[plug] Changing from Win to Linux (was Re: Nick Miller challenge)

[Peter Wright]

Note: copied to Nick.

On Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 10:09:16AM +0800, Jonathon Bates wrote:
> Guys wanna help me out here?
[ snip ]

Okay, I think it's mostly covered by the others, but I'll add a bit.

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 09:59:18 +0800
> From: Nick Miller <nick.miller at wanews.com.au>
> To: Jonathon Bates <batesy at batesy.ii.net>
> Subject: Re: Lexmark Printers
> 
> Hi,
> 
> A couple of people have written to challenge me on the issue of Linux
> software, along the general lines of 'Anything Windows can do, Linux can
> do'.

Um. Pardon me while I put on my Clinton hat:
<clinton>Can you define "can"?</clinton>

Actually, that could also be my Bill Gates hat I guess. :)

(If you don't understand the above, don't worry about it. I admit it, it's
not really very funny. Except to me *grin*.)

> So here's an idea for an article in the West. Answer the challenge, I'll
> print the results.
> 
> The Linux challenge.
> 
> Here's a list of the programs on my PC at the moment that I regularly use.
> Which ones can be replaced, with no loss of functionality,
                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Most notably in the office suite area, this is a requirement that is
difficult/impossible to fulfill. I'll presume you'll accept "with no
noticeable loss of functionality for the 'average' user" as a consolation
prize :).

See below for more specific information on this front.

> by a Linux alternative? And what Linux product, specifically (so I can
> verify claims).

Okay. You may find yourself looking at a lot of sites though.

> - Word

As already mentioned in this thread, probably the best-known freely
available office suite running on Linux that is _mostly_ compatible with
Microsoft's office suite is StarOffice 5.2. This is available as a free
download for Linux, Solaris, several other Unixes, I _think_ MacOS, and
Windows (so you can even try it out without leaving Windows).

NB. StarOffice 5.2 _will_ lose in direct comparison with Microsoft Office
on the same machine (under Windows). MS Office 2000 is faster, slicker,
more functional and prettier. Even MSOffice '97 is, though the margin is
not as noticeable. However, I'd make and emphasise one very very important
point - you can legally acquire a copy of StarOffice without paying any
money[0].

SO5.2 is quite decent and perfectly usable. It also imports most MSOffice
documents reasonably well (I use it purely to read MSOffice documents that
various annoying people insist on sending me).

You can find more information (and download links) at
http://www.staroffice.com/

Sun has released the StarOffice source code under an open-source license
and there is further work proceeding on version 6.0. See
http://www.openoffice.org/ for more information. I'm not sure how reliable
these builds are, and I don't think they're appropriate for end-users at
this stage. I'm not certain about that though, they're probably worth
trying. SO5.2 is perfectly stable for me, though.

KOffice is another free (open-source) office suite which is part of the KDE
project. This is a fairly decent and quite usable option which is improving
all the time, but I think would be safe to say is certainly not appropriate
for a hardcore "real office" environment yet. However, it's probably okay
for a low-level home user that isn't too fussy. The main point in its
favour over StarOffice is that it's a LOT smaller, faster and lighter.

There are also a couple of good commercial Linux office suites. Corel (best
known as the creators of WordPerfect) have released their office suite
under Linux. From a review I read a while back, Corel Office 2000 is
probably the "best" Linux office suite from a performance and features
perspective. It also has excellent MSOffice import capabilities if that's
what you're mainly concerned about.

http://linux.corel.com/

Applixware has sold a UNIX/Linux office suite for quite a while now. I know
very little about it and have never used it, thus can't really comment on
it other than to say it's been around for a long time and it must be
reasonably decent otherwise it'd be dead ;).

http://www.vistasource.com/products/axware

> - Eudora

There are a LOT of free (and non-free, like Eudora) mail clients available
for Linux. In the interests of being specific and naming one with
functionality close to Eudora, I'll say KMail (part of KDE, see
http://kmail.kde.org/).

Though once again, there are a _lot_ of these.

Oooh... actually, I just stumbled across this:

http://www.itworld.com/App/334/lw-11-legacy/

which, if you read, you will find particularly useful and applicable.
Remember that the article is about four months old, and kmail and balsa
would both have improved in the interim. 

> - Microsoft Explorer (inc. news reader)

I use the latest Konqueror (KDE's equivalent to MS Internet Explorer) as my
primary graphical browser on Linux now. Very fast, nice, looks good, does
Java and Flash stuff (using the Linux Netscape flash plugins that
Macromedia have released, which are a few versions behind the latest - I
don't really know much about this though, as I don't use Flash or its ilk).

Also, Netscape 6.01 and Opera 5 are both very good browsing options for
Linux and both can be downloaded for free. These programs are also
available on Windows so you can do a direct comparison between them and IE.

http://www.konqueror.org/
http://home.netscape.com/download/
http://www.opera.com/

> - Napster

GNapster. http://www.gnapster.org/

> - MusicMatch (I use it to play MP3s, with trippy visualisations, and
> compile them to burn a CD)

Purely to _play_ MP3s (or Ogg Vorbis, or quite a few other sound formats):
xmms (X Multimedia System)

"What is XMMS? XMMS is a multimedia player for unix systems. XMMS stands
for X MultiMedia System and can play media files such as MP3, MODs, WAV and
others with the use of Input plugins." 

http://www.xmms.org/

> - CD copier

For CD burning, etc.: XCDRoast.

http://www.xcdroast.org/

For "ripping" CDs, I'd recommend Grip:
http://www.nostatic.org/grip/

> - Ulead Media Studio Pro - video capture, professional edit with plenty
> of transitions, can handle DV, MPEG-1 and -2, MJPEG, AVI etc.

I don't know of any Linux programs, free or commercial, in this niche.
And it is a niche :).

> - Quicktime

There are a number of freely available programs that will play various MPEG
video formats, but the key thing to remember is that there are an
assortment of proprietary and closed file formats for video stuff in use -
and if it's not open, you can't write an open-source player for that file
format.

The classic example here is Quicktime format using the Sorenson codec
(pretty much all movie trailers, etc. are released using this codec
nowadays). So until Apple either decide to release a Sorenson plugin for
xanim (see below)... or release Quicktime for Linux... :), you can't watch
Sorenson-codec movies on Linux.

xanim (http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/home.html) is probably the oldest player
of this kind. The interesting thing is that because it is _not_ completely
open source (the author includes optional binary-only plugins for some
formats), it probably supports more file formats than any true open source
player. It even supports non-Sorenson Quicktime, so technically it is a
workable answer to your question above :). See the page for more info.

> And games (I'll leave it generic to make things slightly fairer):

Yes, that would be nice *grin*.

> 3D pool

A search for "pool" on the LGT (see below) returned:

GTulpas - http://www.suse.cz/gtulpas/  , which is 3D.

Although the site doesn't have a binary download and I'm having some
trouble building it at the moment, apparently due to Debian's xmesalib
being out of date... hrmmmm....

GtkPool - http://gtkpool.seul.org/  , which is not 3D, but I'll mention it
anyway for the hell of it. I've just downloaded it and am playing it right
now... it's actually quite amusing :).

You might be interested in reading a review of GtkPool:
http://news.tucows.com/ext2/99/12/articles/ext212311999.shtml

> Racing game

A search for "racing" on the LGT returned:

TuxRacer - http://www.tuxracer.com/

This is stable, _great_ fun, looks great and I thoroughly recommend it.
Although it doesn't involve cars, will that disappoint you :)? From memory,
there's a Windows version as well.

TORCS - http://torcs.free.fr/

Haven't tried this. Looks all right though.

SpeedX - http://www.isty-info.uvsq.fr/~medernac/SpeedX.GNU.html

Looks to be very much in development, but playable.

<bleedingobvious>
NB. All of the above are free games, and should not be judged in the same
way that you'd judge commercial games with multi-million-dollar budgets.
</bleedingobvious>

> first-person shoot-em-up

Okay, now it gets easy *ahem*.

Currently I have running (very nicely) on my Linux machine (all hardware
accelerated):

Quake II
Quake III: Arena (and Team Arena)
Unreal Tournament
Kingpin: Life of Crime
Descent 3
Soldier of Fortune
Heavy Gear 2

Heretic II is also available, but I don't have a copy.

I still haven't got Half-Life working under Wine yet, though that's
_allegedly_ possible.

Soon to arrive are Linux ports of Deus Ex and Tribes 2 (T2 is not a Loki
port though).

http://www.lokigames.com/

> God game

Not sure what your definition of a "God game" is, but some of the following
should qualify:

Civilisation: Call To Power
Sim City 3000 Unlimited
Heroes of Might and Magic III
Myth 2: Soulblighter

...all of which I have running fine on my machine, all of which are Loki
ports. Starcraft is one of the relatively few Windows games that are known
to run quite well under Wine (see http://www.linuxgames.com/starcraft.php3).

See more about Wine below.

Also FreeCiv (http://www.freeciv.org/) is worth a look. It's a free
software game project that's been around for a while. As the site says:
"generally comparable to Civilisation II, as published by Microprose".


Further pointers:

http://www.linuxgames.com/
http://www.happypenguin.org/   (also known as The Linux Game Tome (LGT))

These sites will have some information on the other commercial games that
are being released soonish with a Linux port.

You can download playable demos of most of the Loki games from

http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/loki/demos/

You can also download Linux "patches", so you can install and run on Linux
from a Windows game CD, for some of these games:

http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/loki/patches/

> Obviously I use plenty more programs, but these are the ones I regularly
> go back to.

Would you like to mention some of the others? Might be able to suggest
replacements for a few of those, too...

Accounting/Finances (eg. like Quicken) - GnuCash - http://www.gnucash.org/

Playing DVDS - Xine - http://xine.sourceforge.net/

Photo editing (eg. like Photoshop) - Gimp - http://www.gimp.org/

> Arguing that you can dual-boot two operating systems, Windows and Linux,
> is no answer in my opinion.

Sometimes it's the only answer if there's a Windows product that you really
want/need and for which there's just no Linux replacement. Quicktime is the
only one left for me, and I've gone for months at a time without finding a
Quicktime file I really wanted to see.

I think most new Linux users go through a phase (sometimes a very long
phase :) of having a machine with both a Linux and a Windows partition.
It's nothing to be ashamed of, it's just sensible. I'd recommend the same
thing if you're changing over from _any_ operating system to a new one (eg.
Win98 to Win2000).

Rather than dual-booting, there are some other options if there are one or
two or three Windows programs you just can't do without. I'll just list
them here and make a brief comment, you can look at the sites to find out
more about them.

http://www.winehq.com/ - the WINE project. Can be used to run Windows
binaries on Linux, and you don't even need the Windows OS. Good enough to
run a whole sh*tload of apps at the moment, including some parts of MS
Office '97.

http://www.vmware.com/ - VMWare, enables you to run a "virtual PC" on which
you can install Windows and run Windows apps inside Linux. Not suitable for
most commercial games or any other performance-critical apps, but good
enough to run most "productivity" apps - eg. MS Office - flawlessly.

http://www.netraverse.com/ - Win4Lin - I don't know much about this, but
apparently it's considered very very good at what it does - running Windows
apps at close to native speed (unlike VMWare, which runs them relatively
slowly because they're running inside a virtual machine). I believe it
needs a Windows install (like VMWare and unlike Wine). Doesn't support
DirectX at all - you'd have to try Wine for that.

> Dual-boot is a pain.

Indeed it is. The idea is to steadily (not in a huge rush) eliminate all
the reasons you need to reboot.

As I mentioned, Quicktime is the last remaining reason for me to reboot
into Windows (well, all right, if you exclude Aliens vs Predator :). The
last thing I eliminated was DVD playing - I now can play DVDs (free of
region encoding) very nicely using Xine as mentioned above.

> Logically, there is no reason to switch to Linux unless A) Linux offers
> me everything that Windows does, or B) Linux does something useful that
> Windows can't.

Now this is the interesting bit...

_Why_, you might ask, would anyone switch operating systems, specifically
from Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP to Linux (or FreeBSD, if you want to be nice
to the *BSDers :)?

Your first suggested answer is not correct, at least not in and of itself.
"So what if X does everything Y does?" the user asks. "Y does everything Y
does as well, and I'm already using Y." 

 From my experience, people will start trying to use Linux even if they
know some of the stuff they do under Windows cannot be done under Linux -
and the reason is usually not quite a soulless as "Linux does something
useful that Windows can't."

Technically, almost all of the Tasks(tm) that I do under Linux I _could_ do
under Windows. It would involve more pain and awkwardness, it would be
slower and more difficult, it would be much more irritating and unstable,
and it would be slower. Did I mention it would be slower? :) But I could
still do them. Most of them. And I would have the bonus of not having to
reboot in order to view Sorenson-codec Quicktime movies and play Aliens vs.
Predator. So why don't I?

(don't you love rhetorical questions? ;-)

> Interested to hear your response. Also generally on the topic: is Linux
> appropriate for the average home user?

Depends what you define as "the average home user".

> Or is it still a specialist OS?

Depends what you define as "a specialist OS". *grin*

No, sorry, I'm really not trying to be difficult just for the hell of it.
It's just that it's a question that doesn't have a universally applicable
answer.

I'd say a fairly accurate (and short) way of detecting whether a person
_might_ be willing and able to use Linux is by asking them the question(s):

"Do you enjoy just playing/mucking around and having fun with your
computer? Do you enjoy installing and experimenting with new applications?
Do you like to spend time customising and/or tweaking your computer's look
and feel, so you can work more effectively with it (or at least enjoy
working with it more)?"

If the answers to all these questions are yes, this person might well be
willing and able to at least try Linux, and possibly use Linux in
preference to Windows.

If the answer to all these questions is a panicked "no, I don't fiddle with
my computer, I might break something," or just a blank look, then I'd say
definitely not. And you might want to check that person's VCR, you'll
probably find it blinking twelve. ;-)

> Bear in mind I write a column for the general PC consumer, not the
> hobbyist or IT professional.

Some of your audience will certainly fall into the category of potential
(or even current) Linux users. And if they make the effort to read a
newspaper column about computers, there's probably a significantly higher
chance they're at least not in the blinking-twelve group.

I think you'd find enough of them may have already noticed Linux
pocketbooks in newsagents, for example, and would be interested in seeing
an (informed) perspective on Linux from someone like yourself.

> Caveat: Because of the Easter break, I need responses by Tuesday evening!

Hope the above provided some food for thought. Feel free to email me
personally if you'd like clarification on anything I waffled about.

> Cheers,
> Nick

As part of your research :), you might find it very much worth reading "In
The Beginning Was The Command Line", quoted from below.

Pete.

[0] I make this particular point because I am fully aware, and I think
everyone on the PLUG list is aware, that a significant percentage, perhaps
even a majority, of Windows users do not pay for their (commercial)
software - ie. they pirate it. I have a wide circle of friends and
acquaintances who use Microsoft Office at home, and I do not know _one_
_person_ who has purchased a retail copy. For these people (and those who
use MSOffice at work), price is simply not an issue... but it should be.
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

--
What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and
enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell
you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can
change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you
don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.
           -- Neal Stephenson, "In The Beginning Was The Command Line"
	      http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html