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Red Hat 8.0 as a Desktop Windows XP Replacement |
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I recently installed Red Hat 8.0 Personal on my home computer as a replacement for Windows XP. My experience beforehand was somewhat limited. I work in a scientific field, so I've been exposed to Solaris and IRIX pretty heavily. Other than that, however, I have no Unix experience, including Linux, and I'm far from a computer science major or sysadmin. This article is based on a little over a month's exclusive use of Red Hat as my primary home operating system, after a couple years of Windows XP experience. My findings so far can be broken down into several discrete categories:
Installation
Hardware support
Desktop usability
Package management
Networking
Overall usability
Within each, I found several areas that need work before Red Hat can completely replace Windows XP for me, and before I can suggest it to other less computer-savvy people for their own use. The first deals with installation.
Installation
Red Hat 8.0's, installation routine was remarkably easy for me, even more so than Windows XP's. There were a few trouble spots, however, the first of which was at the disk partitioning section (I have a dual-boot machine.). After a quick read of the printed installation guide, however, I was ready to go. The only other issue I ran into was that the automatic X configuration detected my monitor's horizontal refresh rates as 30-90 Hz, instead of the actual 31-90 Hz. This was more of an annoyance, though, and once I found the actual values, it was trivial to fix. Overall, my impression of Red Hat's installation was very good, and if it were just this that needed consideration, Windows would have been beaten handily.
Hardware Support
This is where Red Hat stumbled and fell the hardest. Apparently the stock kernels include support for my Quantum Fireball LM30 hard drive, and for my Promise Ultra/66 controller, but not one hooked up to the other. From what I've gathered from conversations with Linux gurus and newsgroups and such, it's got something to do with the fact that the LM30 isn't listed as a “quirk” drive in the Promise controller driver when it should be. From my perspective, though, it doesn't matter the cause, it just didn't work. So in order to get anywhere with it, I had to unplug my hard drive from the controller and plug it into the motherboard, which required a complete rearrangement of my other drives. This can definitely be considered a show-stopper for anyone even slightly less dedicated than I. It's true that this problem only shows up in a very very small minority of computers out there, though, so it won't contribute very heavily to my overall assessment.
Overall, on the hardware detection side, Red Hat actually did better than Windows XP, at least by the percentage of my hardware that was detected on installation. Windows had two unknown devices when I did a clean install: my SoundBlaster Audigy sound card, and my D-Link DWL-650 wireless PCMCIA card (on a PCI - PCMCIA converter). Red Hat detected my Audigy right out of the box, although it also choked on my wireless card. The difference was in how easy it was to get it all working again. In retrospect, they're both about equal, but during the time I was actually trying to figure it out, Windows was by far the winner. With Windows, all I had to do was download the official drivers from the respective manufacturer's websites (or load them off their CDs) and install them. One reboot later, everything was fine. With Red Hat, though, getting my wireless card to work required a careful search of newsgroups, help boards, and online HOWTOs before I learned of the existance of the Linux-wlan project. Once I got that far, however, it was just a matter of downloading the respective RPM, installing it, and changing a line in a configuration file. Red Hat comes with a graphical internet configuration utility, but the wireless module there simply wouldn't work (due to a UTF-8 error or something), so that was out. Overall, Windows was much easier to deal with, primarily due to the fact that manufacturers actually provide updated drivers for it.
Desktop Usability
While I found mostly good things about Red Hat's default GNOME desktop, there are a few items that are worth mentioning. First of all, I find the lack of a centralized configuration utility rather annoying. In Windows, there's the Control Panel, where you can access just about anything that you could possibly need to change how your computer operates. While there is a control panel in GNOME, it doesn't include a lot of needed utilities, and those it does include are spread out rather thin. Most of the configuration utilities I need from time to time are spread out over several menu items, requiring a more extensive search to locate them.
This brings me to another major annoyance I've found with Red Hat's GNOME implementation: there's no menu editor. Windows menu editing is trivial, you just right-click on an item, and you can delete it, move it around, sort it, drag it somewhere, or a myriad of other things. With Red Hat, you're stuck with what you've got, unless you want to edit configuration files and such, something that simply can't be expected of an end user.
To determine the overall effectiveness of the desktop environment, it's helpful to compare the amount of time spent on the console under Red Hat and under Windows. In my years of using Windows XP, I spent almost no time in the console, and when I did, it was for various activities like running Apache, ActivePerl, and ftp. In contrast, under Red Hat I use the console more than the file manager. I've determined that there are several reasons for this, but only a few major ones. The first is due to the absence of a menu editor. Therefore, to access programs that don't install themselves onto the menu, I have to go to the console to run them. Another reason is that some actions need root access. Red Hat's done a good job of allowing non-console root access for a variety of tasks, but the support is far from complete. For example, if I attempt to install an RPM from the file manager, I can double-click it, it prompts for the root password, and it installs the package. The same thing happens when I try to modify a system setting through the control panel or change the clock settings. What forces me to the console, however, is the Nautilus itself doesn't prompt for the root password to do things that require it. If I want to copy a file from my home directory to /usr/local/src, or something similar, it pops up an error message and doesn't do anything. I have to open a console, do 'su', and then copy the file. The same goes for some things I try to download. I've found that if the user is set to something other than myself, I can't delete it from the Trash. If something like that happens, logically it should pop up a box asking for the root password and go from there, not force the user to the console. Under Windows this isn't a problem, simply because by default you are root, if you're using your own system. Something equivalent for Linux would be very welcome, such as being able to label a user as administrator and allow he or she to do root-type things. The last major reason is that to install a large number of packages, you need to run a script from the console, whether it's an install script, or a Makefile, or something similar. This brings me right into the next topic, though, so I'll discuss it there.
Package Management
Much has been said about the limitations of RPM, so I'll be brief. In direct comparison with Windows, Red Hat doesn't stand a chance when it comes to installing new packages or upgrading old ones. Under Windows, all you need to do is download the new program, uninstall the old one, and run the downloaded file. A graphical installer pops up, guiding you through the process. Under Red Hat, there's a myriad of problems that keep the process from being as easy. The first hurdle is that there's a lot of packages out there that simply don't have Red Hat 8.0 RPMs available. The second is that there's no graphical equivalent of Windows' “Add/Remove Programs”. You can only uninstall old packages via the console, and then only if you installed them with RPM. This is what's been termed “dependency hell”. For various reasons, this isn't an issue in Windows, but you can hardly escape it in Linux. For the uninitiated, dependencies are packages that need to be installed before you can install the one you're actually interested in. The problem is that if you install a base package from source, then try to install something that depends on it with RPM, it doesn't know that the dependency was installed, since you didn't do it through RPM. If everything was done by RPM, it wouldn't be as much of an issue. That's not feasible, however, because each distribution, and each version of each distribution, needs its own RPM, creating a nightmare for developers who want to distribute their package to the widest possible audience. For these reasons and more, Windows wins hands-down when it comes to package management.
Networking
I have very little networking experience, and I already discussed my wireless card hassles, so this section will be brief. For the vast majority of home users out there, all they want to do is connect to the internet. For me, it was just a matter of getting my wireless card to work and configuring it properly. From what I hear, a modem connection that's almost trivial to set up under Windows can be a nightmare under Linux. I know, for example, that Red Hat didn't detect my modem. Luckily I don't use it for anything at the moment, so that wasn't a major problem. The one major issue I've found with Red Hat's networking capabilities is that there's no graphical equivalent to Windows' “Networking Connections”, a central location where you can check in on your connection, make some tweaks, and generally make sure things are working correctly. This might exist for other types of connections, but like I said before, I couldn't get the wireless card GUI to work at all. For example, the only way I know of to determine my IP address is to go to the console and run /sbin/ifconfig, definitely not something one would consider “user-friendly”.
Overall Usability
Of course, Red Hat 8.0 does have many good points, and many aspects that I consider superior to Windows. It doesn't need to be rebooted very often at all, it's a lot more customizable than Windows, it's more secure, it's more stable, and it doesn't suffer by having “Microsoft” written all over it. It also comes preinstalled with everything an average user would ever need, in contrast with Windows, which comes pretty much empty of high-quality third-party applications. After my first month of using Red Hat instead of Windows, I am not completely disappointed, but I am also not a complete convert. I'm going to stick with it, though, and track its progress with great interest. I can't wholeheartedly reccommend it to my less-computer-savvy friends, though, and that's a shame. There's nothing I'd rather see than Linux become the primary desktop operating system in the world, carrying the open-source movement with it to the average home user.
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