Bye Bye Bill, it’s Been Bad Knowing You
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing
As yet another slew of "updates" (read: patches) slithers down that execrable pipe laughingly called "the Internet", the question begins to form in my mind: Is Windoze going to be a part of my future? Apparently not . . .
Here in Korea, as I have mentioned previously, I have two computer systems, each of which dual-boots XP and Mandriva Linux. I now spend most of my time in Mandriva, and not without what I think are good reasons. The first of these being what appears to be the inherent insecurity of the former compared with what appears to be inbuilt security in the latter. This issue is not simply about how the different OSes are designed: the trouble with buying Windoze in Korea seems to be that an English-language version is not available here.
In many respects, this is not too bothersome because with the IME functioning, there is no problem in doing anything in English. The trouble is that since all of the menus and dialogue boxes are in Korean – and only in Korean – you are, as a non-Korean speaker, constantly a hair's breadth away from a major security faux pas and infection with whatever horrors infest the local Web – and again, as mentioned previously, there is no shortage of these in South Korea – largely because most Windoze-running PC owners refuse to acknowledge the existence of such things, to such an extent that when their system gets locked up or crashes and becomes useless, the reason why remains something of a mystery. They just go crying to a so-called "engineer" to fix it, like they do with their car. And he usually screws it up some more, just for good measure!
In fairness, of course, foreigners who come here are usually just as clueless as the locals. Recently, a drinking partner of somewhat advanced years – from South Africa – decided that he wanted to get a laptop so that he could more conveniently write a book that he had been planning. To begin with, he had been using a Windoze machine, and he mentioned that it had "become very slow" during the time that he had borrowed it from a friend of his. What had happened was that there had been no AV or anti-malware software, no firewall, you name it, he didn't even know which word processor program he had been using!
Which was bad enough in and of itself, naturally. But it wasn't his machine, he had borrowed it from someone else who also, clearly, knew little of the problems of connecting a machine to the Internet. And who probably didn't care too much, either . . .
In the end, a Canadian friend put him right and helped him to order a new machine of his own, but the root of his problems was that the OS – guess which one? – was simply not secure, and cannot be made secure in any reasonable sense without a raft of third-party security software. Yet we are supposed to believe that this "particular" OS is a world-beater with all sorts of wonderful facilities and add-ons.
And the question started to form in my mind: Is this the end of Windoze on my boxes?
On these machines I have a load of stuff for security – Trend Micro, XoftSpySE, Ad-Aware, Spyware Doctor, Spybot Search and Destroy, and others, simply because the underlying OS was not designed to be secure from the beginning. Some of these are in fact free, but some have to be paid for, and over the effective or worthwhile lifetime of the OS (and bear in mind at this point that Microsoft have just confirmed a Service Pack 3 for XP to arrive some time next year), will together exceed its original purchase cost, and as a paying customer, I don't like that at all. Especially as they can only try to prevent infection of known malware.
This is something that AV app users usually don't understand: the fact that something suddenly pops up as being newly "detected" by the AV scans doesn't necessarily mean that it is actually a recent arrival – some of these things may have been there right from the beginning.
As an example, take my purchase of that shiny new Averatec wifi notebook last year. The first thing I did when I got it up and running was install the AV stuff. And what did I find? No less than sixteen instances of Chinese spyware – detected of course by XoftSpy, there's no denying that it represents good value for money on a Windoze system – and the only place these could have originated was in the original install disks.
In other words, the (Korean) Windoze was probably installed, and the Averatec was probably constructed, in some part of the Chinese-speaking world and if this one machine was infected, assuming that the same OEM installation disks are used over many machines in batches, then so were all the rest.
Nor is there any reason to believe that installing Vista would see the end of these malware woes. Vista, despite its vaunted improvements in security, will absolutely not make the AV vendors redundant. As I sit here downloading patches on a Saturday afternoon, although these are for two different shades of XP, some have also been issued for Vista and it seems that at least some of these are described as "critical".
The other issue with Vista reflects the problems of cost faced with XP with regard to necessary third-party software. Not only are AV makers unlikely to go out of business with mass acceptance of Vista (like anyone would have any choice in the end), the requirements placed upon the system to cope with the memory and graphical loading seems much heavier, too – in short, it would mean building a whole new machine, simply to accommodate resource-greedy Vista with its slick new (but not absolutely necessary) interface. And the simple fact is that not only do I (as an individual) not really need Vista, if I were to build a new system – my third here in Korea – I would probably run 64-bit Mandriva Powerpack Plus, which is not only wonderful to use, but looks much nicer and is more configurable, too.
Many of the things which have to be paid for under Windoze are entirely free in the Linux world – free word processors and graphics software, free video and sound players, all sorts of stuff. And I don't have to fork out a fortune each year on AV and other anti-malware software because – at least at the present time – Windoze is the major target. Most viruses and trojans and the like don't work outside of the Windoze ecosystem, simply because the Windoze ecosystem is the only place they can operate – change the OS and this problem evaporates. Even the rootkit and AV software for *nix systems is free to install and update; the difference being that there seem to be so few viruses and rootkits in the *nix world . . .
Then there is the question of how much Linux distributions (distros) generally have been improving in recent years, as more people have been working on things like easy software installation and update systems, media players and new interfaces, office software and so on. More and more people have become fed-up with Microsoft bringing out new file formats each time they release new versions of their office software, and are worried that their refusal to share information about those proprietary formats might lead to a situation in the not-too-distant future in which important documents are rendered using older file formats which suddenly cannot be accessed, simply because they are so old and therefore cannot be opened any more.
So I have arrived at that point of having to ask myself: Do I really want to keep opening up my credit card each year to this raft of anti-malware stuff, simply because of a desire to run a platform which supports certain useful software functions which are already duplicated or replaced elsewhere? Now, the only function not supported on the Linux partitions is the webcam and frankly, this is no big deal as I have no real use for it right now in any case. I prepare and print documents and sound files entirely under Linux and can save them and convert between formats; my expensive new JVC hard-drive camcorder works wonderfully with Mandriva and there is no function such as web browsing or online chatting which is materially different. The last thing which made me mindlessly happy was when the latest version of Mandriva – 2007.1 – came with preconfigured wifi and worked immediately after installation! Marvellous!
Anyone else who, like myself, finds themselves in this situation should do a little research. Google "Linux distro" and you should find a huge number of links to review web sites and sites offering advice and helpful distro communities. You can download LiveCDs and installation CDs and you can try them out without needing to install them to decide whether they do what you want them to do. A good LiveCD comes with two or more web browsers, office suites and media players and they operate solely in your PC's volatile memory – nothing is installed to the hard drive unless you decide that is what you want.
Maybe the thing I enjoy the most is that Mandriva is up and ready in about a minute, whereas XP takes about half an hour for the hard drive to settle down as all of the various anti-malware apps all try to set themselves up at the same time – and then you suddenly discover that you have to restart the PC, because it's been so long since you last used it that a major architectural change of the AV engine has been applied, or there are "critical updates" or whatever. On previous occasions, I have had to repeatedly restart Windows before I could even start scanning, eventually to give up in disgust and boot back into Mandriva.
Another thing I enjoy about Mandriva is that there are few, if any, annoying, pointless pop-ups which plague not only XP but also so many of the third-party apps which run on it. You decide how you want things like the firewall and Internet browser to behave, and that's it. No pop-ups jumping onto the screen all the time asking you whether you're really sure you want to do it that way and wouldn't you really be so much better doing it their way instead? Aww, go on . . .
But the real joy of Mandriva is that you have complete – and I mean absolutely complete – control over what you install and if there's something you don't want, you either don't install it in the first place or remove it and free up more hard disk space. Or even try something else. Your system can be as simple or as complicated as you require or want it to be and there is a great choice of interfaces to choose from. You can enjoy your DVDs and music and even watch TV exactly the way you want to, and not how some loud fatso in Redmond thinks he can tell you to.
Finally, Linux does all of these things and allows you to extend the life of your existing systems – everything runs on existing hardware, does what you want, looks exactly how you want it to look, and does not slow the system down and accelerate the destruction of your hard drive with endless AV and malware scans. This is because, at the same time as programmers are designing great new interfaces like rotating cubes and other 3D effects, others are also working hard to allow users of older machines to extend their PCs' useful lives by using other distros of Linux. If that can't be described as "ecologically sound", I don't know what can.
So XP is now on countdown. Fed up with the never-ending cost of annual anti-malware bills and with little or no material benefit to be had using either XP or Vista over using any one of a number of Linux distros, the latter are bound to win out. Versatile, cheaper and easier to install and maintain, greatly less prone to malware and actually less boring to use, nicer to look at . . . and all the rest.
And best of all, I own the computer.
Not the loud fatso from Redmond.
Andrew. ^_^
