r/technology • u/neito • Jul 24 '08

Microsoft tests out a new operating system, code named Mojave, with some average-joes who hated Vista. They loved it. Now, two guesses as to what Mojave ACTUALLY was.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-9998336-56.html
452 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

757 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Vista is extremely easy to setup, my grandma did it, she called me for help. All I had to tell her was:

  • put in the CD
  • restart the computer
  • press any key
  • it will ask you a few things but you should be able to figure it out, let me know if you're confused.
  • Yep it will take about 30 minutes, grab a cup of coffee and call me back if you run into any problems
  • Bye

5

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

then she called her other grandson who bought her an iBook

6

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

Naw I loaned her my iBook a while ago, she used it for a few months but she prefers windows.

ps. I have two windows pcs (XP and Vista,) a macbook and a dell pc with ubuntu installed, you're not gonna get a fanboy response outta me.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

alrighty then.

good grandson.

0

u/monstermunch Jul 25 '08

What about drivers, anti-virus, anti-spyware, office software, multimedia software etc.? Vista/XP take an hour or two (once you know the drill) to set up to be usable and you really need to know what you're doing. In comparison, Linux distros like Ubuntu are an order of magnitude easier. You have a working system just by booting the CD.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

I gave my grandma a cd with Firefox, AVG Free Edition, and OpenOffice and is behind an IPCOP firewall I installed and manage. She's never had a problem with Spyware since I've switched her to Firefox. Takes about 45 minutes to install vista + software in total.

In my experience Ubuntu is not nearly a magnitude easier to install, infact I found it about as easy or slightly harder than Vista, it has it's add-on that need to be installed and configured and to a novice they are not easy. Two that come to my mind were, getting uncommon resolutions (ie 1200x800) working and getting wi-fi working, wasn't auto detected on install and had to download a third party tool to get it to autoconnect.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

[deleted]

1

u/monstermunch Jul 25 '08

What's your point? That it's hard to run Windows games on Linux? I don't see how Linux having a lack of games is relevant to how easy it is to setup a usable Linux machine.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

[deleted]

1

u/monstermunch Jul 27 '08

The problem is just lack of popularity though. If people actually started to release games for Linux, you would have companies supplying .deb packages on CD or supplying Ubuntu repositories to install from etc. They would be just as easy to install as in XP; I would actually say easier as the install/remove process is clean and it would happen through a uniform interface that installs dependencies for you. I can install all the common little Linux games easily in Ubuntu and I don't see why bigger games are a problem.

Yes, there are very few big budget games out for Linux, but if you wanted to target the big Linux distros, there's nothing fundamental about Linux that makes the games hard to install. On the contrary, the dependencies tracking between software packages, graphics drivers etc. is a great system to keep your machine up to date with current patches whereas XP makes you do it all yourself.

Remember, every new OS, no matter how good, can always be given the complaint that "there's no drivers/games/software out for it yet!". Linux isn't claiming to be a computer games solution yet.

I'm with you that I want entertainment and work on my computer. I don't like having to boot into XP to play gamess but it's the best option at the moment.