is just half the fun. The iReligion is more fun than the Linux religion, and also the iUser are more used to the battles. At least they have a reality distortion field.

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Is Linux really better than Windows 7?

Looking at the referrals to Mac vs. PC I found this post on why Linux (what version?!?!) is far superior to Windows 7.

I write this response just to show why what a Linux fan boy says is not to be trusted. I am not meaning that Linux is crappy or that it is not working, just that the reasons that the average Linux user will use to convince you are wrong, terribly wrong.

Power Shell vs. *nix shell: I don’t really think that shell is the real tool for an administrator, even if I have to admit that in some cases it is more powerful than a graphical tool. However this is not the point. Power shell is a object-oriented shell and this is enough to declare it the winner in the shell’s battle. I am sorry if you like do black magic to deal with strings but a character based shell is old, nothing else.

Windows setup vs. Linux package manager: the idea of the package manager is surely cleaner but when did you saw a Windows user become mad because of some wrong dependencies? In Windows setups takes care to provide the required things to do the job, so there is no real advantage using a package manager. And all the application you mentioned are available also on Windows without a very little effort. Can you say the same about professional applications?

Crash on a virtual machine: wow that’s cool. A crash of a beta operating system on a virtual machine (that in the past made mess with every OS had to run). It is definitely a reason to install Linux.

The aquarium: I am still thinking what is its use. Or is it simply useless? And My eyes saw both Vista and Seven run on a exec, is it too powerful?

WGA: it is a commercial product, don’t you want to be a pirate, right? If you don’t want to pay get free software, but not cry if WGA stops you using something you pirated.

UAC: are you running as root on you Linux-box or are you using something like su or sudo?

The register: you said you are cleaning your register, isn’t that doing more harm than the good things you would get?

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Is Linux passing the girlfriend test? No, thanks to Free Software Foundation

Guys at TechRadar UK made a girlfriend of one of them playing with Linux, in their girlfriend test.

They told some simple tasks to the girl and looked how she was accomplishing the “challenge” using Linux.

This test aim is to demonstrate that Linux is noob-proof when it is about to deal with basic tasks:

• Bookmark a website in Firefox: is it the same thing that doing it in every operating system with Firefox.
• Write and print a letter in OpenOffice.org: same as the previous. It is still not demonstrating anything but the availability of common software for Linux and Windows.
• Rip a CD: different system, same behavior of the GUI that let the girl do what se wanted. But are you sure she won’t have any troubles?
• Send an instant message: here things are getting quite harder. The girl wanted to use Windows Live Messenger and had to use Pidign. She can nearly the same things after some trials. It is not Linux fault but the experience is losing some of its initial appeal.
• Create a pie chart in OpenOffice.org: other OpenOffice stuff, same consideration I made on the second task.
• Put the ripped CD on to her iPod: thank you Apple, thank you Free Software Foundation for the choice of OGG. The poor girl is not smiling anymore.
• Photoshop her head on to my body: she found GIMP and get it to work. At least the girl should receive a standing ovation since she managed to deal with the unusual interface. She is not a regular noob. Definitely.
• Watch a video on YouTube: my dear package manager, having flash installed is a thing that users want to do in a click or two. I know flash is evil, but the web is heavily relying on it. And using the web is more interesting than having a pure 100% free system.
• Make a phone call using Skype: problems are coming out. And in this case I can’t tell you this is not a Linux fault. An 'audio playback problem' needs to be fixed before noobs are going to consider using Linux.

A noob that has to deal only with browsing on nearly pure HTML/CSS sites that has to do some office work with OpenOffice could consider using Linux.

If the user wants to do more multimedia related stuff the situation is getting terribly worst. Maybe you are wondering about the responsible for this fall of Linux perceived usability

I’m pointing my finger against the Free Software Foundation that is trying to prevent anything not open being installed in the system. In my opinion this is a really bad choice.

The girl would have a better opinion of Linux if she could have out of the box working MP3, Flash and Skype support. Losing users in the name of an ideal is not a clever choice in my opinion. Maybe it is the right choice from the moral perspective. But an ideal without users is not going anywhere.

Just my 2 cents, as usual.

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Is Cedega more DOS/95/98/2000/XP compliant than Vista?

Technorati Tags: GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Games

GNU/Linux guys can't stand that Windows Vista is better than their operating systems, and are searching the most improbable test.

diarrheaBot (OK, I shouldn't read such a shit) come into Slashdot with one of the most ridiculous test ever done.

Maybe he should have thought that testing Windows Vista and Cedega with games developed in the pre-Windows XP era.

I'm not doing to install this software on my machine, I'm going to trust the result I found on the Internet (For GNU/Linux I'm assuming that our friends did the right things).

Soldat: It is a 2002 game with some bugfix, and actually it seems that someone's Windows Vista is not freezing.

Darwinia: maybe there is a reason if a for Windows Vista version was released! On that update there was the porting from OpenGL to DirectX. Did you know that in Windows Vista the OpenGL layer completely depends on graphic drivers you have? So purely OpenGL performances depends on Nvidia, AMD (Ati), Intel and any other GPU maker.

You can criticize Microsoft idea to exclude an OpenGL layer not the OpenGL performances on Windows Vista which are not a Microsoft mistake.

Blackthorne: since you're running it with DOSBox I guess you read that and edited the configuration file.

Civilization 4: You got a compatibility warning. But if you patch the game guess what happens?

Conclusion:

You got your Slashdot quote, GNU/Linux fanboys are happy, Windows Vista users managed to get all work and even experience better performance on new games.

sirus's update:

I've noticed that diarrheaBot uses a GeForce FX graphic card. I've a GeForce FX 5600 Ultra (128 MB of VRAM) on one of my desktop PCs and and I can confirm that Nvidia has dropped driver support for this series before Windows Vista was released. The driver Windows Vista uses for these graphic cards is a legacy one. Another fault in diarrheaBot review.

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