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Comment by vincentkriek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>"Somehow this aggravates me."

That might be because it is poor parody.

"Please note that this article is a parody of what some Windows users write about Linux. The events described here have not actually taken place. However, the article is based on author's experiences with the Windows 7 operating system."

What is being parodied - the experience of Windows users encountering the peculiarities of Linux - is not particularly interesting, nor is it particularly worthy of ridicule. Such stories tend to be about people giving Linux a legitimate chance and running up against technical unfamiliarity.

The particulars of this parody just don't carry any water. Windows downloads drivers automatically? That's dog bites man since the 1990's. Windows doesn't have a live CD? Nobody [1] expects it; again there's decades of precedence AND nobody cares.

The parody isn't funny. It doesn't go anywhere intellectually, and if there is a message it's something along the lines of Windows users are inept. The last point is salient because Windows users tend to admire people who understand Linux, not hold them in contempt.

I read the title and clicked. I read the lead and thought it could be interesting. It wasn't and I too was annoyed. Not because I love Windows, but because the article is dull.

[1] "Nobody" in a statistically significant sense relative to the population of computer users and potential computer users.

"What is being parodied - the experience of Windows users encountering the peculiarities of Linux - is not particularly interesting, nor is it particularly worthy of ridicule. Such stories tend to be about people giving Linux a legitimate chance and running up against technical unfamiliarity."

Yeah, that was what bothered me about the post. The piece that it links to, the example of what is being parodied, is some guy giving Linux a shot because he's tired of Windows breaking all the time. Responding with an attack on Windows seems like missing the point pretty badly. Windows not being very good was like the premise to begin with.

Also note that lots of the stuff in the "State of Linux" piece is about stuff that is clearly wrong/buggy. It is a little funny when Branko goes "people come from Windows to Linux expecting it to behave the way they are used to, and that was the main point." Cause then the whole thing comes off kind of like it's one guy complaining about segfaults and disappearing GUI-elements, and another responding with "you're just expecting them to behave differently because you come from Windows."

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.

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.

USB stick, or don't buy anything HP again (their laptops are all universally shit).

Drive letters actually go back quite a bit further. They originated on IBM big iron, and made it to MS-DOS via CP/M.

While it is true that NT does not have concept of drive letters (and current directory for that matter), it does not internally do equivalent of unix mounting, it just presents volumes in predetermined places of directory hierarchy.

The fact that large swatches of win32 API are implemented as userspace abstractions is wonderful source of weird windows behavior. For example, changing current directory is not thread safe (not only in the way that you don't know which directory is really current in presence of multiple threads changing it, but SetCurrentDirectory() itself is not an atomic operation)

> it does not internally do equivalent of unix mounting, it just presents volumes in predetermined places of directory hierarchy

Why does it matter what it does internally (unless you are knee deep in WDK work)? SetVolumeMountPoint() pretty much acts like mount() as far as the userspace is concerned.

How is it that "everyone knows about it"? It's some kind of intuitively acquired knowledge, or may be the most natural approach? I think not. Any user learns the system for the first time. So the satire in the story is an answer to those who claim Windows to be more user friendly than Linux, and it humorously describes the level of usability of Windows in comparison to Linux.

> I don't think it is realistic to see Microsoft Windows as something that you have never used.

I decided to give Windows 8 a try, but had not used Windows prior to that since Windows 2000 was new and shiny. For someone born in, say, 1995, who is now entering college, it doesn't seem completely inconceivable for them to have never used Windows. Windows had far less dominance during that time compared to when I was a youth.

I thought it was somewhat eye opening to see linux try to bill itself as "having more drivers." I thought that A. linux was originally intended to not contain large libraries of drivers and B. the drivers that it does have are often not as good as those on windows.

I will offer the example of scanner drivers and videocard drivers. True: many linux distros come with immediate support for both. You are more likely to be able to get your monitor's native resolution on first boot with a linux system. You are more likely to be able to use a scanner out of the box on a linux system. You run into problems, however, as soon as you care about more than basic operation. If you want to use a scanner that is not supported by x-sane on linux, you have a very short list of options, and one of the items on that list is "write your own driver." If you want to use certain multiple monitor setups, you typically have to install the buggy proprietary drivers. Certainly it is possible to get stable access to more advanced video card functions, but the process of achieving this is significantly more complex than letting windows update download and install your graphics driver.

>linux was originally intended to not contain large libraries of drivers

Huh? Support for obscure hardware has always been a big selling point for linux.

>the drivers that it does have are often not as good as those on windows.

Quite the opposite IME. With windows you will always get some kind of driver, but it will usually be buggy. Linux doesn't always have drivers, but those it does have tend to be very reliable.

>If you want to use a scanner that is not supported by x-sane on linux, you have a very short list of options

Sure. But how many scanners is that? Maybe I've been lucky, but all of mine (mostly HP, who admittedly have a reputation as being especially good with linux) have "just worked".

>If you want to use certain multiple monitor setups, you typically have to install the buggy proprietary drivers.

Buggy? Maybe by linux standards, but I've found the nvidia graphics drivers far more reliable than any I've used on windows (it's a shame that ideology means installing them is poorly integrated). Admittedly the way modern windows can seamlessly restart its graphics drivers mitigates this a lot - but linux hasn't needed such a thing yet.

With Intel graphics you can do multi-monitor just fine with the open source drivers. I don't know about AMD.

You don't have to guess about scanner support: http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html

I gave multi-monitor support as an example, as it has been one of the areas I've had the worst luck with in linux. I've had a version of Fedora that was completely unable to support connecting an external display to my laptop, as well as an install of Ubuntu that permanently stopped displaying anything after switching the multi-monitor mode in xrandr when the proprietary drivers were installed. I've also had many whole-linux-OS crashes as a result of fiddling with multi-monitor setups. This simply doesn't happen in Windows. I've had Windows gfx driver crashes, but the only time I've gotten a system freeze in Win 7/8 is when there were actually hardware problems (e.g. faulty gfx card, or overheating.)

>I've also had many whole-linux-OS crashes as a result of fiddling with multi-monitor setups. This simply doesn't happen in Windows. I've had Windows gfx driver crashes, but the only time I've gotten a system freeze in Win 7/8 is when there were actually hardware problems (e.g. faulty gfx card, or overheating.)

Shrug, completely the opposite of my experience. I guess anecdotes can contradict each other. Though I wonder: are you using an ATI/AMD card on linux, and NVidia or Intel on windows? Thinking about it when I've had NVidia cards my windows drivers have been just as stable as my linux ones - and when I tried to use linux on a machine with an AMD card I did hit some hard lockups.

Support for obscure hardware has always been a big selling point for linux.

While at the same time, support for current hardware has always been a plus of Windows.

Hardware support is hard.

"Everyone knows" that you need to reboot your computer when it starts acting up, or not reacting.

"Everyone knows" that you need to defragment your hard drive to improve its performance.

"Everyone knows" that you need to keep your anti virus up to date if you want to keep using your computer.

etc.

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