h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: A Guide to Choosing the Right Open Source Operating System For You - A2759844
Author: Baryonic Being - (U717892; A2411191) - U234603

Wanting a break from my usual style of quantum mechanics and advanced cosmology, I decided to document a guide based on my own search for the right operating system. The result is this entry.

The 'step-by-step guide' section of it, however, is rather much advice-oriented, and this is something that may be controversial for inclusion in the guide. However, I do remember a similar guide that was written collaboratively about upgrading ones computer.

As far as I judged, the entry does meet the Writing Guidelines for the Edited Guide. All information included is factual (if you find any such errors, then please do of course tell me), though some of the facts are facts about what the general majority of people think about certain OSs - without the inclusion of such facts, the entry is probably useless.

Thank you, and welcome to the world of the free and the liberal.

Something about this entry - I suspect the tables - is making it wider than my screen and therefore very difficult to read because of the constant scrolling from left to right and back again. And I would really like to be able to read it. I believe that line breaks in some of the table cells might be in order.


Scout

Yes, I get the same effect. How do I put in line breaks?
And also, given how many tables there are and how big they all are, I suspect that it would take a very long time to re-organise all the data.

I guessing that you could use a tag in the table cells, but I'm sure someone else will come along and confirm or correct that.

This is an excellent article. I'm not particularly pro- or anti-Microsoft myself, having both a Windows and a Linux box. However, criticisms that cannot generally be levelled at Windows are that it is (a) difficult to set up and (b) difficult to use. I cut my computing teeth on a Unix box, but it was after several different attempts to use various flavours of Linux that I happened upon Mandrake (which is nice).
No matter how experienced one is in IT, there is always something new to flummox you. This article goes a fair way to demystifying this area of computing.

I have one criticism, though. The actual physical size of the article, in screen inches, is rather daunting. Is it possible to cut it down?

Fantastic entry into the unknown, BB!

Actually, I've used Mandrake, Red Hat, and Caldera. I just haven't found the Star Office or Open Office a sufficient replacement for the bells and whistles of (shudder) Gates' monsters.

Just a quick question on content:
Did I miss seeing the Caldera version of Linus here? At one time, it was considered the easiest installation version.

Thank you for your positive feedback. The only reason that I have not included Caldera is because it has been discontinued, and to somebody wanting to choose a distro for themselves, it would hence be a bad choice.

I will try to fix the too-big-for-the-page situation, but it will mean the total re-ordering of the particularly bulky 'summary' table at the end, and that could take a long time.

FordsTowel, concerning the office suites, which versions were you using? StarOffice 7 and OpenOffice 1.1 are now available, and I have actually found them much better than "Gates' monsters" in terms of features (e.g. export to PDF feature). Another alternative, however, is to get hold of Codeweaver's Crossover Office plugin, which allows the monsters to be run directly in Linux with a Wine-like compatibility layer.

OK, so maybe it didn't take as long as I thought! You can now see the whole width of the entry at once.

Maybe its just me but I find the whole process a tad confusing.

Some of the instructions are clumsy e.g.

"Please note that there may be another distribution not covered in this article that does support your architecture but is not listed in this table; this table only lists the major distributions."

could do away with the "not listed in this table" bit cause you already say "not covered in this article" and tidy it up a bit.

To start with I wasn't sure what I was adding points to since I was told to skip a step because I had x86 architecture.

and afew other places it was a bit awkward . . .

will read it again and be more specific on those.

I like the idea of the entry a lot though. It'll be a great one once its tidied up a bit.

2/3

Thank you, 2of3, I've changed the bit about the architectures in the table as you suggest, and I'll be willing to consider some other tidying-up exercises as you find more examples.

As to your confusion about what to add points to, re-read the introduction that appears just below the header that says 'the guide - step by step' and I think that should make it all clear.

Thanks for responding BB:

I hadn't realized that Caldera was gone!?

I found the Open Office wordprocessing application quite sufficient (except when an MS Word document format is mandated, the translation is not absolute).

The presentation programs work well enough, and most of the spreadsheet features work great; but, not all the more esoteric functions are reproduced there. Some statistical functions, wizards, and add-ins I use are not available.

The real problem, for me, is the lack of a sufficiently GUI version of Access. The db works just great, but the appllication creation does not appear to be as well conceived.

Just my opinion, of course; and probably prejudiced by my familiarity with the MS Office versions.



PS: thanks for not pointing out that I spelled Linux, Linus.

The closest Linux equivalent to Access is StarOffice Base, and StarOffice is theoretically compatible with all native MS formats and should translate things seamlessly. The only other database applications for Linux are MySQL, PostgreSQL and 'Kexi'.

I know this is out of scope for this article, but at what point would you recommend a user switch from Microsoft to an open-source OS? What criteria would you use? Like I said, I run both and have no particular preferences for ideological reasons, but I wouldn't recommend that a novice to computing per se uses Linux. I have, nevertheless, manage to breathe a new lease of life into my old PC by installing Mandrake. So, at what point, do the advantages become apparent?

A lot of people see Linux as unsuitable for beginners, and in some ways, they're right. But if the average beginner just wants to send e-mails, browse the Internet and print off a few letters every now and again, then Mandrake Linux and the other intuitive distros are perfect.

Of course, the main reason for a Microsoft user to switch to an open source OS is the cost. Loyal Microsoft customers that pay hideously expensive license fees that make an economy-conscious person like myself shudder violently will welcome the change to something that doesn't cost them a penny.

The next main reason is security. People who use Microsoft software alone are putting themselves at enormous risk to hackers. I'm not saying that there is no risk with this when using Linux or Unix, but compare the 4 million or so Windows viruses to the 5 or 6 ones that affect Linux, and the evidence is overwhelming: open source OSs are more secure. It's ironic in a way, because hackers have complete access over the source code and can find or even create vulnerabilities at their will, but the vigilance of the open source community always seems to eliminate these things.

A lot of open source advocates also claim that increased reliability is a good feature of Linux and Unix. I have measured this myself, and errors do come less frequently in Linux than in Windows, but sometimes Linux problems are far more difficult to sort out. In my experience, either something works on Linux straight away, or it takes a couple of months of forum-searching and command-line-investigating.

So, I would personally recommend that a novice uses Linux over Windows. Because of the cost, I would say that there's really no reason for a novice to be using Windows. If already using Windows happily, of course, there's little reason to change, I suppose.

Oh, and the reasons that I didn't want to include this sort of debate in the article are that (a) it would take too long to explain fully, and (b) most of it is based on popular opinion, and not necessarily fact.

How about (c) it gets the anoraks and the fundamentalists yelling at each other while the rest of us stand mutely by?
I think that perhaps the most cogent arguments for using Windows are that (a) it comes preinstalled, often with a lot of other goodies (b) XP is very easy to use and quite reliable and (c) there is a huge amount of software out there guaranteed to run on it.

I first learned how to use a computer using VMS, but then progressed to Unix and came to admire the cogent simplicity of its design. Personally, I have always admired elegance and vision, but nowadays I tend towards flexibility and pragmatism. Also, having started out as a software developer, I loathed the 'orrible Windows API but am now coming to admire the elegant .NET Framework. It's easy to use, it's powerful, and it performs. C# is a really nice language. I'll be intrigued to see how Mono shapes up.

Great entry. I only have one major quibble: "Macs won't be covered in this article because they are specific to the Apple architecture" Surely Mac OS is not covered as it is not Open Source. Mac OS X is (just) a GUI on top of FreeBSD and there are reasonably well substantiated rumours that it does work on x86 archtecture.

Other comments:
Would it be worth explaining how command-line/GUI interfaces fit into this?
Is OS\2 worth a mention? (A718562)
Showing my ignorance, how does X11 fit into this?

Another concern is: won't all the prices go out of date really quickly?

The core of MacOS, called 'Darwin' does have open source components. Also, I thought MacOS would take a lot of information to cover and I don't know anything about it to start with.

A lot of people won't touch an OS if it doesn't have a GUI interface, and I suspect a lot of devout-Windows users wouldn't even recognising an operating system if it didn't have a desktop and some icons and menus. That's why I include the table entry about GUIs, but I don't think any other explanation is required really.

Is OS\2 open source? Again, I don't know anything about it.

X11 is a program that runs on top of Linux or *BSD, so without going into a full-fledged discussion of open source applications, which I believe will be covered in a hitherto-uncompiled collaborative entry, I don't think X11 ought to be mentioned.

Yes, the prices probably will go out of date quickly, but there's not much I can do about that. If they change really that much, I can always opt for the Update HQ.

Hi there, Baryonic Being!

Just for future reference, if an entry of yours has started to sink to the depths of Peer Review as this one has, it's usually a good idea to pop in and comment yourself every week or so, asking if people have any additional questions or suggestions -- doing so bumps it back up to the top of the default Peer Review list. If you were to do it daily, it might get annoying , but every week or so is perfectly

That said, here are some of my thoughts and suggestions:

* I really don't like the current long table of links at the beginning -- it's long enough to completely take over my screen, and I totally lose the flow of the text. The really long table does the same thing. Between those two, I probably would have given up on trying to read this entry if I had come across it somewhere other than Peer REview.

* No links to executable files allowed in Edited Guide entries. Also, EG entries usually avoid anchor links as well -- if you look at the right hand side of the entry where all of the external links are shown, it should be obvious why.

* I think it's important to perhaps start out with at least a brief paragraph on why people might choose an open source OS to begin with -- a good bulk of hootoo readers aren't going to be familiar with these issues.

* I wouldn't include prices at all. If you really want to do a price comparison, I might include something like review articles in magazines often do, with $$$$ for the most expensive and $ for the least.

* This is in part due to the tables and all, but this entry is right now far too long, in my opinion. The longer an entry is, the more of your potential audience you lose, so you have to balance providing additional info with keeping an audience to read the entry. I really think that the true *meat* of what's in this entry could be provided in drastically less space than this.

Don't think I'm of an entirely negative view on this one -- I do think it's a good topic for an entry, and that there is worthwhile info in it. I just think that the way it's arranged now, few hootooers will have the persistence to get through it to the info they need.


Mikey

Hello there.

"Just for future reference, if an entry of yours has started to sink to the depths of Peer Review as this one has, it's usually a good idea to pop in and comment yourself every week or so, asking if people have any additional questions or suggestions -- doing so bumps it back up to the top of the default Peer Review list."

I know this. I have been doing that with my Origin of the Universe and Parallel Universe entries, which I wrote so long ago I may forget about them soon.

"That said, here are some of my thoughts and suggestions:"

Very kind of you to provide them.


"I really don't like the current long table of links at the beginning -- it's long enough to completely take over my screen, and I totally lose the flow of the text. The really long table does the same thing. Between those two, I probably would have given up on trying to read this entry if I had come across it somewhere other than Peer REview. "

Long table of links? Where? Do you mean this one:
'If you don't want to go through the step-by-step guide, or if you have been recommended a certain distro already, then here is a list of links for the ones that will be covered in this article:'
Or do you mean the one about computer architectures?

I suppose you mean that all of the tables in the Step by Step guide are too long and frustrating to try to scroll past. Is that right? Please advise me on how best you think I could overcome this issue:
1) Remove the tables and write some elaboration about the subject in prose.
2) Remove some of the more obscure entries in the long tables.
3) Just remove the tables completely.

What would you recommend?


"No links to executable files allowed in Edited Guide entries. Also, EG entries usually avoid anchor links as well -- if you look at the right hand side of the entry where all of the external links are shown, it should be obvious why."

I've changed the link to the executable, but just how do you expect me to create a functional entry that is easy to navigate when I can't use anchors?


"I think it's important to perhaps start out with at least a brief paragraph on why people might choose an open source OS to begin with -- a good bulk of hootoo readers aren't going to be familiar with these issues."

I shall merely need to link to A2953334.

Of course I can't do that until that entry is Edited, can I? It will take many months to finish the collaborative topic beginning at A2953334. At least, I suspect it will.


"I wouldn't include prices at all. If you really want to do a price comparison, I might include something like review articles in magazines often do, with $$$$ for the most expensive and $ for the least."

That's a good idea! I wish I'd thought of that! I shall get on to it momentarily.


"This is in part due to the tables and all, but this entry is right now far too long, in my opinion. The longer an entry is, the more of your potential audience you lose, so you have to balance providing additional info with keeping an audience to read the entry. I really think that the true *meat* of what's in this entry could be provided in drastically less space than this. "

I disagree. I don't expect anybody to read the whole entry (except for the purposes of Peer Review). I thought that was quite clear. The reader reads the Guide, evaluates the best distro for them, and then reads its dedicated section below. You never need to read it all (unless, of course, you really want to).


"Don't think I'm of an entirely negative view on this one -- I do think it's a good topic for an entry, and that there is worthwhile info in it. I just think that the way it's arranged now, few hootooers will have the persistence to get through it to the info they need."

Don't worry - I am a pessimist. I expect to have big issues like these in my work. As I say, readers do not require the persistence to get through it - they follow the convenient anchor links. I think the tables do require pruning, however (see above), so please advise me on how best you think I should attack this problem.

Thank you.