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Comment by meaty | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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>Windows is free to download and try

Lots of ways in which windows isn't quite as expensive or has better things available seem to exist but be hidden. I believe you when you say a trial exists, but it's not easy to find - not only is that not on microsoft's homepage, it's on some random other domain (digitalrivercontent.net? Really). It's the same with bizspark/dreamspark/etc. - there's a lot of ways to get microsoft stuff cheap or free if you know them, but they're not easy to find if you don't.

>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.

Only last week I had to track down some realtek drivers for the microphone on my parents' laptop. Not only had they been unable to find them themselves, they'd paid a guy to install drivers on that computer and he'd missed the microphone. I'll agree that usually it's easy to get drivers once you have an internet connection - but quite a lot of wireless chipsets won't work out of the box without a driver. I haven't bothered with driver fiddling for years either, but that's because I've stopped building my own systems and been using ones that come with windows (and drivers) preinstalled; try installing retail windows on a computer and you might be surprised.

>Everyone installs K Lite Codec Pack and media player classic these days (or VLC) almost as a first item to install.

Sure, "everyone" knows about twenty different things you download and install as soon as you get a new windows machine. I see another post pointing to nlite as a solution to all this. But you only know this because you're familiar with windows. Many of the problems windows users trying linux for the first time complain of are of the same nature, and easier to solve.

>Same as you install win32-codecs on Linux.

That hasn't been necessary for years.

>Maildir import. You stick an IMAP server on your Linux box and copy all the shit to your PST.

Seriously? That's supposed to be a user-friendly solution?

> Lots of ways in which windows isn't quite as expensive or has better things available seem to exist but be hidden

It's the same as digging for coupons. Everything has a learning curve if you want to do it cheaply.

> try installing retail windows on a computer and you might be surprised.

I've been installing vanilla MSDN Windows 7 (with SP1) images on 15 different types of Dell/Lenovo machines. No issues at all. TBH some of the cheap arse vendors probably do have driver issues, but not those ones.

> Sure, "everyone" knows about twenty different things you download and install as soon as you get a new windows machine.

Again part of the learning curve. The same with Linux. the first thing I do is:

   apt-get install build-essential vim-nox tmux sudo openssh-server

That took time to learn.

> That hasn't been necessary for years.

Sorry gstreamer stuff via ubuntu-restricted-extras. It's the same turd rolled in different coloured glitter.

> Seriously? That's supposed to be a user-friendly solution?

There's absolutely nothing at all friendly about Maildir to start with.

>It's the same as digging for coupons. Everything has a learning curve if you want to do it cheaply.

Not linux. For most distributions the free version is right there on the homepage - often it's the biggest and most prominent link.

The coupon-digging analogy is a good one. Rather than a case of "linux is free, windows is expensive", it's often "linux is free, windows is cheap/free if you can dig out enough of the right coupons". But it's still a much better experience with linux.

>I've been installing vanilla MSDN Windows 7 (with SP1) images on 15 different types of Dell/Lenovo machines.

How many different wireless chipsets was that? And yeah, some manufacturers get it right or lucky, but many don't. My impression is your odds of it working out the box without having to hunt down a driver are better with linux - but I've had to track down a driver there on occasion too.

>Again part of the learning curve. The same with Linux.

Which is the article's point - not that linux is always easier than windows, but that many of the things you have to learn when starting out with linux were just as difficult to learn when starting out with windows, you've just forgotten them through familiarity.

>Sorry gstreamer stuff via ubuntu-restricted-extras. It's the same turd rolled in different coloured glitter.

I don't know what you're talking about; I installed mplayer in the default way and it plays everything I encounter on the internet. It would probably need some codec installation to play WMV3 or real media, but does anyone use those any more? My impression is the world has pretty much settled on MKV/h264, and linux handles that fine out of the box.

>> That hasn't been necessary for years.

>Sorry gstreamer stuff via ubuntu-restricted-extras. It's the same turd rolled in different coloured glitter.

The important difference is that Ubuntu will offer to install that for you when you try to play something it doesn't have codecs for. I was trying to play a DVD on Windows 8 last week and it took me forever to figure out that the problem was that Microsoft was no longer shipping the decryption key for CSS by default anymore.

> apt-get install ...

Lame excuse. That is not part of the learning curve for most users. Most users use the GUI of their distro.

>Sorry gstreamer stuff via ubuntu-restricted-extras.

Sorry. GUI. For this, most distros prompt you with a button to click on, to install the required plugins when you try to play a particular file. Not many of my Linux using friends are aware of ubuntu-restricted-extras.

Do most people really use the gui?

I find it pretty horrible and try to avoid it.

My point remains: most people who don't write software find it easier to use a GUI.

I use Arch, myself. But Synaptic is very well-made. I prefer the command line to any other GUI.

It is quite useful when you are not aware of the package names or if you want to make changes to configuration.

> apt-get install build-essential vim-nox tmux sudo openssh-server

That is quite a different level of user though to the things people "just know about" for Windows. Most people that consider themselves Windows power users don't have a compiler installed, let alone a SSH server, customised versions of vim (or emacs, or any similar editor) and a terminal multiplexer! I can only imagine that trying to find equivalents to such things on Windows wouldn't be a pleasant or easy experience - the only one that has an obvious answer is Visual Studio, and the last time I dealt with that it took the best part of an hour + multiple reboots to install, let alone the service pack.

Well its actually a better story than that.

Compiler is installed in c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework folder. You get c# and vb.net compilers in there. This is by default.

SSH is not really the windows way of doing things. Windows 7 pro and above have an RDP server built in though and you can remotely connect powershell to other machines using WinRM.

There is a thing called powershell ISE installed which is a terminal multiplexer, scripting IDE and debugger. the version with windows 8 (and a download for windows 7) has syntax highlighting and completion built in.

So actually, the windows equivalents are already there.

And no you don't need to install visual studio (which the pro edition of 2012 takes only 20 mins to install on my 5 year old ThinkPad).

Dude. Dude. Listen to yourself...

a) "Everyone installs K-lite" Wow yeah. Everyone who torrents. All the other poor fellas have no idea. And I personally know those other poor fellas and they could not tell you want a codec is if you put a gun to their heads. Hell, my wife is one.

b) I WISH there was a Windows 8 live CD. MS does not want you to "try windows" they want you committed.

c) Drivers. Ok I give you this one. For the most part windows 7 is ok. Gone are the windows XP days where if you didn't have a disk on you, you didn't have your network card drivers.

d) There is NO PACKAGE MANAGER! None, ZERO. Windows Installer as a package manager is like saying my Garage is a parking lot + valet. Windows installer (this atrocity that is...) is used to... INSTALL software. It's a glorified unzip. There is no way to say "oh hey windows installer, I'd really like to install ruby 1.9.3 with sources" and it would say "give me an hour". Instead you say "windows installer? hello? ok to google!"... "to google" can often lead an unexperience used like my grandfather to download spyware.

e) Well. At least windows can be downloaded now as a free unactivated copy. Gone are the days where I purchase a copy of windows only to find out I can't get a legal disk image of windows 7 stand-alone. Only some upgrade, which is not upgradable from windows xp 32 bit.

Dude. Dude. Listen to yourself...

a) It is the same as in linux. Linux does not have a magic "Install this HERE" button for whatever problem arises any more than windows does.

b) The general, run of the mill, average person does not need, want or care about live cd's. Businesses (which form the main core of microsofts business) do not want, need or care about live cd's when they buy the system. So why should microsoft spend time on creating them when a super tiny percentage of users will ever use them?

c) Driver management (in my personal experience) is easier in windows than it is in linux.

d) Go back in time, before the internet, when linux package managers only showed you what was installed on the system at a given time and only offered you the option to install packages you had already downloaded/copied to the system. That is what the microsoft thingy (Cant remember the name atm) is. It might not be as fancy as the linux variant, but it is still, in fact, a type of package manager and the MSI files are still, in fact, a type of package manager. Enjoy your garage parking lot + valet.

The theme from your comments is that a inexperienced user, like your wife f.x. which you used as an example, has a easier time doing pretty much ANYTHING in windows than in linux. And through technical inexperience they can cause much more damage in a much shorter time on linux than in windows.

So just chill, relax, look at the sky. The dude was just correcting some inconcistensies in the original article. He wasnt attacking you personally. He wasnt attacking your personal view of the software world.

He was just writing a comment.

> a) It is the same as in linux. Linux does not have a magic "Install this HERE" button for whatever problem arises any more than windows does.

I would just like to point out that something like that is entirely possible: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:One_Click_Install

And as an example[1]: you can go to http://software.opensuse.org/, and type the name of a program[2] in there, and it will give you a quick description along with a link that installs that program by enabling the appropriate repository. This means you get the program automatically, in one click, and you get a working upgrade path since the repository is selected. I think that's pretty close to magic, and it is all centralised as well!

[1]: To provide a direct example: http://software.opensuse.org/package/chromium

[2]: It doesn't actually need to be a name, you can also type e.g. "Browser" and look through the results until you find something suitable and/or what you were looking for.

edit: formatting...

There have been efforts to get Chocolatey going - http://chocolatey.org/

I used it to setup most of my dev stuff in my box. VS, SQL server, Sublime, Git, and others - all installed using Chocolatey.

How's it like?

cinst git

and git is installed.

Based on Powershell.

What's the difference between "cinst git" and "cinst git.install" and why do both exist?

>I WISH there was a Windows 8 live CD. MS does not want you to "try windows" they want you committed.

I kind of have to take issue with this one... They handed out the pre-release version of Win 8 for a half a year. It had no upgrade-to-full option, but for anyone who wanted to try it, they put it out there.

I'll admit that they don't give you a lot of [read: any] try-before-you-buy options for Win 8 currently, but this is the first version in a while that they've done like that, so it might get better again.

Which only early-adopters and the techy side of the population would even remotely consider using, yes.

It doesn't count. At all. It was a "be nice to developers and crowd-source the bug-hunting" gesture, not a "lets get everyone in the world to try Win8 for free!" one.

While there is technically a package manager (as others have pointed out) I think what you mean is that there's no official centralized repository. That's a legitimate complaint I have with Windows and one of the reasons I wouldn't consider going back. It is baffling to me that Windows still requires their users to navigate to firefox.com to install Firefox, etc. For people I introduce to Ubuntu this is a major selling point.

Windows simply uses a decentralized approach to software discovery, based on the open web. Anybody can put their software up for download on their own website built with web standards, without having to go through any gatekeeper such as a distro manager. Multiple entities can offer software discovery services (Google, Yahoo, Bing... To say nothing of specialized services), again based on open web standards. It's a more bazaar-like system than the average Linux distro's official repository cathedral, but the huge variety of software available for Windows shows that it works pretty well.

There's no gatekeeper on linux systems. You're free to ship .deb, .rpm, .ebuild if you choose to. If you don't feel like rolling packages, a tar of the sources and a shell script that drops the right stuff in the right places will do in pretty much every case - you can even combine the two, as for example the wowza installer does. It's a tgz with the installer prepended. On the other side, if you want to get fancy, you can provide your own package repository and get dependency tracking for all your software and its OS dependencies as free addon.

So the package repositories are nothing but convenience for the end-user.

> So the package repositories are nothing but convenience for the end-user.

Isn't conveniencing the end user kind of the goal of all software? Surely there is value in tracking dependencies and conflicts (and in avoiding problems that can arise without these things) that should not reasonably be dismissed as "nothing but convenience". Perhaps I could say the same of every useful thing you've worked on.

> Isn't conveniencing the end user kind of the goal of all software?

I'm not debating that nor am I dismissing that package repositories provide tremendous value to the user. However, the parent asserts that package repositories act as a gatekeeper, thus making it harder for users to install software that is not in the package repositories. That's not true, since linux/BSD/MacOS package repositories just enhance an open system. In that context, they're mere convenience, not a requirement.

Until you have to get sstp-client, networkmanager-sstp versions that work on your particular API versions...

External dependency hell. Not in the repository, not invited.

I fail to understand your point. For any software, you can create a deb, rpm, ebuild that correctly models the dependencies and install it on the system. No package repo required. You can provide a package repo for any Linux system and install it from there, as for example the varnish people do. Both options provide full dependency resolution without a gatekeeper.

My impression was that they are trying to remedy that with the store(whatever they're calling it) in windows 8. Yes, I know it's not the same because that's only for metro apps but I guess it would be close enough.

Honestly, I haven't used windows(other than in VMs that is) since windows XP. When vista came out, I went "fuck that shit" and switched to ubuntu(then gentoo and eventually settled on Arch). Now my personal laptop is still running Arch and for work I use a macbook and an iMac(Hate the fact that you can't develop for iOS without OSX but meh, gotta be pragmatic).

TL;DR; I'm no expert but I guess they're trying to remedy that with the store thingy in Win8.

The store in Windows 8 isn't only for Metro apps, it has desktop apps too, the only difference is the store handles the discovery but doesn't handle the install of the desktop apps.

I suppose the closest is the Windows Store?

a) They install VLC. It plays everything you throw at it.

d) It does manage your software and you can use the package manager to remove software.

a) Even my grandparents worked out how to find and install k-lite codec pack.

b) No there is just no value in it. 99% of PCs come with it preinstalled. Why would they bother to target a few Linux users.

d) Yes there is. Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Installer - yes a fully transactional installation system. If you can work out which things not to put your penis in, then you can work out which web sites are trying to rip you off. Oh and they even bother to sign official packages and warn you if it looks dodgy.

a) good for them, that's a sample of 1.

b) I cannot agree more. However this is still a great parody as to the fact that getting even a sniff of windows is an effort in itself if you didn't have it installed.

d) Sorry, a unzip with rollback capabilities and upgrade tools. Still not close to apt / homebrew / etc. Look if windows installer didn't have the ability to say that MS Visual C++ distribution is a requirement for running this software, it would not be worth the space it takes on ur hard drive.

In any case. Let's do one with a linux user trying to install Mac OSX... Fast one

- Looks like I need to shell out 1000 dollars on a macbook air because there's no way to even try it out on my laptop without spending days making a "hackintosh"

> - Looks like I need to shell out 1000 dollars on a macbook air because there's no way to even try it out on my laptop without spending days making a "hackintosh"

To be fair, setting up a "hackintosh" install isn't really any harder than setting up Gentoo or Arch. It's not a very relevant comparison though; Unlike with Windows or Linux, the makers of OS X explicitly do not want people installing their OS on "PC" hardware.

d) except for the one in Windows 8.

They call it the "Store" because package manager is scary, and doesn't allow you to part with money quite so easily. Maybe someone should make a fork?

sudo apt-get install 99centgame --CREDIT_CARD 4959 4959 4959 4959 01/14

Surprisingly short on facts, even if it is a parody. Very slashdot circa 1999.

Congratulations! Now you know exactly how Linux users have felt for the past 10 years every single time someone wrote an "I tried Linux, but . . . " article.

Yes I've been a Linux user too and have experienced that as well. In fact I've kept a finger in both pots.

It should be "an ignoramus tries another shaped hammer and hits their finger a few times before they get a nail in". That applies both ways.

> 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.

You shouldn't need to know this. Also K-Lite is full of garbage, CCCP is what you want.

> 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.

Well yeah, the maintained repository is what makes package managers so attractive.

are codec packs still needed? i just install vlc and havent had to deal with codec packs in years

> 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.

Funny thing that, I have a Microsoft wireless keyboard/mouse. When I plugged it into my old Linux laptop, I was a bit worried it might not work, but it did, instantly. When I first plugged it into my newer Win7 laptop, not only did it have to install drivers, but an installation wizard popped up, for a piece of application software, didn't tell me what it was for, except that apparently it was related to the wireless keyboard/mouse and was going to "enhance my experience" (yeah, whatever). All that from just plugging a device! I had to click though this wizard before I could even use the mouse/keyboard. I didn't have to reboot, but for sure did it have some extra updates to install next time before I was allowed to shut down.

> 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.

Keep dreaming. I'm currently demucking my roommate's HP shitbox. It doesn't have VLC. For the love of god, she installed Quicktime.

> Surprisingly short on facts

That is justifiably part of the parody.

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).

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.

I may be wrong but I thought ninite grabbed the latest release from their respective website?

"Always Up-to-date: A Ninite installer always gets an app's latest version no matter when you made it."

Not quite. It only installs the latest version they know how to install.

I'm guessing its slightly cleverer than the dev having to find the DL link for every version and manually update the entry somewhere.

Neither are Linux package repositories always up to date.

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