I came across a couple of links I thought people might be interested in this week.
The first is a post on switching to Vim. I thought the advice here was quite good (perhaps because it is similar to the approach I advocate!):
To those who would say “that’s obvious; of course you learn vim incrementally”, I would simply say that having spoken to a number of vim users in the past, I never got that advice. Instead, I got a lot of advice about turning off my arrow keys, disallowing the use of the mouse, and learning the (MORE EFFICIENT!!!) vim ways to do everything, all at once. People just couldn’t stomach the idea of me continuing to use an outmoded practice (like apple-f) when vim had much better tools available just a (huge volume of) memorization away.
This is good advice for any editor (or software in general) that has lots of shortcuts or customization options.
The second is an article I’m guessing Kevin will like on installing Ubuntu to update an old computer. Linux is often daunting to people, but this review makes it sound like Ubuntu is fairly straightforward.
I installed Linux last year on a laptop I bought back in 2005, and it really did breathe new life into a very old, very slow system. I highly recommend it.
Not only is Ubuntu pretty straightforward, but I think by any objective measure Ubuntu and the other recent linux distros aimed at regular desktop users, like Linux Mint and PCLinuxOS (probably Fedora and OpenSUSE too; I’ve only played with them a little) are far easier to set up and use, and are far more user friendly than Windows. Some people may find them difficult to use at first, but only because they are used to something else, and it takes awhile to adjust to any change. Most people migrate to linux from Windows, and the complaints about it not being user friendly usually just stem from people expecting them to be exactly the same. If people started with these, and then migrated to Windows, no one would say that linux is more intimidating than Windows.
Comparing what it was like to set up Ubuntu for the first time vs. what it was like to set up Vista for the first time, it was no contest. Vista’s installation was far less user friendly, and it took me hours to get all the right drivers in place to even get on the internet to download the rest. With Ubuntu, I put the CD in the drive, and had a completely functional system with working wireless internet, sound, webcam, DVD burner, etc., in less than 20 minutes. “Your grandmother could install Ubuntu.”
(Of course, I wouldn’t say the same about geek-oriented distributions like Slackware, Arch and Gentoo.)
I read that article a few days ago, and while I do like it and agree with most of it of course, a couple things annoyed me. I dislike the suggestion that linux is only suited for older hardware. If your old hardware runs twice as fast with linux than windows, imagine what your new hardware will do. Is there some reason to prefer a bloated Windows system, anyway?
I also thought it was strange that if it was going to focus on running on older system, no mention was made of lighter alternatives than the regular GNOME version than Ubuntu. While it does of course has a much smaller overhead than even XP, the “lightweight” Xubuntu, Lubuntu versions are even better suited for old hardware, and are just as easy to install. Hell, with something like Crunchbang, PuppyLinux or Damn Small Linux you can run up to date software on hardware from the mid-90s.
Sometimes things are difficult with linux, and you have to dig into config files or use the command line, but half the time it’s stuff that you can’t even do at all with other OSes.
I agree that lots of the linux distros are remarkably easy to get set up. The thing I love about them is the live CD option–most linux distributions can be burned onto a CD and then run directly from that. This lets you try basically any distribution out and see how you like it. I tried a load of versions of linux this way before I settled on one. I ended up installing a handful on various partitions of my hard drive, and almost all were really easy to install. (The main exception was Zenwalk linux, which worked perfectly on the live CD but I couldn’t ever configure to work with my display for some reason.)
I wonder if the idea about putting linux on only older hardware is that most people are going to be leery about messing around with a brand new computer. Maybe Windows isn’t so great (the reasoning goes), but I just payed however many dollars for a computer and I don’t want to mess it up with linux. Maybe.
There is also the possibility that people have older computers at home but nicer/newer ones at work. They might not have the ability to mess with their operating system at work, but they can fix up the old computer at home.
It is worth noting that if you want to run linux on a work computer and you can’t install a new operating system, you can run many versions of linux from a USB drive. You can boot the computer using the system of your choice, then save all your documents, etc. to that drive. This way your operating system can travel with you. Most distributions will have directions for how to do this, but you can also use this utility to do it.
Another way to try linux before (or instead of) installing to harddrive is through a virtual machine. UNetBootIn is great. The pendrive linux site gives instructions for running a persistent version of most linux distros from USB.
Yeah, it’s frustratingly hard to actually buy a computer that either comes with linux pre-installed or comes with no OS at all. On and off, Dell sells some prepackaged with Ubuntu, and they’re cheaper than the Windows machines with the same hardware (as they should be), which is nice, but this is sporadic and doesn’t cover all the models it should. I’m not sure any of the other big vendors do.
However, it is your legal right to get a refund for Windows if you reject its EULA. (Indeed, this is required I think by the settlements in one of th early anti-trust lawsuits against MS.) This can be more frustrating than it should be, and the Ubuntu and other linux-forums are awash with people giving their sob stories about how hard it was to achieve, though most succeed if persistent. There’s a good article about it here, and googling will turn up more. I don’t know whether you’ve seen the RevolutionOS documentary, but there’s a nice scene in there about people demonstrating outside of Microsoft asking for their refunds while MS PR execs give them lemonade (IIRC).