Ostensibly. Ubuntu isn't Linux per se, but an operating system based on Linux in combination with other software. Android is also based on Linux.
Unix like operating systems have been the backbone of the internet community since its inception when Bill Gates was still at school. Competing with windows look and feel for market share has never been the priority in a general sense, yet more and more it just happens.
Unix like operating systems have been the backbone of the internet community since its inception when Bill Gates was still at school. Competing with windows look and feel for market share has never been the priority in a general sense, yet more and more it just happens.
Not wanting to judge a book by its cover.
Sounds like you would prefer to say gnu/linux? Me, not so much but I have a little knowledge which is a dangerous thing.
I think I get it. In my younger, more adventurous days i played around with gentoo. Wow was that a way to learn linux.
I think I get the difference, but could be really off-base, of a linux kernel, the gnu tool chain, window manager, file system, package manager. But again a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Android - is it based on the linux kernel but it doesn't use gnu? Do I have that correct?
Indeed. That's not to say that I haven't hard horrible experiences with Windows in the old days. But both Windows and I were younger and greener back in then. All that frustration and extra work paid off. Windows taught me how to troubleshoot an OS like nothing else (kinda had to). But this is 2022, we're all more mature and settled now.
When I had to do a fresh XP install on that old laptop, I realized how much XP sucks. No nostalgia there for me. I still feel nostalgia for Windows 2000, but I'm not going to spoil that by actually trying to use it again. 😛
When I had to do a fresh XP install on that old laptop, I realized how much XP sucks. No nostalgia there for me. I still feel nostalgia for Windows 2000, but I'm not going to spoil that by actually trying to use it again. 😛
Yes, literally hundreds of thousands of viruses and worms and trojans are available for Windows, and friendly hackers from obscure countries will automatically install them for you, too. Easy-peasy. 😀
The timing is fortuitous; this very morning, well over 1000 Microsoft Teams Internet phones (made by a MS partner company Yealink) at my workplace have shut down, because Microsoft pushed a software update. Phones located in an office with one user can be brought back to life by that sole user logging back into them, but over 800 shared-use phones in offices, labs, and classrooms have to be visited, one by one, by our small team of IT personnel, so that they can manually log back in to reactivate each phone.
These Microsoft phones were installed to replace older VOIP phones that just worked (TM). The replacement MS phones never worked properly from day one; not only is voice quality very poor, but while I could call off-campus numbers, outside vendors and students frequently reported being unable to call in to me.
If only this was a rare screw-up on Microsoft's part. At my last teaching job I was forced to use a Windows laptop; more than once it started an automatic software update just as I started a lecture, with 100+ students waiting in a gigantic lecture hall. This in spite of checking all the boxes that told Windows to update only after 5 PM and before 7 AM. Microsoft, with typical arrogance, decided to force their updates whether or not I, the user, wanted them at that moment. Other faculty I spoke with reported having the same problem from time to time.
In 2018 Computer World magazine published an article titled "Why Linux is better than Windows or macOS for security" which makes for some interesting reading: https://www.computerworld.com/artic...etter-than-windows-or-macos-for-security.html
A couple of recent posts on this thread discussed expensive sound cards which suddenly became unsupported on Windows. This problem is rare on Linux - if the hardware can still plug into your PC, chances are it still has free and fully functional drivers.
In fact, the last time I heard a ruckus about expensive sound cards that are no longer supported on Linux, the topic was FireWire audio interfaces; the FireWire hardware interface was short-lived, as USB2 and then USB3 usurped its place, and few consumer PCs made after 2010 have had FireWire ports. The Linux driver guys finally gave up trying to support FireWire interface and audio cards they could no longer plug into their development workstations.
Incidentally, it was Apple Corp's attempt to price-gouge the rest of the computer industry with an extortionate FireWire licensing fee that killed FireWire, and caused the rest of the industry to instead choose to improve the feeble USB 1 standard to the point where it became a tolerable replacement for FireWire. That story is well told in this Ars Technica article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/201...the-standard-everyone-couldnt-quite-agree-on/
Yes, there is lots of software available for Windows. Along with that you get poor security, an invasive End User Licensing Agreement, massive online tracking and spying, dubious software updates forced down your throat whether or not you want them, and your choice of 'Web browser constantly reset as MS keeps trying to force you to use MS Edge. You also get flaky USB connections, and premature hardware obsolescence as each new version of Windows slows your hardware down further.
IMO living with Windows is much like being married to Donald Trump. You get some pretty things and some comforts and conveniences, but in return, you get to live under the thumb of a domineering tyrant, and sooner or later you will get kicked in the teeth and left in a ditch. Just ask Ivana. (This link contains disturbing information regarding sexual abuse: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/24/documenting-trumps-abuse-of-women )
It's amazing to me, the direction in which mainstream commercial consumer operating systems have gone during the last half-decade or so. Virtually all of them are now designed to spy on and track the user as much as possible - doesn't matter if you're talking about Windows, MacOS, or Android. I know little about Chromium OS, but its centrepiece, Google Chrome (browser) is certainly spyware ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...pro-max-ipad-and-macbook-pro/?sh=42cb48b64d08 )
Thank goodness for Linux and the BSDs. They are now the only operating systems whose primary function is to serve the user, rather than invasively spy on them as much as possible.
-Gnobuddy
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Speaking of nostalgia, I know some of you use audioasylum. If you look at their home page, way at the bottom
This site optimised for 640x480 using ALynx, a ASCII-Web-Browser for Amiga,
(AmiTCP | MLink | AS225), ported from Lynx version 2.4-FM.
This site optimised for 640x480 using ALynx, a ASCII-Web-Browser for Amiga,
(AmiTCP | MLink | AS225), ported from Lynx version 2.4-FM.
Maybe I live in a different world. I just retired from doing A/V for corporate presentations and theater. Hundreds of people in attendance. Yes, I've seen Windows try to update when it was absolutely the wrong moment. I've seen pop-ups when there shouldn't be - and all the other Windoze frustrations. However not on my show machines, at least not during a show. That's why we used specific show computers that were set up and imaged to run shows, and do nothing else. Any good A/V tech dreads the client who says "It's OK, I'll use my own laptop". Um, no. But they insist, and at least 60% of the time there are problems. After the presenter panic at least I get to shrug and say "See? That's why we use our computers." On large shows it is strictly our own hardware backstage.
Mac? Yes it's the default video playback device for videos at corporate shows and in the theater. How many times have I had a video crash when the CEO of a Fortune 500 company takes the stage? A few too many. That wasn't the OS, it was the software. However I never had audio playback fail on a Mac (even via Firewire) unless I screwed up. Want to try to use Linux on a show? No way, not for any kind of playback to the screen or to the PA. Sure, it might be great, but it it fails, you'll lose your job because you were the idiot using "some weird OS". Not fair, but that's show biz. And if the content is authored on Windows, you darn well better play it on Windows. Same goes for Mac. Been there, have the scars.
FWIW, in over 25 years of using Windows for shows and in print shops, I've never had a virus or malware completely take down a computer. Not Windows, not Apple, not even IRIX. Never lost any data to a virus either. Sure, the computers get them from time to time, but we just clean them up or re-image them. There have been many hardware and software problems and failures in my career, a good measure of human error too, but the OS has been the least of my problems. Maybe that's because I live in a more self imposed isolated environment. Or maybe I lead a charmed life. Dunno.
Mac? Yes it's the default video playback device for videos at corporate shows and in the theater. How many times have I had a video crash when the CEO of a Fortune 500 company takes the stage? A few too many. That wasn't the OS, it was the software. However I never had audio playback fail on a Mac (even via Firewire) unless I screwed up. Want to try to use Linux on a show? No way, not for any kind of playback to the screen or to the PA. Sure, it might be great, but it it fails, you'll lose your job because you were the idiot using "some weird OS". Not fair, but that's show biz. And if the content is authored on Windows, you darn well better play it on Windows. Same goes for Mac. Been there, have the scars.
FWIW, in over 25 years of using Windows for shows and in print shops, I've never had a virus or malware completely take down a computer. Not Windows, not Apple, not even IRIX. Never lost any data to a virus either. Sure, the computers get them from time to time, but we just clean them up or re-image them. There have been many hardware and software problems and failures in my career, a good measure of human error too, but the OS has been the least of my problems. Maybe that's because I live in a more self imposed isolated environment. Or maybe I lead a charmed life. Dunno.
Here's one of the many Windows BSODs I've seen in the wild. It can't even run a mall directory properly 😛
I have photos of crashes on a train station departure board, a fast food menu, a fast food cash register... I even have a pic of a crashed bank machine somewhere. That one surprised me - I figured a bank machine would run *nix.
To be fair to Windows, if you replace explorer it doesn't crash as often. I used to use Directory Opus and Aston Shell instead and it was usable. After years of tech support for people, organizations, and governments running Windows, I'd never run it again. If Linux didn't exist, I'd build a Hackintosh.
I have photos of crashes on a train station departure board, a fast food menu, a fast food cash register... I even have a pic of a crashed bank machine somewhere. That one surprised me - I figured a bank machine would run *nix.
To be fair to Windows, if you replace explorer it doesn't crash as often. I used to use Directory Opus and Aston Shell instead and it was usable. After years of tech support for people, organizations, and governments running Windows, I'd never run it again. If Linux didn't exist, I'd build a Hackintosh.
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Interesting; financial computers for financials, show computers for shows, audio computers for audio. Gaming computers for gaming - of course. What's next, printing computers for printers? 3D; I suppose so.
I once was interested in these software packages that would "remix" a windows install by removing all the malarky prior to or during install. Unsure if such a thing is even available these days, but there was a time.
I got a PC "late model" Pentium running Ubuntu... the box has lots of holes -took out all the PCI cards and front panel covers- and the fan in the PS barely needs to run. I connect to it via ssh, using Mobaterm and Putty. Works awesome.
I run Apache and a few other things. The machine is like almost 20 years old and still runs like a charm. (Watch it.... now it will croak..).
Every so often, when I remember, I check it and might update it. Normally I boot it from a USB stick.
For the main audio AD/DAC machine I still run a Dell Latitude laptop dual pentium with XP Pro. Running Latitude laptop i5 Win7 Pro for the HT. Running Latitude laptop i7 Win7 for my personal machine. I just upgraded my wife to a Dell Optiplex SFF with i5-10K and Win 10 Pro. I'm planning on moving to an Optiplex i7-11K with Win 10 Pro.
I found that the laptops use less power than the towers and are much quieter, good qualities in the main stereo and HT. Nowadays, though, I'm migrating to Android tablets for driving DACs over USB OTG... and the NAS are now stand alone WDC PR4100s. Also, I got some Raspberry 3 and 4.
The days when everything was a tower are long gone. And my power bill has dropped dramatically. Today it makes a lot more sense to buy the hardware specific for an application: Android is great for multimedia, Linux for servers, Windoze for user work (compatibility). Dedicated NASs for NASs. And so on.
Heck, my Samsung tablets and phone have a 512GB chip... so that's LOTS of Tidal downloads at high rates.
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I realized yesterday that I actually still have a Core 2 Duo machine running - my PFSense router. By my calculations, that Optiplex 755 has between 100,000 and 125,000 hours on it.
I know I should replace it, but inevitably it gets pushed down to priority #150 on my list of things to deal with, so it's probably destined to run until it decides to ruin my day.
I know I should replace it, but inevitably it gets pushed down to priority #150 on my list of things to deal with, so it's probably destined to run until it decides to ruin my day.
Here's an analogy, courtesy of a friend with a more extensive dating history than myself:
Windows is the really, really clingy girlfriend who texts you every 15 minutes and will not leave you alone in time-critical situations, and about once a month you get a call from someone asking you to pick her up because she's drunk out of her mind. You will get this call at the worst possible time, like when you have 1 hour to fix a piece of equipment "or else".
Unsupported Windows: She has an addiction and is in and out of rehab every other week. She's nice, in any given month there is a 30% chance she'll drain your bank account and file a lawsuit against you.
MacOS looks like a supermodel but has a controlling death grip over every aspect of your life. She has to approve everything you do, and her rules don't make sense. You be a part of amateur sports, as long as their are no women on the team. You can travel for work conferences, but she won't let you attend your great-aunt's funeral because she doesn't trust your cousin. But she's safe and trustworthy...
Linux is the girlfriend who is absolutely beautiful, unbelievably sweet and is generally everything you could ever want in someone... 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time she's an alcoholic screaming nightmare.
Linux on the Raspberry Pi is the same as normal Linux, except she is physically incapable of lifting anything that weighs more than five pounds and has nine cats.
ChromeOS: She's reliable, trustworthy and dumbest person you've ever met.
FreeBSD is the girl who is wickedly smart, knows Quantum Mechanics like the back of her hand, but is 100% incapable of normal things like ordering a pizza and needs hand-holding while doing her taxes or buying a plane ticket.
So pick your poison, because all of them will make you scream at least occasionally.
Windows is the really, really clingy girlfriend who texts you every 15 minutes and will not leave you alone in time-critical situations, and about once a month you get a call from someone asking you to pick her up because she's drunk out of her mind. You will get this call at the worst possible time, like when you have 1 hour to fix a piece of equipment "or else".
Unsupported Windows: She has an addiction and is in and out of rehab every other week. She's nice, in any given month there is a 30% chance she'll drain your bank account and file a lawsuit against you.
MacOS looks like a supermodel but has a controlling death grip over every aspect of your life. She has to approve everything you do, and her rules don't make sense. You be a part of amateur sports, as long as their are no women on the team. You can travel for work conferences, but she won't let you attend your great-aunt's funeral because she doesn't trust your cousin. But she's safe and trustworthy...
Linux is the girlfriend who is absolutely beautiful, unbelievably sweet and is generally everything you could ever want in someone... 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time she's an alcoholic screaming nightmare.
Linux on the Raspberry Pi is the same as normal Linux, except she is physically incapable of lifting anything that weighs more than five pounds and has nine cats.
ChromeOS: She's reliable, trustworthy and dumbest person you've ever met.
FreeBSD is the girl who is wickedly smart, knows Quantum Mechanics like the back of her hand, but is 100% incapable of normal things like ordering a pizza and needs hand-holding while doing her taxes or buying a plane ticket.
So pick your poison, because all of them will make you scream at least occasionally.
That's XP. We know it was crash-happy.
I'd like to see examples of W10 (not that there aren't any) out in your own computers.
I've been using Windows since 1997 (W3.1) and saw a few malware infections around the 2000-2001 mark till I figured out what to not click on.
Since then, nary a single infection.
As for updates, disabling them is really, really simple. Most corporate sysadmins will vet updates in a sandbox and then push them to the userbase only when deemed safe. Any other sysadmin is sleeping on the job, incompetent or both.
You have to disable Windows update in 'Services', for it to properly stop updates and reboots.
Not true. The E-mu cards are not properly supported on Linux and the control application needed to access the DSP is not branched out because the source code isn't public.
Would you care to point out specific examples, or is this something you're generalising? Telemetry is easy to turn off, I never get a browser reset (I use Firefox mainly), and Chrome has a thousand times more telemetry than Windows anyway. There's a bunch of software I'm comfortable not updating. Security issues with apps is user responsibility. You do have the choice of not installing the software, or switching to Linux for that task. Every single device that can run Windows, can run Linux - so you have an option to dual boot, or if you like, switch totally to Linux. It's your choice.
There's no issues with Windows USB connections unless your hardware is faulty or underpowered - many motherboards are built to bare minimum spec and will be flaky regardless of what you run on it, just that issues will surface earlier. and I admit Linux does some things better, and so do the Apple devices (I love my iPad Air, for example). But if you know how to use it, Windows is as good and flexible as anything else, and the only real complaint I have about it is how bloated it is, and needlessly so - leading to, among other things, very high DPC latency and inability to get good performance on low power devices.
Apart from that one issue, it works just great for me when I use it. I generally prefer to convert light laptops to Linux myself, because things run cooler and much quicker, also Daphile on X86 NUCs, and four of my 5 servers run Linux in different forms. So this is not a biased point of view from a Windows fanboy. I use Android as well on my phone and a Lenovo tablet. Everything ends up with its positives and negatives, just like anything else in life.
QFT.
Yeah - that's why I lock out auto updates on W10. The way they run updates is awful. Not going to touch w11 with a bargepole.
W10 - some of the ISOs anyway - is a good os under the BS. I use a powershell script to disable all the "telemetry", remove all the BS etc. Takes a few moments and then you have a nice, friendly, stable OS....
MacOS used to be ok, but later versions are very buggy, I see a lot of crashes and weird stuff of recent times.
I only use linux as server os, for which it's unbeatable. None of the rather tacked on GUIs seem very good to me.
All the common OS have their plus and minus points, there's none that are perfect for all situations.
That can still be done. See the post above. But I must say that a clean install from a Windows image supplied by MS is far cleaner than anything that comes from a computer supplier. They have always junked up their installs. Start with a 100% MS image, then do a few little clean ups here and there.
Actually, the vast majority of Android is open source... Only some binary blobs that are vendor specific...
https://source.android.com/
Perhaps that's open to interpretation - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.html
Many bank terminals and POS systems were running a version of XP or W7 stripped down and built for this purpose. Most have been upgraded to some IOT version of W10, usually with a hardware upgrade. These have always been relatively secure.
I recently decommissioned a working XP machine that once working properly, never screwed up or crashed. It had no internet access and after a while quit looking for updates.
I gave my oldest grandkid my overclocked Core 2 duo e6600 machine that still ran Vista Ultimate. That machine was the reason I sold the Emu 1820 box since there were no Vista drivers for it and XP drivers would not work. After waking the PC up from a multi year sleep, I ran "Windows Update" to which It responded "Windows could not search for new updates." I played with it for a while, then gave it to him. I know it's not running Vista any longer, but I don't know what it has now, maybe W7. It still scored reasonably well on Passmark's Your System vs the world with Vista. Not bad for a PC that's over 15 years old.
I still have two working W7 machines that don't screw up. One is an old Core i5-2400 machine, untouched since I built it, the other is a recently built Core i5-4670K machine made with reclaimed parts. The 2400 machine was built when I was in Florida to use a Silicon Dust OTA TV box as a DVR. The DVR function with a program guide was built into W7 and removed during W8. There is No built in DVR in W10. It worked fine for several years in Florida, and still works here without the program guide (killed by MS). It is not connected to the internet any longer since there is no program guide to retrieve. The 4670K machine was setup with W7 to run some really old M-Audio PCI hardware with XP drivers. I let it take all the available updates when I built it over a year ago, and it has not seen an ethernet cable since. So far, no issues.
And who had to remind me of that annoying paper clip with 9 lives. It could extract itself from the trash / recycle bin at will, often with a smirk and a rude comment.
I recently decommissioned a working XP machine that once working properly, never screwed up or crashed. It had no internet access and after a while quit looking for updates.
I gave my oldest grandkid my overclocked Core 2 duo e6600 machine that still ran Vista Ultimate. That machine was the reason I sold the Emu 1820 box since there were no Vista drivers for it and XP drivers would not work. After waking the PC up from a multi year sleep, I ran "Windows Update" to which It responded "Windows could not search for new updates." I played with it for a while, then gave it to him. I know it's not running Vista any longer, but I don't know what it has now, maybe W7. It still scored reasonably well on Passmark's Your System vs the world with Vista. Not bad for a PC that's over 15 years old.
I still have two working W7 machines that don't screw up. One is an old Core i5-2400 machine, untouched since I built it, the other is a recently built Core i5-4670K machine made with reclaimed parts. The 2400 machine was built when I was in Florida to use a Silicon Dust OTA TV box as a DVR. The DVR function with a program guide was built into W7 and removed during W8. There is No built in DVR in W10. It worked fine for several years in Florida, and still works here without the program guide (killed by MS). It is not connected to the internet any longer since there is no program guide to retrieve. The 4670K machine was setup with W7 to run some really old M-Audio PCI hardware with XP drivers. I let it take all the available updates when I built it over a year ago, and it has not seen an ethernet cable since. So far, no issues.
And who had to remind me of that annoying paper clip with 9 lives. It could extract itself from the trash / recycle bin at will, often with a smirk and a rude comment.
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I remember walking through Fry's Electronics in Southern California, and seeing BSODs on about half the GPS units on display. Those were the ones running Windows Embedded Compact, aptly known as WINCE. 😀
Microsoft's own Hotmail email servers ran on FreeBSD for many years, because they could not get their own operating system stable enough! This was a standing joke in the FreeBSD community, and a thorn in Microsoft's side. After a number of years of being mocked on the Internet, MS finally migrated their Hotmail servers to some flavour of Windows. (I bet the server admin's workload shot up several hundred percent after that.)
There is now one Windows PC in our house - one of two identical cast-off PCs I found by the trash dumpster, and took home to see if they would run. On inspection, both had a nice 2009 Intel motherboard, a 2009 Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, but one had no hard drive.
Both booted up and all the hardware seemed to work, so I plopped in an older SSD I wasn't using any longer, pulled out my ancient officially blessed Microsoft Windows XP SP3 install CD, tracked down WinXP drivers for the old Intel motherboard, and got it running.
This PC's sole purpose is to run an old Windows-only radio control flight simulator programme, which I use when I have the odd fit of nostalgia for a long-abandoned hobby. Needless to say, this Win XP computer has no internet connection of any sort, and never will.
I tried Linux on this hardware before putting WinXP on it. The Linux install took one-tenth as long as the WinXP install. Xubuntu Linux (20.04.3) is fast and nimble on this 13 year old hardware.
Win10 won't even run on it at all. Planned obsolescence at work again.
More bad decisions made by pointy-haired bosses rather than by software engineers who know what's what.
There have been a number of Windows viruses that target bank cash machines (Automatic Teller Machines or ATMs in the USA). Some make the ATM spew cash on command!
I remember having to go into my branch of Wells Fargo and Bank of America for a week or so, because they had shut down all their ATMs until they could be purged of the virus and patched.
Here are some related news stories about Windows ATM viruses and worms:
1) https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/tyupkin-malware-atm-security-malware
2) https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x5...-cash-out-of-atms-has-spread-across-the-world
3) https://www.dnaindia.com/world/repo...tm-virus-that-steals-money-from-banks-1242896
Even more horrifying than putting Windows in charge of ATMs, is putting Windows in charge of automatically firing surface-to-surface missiles on warships. Yes, Windows for Warships is a thing:
4) https://www.theregister.com/2007/02/26/windows_boxes_at_sea/
5) https://www.theregister.com/2004/09/06/ams_goes_windows_for_warships/
That was before 2010, but the fun (!!) continues:
6) USS Yorktown crippled by Windows NT problems: https://gcn.com/1998/07/software-glitches-leave-navy-smart-ship-dead-in-the-water/290995/
7)Another story on how Windows NT crippled the USS Yorktown: https://www.wired.com/1998/07/sunk-by-windows-nt/
8) UK was still running Win XP on aircraft carriers in 2017: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/bad-combination-lethal-aircraft-carriers-and-windows-xp-57027
Been there, done that, went back to Linux because it works much better and has far more hardware support.
At the time, my wife was using Macs at work, so we bought her a Mac for home; even with her educational discount it cost five times as much as the PC hardware I ran Linux on, and ran five times slower. This was just before Apple switched to Intel chips, making the slow and overpriced hardware we'd just bought obsolete and unsupported.
After that debacle, I put together a Hackintosh for her, which she used for several years. Then, when she changed jobs, she started using my Linux box at home, and soon found she liked it better than MacOS. Now we have his-n-her Linux desktop PCs, his-n-her Linux laptops, and Linux doing all the other household computing chores (Netflix box, Raspberry Pi video conferencing box, Raspberry Pi file server, Raspberry Pi bedroom PC.)
Incidentally, just one day ago, Apple's overpriced new hardware has been found to have a massive security vulnerability: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/a...hit-with-world-first-augury-dmp-vulnerability
-Gnobuddy
Reading that one, the biggest fault seemed to be a divide by zero error causing a crash... That's sounds more like more bad programming than bad os... (not that I'd use obsolete NT for anything...)