Windows, I Just Can’t Quit You

Posted on August 10, 2007 by Scott Jennings| 42 Comments

Warning: I am going to totally geek out in this post. This probably marks me as one of those evil tekki-wikkis destroying Second Life, but that’s just how I roll.

Tipa at West Karana tells about her blissful upgrade from Ubuntu to Mint this morning. I mention this because, well, I’m jealous.

I tried, once again, to move my laptop from Vista to Linux, using Mint this time. And again, I went back to Windows over one single issue: video driver support. Specifically, the embedded Radeon x600 in my year-and-a-half-old laptop. Apparently Radeon and Linux just don’t… get along.

I use my laptop chiefly as my ‘communications’ machine, and take it to and from work to check email, keep up with IMs, store files, listen to my MP3 collection while working, take notes, etc. I’ve been pretty happy with it, though I find I rarely use the tablet functionality as time wears on simply because I type much faster than I write and there’s no cultural aversion at NCsoft to people merrily typing away into laptops during meetings.

The programs I use most often on the laptop: Outlook, OneNote, Winamp, and Trillian. There’s Linux alternatives to all of these, though I could do with a better interface than Evolution (unfortunately as NCsoft uses Exchange, that’s really the only option) and note taking apps for Linux are still fairly primitive.

But the kicker: I need to be able to dock my laptop. And when I dock it using Vista, it smoothly switches from the 1280×768 internal widescreen display to an external 1280×1024 monitor. But with Linux, it …doesn’t. Despite repeated cajoling of .conf files, the best I can ever get is a madly flickering 1280×768 resolution on my external monitor, either mirrored or extended. Which, on a non-widescreen LCD monitor? Looks like *ass*.

So, I’d really like to walk around with a Linux laptop. I’m willing to give up tablet functionality to do it. But I’m *not* willing to give up my ability to dock to an external monitor. Linux, thou hast forsaken me! Or my video card. Which is kind of the same thing, really.

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  • BugHunter

    I think there are many more just like you Lum. Those of us who don’t love Microsoft necessarily, but no other entity has been capable of providing funcionality on par, let alone beyond what the great enemy from the northwest does.

    A viable alternative is all I ask.

  • http://qt3 Daniel Pritchett

    Why do you so long for Linux on your laptop? Would it be better for work or do you just want a breath of fresh air?

    I’m sure it would be *fun* for someone who’s written scripts for a living.

  • Nicademus

    Huh, I wonder if someone is going to preach the holy high and mighty gospel of “Mac is soooo much easier, everyone should switch, but they can’t b/c they’re not as r33t as us Macians” in this thread. That sure would be a change of pace.

    I tried Vista for a week and went back to XP. Whoever decided to green light the friggin ribbon concept should be banned from owning a computer for life.

  • Scott

    I’m planning on trading in the ol’ desktop for a shiny MacBook Pro around the time 10.5 drops. Cost out a similar Dell and the price tag isn’t that scary anymore.

    Plus I’m finding that I’m way more productive on a Mac than I ever was on Windows. That and, lets face it, PC gaming is dead. AMIRITE?

  • Halibut Barn

    Unfortunately, video card support is one area Linux still needs serious work on. Hell, I’m an old Slackware fogey, and it took me a *week* to get a stable setup on my upgraded MythTV box, between the confusing configuration, driver roulette (“Oh for that card you should prefer the legacy driver. No, the *other* legacy driver.”), and general flakiness (enabling AGP at all causes hangs), and this same hardware worked just fine when XP was on it.

    But nobody cares, because it works ‘well enough’ for the people who are able to fix things like this, and the people who want an easier setup aren’t exactly the kind who’ll be whipping up kernel patches in their spare time…

  • http://ambernight.org Amber

    Mac is soooo much easier, everyone should switch, but they can’t b/c they’re not as r33t as us Macians. There I said it. :)

    I have a Mac Pro at home running Bootcamp. I boot into Windows when I game. I’m in OS X when I need to get actual work done. Life is grand.

    I don’t get the attraction to desktop Linux. At my real job we run Linux supercomputers and Linux is perfect for the job. I even learned my way around the shell and how to program in Perl. But my experience with Linux on the desktop was frustrating. Mostly it works but then there are the times when you find out “oh it’s simple, just patch your kernel, install this RPM, oh and you’ll need to download these drivers and compile them and don’t forget to get the patch that makes them work on your hardware…” If you’re a techie and enjoy doing that kind of stuff then I guess it’s a lot of fun. But I use my PC do do work, not to generate it.

  • Scott

    Mostly it works but then there are the times when you find out “oh it’s simple, just patch your kernel, install this RPM, oh and you’ll need to download these drivers and compile them and don’t forget to get the patch that makes them work on your hardware…” If you’re a techie and enjoy doing that kind of stuff then I guess it’s a lot of fun.

    It is alot of fun, actually. But I’m the kinda guy who likes to tweak windows services to get every last ounce outta the thing. It’s exciting to build linux systems to do something special. I roll Gentoo on servers for kicks. But it all breaks down when you wanna get some word processing done or work on a web app which needs to work with IE6, then you want it to just work… now.

    That’s what mac is for, getting work done… now. It felt totally alien the first time I used it, nothing to tweak, nothing to set, just punch in my name and lets get to business.

  • Nicademus

    Scott why buy a Dell? I’ve got to imagine you know how to assemble a PC from parts. Buying assembled computers when you know how to do it yourself is literally throwing money away.

  • Therrik

    Warning: I am going to totally geek out in this post.

    Do I even need to comment on this? Nah…we all know.

    On topic though. I’ve been a huge Linux supporter for ages. For a server, it’s usually my first choice, you need a compelling option to make me consider Microsoft. It’s just rock solid and performs great for most server tasks (web server, ftp, dns, etc).

    However, once you move to the desktop/laptop world, it crumbles. It’s a bit better on desktops than laptops. I have a Linux desktop running Fedora 7, which was cake to setup. But I spent about 2 weeks trying to get Fedora to run on my laptop, no luck. In the end, it was the same exact issue you’re having Scott. Lack of video drivers. ATI just don’t work, no matter what I tried. I probably tried every driver there was, no luck at all.

    As far as usability goes, I don’t see much productivity difference on a Linux box vs. my XP box. I use Mozilla for browsing, Thunderbird for email, and then a pile of dev tools w/o issue. The only ones I need windows for is Visual Studio (.NET stuff), and SQL Server tools. There are some Eclipse (IDE) plugins that do what I need for SQL Server, but I’m just so used to the Microsoft tools that I just get it done faster there. The other big thing I can’t live without on windows is a copy of MKS Toolkit (there are alternatives like UWIN, etc). Basically, I want/need to be able to grep, sed, etc on whatever machine I’m on, and a shell is very much preferable to a windows command prompt.

    In the end though, even I am starting to look at Macs. I’ve never owned one, and have hardly used one. But, they’re starting to look really attractive since they just work.

  • Scott (Not Lum)

    Nicademus:

    True enough. Buying decent desktops opposed to building them is the route to go for anyone with a certain technological comfort level, but building laptops is another matter. I work on my desktop less and less to the point where it really is just a big, wirey gaming machine, and I’ve already got 3 other gaming machines to play with.

    Another laptop would allow better a laptop availablity ratio with my wife, and provide adequate gaming power for that time when I just need to raid and sit comfortably in my recliner.

    Hence, I’ll be getting MacGilla (I’ve already named it, ha). Then I just need to get some laser etching done so all the other geeks will know who the king is.

  • Scott Jennings

    > Mac is soooo much easier, everyone should switch, but they can’t b/c they’re not as r33t as us
    > Macians. There I said it. :) I have a Mac Pro at home running Bootcamp. I boot into Windows
    > when I game. I’m in OS X when I need to get actual work done. Life is grand.

    I will probably replace this laptop with a Mac laptop, but it still has a good few years of life left in it and if I brought home yet another new PC I would need to find a new place to live shortly thereafter.

  • http://www.beafraid.com Hellfire

    There’s a longstanding gripe from linux people about the lack of solid userspace ATI drivers. There was a “new” version released not more than 3 weeks ago that was being lauded as supermegacool, but I doubt it’s been rolled into Ubuntu quite yet. As of last week it wasn’t even in the gentoo repository so there must be something foul afoot. ATI and nVidia both have a real problem putting driver code out to the public, they seem to feel very, VERY threatened by the loss of trade supar-sekrits.

    Mac hardware is elegant, generally. Although in the enterprise it sucks wang, especially when you need to support people who are inept. It’s funny how a system that is perfect for nubs in a stand-alone setting swings wildly to the unusable in a group-stupid one.

    Me personally? I loathe OSX. I’ve used every version and most of the point released in between. Style over substance, oohs and aaahs over works vs doesn’t. Years before OSX I was using Linux, OpenBSD and Solaris in the enterprise. To say the transition to OSX was jarring is an understatement. The NFS implementation was a peach. “What do you mean the checkbox doesn’t work?” … Yes Mr. phone guy, the sum-total of NFS nuance can be completely encapsulated by “on” or “off”. Who needs settings! You don’t make a “mac system” work with an enterprise. You make the enterprise work for the mac. Of course that’s nothing a single user at home ever worries or cares about…

    Office 2008 for mac has been delayed again. For anyone who uses those types of apps that alone should keep you rooted in Windows. Office 2007 makes my heart go all a-flutter with it’s awesome.

  • http://larpscribethreadsnola.com SavageX

    Isn’t one Note TEH SEX? im hooked.

  • Mr_PeaCH

    There are laptops for which performing a powered-on docking maneuver works correctly? This is great news!!

    Or is it a Vista thing vs. XP… I swear, I have seen it time and time again… someone comes to me – IT grunt – with an unusual, not easily reproducable problem, and once I learn they are either a habitual dock/undocker or otherwise rely heavily on stand-by and/or hibernation in Windows XP I give them ‘the lecture’. Whereby they agree to forego these practices for a week or so and see if their problem goes away. Invariably it does. Or they decide whatever the problem was isn’t so bad that they’ll give up their precious eternity of seconds saved by live docking. It would be amusing if this was the one thing that Vista actually improves for laptop users.

  • http://www.beafraid.com Hellfire

    That depends on the docking mechanics as well.

    In the mid-90′s we used Toshiba Satellite “laptops” (all 14 lbs of them) and the dock that was part of the bundle. The funny thing is that Windows 95 worked pretty damned well – for the stuff that people used. PS/2 mouse, keyboard, monitor, 3.5″ floppy. All of which are simple analog devices that don’t have any tie to drivers or other software.

    We used the manufacturer’s “dock” hardware on some machines in the early 2000′s and the changing reliance on drivers and “fancy” stuff like USB completely boned the whole works. Be it under 98 or win2k.

    Following those debacles a friend of mine suggested a different approach which has worked perfectly to this day. USB port replicators – even when there is a custom dock available. By moving everything to a single-driver USB “appliance” everything just plain works again no matter how many times you plug/unplug. Depending on the quality of the dock you may even get software* that automatically bumps the hardware config to your “docked” settings when plugged in! The last one I used that had that feature was a 200$ belkin model around 2005.

    *Note: Software is XP only. :sadface:

  • Kardien

    I’m not savvy enough with X to know if this is a good solution, but it would work well enough for me.

    http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3597968.html

    You can set up multiple layouts in your xorg.conf–one for your laptop display and a second for your docked display. The layout can be specified when starting x by typing:

    startx — -layout Laptop

    You wouldn’t want to type that every time so add an alias to your .bashrc like:

    echo “alias lappyx=’startx — -layout Laptop’” >> ~/.bashrc
    echo “alias dockx=’startx — -layout Docked’” >> ~/.bashrc

    This assumes that your Linux installation does not boot directly into a gui login like xdm/gdm/kdm. With Ubuntu you can disable that with this command:

    update-rc.d -f wdm remove

  • http://www.onlinegamers.org Rasputin

    I’ve been annoyed with Ubuntu for a while.

    Mint seems to solve my annoyance with it.

    I just installed it and I like it better already.

  • Todd Ogrin

    “I tried Vista for a week and went back to XP. Whoever decided to green light the friggin ribbon concept should be banned from owning a computer for life.”

    Still running XP, but I installed Office 2007 on Monday. I spent the rest of the week going “where the hell is X?” where X is some Office function critical to the completion of a job task.

    Some icons are big. Some are small. Some have text. Some don’t have text. Some are stacked vertically, and some are stacked horizontally, and sometimes they’re stacked both ways. They’re grouped in ways I can’t predict. Then there’s the quick task bar and the big round button, when all I want is a File menu. I swear to God…I want Clippy back.

    …almost.

  • Artheos

    @Kardien

    Interesting, I’ll just need to get my translator to figure out what you just said!

  • http://mythicalblog.com Jeff Freeman

    These days, there’s almost nothing I do that Linux doesn’t support (and better than XP). Almost all web sorts of stuff.

    Except for (right now), Dungeon Runners.

    But it’s always some game, and my little hobby web game isn’t playable yet (if it were, and people were playing it, I’d probably spend all my time messing with it and zero time playing other games).

    Still, little as I play, I really ought to spend the next 2-day spyware hunt on going dual-boot.

    I think the only little bit of anti-Linux left in me is personal angst at how it uses every weird little keyboard character for some damned command line thing – as though I must learn to speak my computer’s language rather than it learning to speak mine. Just some of mine, too – I’m not even using the whole thing.

    Windows is guilty of that as well, but it feels like Window is trying; it’s just stupid. Versus Linux being real smart, and not even trying.

    But again, another weekend shot rooting-out spyware, trojans, and virii ought to take care of that angst.

    On the other hand, I worry that with Linux, I won’t know how to secure it (let alone clean-up the crap that gets through my improperly securing it), which at least I can do with XP.

  • RichVR

    Outlook?

  • http://ambernight.com Amber

    Me personally? I loathe OSX. I’ve used every version and most of the point released in between. Style over substance, oohs and aaahs over works vs doesn’t. Years before OSX I was using Linux, OpenBSD and Solaris in the enterprise.

    The number one difference I see between WIndows and OS X is that Windows constantly demands my attention whereas OS X makes the information available but otherwise leaves me alone. For example, every time I connect to my wireless network in Windows, I get one of those bubbles that pops up on the lower right of the screen informing me that I’ve connected to my wireless network. And it WILL NOT GO AWAY until I click on it. In OS X, there’s an icon on the top of my screen and when it’s not grayed out then I know I’m connected. In fact, those little popup bubbles are always popping up. It pops up when my antivirus is updated–why? Pop up when my antivirus *doesn’t* update! If I turn off my firewall, *pop.* Which is great…once. But it keeps popping up every 5 freaking minutes. If I turned off my firewall and you let me know, then let’s just assume I know what the hell I’m doing please. And yes I know you can edit your registry or whatever to change this behavior, but I shouldn’t have to. (And everything I’ve seen/read about Vista indicates the OS is in your face even more than before.)

    I’m sure we could do a feature-by-feature OS war where OS X sucks at stuff where Windows shines. For example, I like the feature where Windows just goes out and gets updates without bugging you. Apple should do that too. But my point is that what looks like a “style over substance” mentality is really a “I’m going to stay out of your way and let you do your work, call me if you need me” mentality.

  • http://www.dragonsmind.co.uk Dragon

    I get one of those bubbles that pops up … And it WILL NOT GO AWAY until I click on it.

    Seriously? This is what you have to complain about? You need to treat it like you would a project manager – ignore it long enough and it goes away of it’s own accord.

    But thanks Amber – this is about the only comment I understood in this thread so far – everything else read like Swahili to me. I really should stop working in IT – I have absolutely no fucking place here.

  • http://www.beafraid.com Hellfire

    You can configure that, Amber. It’s the one that says “notify when limited or no connectivity” in network properties. :P

    It took the OSX wireless client 2 major releases (that’s $200 to you and me) before you could even TRY connecting to a wpa/radius line correctly. Even then, it was iffy. The typical mac “expert” used to say to me, why don’t you just make the network like airport, so everyone can use it? Cue rage. Cue :rolleyes: Even simpler things, like a DHCP client that properly obeys RFCs and sets dns/domain/etc data when it registers. What’ll really bake your noodle is that the exact same client AND version worked correctly elsewhere in the shop.

    Mac’s are 1-click (right-click is the debil) and it “works”. Works is in the big air-quotes because anything outside the defaults is obfuscated or outright verboten. This for an OS that’s built upon one of the most elegantly versatile and tunable *nix variants there is.

    Windows has issues. Lots of them. Malware of all sorts and the omnipresent need for maintenance chief among them. It’s normally not a big problem for me, as someone who does know a little sumpin’ sumpin’ about this stuff. I schedule the stuff that needs to be scheduled and go about my biddness. At least prior to Vista. I spent more time on my other XP box googling for ways to get Vista to let me work than I actually did working. It was, shall we say, unpleasant.

    I dunno, maybe I’m just bitter. I worked in commercial printing and dealt with hundreds of militant mac people day in and day out who couldn’t operate a computer to save their lives. But they “know stuff” because they use a mac and it’s Unix. Yes, getting Quark to load properly makes you certified genius… hrm, bad example. That may actually be true.

    Anywho. If a mac works for you, it works. Computers are supposed to be productivity tools. If they make you more productive they’re doing their job. Just go easy on IT people when they tell you that your “easy to use” computer ain’t exactly easy to integrate properly.

  • http://www.beafraid.com Hellfire

    PS: Same with the firewall, spyware and AV warnings. There’s a button in that fancy “warning” dialog that pops up that asks if you have a solution you’d like to monitor yourself. If you say yes, you’ll never be pestered again.

    I’m assuming you disable your firewall in lieu of making a specific (permanent) exception for a particular item. It happens, no big whoop.

    If you’re using an app that doesn’t hook into the XP/Vista mechanics though, I’m not sure how much I’d trust it… Of the like 15 different commercial/OSS AV packages (and the half-dozen spyware ones) all properly work with XP’s System Manager applet deal thingy*.

    *Note: Not the technical term.

  • Anticorium

    (right-click is the debil)

    Then why does every new Mac ship with a four-button mouse?

  • Engels

    I somehow managed to get my x800 ATI card to work with Fedora Core 6, but I wasn’t able to do it with Ubuntu. I think FC managed to get the right drivers, and tweak them themselves right out of the box so that it’d play nice with Beryl/Windows Manager, but Ubuntu leaves it up to you, so you have to wrangle with unsupported drivers.

  • Viz

    Four-button mouse? Awesome! It only took them… 23 years to get with the program!

  • http://www.beafraid.com Hellfire

    I’ll mind my tongue-in-cheek from now on!

    The problem, as I understand it, with ATI and nVidia accelerated (ie usable) drivers is that they’re binary-only libs. So if there’s not one built that will run on your arch/compiler/etc. there’s nothing they can do to help you. Distro’s like gentoo usually have them in the unstable tree almost immediately, but loading them in is not for the “regular” folks who just want their crap to work.

    There’s also probably some insider efforts at work with certain distros as well. When Dell bundles your product as their OSS option you WILL have good drivers because you know your competition will. Dell may still ship your cards, but they’ll put a big asterisk on it that says “does not work with …” and you don’t want that press.

  • Brask Mumei

    The day I drop Windows is the day that a debugger that can rival MSVC ships. For working with multi million line programs, all the Linux “solutions”, often mere UI on top of GDB, are crap.

    The fact of the matter is that Window, Mac, and Linux are sitting at three corners of a triangle of suckage with the mysterious dream OS somewhere in the center. My only consolation is that three offerings are (usually, rant against DRM deleted) moving to that center, so in sufficient time it shouldn’t matter what our choice was.

    (I am eternally thankful that I pledged my soul to Atari decades ago, thereby allowing myself to view the current state of OSes in a purely objective fashion. The only downside is that the Atari logo resurrected itself as a “game publisher” and has led me to purchase a number of games I would have otherwise passed. And that Atari Teenage Riot album that I had to listen to for three months before I could enjoy it. A small price, however.)

  • Scot NZ

    I recently also tried updating an XP Prof machine to Linux when Ubuntu last came out. I was happy with the Boot from CD, the repartition went well along with the install. I went wit the 64bit verison for a Core 2 Duo. The issue I had was wireless USB, I tried the 2 or 3 I had, but none worked. The next thing you know, your on to open source projects that reverse enginnner USB drivers. I had a WTF reality check, why am I doing this and abandoned it. But it would be nice to move to Linux one day and have Window XP on a virtual machine, rather than the other way around on my home box, as I only need XP for games.

  • Boanerges

    Have you tried Fedora 7, Scott? It might have a functional driver. Fedora tends to be bleeding edge in everything.

    No OS is perfect. My gripes with XP were addressed in Vista but Vista is merely an OSX interface built on top of Windows. Why they decided to make it more like a Mac is beyond me. The only thing Vista seems to do better than XP is lock down the OS so malware isn’t as easy get on your machine. My older gaming desktop still runs XP and I won’t upgrade it but my wife’s new laptop runs Vista Home Premium and it does so fairly well (better than I would have thought with only 1GB RAM). Networking Vista Home is a giant bear tho.

    As for Macs… Steve Jobs likes to live in his own world. Reminds me of the creator of Digital,who was thrown out in the late 90s for still holding fast to the idea that PCs were a fad. Consider how long Apple had used RISC based PowerPC processors before finally jumping to the CISC based Intel ones (which probably had more to do with IBM having trouble making faster RISC but still…). And Apple still likes to consider itself superior to PCs despite the fact that is is now little more than a PC itself running a professionally made GUI on top of Linux (OSX is built on top of Linux but don’t tell Amber or she might think she’s less l337). In Steve Jobs’ world you do it Steve’s way or you wait for Steve to recognize he’s a bit off.

    The funny thing? If Apple were to open source OSX I think it could do far better than it does now AND give Windows a (small) run for its money. Linux has always lacked a good, unified GUI and Apple has it. Just gotta sell Steve on it…

  • http://ambernight.org Amber

    OSX is built on top of Linux but don’t tell Amber or she might think she’s less l337

    OS X is built on top of BSD Unix, not Linux. I’m told this distinction justifies my feelings of 1337ness. :)

  • Erieg

    Quick side track… How well does a Mac run pc games when you dual boot to windows? I would ditch my pc in a heart beat if I could run EQ2 on a Mac.

  • That Chip Guy

    If you’ve got the proper hardware, smoothly. You need enough hard drive space for a second partition (or multiple internal drives on a Mac Pro) and an adequate video card. I suspect that the video drivers Apple includes on the Boot Camp driver installation CD (which you burn yourself) aren’t perfectly optimized, but I have never encountered a problem running City of Heroes or Guild Wars on a previous-generation MacBook Pro.

    You should have absolutely no problem running EQII on a modern Mac.

  • http://ambernight.org Amber

    I run EQ2 on a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro with no problems. I don’t even have to turn the graphics down.

    @ThatChipGuy: Near as I can tell, the video drivers included on the Bootcamp CD are the same drivers you would download from the NVidia or ATI.

  • Erieg

    Time to hit the Apple Store on the way home. Thanks guys.

  • http://www.beafraid.com Hellfire

    The only drivers that matter from the bootcamp CD are the apple HID ones and possibly audio, depends on what machine – everything else is a stock part. Apple doesn’t actually “make” much of anything internally anymore. In fact in XP you’ll probably end up updating your video drivers after a clean install. ATI and nVidia drop new versions every 45 days or so and *usually* are well worth the upgrade if your card is current.

    And yes, BSD (OSX) is most definately NOT linux. You only get l337 points if you work from the command line though and eschew the whole gui thing entirely. :P

  • Jadagul

    Hellfire: Does it count if I only eschew the GUI when I’m on a Mac? I’m comfortable in the GUI for Windows and Linux, but whenever I try to use a Mac I get frustrated after a minute or two and start doing everything I can at the terminal.

  • http://www.beafraid.com Hellfire

    Essentially, yes. XP is simple and functional and Beryl … well it’s like little tiny baby jesus made of pixels.

    Doubleplusbonus if you never boot past single-user mode. That’s the real butterzone of OSX.

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  • Smokey

    I have a MBP which I’ve been messing with over the past couple to last longer then an hour while playing EQ2(works anywhere from 15min’s to almost 2 hrs). I have been tweeking the settings every 2 crashes for test logging, and haven’t been able to come up with any settings that are a definate solution for continious game play (1400×900 rez, anything lower I can’t get it to last longer the 20minutes)

    2.3C2D, 2GB, xp partition(21gb), x1600