MS Vista is now Zod’s Bitch
I’ve been a little late to the party, yet today I took the plunge, backed up 10Gig’s worth of email, data, home brewn code, papers, articles, documents, chat logs and whatever else that sits in /home/ditesh.
I installed Fedora Core 6 and my impressions are simply this: it’s brilliant!
Distribution reviews generally point out problems that they have had with installation or use. My review will take the opposite perspective simply because I have nothing to kvetch about. Fedora Core 6 got everything right on my machine:
- Installation, is as in the case of modern Linux distributions, was a breeze.
- Post installation update weighed in at 500MB and over 350 packages, but that simply because I installed a large set of software to begin with. Nonetheless, it was smooth sailing.
- Getting into X and GNOME was delightful. Getting to a workable desktop was noticeably faster, possibly due to the DT_GNU_HASH optimizations.
- Sound, network, display worked out of the box. Nothing extra to install or configure.
- The GUI goodness of AIGLX worked out of the box and now I too have 3D flipping desktops (eat that, alphaque - let’s see how long before your operating system supports this :))
- Wifi support required downloading the ipw2200 firmware (understandable), but after dumping it into /lib/firmware and a subsequent modprobe, all was good.
- My obscure ADSL modem, previously requiring hacks upon hacks to get working, worked out of the box!
- Suspend to RAM Just Works(tm)
That’s right, out of the box. No more fucking around with my video BIOS and network card settings to make sure the device handles its state correctly when reawakening.
I had a Windows chap sitting beside me all the time and he was blown away by how easy the install was (and I was using text mode too) and how great the GNOME desktop looked. Not to mention all the goodness that comes installed by default to be productive immediately (OpenOffice, beagle, tomboy, Evolution, full development environment set up just the way I like it [vim, apache, php, postgresql] and the likes).
I am wondering who the hell would ever want to buy a commercial copy of Microsoft Vista and be shackled by DRM, licensing fees, viruses, security issues, DLL hell and inferior tools when the free software community can provide significantly better quality software.
Did I mention DLL hell and inferior tools? Yes, I have spent two nights just fixing Microsoft Visual Studio makefiles to circumvent Microsoft Visual Studio’s bugs (which, I must tell you, are cheerfully admitted on Microsoft’s Knowledge Base). I will reserve a well deserved Microsoft bashing for another full length post. Clearly, Microsoft has much more to learn from the Unix guys then just symbolic links (new in Vista, but heyUnix has had it for many years now!).