__/ [ Kelsey Bjarnason ] on Wednesday 15 March 2006 15:19 \__
> Just for all you Windows weenies...
>
> This machine here is running Ubuntu Breezy. Nice little distro, but lacks
> some of the sexy new features of KUbuntu's later offerings, such as, oh,
> flight 5.
>
> So I added some repositories, did and apt-get update, now I'm doing a
> system-wide upgrade.
>
> This happens to include some 1437 packages. Among these are the entire
> office suite, the email app, the media player, development tools, news
> reader, IM client for MSN and Yahoo, among others, plus graphics editors,
> fax apps, PDF readers, web and database servers, and on and on and on.
>
> Now, what was involved? Let's see.
>
> 1) Add new repositories to the sources.list - a simple text copy-and-paste.
> 2) Run apt-get update
> 3) Fire up Synaptic
> 4) Select "Mark all Upgrades"
> 5) Examine results - broken down into remove, upgrade and install
> 6) Click "apply"
> 7) Click the next button - "Install", I think it was
> 8) Wait a while
> 9) Restart X so I'm using the new version of KDE, et al
>
> Now, just for our edification... how do you upgrade Windows, including
> everything from MS Office to Visual Studio, plus mIRC, MSN Messenger,
> Yahoo Messenger, web and database servers, PDF viewer (Adobe?), WMP, your
> news client - say Gravity or 40Tude Dialog, and, well, every installed
> application on the system... with *anything* remotely approaching the ease
> of this?
>
> 'Course, I could have, should I have wanted, also added the repositories
> and done the package list update through the GUI; it's simply more
> efficient not to.
>
> So what's Windows got that can compare with this? 1437 packages,
> encompassing every aspect of the entire computing experience, from
> multiple vendors, all in one fell swoop?
>
> Last I checked, "MS Update" still didn't even update all MS's own products
> - let alone anything else you've got installed.
>
> Pretty pathetic. Make you jump through all those hoops, all those
> reboots, downloading dozens or hundreds of install packages, installing
> them one by one, manually, wading through a half dozen pointless "wizard"
> pages on virtually every one, a process which could, all told, easily take
> an entire day - to do what I can do in a couple of minutes of setup and
> about 90 minutes' worth of downloading - and still be able to continue on
> doing what I'm doing on the machine until the very last step.
>
> But Windows is easier, right?
Windows goes by the assumption (as well as idealogy) that it should be a
stripped-down, lightweight O/S that updates its narrow trunk every now and
then. Thus, it assumes that IE, OE, notepad, paint and the like are all
the components one ever wishes to have updated. You cannot describe this
as surprising because more prominent revenue streams (Office, premium edi-
tions, development tools, etc.) are a form of 'enhancement' of the O/S,
which in some cases was intentionally made crippled (Starter Edition, no
spellchecker and so forth).
The same arguments apply to setting up a Windows box. How long does it
truly take to have Windows installed and drivers collected from all across
the Web (or CD/floppy)? Then comes the issue of software, which rather
sadly is not guaranteed to remain free of interferences (e.g. McAfee).
Ubuntu, amongall distributions, are doing all the tests /a priori/. Apart
from the functionally-required software comes some mandatory software,
which is needed to give the O/S its 'shields up'.
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz, Ph.D. Candidate in Medical Biophysics
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
3:45pm up 7 days 8:22, 7 users, load average: 0.75, 0.95, 0.60
http://iuron.com - help build a non-profit search engine
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