Switching to Windows: Not as easy as you think

jhuangjiahua

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This is the way the world of Linux ends. Not with a whimper, but with a bang.
I grew up on a Unix command-line. BSD, I believe. I have dim memories of dialing up on a black and green Wyse50 terminal, sending e-mail with 'mail', reading newsgroups and playing Nethack in all its ASCII glory. I even became rather adept at vi. I was happy, ecstatic even, wrapped all snug and safe in my warm, green world of text and terminal beeps. But my friends all had 'IBM clones', and as I grew, so too did the technology. My early youth was tinged in the stark, cyan tones of CGA. My preteens were illustrated in glorious EGA, and as I came of age, so too did the startling, varied hues of SVGA. But I get ahead of myself. As a child, we did play games, primitive games, on these 'IBM clones'. Bolderdash, Centipede, Double-Dragon, Golden Axe. But no computer game could compare to the imagination of a ten-year-old boy! And so for the better part of my youth I remained shrouded by the eerie, flickering glow of scrolling text. My first experience with a 'Graphical User Interface' was an X-terminal. Then it was Red Hat Linux all the way, until Ubuntu walked itself onto my desktop nearly a year ago... and there things should have ended.








      Note: Well, there was Windows. There was always Windows. But for comedic effect, the author chooses not to mention the long, heavy years spent using Microsoft Windows for School, University and Work. Now please continue reading, happily oblivious to this devious bit of artistic license.

Except that life does not always go according to plan. You see, I was typing one day, at work. Just typing, tapping the hours merrily away, and suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, my computer rebooted. It reset, then reset again, and continued to reset, sometimes making it past POST, sometimes not, but certainly never managing to boot an OS. And the CD drive was making weird, grinding noises. "Calm down, little computer", I cooed softly, but it didn't, so I jerked the power cord out with a vindictive snarl, and then unplugged the CD-ROM. Then gently, gently, ever so gently, I turned the PC on again. There was a loud bang, a nasty smell (think burnt cabbage) and a lot of smoke billowed out from the hole where the CD-ROM used to be. I was a little surprised. Upon further investigation I discovered that a tiny black thing had fallen off the motherboard and hit a tiny, round white thing with copper wires running around it. Curious, I sticky-taped the little black thing back onto the motherboard, in approximately the same place it had been before it fell off, and tried the power switch again. Nothing. At this point, the idea occurred to me that maybe my computer was broken. Luckily, we had plenty of spare parts around the office. Briefly, I considered transplanting my hard drive into one of the spare machines. Then I noticed the Windows XP OEM license key stuck to the side of a nearly empty chassis, and had a better idea! "Oh ho!" I thought to myself, "Why not use this opportunity to try a fresh install of this 'Windows XP' I keep hearing so much about." So I grabbed an all-in-one Intel board, and a spare 200GB IDE hard-drive we had kicking around, then rooted through the cookie jar for some RAM chips that I jammed into slots until I heard clicks. Then I rooted through the trash pile until I found a Windows XP OEM CD, and we were all set for this grand electronic experiment!

Installation
Windows installation occurs in two parts. The first half is text based, consisting of a blue screen with white text. Not exactly pretty, and not particularly functional. It spent a long time 'copying system files' before it asked me any questions. Copying them where, though? I had an unformatted hard-drive in this machine, so I suspect the RAM. Microsoft should also be aware that this long, textually silent wait might frustrate Distro junkies, who are used to installers that begin asking questions almost immediately, or even boot straight into a usable system and allow a hard-drive install to be performed in the background, at their leisure. The next step was the partitioner, and it was a bit of a let down. Anyone who complains about a Linux partitioner obviously hasn't tried installing Windows. Your only choice of file system is FAT32 or NTFS, and although you can create as many partitions as you like, you can only format the one partition - the partition you select for the Windows installation. Obviously, this gives you no chance to create a separate home or boot partition, or even a swap partition. Apparently Windows automatically creates a swap file for you on the main partition. A user with suitable expertise could create a separate partition for the swap file after installation... but this is still an annoyance. Worse, the Windows partitioner hoses your MBR, and installs it's own MBR with no attempt to detect and provide for any other operating systems you may have installed. Worse yet, the Windows partitioner tried to tell me my 200GB IDE drive only had a 130GB capacity. I figured I could always extend the partition later if need be, and installed anyway. Windows copied the base system over and then asked for a reboot. Unfortunately, it could not boot off partition it had created for itself. Figuring the problem was related to Windows not recognizing the drive, and not wanting to waste time trouble-shooting, I simply ripped it out and found an old 20GB drive instead. Windows made no complaints about this older technology, and installed without any obvious problems.

The second stage of the installer is graphical, which is a nice touch, but it does have a rather irritating way of interrupting installation every 15 minutes or so to ask questions about language, time zone, networking, and so forth. I would prefer if all pertinent questions were asked up front. You are prompted for an administrator password, which I suppose is analogous to the 'root' account. You are also prompted to create a 'user' account. Do not be fooled, the 'user' account also has full root access. Windows hardware detection leaves a lot to be desired as well. Aside from the installation issue with the hard-drive, Windows was also unable to detect my graphics controller and sound-card. Intriguingly, Windows offered to automatically adjust my video settings for 'better performance'. I was not given a choice in the matter. It adjusted my desktop from the default 640x480 with 16 colours to a glorious 640x480 with 16 colours ... Gee. Well, I suppose it's the thought that counts.

In comparison, an Ubuntu 5.10 live CD tested on the same hardware correctly detected the 200GB hard-drive, sound card, graphics controller and monitor. Within minutes of sticking in the CD, I was booting into a fully functional 1280x1024 desktop with sound, Internet access, even 3d acceleration! For shame, Microsoft. With more and more consumers purchasing computers without an operating system, or with Linux pre-installed, you can't expect OEM system builders to pick up the slack for you any more.

In order to get the hardware working, I had to visit the Intel website and download the required drivers. Finding out what hardware you have is a difficult process under Windows. With most Linux distributions,it is often as simple as typing lspci. Not so under Windows. Instead you have to open up the 'Control Panel', find your way to the 'System' applet, look for the Hardware tab, then launch the 'device manager'. That's a lot of clicking, for such a simple task!

After a long download, a lengthly install, and a reboot, we were in business. Almost. Windows still did not correctly detect my monitors optimal resolution, instead opting to give me 1024x768. Trivial, I know, but many little problems add up to an overall lack of polish.

Network Setup
During install, Windows had asked me whether I wished to join a domain or a workgroup. I selected workgroup at the time, figuring I could join it to my work domain later. Like everything in Windows, setting up networking is a graphical affair. Moreover, I had expected Active Directory integration to be a strong point of Windows. It had previously taken me 2 hours to add my Ubuntu machine to the Windows domain and I hoped Windows would cut the effort required substantially.

I was wrong.

Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 comes with a wizard you can use to join client computers to the domain. You use this wizard by visiting a web page running on the server and clicking 'Add my computer to the network'. It didn't work. It bailed out, claiming it could not talk to the domain controller... Lies! All lies! If it couldn't talk to the domain controller, how was I able to visit a website hosted on that self-same server?

I tried using the client-side tools to connect to the domain. At first it failed, claiming there wasn't a machine account for the computer. Then, after I created a machine account, it complained that it couldn't join the domain, because a machine account already existed. Make up your mind, Microsoft! I did eventually get it sorted. After some two hours of chasing dead-ends, it turned out to be a DNS problem, related to a badly configured DHCP server. So we can't really blame Windows for that, except inasmuch as unhelpful error messages are concerned. But things were not about to get any better...

After finally managing to join the computer to the domain, I tried logging on using my very underused domain user account. Windows seemed to authenticate successfully, but then just sat there at the login screen saying 'Applying your personal settings'. I walked away, heated up a small mushroom pizza, and ate it. I came back, perhaps 15 minutes later. It was still sitting there at the login screen, 'loading my settings'.

I wanted to know what was happening, so out of habit I hit Ctrl+Alt+F1. Of course, this was a no go. It seems that virtual consoles aren't enabled in Windows by default. In fact, subsequent Google searches seemed to suggest that Windows doesn't come with this functionality at all! Your GUI is all you get. Perhaps new and inexperienced users would not need this functionality, or even notice it was missing, but I'm sure Linux 'power users', attempting to switch to Windows, will miss it.

Without being able to use a virtual console to kill the login process, I had no option but to do a hard-reset of the machine, and try logging in again. This time it popped up an error message saying it couldn't make a copy of my roaming profile, and it was going to give me a temporary default one instead. Why could it not load my regular profile? No reason was given. I logged out once more, logged back in again, and behold, this time it copied over my profile with no complaints. Or did it?















User Experience
Okay, so I was finally logged in. There were icons all over the desktop. Icons I certainly had never placed there. With a growing sense of trepidation, I opened 'My Documents', a folder which should have been empty. It wasn't. It was full of my boss's stuff. I double-checked the profile information in Active Directory to make sure I hadn't inadvertently typed in the wrong profile path. I hadn't. Windows had simply magnanimously decided to swap my own My Documents folder with that of another user in the system. Now that is a truly disastrous bug.

Worse, the Windows desktop was ugly! I mean, uglier than usual. The local account I'd used before joining the domain had seemed nice enough. That is, except for the blue and green colour scheme, which is too similar to Linspire for my liking. But now, it was obvious something had gone wrong. All the menus and dialogs were a flat, slug grey, and some of the widgets, in particular the minimize and close buttons, were very, very tiny! Very, very, very tiny! There wasn't any obvious way to change the size of those widgets in the preferences menu, so I tried editing the Explorer config file directly. Bad idea! Turned out it was in binary. Not exactly user friendly...

No matter. Time to see what software we get with a standard Windows install. Not much, as it turns out. I wasn't expecting a lot from a single CD install, but the complete lack of applications was rather scary, considering the normal price tag on a copy of Windows. Microsoft did include a text editor, but I don't know why. It had no options for syntax highlighting or automatic indenting, let alone 'advanced' features such as whether or not to use spaces instead of tabs, and if so, how many. This renders it rather useless for anything beyond basic editing of config files, and given that Windows config files all seem to be in binary formats anyway, it's hard to imagine why they even bothered including it. I'll stick to vim, thank you very much. There are versions compiled for Windows.

Windows' only drawing program, 'MS Paint', is so basic it would turn even the most accomplished digital artist into little more than a kid with crayons. In a similar fashion, the default e-mail client 'Outlook Express', is barely functional, and the web-browser, 'Internet Explorer' is famed for its ability to destroy your entire computer.

The Windows command-prompt is called 'cmd', and it uses old DOS commands you are probably not familiar with. However, this is not likely to be much of a problem, as it is extremely limited, and not particularly worth using. Very few Windows programs are scriptable, anyway. Again, this appears to be an area where Microsoft have made our choices for us, deliberately neglecting an area of functionality they do not expect or want people to use.

Package Selection and Management
Well, time to add some open-source goodness to this bare-bones Windows desktop. Firefox would be a good place to start. Sadly, the Windows GUI for package management is more or less useless. It shows what you have installed, and lets you uninstall packages, but the 'add software' option simply prompts you to insert a CD. There do not seem to be any official Windows repositories at all, in fact. Software is scattered all over hundreds of websites. Google can ease the pain slightly, but it is a poor substitute for apt-get/Synaptic.

As it happens, I already knew the web address of the Firefox website, so I could skip a step here. I downloaded the Win32 binaries from the Firefox site and ran the built-in installer. It seemed to install correctly, that is, there were no error messages, but something obviously went wrong. Whenever I launched Firefox the program would run, but I couldn't type anything into the address bar. The menus were all frozen, too. I tried Opera instead, and that seemed to work fine, as did Internet Explorer. But no go with Firefox, no matter what I tried.

Giving up on Firefox, I tried to install a scripting language. My personal preference is for Python. Once again, you have to download the binaries and install manually, by double-clicking on the install file. But Python would not work, either! It would not even finish installing, and I was unable to determine why, as the error message simply stated that 'Installation could not be completed'. I spent 20 minutes mucking around in safe mode, and tried downloading the file again to make sure the first run hadn't been corrupted, but neither solved the problem. In the end I gave up on Win32 Python.

The installation of 'genuine' Microsoft software, in this case Microsoft Office 2003, was much smoother. Ignoring the obnoxious copy-protection, which is par for the course, the installer was modular in nature, allowing me to choose exactly what I wanted to install, install on first-use, and what I wanted to disable completely. That was a nice touch. After installation rough edges once again began to show. The post-installation screen informed me that Windows was caching the install files, which would take up some few hundred megabytes, but gave me an option to delete them. I gladly took this option, and deleted the installation files. However, when I later tried to run Office as a different user, it ran the Office installer again, without telling me why, and then bugged out complaining that it couldn't find the installation files. Keeping separate configuration files for each user is one thing. But needing to rerun the installer is something I find quite peculiar.

I do understand that one of the main advantages of Windows is the massive amount of commercial software available that hasn't been, and likely won't be, ported to Linux. Nevertheless, Linspire's "Click 'N Run" and Valve Software's "Steam" service have demonstrated that commercial software does not necessarily preclude online delivery. And that doesn't even begin to cover the host of open source software also available for Windows, that could be more easily managed by a half-way decent package manager. I've had more trouble getting my software running on Windows machines than I ever have under Linux.

Performance and User Experience
I'm not going to talk about benchmarking here. It's not the kind of performance I'm interested in. Instead, we're looking at all round ease of use. How does it handle, how does it feel.

It may be petty, but the Windows desktop irritates me. There is a very limited selection of themes [2], and a very limited selection of colour-schemes (read: 3). Additional themes requires the use of third party software which, once again, has to be hunted down with Google and installed by hand. The task bar can be positioned at the top of the screen, or the bottom, or either side. But it cannot be split, and it doesn't support 'applets'. You can find odd little system tray utilities if you Google around, but the vast majority of these appear to be, or be bundled with, spyware. Best rewards go to those who can just take the desktop at face value, and either work with it or around it.

While navigating the desktop, there was often noticeable lag before before menus popped open for the first time, or folders were populated in Explorer. This gave the desktop a sticky, almost 'soggy' feeling. Mind you, Gnome and KDE can do the same thing, especially on older hardware or machines without a great deal of memory. But in such situations, a speed freak can always switch to Xfce4, or Fluxbox, or even recompile everything with hardware optimizations. Perhaps a little extreme for everyday office use, but I dare say Windows gamers, who already need to disable most non-critical system services to squeeze performance out of anything but the most modern hardware, would be overjoyed at the ability to drop down to a less resource hungry desktop when the need for speed overtakes them.

The desktop provides you with a lot of feedback. Pop ups when your firewall isn't on. Pop ups when your anti-virus program isn't running. Popups when your anti virus program is running (if it does not report its status to the Windows Security Center). Well, fine. Security is important, and most people don't know nearly as much about it as they need to. On the other hand, most people know far more about it than they ought to, if the software they use had been designed properly.

Not that it's particular viable to run a non-administrator account under Windows. I had trouble with certain software packages, like MYOB (Australian Business Management/Accounting software), attempting to write files to outside my home directory, places a non-administrator user does not have write access. And this is modern software, updated with every change in Australian business law, not just some legacy Windows 9x application.

On slightly more positive note, the XP media 'experience' is a little smoother than it is under many Linux distributions. Microsoft is obviously able to afford the licenses necessary to include out-of-the-box support for certain restricted media formats. Notably MP3s, and Microsoft's own WMA and WMV formats. Seeing as the majority of streaming media on the Internet at the moment uses these formats, Windows users do have an easier time of it. Just like Linux, Windows will not play DVDs out of the box. You need third party decryption software, which luckily seems included with every DVD drive you buy anyway.

Conclusion
I must say, I am not particularly impressed by Windows XP. To be fair, it has made great strides forward in both stability and usability. Security is improving, but still has a long way to go. And, of course, the closed source nature of the project prevents anyone but Microsoft from making improvements.

The 'task orientated' interface is fairly intelligent, and in my personal opinion a little less quirky than Gnome, and fairly user friendly, as far as common desktop tasks are concerned. From a GUI point of view, it may even edge out over Linux. System administration is another matter. But if you don't mind everything being several mouse-clicks deep, and take the time to discover the obscure places Windows puts its configuration options, it's really not that bad. But I daresay that unless you specifically need some feature offered by Windows only software, the average user is much better off staying with their favourite Linux distro.

      Written by Simon Gerber for Mad Penguin™

      Disclaimer: Kudos to NewsForge for the idea, and Microsoft for the inspiration. I also declare that all events described in this piece are factually correct, they really, honestly happened. Just not necessarily all at the same time, on the same computer.

MMMIX

感同身受啊!