Welcome to My World

Occasionally I’m asked by a friend of mine “why bother with Linux if it gives you trouble like this on your notebook?” Usually, when she asks that question, I’m in the midst of figuring out how to make some random piece of hardware in this notebook cooperate under Linux, or determine why suspend-to-RAM doesn’t work, and so on, and I rarely have time (or, sadly, patience) to actually answer the question reasonably. I also always ultimately meet with success in my efforts getting that “whatever” fixed or working once I’m done, but by then the conversation has moved on to other topics.

The same goes for Vista, I suppose, but the answers to her question always end up being of the same variety:

• Because it’s more fun¹
• Because it’s faster²
• Because it’s easier to use³
• Because it never sends me on monstrous goose chases like Vista loves to⁴
• Because it’s cheaper⁵

¹ I can break things, figure out why they broke, then fix them again. I can pick the system apart, from kernel to high-level scripting language, to find out how something works or how things are accomplished. When a piece of hardware doesn’t cooperate, I have a useful debugging environment available to me to trace every step the system takes, every setting it applies, every instruction it executes, to find out exactly where things go wrong. I went to college to study computer science — this stuff is my idea of fun. I promise.

² It boots faster. It shuts down faster. It suspends to memory faster (yes, that works now). Programs launch faster. It takes much, much more actual activity (more programs, more interaction from me, tougher workloads) to make it start responding in a sluggish manner than it takes for Vista to hit the same slowdowns. Operations involving the disk are faster, especially where lots of little files are involved. Network operations are much faster than Vista (there have been plenty of complaints about Vista’s network transfer performance). Programs respond faster to inputs. It can do the same jobs Vista can, but more quickly. Don’t even ask about server-level performance — Linux routinely blows Windows out of the water, whether it’s Vista, Server 2003, or the older NT releases.

³ For me. For a lot of other people, too, but in this context (why do I like it more than Windows?), mine is the only opinion that counts

⁴ Explanation coming right up! Keep reading

⁵ The cheapest Vista is over fifty bucks. Linux is free. I can’t make a copy of Vista (legally) for friends (which is a good thing — they’d stop being my friends if I did that to them). I can copy my Linux install discs and hand them out as much as I want. Right in front of a cop or a judge. That’s legal. I’m encouraged to do so. Buying a computer with Vista on it costs an extra fifty bucks at least — buying a barebones system (with no OS) is cheaper, and it’ll run what I want it to run, just like a machine preloaded with Vista would.

What About a “Wild Goose Chase?”

Ah, yes, right — the promised wild goose chase.

If you scroll down to the bottom of this site’s sidebar, you should see a graphic for my current stats for the BOINC project family I participate in. I run the BOINC client on three systems (two of them have two cores, so I’m really crunching away on five different nuggets of the project at once in most cases, unless my notebook is asleep for a ride to or from home). I like it to run at all times, which the client makes easy through a configuration option.

On Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and even Windows variants as new as XP, this is trivial. Check a box and it automatically runs whenever the system is powered up and running.

And then … Vista came along. There’s a flamewar of sorts about how Vista handles the BOINC client (and a trouble ticket within BOINC’s own bug management tool), but the short version is this:

• On every platform, except Vista, the BOINC client can easily be configured to start on system startup or user login.
• On Vista, without (lots) of extra steps, the BOINC client is automatically blocked from starting up when the user logs in (it also can’t be installed as a system-wide service without some hoop-jumping), every time, and the user must manually start the application every time, via a forced interaction with that knobby little “UAC” thing Vista annoys with.

If you just install BOINC and tell it to run at startup, it won’t. It will try, but Vista will stop it. A little icon appears in the system tray, that you have to click to reveal a menu. Then select “blocked programs,” and select the BOINC client from within that menu. Finally, you must click “Allow” in the UAC dialog that appears.

To actually get it to always run when you log in, you have to create a special “launch on startup” task within Task Manager, explicitly stating what binary to run, what arguments to use, and which account to use (usually yours). There’s a whole sequence of steps to walk through to make this fucking operating system actually do what you tell it to do.

I can attest to the validity of those steps (and to the fact that nothing else works). The root of the problem is Vista’s “Windows Defender,” which has spontaneously decided BOINC sucks and doesn’t “deserve” to be run. Nope, you can’t change its mind, you can’t override it, and you can’t force it to permit the app to run (it never even gives you the option). Microsoft “tightened the noose” on developers, and there are now fewer ways to do certain things in Vista programmatically in a “blessed” fashion, and fewer channels available to actually get that blessing from Microsoft (BOINC needs a certain kind of special “signature” from Microsoft before it can configure itself to start up when the system does).

And this is better than Linux how?

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