IOS – Andrew the Hopeless Techie

Tag Archive: IOS

Linux, Windows and the ever-changing world of Operating Systems

Introduction

The term Operating System refers to the software used by a Hardware device to allow the user to interface with hardware and other software suites. Among these Operating Systems, often referred to as OS for short, many different varieties exist. Among these variations 4 Specific varieties are most popular, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and Mac OS.

Among even these 4 primary OS variants they are even subvariants and other deviations based on the main OS. A perfect example of this is Linux which is a Variant itself from the UNIX OS which is not as popular as it was at the time Linux was created. From Linux, different variations or distributions as they are called in the Linux Community exist which either add specific functionality or features to Linux or are target at being more secure or as small as possible so they can be embedded in devices like computers in cars and the like.

The above statement is an overall simplification of what Linux is but going into depth would be an entire post all on its own and the purpose of the paragraph above is to give a brief understanding of Linux. If you would like more information on Linux specific to what it is or how it works differently then say Windows you can google this as a wealth of information to this topic exists.

Windows is probably what most people who use a computer are familiar with it holds the largest share of the OS market as of the time I am writing this post. Again the point here is not to go into the background of Windows plenty of information already exists to this point. One thing that is important to point out though, is that due to its large market share a majority of Games and software are coded for Windows (though MacOS has a version of most of the same key software). This fact is what keeps most businesses from switching to a free alternative such as Linux.

You may have noticed I did not mention MacOS in much Detail above and this is because there are mountains of information comparing Windows to Mac OS online and me adding to that pile seemed irrelevant.

This brings me to the point of this post (I know a long-winded build-up), how Linux and Windows (along with a few others I mentioned above) have changed from the point of view of a consumer and not so much a developer (because I am far from one) or IT professional.

For the sake of making it easier to type future references to the Operating System may simply be referred to as OS.

Notable Changes

Linux

Linux I would say has undergone the biggest change here given its roots and what it is now, everyone uses it weather you realize it or not, how you use it may differ from person to person.

Without going into the entire history lets just say Linux when it was conceived was not very friendly to anyone other than developers and required a health understanding of the command line. It has undergone significant improvements in this area and now the average user could if they so chose to sit down at a Linux desktop and never touch the command line.

Variations of Linux such as Ubuntu have made this even easier taking a lot of the complex tweaking out of sight of the end-user allowing a more “it just works” type of experience out of the box. As this makes Linux more accessible to more people manufacturers start to see the value in adding support for Linux and some even start coding drivers to make their hardware work on Linux which in turn makes Distributions like Ubuntu even better and more seamless.

As is typical in Linux there are multiple flavors of Ubuntu and even some Distributions that are spun off Ubuntu. This may seem at first glance that it is rather redundant and in some aspects Chaotic, well if it was done poorly this would be the case for sure. I only mention this because the Debian Based Distro I will be talking about here is PoP_OS which is based on Ubuntu but has some notable differences. For the use of talking about Red Hat-based systems, I will use either Fedora 32 or CentOS 8. As the name implies Fedora and CentOS 8 are based on Red Hat and Ubuntu on Debian.

Linux is a very powerful tool and the more time that goes by the better it gets, now most of my use cases are supported by Linux something that just 10 years ago was very shotty. Ubuntu has even reached out to Microsoft and has co-developed a feature allowing you to run a Ubuntu shell on Windows. While this feature right now is primarily useful to developers they are slowly starting to add more and more features to it making Windows have an almost entirely feature-rich Subsystem.

The new subsystem should not be confused with a full Linux kernel as it lacks some of the more advanced features of a full-fledged Linux system. This brings us to the section of Windows something of a controversial topic as of late, we will dip into that a bit below.

Windows

I will briefly touch on this as most everyone who has used a computer in the past 10 years has at some point come in contact with some version of Windows.

While generally Windows had taken a more traditional software approach and released a new full release every 2-4 years, it has lately moved to a more modern approach both with its ups and downs. While Linux on the other had remained ever changing the core way to acquire and use it has not changed much over the years.

When Windows first entered the scene there was a command-line OS called DOS (Disk Operating System), back in those days HDD (Hard Disk Drives) was not common and in fact often cost quite a bit for a, by today’s standards, laughable storage size. You need to remember that back in these days computer code was small and in fact, an entire OS could be booted from a 1.4mb Floppy Disk (or less in the beginning), so many PCs (Personal Computers) were shipped with either 2 3.5″ floppy drives or one 5.25″ and one 3.5″ drive. This allowed for one drive to be able to boot the OS and the other for loading programs like a Word Processor or early game.

Fast forward to Windows 95, this was the first version of Windows that did not rely on DOS being installed and loading Windows from the command line as all previous versions did. While Windows 3.1 for example had the option to load automatically at the start of the machine it still relied on DOS to boot. Windows 95 did not entirely get rid of DOS in fact due to the small nature of DOS it was a core part of Windows 95 and in fact, would not be until Windows NT which eventually merged with 98 and gave us the disaster that was Vista (the pre-cursor to Windows 7).

As times changed DOS was slowly stripped out of the Windows Kernel all together in place was a Terminal which emulated DOS commands so that core commands could be done as though it was DOS, for example, listing a directories contents with the “dir” command or listing all directories inside your current director with “dir /w”.

This change from DOS to the NT Kernel (as I have come to call it) was not without issues, several programs build for windows 95, 98, or ME were reliant on DOS and were not optimized for NT. It’s worth noting that the NT kernel had been around in workstation and enterprise versions of Windows for several years it was not until Windows Vista (as mentioned earlier) that this was migrated to the Core Windows suite.

If we fast forward another few years we get Windows 10 which attempts to make a familiar-looking OS with new elements, for example, it uses the Desktop feature similar to Windows 7 but adds dynamic tiles to the start menu it calls Live Tiles. It’s also worth noting this was a result of user complaints at the radical new direction they attempted to go with Windows 8 and later slightly improved with 8.1. The biggest change with Windows 10 (and there are a ton of small and drastic improvements not worth mentioning unless you’re a software enthusiast) is that for a long time it was offered as a Free upgrade to Windows 7.

This may seem like a goodwill gesture on the part of Microsoft, however, there was a very strategic reason why they made Windows 10 so easy to obtain, some of which I will touch on but given the drastic amounts of changed from Windows 8.1 to 10, I will only touch on the most jarring or noticeable changes.

First, there are three ways a company like Microsoft can make money off an OS. The traditional way which Microsoft did for all their previous versions, this method involves selling major versions as new Versions of any OS. For example, Windows 95, 98, ME, 7, and 8 are all considered new versions. This method gives the developer a boost in cash for each version it releases which allows for a jump start to the development of improvements and iterations of new versions.

Second, is the version that Linux and many other Open Source projects use, Corporate sponsorships or donations by the community. This type of model does not require the consumer to pay anything upfront instead they focus on donations and trying to get corporate sponsors or selling support packages to larger companies deploying their OS on a large number of computers.

Third, the method Microsoft uses on Windows 10 is to give the OS away free at the firs to the consumer. This is monetized by gathering data on the user that is used to advertise or sell to other companies in an effort to make money. This is a controversial method because your privacy as a consumer is often brought into question. While later in the release cycle they do sell the OS for around $120 a pop they still collect your information. It’s possible to disable some of this data collection but if you really want to disable most of it you need to be proficient in registry editing and tweaking, however, this is often reversed by updates released to fix/update features and bugs in the OS.

Closing Thoughts

So as you can see from y brief summary tons of things have changed in the OS market allowing us to get where we are. As Linux changes and closes the gap between Windows and itself the choice between which one you use comes down to small things like Gaming or very specific software needs.

While Linux is becoming closer in terms of Gaming to Windows there is still a lot of work in this area that needs to be done. Businesses can however use a lot of tools that are open source on Linux to do their everyday jobs and save 100s if not thousands on licensing fees. The future of OS improvement all around is exciting as these improvements whether perceived or not play greatly into what you see every time you boot up your machine.

Next time you start your computer whether it be Windows, Linux, or Mac OS takes a second to appreciate the amount of software and hardware engineering involved with getting to where we are now.

Disclaimer: I am not a developer of any software listed below opinions are my own and this article was written over several days (given my schedule) so I have done my best to make sure it is consistent any suggestions or spelling errors can be put on the forums quick comments can be made below in-depth discussion should be done on the forums by clicking the link in this disclaimer. I encourage you to do your own research and dive into either of these OS yourself you may be surprised by what you find. If you find any of my information to be in error please constructively mention it in the forums and I will do my best to address it.

Ubuntu 11.04 – review of unity interface

In a rather long blog post I wrote several months ago, I compared my first looks at the Fedora 15 Alpha and Ubuntu 11.04 beta. I also promised that once each one of these distributions was released I was going to do a more in depth review of each one. Ubuntu 11.04 has been out now for quite some time, due to the fact the Fedora 15 is not yet in its final stage I’m going to hold off for reviewing that.

This review is going to be focused primarily on the unity interface, my first use of the unity interface was a little skewed back in the alpha. This could have been due partly to the fact that I was running Ubuntu inside of a virtual machine, which is known not to work with the next generation desktop special effects such as unity in Ubuntu and Gnome shell and Gnome 3. To circumvent any problems that may arise with having Ubuntu in a virtual machine, I set up a small partition on a second hard drive and installed it natively having a dual-boot between Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04.

First impressions of unity were not very good. There were a lot of artifacts on the screen, as well as several black spots blocking text, I found out later that these were due to the fact that the open-source driver for my video card was not up to par for handling the 3-D effects, installing the proprietary drivers using the hardware management tool and Ubuntu fixed this problem.

While I generally enjoyed the overall look of unity, it seemed to be way to stripped and too simplistic for somebody with my level of knowledge (though my level of knowledge is nowhere near as much as other users who use Ubuntu). There were a few things I liked about it, such as the remapping of the Windows key on my keyboard to pull up a search dialogue to be able to search for programs, if you ask me this was a brilliant remapping, the fact is a lot of Windows users switching to Ubuntu use the Windows key fairly often to pull up the start menu in Windows. While was entirely possible to remap the Windows key Using older versions of Ubuntu or clearly any other distribution, the fact that it was remapped by default. To me just seems like a good idea. Now before installing the initial updates that came with Ubuntu.

After installing it, I found unity to be a much more pleasing experience with the exception of one or two features that to me just drove me bonkers, a prime example: pre-update Firefox still had its menu contained within the Firefox window, post update the menus were then moved out of the Firefox window and opened the black taskbar across the top of the screen. Now to most people this might seem like a good change, however somebody who spends the majority of their time in Windows for whatever reason might find this extremely annoying, I know I did. I haven’t yet looked for a solution to convert this back to the way it was, although I’m sure one exists or will shortly. I was trying to keep Ubuntu as close to the default installation is possible so that this review would apply to as many people as possible, if I had gone and customized a bunch of the features my experience might be different than somebody who just installed Ubuntu.

There were some intuitive things that thing could have been worked into unity they would have made it a little more user-friendly, some of these include frequently used programs showing up in the launch bar by default. As it stands under a currently default install of Ubuntu, if you wanted to make a specific program launcher permanently show up in the launcher bar, You would have to right-click it, While the program is open and click pin to launcher or something to that effect. I know it seems like I am just nitpicking but this is something that could drive a new user to Linux, especially one that’s never even touched it before nuts.

Ubuntu claims to be an operating system that’s extremely friendly and even somebody who’s never used Linux before, even specifically targeting somebody switching from Windows to Linux, as using Ubuntu is a good starting point. My beef with this claim is that if they take such simple, intuitive features and make them five or six more steps than they need to be you will only confuse new users. I mean yes of course most of the hardware 95% of time is going to work out-of-the-box, this is something that Ubuntu is extremely popular for.

Unity to me seems like it was geared towards people who wanted a simple experience, and one that was formatted specifically for touch devices such as a tablet PC. This is great for Tablet PCs, this however in my opinion sucks for desktop use, I don’t consider myself to be an advanced Linux user but, I do know enough about settings that I’d like a little more control, and while unity does not constrict any of the functionality of Ubuntu, it makes it feel like you’re restricted to me anyway. Yes, there is a way to disable unity and run in what they call classic mode, however you have to figure how to do this yourself because no documentation I have been able to find comes with Ubuntu explaining how to do it. Yes I could figure it out when it comes time for me to do that.

Now I know a lot of you who are pro-Ubuntu are probably go to say I’m being biased because I’m a Fedora person, I’ll be fair and say that what little bit I’ve seen of gnome shell doesn’t impress me either. I’m not a fan of over simplifying the user experience, simplifying is okay in my opinion but over simplifying just makes me feel stupid. It’s almost as if these distributions are trying to say the average Linux user now has no common sense, So let’s make things as easy as possible, in reality, they often end up making things so much more complicated for somebody who is used to using it the old way.

So I know this post is supposed to be a review about unity and I haven’t talked about many of the features, this is mainly due to the fact that there really aren’t any features that you can’t see when you look at screenshots of unity. I will touch on a few below, just for the sake of a decent review, myself, as well as some of the other people I’ve talked to however seem to think they unity is going to be dragging Ubuntu in the wrong direction. I am not against Ubuntu making a spin specifically geared towards the tablet PC, for such a spin unity would be perfect. When I use a desktop computer, I want to use a desktop computer not a super powerful tablet experience, this is why IOS is not made into a desktop platform, it would make any sense. Just like why was somebody install Android as their primary operating system on their PC.

One thing it did particularly like about unity was the fact that by default it seems to try to organize open windows in a fashion where there no overlapping, however you can still overlap windows if you want, they just don’t open that way. Also, thank God, If you try to maximize a window, it makes that bar that unity bar on the left go away, this is extremely useful, particularly for people with smaller computer monitors. I myself have a 27 inch monitors so screen real estate is almost at an abundance, but somebody with a 15 inch screen or smaller would not have the same amount of screen real estate. Therefore, if that bar didn’t hide when some was full-screen practically all of their screen would be filled with that bar.

Some of the key combinations that people are used to in Windows work with unity as well, such as Alt + Tab which can be used to cycle through open programs. As simplistic as unity is, some shortcuts that advanced users grieving users that have grown accustomed to keyboard shortcuts, might miss is Alt +F2 this key combination. It used open dialogue we could enter a command in the GUI, this would allow for quick launching programs without having to open a terminal window. As far as I can tell there’s no way to enable this in Ubuntu 11.04, I’m sure you could make a custom keyboard shortcut that would do the same thing, but that’s a little out of the scope of being easy to use out-of-the-box. I mean seriously, how much memory could that little feature of possibly taken up that they needed to strip it out of the distribution in a default ship?

Bottom line here if you’re looking with going with Ubuntu as your Linux distribution of choice, and you want a experience is very close To the Way, Windows was set up, then you’re probably either going to want to run 11.04 in classic mode, or run the latest long-term service release. Canonical has made a great product with Ubuntu. Building on free and open source software, so don’t get me wrong by the negativity in this blog post. I’m not being negative about Ubuntu itself.

Ubuntu is a great operating system and know tons of people who use it every day as their primary operating system, unity, however, is an entirely different matter. I was one of those people who was outraged when it was announced that 11.04 was going to have unity and by default, but what really did it in for me was when I found out unity cannot be removed, it just simply cannot be removed. It’s like cancer. Thinking back I know one other piece of software in a popular operating system that cannot be removed and starts with the letter I and ends with the letter R, and uses the abbreviation IE.

If you want to include unity fine, at least give people the chance to remove unity if they don’t like it, and install something else in its place. My honest advic, If you’re going to go with Ubuntu 11.04, think about Kubuntu 11.04 KDE seems to be a lot closer to the kind of experience that I would come to have expected from a desktop operating system.

Oh in case you’re curious the blog post I mentioned at the beginning the one where I compared early versions of February 15 to early versions of Ubuntu 11.04, I can be found by clicking here

as always, please feel welcome to leave comments below, I don’t expect to make a lot of friends with some of the statements of listed above but I’m not about to lie about what I feel. Canonical if you’re reading this which I seriously doubt, great job on Ubuntu 11.04 just ditch unity already in your operating system will be gold in my opinion.