“If these OS’s were cars, XP would be the Warner Brothers Special Edition minivan, and 7.2 would be a Yugo well on its way to becoming a KIA. Damn.” This is a… pretty funny article regarding the experience of a TheRegister journalist, trying to compare both RedHat and WindowsXP. Our take: AFAIK, all he had to do was to decrease the PIO mode value of his CD-ROM in his computer’s BIOS. After doing that, the Linux installation should have worked just fine.
TheRegister on Windows XP vs Red Hat 7.2
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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That article was pretty biased with comment’s like this.
“You get your first hint of its ‘you’re an idiot; let Daddy help’ posture during the install, where the progress summary informs you that Windows is “analyzing your computer”. Yeah, right. Analyze this…. “
I normally really like The Register, but that was a thoroughly biased, uninformative article. Opinions were given with no justification, and features attacked without acknowledgement of their benefits.
For example, I can certainly see how driver signing can be controversial, but it has clear benefits. With a good kernel like XP has, installing poor or incorrect drivers is one of the ways to make your system unstable. Clearly, it is in Microsoft’s best interests that XP run as stably as possible, for it saves them support costs and reputation. It is reasonable that there are safeguards against people installing incorrect or poor drivers, and a link to “why this is important” is not only reasonable, but also useful. Granted, it’d be nice to turn the feature off, but why didn’t the author mention these benefits? Oh yeah, because he preferred to rant rather than fairly evaluate.
My favorite line in the article is when the author claims that Red Hat 7.2 “outclasses [XP] by a mile.” I would love to know the rationale behind this bold statement, but the author is content to not provide it. Sure, I can think of many ways in which Linux is better than XP, but I can also think of a hell of a lot of ways in which XP is better than Linux. “Outclasses it by a mile” has got to be one of the most humorous general statements I’ve read regarding the two OSes, which is almost certainly the reason the author didn’t back it up. One wonders whether he could.
Articles at The Register are often satirical. Anyone who has been reading it for a while should have picked that up.
I thought it was a pretty decent article, on the whole. Thomas C Greene emphasises the extreme paternalism of XP (“eXPletive” or “eXPlosive diahorrea”, take your pick), and at the same time details his difficulties in getting Red Hat to install. I don’t understand why he had to wipe his disc again just to try GNOME, though. He could have easily installed them both – in fact, this is the best thing to do for any desktop GNU/Linux system.
The extreme custonisation and flexibility that is availiable in a GNU/Linux system is in direct contrast to the hand-holding that MS does, and a main reason why it’s so much better.
I can tell you why they want driver signing. They don’t want any drivers poking around memory discovering what kind of trojans or back doors they may have placed in their OS. Neither do they like alternative 3rd party products which can possibly do a better job than their own drivers or provide an improved level of privacy. You can bet that they would never pass our NT driver for Trumpet Winsock through the signing process for these reasons. We’ve had to contend with this stuff for the two most recent releases of Windows (Win2K & WinME)for DLLs – now we’ve got XP to deal with the device drivers too.
I’m sure an independent TCP/IP stack like ours is a serious threat to their surveillance model.
So what do we do – sign our lives away in blood to Redmond, or run the gauntlet with customers complaining about how MS sees our drivers as a “threat” to system stability.
Sigh
P
bkakes
‘For example, I can certainly see how driver signing can be controversial, but it has clear benefits. With a good kernel like XP has, installing poor or incorrect drivers is one of the ways to make your system unstable.’
OK shall we extend this argument further and let Microsoft vet all applications too to make our systems more stable?
Given Microsofts past behaviour do you not think with respect to driver signing that they would be just a tad more helpful to hardware companies that are obedient?
AFAIK, all he had to do was to decrease the PIO mode value of his CD-ROM in his computer’s BIOS. After doing that, the Linux installation should have worked just fine.
Which is exactly why Linux didn’t rate higher than it did. I mean really, how is anyone supposed to know stuff like this ? It certainly didn’t occur to me, and I’m hardly a Unix virgin
Of course, the fact that Linux needs such obscure, propeller-head tweaking is also damning… I’m a (mostly) happy user of Linux/FreeBSD, but they aren’t going anywhere with the Masses until these sorts of issues persist.
David Huff beat me to what I was going to say, dangit! What the Thomas Greene was trying to say in this funny little article is that RedHat, SuSE, MandrakeSoft, etc.. still haven’t made a Linux distribution that most people can jump right into WITHOUT major issues stopping them. There’s no distribution for nongeeks. I often don’t think anyone WANTS to make a completely user-friendly Linux distro their top priority, because geeks are still the ones who make, tweak, package, distribute, and BUY Linux distros. He’s saying that so far, nothing is really that compelling enough to make him refuse to deal with XP Home edition’s shortcomings (the attitude that it knows and sees all, and that all users are monkeys on typewriters).
Wait a minute, most of us already know this. Maybe one of the homebrew distros can do it…
Dangit.
Eugenia,
This has topped your bashing sessions with one swoop. I read the whole article and even though I am not a MS fan by any means, I thought he was a little too harsh. I am not sure what your opinion is on the subject, but that again was not a review, it was a bias bashing article. I can admit that my XP wielding friends have been complaining about the driver installs, but they have found ways around that… I am not sure what they done, they were complaining about it though, so go figure. As for Red Hat 7.2, we will more than likely have it installed at work since we are running 7.1 now… so I guess I will ask our software engineer how his experience went.
>Eugenia, This has topped your bashing sessions with one swoop.
I think you should watch your language. This was not my article, I merely linked to it, as NewsForge and also LinuxToday did (who are Linux-only sites and they should have been even more sensitive into the matter!).
>I am not sure what your opinion is on the subject
Then why do you write that this was my bashing session? I was the one who suggested a simple solution for this guys’ problems with Redhat on “our take”.
XP has overwritten my BeOS bootloader so it’s evil!
People! The flaw with discussion on this subject on this board is that we all have knowledge of other OSs. The fact is, Windows XP has made many assumptions about our stupidity and taken control in ways as yet unimagined. While many of us are experienced enough to figure out *nux, *BSD, BeOS, AtheOS, etc, most people have not, and Microsoft can’t forget them when summing their customer base. XP is a great product. It has many many flaws, but overall, it’s the best thing (currently supported) I’ve run at home so far. I love Red Hat and want them to succeed, but in order to run Linux productively, you still need significant knowledge of bash or some other shell. It’s possible that by version 8 or 9 Linux will have a serious competitor, maybe FreeBSD 6 will be the one, but right now, XP is the best thing for the general user. Microsoft may do everything in it’s power to be a monopolistic giant that steers the industry toward its subpar standards, but it is also putting out many products that can stand up well. After all, many tricks on even this website (!) only work in IE!! That means at least one person we all know is using MS software…no names….ELQ….
Hey, my 2 cents only.
Having used it all morning my first impressions are pretty good.
XP does force you into organizing things in certain ways, but that is ok as most people haven’t a clue how to organize anything anyway (thinking of generic officey or home AOL users here).
XP has also added on a couple of features over Win2k which are interesting, though it will probably confuse many beginners.
My testing was done using a corporate edition of XP Pro, i.e. no activation required, and I did not connect it to the network at work (I had been warned against it before), but as a stand-alone I didn’t find anything which I didn’t like which I couldn’t fix.
Which takes me to another point. Yes, there is a _HUGE_ potential for major breaches of privacy with XP. However, most of these privacy “features” can be turned off, which is good for an experienced user like myself, but I definitely do think that most people would be pretty shocked at what the default settings allows Microsoft to track.
Personally, I plan on buying XP for home use, next time I upgrade our home systems (probably Spring time). It has a nice UI, lots of extra features for doing what you want, and, if you’re not scared of configuration windows, it can be made to do what you want, rather than the other way around.
I’d rate it 9/10 for experienced users, 8/10 for newbies because of the privacy issues.
XP has overwritten my BeOS bootloader so it’s evil!
—-
Yes, if we ever needed proof, that’s it!
>After all, many tricks on even this website (!) only work in IE!!
Of course they do. I am a professional web developer, this is why this site does not use things like PHPNuke. I designed it from scratch and coded it all in a weeks time. My market is IE’s market: 90%. And you will be surprised to know that about 65% of the people visiting OSNews, are visiting with IE.
And also you will be relieved to know that my code works EVERYWHERE. I have tested OSNews from w3m up to iCab and any other obscure or big or small web browser you can think of!
>That means at least one person we all know is using MS software…no names….ELQ….
It is my job to use any OS in the face of this planet. I mostly use Windows for my email and general web browsing. I like IE (speaking as a web developer) and I prefer Outlook from other email offerings. That is my personal preferences, not the preference of the OS itself necessarily.
I write this from Win98, as I don’t have my PC with the 7 OSes in it (Win98, Win2k, two BeOS installations, Mandrake Linux, QNX RtP, AtheOS and a full copy MacOS 8.1 under emulation) at my new apartment yet. (it is still locked in a public storage room) I use this crappy Win98 installation for a month now and I am not allowed to even add things like ICQ in it, as the machine is not mine.
Can’t wait to get my beloved PC back.
>And also you will be relieved to know that my code works EVERYWHERE.
I love your website. Don’t get me wrong, I’m only saying that people who attack XP out of the box and defend Red Hat 7.2 are probably doing so partly out of bias. IMHO, IE is by far the best web broswer on the market. Too bad it tosses W3C standards out. Opera isn’t far behind, but I’d like to see better CSS and javascript support.
>I use this crappy Win98 installation for a month now and I am not allowed to >even add things like ICQ in it, as the machine is not mine.
Windows 98 is a piss poor product, period – only slightly better than 95, which is also a sack of crap. Please accept my sympathies.
“OK shall we extend this argument further and let Microsoft vet all applications too to make our systems more stable?”
Nope, because application stability does not equal system stability. Poor drivers can cause instability in the system as a whole, affecting all applications (including Microsoft’s). One of the main goals of an operating system is to not crash. It doesn’t care whether or not the applications which run on top of it do.
>Eugenia, This has topped your bashing sessions with one swoop.
I think you should watch your language. This was not my article, I merely linked to it, as NewsForge and also LinuxToday did (who are Linux-only sites and they should have been even more sensitive into the matter!).
I wasn’t pointing the finger at you… sorry for the confusion, I usually don’t take the Register that seriously anyway! They have spread enough gossip than what is enough and their credibility is getting worse. So my comment was not attended for you, it was for the guy who wrote the article!
Windows versions 95 and all overwrite the boot sector so it boots windows instead of your boot manager. I find XOSL is a good boot manager, it’s at http://www.xosl.org/
I like IE (speaking as a web developer) and I prefer Outlook from other email offerings
I do also “enjoy” when my Win2K freezes for a sec or two while IE does DNS query.
And I really “love” Outlook – I had to change every folder to disable preview pane because some teenager wanted to exploit built-in VBS features. It just makes life wonderful.
May be as web developer you like IE but as an OS junkie you should be horrified by IE – it spends a good deal of time in kernel space. That’s why it’s fast.
I do use MS products but I haven’t yet paid for them a penny – my employer did.
For many of your viewers it’s not a choice.
. My market is IE’s market: 90%. And you will be surprised to know that about 65% of the people visiting OSNews, are visiting with IE.
Is it just me or there is something strange logic behind the numbers – 25% OSNews visitors are not really welcomed here ?
Who cares what browser you use… they all have their flaws, just like the OSes we all fight over. I have been rotating between IE, Netscape and OmniWeb lately, though I like Netscape the best, I could care less anymore… just like I am getting to the point of who cares what OS you or I use!
I like what I like and the same goes for everyone!!!
I don’t think very highly of RedHat’s distribution because they are obviously not tested very well. Mandrake has the same problem. Suse may be okay, but the last time I tried it, which was a few years ago, I suffered a technical onslaught of extraneous information and packages to the point of paralysis. I cringe every time I see RedHat being used in a comparison with Windows. I think the Linux camp has much better offerings.
For beginners, I think Caldera 3.1 and Libranet 1.9.1 are very good choices. I have also heard that BearOps is a good distribution for beginners, but I haven’t tried it so I couldn’t really say one way or another.
Thanks voor the xosl link, that one didn’t show up with google…
And it works. Installing the original Be bootloader (bootman) is a bit of a hassle, bootfloppies don’t boot
on my system, and the beos cd doesn’t recognise the promise ATA100 controller.