Google Announces PC Operating System > Open Source Chrome OS

reply to stevephl

Re: Open Source Chrome OS

AND, if someone other than Apple can design even a half-friendly user interface for it, it'll spread like wildfire. That's the problem with Linux: most people are not computer savvy or patient enough to jump through all the hoops required to make linux dance like Windows or OS X does.

Can Linux do everything that Windows does? Yes.
Is it a royal pain in the ass to do so? Almost certainly.

I haven't tried one in a couple of years now. I remember having particular difficulty getting dual monitors to act as a single environment with an nVidia card... just about pulled my hair out. Red Hat, SuSe... didn't matter. General setup was cake, but certain things were just a real pain in the ass... I've got patience, but not enough to write my own drivers when I have an unsupported device. In the end, I always went back to my heavily pirated copy of XP. Every time I installed linux, it just seemed like open source was a small step behind the MS and Macs of the world as far as things just working. I honestly feel like I gave linux an honest shot (more than once)... it just ended up not being worth the trouble to get things to work the way I wanted them to.

reply to openbox9
I'm far from impressed when it comes to linux attempting to mimic features of more polished desktop (not server, as that is a different story) OS like Windows (and probably Mac OS, which I haven't used, but those that use it seem to like it). I find the gnome and kde a bit confusing and slow to navigate through, thus back to the much over used commandline to do anything at all. I'm looking for something that is as simple to setup that is just as fast as Windows RDP.

Guess I'm expecting too much (based on all this hype on linux vs Windows) from a bunch of unpaid programmers with questionable background and abilities to create something that rivals Windows.

I'm not defending Linux distros by any stretch, but there are other simpler and faster Window managers besides Gnome and KDE. I understand developers' tendencies to attempt to mimic MS Windows, but it would've been nice if they had thought out of the box and made something unique, better organized, and more efficient than mimicking MS Windows' UI.

To be completely honest with everyone I don't see what's so complicated about linux, I learned most of it on Ubuntu, and then went to dabbling with YDL for PS3 and a bit of Slackware...

I think what most people don't get about Linux is that like all new things there's a learning curve, and the only reason its not as polished as Win/OSX is that at first you don't know how to use it.

If you've been at it as your only OS for anywhere from six months to a year, you're golden.

How long did it take you guys to learn windows flawlessly?

Probably as much time as it would take you to run a modern linux flawlessly if you put the elbow grease in it.
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Working to bring you closer to a Bell and Rogers free household.

reply to El Quintron
Agreed. An additional factor besides the learning curve is that a lot of people use MS Windows at work which make them all that much more resistant to change their OS at home. My wife is like that. I've attempted to ween her off of MS Windows a couple of times with Linux and OS X and the recurring comment is "but it doesn't look like my computer at work". That and a couple of application incompatibilities that can be solved with Wine, but that's kind of kludgey solution which doesn't help my credibility in the transition attempt.

reply to El Quintron
Say command prompt / terminal. Scares most people, even though it can be much easier to use. Take creating LVM for example. The command line is much easier and faster than the GUI.

reply to openbox9
I'll agree with that.

I suspect that I could have a computer 'newbie' (i.e. someone that never used a computer in their life) use a PC, Mac or Linux with a decent Window manager with ease.

I was brought up on Windows OS/2 (gack), and started hacking with Linux distros in College (Slackware 1.0) as they were cheap, fast, reliable and at the time blew Windows 3.x/95 out of the water for cost and performance. I was able to get things on Linux that were never available (or cost a lot) on Windows at the time (ftp/email/web/proxies/irc/printer/file servers).
At one time - in a lab I ran circles around NT for performance (both used same hardware).

Getting back on topic - Linux is good for specific things - VMWare, Servers (cheap Solaris replacement) and light weight OS. Windows OS has already become 'the Borg', assimilating all OS functions and application functions into its core, becoming VERY bloated, and memory dependent (i.e. don't get Vista with less than 3GB of RAM)
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Canada = Hollywood North

reply to mlundin

reply to cornelius785

reply to Romney2012
Diggity! Aint it! Vista is totally tamable. I have no problems making SP1 livable, and even better with SP2.

Windows 7 is definitely coming along nicely. I think most people don't appreciate what an undertaking it is to create an OS of this magnitude!

-Akbar humor aside.... If there was a concentrated effort in the Open Source (Linux) community, I believe they could compete well. The obvious difference is all the paid developers Micro$oft has with mega overtime. I for one am interested in seeing what Google (Skynet Indeed!) produces over Linux. Perhaps a good starting (or jumping off) point for the community!

reply to Romney2012
I since I only have 1 Vista Home Premium and it originally came with 1 GB (horrific) on a Compaq AMD 64 3800+ and was horrific. I was able to get a deal on memory and upped it to 3GB.
On Fedora core, 1GB was more than enough.

The laptop came with 3GB

The main differences that I've noticed:
Linux by default = Kernel + a few daemons (sshd, syslogd, etc.) most are 'sleeping' and consuming very little RAM / cpu.

Windows by default has a significant amount of services running, and most 'builds' toss in a whole ton of junk, many consuming a lot of RAM while sleeping. I typically see many svchost.exe processes totalling up to ~200MB, IE consuming over 100MB, and cpu ~8-10%

On a server level, there's no comparison - I've had people wondering if monitoring was broken, as ntload would be all over the map (caching files, AV sweeps, reindexing, etc). The linux box sitting between 99% and 100% idle - of course an ftp server running on a quad Xeon 3.40GHz AS 3 box is WAY overkill

63 processes: 62 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait    idle
           total    0.0%    0.0%    0.1%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   99.9%
           cpu00    0.0%    0.0%    0.2%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   99.8%
           cpu01    0.0%    0.0%    0.0%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%  100.0%
           cpu02    0.0%    0.0%    0.2%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   99.8%
           cpu03    0.0%    0.0%    0.0%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%  100.0%
Mem:  4087688k av, 4066944k used,   20744k free,       0k shrd,  156344k buff
                   3082648k actv,  591032k in_d,   89060k in_c
Swap: 2048276k av,       0k used, 2048276k free                 3639320k cached
 

 prtdiag
System Configuration:  Sun Microsystems  sun4u Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 Server
System clock frequency: 1012 MHz
Memory size: 32768 Megabytes
 
==================================== CPUs ====================================
 
      CPU                 CPU                         Run    L2$    CPU   CPU
LSB   Chip                 ID                         MHz     MB    Impl. Mask
---   ----  ----------------------------------------  ----   ---    ----- ----
 00     0      0,   1,   2,   3                       2150   5.0        6  147
 00     1      8,   9,  10,  11                       2150   5.0        6  147
 00     2     16,  17,  18,  19                       2150   5.0        6  147
 00     3     24,  25,  26,  27                       2150   5.0        6  147
 
============================ Memory Configuration ============================
 
       Memory  Available           Memory     DIMM    # of  Mirror  Interleave
LSB    Group   Size                Status     Size    DIMMs Mode    Factor
---    ------  ------------------  -------    ------  ----- ------- ----------
 00    A        16384MB            okay       2048MB      8 no       4-way
 00    B        16384MB            okay       2048MB      8 no       4-way
 
 

Most people I know uninstall the preloaded crap that comes on laptops...or desktops for that matter. But Vista still had too many processes running for my comfort. Even after I butchered vista, it was still running 60 some processes. Then the switch came real easy for me....I installed a windows update and it put my 4 week old Vista laptop into a shutdown/start up cycle that made it unrecoverable. I switched to 7 and have been running 7 on that laptop ever since. Fully loded with the apps I use, 7 is running with 28-30 processes. Getting rid of Vista was a blessing.
--
BF69~~~Please stop suffocating gerbils!

reply to Romney2012
A lot of the 'junk' that the retailers add/bundle in are 'paid' installs that 3rd party companies want your business and throw in a whole bunch of trial ware / Toolbars (plague of the modern PC), and tons of apps that want to 'dial home' for updates frequently.
Many peripherals have become that way, IMO.
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Canada = Hollywood North

reply to Romney2012