Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Vista Aero vs. Linux Compiz
zridling:
In a corporate environment, what are the values that absolutely cannot be compromised - being conservative and not flashy, backwards compatibility, features based on actual user feedback and customer demand.... Guess what, these are the exact areas Windows outshines OSX and Linux. It may not be sexy, and it has a bit of design-by-committee, but the features are put in after extensive user testing, not because some dev coded an overnight effect that looks good on youtube. Windows [Server] 2008 lets you mix and match what you want to run, so e.g. you can run it without a GUI. So I have hopes for reduced resource usage as well.-MrCrispy (April 24, 2008, 11:34 PM)
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Interesting, and I'd like to break this down.
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(1) In a corporate environment, what are the values that absolutely cannot be compromised — being conservative and not flashy, backwards compatibility, features based on actual user feedback and customer demand.... Guess what, these are the exact areas Windows outshines OSX and Linux.
Really?
— I presume you mean XP (which Ballmer hinted may get its death sentenced commuted again), not Vista. But since we're in the now, let's stick with the current Windows: Vista.
— This doesn't account for MS-OOXML in Office 2007, and its lack of support for the other ISO standard format, ODF.
— Vista also broke lots of hardware with missing drivers. And please don't tell me that "XP did the same thing when it came out." After five years of development, I somehow thought things were supposed to be more compatible, faster, and better. For example, I lost both an old and a new HP laser printer for over a year. Talk about being bummed. Yet those open sourcers were able to hack up a Linux driver in about three weeks.
— Microsoft itself was never clear on whether we should get new hardware for Vista. They slapped 'Vista-capable' stickers on systems that were not. That did wonders for goodwill, and brought the inevitable lawsuit from consumers. They could have easily sold a demo/test CD for €1 to see if Vista worked on your old system like Linux does with its Live CDs.
— So far, I don't see the "outshining" MrCrispy, as Windows is actually losing desktop market share to OS X and Linux. Microsoft never loses desktop market share. But with Vista Microsoft is finally losing customers. And according to that same Forrester Research Report, Windows enterprise adoption declined 3.7% and Vista only accounted for just over 6% of business/enterprise clients to date.
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(2) It may not be sexy, and it has a bit of design-by-committee, but the features are put in after extensive user testing, not because some dev coded an overnight effect that looks good on youtube.
— Okay, you're talking about Compiz here, but something most of those YouTube 'Compiz' videos don't show is how it works among desktops you establish as you work. For example, you can create a set of programs that work within one 'desktop' — say, graphics, or database/spreadsheet/data analysis, or coding, whatever — keeping that workspace clean and segregated from things like surfing, burning, gaming, etc. The flash and zazz on the videos are just effects, and hide its utility.
— I'll grant you that Microsoft did at least deliver Aero (along with several fantastic fonts) after dropping WinFS, which was originally announced as one of the three "pillars" of Windows Vista — the other two being the new Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) user interface layer and the Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo) web services layer. File systems on Linux are its core attraction for stability, no need for defragging, and since everything is a text file, they last forever, and I don't have WGA, Windows Update, or OGA checking my computer at every boot.
— Despite years of development, unprecedented and broad alpha and beta testing by many, many Windows power users, Vista wasn't ready for release at the end of Jan. 2007. SP1 is acceptable. Even Microsoft didn't make a big deal of Vista's rollout, and you'd hardly know they just released Windows Server 2008.
— Windows Explorer could not have been designed by committee. Nor could Vista's Control Panel labyrinth. Nor could UAC. Nor could the way that Vista drains laptop batteries. The list is long.
— And then there's that nasty Windows Home Server data corruption problem (marketed on Microsoft.com for Small Business Server Networks). Corrupting data is an absolute compromise (KnowledgeBase listing). When run on servers with more than one hard drive running Windows Home Server can destroy your data if you use any of nine programs: Windows Vista Photo Gallery; Windows Live Photo Gallery; Microsoft Office OneNote 2007; Microsoft Office OneNote 2003; Microsoft Office Outlook 2007; Microsoft Money 2007; SyncToy 2.0 Beta; Intuit QuickBooks; and uTorrent. To be fair, Windows Server 2008's Hyper-V virtualization is freaky good. But the whole point of a server OS is to serve files, not corrupt them. Who tested that at Redmond? Seriously. Not even ed bott can spin that. Just install Linux and Samba on the PC of your choice that you want to be your server and save yourself the cash and heartache.
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(3) Windows (Server or Home?) 2008 lets you mix and match what you want to run, so e.g. you can run it without a GUI. So I have hopes for reduced resource usage as well.
— Would you be willing to run Windows without a GUI? (I think you would because at your level, you'd be an expert on any OS, not just Windows.) But for my level, I couldn't.
— Reducing resource demand would be a new, welcome direction.
— Win7 is rumored to be subscription and possibly modular. But once software goes subscription, I'm outta there. I saw they floated a price of $33/month for Office 2007! Much like gasoline, I can't afford to drive with Microsoft anymore. Therefore, GNU/Linux best serves my economic and data interests.
f0dder:
File systems on Linux are its core attraction for stability, no need for defragging, and since everything is a text file, they last forever,-zridling (April 25, 2008, 01:09 AM)
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That linux filesystems should not need defragging is a goddamn lie. It's true that they generally don't fragment as badly as, say, FAT filesystems, but they sure as hell do fragment. (Oh, if you follow the "never use more than 80% of a drive" the fragmentation issues aren't as bad, but that's damn lame advice).
But they do fragment. How badly depends on filesystem type and usage. And what's your option then, to defragment? General advice is to "make a new filesystem, copy all files there, erase old filesyste, copy back". I don't know of any decent defrag applications for linux - there's some experimental thing for ext2, and for XFS you can hack up a command pipeline but it essentially uses single-file defragmenting, and isn't as comprehensive as tools available for windows.
Yet linux users keep propagating the misconception (or even outright lie) that linux is fragmentation-resilient. I dunno if it's simply because there aren't defragmentation apps available that this ignorance hasn't been debunked, or if it's because linux users have simply gotten used to sub-par performance...
Edvard:
Correct me if I'm wrong (and somebody usually does...), but it's not whether Linux does or doesn't need fragmentation, but how any particular filesystem deals with the inevitable fragmentation. Any multi-user, multitasking operating system should not benefit greatly from defragmentation (ntfs included...) and there are valid arguments against defragging such a system.
Linux adherents have been sold the mantra "no need for fragmentation" because the guys who designed the filesystem designed it from a multiuser multitask standpoint from the first.
It's not a lie, it's a misconception of the nature of the problem.
If the msdos and fat filesystems had been designed this way from the first, we wouldn't even be asking this question.
I know this is old, and concerns mainly the ext2 filestystem, but it's a very good technical explanation of the situation from the wtfl-lug mailing list:
http://www.salmar.com/pipermail/wftl-lug/2002-March/000603.html
Here's a perl script for checking fragmentation:
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/96989/index.html
...and an non-techie ascii-art explanation of linux filesystem fragmentation here:
http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting
f0dder:
Edvard: try maintaining an Arch linux setup for a while - eventually, the speed of "pacman" (lovely name for a package manager ;)) slows to a crawl... because of fragmentation. Fragmentation is inevitable, you can do a lot of heuristic to try and avoid it, but it eventually ends up happening.
And it does impact performance, no matter what people say. Claiming it doesn't is pure and simple ignorance. NTFS fragments as well, by the way, so I'm not claiming it's a linux issue - it's an issue with all filesystems.
Obviously, how bad fragmentation affects performance depends on a lot of different figures - but it all boils down to fragment size and the nature of the storage system (transfer speed, seek speed, ...) - Microsoft's Vista defragmenter guesstimates that with current storage systems, you're generally OK and don't lose too much performance as long as each individual fragment is at least 64 megabytes in size.
But blanket-statement claiming that fragmentation is a non-issue and that it doesn't happen on linux - well, sorry, that's either ignorance or outright lies.
Dirhael:
Edvard: try maintaining an Arch linux setup for a while - eventually, the speed of "pacman" (lovely name for a package manager ;)) slows to a crawl... because of fragmentation.-f0dder (April 25, 2008, 11:25 AM)
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pacman -Sc; pacman-optimize; sync
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