No--I was in over my head with Arch. (Went crying back to Ubuntu after breaking my system a few times. My PC is also my livelihood.)
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5 Reasons You Should Switch From Windows To Linux Right Now
- Thread starter phands
- Start date
No--I was in over my head with Arch. (Went crying back to Ubuntu after breaking my system a few times. My PC is also my livelihood.)
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
TV ads, I'll keep an eye out for it.
Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
There are several such systems. Probably what you are referring to is WOW computers for seniors. It runs a bastard Linux system that does not allow adding other software, to keep it safe. Crippled Linux.
lpetrich
Contributor
I have a confession to make: I am a Macoid. I'm not saying that I am an Apple fanboy, let alone a Steve Jobs fanboy. Apple gets a lot of criticism for offering limited options, and there is some truth to that -- Apple needs to offer CPU boxes in between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro. But Apple offers most of what most computer users are likely to need, or at least the ability to attach or install what they might want, and Apple is also very good at making long-lasting, low-maintenance systems.
MacOS X, now plain macOS, is essentially an update of NextStep, the OS of Steve Jobs's NeXT cube from 1990. That's what he came up with after being forced out of Apple in 1995. NeXT was never very successful. NeXT cubes and their successors did not sell very well, and stripping out the user-interface part and selling it as OpenStep was not very successful either.
In its earliest days, Apple came up with one-off systems: Apple I, Apple II, Apple III, Lisa (Apple IV?), and Macintosh (Apple V?). Of these, the Apple II and the Macintosh were Apple's only successes, and they were the only ones that Apple made successors for. The Apple II line ended in the early 1990's.
The original Macintosh Classic OS was rather limited, since it could do only 1-bit black-and-white, it was single-tasking, and its memory space was only 24-bit, with the remaining byte being used for various OS tasks. But over the years, Apple's engineers made MacOS Classic capable of doing color, first 8-bit indexed, and then 24-bit full color. They also made it do cooperative multitasking, even if not preemptive multitasking, and they made apps share the OS's single memory space by giving each app its own partition in it. They also made apps fully 32-bit with the help of a "32-bit clean" flag in each app's data files. In the mid 1990's, MacOS Classic was moved from the original Motorola 680x0 hardware to PowerPC hardware, complete with an emulator for M68K code -- one that would be run on much of the OS. But it worked remarkably well.
Apple tried to develop a success for MacOS Classic, starting with what was originally a kernel and file system. But this successor's designers kept adding features without ensuring that they were working properly, and "Copland" became an embarrassing flop. Another ex-Appleite, Jean-Louis Gassee, founded a company called Be, Inc., and came out with a NeXT-ish OS called the BeOS. It first run on hardware called the BeBox, and then on Macintosh PowerPC hardware. Be was upstaging Apple, offering what Apple had trouble delivering.
In 1996, Apple's engineers looked for alternatives. JLG demanded a huge sum for the BeOS -- he wanted to rub it in. SunOS/Solaris? Windows NT??? Then late that year, Apple and NeXT merged. Over the next year, Steve Jobs took over Apple and appointed his underlings to top spots, essentially doing a coup from within. When he came out with new Macintosh models, he refused to release their lower-level specs, thus creating a poison pill for Be. The Be people went to Intel-x86 PeeCee hardware, but they could not get good preload deals, and Be eventually went broke.
It took nearly five years for Apple's engineers to get NextStep updated to their satisfaction, but when it was, Apple released it as MacOS X 10.0 in 2001. Though Apple now calls it macOS (note the capitalization), it has little in common with MacOS Classic.
MacOS X, now plain macOS, is essentially an update of NextStep, the OS of Steve Jobs's NeXT cube from 1990. That's what he came up with after being forced out of Apple in 1995. NeXT was never very successful. NeXT cubes and their successors did not sell very well, and stripping out the user-interface part and selling it as OpenStep was not very successful either.
In its earliest days, Apple came up with one-off systems: Apple I, Apple II, Apple III, Lisa (Apple IV?), and Macintosh (Apple V?). Of these, the Apple II and the Macintosh were Apple's only successes, and they were the only ones that Apple made successors for. The Apple II line ended in the early 1990's.
The original Macintosh Classic OS was rather limited, since it could do only 1-bit black-and-white, it was single-tasking, and its memory space was only 24-bit, with the remaining byte being used for various OS tasks. But over the years, Apple's engineers made MacOS Classic capable of doing color, first 8-bit indexed, and then 24-bit full color. They also made it do cooperative multitasking, even if not preemptive multitasking, and they made apps share the OS's single memory space by giving each app its own partition in it. They also made apps fully 32-bit with the help of a "32-bit clean" flag in each app's data files. In the mid 1990's, MacOS Classic was moved from the original Motorola 680x0 hardware to PowerPC hardware, complete with an emulator for M68K code -- one that would be run on much of the OS. But it worked remarkably well.
Apple tried to develop a success for MacOS Classic, starting with what was originally a kernel and file system. But this successor's designers kept adding features without ensuring that they were working properly, and "Copland" became an embarrassing flop. Another ex-Appleite, Jean-Louis Gassee, founded a company called Be, Inc., and came out with a NeXT-ish OS called the BeOS. It first run on hardware called the BeBox, and then on Macintosh PowerPC hardware. Be was upstaging Apple, offering what Apple had trouble delivering.
In 1996, Apple's engineers looked for alternatives. JLG demanded a huge sum for the BeOS -- he wanted to rub it in. SunOS/Solaris? Windows NT??? Then late that year, Apple and NeXT merged. Over the next year, Steve Jobs took over Apple and appointed his underlings to top spots, essentially doing a coup from within. When he came out with new Macintosh models, he refused to release their lower-level specs, thus creating a poison pill for Be. The Be people went to Intel-x86 PeeCee hardware, but they could not get good preload deals, and Be eventually went broke.
It took nearly five years for Apple's engineers to get NextStep updated to their satisfaction, but when it was, Apple released it as MacOS X 10.0 in 2001. Though Apple now calls it macOS (note the capitalization), it has little in common with MacOS Classic.
Phil Scott
Member
Don't blame you. I wrote a few Arch definitions for personal use but hated the experience and generally don't like the philosophy behind most package managers.
But you must know the open source retort whenever you have a problem: why haven't you fixed it? If Arch has packages missing that you need, why haven't you contributed them?
This retort is a bit unfair for most people, but it highlights that open source is often a collaborative endeavor where user and developer are blurred, and where the user has neither a warranty nor a deserved sense of entitlement when things are missing.
This is not to call you entitled. It is to agree that there is a mismatch between the interests of the OP to say that linux is now ready for end users, and Arch folk who say you better muck in if you want a computer that works to your demands. I am with the Arch folk, and will tell end users to run for the hills rather than sink in our quagmires.
I joked earlier that I don't want a popular operating system, but I was only serious. I don't want my OS to be popular with end users, because I think there are still big open problems in this space that really interest me, and I want to be hacking on them. So I also want the average member in my user community to have a decent understanding of the distro's internals so we are more likely to be able to solve those problems and help each other when stuck. I want feature requests to come from users who understand the technical challenges if they can't immediately see the implementation path, and who are prepared to code. I'm also currently on a distro where I expect the overwhelming majority of users to have written package definitions, if not submitted them to master.
These are all irrelevant to you, no doubt. It is personal hobbyist interest, and I wouldn't encourage you to switch. I do wonder, though, to what extent my attitude is reflected historically in open source communities. The OP, phands, has done kernel hacking, for instance, which puts him in an elite demographic, and one that I am led to believe contains a lot of passionate volunteers.
Those are all good points. I made the mistake of mixing business with leisure. I thought I could handle the Arch user environment and enjoy the benefits of bleeding edge package builds, but it became a quagmire. Once I have time, I'd like to take a hobbyist's look at an OS (on a spare laptop, this time). Maybe Linux or maybe something else like Redox.
lpetrich
Contributor
Strictly speaking, Linux is a kernel. It handles memory spaces, process scheduling, interprocess communication, files, networking, handling device drivers, and other such low-level functions.
A kernel by itself is not very usable, so it needs additional software: software libraries and utility programs, including a user-interface shell. A package of such software is called a Linux distribution, and Linux users have created a large number of them. Windows and OSX are like Linux distributions rather than the Linux kernel, and Android is essentially a Linux distribution.
NeXTStep had a microkernel called Mach. A microkernel is a kernel that does only a few things: memory spaces, process scheduling, and interprocess communication. Everything else that, including files and networking, was done by other software, like NeXTStep's BSD layer. NeXTStep was a Unix flavor, as OSX is, but its GUI shell was designed to make it work in Macintosh-like fashion, without needing a command line for very much. Thus hiding its "Unixness" very well.
NeXTStep is the ancestor of OSX, and that in turn is the ancestor of iOS and what Apple calls tvOS and watchOS. Several NeXTisms survive in OSX:
A kernel by itself is not very usable, so it needs additional software: software libraries and utility programs, including a user-interface shell. A package of such software is called a Linux distribution, and Linux users have created a large number of them. Windows and OSX are like Linux distributions rather than the Linux kernel, and Android is essentially a Linux distribution.
NeXTStep had a microkernel called Mach. A microkernel is a kernel that does only a few things: memory spaces, process scheduling, and interprocess communication. Everything else that, including files and networking, was done by other software, like NeXTStep's BSD layer. NeXTStep was a Unix flavor, as OSX is, but its GUI shell was designed to make it work in Macintosh-like fashion, without needing a command line for very much. Thus hiding its "Unixness" very well.
NeXTStep is the ancestor of OSX, and that in turn is the ancestor of iOS and what Apple calls tvOS and watchOS. Several NeXTisms survive in OSX:
- The Dock, a strip with app icons in it. I remember using a MacOS Classic approximation of it called Applicon / The Tilery
- The OSX file manager, the Finder, continues the Classic one's name, icon view, and list view, but it adds NextStep's column view.
- NeXT/OSX apps are really folders containing the executable files and app data, like GUI-widget definitions. These folders look like files by the file manager.
- The NeXT IDE survived into OSX, as Project Builder and Interface Builder (the GUI-builder part). Project Builder was eventually renamed Xcode, and Interface Builder was eventually folded into Xcode. Thus, one can do one's GUI building in Xcode.
- The GUI API uses Objective-C, an object-oriented extension of C different from C++. Many of the NeXT GUI classes got carried over into OSX.
- With the NeXT/OSX GUI builder, one draws lines between objects to associate them. Thus, one draws a line from a text-field definition in one's code to a text-field definition in a GUI window. Also a button in a GUI window and a function in one's code. Pressing the button then calls the function.
lpetrich
Contributor
Windows has a complicated history.
It started with DOS, a very rudimentary sort of OS. The earliest versions of Windows ran on top of DOS, with Windows 3 being the first successful one. Around then, M$ came out with a high-end OS called Windows NT, one with a "real" OS kernel. Windows 3 had successors Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me, while Windows NT had successors Windows 2000, Windows XP, and every later version of Windows.
One of Microsoft's major "innovations" has turned out to be a flop. The Windows Registry, a database of configuration data. It was introduced in Windows 3.x as an alternative to the usual practice of configuration data being scattered among numerous files, with each app writing its own ones. Instead of separate files, the data would reside in a single file, the Registry.
But the Registry was vulnerable to corruption, and one misbehaving app could make the entire Registry useless.
In later versions, the Registry's data would reside in several files, or "hives".
It started with DOS, a very rudimentary sort of OS. The earliest versions of Windows ran on top of DOS, with Windows 3 being the first successful one. Around then, M$ came out with a high-end OS called Windows NT, one with a "real" OS kernel. Windows 3 had successors Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me, while Windows NT had successors Windows 2000, Windows XP, and every later version of Windows.
One of Microsoft's major "innovations" has turned out to be a flop. The Windows Registry, a database of configuration data. It was introduced in Windows 3.x as an alternative to the usual practice of configuration data being scattered among numerous files, with each app writing its own ones. Instead of separate files, the data would reside in a single file, the Registry.
But the Registry was vulnerable to corruption, and one misbehaving app could make the entire Registry useless.
In later versions, the Registry's data would reside in several files, or "hives".
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
The computer 2nd party market took off when IBM releasedmBIOS and specs for the AT Bus. There were all sorts of 2nd party harware collisions and applaication software conflicts. You had to be an expert to make a system work. You had to install drivers for printers and other devices.
Maybe it has changed, with Apple you only got Apple devices. No configuration hassles.
Maybe it has changed, with Apple you only got Apple devices. No configuration hassles.
lpetrich
Contributor
Actually, the design team at IBM that designed the first PC (PeeCee?) used a lot of components from outside sources. It was a way to circumvent IBM's cumbersome development processes.
Not only was all the hardware from non-IBM sources, the OS was also: DOS, something that M$ bought from another developer. Bill Gates did a masterpiece of corporate politics with DOS. He let IBM have "PC-DOS", while keeping the rights to "MS-DOS".
Then came the cloners. The engineers at Franklin Computer came up with an imitation of the Apple II -- but it copied off of the code in the Apple II's ROM. Apple successfully sued Franklin for copyright infringement. IBM had similar success with some early PC cloners, until they succeeded in clean-room reverse engineering of the PC's BIOS code. Using outside sources made IBM vulnerable to the cloners, because those sources were as willing to sell to the cloners as to IBM. This included M$ with DOS.
Not only was all the hardware from non-IBM sources, the OS was also: DOS, something that M$ bought from another developer. Bill Gates did a masterpiece of corporate politics with DOS. He let IBM have "PC-DOS", while keeping the rights to "MS-DOS".
Then came the cloners. The engineers at Franklin Computer came up with an imitation of the Apple II -- but it copied off of the code in the Apple II's ROM. Apple successfully sued Franklin for copyright infringement. IBM had similar success with some early PC cloners, until they succeeded in clean-room reverse engineering of the PC's BIOS code. Using outside sources made IBM vulnerable to the cloners, because those sources were as willing to sell to the cloners as to IBM. This included M$ with DOS.
DBT
Contributor
Meanwhile my two Linux laptops are working smoothly while the Win10 machine lies dormant....
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
The story was IBM dgt scared of the APPLE potential when business started using the Apple II with two floppy disks, basic but useful. There was a word processor, a database, and other business apps.
IBM had a Not Invented Here policy that would not support a fast development cycle. They tasked someone to go off and do whatever it took to come up with a desk top system. The original IBM PC printer was designed for robotic assembly.
Today a new concept in HW and SW is need tedo straighten out the mess. Security should be fixable. MS should be broken up. Too much power that is undoubtedly stifling real innovation.
IBM had a Not Invented Here policy that would not support a fast development cycle. They tasked someone to go off and do whatever it took to come up with a desk top system. The original IBM PC printer was designed for robotic assembly.
Today a new concept in HW and SW is need tedo straighten out the mess. Security should be fixable. MS should be broken up. Too much power that is undoubtedly stifling real innovation.
phands
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