Changing OSes: Harder Than You Think

I have had experience in a wide variety of operating systems over the years -- every version of Window$ except 2.0 and NT 3.5, DOS 3.0 - 6.0, Linux distributions, MacOS 7.5.3 - OS X, BeOS R5 through Haiku, and even a little QNX. It dawned on me yesterday that this actually colors my perspective significantly. As proponents of alternative operating systems, we need to be aware of how hard it is to change your primary OS.

Think for a moment about what using Windows is like: always being on alert for viruses, perpetual security updates, going to the Geek Squad or a friend / relative for fixes, Microsoft Office, buying a PC loaded with bloatware, Photoshop and other can't-live-without-it apps and so on. It's a way of life, and an inferior one at that, but that realization comes only if you are made aware of better options. Let me repeat part of that: it's a way of life, as in a culture. Not that I've done it myself, but I know enough to know that changing your primary OS is very much like moving to another country.

Consider the differences in what you know about the United States, England, and Australia. Last time I knew, there weren't too many koalas climbing trees in Willesden Green, for example. I'm not even going to comment on the "Chocolate Thunder from Down Under" server at Outback steakhouses here in the States -- I've never had it -- but I do know what it is that Australians call a thunderbox, and the only thing it has in common with chocolate is the color. Eeew. Riding a lift is something I might expect a construction worker to do, as in driving a forklift, but that's not what it means across the pond. They all speak the same language, but there is a lot of difference even though there is a lot of common ground beyond language.


Imagine for a moment moving from your home country to another one which speaks the same language that you do, but one you've never visited before. Which would be more difficult: packing everything and leaving on the next plane out of town or spending time there and planning your trip, possibly having a house in both places for a while? Without a doubt, the harder option would be the first one, but sometimes we, who have successfully done that in a computing context, mention it without hardly a second thought -- "Just use Linux (or a Mac, or whatever). It's easy!" That's like saying to my neighbor who has lived her entire life in the town I live in to move to Australia without any regard to all, if any, of the implications that this entails.


Changing your primary operating system is something that takes time, effort, and patience. The change requires willingness to put in effort to learn something new, even through the problems and inconveniences that will arise. Total beginners actually have an easier time than people who "don't know much about computers" but they still require a lot of help. Keep in mind that truly helping people requires an investment of your life into theirs.

Working Harder than Before in the Office

This school year sure has been a busy one. Like last year, I'm teaching computers, but unlike last year, I'm teaching junior high and high school students. No rugrats for me this year, which is a bummer. I like the students I have -- especially when I taught most of them when they really were rugrats -- but I love teaching little kids. The courses? Office and typing. Bleah. Luckily, teaching Office 2007 isn't so bad because I'm also teaching OpenOffice.org right alongside it. Time is tight, but some of them are getting it.

I haven't written a line of code since school started. :( I'm having to learn the Office curriculum I'm teaching, which has been sucking up a lot of time. I also need to expand my IT skills, so I've started studying for an MCSA. Just so you know I haven't drunk the Redmond brand of Kool-Aid, right before I started I had been working on learning CentOS administration, which I still plan on learning. The upshot of the studying is that just in the last week (which is when I started) I've managed to put to use immediately almost everything I've been learning. All of this has seriously cut into my coding time, but with the potential for more money, this is a Really Good Thing (TM).

I'm still planning to go to the Ohio LinuxFest, but I don't know if Haiku will be able to get a table. I'll find out later today, so I guess we'll have to wait and see. Even if we don't get a table, I'm still going and pushing Haiku from the other side of the vendor table. Heh. *evil grin*

Windows Responsiveness (or Lack Thereof)

It's official: I really have gone off the deep end -- at least if you talk to anyone from Redmond. BeOS fanatic zealot that I am, I'm acutely aware of the responsiveness of an operating system's desktop user interface. I expect my computer to run slower if I'm hitting the hard drive or processor pretty hard. I also expect programs to NOT take several seconds to respond to input or to redraw themselves. My experience with OS X is pretty shallow in comparison to my usage of various Linux distributions, BeOS and its variants, and all Windows versions save Media Center and 2.0 -- yes, I there was a time where I twiddled with Windows 1.0. Nonetheless, to my recollection, I have never seen Windows respond to the user very well even on a machine far beyond the recommended specs.

After spending the summer with my work laptop running Ubuntu, I had to install XP Pro. I didn't want to, but my school is a Windows-only shop. I disliked doing the install and resented having to hunt all over the Web for drivers only to have to install 500MB of system updates, but the last straw was when I was copying over my MP3 collection. Both machines were running XP and the file copy was taking forever. After about fifteen minutes, I rebooted the source machine into Linux, deleted what little had been copied, and started copying the collection using FileZilla to do an SFTP transfer. I had two files being copied at once and each one was taking half the time to copy as the XP file copy had. Somewhere in there, there's a problem. Worse yet, the destination machine was so slow (Athlon 64 3000, 512MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive) as to be unusable. Just plain sad. Man, I'm going to dislike using this machine with Windows again. :(

Extracting Clipart from the Office Website

Despite things like the recent GPL-licensed(!) contribution from Redmond, Micro$oft is not well-known for being friendly toward the open source movement. One example is the clipart available on the Microsoft Office website. It's an excellent resource for teachers and office workers. With the Office 2007 clipart manager dead in the water with Crossover Office and Wine last I checked, getting clipart to make newsletters and such in Linux is a problem.

The problem is that clipart from the Office website is downloaded in MPF files. These are simply XML files with the actual file data base64-encoded. There is a Perl script to extract the files, but it requires several modules to be downloaded from CPAN. Not too horrible for me, but definitely not something that, say, the secretary at my church would be able to tackle. No more. I have written a GPL-licensed Python script, mpfextract.py, to extract all clipart from MPF files. This'll also be a nice thing to have once Haiku has WMF support beyond having libwmf ported. :)

Will Windows 7 be a Hit for Microsoft?

Right now, I’m sitting in my living room, writing this from Windows Live Writer from within the newly-released Windows 7 that I put on a spare laptop from school. So far, my impressions are largely positive ones. The installer is much less involved than any previous version, though it does have a couple of annoyances. It creates a 200MB System Partition – not sure what that’s for – and it, once again, overwrites the MBR, so if I had another OS on this machine, I’d have to install the bootloader. Again.

Performance was my biggest gripe for Vista. Getting around feels a little more like a battleship than the cruise liner that Vista is. Driver and device handling is much easier. Once again, more stuff has changed, rendering an experienced user like myself a stranger in a strange land. Numerous places, as usual, are two usability steps forward and one step back.

Some of the changes over Vista are truly nice to have. Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it. Dragging it to the right or left edge tiles it to occupy half of the screen. The new taskbar is a nice improvement. Windows Live Writer is a very nice blogging tool that I just might be using quite a bit on my main computer if it’s even possible.

Other changes are… less than ideal. I’m not impressed by the fact that I have to download a separate e-mail client. Even Windows 95 came with Outlook Express. Yeesh. If I want to download an e-mail client, let it be out of choice and not from lack of one. If Microsoft is going for their own answer to iLife, this ain’t it. The whole Windows Live cloud computing thing doesn’t exactly impress me. If you live in Silicon Valley, fine, but there are many people in the US that are stuck with the choice of dial-up or satellite, with neither being a pleasant option.

I’ve only had Windows 7 for about 6 hours now, so I know I haven’t hardly scratched the surface of the entire experience, good or bad. Some general looking around has given me some ideas for Haiku that would make it more pleasant, but for now, the jury’s still out on the next generation out of Redmond.

Windows Workstation 2003 Reviewed

Besides all my BeOS development misadventures of late, I've also been working with Windows Server Standard 2003 as a desktop OS. In a lot of ways, you could call it similar to running Linux on the desktop, and it's not all it's cracked up to be. Just for the sake of others who might be thinking about doing the same (or something similar with 2008), I'll offer my thoughts and experiences.

Installation

The actual installation wasn't any more difficult than a regular Windows XP installation. In fact, there wasn't much difference. Considering that XP and Server 2003 are based on the same codebase, this isn't at all surprising. Once installed I did have some issues with drivers.

There isn't nearly as good official hardware support as XP. My Via Vinyl AC'97 sound card wasn't recognized, nor was my D-Link DWL-g510 WiFi card. I didn't have Service Pack 1 slipstreamed on my disc and my machine uses a wireless connection, so even if I had had drivers for the devices, I still had a few hoops to jump through to get things working at all. Luckily for me, even though neither officially supports Server 2003, I was able to get them both working using the XP drivers.

Post-Install Configuration

Once Server 2003 is installed, if you're looking to run it as a regular desktop OS, you still have quite a bit of work to do. Fortunately, at least a few other people had gone before me in this area and wrote an excellent guide which can be found at the Microsoft Software Forum Network. There are quite a few things that need changed, mostly for convenience's sake. Here's a quick summary of all the tweaks needed:

• New User: you need to create a regular user account to use instead of the Adminstrator account
• Disabling Internet Explorer's Enhanced Security settings: By default, IE will only go to a whitelisted set of sites. Good for a server, bad for a desktop, so this has to get disabled.
• Disabling Shutdown Event Tracker: Server 2003 logs all shutdowns and reboots. How annoying for a desktop.
• DirectX, Sound / Graphics Acceleration: DirectX isn't installed and acceleration is turned off. Few people do any gaming on a server, so this makes sense. Installing and enabling these wasn't a big deal.
• Theming support: Server 2003 uses the ugly Classic look by default, so turning on XP's shininess was a requirement.
• CD Burning and Image Acquisition: Most desktop users have a need for a digital camera, scanner, or CD burner, so these services also had to be turned on.
• Error Reporting, CPU Scheduling, System Restore: Once again, just some more configuration because of the different outlooks for a desktop and a server. Error Reporting is turned off except for critical errors, the processor scheduling is set to give programs priority, and system restore is turned on.
• Games: The usual games which ship with XP are not included at all with Server 2003. It was surprising just how much work was required just to install them, too!
• Three-Finger Logon: Logging in on a Windows Server involves using Ctrl+Alt+Delete to supposedly get around keyloggers. I don't know how successful it is, but knowing M$'s track record, I'm not real confident. I much prefer as simple a login as possible, preferably an automatic one.

Software Installation

After every Windows install, there is the inevitable install of what seems like 50,000 programs to get things from spartan to usable. With all the tweaks listed above, Server 2003 really looks and acts like Windows XP, so it's easy to forget that you're not running XP until you change hardware or install certain programs.

Antivirus software is one of them. I'm a fan of AVG's free-for-non-commercial-use antivirus package, but it won't install on Server 2003. By running a server operating system, it thinks you're running a server and, thus, refuses to install. I can't say I completely blame AVG for this move, and there's probably a way to beat it into submission (probably illegally, though), but I wasn't about to mess around with it. Instead, I installed DriveSentry, which while also free for non-commerical use, didn't slam the door in my face like AVG did.

After fighting with A-V software I ran into the same thing for several other programs. Office was one of them, for example. I actually had to install my copy of Office 2007 Professional on my machine (I avoid Office when/where/if I can), but Micro$ft did the same thing as AVG. When I installed a copy of my legitimately-licensed corporate version on it, it ran without a problem, but then Google Calendar Sync pulled the same stunt. It seems that quite a few people expect you to actually run a server with a server OS.

Other Configuration Adventures

One of the reasons I tried the whole Workstation 2003 thing was because of Remote Desktop. I'm well-versed in using VNC for my network, but it really is a bandwidth hog and I see noticeable lag even within my home network, so I wanted to give it a shot. I found out that licensing and setup for Terminal Services is just as draconian as the copy protection found in Vista. It wouldn't surprise me if the same guys are responsible for both. Once I did get it set up -- which did take some doing, though not as much as remote login via VNC on a Linux box -- I was quite pleased to see how responsive and easy-to-use it was. No wonder it's closely guarded.

File sharing using Server 2003 still stumps me, and I never got it working correctly. Perhaps I'm just a Weenix Unie on this one, but user management and file permissions under Windows operating systems just seems weird. I had what I thought was the proper boxes checked and the right users added and so forth, but I couldn't access files on my other Windows box that was running XP. Oh well.

Conclusions

It's kind of a nice idea in theory, but running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition as a desktop operating system is not all that it seems on the surface. In the end for me, it was far too much work to stay with it. Even more than Linux, believe it or not. You're on your own for hardware support, certain regular desktop programs won't support it, and from a cost effectiveness standpoint, it makes no sense whatsoever. The only compelling reasons to run a Windows server might be for Active Directory (not sure about that one) or Terminal Services. Then again, that may not even be true -- I need to investigate xrdp a little further before I can definitively say so. For now, the jury's still out.

360 Desktop: Cool but Not Very Usable

I visit Lifehacker frequently because of all the really useful information that is posted there. When I saw a post for 360 Desktop for Windows, I thought I'd take it for a spin. It certainly sounded like a neat piece of software.

The Concept

360 Desktop changes the "flat" mental model of desktop workspace into something of a cylindrical one and gives you the ability to add widgets to the desktop, as well. For people who are into this kind of thing (I'm not), this is nice, especially because it opens the door for Windows XP users. The picture at the right, courtesy of UpToDown.com, gives you an idea of how it works. A small slider is placed in a window at the top right part of the screen and an icon is placed in the system tray after installation. By dragging the slider left or right, the desktop pans in that direction. By using 360 Desktop, you suddenly have a lot more desktop space and some nifty backgrounds and widgets to go with it.

The Good

It certainly adds work desktop space, and being Windows still does not have built-in support for workspaces like the rest of the world, this is quite helpful for people with smaller monitors. The space taken up by desktop widgets doesn't matter quite so much any more. The panoramic desktop wallpapers were really pretty.

The Bad

The extra work involved with accessing and navigating the extra desktop space wasn't really worth the benefit it gave. For example, if you have a plethora of open windows strewn across the cylinder, how do you jump from one side to the other quickly. Panning is great for keeping track of where you are, but it's not so good on speed. It's also not very precise. Also, unless I missed something moving windows around the cylinder isn't possible, either, so you have to either repeatedly pan the screen some and then drag the window or close the window, pan to the new location, and reopen it. Either way is a pain. The selection of panoramic wallpapers wasn't very big and most of them were really bright, which looks nice but makes finding icons on the desktop more difficult.

The Verdict

I'd say that 360 Desktop is a nice idea, but it's another case of a nifty demo being developed into a full-fledged program when it really shouldn't have. Some people may really like it, but in this writer's opinion, it just slows you down -- workspaces are much faster by way of the keyboard, much more precise, and the jury's still out on desktop widgets. :)

Steve Ballmer is a Funny Guy

I doubt that he really is trying to be as laugh-inducing as he is, but he makes me laugh on a regular basis. Most of the time it's by making himself look more than a little foolish. For example, I'm not the only one who enjoyed the video of his "Developers, Developers, Developers" hype. He dances at least as bad as I do. Sometimes I just shake my head in disbelief at events surrounding his leadership at Microsoft--times like a very unhappy Hungarian lobbing eggs at him, his training for the Chair Throw event at the next Summer Olympics, or his comparison of Linux to a virus. Today, I'm doing both.

Apparently, Windows Vista sales are really good in Steve's opinion. More and more often I hear about low opinions--often very vocal ones--about the latest desktop OS from Redmond. This article was quite an enjoyable read. Why? It shows just how much of the Kool-Aid he really has drunk. He's happy that Vista is selling really well because of OEM preloading it onto machines. I wonder what he would say if he had to depend on selling Windows than depending on OEMs to do the dirty work for him by not offering customers a real choice. Here's where I translate the marketing speak Steve used into real English:

Steve: "Application compatibility in Vista was not as high as many of our customers would have liked."
English: People didn't like that we broke as many programs as we did.

Steve: "I think we’re going through something of a process whereby Vista users are still getting used to Vista after moving from XP"
English: People are going to have to get used to all of the changes we made, whether or not they're good ones.

While there are those people who wanted it for whatever reason, many consumers who bought it with a computer don't necessarily know the difference between Office and Windows, but they knew something was wrong when their hardware wouldn't work and a comparatively smaller number of people don't want it at all. He really thinks that a lot of people like Windows Vista and wanted to upgrade it. Now that's funny.

What Vista could Teach Linux and Haiku

Once again, I am in the process of finding some hot sauce to go with the words that I'm eating. There was once a time when I said to myself that I'd never, ever install Windows Vista on my desktop machine at home. It's funny how circumstances have a tendency to change your mind. To make a long story short, I plonked down 65 clams to get an upgrade license to Home Premium and my computer now dual boots Vista and Xubuntu. I haven't forgotten or abandoned my love of Haiku or my liking for Ubuntu, but I will share with you a little food for thought, as in what Linux and Haiku could learn from Vista, both its successes and failures.


The Out-of-the-Box Experience Matters

This one is mostly for Haiku, but it could also apply to just about any Linux distro. Apple has got this one nailed, but I digress. Microsoft did well on the OOBE for Vista. From the unpackaging the CD (or DVD) to the "junk papers" included in it, the installation and ability to upgrade from within Windows, Vista at least gives you the impression that it is a well-polished piece of software.

The installer is nice-looking, clear, well-worded, and--dare I say it--usable. I can do without all the marketing-speak, but that's par for the course and easy to ignore. I think that Haiku could do more to reduce the amount of interaction needed to get an install done, but Redmond has certainly improved over, say, XP's installer.


Proper Hardware Support Really Matters

Driver support has been spotty in Vista. I know more than a couple of people who have been burned by unsupported peripherals after an upgrade to Vista. My desktop machine is about a year old, and -- unsuprisingly -- its game port is not supported. I have an old 3com 3c905b network card which I'm not exactly surprised isn't supported. Yeah, yeah, some of you are might be saying that it's up to the manufacturers to support their hardware, but I'll say it again: the technical details only matter to the technically-minded. Businessmen don't typically care unless it significantly changes profits, one way or the other. Nontechnical home users don't care. Many office workers don't either.

Some devices in Linux work perfectly out of the box. Others require some tweaking, and then there is the On Your Own realm where either a device requires a lot of playing, configuring, reconfiguring, swearing, forum scrounging, and possibly even code hacking to get to work. Of course, there are more than a couple devices that don't work at all, for whatever reason. The funny thing is that even between distros you find support for certain hardware or hardware-related features, such as suspend / hibernate, varying between distributions.

BeOS did somewhat better in this matter. It either worked or it didn't, and there generally wasn't anything in between. Unfortunately, there were occasions where it wasn't obvious whether a device worked and, as a result, remained a mystery without some digging around. An easier device manager app might be the solution to this. Hardware support for Haiku will be hit and miss in many cases for a while, but it should be easier to make it come around, thanks to many of the inroads made by Linux.


Place No Unnecessary Restrictions on Your Users

Vista has a variety of methods for getting in the way. You can't use GRUB (or any other bootloader, for that matter) without some hackery. The UI is comfortable, but slow. More steps are required to do certain tasks than in XP. There is much change for the sake of change. UAC makes me Cancel or Allow seemingly everything, and while Linux and its brethren have the occasions where you have to type in your password to do administrative tasks, this happens much less frequently in my experience than Vista. Filesystem permissions can give headaches from time to time, but they have nothing on the annoyance value that Vista's do. Using an upgrade license key isn't that bad unless you need to change the partition table, in which you will have no choice but to install Vista twice -- the key only works when installed from Windows and the partition table can only be changed when booted from the install media. Joy. It's things like this that make books like O'Reilly's Vista Annoyances necessary.


Eye Candy isn't Required, but it is Nice to Have

Believe it or not, I'm not even referring to a 3D-accelerated desktop experience, even though that is the direction that Vista took. Good looks aren't necessary for the experience, but it does help to initially draw someone in to take a second look and it makes working with the OS more enjoyable. One thing that I've felt in using Vista is that it feels like going on a luxury cruise: it looks pretty nice, has its annoyances, costs a lot of money, has a generally cushy feel to it, and it takes some time to get used to your surroundings. It also makes some people want to throw up. Don't get me wrong, though. Let's just say good looks has enough value to make a requirement.

Linux has some distros that look good and others not so much. GNOME and KDE go in opposite directions in terms of general look and feel. GNOME is very conservative and KDE is brightly colored-- so much so that some would say it is garish.

The initial work that Stephen Aßmus and others have done on the icons and general look is praiseworthy. The colors aren't too bright, but it does look nice and without shying away from the use of color. I'd say Haiku's in good hands on this one.


A Broken Trust is Hard to Repair

This has more to do with a company behind the software than the software itself. There are numerous instances in both XP and Vista where it shows that Microsoft groups users into two categories: geeks and clueless people, and it doesn't trust geeks without making any attempt to hide it. How? Let me see... Windows / Office Genuine Advantage and its WGA Notifications nagware, DRM in Windows Media Player, Trusted (ha!) Computing, the privacy-invading Windows Vista Customer Experience Improvement Program, and forced software activation, and even stealth computer updates by means of Windows Update, just to name a few.

Most of this stuff has been put into place because of software piracy in the warez scene and bootlegging overseas, even though Microsoft has made money by the truckload with Office and Windows. As a result, many existing customers have less trust for MS than most citizens have in the Internal Revenue Service here in the U.S. The sad part that Microsoft neither seems to care nor has any plans of changing this. Combine this distrust of its users with several botched software upgrades like XP SP3 and you have a reputation problem on your hands that even Redmond's spin doctors will have a hard time fixing.

Linux proponents vary in their opinions, which, considering the wide variety of its users and developers, isn't surprising. Many of them fall into the Richard Stallman camp which not only preaches software that is free as in speech, but has a somewhat-justified distrust of proprietary software.

My experience with the BeOS / Haiku community is that open source is good. Haiku is developed under the MIT license but bundles in software with other licenses. I remember asking Michael Phipps about the "what if someone grabs the source and makes a closed-source product with it" scenario and I liked his answer. It went something like, "So what? Haiku is still free. Call it a gift to the community. If some one makes a closed source version, Haiku is still free." If that's not goodwill, I don't know what is.


Conclusions

All-in-all, Vista's not a bad experience for most folks. It's just that, at best, it's not very compelling and at its worst, it's a nightmare. High cost, steep hardware requirements, too many choices of editions, a development cycle that went way too long, a company whose bureaucracy weighs heavily on software development, a lack of trust for its customers, and many other factors combine for a let-down with few positives. If Microsoft wants to head into decline, it need only continue its current behavior. However, it's unlikely that Linux's chaotic development into all directions without a clear vision for certain markets will cause it to become a Windows-killer, but that leaves opportunity for Haiku to find a clear niche. Only time will tell to see if anyone learns from Vista and Microsoft.