Why Linux?

I wandered onto linuxhater’s blog. It makes compelling arguments as to why Vista > *nix, in a very tongue in cheek and into your face kinda humor, and it makes you laugh. Before long you’ll find yourself agreeing to what he says. If I am lucky, he’ll link to my poor blog.

And for good reason too. So, of course I can’t rebut him, because I am not sure of my own convictions. So let me start by telling you guys about basyt the luser.

I am a noob. I can write pretty simple codes in JAVA in C, and that’s it. I have a DELL XPS 1530, which has a T8300 2.4 GHz Geforce8600m 4GB’s ram 250 GB hdd. So I am basically an lnoob with a pretty sweet laptop. I was on Ubuntu for almost 2 years on and off before that. Which was because, well you gotta start somewhere, I inquired amongst my friends who were using *nix about what to use and they suggested Ubuntu with wine for the softwares(read utorrent, others don’t have NAT enabled) that didn’t have a proper opensource counterpart. I am not entirely sure why I needed Ubuntu in the first place, but that is a moot point now. Anyways for the last 20 days about I have been using archlinux, the 32-bit version only because of no flash love for the 64-bit versions.

And here is a list of my gripes.

1. My shiny media control buttons don’t work. Not even volume. Atleast which worked out of the box on  ubuntu.

2. My touchpad now works, barely. Earlier, I had the erratic touchpad behaviour problem. It is now fixed by adding a line i8042.nomux=1 to the grub boot parameters. It was a very very strange problem to say the least, in that my touchpad would either have no response or would move arbitly across the screen where it pleased at a very very high speed. Now my touchpad(alps) works. But no vert/horiz scroll, or any of the flashier features. I installed gsynaptics. But it gives a SHMConfig must be on error and exits. Never mind that I have that line in the proper section in my xorg.conf.

3. mp3 support somehow got added when I installed amarok, but its resource usage is so unbelieveably high, that I use mpd+ncmpc. Still despite having all the codecs, my mplayer doesn’t play the propreity codecs. Thankfully vlc does, but its subtitles support is highly suspect. It shows them when it is in a good mood. Never mind that I am trying to watch animes. Ofcourse the fact is that, my lappy is quite top-of-the line, atleast by Indian standards, so I shouldn’t mind if amarok uses a large amount of memory or takes a gazillion years to start up. Yet I think of my computers as sentinent, so I don’t like the idea of stressing it beyond its limits. If I can do something for only 1-2% resource usage, why should I do the same for 30-50%?

4. Compiz-fusion. It actually makes gnome worth looking at. Yet, at what great price. Try turning on motion blur. I am just motion-blurring windows no? I am not playing COD4 at all details maxed out. Yet still I have unbelievable slowdowns. Why linux why? On my desktop, I used to think that it was because I have a crappy 7300. Now I have a 8600, and nvidia are kind enough to release their drivers. So you’d think that if you have the latest drivers, a properly built up video card, then you can just use compiz at everything maxed. Apparently no.

5. I don’t file bug-reports. I have read a few bug reports and for the most part, they’re Trollsville. I admit that I have had help from them. But reading through 100+ troll grunts just to get to that amazing dev who writes i8042.nomux=1 is too much work for people who have things to do other than sit in front of their computer and wade through oceans of turd in the nude. hehe.

6. I use the numpad with my fn key. It usually works nicely, but every once in a while, a single press will result in it just spamming the output and me ending with a line full of pluses or asterisks, which frankly pisses me off a little.

7. The brightness changes, but there is no feedback on the brightness bar. Which looks absurd.

So every time I boot to vista, I am so wowed. My remote control works. My media buttons work. My touchpad works exactly as I want to. Vertical scroll. Horizontal scroll. Webcam. Fingerprint reader.

I formatted my laptop, removed all the dell bloatware and everything just works. The word for this is magic. Took me probably 20 minutes and one restart to install all the drivers from the dell official cd. You don’t need to restart everytime you install a new driver, as some lusers claim incorrectly. Just install them all in one go. There probably is no need to install updates to drivers, except maybe for video. The stock ones work pretty well imo.

So why linux? First a disclaimer: Your mileage will vary. If you are my mom, or your mom, then vista is made for you. My mother is still wrapping her head around vista. So if you need an os for ‘light’ tasks, forget linux. And don’t in any case trust any luser who says the opposite. Forget Arch or Gnome, even installing Ubuntu with all its much hyped 6 click install is very complicated for many people. Setting up a dual-boot for example, reduced me to tears. I still can’t add proxy support by myself. I don’t really know much about OSX so I won’t be talking about it. Except that quicktime and itunes suck awesomely. I sync my itunes using gtkpod.

So anyways, linux is not, never was and probably will never be for the common man who just wants to send mail and watch his xvid porn. The main reason is probably the fact that Unix was an OS by programmers for programmers. The same guys also wrote the C compiler too. Of course there is OSX, but then Apple knows exactly what hardware it’d be running on.

On the other hand are *nix devs, who for some reason want to support everything from amiga and saturn to supercomputers on the same kernel. Why? I think that they probably get off on this kinda sh*t. Nerds you know who you’re, just pawn off your saturns and move on with your life pretty please. Its not that hard is it? Every app on windows has a system requirements on it. It is a neat idea, it establishes a baseline against which the software developer builds his binaries(this is of course from whatever little understanding I have of the process). Vista e.g makes people upgrade their hardware, here, distro devs spend valuable hours enabling support for old redundant hardware.  Its probably because of the lwhiners, who will crucify them, if their latest hardware whims are not properly placated. I think distro binaries should be for newer hardware only. If you have to have something on your ENIAC go ahead and compile yourself. Does that make sense? I have never used compile flags or compiled a kernel so I am not very sure how correct I am being.

I know that the solution to most of my gripes are just a google query away. Yet I don’t have atm the kind of time to spend goosing around.

This hopefully concludes the why linux why? part of this post.

Looks actually do matter.

Why am I still on linux?

1. As is clear from the screenshot, looks matter to me a lot.

I have always spent a lot of time trying to make my desktop look exactly the way I want it to look. In fact I could probably have solved all my problems if I had devoted time to that instead of browsing through gnome-look. And the almost countless customization possibilities it implies. The idea is that, even if a few features do not work if it looks the exact way I want it to look. Everything else is for me acceptable collateral. This is something I know will not win me any supporters for linux. So maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that.

2. A recently growing sense of responsibility.

To make any complete use of Vista, you need tons of propriety softwares. Adobe, Office(which for some reason is never bundled with Windows, which is just plain wrong), Visual Studio(which costs more than all of Bhutan and Ghana combined), etc etc. I am but a poor student with no income of my own and buying software that costs thousands of my parents hard-earned rupees is not a feasible option for me atm. One solution is to use free alternatives whenever you can, which is something I now do, as much as possible. The other is piracy which I was majorly into till some time ago. Also fact is that software is incredibly hard to get in India, outside of metros, where the software available even in respectable shops is pirated, not because they’re trying to make easy money, but a) most of the vendors are virtually computer illiterate, they have been shopkeepers for all their lives and computers have only now began to penetrate to any limit and b) the sick Indian mentality(or human??) of trying to get as much for as little, even if it means resorting to piracy, peeing on your neighbors walls, stealing fruits from his garden, underpaying your employees, child labor, throwing your garbage on the roads…  using linux, I sleep better.

3. You need to write code.

Like linux and casual users is the case of Vista and programmers. Matlab will kill your computer simply by overheating it. If you’re writing c on vista, then you’re probably using eclipse and mingw(the free alternatives) and my latest switch to linux was completely because of this. For some reason eclipse would not compile and things like this drive me crazy.

4. My take on the old anti-virus, anti-spyware defragmenter thing.

I have a very secure campus. Its like completely firewalled and everything else. So I have never felt need for either of the two. I stay away from the grayer regions of the internet. Do not install anything without thinking first, no clicking on pop-ups, etc. In fact I do not even use any anti-virus, spyware, defragmenter etc. So why I am I raising this issue? Because of the huge performance overhead they have. If your net is not as secure as mine. You’ll need them, and their scans really kill hardware. Norton on backgrounding still used to take like 20% on my old pentium 3.0GHz HT. Linux just bypasses the whole problem.

5. Shells are way too powerful.

Unlike windows. Shells here are overpowered. And its not just moving around files using regexps, which is what I am doing most of the time. Shells offer an amount of control that you can’t have in windows. Again, if you’re casual, then you don’t need it at all, you’ll be happy to cntrl click and shift click all your life. Shells can cut that time down a lot. And since we move around files everyday, you know where this argument is going. It is a wee bit dumb so lets just leave it at that.

6. A legacy computing experience.

I am here refering to init 3. My lappy uses like 128-140 Mbs in text mode. And virtually everything I need to do, I can do it from text-mode. links, pine, vi, ncmpc+mpd. I really don’t need anything more. The only reason for me sticking around in init 5=> eye candy. Compiz you mayn’t be perfect, but I love you still. hehe.

Thats about it. For now.