10 ms·

On the state of Windows on the desktop

212 points by ameen 14y ago

Joeboy 14y ago
Do newer versions of Windows include an ssh client yet? If they do, that will remove my major irritation with Windows on the rare occasions I have to use it.
- dschep 14y ago
  Not AFAIK (win7).
- jaredmcateer 14y ago
  No I don't believe they do. I just keep a copy of PuTTY on a USB stick for the situations I need to use a Windows PC
- cleverjake 14y ago
  The closest thing you get is subsystem for unix based applications (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771672.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771672.aspx) which is built into windows. There isn't an ssh client built in, but there are community compiled ones you can download http://www.suacommunity.com/tool_warehouse.aspx http://www.suacommunity.com/tool_warehouse.aspx
- meaty 14y ago
  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.h... And you don't have to install anything. I chuck it all in c:\windows and it's available in PATH then.
  - lmm 14y ago
    >And you don't have to install anything. I chuck it all in c:\windows and it's available in PATH then. You think copying random files from the internet into system directories with no tracking, no upgrade management, no uninstall capability is a good thing?
    - meaty 14y ago
      It's not a particularly great thing, but it's "good enough" for your average single shot laptop. If it was a corporate machine, we'd package it and deploy it via GPO.
    - marshray 14y ago
      No, it's secure. All you have do is first download a random GPG exe from the internet and check the .sig using the PGP key supplied with PuTTY :-)
  - pmarsh 14y ago
    Sure you know but you could just edit the PATH variable as well so you don't have to muddy up c:\windows.
  - Joeboy 14y ago
    I know about putty of course, the problem is that I feel I have to ask people if it's ok if I install mysterious hacker software on their computer. Maybe I just need to get over that.
- recursive 14y ago
  Nope. I recently had to use ssh, and needed to download a client on Win 7.
- madsushi 14y ago
  Microsoft is actually moving in the opposite direction; they removed the telnet client from the default install.
  - commandar 14y ago
    Pedantry: it's still included in the install, it's just disabled by default.
vincentkriek 14y ago
Somehow this aggravates me. I am an avid Linux user and I agree with a lot of points in the blog post but I don't think it is realistic to see Microsoft Windows as something that you have never used. Microsoft relies heavily on "common knowledge". Everyone knows that you need to install software by downloading it from the vendors website, everyone knows about drive letters. This might not be a good thing but they can get away with it because they are the leading OS manufacturer. Some good points the article makes are about the drivers, which need to be installed from CD and/or downloaded from the vendor's website. I think Linux does this a lot better by including a lot of the drivers into the kernel itself. But these points are easy to be ignored when you are irritated with the article.
- meaty 14y ago
  Actually 99% of drivers now come from Windows Update. I have only had to install one driver manually in the last 5 years and that was an old and obscure Tektronix laser printer. Drive letters are a hang back from DOS. Ironically at a very low level, NT doesn't have the concept of drive letters at all and does volume mounting as per *NIX systems. That's all down to Win32.
  - ts- 14y ago
    What if you can't access Windows Update? The last time I installed Windows 7 on a laptop (a HP netbook to be exact), it supported neither of wireless and ethernet adapters. Luckily I had my phone to tether to (with Bluetooth); drivers for ethernet were not available in Windows Update, though.
    - meaty 14y ago
      USB stick, or don't buy anything HP again (their laptops are all universally shit).
  - CurtHagenlocher 14y ago
    Drive letters actually go back quite a bit further. They originated on IBM big iron, and made it to MS-DOS via CP/M.
curlypaul924 14y ago
Is it "a linux user's perspective" or "many linux users' perspectives"? I can't tell due to the ambiguity.
- brudgers 14y ago
  It's both. He's hedging their bets.
meaty 14y ago
Surprisingly short on facts, even if it is a parody. Very slashdot circa 1999. Some notes: Windows is free to download and try. You don't have to enter a product key - just hit next and add it if you decide to buy it. You get it for 30 days. Here is the URL if you want to try it (windows 7 x64 professional): http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59186.iso http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59186.iso There is a live CD but it's only used for recovery. There isn't much of a market for trying Windows. Drivers. Windows update always handles these for me at least. I haven't had to bother with driver fiddling for years. Not only that, 99% of hardware I've worked with recently just works out of the box anyway. Package manager. Yes there is - there is just no pick and place repository like Debian. You can get packages from Windows Update though. The package manager is called Windows Installer and the packages are MSI packages. Everyone installs K Lite Codec Pack and media player classic these days (or VLC) almost as a first item to install. Same as you install win32-codecs on Linux. Maildir import. You stick an IMAP server on your Linux box and copy all the shit to your PST.
- criley 14y ago
  New Windows install: use www.ninite.com to get a 1-click installer for most popular programs and codecs. I agree with your analysis though: there is a difference between parody and stupid, and this hits the latter. I've been building Win7 PC's for years and I haven't loaded to messed up graphics and no networking since before the friends and family beta. That was always a hallmark of WinXP, not 7. The only thing I can think of is that he installed Win7 on 10 year old hardware and the drivers for such an antiquated setup weren't even included in the default set. It's also possible that he grabbed a really old copy of Win7 with no service packs or updates baked in, which includes tons of driver updates. However, and I run Ubuntu, Mint and Win7 on my machine, I can say that both found all of my drivers immediately and worked, although the Windows drivers are newer, more stable and more fully featured (I'm looking at you ATI).
  - meaty 14y ago
    I prefer to do it by hand. Ninite isn't always up to date so you end up with a crapfest of auto updaters running instantly.
norswap 14y ago
Now do the reverse perspective (actually, it already exists). Not sure it will look much rosier.
- foxbunny 14y ago
  The reverse perspective is the basis of the parody. There is a link the yellow box towards the beginning of the post.
camus 14y ago
well , Windows can be good , i use it everyday , the only problem is that is not a POSIX env which sucks when one is a developer using a lot of open-source stuffs(hello VM). Window can be proprietary , that's not an issues MacOSX is , but all that DOS stuff is just stupid in 2013 and makes it hard to use some neat Linux dev tools.
hydrology 14y ago
Lucky enough for the guy who wrote this. He didn't try it long enough to know that there's this thing on Windows OS called "Virus/Worm/Trojan" that eats up everything on his PC. ROFL.
- aw3c2 14y ago
  I dread the time when Linux is popular enough for malware. it will be a massacre.
  - voidlogic 14y ago
    People often say this, there are a lot of complicated technical reasons this is not true, leaving those aside, here are two very simple ones: 1. You download virusBin in Linux, you cannot run it- it does not have execute permission by default. 2. OK so either graphically or at the terminal (chmod u+x) you make virusBin executable.... (I'm not sure why you did this...) If you run it, all of its access outside of /home/$USER is read-only, the system and other users are safe, maybe your data is not. So if you really want to mess up your machine 1. Download virusBin 2. Give virus Bin execute permission 3. Assuming you are the systems admin, you can now run it as root... sudo ./virusBin.. To get a user to do all that it is going to take a LOT of social engineering.
    - TheAnimus 14y ago
      1) Ever since XP SP2, anything that has been downloaded does not have execute flags. The downside is the user is prompted in a manner that allows them to override this. The question is, how did the executable get there in the first place? Most of the explots that really hit windows are bugs in browsers / addins. A lot are also spread via 'naughty things', to view this really degrading porn of some celebrety you must first do this survey and execute this code. Or even bundled in with pirate versions, over a few beers a buddy who works for a small design software firm was laughing at how many people had become infected by a virus which was spread by just one torrent of their product (not by him!). Or like 419 scam emails, really obvious things, that weed out the people with an ounce of sense to leave only those dumb enough to run it. People like my Dad, who typed in the admin password because he was running as regular user :( Then threw a hissy fit when I suggest he not know the admin password in future. Sure administrator as default is dumb, really dumb. But most of these attack vectors would still be open on linux, in fact we've seen some for the bsd based OSX last year.
rjknight 14y ago
This submission really should have kept the original title of the post.
mamby 14y ago
Linux ad! use what you want, and let us (the rest of the world) use what we want ... Windows sucks blah blah blah
hhudolet 14y ago
Stupid blog post. Everybody can write "OS sucks" article about OS in which they dont work & dont know how to use it.
- BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
  This post is a parody; The author explains this in a brightly-colored box on the page that's hard to miss. Perhaps your beef is with the article being parodied?
sauravc 14y ago
I'm shocked by the author's ignorance. He's kind of an idiot. Simply because he's been living under a rock and lacks common knowledge about how 90% of the world's personal computers run. Pick any OS and if you've never used it before you'll run into quite a bit of cognitive dissonance when trying it out for the first time. Nothing new here. Just a dummy who's trying to acted shocked by an OS everyone and their grandma has used for years.
- AimHere 14y ago
  >Pick any OS and if you've never used it before you'll run into quite a bit of cognitive dissonance when trying it out for the first time. That's the author's point. He's parodying the myriad 'I tried Linux, and it sucks' blogs that have been around since forever ago. Since he knew that large sections of the internet have trouble with subtlety and sarcasm, and wouldn't get that without him saying so explicitly in the text, he said so explicitly in the text. Which would have helped if there weren't also large sections of the internet that are prone to commenting before reading the text.
  - WayneDB 14y ago
    Yeah, but Linux sucks on the desktop for reasons that are completely different than the types of reasons that are being enumerated here for Windows. For instance: Fragmentation. Relatively low quality desktop software. Unavailability of certain types of software. Lack of certain features altogether like file "created date" for files, on most distributions.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- webreac 14y ago
  I think you have completely missed the point of the article. It is a parody of the behaviour of microsoft users. As a linux user (I have left microsoft because of Vista), I can ensure you that windows Vista, 7 and 8 are very weird.
- 14y ago
shmerl 14y ago
The fact that Windows can't read most common filesystems is indeed a sheer idiocy, most probably caused by Microsoft's arrogance and assumption that anything else doesn't worth attention since they'll dominate the world forever.
- Argote 14y ago
  Not really, the thing is that implementations for accessing said file systems are under a GPL license. In order to integrate them to Windows, they'd have to re-implement from scratch which could lead to a ton of bugs and then they'd have to officially support all of those file systems. Definitely not worth it from MSFTs perspective.
  - shmerl 14y ago
    They could implement it for the sake of interoperability. Surely it doesn't worth it from MS perspective since they didn't do it. But the reason is not because they don't have resources or it's some extremely hard problem to tackle. The reason is that they don't care about interoperability until forced. That's their whole approach.
    - marshray 14y ago
      Seriously, how big of a use case do you think it is that someone has a drive formatted with some FreeBSD filesystem which they want use in Windows? How hard is it to just copy the data over a network or mount the image in a VM running its native OS? Note that support for the .iso filesystem was recently added.
      - foxbunny 14y ago
        Copy 2TB JSF partition over network sounds like something I wouldn't want to do... An easier solution is to just get a Live Linux distro, and another 2TB NTFS partition, and copy over the data... if you have another 2TB drive.
        14y ago
armored_mammal 14y ago
I don't consider myself a windows hater per se, but his 'parody' really rings true to my experience, though the absolute limit for me was having to install a special piece of software so that I could scroll the areas underneath the mouse without clicking into them.
marcloney 14y ago
As a Windows to Linux convert for the past 5 years I actually enjoyed this parody due to some of the points he brought up that make me facepalm every time I use Windows. I don't know how many times I've cursed Microsoft over not recognising alternative file systems, then to realise I can't even get straight back into Linux because my boot loaders been replaced!
jonascopenhagen 14y ago
Half the article is about Windows installation problems. Thing is, though, most Windows users don't install Windows - it's already there on the computer they bought.
- foxbunny 14y ago
  You said it yourself: "most Windows users".
Shish2k 14y ago
> Using an ethernet cable to get internet to download wifi drivers Lucky him -- I was installing some new PCs just yesterday, and windows didn't even have ethernet drivers for them; digging around for the driver CD is a pain :-/ Then when I eventually did get online, I found that the company that made my scanner don't support 64-bit versions of windows at all :-| (All works fine out of the box with latest ubuntu) Also, what's the windows equivalent of "tar czvf /media/usb/home.tgz ~/" transport USB stick "tar xzvf /media/usb/home.tgz"? Setting up custom profiles for several users on several PCs was hours of pain, and they somehow came out differently each time x_x (As you can tell, I'm not a windows sysadmin, and don't have access to a copy of Windows Server...)
qwerta 14y ago
There is joke that best Win32 implementation is Wine on Ubuntu :-)
reptile83 14y ago
Truth: http://jonas.lophus.org/2013/1/on-the-state-of-linux-on-the-desktop.html http://jonas.lophus.org/2013/1/on-the-state-of-linux-on-the-...
EricButler 14y ago
It actually is possible to "mount" drives to a folder in unix fashion. http://www.computingverticals.com/136/map-usb-drive-to-desired-folder-in-windows-xp/ http://www.computingverticals.com/136/map-usb-drive-to-desir...
- foxbunny 14y ago
  4) You need to Specify the complete path to the desired folder (it must be empty) On Linux, you just specify it as a mount point at install time, and it gets populated (or it uses its existing content if you don't elect for format it). Technically, you could do it after install by copying the existing files over to the new drive, and then changing the mount options. So, out of curiosity, how would you do that on Windows for folders like C:\Users?
bobsy 14y ago
This is just a parody but seriously. Windows 8 desktop has 3 major problems. (4 if you include the branding of Metro or whatever it is called.) 1) Desktop should have Metro app's but not in their current implementation. Instead they should be opened on the desktop like any other program. This would allow multi-tasking, use of app's between various devices and it would greatly simplify the dual application environment problem you have now. It would also allow the Windows key to always toggle the start menu and the desktop. Currently the Windows Key toggles last program or menu which is pretty confusing. 2) Power options... a desktop computer should have a default state of off. Not locked. In the metro menu, where you sign out there should be options to both put the computer into stand by and shut down. Using the lock option signs you out and doesn't put the computer into stand by. Using stand by does what it says it does but mysteriously doesn't sign you out... very strange. Shutting down the computer requires too many steps. (windows 7 is windows key right arrow enter) A locked work station can be shut down by what is essentially an unauthenticated user. For some reason the default metro mail app frequently wakes the computer from standby making it unusable. Stuff like this should be fixed. 3) Dual screen is painful. The right settings menu is on the far edge of your second screen. The start menu seems to appear on a random monitor. Both screen's have app launch icons on the desktop yet if you click an icon on the second screen it opens up where-ever the app was last opened. This means often you launch an application on screen 2 and it appears in screen 1. Its weird. In its current state you never know where you should be looking when you perform actions. You then have minor stuff. If IE is your default browser the IE launcher will fire the metro version of IE. If you have different default browser the same icon fires IE on your desktop... its strange. Some programs are just unfindable on the start menu... I can see no reason for it. Sometimes they just don't exist which is pretty weird. Moving to the top right to get the settings panel often doesn't fire properly. Can sometimes start appearing when you are closing a program.. I look forward to Windows9. I feel all of the problems of Windows8 are solvable and the next version is bound to solve a bunch of these problems. If you don't have Windows 8 don't get it. Stick with 7 which is a far more together system. ------------- In contrast I installed Ubuntu again on Saturday and everything is much smoother. The Amazon results when searching for files is weird but things are far more intuitive and together than Windows 8.
- archangel_one 14y ago
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Wow. Did anyone read the article that this is parodying? Everyone is rushing to be a Windows white-knight but this article is just mind-blowingly stupid. I'm having a hard time even believing it was written in good faith: http://jonas.lophus.org/2013/1/on-the-state-of-linux-on-the-desktop.html http://jonas.lophus.org/2013/1/on-the-state-of-linux-on-the-... (This is no excuse for Evolution, but honestly, who uses Evolution? I wouldn't blame all of Windows for <insert crappy Windows app>).
ivix 14y ago
Snore.
Finster 14y ago
Really. We're doing this. It's now 2013 and we're really gonna do this. We're going to have a Linux vs. Windows flame war right here, right now? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE4fz8cwL9c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE4fz8cwL9c It's OVER
shareme 14y ago
He forgot the real fun part make your own visual shell skins..come on folks some imagination please! Wait you guys don't customize your visual shells?
JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
Windows isn't Linux and Linux isn't Windows. Like another commenter said, Windows users don't typically hold Linux users in contempt, which makes this parody rather ironic. What is more ironic is that they play up features of Linux like they're great (Live CD), or berate Windows for driver issues. Linux is infamous for lack of driver support. My most recent experience: Attempting to install Ubuntu variant on my 3 year old Dell Studio laptop. I must boot onto the Live CD first to run the installer, but the Live CD freezes while loading because, I'm sure you guessed it, it doesn't have the proper drivers. Still running Windows, money well spent I guess.
dredmorbius 14y ago
Parody or otherwise, the experience strongly mirrors my actual response to my first Windows NT installation in the late 1990s, shortly before first trying, then converting to, Linux. I'd used both Unix and Microsoft DOS / Windows systems for about 10 years already, so my biases were fairly balanced. What I'd been told was a real server OS disappointed me with its lack of a true admin account and access method (there are privilege states above "Administrator", there's no sudo), its paucity of shell commands, its lack of true terminal emulator support, its lack of multi-user capability, its lack of 'mount' semantics (some parallels), X11 display abilities, a badly crippled POSIX implementation, miserable documentation, remote access, etc., etc. After a few months of playing with a number of then-available Unix compatibility environments (MKS, UWIN, Cygwin), I finally gave Linux a shot. And ... it wasn't bad. Comparable to the SunOS workstation I was using at the time in tools. Eventually discovering Debian and what real package management could buy for you really sealed the deal. I've continued to have tangential exposure to Windows over the years, but it's always been a hugely frustrating, complicated, inconsistent mess to deal with.
abcd_f 14y ago
> There was also no option of resizing a partition to make room for Windows. Uhm... no? There's a re-partitioning step in W7 installer.

212 points by ameen 14y ago

Do newer versions of Windows include an ssh client yet? If they do, that will remove my major irritation with Windows on the rare occasions I have to use it.

dschep 14y ago
Not AFAIK (win7).
jaredmcateer 14y ago
No I don't believe they do. I just keep a copy of PuTTY on a USB stick for the situations I need to use a Windows PC
cleverjake 14y ago
The closest thing you get is subsystem for unix based applications (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771672.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771672.aspx) which is built into windows. There isn't an ssh client built in, but there are community compiled ones you can download http://www.suacommunity.com/tool_warehouse.aspx http://www.suacommunity.com/tool_warehouse.aspx
meaty 14y ago
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.h... And you don't have to install anything. I chuck it all in c:\windows and it's available in PATH then.
- lmm 14y ago
  >And you don't have to install anything. I chuck it all in c:\windows and it's available in PATH then. You think copying random files from the internet into system directories with no tracking, no upgrade management, no uninstall capability is a good thing?
  - meaty 14y ago
    It's not a particularly great thing, but it's "good enough" for your average single shot laptop. If it was a corporate machine, we'd package it and deploy it via GPO.
  - marshray 14y ago
    No, it's secure. All you have do is first download a random GPG exe from the internet and check the .sig using the PGP key supplied with PuTTY :-)
- pmarsh 14y ago
  Sure you know but you could just edit the PATH variable as well so you don't have to muddy up c:\windows.
- Joeboy 14y ago
  I know about putty of course, the problem is that I feel I have to ask people if it's ok if I install mysterious hacker software on their computer. Maybe I just need to get over that.
recursive 14y ago
Nope. I recently had to use ssh, and needed to download a client on Win 7.
madsushi 14y ago
Microsoft is actually moving in the opposite direction; they removed the telnet client from the default install.
- commandar 14y ago
  Pedantry: it's still included in the install, it's just disabled by default.

vincentkriek 14y ago

Somehow this aggravates me. I am an avid Linux user and I agree with a lot of points in the blog post but I don't think it is realistic to see Microsoft Windows as something that you have never used. Microsoft relies heavily on "common knowledge". Everyone knows that you need to install software by downloading it from the vendors website, everyone knows about drive letters. This might not be a good thing but they can get away with it because they are the leading OS manufacturer. Some good points the article makes are about the drivers, which need to be installed from CD and/or downloaded from the vendor's website. I think Linux does this a lot better by including a lot of the drivers into the kernel itself. But these points are easy to be ignored when you are irritated with the article.

meaty 14y ago
Actually 99% of drivers now come from Windows Update. I have only had to install one driver manually in the last 5 years and that was an old and obscure Tektronix laser printer. Drive letters are a hang back from DOS. Ironically at a very low level, NT doesn't have the concept of drive letters at all and does volume mounting as per *NIX systems. That's all down to Win32.
- ts- 14y ago
  What if you can't access Windows Update? The last time I installed Windows 7 on a laptop (a HP netbook to be exact), it supported neither of wireless and ethernet adapters. Luckily I had my phone to tether to (with Bluetooth); drivers for ethernet were not available in Windows Update, though.
  - meaty 14y ago
    USB stick, or don't buy anything HP again (their laptops are all universally shit).
- CurtHagenlocher 14y ago
  Drive letters actually go back quite a bit further. They originated on IBM big iron, and made it to MS-DOS via CP/M.

curlypaul924 14y ago

Is it "a linux user's perspective" or "many linux users' perspectives"? I can't tell due to the ambiguity.

brudgers 14y ago
It's both. He's hedging their bets.

meaty 14y ago

Surprisingly short on facts, even if it is a parody. Very slashdot circa 1999. Some notes: Windows is free to download and try. You don't have to enter a product key - just hit next and add it if you decide to buy it. You get it for 30 days. Here is the URL if you want to try it (windows 7 x64 professional): http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59186.iso http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59186.iso There is a live CD but it's only used for recovery. There isn't much of a market for trying Windows. Drivers. Windows update always handles these for me at least. I haven't had to bother with driver fiddling for years. Not only that, 99% of hardware I've worked with recently just works out of the box anyway. Package manager. Yes there is - there is just no pick and place repository like Debian. You can get packages from Windows Update though. The package manager is called Windows Installer and the packages are MSI packages. Everyone installs K Lite Codec Pack and media player classic these days (or VLC) almost as a first item to install. Same as you install win32-codecs on Linux. Maildir import. You stick an IMAP server on your Linux box and copy all the shit to your PST.

criley 14y ago
New Windows install: use www.ninite.com to get a 1-click installer for most popular programs and codecs. I agree with your analysis though: there is a difference between parody and stupid, and this hits the latter. I've been building Win7 PC's for years and I haven't loaded to messed up graphics and no networking since before the friends and family beta. That was always a hallmark of WinXP, not 7. The only thing I can think of is that he installed Win7 on 10 year old hardware and the drivers for such an antiquated setup weren't even included in the default set. It's also possible that he grabbed a really old copy of Win7 with no service packs or updates baked in, which includes tons of driver updates. However, and I run Ubuntu, Mint and Win7 on my machine, I can say that both found all of my drivers immediately and worked, although the Windows drivers are newer, more stable and more fully featured (I'm looking at you ATI).
- meaty 14y ago
  I prefer to do it by hand. Ninite isn't always up to date so you end up with a crapfest of auto updaters running instantly.

norswap 14y ago

Now do the reverse perspective (actually, it already exists). Not sure it will look much rosier.

foxbunny 14y ago
The reverse perspective is the basis of the parody. There is a link the yellow box towards the beginning of the post.

camus 14y ago

well , Windows can be good , i use it everyday , the only problem is that is not a POSIX env which sucks when one is a developer using a lot of open-source stuffs(hello VM). Window can be proprietary , that's not an issues MacOSX is , but all that DOS stuff is just stupid in 2013 and makes it hard to use some neat Linux dev tools.

hydrology 14y ago

Lucky enough for the guy who wrote this. He didn't try it long enough to know that there's this thing on Windows OS called "Virus/Worm/Trojan" that eats up everything on his PC. ROFL.

aw3c2 14y ago
I dread the time when Linux is popular enough for malware. it will be a massacre.
- voidlogic 14y ago
  People often say this, there are a lot of complicated technical reasons this is not true, leaving those aside, here are two very simple ones: 1. You download virusBin in Linux, you cannot run it- it does not have execute permission by default. 2. OK so either graphically or at the terminal (chmod u+x) you make virusBin executable.... (I'm not sure why you did this...) If you run it, all of its access outside of /home/$USER is read-only, the system and other users are safe, maybe your data is not. So if you really want to mess up your machine 1. Download virusBin 2. Give virus Bin execute permission 3. Assuming you are the systems admin, you can now run it as root... sudo ./virusBin.. To get a user to do all that it is going to take a LOT of social engineering.
  - TheAnimus 14y ago
    1) Ever since XP SP2, anything that has been downloaded does not have execute flags. The downside is the user is prompted in a manner that allows them to override this. The question is, how did the executable get there in the first place? Most of the explots that really hit windows are bugs in browsers / addins. A lot are also spread via 'naughty things', to view this really degrading porn of some celebrety you must first do this survey and execute this code. Or even bundled in with pirate versions, over a few beers a buddy who works for a small design software firm was laughing at how many people had become infected by a virus which was spread by just one torrent of their product (not by him!). Or like 419 scam emails, really obvious things, that weed out the people with an ounce of sense to leave only those dumb enough to run it. People like my Dad, who typed in the admin password because he was running as regular user :( Then threw a hissy fit when I suggest he not know the admin password in future. Sure administrator as default is dumb, really dumb. But most of these attack vectors would still be open on linux, in fact we've seen some for the bsd based OSX last year.

rjknight 14y ago

This submission really should have kept the original title of the post.

mamby 14y ago

Linux ad! use what you want, and let us (the rest of the world) use what we want ... Windows sucks blah blah blah

hhudolet 14y ago

Stupid blog post. Everybody can write "OS sucks" article about OS in which they dont work & dont know how to use it.

BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
This post is a parody; The author explains this in a brightly-colored box on the page that's hard to miss. Perhaps your beef is with the article being parodied?

sauravc 14y ago

I'm shocked by the author's ignorance. He's kind of an idiot. Simply because he's been living under a rock and lacks common knowledge about how 90% of the world's personal computers run. Pick any OS and if you've never used it before you'll run into quite a bit of cognitive dissonance when trying it out for the first time. Nothing new here. Just a dummy who's trying to acted shocked by an OS everyone and their grandma has used for years.

AimHere 14y ago
>Pick any OS and if you've never used it before you'll run into quite a bit of cognitive dissonance when trying it out for the first time. That's the author's point. He's parodying the myriad 'I tried Linux, and it sucks' blogs that have been around since forever ago. Since he knew that large sections of the internet have trouble with subtlety and sarcasm, and wouldn't get that without him saying so explicitly in the text, he said so explicitly in the text. Which would have helped if there weren't also large sections of the internet that are prone to commenting before reading the text.
- WayneDB 14y ago
  Yeah, but Linux sucks on the desktop for reasons that are completely different than the types of reasons that are being enumerated here for Windows. For instance: Fragmentation. Relatively low quality desktop software. Unavailability of certain types of software. Lack of certain features altogether like file "created date" for files, on most distributions.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
webreac 14y ago
I think you have completely missed the point of the article. It is a parody of the behaviour of microsoft users. As a linux user (I have left microsoft because of Vista), I can ensure you that windows Vista, 7 and 8 are very weird.
14y ago

shmerl 14y ago

The fact that Windows can't read most common filesystems is indeed a sheer idiocy, most probably caused by Microsoft's arrogance and assumption that anything else doesn't worth attention since they'll dominate the world forever.

Argote 14y ago
Not really, the thing is that implementations for accessing said file systems are under a GPL license. In order to integrate them to Windows, they'd have to re-implement from scratch which could lead to a ton of bugs and then they'd have to officially support all of those file systems. Definitely not worth it from MSFTs perspective.
- shmerl 14y ago
  They could implement it for the sake of interoperability. Surely it doesn't worth it from MS perspective since they didn't do it. But the reason is not because they don't have resources or it's some extremely hard problem to tackle. The reason is that they don't care about interoperability until forced. That's their whole approach.
  - marshray 14y ago
    Seriously, how big of a use case do you think it is that someone has a drive formatted with some FreeBSD filesystem which they want use in Windows? How hard is it to just copy the data over a network or mount the image in a VM running its native OS? Note that support for the .iso filesystem was recently added.
    - foxbunny 14y ago
      Copy 2TB JSF partition over network sounds like something I wouldn't want to do... An easier solution is to just get a Live Linux distro, and another 2TB NTFS partition, and copy over the data... if you have another 2TB drive.
      - 14y ago

armored_mammal 14y ago

I don't consider myself a windows hater per se, but his 'parody' really rings true to my experience, though the absolute limit for me was having to install a special piece of software so that I could scroll the areas underneath the mouse without clicking into them.

marcloney 14y ago

As a Windows to Linux convert for the past 5 years I actually enjoyed this parody due to some of the points he brought up that make me facepalm every time I use Windows. I don't know how many times I've cursed Microsoft over not recognising alternative file systems, then to realise I can't even get straight back into Linux because my boot loaders been replaced!

jonascopenhagen 14y ago

Half the article is about Windows installation problems. Thing is, though, most Windows users don't install Windows - it's already there on the computer they bought.

foxbunny 14y ago
You said it yourself: "most Windows users".

Shish2k 14y ago

> Using an ethernet cable to get internet to download wifi drivers Lucky him -- I was installing some new PCs just yesterday, and windows didn't even have ethernet drivers for them; digging around for the driver CD is a pain :-/ Then when I eventually did get online, I found that the company that made my scanner don't support 64-bit versions of windows at all :-| (All works fine out of the box with latest ubuntu) Also, what's the windows equivalent of "tar czvf /media/usb/home.tgz ~/" transport USB stick "tar xzvf /media/usb/home.tgz"? Setting up custom profiles for several users on several PCs was hours of pain, and they somehow came out differently each time x_x (As you can tell, I'm not a windows sysadmin, and don't have access to a copy of Windows Server...)

qwerta 14y ago

There is joke that best Win32 implementation is Wine on Ubuntu :-)

reptile83 14y ago

Truth: http://jonas.lophus.org/2013/1/on-the-state-of-linux-on-the-desktop.html http://jonas.lophus.org/2013/1/on-the-state-of-linux-on-the-...

EricButler 14y ago

It actually is possible to "mount" drives to a folder in unix fashion. http://www.computingverticals.com/136/map-usb-drive-to-desired-folder-in-windows-xp/ http://www.computingverticals.com/136/map-usb-drive-to-desir...

foxbunny 14y ago
4) You need to Specify the complete path to the desired folder (it must be empty) On Linux, you just specify it as a mount point at install time, and it gets populated (or it uses its existing content if you don't elect for format it). Technically, you could do it after install by copying the existing files over to the new drive, and then changing the mount options. So, out of curiosity, how would you do that on Windows for folders like C:\Users?

bobsy 14y ago

This is just a parody but seriously. Windows 8 desktop has 3 major problems. (4 if you include the branding of Metro or whatever it is called.) 1) Desktop should have Metro app's but not in their current implementation. Instead they should be opened on the desktop like any other program. This would allow multi-tasking, use of app's between various devices and it would greatly simplify the dual application environment problem you have now. It would also allow the Windows key to always toggle the start menu and the desktop. Currently the Windows Key toggles last program or menu which is pretty confusing. 2) Power options... a desktop computer should have a default state of off. Not locked. In the metro menu, where you sign out there should be options to both put the computer into stand by and shut down. Using the lock option signs you out and doesn't put the computer into stand by. Using stand by does what it says it does but mysteriously doesn't sign you out... very strange. Shutting down the computer requires too many steps. (windows 7 is windows key right arrow enter) A locked work station can be shut down by what is essentially an unauthenticated user. For some reason the default metro mail app frequently wakes the computer from standby making it unusable. Stuff like this should be fixed. 3) Dual screen is painful. The right settings menu is on the far edge of your second screen. The start menu seems to appear on a random monitor. Both screen's have app launch icons on the desktop yet if you click an icon on the second screen it opens up where-ever the app was last opened. This means often you launch an application on screen 2 and it appears in screen 1. Its weird. In its current state you never know where you should be looking when you perform actions. You then have minor stuff. If IE is your default browser the IE launcher will fire the metro version of IE. If you have different default browser the same icon fires IE on your desktop... its strange. Some programs are just unfindable on the start menu... I can see no reason for it. Sometimes they just don't exist which is pretty weird. Moving to the top right to get the settings panel often doesn't fire properly. Can sometimes start appearing when you are closing a program.. I look forward to Windows9. I feel all of the problems of Windows8 are solvable and the next version is bound to solve a bunch of these problems. If you don't have Windows 8 don't get it. Stick with 7 which is a far more together system. ------------- In contrast I installed Ubuntu again on Saturday and everything is much smoother. The Amazon results when searching for files is weird but things are far more intuitive and together than Windows 8.

archangel_one 14y ago

drivebyacct2 14y ago

Wow. Did anyone read the article that this is parodying? Everyone is rushing to be a Windows white-knight but this article is just mind-blowingly stupid. I'm having a hard time even believing it was written in good faith: http://jonas.lophus.org/2013/1/on-the-state-of-linux-on-the-desktop.html http://jonas.lophus.org/2013/1/on-the-state-of-linux-on-the-... (This is no excuse for Evolution, but honestly, who uses Evolution? I wouldn't blame all of Windows for <insert crappy Windows app>).

ivix 14y ago

Snore.

Finster 14y ago

Really. We're doing this. It's now 2013 and we're really gonna do this. We're going to have a Linux vs. Windows flame war right here, right now? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE4fz8cwL9c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE4fz8cwL9c It's OVER

shareme 14y ago

He forgot the real fun part make your own visual shell skins..come on folks some imagination please! Wait you guys don't customize your visual shells?

JimmaDaRustla 14y ago

Windows isn't Linux and Linux isn't Windows. Like another commenter said, Windows users don't typically hold Linux users in contempt, which makes this parody rather ironic. What is more ironic is that they play up features of Linux like they're great (Live CD), or berate Windows for driver issues. Linux is infamous for lack of driver support. My most recent experience: Attempting to install Ubuntu variant on my 3 year old Dell Studio laptop. I must boot onto the Live CD first to run the installer, but the Live CD freezes while loading because, I'm sure you guessed it, it doesn't have the proper drivers. Still running Windows, money well spent I guess.

dredmorbius 14y ago

Parody or otherwise, the experience strongly mirrors my actual response to my first Windows NT installation in the late 1990s, shortly before first trying, then converting to, Linux. I'd used both Unix and Microsoft DOS / Windows systems for about 10 years already, so my biases were fairly balanced. What I'd been told was a real server OS disappointed me with its lack of a true admin account and access method (there are privilege states above "Administrator", there's no sudo), its paucity of shell commands, its lack of true terminal emulator support, its lack of multi-user capability, its lack of 'mount' semantics (some parallels), X11 display abilities, a badly crippled POSIX implementation, miserable documentation, remote access, etc., etc. After a few months of playing with a number of then-available Unix compatibility environments (MKS, UWIN, Cygwin), I finally gave Linux a shot. And ... it wasn't bad. Comparable to the SunOS workstation I was using at the time in tools. Eventually discovering Debian and what real package management could buy for you really sealed the deal. I've continued to have tangential exposure to Windows over the years, but it's always been a hugely frustrating, complicated, inconsistent mess to deal with.

abcd_f 14y ago

> There was also no option of resizing a partition to make room for Windows. Uhm... no? There's a re-partitioning step in W7 installer.