New computer time

[algeh]

It occurs to me that I need a new computer. Note that I did not say that I particularly WANT a new computer. I don't. I hate change, and a new computer will be a major change. I'll have to spend all kinds of time getting it set up Just So, and there will, assuredly, be at least one thing that is easy to do on my current machine that, for whatever reason, will be difficult or impossible to do on the new one. However, I should really get a new one anyway.

I am currently running a Windows 98 box which I bought, unsurprisingly, in 1998, when I started college. His name is Basil. He's been a good computer to me all this time, but 8 years old is getting close to "creaking ancient" in computer terms, and I think it's time to give him a dignified retirement in which I no longer expect him to go on the internet so I can stop worrying about security vulnerabilities and just use him for programs like 3-D Home Architect that probably don't exist in modern form because no one liked them but me. I think I could also coax Basil to play The Sims, but I'm unwilling to try until I don't need the computer to do anything else in case that does Horrible Things.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I don't want a Windows box. The Independent Cuss in me wants to be able to reinstall the operating system as many times as I damn well please without anyone being able to tell me nay (this is despite the fact that I don't think I've ever done this on Basil). Also, I hate change and Windows seems to bundle all of its upgrades together when you try to go in for bugfixes. Also, you know, Microsoft is the devil in many more ways than I can even begin to go into here, but I want to explain why I don't want Windows again on its own merits rather than start angsting about why I hate pretty much very company ever, or else I'll just end up reading library books by sunlight and going to bed when it gets dark rather than get a new computer. Also, it's the most common target for viruses, thus necessitating constant minor upgrades, which I hate because they tend to break things and make the computer run more slowly.

So, Mac or Linux? On one hand, I used to be quite the computer hobbyist back in the day (I've been using computers since before I could read, which is a pretty mean feat when you realize that this meant DOS-based programs at the time) and Linux calls out to the part of me that misses the Good Old Days of doing everything yourself. On the other hand, just like in the Good Old Days, it can send you on a Write Your Own Drivers Adventure when you really just want the shiny new thing you just bought to work. Also, you need to have a pretty good pile of clue if something becomes broken and you need it fixed fairly quickly or you want to install something at all obscure. It does, however, have multiple desktops, and I've missed them in the years since I last used it. The two main "fun" programs I use are Firefox and Gaim, so I wouldn't have to find new programs for those tasks if I switched to Linux.

Macs, on the other hand, would require minimal amounts of clue on my part. I know the basics of computer use already, and I'm unlikely to be sent into "nobody ever got around to writing end-user documentation for that" hell, let alone driver-writing hell. On the other hand, it's a Big Company and I have no idea how bad they are about forcing upgrades along with bugfixes. On an additional hand, I can buy a scanner and a digital camera that will say on the box that they'll work with my computer, and they probably actually will. Plus, I can get a laptop. (It is my understanding that there is no way to get a Linux laptop without buying a laptop that originally came with a different OS on it, which seems to defeat part of the point.) I've moved Basil enough times that a laptop is pretty appealing. (He moved into and out of the dorms twice a year, went with me to California when I was living out of hotels (nothing says fun like moving a 17-inch monitor at least once a week), and has generally been quite well traveled for a mid-tower.) Also, I'm going into k-12 education, and everyone else will have a Mac. If I have a Mac, I'll probably be able to open any file they happen to send me.

Bah. I want a Linux box on a philosophical level, but I know a Mac would be more practical for what I will actually need a computer to do for me in the coming years. I really don't consider computers a hobby anymore (I've found new ones that make me less angry all the time than computers have started to), but at the same time I want to encourage the type of computers that I want to have exist to come into being. But I really, really need a computer that will just work most of the time without me having to constantly mess with it.

I hate this. This is why I've kept Basil so damn long.

So anyway, any advice? I should really get this bought this week before this term gets too much underway.

Comments

[clipdude.livejournal.com]

If you get a laptop, one thing to keep in mind is the quality of the case. This sounds silly, but my laptop case is starting to disintegrate, even though the computer itself still works (mostly) okay, and I find that just a little bit annoying. If you are going to be carrying your laptop a lot (e.g. to school and back), that’s all the more reason to get something with a rugged case.

I find that OpenOffice can open the Word files people occasionally send me, although not perfectly. (The formatting is usually a little off.) I’m not sure about how well it handles PowerPoint slides, however. Keep in mind, most of the documents I send to and receive from other people are (La)TeX files, so my experience with dealing with Office files on my Linux box is limited. Also, when I do have problems with Office files, there is a nice Macintosh on the other side of the room I can visit.

[ladysunrunner.livejournal.com]

the openoffice equivalent of powerpoint generally does very badly with windows-formatted powerpoint files. my school computer is dual-boot, but one day i got lazy and decided to work on my ppt talk in linux since i was already logged in. yeah, didn't work so well :-) so, if powerpoint is something you need a lot, translating windows ppt to mac ppt (which also had issues, only much smaller ones, when i did it last) is easier than windows to openoffice.

[luinied]

Have you tried Ubuntu and/or other newish, friendly distros? They really have progressed quite a bit; Ubuntu took very little configuration to work on my new laptop, and I doubt you'll be getting a machine with more crazy new hardware than a ThinkPad.

Also, using a Mac tends to lead to "I just don't do that" syndrome. For example, you still need a bit of a clue to install something obscure - e.g., something that isn't distributed as a disk image - but few Mac users will ever do that. My Mac convert friends here have fairly readily admitted that, on Linux, you want to do something, can't figure it out, and feel bad, whereas under OS X you just accept that you can't do it and move on with life.

[qousqous.livejournal.com]

I haven't found that. I've done all sorts of weird things—installed X11, installed the equivalent of apt-get, added fonts, added various codecs for QuickTime to access, installed things that weren't on disk images, etc.—and it hasn't been difficult at all. All you need to do is read the ReadMe file and it will tell you where to stick everything. If you're confident enough to use Linux, you can figure out how to do what you want to on a Mac.

[luinied]

Maybe I should have been more specific; it isn't that using a Mac leads to that so much as using Apple's software does. For example, I often hear people complain about the time they used to spend customizing their window managers or desktop environments to work exactly the way they liked, and when I remind them that the customizations they're talking about aren't even possible with what Apple provides, they admit to being happy about this. Which may just say something about people.

Anyway, while nothing you've described is difficult - and in many cases it's exactly as it would be under Linux - that doesn't mean that most Mac users will ever do these things. The ones I tend to encounter will, of course, because they're computer scientists who need all sorts of free software, but they are far from the norm.

[greatblondelf.livejournal.com]

Well, here's a simple test I would use:

About 3 months ago, I needed to change the resolution no my debian linux box (I have one debian box, and one WinXP box at home). Only one resolution was displayed as being possible with the xwindows-automatic tool, and it was 640x480, almost impossible to use for work. In order to actually get my screen to a respectable resolution , I had to:

Hunt online for the location of the file in which these things resided, which turns out to be a long configuration file called XF86Config_4, a few directories down in the directory structure,

Manually add a new entry for the resolution mode(s) I wanted,

Restart the thing and find that it didn't work, and hunt some more online,

Determine that those modes weren't supported under the monitor's stated refresh rates (elsewhere in that file), take a chance and comment out the refresh lines,

restart the computer and wait for the auto-probe script to probe the monitor, and cross my fingers that none of my graphics hardware was overloaded by any of this.

Now, the upside of all of this is that, if I wanted, I could use all kinds of crazy resolutions, ones that aren't in any other OS. However, what you should probably ask yourself is this question: Would the "resolution change" escapade take me, on average, more than 2 hours to resolve, or less than 2 hours to resolve? If you can confidently say "less than 2 hours," then Linux is probably your best bet, because stuff like that will keep happening every fourth time (or so) that you want to do something new with the system. Otherwise, I'd go with MacOS (I've been thinking about a Mac myself). As an added bonus, you can get a teeny-weeny distribution of linux to put on Basil, if you know that you don't need the current system anymore, and see if you hate it.

I also have to chime in with safiiru here that Windows also has the "can't get there from here" syndrome in spades. Several times I have wanted to do something which would be straightforward on Linux, and have been stopped by windows. Seriously, they actually have error boxes that pop up to say "that thing you're trying to do? You can't. Why? 'Cause."

So, basically, it's a toss-up between how much you'll actually use the "wierdo customizability" of linux, versus how much time you're willing to spend on internet forum pages looking for an answer as to why that email server "just won't go".......

[luinied]

Ah, but you were using Debian. I like Debian, granted, but you must admit that most other distributions these days have a well-tested set of graphical configuration tools that let you do these things with the ease you'd expect, modulo typing in a password more often than you would on Windows or MacOS.

[greatblondelf.livejournal.com]

Well, that's just it. To people who like it, so does debian. Debian also has an extremely simple method of installing software, which is totally tested and works - except when it doesen't. Most modern distributions have well-tested and comprehensive desktop tools that work perfectly - except when they don't.

So, for instance, here at work I commandeered a bunch of old computers with no drives that no one wanted anymore, and turned them into a diskless beowulf cluster for numerical analyses. To do this, I had to format a bunch of floppy disks, because the CMOS on the old boxes was too old for a network boot without media. So, I had to scrounge floppy disks, and the old disks here at work were full of bad sectors. Now, when I used the handy-dandy Gnome desktop format utility, 19 out of 20 disks would fail, due to the way it handled format checking - laying down the format, writing the filesystem, then read-checking every sector and dying if errors were found. Now, the windows format utility (formatting FAT32) has a default setting that labels bad sectors first, and avoids them. Linux will, of course, do this as well, but the option wasan't in the Gnome desktop took, and so in order to make it work, I was hunting through the man pages to find the appropriate switches. Now, this was just an example from this last weekend. There are an awful lot of things that "really work so much better," except when they don't.

On the other hand, Im not a really big distribution-sampler. I've used Debian, Red Hat, and SuSE, and simply have yet to see any release that can get down to 3% on the "have to break out the manual"-o-meter, which is about where windows sits, in my estimation.

[luinied]

If you want things to work better in areas where things are currently more complicated than they should be, you really should check out newish distributions, especially ones based on older ones. They're usually designed with this in mind, whereas older distros are there for the people who are already heavily entrenched. And, for what it's worth, I've never found a method for installing software better than Debian's, and I picked Ubuntu in large part because I wanted an approximation of that.

The floppy example does remind me of one complaint I have about Linux, though, which is that certain older, less popular pieces of hardware - floppies, modems, etc. - tend to get some slightly shappy treatment. It's not that you can't use them (with the exception of whichever winmodems are still unsupported), but it's clear that the developers don't put too much thought into them, leading to unwise defaults, silly bugs, and so on. I can't entirely blame them, as I only remember these devices when I'm visiting my parents, and it's not like Unix has the historical connection with floppy drives and modems that Windows does, but it's still annoying.

Of course, it's an annoyance that I'm more than willing to put up with, and I wouldn't consider it a point against Linux in any situation other than my parents', and maybe not even then.

[diantha.livejournal.com]

I've allways liked macs, but I also like linux. A lot of people who like linux seem to also like OS X, because its fairly linuxesque. I have no experience with mac operating experiences beyond OS 8.6, becuse I have a similar problem to you with having a decrepit old computer that won't take much more than that. Currently, I'm finidng OS 8.6 frustrating because I can't find any shareware type programs that do xhosting- so I can't get much work done on my laptop (compounded with my lack of internet at home, this makes my laptop pretty much a pretty hunk of uselessness). However, I assume that OS X now comes with some suitable kind of xhosting, again since its rather linuxesque. Mmm, I'm realizing this is not exactly helpfull info for you, so I'm going to stop now. Goodluck! One other thing you may want to take into consideration is that mac laptops are expensive- a linux or windows machine would probably be significantly cheaper, if cost is an issue.

[clipdude.livejournal.com]

However, I assume that OS X now comes with some suitable kind of xhosting, again since its rather linuxesque.

I don’t know if it is standard in OS X, but the eMac in my office has X11 installed, and I have used it to run X programs remotely without a problem.

[unkle-social.livejournal.com]

everything i ever knew about computers became obsolete somewhere around the tenth grade. that being said, i recently recieved a mac laptop-ma-jig for a grad gift and i absolutely love it. the transition from windows was so very easy, especially considering that i can still use word and excel on this thing.

i keep getting nice surprises like: what? no one writes viruses for macs? all right!!

and if you're going to be using macs in your schools, it probably makes sense to be using something compatible yourself.

so, laptops = SO NICE!!
macs = pretty darn nice.
linux = i have nothing to say because i've never ever used it.

[qousqous.livejournal.com]

You can get shareware that will do virtual desktops on OS X.

[two-star.livejournal.com]

From googling on linux laptop, it appears that manufacturers of Linux laptops do exist and buy google ads. But all the Cool Geeks I've met seem to get Mac laptops, even if they use Linux as their desktop machine, and they probably have a good reason. (Although it may be that the reason is just that the Macs look cooler.)

I'm mostly happy with Linux, but I don't mind too terribly having to mess around with configuration files, and I actively enjoy fiddling with code, which is something that works pretty well on Linux. As safiiru said, newish distros are pretty user-friendly.

[ccnuggie.livejournal.com]

Hey I found your support request here (http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=542021) because I was looking for an answer to your same question. I posted a new request here (http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=545788) asking the same question and referencing your question as well.

Did they ever give you a satisfactory answer elsewhere? If I get one, I'll share it with you if you'd like.

[algeh]

No, they've been ignoring me since the unhelpful FAQ reference, presumably because I found an actual bug (add.bml erasing existing colors) and there isn't currently a bug-tracking system because they're switching from zilla to something that I've forgotten the name of.

Support, in general, is better for "how" questions than "why" questions. I don't know who we're supposed to go to for explanations or grievances, my guess is that they just don't want to deal with it anywhere so they don't have a place.

I really, really want to know why they changed this. I can't imagine it being a Security Thing and they gave no explanation at all anywhere that I've been able to find. PILES of lame.

I'll let you know if I hear anything useful.

[ccnuggie.livejournal.com]

http://community.livejournal.com/featureannounce/18071.html

They're adding it back!