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What Keeps You On (or Off) Windows in 2013?
Five years ago today, reader J.J. Ramsey asked what's keeping you off Windows (itself a followup to this question about the opposite situation). With five years of development time gone by for Windows as well as all the alternative OSes, where does Windows stand for you today? (Is it the year of Linux on the Desktop yet?)
For actual work and play I use windows. Everything works best on it.
Every now and then I boot into the latest linux distro currently in favor and give it a spin. And I've always ended up disappointed.
There is no serious personal tax software to run on GNU/Linux (or BSD), and many websites, systems management GUI and appliances still require IE to access. Hideous state of affairs, I hate it, but there it is.
I know w/ Windows any new app or game comes out and it WILL be released for it. Yeah, maybe your favorite game is available on another platform, but what happens when you get bored w/ it?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Linux Mint makes it tasty to stay off windows.
If i hear that question again i'm gonna start swimming head first in concrete.
Is a necessary evil because I need or want to run certain software which won't run on Linux, or customers expect they will be able to use the software I write in a Windows environment.
Otherwise it could shrivel up and blow away and I'd be happy to see it go.
Linux Mint makes it tasty to stay off windows and super easy to use.
Almost 10 years by the way. What's pretty much keeping on Windows is work. I work is IT, and yea, I do use Linux as my main OS, I do occasionally need windows for a few things. Like testing software and the likes.
For me, it has to be the games. Now, I have no intention of "upgrading" to Win8, but I'll stay on Win7 pretty much until I can't any longer. I like the OS, I know how to do anything I could want to do with it. I do have other OS's in the house performing specific tasks, but for general purpose computing and especially for gaming, Win7 is tops.
No fuss . No Anti Virus
No bull. No Monkey Boy Either.
NO Gates. or Ballmer.
Just works all the time.
Then move your tax software to The Cloud(tm) like I did, when I prepared my federal and state income tax returns for both 2012 and 2013 in H&R Block At Home in Firefox in Xubuntu.
Because I can type first post based on the Windows keyboard!
Off the top of my head:
1. Windows has a terrible interface, both Windows 7 and 8 have ugly, inflexible displays.
2. Windows still doesn't have proper package management. Which leads to...
3. With Windows every app has its own update process that takes up resources and nag the user.
4. Malware and adware is thick on Windows.
5. Windows doesn't come bundled with common tools I use, such as a compiler, OpenSSH, productivity suite, etc.
6. Windows seems to need to reboot almost constantly and takes a long time to apply updates.
7. Windows is expensive compared to most other operating systems.
8. Release/upgrade cycles are not at fixed/predictable times.
9. Windows lacks containers/jails.
10. Windows lacks a good, advanced file system like ZFS.
11. Windows has poor driver support, requiring hardware be bundled with driver discs that take a long time to load and include apps that nag the user.
12. I can't hack on the Windows source code.
So there's a dozen reasons, take your favourite.
For me Windows is just a gaming console for my computer. All my work I do from Linux and hibernate to switch to Windows to start a game, and then switch to Linux again do to web surfing and work. I guess I could try and install some games with Wine but since Windows comes pre-installed I can use it for the games.
I'm using Fedora Linux with KDE. Works extremely well. I use LibreOffice, Java development in Eclipse, Firefox, Skype, TeamViewer, and Latex for documents, letters and presentations.
For me Windows is just a toy system that is only good to start my games, since the AAA games don't target Linux. Lets see maybe it will change with Steam for Linux.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
I've been a believer in pen computing since reading Niven & Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_.
Had an NCR-3125 running PenPoint. Using a Fujitsu Stylistic.
Can't find replacements for:
ArtRage
Autodesk Sketchbook
Macromedia Freehand
Creaturehouse Expression
Futurewave Smartsketch
Lotus Improv
Windows Journal
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I try to keep up to date with the three major desktop operating systems. Flexibility in skills (and philosophy) is a pretty good way to remain adaptable to future trends in technology. That, and each platform is interesting and useful in their own way.
windows 7 is just plain awesome. It's actually quite ridiculous how good UI is. It lacks in the flexibility of the underlying system objects, but it's not what I want from my Desktop. I want to get me to where I need to be while using the desktop... not while typing. I have other tools for massive text processing and low-level data processing. The desktop has to to just do things and never break. Windows 7 is beautiful at it.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Isn't that good enough reasons?
Approximately 50 million lines of shit code, is what.
I created this name 12 years ago because I was young, immature, and hated Microsoft with a passion.
(typical slashdotter at the time in 1999)
Windows crashed and DOS was horrible though slashdot had its loyalists I should not by 1993 create autoexec.bat files for Monkey Island and another to play Doom because of expanded vs extended memory?? WTF this is a 486 not a 8086?!
Around the time they were asked 10 years ago on what kept me off Windows questions
I tried Linux then and fell in love with the aspects of free software, tons of apps on cd (I was on dialup then), I did not have to pay $$$$ for compilers for game development, could get any gui I wanted, I could get paid a shit load of money if I had Unix on my resume.
I fell in love with FreeBSD. It was stable, never changed, just worked, unless I did something stupid to it. I started disliking Linux. It was beta quality and kept crashing compared to FreeBSD and Solaris. I felt it was the Windows version of Linux where crapware and hardware are thrown on it and it is not tested well.
I took a java programming course and gave up on FreeBSD as I needed Java 5 in 2004. I reluctantly started using XP.
Why in 2013 I stick with Windows
It works and no longer blows and sucks. For the slashdotters who have ran Linux for 10 years you have to ask yourself if your memories of IE 6 and WindowsME still apply today?
Windows 7 is stable, IE 10 is a modern browser and has 90% of Firefox's HTML 5 features, Office has its issues but it still is professional, and Adobe products are nice to have but they also exist on the Mac as well. Windows Server 2012 is ok. It is finally catching up and is finally VM ready.
Linux never just works and has problems with updates with my ATI and AMD hardware due to the lack of a stable ABI. It doesn't have Microsoft Office. Java is butt ugly as the fonts are broken in Debian/Ubuntu distros as the bug is 6 years old now! WTF. FreeBSD is out of the question today as 5.x and 6.x were horrible! I stuck with the 4.x all the way until 4.12 which was now quite stale by 2005.
My exwife asked me (no not flamebait moderators but her real opinion and words) why I use such an inferior system? My response was WTF Windows sucks, Windows blows, Windows is unstable, and went on and on. Her response was well you are the one who always has to reinstall your operating system. My Vista just works? Whose is better now?
She is right. World of Warcraft was a pain with Wine, then I had to get Ventrillo to work, and then Office. In the end it just is not worth it.
I keep CentOS around in virtualbox and VMWare. It rocks as a server
In 2011 after gnome 3 I gave up. Sorry guys. I put Windows 7 on and it just works. I have reinstalled it a few times but that is it. Compared to Windows 3.1 it is certainly tolerable.
http://saveie6.com/
Microsoft's support for POSIX has been historically flakey at best. With Windows 8, it's nonexistence.
Visual Studio - Anything else is a PAIN!!!! Development under Linux is horrific...GNU DEBUGGERYOUUPTHEARSE. Fuck that shit!!!! Windows provides meaningful errors not "segment fault", consistant libraries and you don't need bolt on your GUI from a toolkit. Most importantly, everything is designed to work together and pass information in a robust and consistant manner. Linux has thousands of devs and no one to crack the whip to make things work seamlessly, consistently and most importantly...simply.
Linux is an exercise in how to overcomplicate things and completely ignore the market audience...the end user. Until Linux gets business sense, it will never gain solid traction as a desktop PC. It will be restricted to places no one can see it ugly mug.
If I were to offer one piece of advice to Linux...it would be to think of your target audience as a hamster and design accordingly. Also, even for those with technical backgrounds, I for one don't want to fuck around with my machine all day, I want to use it.
At work: The corporate overlords keep me on Windows. I'd be able to do my job better in Debian. All our schematic entry tools and embedded IDEs (IAR especially) are available for Linux.
At home: Windows's proprietary-ness keeps me off Windows. Linux's freedom keeps me on Debian.
Debian is designed to serve the user, while Windows is designed to serve Microsoft. Windows has product activation and DRM integrated into the kernel, while Debian has DRM circumvention to respect user freedoms. Windows is locked to the Metro interface, and requires purchasing third-party software to add a more useful interface (you still can't uninstall Metro). Debian has Gnome 3, which is just as ugly, but you can choose among that, XFCE, LXDE, build-your-own with plain metacity, or the plain monochrome command line interface. Windows has kernel patch protection, to prevent you from adequately using your own software, while Debian allows you to compile your own kernel.
other than that, i'd be happy with linux (with the cinnamon desktop)
and the way adobe is acting at the moment, i'd be happy for some people to break in, steal their source and release a free version. i work in an educational institution, i've no f*cking idea wtf im going to be installing/supporting next academic year yet. and last year was sh*t, for the first time in years we had many computers drop out of adobe authenication, prompting many licesnce reinstalls.
I have about 100k lines of VBA code in Access that would be downright painful to rewrite in .NET, and completely unwritable on any *Nix platform.
I switched back to Windows as my main and Linux in a VM.
Windows does not suck like it once did. Even IE is tolerable and IE 10 is modern and I say on par with Chrome and Firefox for the first time since 2001 is competitive. ... for course if those crappy gui intranets probably wont work with IE 10 as they were written when IE 6 was the standard and W3C was broken in the eyes of I.T.
Linux just seems like a poor desktop OS that just works.
http://saveie6.com/
I've run Linux since college. I dual booted Fedora Linux (it was Fedora core back then) and Windows xp on my Laptop. I was in the habit of reinstalling windows xp every 6 months. After one such install, I went to my C: drive to tweak something, and the files were hidden with the message that it was dangerous to change any files. I suddenly realized that message encapsulated everything I disliked about Windows. My computer was telling me I wasn't to be trusted with anything under the hood. I wiped out that windows install and have exclusively run Linux on my main machine ever since. Now I actually have control over my computer and what runs on it. It's also more usable than a Windows machine for IT and server administration. My two disappointments are that one: I am still running the proprietary video card drivers (though with the upcoming Fedora release, I'll probably run with the foss drivers), and two: Coreboot doesn't yet work with my mobo and processor combination.
A more appropriate question would be: why wouldn't I use Windows? Works great for both my business and personal stuff. No reason to spend a ton of money on Apple stuff, and no reason to spend tons of time with *nix stuff.
I don't respond to AC's.
I bought a laptop and a desktop this year to get off of Windows XP and purposely avoid Windows 8. H8 Win8...
mac os to much hardware lockdown with high prices and limited choice.
why no $1000-$1500 desktop that has desktop video cards, RAM and cpus? at least 2 HDD bays?
Why is AMD cpus need a custom kernel? Linux and windows don't do that.
I always been a fan of many oses including windows. it just seems microsoft hasn't given me enough...fast enough and what they give me gets in my way. I love linux/unix/gnu/bsd/ect for a good many year since i was handed a copy of slackware 2.something and told this is the future of computing (in truth it was at the time) but it still a little geek for most of computing kind. Apple (current desktop) used to be called the "awful macintrash" but now that it has incorporated my love of *xin/bsd/ect's and a interface that honestly hasn't changed majorly over it's life. Intel based machines, power and sophistication, flexibility, open source-i-ness, has kept me from the windows side of computing for a while. I don't even like troubleshooting a windows machine anymore. If Microsoft would start from scratch and rebuild windows on a more secure level and ideals i would give it a shot. I would love to feel at home again in a Microsoft enviroment but they seem to make it impossible to find stuff, and keep a status flow. For me the removal of the start button was a prime example of what i don't like about windows and microsoft's enviroment changes... as long as i can remember the apple in the left hand corner has been a fixture in mac os since mac os.
some people are a "glass half empty" some are "glass half full" i'm a "there is something in the glass be happy" person
It has nothing I want or need.
The only remaining problem is listening to other peoples windows problems.
Windows still just works. I've tried really hard to make the switch and can't.
Steam (or video card drivers?) still isn't good enough to get me to make the switch. I have a pretty recent AMD card that gets around 300fps on Windows with the recommended settings. The radeon xorg driver gets 30-40fps with terrible jitter and fglrx has too many bugs in general to make much use of. I've done a lot of searching and tried many things, nothing helped much.
I have wireless usb headphones and, for some reason, they really only work well in Ubuntu with Unity. As much as I hate Unity (it's un-user friendly, buggy mess), it's the only DE that allows me to easily select that output and has support for the volume wheel on the headset. I've tried several of the popular distros and DEs. As an example, the volume wheel works in Mageia, but it kicks me out of full screen mode. I can't even select the headset output through other DE's like Cinnamon or MATE.
So basically the same stuff that kept me on the previous iterations (besides Vista, which I only had on my laptop as a stock OS and was too lazy to replace with anything else).
Linux has too choice in ways that should be like do I really need 6 text editors as part of the base os?
Also make so you move a little slower then distribution X 2012 2012.5 2013 with out a seamless update system.
What keeps me on Windows is the same thing that made me switch from Mac 20 years ago -- games. Both could surf. Both had Word and Excel. Both had C programming IDEs.
What keeps me now? Nothing. Windows is where the Mac was then. The Mac got games that were PC ports, and only the most popular at that.
Here, Windows now gets the ports rather than native games, and console-oriented games at that. Very few powers, and frequently you must choose an even smaller subset to be active at that. So screw it.
I'd rather play simple stuff for smartphones and tablets than the MMORPGs of the past 3 years.
So nothing holds me to Windows except inertia. My next will probably be an Android tablet with bigger screen and mouse and keyboard, if such a thing can be configured, sitting on my sofa with everyone else on the planet simultaneously watching TV.
And MS, like Big Blue before it, can see why 2014 won't be like 1984.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
lots of laptops have windows only drivers for some of there parts / chips used.
I'm not gonna pretend that viruses and malware don't exist on Linux. They do.
However the final straw that drove me to Linux over Windows 7 was a very, very nasty Java virus that managed to disable my antivirus program outright, disable my administrator account's admin privs, and even manage to corrupt some core DLLs required to boot Windows. At that point, I literally said "fuck it" and downloaded the then-current version of Linux Mint and gave it a whirl (after a few months I settled into Arch Linux and never looked back).
Also, I realized that I only really needed Windows 7 to play games, and I just don't have as much time for games as I used to. I still keep it around on a separate hard drive, ready to boot into at any time, but it is no longer my primary OS.
Why I stay off windows whenever possible:
1. The Evil Empire: no matter how much money Gates & Co give away, I never forget where (and, more importantly, how) he got it in the first place. Also, how they continue to compete with Apple and Oracle for the title of Most Evil (Tech) Company. (Almost forgot about Monsanto there...)
2. FOSS is far more secure, especially from spyware and such. I don't access my bank account, for example, from anywhere other than my computer sporting Slackware that I know personally to be clean.
3. It also follows the Golden Rules: "treat others as you want to be treated" and "share and share alike".
4. I can afford it!
Why I must use winblows at times:
1. Certain proprietary software that will not run on anything but winblows, usually because of DRM, but occasionally due to lack of a driver in Linux/BSD. For me personally this is some games or my radio programming software (http://www.rtsystemsinc.com which is surprisingly DRM'd to the point Wine/Crossover won't run it--and the author has stated to me over the phone that he doesn't care about anything other than windows).
2. The company that I, er, the franchise I work for, works for, decided to become a M$ $hop, forcing us to use their proprietary software that breaks all the time and runs as an Active-X app! Curious thing, though: I'm convinced, now, that the backend may be an IBM CICS system. Weird.
3. Trying to teach my non-tech family (particularly my technophobic parents--my dad STILL doesn't have an ATM card!) is an exercise in futility. Only a few years ago did he finally get a laptop because he has to do certain transactions (some commercial taxes, etc) online. I just broke down, let them use winblows, and hope for the best--they never listen to me anyway.
For me, Windows is nothing more than a gaming platform now. I transitioned over to Ubuntu soon after the release of Windows 8 for daily operations, but keep a Win7 based gaming machine. Win8 was the catalyst, as I didn't want to put up with Microsoft's Metro interface on a 15" or 17" display. I don't need a 15" smartphone on my desktop, I need a usable desktop. The fact that so much of the software I use already was cross-platform (Win/Linux) aided the transition. I was comfortable with the whole system within 5 hours, and had Unity tuned to my needs within 5 minutes. I may not even be using Windows for gaming too much longer if Valve's forays into improving gaming on Linux continue and other developers see that there is a market to be had there. Dispite it's popularity, Windows has gone and made itself irrelevant in my life. For me, this is the year of the Linux Desktop.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
Installed Arch in 2011 at an installfest. Wiped the preinstalled Windows 7 partition a few months later. Never looked back.
Linux does everything I need it to do, and it's so damn flexible and customizable. Not to mention FAST. Boot and shutdown times are 1/3 of what they were on Windows.
Installed Lubuntu on the family computer. No one has any complaints about it. It does lag sometimes, but that's the fault of the shitty P4 it's running on.
In rough order of importance:
1) Games. I am a gamer, I'd rather play video games than watch TV for entertainment. I also find that the games I like the best are either PC only (like Civ), or better on the PC (like Skyrim). So a PC it is. Well, Windows is far and away the best for games. Any other platform has way, WAY less games. So all other things equal, I'd be on Windows just for that.
2) Pro Audio. I like to play with audio creation and production. This is something I could do on a Mac, though not with my prefered tool (Cakewalk Sonar). I couldn't do it on Linux though, the audio production software there is abysmal, and even if it wasn't all the samples I own are Windows and Mac only, and I do not wish to rebuy them, nor have I found any for Linux remotely close in quality.
3) Price. This relates only to switching to a Mac, but to get what I want, that being a tower unit with some good hardware, it would be monkey-fuck retarded expensive compared to PC hardware. I am not a rich man, so while I'll spend a good bit on computers, I can't afford to just blow money for no reason.
4) Hardware support. Linux in particular has issues with much of the hardware I choose to use. I really don't feel like compromising on that, I don't want to have to say "Man I'd like to use that, but it won't work on my OS." Thus far, no piece of hardware I've want has not had Windows support.
5) Ease of use. Perhaps it is just my lack of familiarity with it, or my somewhat odd requirements for use (like pro audio and good 3D acceleration) but I seem to be able to find an unsolvable problem in Linux rather quickly. When I've tried to use it at work I'll find something I can't get to work that even stumps the Linux guys. I feel like I have to fight with the OS to get it to do things, and often the solution is "Oh just write a script," or "Just modify the code and recompile," which isn't an option. I'm not a programmer and have no wish to become one.
6) It works. I'm not big on change for change sake. Were I to move to another platform, someone would have to convince me of the superiority. They'd have to show me what it is I could do there I can't do now, or how I could do what I do better. Even if it is just equal, I've little interest in changing.
That's my reasons at home. At work, well I'm the Windows lead, so of course I use Windows. I need to be familiar with it and be able to easily administer the Windows servers because that's what I'm expected to do.
I've heard this Windows thing has become better, much much better, since Windows 95. I've seen it on other peoples computer and it looks real nice. What's keeping me off trying this Windows thing is that I'm really happy with my computer as it is, I have the software I need and it's stable and I get what I need to get done. I've also got the impression that this Windows this is very limited when it comes to the command line (which I use all the time), multiple virtual desktops, good editors and so on. But I may be wrong, all these things and more may exist in the Windows world - I haven't really paid much attention to what's going on there, but I do have the impression that Windows has become a lot better since I switched.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
If I had to make a list of reasons I don't like Windows it would be very short as it has been so long since I used it as my primary OS. But some of the reasons that I remember leaving for would be:
.net were exciting. When was that 2000? So nothing in 13 years. Not one thing.
Microsoft almost always accusing my legitimate versions of windows of not being Genuine.
There being 800 different versions of the OS (Home, Cottage, Small business, Business, Cottage Pro, Professional Pro, Pro Ultimate, etc)
It crashing once or twice a day (I C++ program so my code was no doubt a contributing factor but it shouldn't bring down the OS, plus the same crappy code doesn't upset my present OS).
A virus a day keeps my sanity away. And then the required AV software was just as bad as the viruses they supposedly fought. Although I did like NOD32 just before I left.
All the coolest stuff worked better with other OS such as Linux, Mac, and BSD. Libraries such as OpenCV in its early days things like Python Libraries.
Plus all the cool kids were (and still are) using other OSs. By cool kids I don't mean people using computers as fashion accessories but people working in the best universities on things such as ML, Robotics, and computer vision.
But what flipped my switch away from MS was that I didn't need it anymore. All the software I usually ran was available elsewhere and the software I wanted to run and either couldn't or had trouble with was also elsewhere. So bye bye MS. I did miss Visual Studio somewhat.
So at this point let's assume that Windows is exactly as good as what I am using now. Why would I bother switch? I can certainly say that there is nothing that I have to have that is only available on Windows. I can say that Windows would slow down my development process. The very very few things that I need I run in an old copy of Windows XP that I have tucked away in a VM.
The last two bits of software that MS made that got me excited were Visual Studio 1.0 (bye bye Borland C++) and then the early days of
Switched from Windows to Linux in 1999. Never looked back. Have been running several companies since then, cooperating happily with scores of customers in many areas. Never any real issues with file formats or the like. Run as many programs on the command line or in (n)curses as I can. Extremely efficient setup - I am stuck with Linux due to efficiency.
Unfortunately, Adobe's software, as well as sketchup, don't work in Linux. I'd use a Mac, but that's just about the only thing I hate more than windows. So until Adobe and Trimble make Linux versions of their software, or a usable Linux alternative is created, Im stick with Windows. But I spend literally every second hating it. It's an awful OS.
If your tax software won't run in Wine then it's probably time to get some better software. I can do my taxes online in TurboTax (and not on the cloud) so I don't see why this is such a challenge.
Linux is too hard, period! iOS and Android are limiting. OSX is expensive and more limited than Windows.
Windows is still the sweet spot. Everything works on it, it's not outrageously expensive and works with legacy sw.
I have a dual boot on some of my machines using Windows 7 and OpenSuse 12.3. Most of them just run OpenSuse Linux though. I really like Mint too, but my preferred UI is KDE. I only boot Windows now when I have to. I have mostly had an uneasy relationship with Microsoft for years. I kept spending and upgrading the OS, the utilities and other add-ons. I was convinced I needed to stay with Windows. But after being asked to help my friends, family and colleagues with their trashed Windows installations, I decided to tell them I would only help them if I could install Linux. First of all, everybody wants a copy of my damn software. I fricken paid for it and it was getting old and annoying with all the friends, family and colleagues that were asking me to give them the copies I paid for. My reply to a plea for help has been, call the local computer guy and give him your card number or agree to trying Linux. The first reason to install Linux for them is that it is legal and doesn't affect my licenses. Second, it is FREE and that was hard for them to argue with. Third, doing a full Linux install to a fraction of the time that a Windows install too. My kid's behavior online kept pounding their Windows installations. They didn't obey my rules for the Internet. But they needed it for school work too. Fine, now their installations don't break and even if they did, it would be free and less timely to fix. Another benefit is my kids are now grown and the Linux experience I forced on them, has enhanced their career opportunities and resumes. At the office I replaced the server and workstation OS's and everything still runs great. My computers also are easier to deal with. Linux uses all human readable config files. I don't like regedit or "win.ini" edits. Yes, there still are some decent Windows products. But the reason to use them is because others annoy you to keep them in the fold and you aren't motivated enough to try something else yourself. Microsoft will always be with us and a force to be aware of, but they're relevance is in decline. They might have their "Coca Cola" moment with Windows 8 and 8.1, but the horses have already left the barn. Most young people use mobile phones more so than anything else. They will be more familiar with a UI like that at the desktop at work, and so will their eyes when they age. None of them are using Windows on phones. Of all the people I have helped, only 2 have gone back to Windows. Some that have bought new computers with Windows 8 have begged me to come over again and get rid of it. The handwriting is on the wall.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
NolaPro. Or KmyMoney. Or Gmoney
These sound like alternatives to Quicken, not alternatives to TurboTax. Do they come with annual updates to conform to annual changes to the U.S. federal tax code and the respective tax codes of the several states?
As I've said before, the year of the Linux desktop is the year all these get ported.
Your grammar stinks, and makes your post unintelligible. By your handle I can't tell whether you're stupid or English isn't your native tongue (or both).
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
My boss!! :-D
But it appears that for little time, I hope. The support guys are asking about what Linux distro I would like to use to host our VM's that are used for software development (we develop products that runs on Oracle, for SQL Server, and it's easier to setup dedicated development environments using VMs!).
It's almost three years since I used Windows for something but playing media and games: I'm using Gnu/Linux where I can, or Mac OS at my home and some freelancing. Not a single drop of regret, this piece of crap is just not missed by me.
I keep a old Windows XP box for my retro-computing interests just for the taste of using/playing in the real hardware - I could easily dump the hard disk to be used on a OpenBOX VM on some of my UNIX (or like) machines. But that SoundBlaster Audigy and that Radeon HD 3850 still does so great on my favorite PC games that I just can't stand throwing it away. Yet. :-)
To tell you the true, there's just one situation where I'm stuck on Windows 7 on my personal affairs - at least, for now. I had setup a Atom 330 to be my torrent/media/file server under my TV-Set, and the sad true is that Intel was a bitch on supporting Linux. The Atom 330 just sucks playing media on Linux (or even in Windows, without the Intel's codecs), and this is Intel's fault.
But since I don't plan to switch my Atom 330 for anything else, as it's energy consumption is far better than anything else I could use for the job (or someone else can recommend to me an ARM based MiniITX board that can fully substitute the 330 in processing power and hardware expandability?) and HD videos (that the Atom 330 handles badly - 1080p movies aren't handled very well, if handled at all) can be watched on my PS3 when I really want to see something in HD, I think I will stick with Win7 for some more time. My girl friends are still used to Windows anyway and keeping the Media Center on Win7 is easier for them - at least, for now. :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Continuing to use Windows is like being a lobster gradually being boiled. No thank you. I've used Windows XP for almost 10 years, and when it will be discontinued next year I'll use Debian. Will I completely reject Windows ? Nope, for those 2 applications (legit not warez) plus several original windows games that don't work on Wine I'll virtualise XP. But I will never again buy another Windows license.
Games and business software.
Until one or both of those runs on something else... (i really don't give a fuck what my OS is.. really)
I'm stuck with it.
Heck i was happy with windows 98se.. You strip the garbage out and it was fine.
I was forced to move onto win2k. And if you strip the garbage out it was fine...
I was forced to move onto xp. And if you strip the garbage out it was near perfect.
I skipped vista. it was a bad joke until several service patches got out. and still.
And then i was forced onto windows7 when stuff started requireing it or vista... and well... fuck vista.
Eventually they'll try forcing me into windows 8... And so far.. No... nope... that's where i draw the line. Its crap. with a massive ammount of garbage on top.. the hours of work required to remove it all is just too much.. With still no real improvements to anything that matters.
I figure by that time i'll be getting too old for games. And be set in my ways for business software. So fuckit. win7 is the end of the line for me. It works. And its near the limit on garbage i want to clean out for an operating system that i just use to start OTHER programs.
And for the record.. garbage includes IE.. you don't actually need that shit for any site. Just change your useragent in firefox and hey... that IE only site works just fine. I dont want a fucking browser embedded right into my file operating system. it's stupid.
I run Windows 8 Enterprise x64 on a MacBook Air via Bootcamp.I boot into MacOS only for music recording. I run Ubuntu in Hyper-V when needed. Why I continue to use Windows - Visual Studio 2012 for :NET and Win32 C++ coding, the integrated debugging tools, automated testing compatibility, integrated code analysis all seem superior to what I've tried in Linux
- Office 2013. Sorry LibreOffice/OpenOffice you're still playing catchup. Maybe for certain uses this may be OK, but for complex docs I work with MS Office is superior.
- bash is nice, PowerShell 3.0 far superior , and if I want bash can run it on windows anyway
- Windows is now very stable/secure even out of the box
- Internet Explorer is no longer the crappy browser it was
Two words: Warranty period. When my 12 months are up, on comes Ubuntu.
Czech language for absolute beginners
I'm probably a good person to ask that question of, it's on my thinkpad despite my starting with Unix in 1977; in my entire professional career as a program I had only one Windows gig the rest was Unix or embedded assembly. I really do c/unix stuff, for work and fun. So why then do I still use XP?
Cause it works finally.
If it were as bad as it were 10 years ago, I'd be using Unix on my laptop, but xp has stopped pissing me off with stupid shit and does the very little I ask of it reasonably well, although my expectations of it are so low I'd be equally happy with a BIOS that boots to a web browser.
It does need daily reboots and sometimes goes for weeks on end without a need for a reboot and (touch wood) doesn't seem to crash any more.
So, under the "don't fix what aint broken" maxim, I'll leave xp on this machine. Would I "upgrade"? Not a chance in hell. If I used anything else I'd put BSD on it instead.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Along similar lines, if you're dependent on a handful of apps most people have never heard of, because they drive something specific (like scientific equipment, or in my case, telescopes and cameras for amateur astrophotography) your chances of moving to Linux are poor. There's a lot of good open source effort devoted to making equivalents for things most people need, but when there aren't that many users, the community of potential open source developers is small.
My own list of boat anchors keeping me in the Windows pool includes MaximDL, PHD Guiding, PemPRO, FocusMax, and a bunch of drivers for things like telescope mounts, focusers, a CCD camera, etc.
And yes, there's virtualization, and such, but some of these programs and pieces of equipment are finicky enough to get to work together to start with, without that added level of complexity.
That's the only reason. But that's changing.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Raider, Assassin's Creed, Deus Ex, absolutely nothing else. AAA-titles still not available on Steam.. :(
It's not getting much better it's just getting more fragmented, I keep trying Linux (and have been for 15+ years) but keep coming back to Windows. IMO Linux isn't a real OS, Linux does not need 50+ distros all reinventing the same wheels over and over. Windows (7 for me) is a stable OS that does everything I need it to.
But aside from the atrocious and mystery-meat-oriented Unity, Linux distros seem to come "dumbed-down" in terms of user interface. File managers have the dreaded and useless "icon view", and it's not easy to put stuff on the desktop, etc. And I personally think that Windows 7 looks waaay better than any Linux desktop out there.
when IE 6 was the standard and W3C was broken in the eyes of I.T.
i realize with your username you have to praise everything microsoft, but surely that was a joke right?
Everything.. Work, Personal, Gaming, Music, Videos, you name it, it's all Windows. MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, PhotoShop, Corel Draw, NetBeans, DVDFab, WinAMP, Browsing, banking, MAME, I can go on and on. Which is why Windows 7 is a big deal for me and going to Windows 8 or 8.1 isn't going to cut it, because I've invested a lot of monies into my software apps. Microsoft is stupid to think that people can invest time and monies every 2, 3 yrs just because they want to upgrade their OS to make more money.
That the biggest reason for staying on Windows is gone. I use Cygwin a lot. Lots of apps are still on windows, but the advances in VMs, , the cloud (online apps), etc. are going to gradually erase the reason Windows is necessary.
Windows 2000 and Windows XP are rock solid and have software I want (or need) to use. What does linux bring to the table?
Windows 2000 is already owned, and Windows XP reaches end of support 10 months from now, after which point computer criminals will discover a defect that can be used to compromise a computer remotely, Microsoft won't issue a patch, and nobody else is legally allowed to. What GNU/Linux* brings to the table is that because popular distributions are both freely licensed and available without charge (assuming unmetered Internet access), you keep getting OS upgrades that are about as easy to install as Windows service packs. Canonical, for example, brings out a new long-term supported (LTS) version of Ubuntu every two years, and the five-year support lifetimes of successive LTS releases overlap by three years. And even if Canonical were to stop distributing Ubuntu, you could switch to any other GNU/Linux distribution and keep running all your applications.
* As opposed to Android, which uses the same Linux kernel as GNU/Linux.
I'm going to be marked as troll and care very little about it but:
There is something to be said about using an OS 90+% of the population uses. There are intangible and tangible benefits, like hardware working properly and to full capacity (not the lowest common denominator support Linux often boasts), like MS Office working well, saving you the effort of mucking about with Libre/Openoffice, Strange IE-only sites not being a issue, not worrying about updates breaking your system (updates are much more likely to break things under Linux), A stable video-editor (Linux has nothing compared to the windows side), being able to connect to a projector.
There is also the stability you get when you buy a complete desktop OS from the same vendor, with everything from the kernel to the UI because closely coordinated. This is better than the Linux approach of fiefdoms with everything being plugged together by the distros, praying that updating one package won't break another package because it's often impossible to test all the possible configuration variables.
When MS introduced UAC, discouraged the use of the registry (preferring a local approach to settings management), and separated the update manager from the browser windows and began offering a decent AV, all in vista, windows became a superior option. Linux offers litter benefit to the user because MS has largely addressed their problems.
If your tax software won't run in Wine then it's probably time to get some better software.
My tax software company didn't target Wine, so although I might fault them for failing to have a Linux version, I sure as hell won't complain that it has bugs when run in an emulator they might never even have heard of.
I play games, I don't want to have to fight Wine every time I want to install a game, I don't have security or stability issues with Windows and I got 8 legitimately for free. I simply have no reason to change.
They do it to maintain their monopoly. That is more than enough reason for me.
What with the rise of mobile they seem to have lost the ability to prevent progress. And look at all the wonderful new things we get when that power is lost. Isn't it amazing ?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm not sure where you're from, but *all* the web software I've seen these days does not require IE, and a larger and larger majority of it explicitly does *not* support it.
I'm a developer. Linux isn't a target because F/OSS users think that if one thing is free, everything is (or should be, or is when I copy it.) Thus Linux isn't an option, leaving Windows.
And no, I don't care about Humble Bundle averages. Those 'purchases' are political statements that don't translate to sales for actual developers outside the bundle
I've filed my taxes using software available on Linux for the past ten years. It's been almost that long since I've seen a website which requires IE. Even if a website does still require IE, other browsers can spoof their ID.
Switched from Windows to OSX five years ago. Never looked back and won't go back. It's easier, it's more powerful (Unix!!), less headache from stupid and inexplicable software design flaws, etc, etc, etc.
I used IBM DOS, sometimes running the oh so ugly IBM DOS Shell on top, then switched briefly to MS DOS 6.22 with Win 3.0 on top, then to OS/2. Then very briefly used a mac, then got started with Slackware, and that's what I used until I moved to Ubuntu 3 years ago (I'm looking to going back to Slackware, but I simply don't have the time to mess with my system anymore, and that's a requirement to do just about anything on Slackware).
Why is it always considered than anything non-windows is "alternative"? With Android growing the way it is, OSX becoming more popular, and GNU/Linux growing more popular, specially in corporate environments, how is it exactly that anything non-ms is alternative? Sure, Windows enjoyed some almost complete market dominance, but it lasted but a decade (Windows became dominant around '95, and started its rapid decline around '05/'06).
Isn't it time we stop using the word "alternative" to describe anything other than windows?
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
enough said
Linux modi 2.6.26-2-parisc
I'm an electrical engineer. Solidworks and Altium run on Windows. Also, Windows is good at window management; the new super+ shortcuts are great. Sure I can set something similar up on your Linux flavor of choice, but that's missing the point.
...
Thin client development is Windows/OSX.
Mobile is iOS and Android with serious clients insisting on Android first and less savvy clients only concerned with iOS (despite my efforts to explain market share to them.)
Middleware development is almost entirely CentOS/Mint mix.
Back end is WS2003/2008/CentOS for horizontally scalable, and exclusively CentOS for massively scalable (i.e. something along the lines of the AKF cube.)
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PC Games and iTunes
When it comes Python coding, R, and other "Data Science" tools, Linux is much easier. There's nothing I hate more than getting a F/OSS tool that requires cygwin. cygwin on XP just doesn't work well for what I do - or it's my old machine. Having a Linux boot is much nicer.
BUT - my current Windows machine is starting to crap out and the drive with my XP partition is just full and unfortunately, many developers still ONLY allow installs to the C; drice - like everything that CANON produces for their support programs: scanners, cameras, all go to C:
And, newer software isn't supporting XP.
My XP 32-bit running on a 64 bit processor and m machine is slooooooow. The exact same machine on Ununtu - WITH Unity - is much more responsive, boots MUCH faster, and is a pleasure to work on - mostly.
U 13.4 stability issues have been mostly cleared up, but for a brief time, it sucked.
Anyway, I'd like to get a Mac Book Pro, but I'd save hundred of dollars getting a Win 8 machine with a touch screen (ASUS Vivo or Zen) - and they're on sale at Microcenter.
(for me, Ardour doesn't cut it. I realize this is very much a catch-22 for OSS and making $, but I don't like the method Ardour uses to financially support itself)
But both of those are now taken care of.
Lightworks - awesome NLE, feature set on par w/ Final Cut Pro before the iFCP dumbening - http://www.lwks.com/
Tracktion 4 - professional daw (originally by Mackie). Methods are a bit different from more traditional software (Cubase/Reaper/Protools/Samplitude/etc) but professional thru-and-thru. http://www.tracktion.com/
Games and only games so I really hope Valve can fix this
Allow me to translate (native English speaker, age 30+):
Mac OS X has too much hardware lockdown with high prices and limited choice. Why has Apple chosen not to make a $1000-$1500 desktop that has desktop video cards, RAM and CPUs, and at least 2 HDD bays? Why do AMD CPUs need a custom kernel? GNU/Linux and Windows don't do that.
Active Directory and GPOs. Microsoft has made it simple for me to administrate everything from users to e-mail to installed software, made it easy, easy to automate, and easy to scale.
Every time my boss sends me an exchange appointment, thunderbird shows a blank email. It used to show some basic text explaining who/what/when/where/why, but now the body is completely blank. Been that way for quite some time. Oh, I could use the outlook web interface, but it's not thunderbird. Also my net-phone uses Lync. I've got libreoffice, smbclient, rdesktop, etc. But between my desk phone and my appointment emails, I have to use a Windows computer too (it mostly just sits under my desk).
do I really need 6 text editors as part of the base os?
For a while, many sellers of PCs that come with Windows XP were shipping Notepad, WordPad, Microsoft Works, and Microsoft Word (Home and Student version). It's not quite six, but I could probably find two more buried in Windows if I were to dig hard enough.
Also make so you move a little slower then distribution X 2012 2012.5 2013 with out a seamless update system.
You might prefer Ubuntu's LTS (long-term support) release channel. You get a service pack every two years, and after a new one comes out, the previous one is still supported for security updates for three more years for a total of five.
I use it because I bought a copy of Windows XP in 2003. I've burned through 4 computers since then, but only one OS. Until it stops working, I'm not switching.
Honestly for me, Linux is very close to being usable. My main problems however are:
1) Distro's still regularly use apps/libs which are NOT READY, and are a significant step backwards. Unity for instance was a huge step backwards at first (and only recently became decent), and Ubuntu happily made it the default. Udev was being actively used whilst it was missing major functionality, etc. Distro's should wait until the apps are at least as good (or nearly as good as the old ones), before they go mainstream.
2) No stereoscopic 3D support on standard NVIDIA cards (not Linux's fault though)..
3) Ubuntu at least still has lots of bugs. Crashes are still common for applications, whereas for Windows, they are extremely rare
4) Updates are a hit and miss. I still sometimes get updates which break things royally (I've seen this on OpenSUSE and Ubuntu).
5) Windows has more safeguards against failures. ie, if an update fails, it rolls it back automatically. If an update fails on Linux, you are lucky if your system still boots. Generally, you need to mess around in terminal to fix things.
6) Resources on Linux are spread too thin to perform proper QA. We now have at least 3 or 4 major packaging systems which are incompatible with one another (with not enough work going into supporting cross compatibility), we have plenty of desktop environments (and, when major changes are made, people freak out, and rather than port the features they need, they simply fork the old one), we have upstart and systemd, and things are even growing to the point that we might have more than 1 Xserver. Even worse, the most vocal in the community STILL try to up themselves by telling newbies that GUI's are useless (despite the fact, many of these experts probably have accidentally done a "rm -rf / application/etc/etc/etc" before).
So, a huge percentage of programming hours are wasted on repackaging applications for the various distro's and everyone keeps forking everything so bugs end up not getting fixed. We don't need 300 different subdistros (people are doing silly stuff like making subdistros such as "catholic" or "education editions" which are mostly unnecessary).
Linux can succeed (especially since steam has been ported to linux now, so, there will be more emphasis on support and performance), but, more cooperation is required, and we need to start looking at goals. To end users, emerge, apt, RPM are the same thing, and, they should work on interoperability (and working towards a common format). We don't need 5 packaging systems these days, and, we need to stop encouraging forks of everything. Otherwise, we will never have the resources required to succeed.
1. "Product activation" is a deliberate crippling of the system. It's a bureaucratic system that I want no part of. I will not sit on a phone call with a Microsoft representative explaining why a major upgrade of my hardware should NOT be perceived as a "new system" requiring a new license.
2. The Linux repository is an amazing cornucopia, bursting with powerful tools in countless numbers. I have one huge "apt-get" command line that I paste in to grab them all. With Windows, I have to collect a bunch of separate pieces of software from a bunch of different sources, and then individually install them each by hand. Fuck that.
3. I'm a command-line guy. For 15 years, Microsoft deliberately refused to upgrade their command-line language. I finally got tired of its limitations. Bash is 100 times more flexible and better-designed than cmd.exe.
4. In the same vein: I strongly believe in config files. When I edit my /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/hosts or whatever, I can easily back up my settings and restore them. With Windows, you can't do that -- it requires click click click with the mouse in a GUI program every damn time.
5. Windows has many strange architectural limitations that they steadfastly refuse to fix. Drive letters (26 max. What. The. Fuck?). Unnecessary restrictions in file names. The inability to use a UNC name as the current directory. Shortcuts are implemented by the Shell instead of by Win32. The inability to reliably delete or rename a file without rebooting (that's why most installers/uninstallers require a reboot). I could go on and on and on. None of that stupidity exists in Linux.
7, 8
What the heck is a 'sig'?
I've better things to do with my time that fiddling with wine and having erratic behavior at income tax time, thanks
No Omni Outliner, Omni Graffle, Text Mate, Keychain, bash (grep, sed, awk, rsync, ssh, smbutil), iCal, Cyberduck, Time Machine. Yes I know Windows has similar apps, they just aren't as good or cost as much (usually more than) a Mac.
only runs on Windows and OSX. As soon as somebody figures that one out I'll be able to overwrite the Windows partition on my Kubuntu box.
Actually HBOGo works in linux so I may ditch Windows anyway...
Linux has too choice in ways that should be like do I really need 6 text editors as part of the base os?
Also make so you move a little slower then distribution X 2012 2012.5 2013 with out a seamless update system.
All come with gedit only (ignoring CLI) and its great and available for windows. Ironically you are given a choice on Linux or having a fast moving cutting edge distribution like Linux, and a slow moving desktop like Debian. Its why there may seem like there are a lot of choices, but really there are only a few sensible ones dictated by your needs.
In reference to your comments the alternative in Windows your choice is something unwanted or something old, nether is particularly desirable.
From 2000-2010, I mostly used Linux and considered Windows a toy OS for playing games. Then I decided to stop using pirated software and haven't looked back. I'm a software developer by profession and hobby, but I'll never develop for or even use Windows again until it's completely gratis.
Until very recently (when my office was turned into a nursery) my home computer was an old Dell laptop running Windows XP. So in that sense I was "on" Windows. But I had zero interest in upgrading to 7 or 8, so in that sense I was already "off" Windows. They're not fundamentally different from XP, but the mere fact that they're different at all is an irritation. I'm really not interested in acclimating myself to a new desktop environment. Also, since May 2007 I've used nothing but Macs at work, a period spanning three different employers. At this point, if I were to buy a new machine for personal use, it would almost certainly be a Mac.
Let me guess: You prepared and filed within a week of the deadline. I prefer to file as soon as I get my W-2 and 1099 forms, when H&R Block's servers aren't quite so slashdotted.
I can do 100% of what I need and want to do in Windows, whereas that number reduces to about 80-90% in Linux. It's the edge cases which reduces things in Linux; it's not just games that I use Windows for - it's also the fact that I know it has commercial support for top-tier software that I want to use. It's not just games - whether it's MS Office or Photoshop or that niche app you use to do something for a hobby or work, Windows will have what you want. Linux will either have an alternative that does close to what you want (but not everything, and hence is a downgrade), or it won't have it at all, necessitating either giving up using that software and the resulting features, or trying to use WINE (which has regressions on every second version) or virtualization (in which case, I'd rather just use Windows and deal with maintaining one operating system instead of two).
I used to really, really want to move to Linux, but I could never justify it because I'd end up with less functionality. I'm surrounded by some very smart engineers at work who, after talking with them, I learnt that they all use Windows at home for their primary (non-server) machines because frankly, they have had their own problems with Linux which do not offset issues in Windows.
It's a shame to some, but Windows just doesn't really suck as much as some might wish it did.
Representatives of Microsoft may be hanging out on the social news site voting up positive comments about the Xbox One, voting down negative comments and adding pro-Xbox comments of their own, Misty Silver says.
While at Microsoft for a meeting, Misty Silver saw and overheard some employees on Reddit. She looked at one of the employee’s screens:
“I noticed he was mass-downvoting a ton of posts and comments, and he kept switching to other tabs to make posts and comments of his own. I couldn’t make out exactly what he was posting, but I presumed he was doing RM (reputation management) and asked my boss about it later. According to my boss, MS have[sic] just brought in a huge sweep of SMM managers to handle reputation management for the Xbox One,” Silver reported.
“Reputation management” is the term social media marketers use to “pose as happy customers” on social media sites. They upvote/downvote and make comments.
http://au.businessinsider.com/microsoft-positive-reddit-comments-2013-6 [businessinsider.com] [businessinsider.com]
For quite a while I used to dual-boot between Windows 7 and whatever the distro-of-the-month was for me during that particular time, I had to stop though because it became a mess to manage files between the two after a while. The only thing still keeping me on Windows is just a handful of the games I play, everything else I ever do on the PC can be done better in Linux. In contrast to what a lot of other people said here, I'm actually more satisfied with the drivers on Linux than those on Windows, but that's probably because I never had graphics issues since I have Intel integrated graphics instead of a proper dedicated graphics card. For example, a really old scanner that I have works just fine in 64-bit Linux, but absolutely refuses to function in 64-bit Windows. As for other tasks, most of the non-game programs I use on Windows either started on Linux or have Linux ports (LibreOffice, Transmission), and of course programming in Linux is a lot easier than in Windows thanks to gcc being built-in.
As for games, 2/3 of the ones I play have either been ported to Linux because of Steam for Linux (such as Team Fortress 2) or work just fine under Wine (Darkest Hour, Starcraft 1). However, the Steam ports don't seem to be working for me since I have Ironlake graphics and not the newere Ivy Bridge / Sandy Bridge chips, and since I'm on a laptop and have a tight budget at the moment, an upgrade is out of the question for the time being. That is the only thing keeping me from switching.
At work I use seven monitors of various sizes and orientations, and at home I use four. Software needs notwithstanding, Windows' effortless support of these configurations is really the deal-maker for me. I use a lot of Linux servers, and my daily carry is a retina MBP, so once or twice a year I get a hankering to install Linux as my primary desktop OS, only to invariably run into issues with monitor configurations. Linux was my primary client OS from 2000 to 2004 as I used only a single machine, a laptop, for everything, but these days it doesn't meet my (client) needs.
A decent shell/command line
I know there are third party shells that work "ok"... but 95% of my working life is in vim or ssh'd to a linux server (and probably also in vim..). I converted to OS X as soon as it came out and really haven't looked back for my desktop needs, primarily because I get a system that just works + a bunch of built in unix tools that fit with my workflow better than anything windows can offer.
Games are the best foothold windows has for me.
the htpc in the living room with the 60 inch tv is for games (movies and music more-so, but linux could handle that easy).
the linux machine in the office is where i do all work now (programming, 3d modeling, image editing, word processing, etc.).
i also like to test my c code on windows too to make sure my source stays cross-platform.
from the looks at the comment scores, I'm guessing they're doing the same thing here.
while
And before someone chimes in with "but there are lots of good games for linux!" Yes I am sure there are, but nor the ones I want to play. The choice of app is more important than is.
Now my work machine has been all Linux for years now. I honestly don't know how I put up with java development in windows for all those years.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
It seems like everyone bashing one OS or the other has not used either OS in 7 years. Everytime there is a linux vs windows debate why do I have to read comments about things that happened 11 years ago? We got one guy talking about I couldn't get Mandrake to work 11 years ago, but XP was no problem. Why do we even care about what happened 11 years ago in personal computing? We have these other people talking about Windows GUI is slow, I want to type out all my commands. Powershell has come along way, with some options are only available via command line for windows now.. some might saw that Powershell is far superior to BASH Can we stop talking about Windows XP spyware/malware problems as well? I mean MS has gone a long way to address these.. these are legacy issues. I dont find one more stable over the other.. they both crash. I use both.. Id rather be on linux but i still like serious gaming.
Look, if Firefox can run fine in Wine, then basic financial software shouldn't have a problem. New games and other things that take advantage of more obscure libraries and APIs, maybe. But tax software? It's no excuse when entire Office suites run fine in Wine.
Linux is not a toy. If it were true, then Cisco, VMWare and dozens of other highly respected and expensive technology brands are foisting toys upon the world.
But even so, Linux on the Desktop will never be a "mainstream thing." But that's perfectly okay. Windows (and DOS before it) was always designed to be a desktop system... a non-critical desktop system. And of course, it has critical mass which is why "everything works best on it." But don't confuse that apparent fact to mean that means Windows is the best.
I do use Linux on the desktop and mainly because I can trust it a great deal more than Windows. And in today's ridiculous political climate? You'd be an absolute fool to use anything but Linux today. After all, if you disagree with the tremendous amount of government overreach lately (and the vast majority of us do) I can't imagine why you couldn't presume your Windows isn't compromised already. Seriously. It's mainstream news. It's not "conspiracy theory" any more. And it runs things nicely and well.
So why won't there ever be a year of the Linux Desktop? Well... that's because it's the desktop itself that's on it way out. And it happens that Linux is already dominating its replacements and Microsoft/Windows has already been soundly rejected by the consumer community.
Nope until 2008 IE 6 was the defecto standard. If something didn't work on IE 6 it was broken. If Firefox wouldn't render it then it was broken. If something was broken in Firefox but works in IE 6 corporate users considered it standard and proper.
Which is why in 2013 you still have software that only works with IE 8 that is being sold currently.
http://saveie6.com/
My sister in law had a Dell Mini-9 that she received for free when my brother bought a high end laptop from them. It only had an atom processor and was loaded with Windows XP. It took 1/2 hour to boot and 10 minutes to load any web browser. In frustration they just gave it to me. I wiped it and loaded x-ubuntu on it. It boots now in 30 seconds and Firefox works great on it. That's all I really need for recreational use is a PC that can run a web browser, some office software (Libra office is running on all my PCs, Linux & Windows) but there are some clear deficiencies in Linux. It does not run Silverlight which means Netflix is off the table. The simple games; Solitaire, Freecell are available but *REALLY* clunky! I do *NOT* want to run some interpretive compatibility software like WINE to get these features. Linux should have these simple features in native mode. I keep it around because I like being in a non-windows playground, but it's just not all there yet.
Games will keep me on it. Although with quite a few games having good wine compatibility and more native games going linux (thanks valve/unity) there is a good chance it wont keep me here much longer.
What will keep me away from it is debian and cloud based applications. I no longer have an office suite on my pc, google docs suits my needs just fine and when I want more I use latex.
The main reasons I would leave windows isn't really because I dislike it that much. The last crash has been a good while ago. But recently I have become a huge, huge fan of command line. And linux beats the windows command line tool right away. Command line rules because, for starters, advice on the internet is easy to follow, you open up a command line and copy paste if you are lazy, further on I actually love interfaces that make great keyboard usage since typing multiple characters is usually faster than moving the mouse through menus, and if you want keyboard based, whats better than command line.
For the things I do need an interface for, I may be completely crazy but I loved gnome3. It was clean, pretty fast and did all I need. Being a not so tidy person, I often got gnome2 cluttered in minutes.
The main thing I lack on Linux systems is powerful file manager. And by powerful I mean really powerful. On Windows, I use Far, I can manage files, processes, edit multiple files, start/stop services, browse SMB network, connect to ssh (scp), connect to sftp, manage registry, view images and so on. And there are many plugins I can use for many more features, if this is not enough. Totalcmd has similar features. There is absolutely no comparable file manager on linux. Midnight commander is just nightmare and doesn't have half the features that Far does and as far as I remember, Krusader is also quite behind.
Is Misty Silver supposed to be a name?
IE 10 is "modern" and "tolerable"? Which version--desktop or Metro?
WINE Is Not an Emulator, surely you must know that by now
It really is just those two things.
At home, games: (Debian) Linux does everything I want except play games. Windows does everything I want [in a desktop] including play games. Linux has some advantages (middle click to paste what was selected, pasting text or image data on the desktop creates a file of appropriate type, easy always on top for arbitrary windows, less scary full disk encryption) but a lot of them have been disappearing (ie: Windows 7 includes desktop slideshow, a feature that kept me going back to KDE). I do have a Linux file server using Samba 4 which gives me all the non-desktop goodies that I am missing from Windows (SSH access, rtorrent, irc, DNS server, real scripting, etc).
At work, Outlook: Yes I can get the email all kinds of ways but that is only 10% of Outlook in an Exchange environment. Creating complex filters and rules, the colored flags, scheduling, calendar, and tasks are all necessary parts of the Outlook experience (even more so when there are shared mailboxes involved) and Evolution isn't quite there yet. I do have a Linux box as well but until that's ironed out, I am stuck with Windows as well.
From the double-posting of that text in two parts of the thread, there may be some ppl attempting to "manage" Microsoft's reputation (downwards) too.
Linux as a serious OS has been around for what, 10 years ?
Yet almost no one uses it.
At some point, you have to say, the market has spoken.
For whatever reason, people don't like it.
I work with a set of modest geeks, and none of them (not one) uses linux for anything. They all have tried it.
SO, ymmv, but at some point you have to stop blaming the evil MS, and face up to the truth: people have had 10 years to try linux, and they have said NO
(my personal opinion is the silly idea that choice is good, which accounts for all the distros, is a major factor in the lack of linux uptake)
What's keeping me on Windows? Office and .Net. My employer requires Word, Excel and Outlook. Those packages are designed to make it infeasible for any other software to correctly handle their files and interoperate with all the exotic features of Exchange. Plus some of their Web applications are designed to operate only with IE6 (to the point where they don't work correctly with IE7+). And the software I need to work on's written in C#/.Net using Windows-only libraries from MS on top of it. Note that none of the functionality's Windows-only, but the non-functional requirements preclude any non-Windows OS.
What's keeping me off Windows? Posix. The older software (that's still handling the bulk of the workload) is C++ using Posix APIs, and Windows simply doesn't have the Posix support to let it compile. Considering the sheer bulk of accumulated code and features in the old software, I don't see it going away any time soon. Not to mention that Windows doesn't have the performance to handle the workload. No, I'm not joking here, we've literally made Windows boxes fall over handling a workload that's just beginning to make smaller and less powerful Unix servers break a sweat. I don't see Windows gaining a high-quality Posix subsystem any time soon, nor of getting an order-of-magnitude improvement in performance, so.
Which all translates to my sitting on a Windows machine spending 90% of my time in Cygwin using Unix tools to do Unix software development, using terminal windows to run/debug the software on Unix servers.
Like all good Computer Scientists, I use what is best for the job and the situation. What's the best cost point? What are the users most comfortable with? What is already available? You can't walk into a problem already leaning toward a fanboy solution either way.
This is the first year that I've been completely Windows-free, and that's basically for two (or three) reasons:
1) Pro audio workstation software is finally coming to Linux
Tracktion published a Linux beta a while ago, and later this year (hopefully) Bitwig Studio will be published, also on Linux. After this one, the rest of the developers will follow up. While waiting for these, I've been using Reaper, which has an officially supported Wine build.
2) Pro video editing software is finally coming to Linux
In April, a public beta of Lightworks was released for Linux.
3) Gaming
Steam + the Humble Bundles. Suddenly, there's an abundance of Linux ports of great games. Other developers will follow.
So, 2013 is, finally, the year of the Linux desktop, but perhaps not in the way it was expected to happen. The OS field is more fragmented than ever. But perhaps it doesn't matter. It is also easier to port software across OSs than ever. Or at least design your software for portability.
Because everythings written for windows. Simple as that. It's a snowball effect.
Simple answer. Desktops are dying and everyone knows it. People who aren't sticking to phones/tablets are using laptops and will likely never go back to a desktop.
Personal tax software? I've done turbo tax online from my linux desktop for 4 years now, no issues.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Nope until 2008 IE 6 was the defecto standard.
If that was deliberate, it gets the "funny post of the day" award.
If it was accidental, it gets the "funny typo of the day" award.
I'm a student, power user, but a student, I dont have a job with complex program requirements, I don't need PS, Windows-only audio software, whatever......The alternatives, GIMP, Ardour, Libreoffice/Google Office....I have 60% of my games, Minecraft,TF2,Beat Hazard, Linux Tycoon (of course), Gmod, whatever, on (a good amount of ) *nix. Linux is heavily customizable, themes, compositor configurations, Desktop Environments, and...best one...you the under laying are not tied to a UI, maybe Xorg /Wayland (never Mir :P) crashes one day ( has happened on a VBox install) and you have to remove Xorg/Wayland and but your repo's back to the stable/LTS branch, apt-get install Xorg/Wayland and be good to go....or whatever the problem is...you can do it on the terminal. I dont speak for everyone...but I think I at least speak for others in my age range who don't need PS or certain software for their job. Just my thoughts
People once told me 68K ram was all we needed,
and microsoft is the only company to do this.
if only..... there's hope and theory, but little fact and application. pity really....
I have zero issues with Windows 7 at home. It's been very stable for me, and I'm able to do all I need with it. I have VMWare when I need it for any other OS.
I use Linux at work exclusively, currently Mint 14 with Mate. Overall, it's a great distro, with an intuitive feel most of the time.
I guess the thing that keeps me from using Linux at home is that I'm comfortable with the collection of applications I use at home, and there are no comparable equivalents for Linux that I've seen. So much work goes into improving the Linux Desktop experience....I wish the same level of resources would go into the application base. The office suites are fairly mature, but it's just all the smaller peripheral applications I use that aren't really there. I could probably make some combination of Linux programs work, but there is zero incentive for me to break what currently works.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
That's because all Linux users are in the 41%. Nothing to see, move on.
Currently using linux because Microsoft has abandoned the power user in pursuit of the lowest common denominator. I'm guessing this is because they saw how Apple was taking market share from them, and decided they'd follow along.
*I want a system that does what I tell it, not what it thinks I want.
*I want a system that provides the fewest steps to any task. I don't want to click a bunch 'ok' prompts, or search the depths of the system for something they hid from the lowest common denominator user in fears they'd screw up their system. I'm sick of obfuscation of not just Windows, but other Microsoft software like Word.
*I want a system that allows me to install what I want, how I want - be it drivers, or any sort of application
*I want a system where I don't have to worry about key-code validity, authentication, etc. ...ever! ...and that's all I have time to post
Fedora Linux does everything I need, I don't really do more than email, web reading and office documents.
If I was a gamer I am sure it would require Windows.
My current desktop is a Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3(rev 1.0) with an i7-2600K and 16GB of RAM; everything works flawlessly. I don't even have a video card, I am just using the SandyBridge integrated graphics via HDMI...
Why change?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
This question has flamewar all over it, but I'll try to answer it practically.
Server: For my servers, it's Linux. Far easier to manage and configure than Window's reg entries with a dozen different inconsistent management apps. Is that setting in the firewall? Group policies? Computer management? Services? No app at all, manual reg setting?
Destop: I use Windows since it's the most flexible, configurable, consistent windows manager that doesn't involve programming it (scm). I can run linux and windows apps in their own windows, and everything's configurable if you know where to look (not always easy, but there are apps to simplify it). And it's far easier to emulate Linux under Windows than Windows under Linux (WINE). Plus, I like my games - Steam may change that, but not yet.
If I were using Mac OSX, I could run Windows, Mac, /and/ Linux programs using Parallels, but I haven't found anything OSX that I absolutely need, and the UI and apps constantly fighting me, thinking they know what's better for me, means it's a constant battle. Add that to the extra hardware cost for desktops and it's not worth it. Windows 8 would fall into the same category, but you can at least return it to Windows 7 levels of usefulness with Start8.
So basically, I'm a lazy whore (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI, whatever, whoever's best at the time) and Windows desktop gives /me/ the best combination of flexibility, configurability, consistency, and gaming with the least amount of effort. That's why I use Linux for servers too.
I stick with it because the Windows ecosystem just works (I don't have the blue screens, etc people rag on MS about; I also don't keep old hardware; even IE hasn't crashed on me in over a year, while Windows hasn't crashed on me since Win7 released to MSDN). Linux is too much of a hodge podge of mix-and-match for my liking. It reminds me of the shareware days, where there were a dozen word processors and other productivity apps to choose from, all written as pet projects and flakey as hell. I just want to put stuff on my system that all works similarly and well together without having to research which ones are decent.
mac os to much hardware lockdown with high prices and limited choice.
why no $1000-$1500 desktop that has desktop video cards, RAM and cpus? at least 2 HDD bays?
Why is AMD cpus need a custom kernel? Linux and windows don't do that.
The answer to the third question is "because there's hardware lockdown", i.e. Apple have chosen not to offer OS X for non-Apple machines and have chosen not to use AMD CPUs in their machines and, therefore, as they didn't need to support AMD CPUs in XNU, have chosen not to bother supporting them.
The answer to the first and second questions is "because, for whatever reason, Apple isn't interested in offering them" (combined with "because there's hardware lockdown", so you can't have machines like that from anybody else running OS X unless you make the machine a Hackintosh).
At home, I use Windows. This is mostly because of compatibility with games (although I don't play them often any longer, it's still nice to have them for the occasions when I do). I can do any hobby development I want on Windows and don't feel hindered. I do actually kind of prefer a Linux or Unix-like OS, but not enough to switch.
At work, I use Windows. This is out of necessity. I work on games. Console development tools are all Windows-based, and our target OS for PCs is Windows (we're a very small company, just porting over to the consoles is going to be a hell of a stretch for us, never mind Linux and OS X).
Windows is a great platform for development - Nothing really compares to Visual Studio+TFS+MSDN for business dev
Windows is manageable - You can do it by hand with batch scripts run on work group PCs via remote PowerShel sessions for real small shops,and scale into use of AD as you grow, and further manage all aspects with tools like System Center and Intune. Nothing else offers this level of control,
Windows is pretty bullet proof...I know in a controlled datacenter environment Linux is rock solid, but my only use of linux is on my Roku and Nexus 7 - both have crashed 2 times in the last week - I have had 0 BSODs in Windows 7 or 8 since 2009, including use of pre release code on both versions. I know that is antidotal but hey, I know what I see and I haven't had a windows system crash that was not caused by hardware failure in many many years.
For reference, I own more than that on Steam, 165 currently. Sorry man but trying to sell gaming on Linux right now is a non-starter. 126 games is not an impressive number, it is rather pathetic.
That aside with games the number has never been really what has mattered, it is the quality, the specific titles that you can get. I don't want 165 random games, I want the 165 games I have (well ok, I want about 150 of them, some have ended up sucking). That's why I bought them.
Will gaming on Linux get better? Maybe, we'll have to see. But don't try and sell Steam as being some big thing. Right now, there are vanishingly few games available, and basically all of them indy titles. That's fine, but not likely to be of much interest to most gamers.
The average non-technical user couldn't give a rats ass which OS they're using. They want their apps, they want it simple, they don't want to mess with the guts of the computer.
Linux has been around for over a decade, it has its uses but will never ever take over windows for compatibility, practicality and ease of use. I've seen comments on here talk about windows having a bad GUI, has it hell there's not even anything wrong with windows 8, the only thing wrong is the people using it. Windows will and is here to stay and I am extremely glad for it, its been number 1 for decades! Linux is a good alternative for niche projects you may want to do, servers, for use on a laptop for better battery life, programming etc but certainly not for business tasks such as gaming, media, video, etc etc windows has the numbers it has the compatibility it won't change.
Your hobbies are valuable, and his hobbies are worthless?
Oh come off it. I thought in general society was getting beyond the "videogames are a waste of time," thing and I'd certainly think Slashdot would be better about it. If they aren't for you that's fine, but don't try and make it out to be something bad, like it is so much more valuable to spend time reading or playing outdoorsman. Nor, for that matter, do videogames have to be one's only hobby.
Because Microsoft is still as evil as ever.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I like my windows open. So I use windows by x.org
I have been using the SaaS TurboTax for ages, and it works just fine in Firefox. In fact it has worked pretty much since the day they have launched their service IIRC. I see no point in downloading a piece of bloatware to my own computer just to do taxes once a year.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
At work it's windoze, at home it's Mac. The only time that I NEED to run windoze at home is to submit my income tax form. I dislike the inconsistent windows interface and generally poor GUI design, and I mean deep stuff like file associations, no standard keyboard shortcuts, screen robbing menu bars in every window, etc. I am 'upgrading from XP on an old laptop to Win8 in bootcamp because I got Win8 cheap and the laptop is unreliable, after about 10 years.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
OK, I'm from Canada so this may not be helpful... but I've been using ufile.ca and using the browser to file my taxes for the last several years. I use various Linux distros for this, mostly vector linux. Online Banking is the same.
If you run Windows 7, the desktop version is the only one you have since Metro is not being backporterd to 7. If you run Windows 8, you may use whichever you wish, which will end up being the desktop version after you try the Metro version. It looks, well, like a web browser. It has the rather minimalistic interface that Chrome pioneered that they all seem to have now and it looks and works like any other.
You might wish to actually, you know, research things a little before firing off.
Learning the commands is SO much faster then clicking through layers and layers of menus. Windows is very easy to use in that it's discoverable. A three year old can sit down and start clicking around on Windows and discover how to use it. You don't have to know anything. On Linux, at least with the command line, you need to know what you're doing. The difference is similar to talking to someone who know vs trying
to communicate with someone without knowing the language . You CAN communicate using gestures, without having to learn the language first, but DANG it's slow and cumbersome. Windows is like that. You don't have to know anything in order to do it, and things take ten times as long as they take if you learn the (Linux) language.
I'm not running a client trading terminal that deals with thousands of dollars on anything unsupported... even though it tends to work OK-ish under Wine.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
My company issued laptop is a Windows 7 system. This was a requirement as some of the tools I use only run on Windows (e.g., VMWare VSphere Client, some IE specific apps, miscellaneous other tools). Much to my embarassment, I'm actually the only one on my team still running Windows on my laptop. The others are running RHEL6 Workstation builds. Within a month I'll be joining them (my desktop is already RHEL6).
At home my main workstations are all CentOS 6 with KDE desktops. The main apps I run are the Chrome browser, konsole, Firefox, R, VLC Media Player, Pidgin, Octave and VMWare Workstation and Player. I fire up Nexuiz every so often, but I'm not much of a gamer. Other occasional apps are Blender, Gimp, GnuPlot, some Java apps, LibreOffice and occasionally a Fortran compiler. The only thing I can't do easily on Linux is video editing.
There's no compelling reason for me to have a Windows workstation or laptop any more. I always build my desktops and paying another $120 for a Windows license just seems a waste. If it was $30-$40, I'd probably have bought three or four licenses by now for running the occasional Windows-only software in a VM. Many of my apps are web based including my email, chat, spreadsheets, image management, etc..
I was going to put 'the high road' in my subject line, but then I realized there might be other 'high roads' some of them even 'higher'. Later I'll try to say a little about why it's a 'higher road', but first I'll say why I can 'afford' to go the linux route.
I worked in the Unix world from the early 80s. I was a programmer and a lot of my work involved porting code from one flavor/architecture of Unix to another, things like Xenix, BSD 4.2, System V, HPUX, so when Linux came along and I got my first distro, slackware on 50 diskettes (two of them mislabeled), I was used to having to figure things out when I replaced Dos and Windows 3.1 on my no-name brand laptop with its 33 MHZ CPU, 250 Megabyte Hard drive and 4 meg of RAM. Over the years I did my share of struggling to get apps to work, being sure to buy compatible modems and later ethernet cards, TV capture cards, etc, finding the right incantations to get a modem connection to an ISP where tech support had never heard of linux and didn't feel obliged to give you the time of day if you weren't running WIndows or a Mac.
I was very proud of the fact that I got the Netscape browser to work on my linux system and (o mirabile dictu) I actually got a short contract job to work at Netscape only a few weeks later! I remember telling the interviewer I used Netscape under Linux and he looked at me for a second and said, "So do I". I think that was 1995 but I'd have to go check and I'm not going to bother.
(I STILL HAVE TO PUT UP WITH frustrations here in the linux world, EVEN IN THIS POST! I was on slackware 14, using Seamonkey. I logged in to slashdot as shoor, but when I actually tried to post I got a smarmy message about how they didn't know if I was human and I should log in! Now I'm trying ubuntu and we'll see if it works.)
So why I didn't I take what might have been the easier path and just go with Microsoft? I was aware of some unsavory things about Microsoft's way of doing things. I realize that this is the business world and there are plenty of people from all walks of life who wouldn't think twice about the ethics or morality or whatever if they had the same opportunities as the bosses at Microsoft, so I'm not posting to get on that old soapbox. It's been so long that I don't know that I could even remember accurately the details, and if I got something wrong, I'm sure there'd be plenty of people eager to flame me over it. Even back in the 90s, when people would come to me for advice, I'd be straight with them and say Linux had a big learning curve and there were things you wouldn't find on it. I can get away with keeping my 'virtue' because I don't have the same needs as a lot of people. I'm not a big gamer for instance, and have mostly only experimented with games that could run under Wine, usually getting them when they were out of date and cheap. I don't need fancy spreadsheets or whatever. I actually do casual writing with emacs and vi (and no, I don't endorse emacs for anyone who hasn't already gone through the learning curve, but my fingers know the hot keys now, so I use it.) I used to prepare fancy hard copy stuff like resumes using TeX too.
But I hated Microsoft! I was around in the 70s, when the hobbyist computer world exploded, and people wondered where it was going, and there was excitement at all the cool prospects. I did contract work on somebody's CP/M based system and had an Ohio Scientific Superboard II with a 6502 microprocessor (same as in the Apple) and my brother homebrewed a system from the 8080 bug book. But then IBM came out with the PC with its miserable Intel 8086 CPU (when the Motorola 68000 and Zilog Z8000 had already come out) and suddenly it seemed like the only game in town was that with Dos!
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Arent some tax software written in Java? Surely that means it will work.
Clippy had me at "Hello".
I started my professional career developing for Sun workstations, then various Unixes, and for the past 14 years, Linux. Initially, it was just easier to use Linux as my desktop development environment, as my toolchain is here and I'm more familiar with the Unixy way of doing things. Besides, Windows was unstable and not very pleasant to use.
Nowadays Windows seems a lot more stable, and there are better tools for working cross-platform and/or over a network from a Windows desktop. But Linux GUIs have improved too, and I pretty much hate it when I occasionally need to use OSX or Windows machines. They're ugly, difficult to use, and generally less functioanal than my Linux environemnt. I could probably tweak them to make them friendlier, but why bother?
A lot of developers seem to use Macs, but the single-menu interface drives me crazy. It really doesn't work if you have multiple monitors.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Honestly I love hacking Linux and learning how everything works, but these days I just don't have the time. Things on windows generally just work. Things change and break all the time in the Linux world, although it's fun and a learning experience to fix them, I just don't have the time anymore.
It kinda depends on what people mean too. If what you mean is a central software repository, where you can download stuff, then nope, Windows doesn't really have that. Part of it comes from the fact that much of the software on Windows is commercial and thus they can't just give it so you. It'd be a store, not just a download utility. However they are trying to introduce that, the Windows Store in Win 8 and as you say, people are raising hell. Not because it is crap (it is) but because evil MS wants to rule all your downloads (they don't). People have raised hue and cry over the idea.
However if by package management you mean something that deal with installing and uninstalling software or other things, and tracking changes, well then Windows has long had one and it is great: the Windows Installer. That is what manages those MSI files you'll see and most software uses it, even if they wrap their own executable around the startup. It is extremely robust, flexible, and good at what it does. It keeps apps from breaking one another, can be used to script installs, offer software from central enterprise repositories, and so on.
So depending on what you mean, MS has it, and you just might not have known it. But as for the "one place to get your software" they've decided they want that and as you say, people are raising hell.
...is what keeps me on or off Windows. I keep a couple of Windows computers around, but I mostly turn them on monthly so I don't get too far behind on updates. They have Vista and Windows 7 on them; no need for Win 8 as I don't have a tablet computer aside from my iPad. My Macs are on 10.6 and 10.7. and that's where I spend most of my time. No Mac OSX 10.8 as that's becoming too touch oriented.
Gaming. Even if Linux was truly an equal option, I don't *want* to go through the hassle of trying to get games working in Linux from years ago.
Gaming, however, is also what's keeping me on Windows *7.* I've found far too many Steam titles are a bit finicky with Windows 8 -- not so much that they don't work, period, as that getting them working turned into a major hassle, with GfW patches required and a great deal of hoop-jumping. I had trouble with both DiRT 3 and Arkham City on W8, while both were flawless in W7.
Beyond gaming, Linux, at best, is a "me-too" solution. Yes, Linux can be configured to do everything I need from Windows outside the gaming question. But it takes me far more time to learn to do that than it does to just use Windows.
That's always been the problem, from my perspective. Not that Linux is bad, or incompatible, but that it's never offered me enough of a personal advantage to make it worth switching. Obviously there are millions of people who have felt very differently, including plenty at Slashdot, and I've got *no* bone to pick with that. For whatever it's worth, I was unimpressed with Mac OS X 10.5 when I switched to it on a work laptop. After years of hype, I expected to be wow'd by this fundamentally amazing way of doing things. Instead, I discovered that Macs were organized on different principles and that I liked some of it and didn't like some of the rest.
Microsoft would have to fundamentally *break* something in Windows for me to switch. Alternately, Linux would have to add something amazing and unique that I couldn't get from an MS operating system. "Just as good" is never good enough when the cost of switching is a significant time and energy investment.
I spent about twelve hours today getting ubuntu up and installed on my new computer and then promptly removing it and installing windows 7. Although the installation was long and painful (thank you, OCZ), once it was up and going I was very satified with it. It looks much better and works much better than the last time I had tried some form of linux (three years ago). Of course, there is still the constant requirement to go to terminal; although that is fine by me, it is still a major barrier to wide spread adoption.
My decision to remove it and go back to windows came from windows software. This computer being HTPC rather than for gaming, I figured I wouldn't need anything windows specific, but I found out better soon.
A tiny app. Open source even - but only available for windows. And it is the stupidest little thing - all it does is automate downloading anime and updating a website. That one thing killed what otherwise would have been one more box running linux.
I find it all rather humorous. Linux has come a long, long way, but even the smallest "problems" will turn away users in seconds.
Reasons I still use Windows for my desktops: Consistency between OS parts, direction as a whole, design, software and hardware compatibility, stability (it hangs so much less often than a Linux *desktop* nowadays), driver support and last but not least I can play decent (contemporary) games. This is right now, I'm not talking about the future nor the past. I still prefer Linux for most of my servers though. Command line only of course.
MS could had made metro UI the only and primary UI for windows 8 and rid the taskbar for good, but as usual those fucking idiots do a half ass job. FUCK HEADS. I don't think MS would of had any issue making metroUI open any win32 applications in the foreground. The metro UI left corners operate like a taskbar anyway so what was the point of the taskbar UI. It would of been nice as well to have the user add their own custom title labels for the grouped tiles. Also, tiles showing how many instances of firefox or any application for that matter opened. Why couldn't these shit heads just give the user 3 options; old windows 7 menu UI no metro, taskbar UI and metro, and lastly just metro UI.
In windows 7, I either pinned most used applications to the taskbar, desktop, or rocketdock. Even though you could pin in the windows 7 menu favorites I just never used it. I hate exiting the metro and going back into the old taskbar UI that's pretty much useless to me.
Linux needs to dump all those old 1990's looking DE's and just adopt the metro.
What I like about Windows:
1. Every time I buy a pre-built computer, I get to repartition the hard-drive or do a new install.
2. With every new version, I get to see just how many design ideas have been swiped from the Macintosh.
3. With every new version, I get to re-learn where the heck they put what I need to use to do my job.
4. It has a larger attack profile compared to Linux, so most everyone writes virii/malware for Windows.
What I hate about Windows: Patches and Viruses
What I like about Linux: Flexibility, multiple GUI systems. changing the UI to be exactly how I want it (KDE4.4, classic, Plastic), LibreOffice. Abiword, OpenOffice, VLC, Mozilla, Opera, and Konqueror. No upgrade carousel. OpenBox. Virtual Machines. RPM. GrSync. Apache. Development suites and tools. Airsnort.
What I hate about Linux: Newer hardware support (printers, wifi, sound, video) is often lacking for a few months. Figuring out the sound system (why is it my when my HDA11 driver doesn't work that Amarok does, but when it does, Amarok doesn't work?)
One of the main reasons I keep Windows is because of Ad Muncher.
The only transparent system wide ad blocker.
Not only does it work for a few hundred applications by default it removes many types of ads that no other ad blocker can, while also removing the usual suspects like 3rd party tracking and popups etc...
www.admuncher.com
http://www.quantumheat.org/index.php/en/
http://www.lenr-coldfusion.com/2013/01/26/mit-cold-fusion-101-videos/
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml
"In 2005, Dr. Allan Widom, a condensed matter physicist with Northeastern. University, and Lewis Larsen, president and CEO of Lattice Energy LLC, began publishing papers that presented a new theory to explain the experimental anomalies observed in LENR experiments. Their theory claims these anomalies are due not to a fusion reaction, which would involve the strong force, but to other low energy nuclear reactions that involve weak interactions, namely neutron formation from electrons and protons/deuterons, followed by local neutron absorption and subsequent beta-decay processes. The following published papers and news items provide more details on the Widom-Larsen Ultra-Low-Momentum Neutron Catalyzed Theory of LENRs."
Although there are also similar reports going back decades before Pons & Fleischmann...
I guess the same forces that keep us on Windows instead of Linux keep us on coal and oil instead of solar and LENR? :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Switched to linux some years back after getting fed up with BSA threats and MS paranoia, but kept one WinXP box for accounting, sitting in a lonely corner with no net connection. Added a couple Macs for marketing and admin functions. Then MS appeared to mostly get its act together, so a couple of Win7 boxes were added. I retired, and put a Win7 box on my desk for fun and games. So, current snapshot is linux for R&D operations and sales, Win7 for admin and goofing off, and WinXP (in isolation) for accounting.
I use basically every operating system at least semi-regularly. My laptop runs Windows 7, with a partition set aside for me to install Linux on one of these days. I use it both for moderate gaming and for work, regularly connecting (via PuTTY) to numerous Linux servers.
My desktop runs Windows (in the process of upgrading from Win7 to Win8, although the real benefit for me is going from x86-32 to x86-64) and OS X (it's an old Mac Pro I've been upgrading). It's been spending a good chunk of time in Windows lately (again, gaming), but OS X is there for the few Mac-specific apps I have.
My backup desktop slash home test server even runs OpenBSD. I don't know why OpenBSD in particular - just a weird personal preference. But it works perfectly for what I need: a server I can use to mess around with any weird new tech, and a light desktop for those times when both my main desktop and laptop are out of commission (which has, in fact, happened).
So what keeps me on Windows?
1) Gaming. Linux and OS X gaming is a joke, and console gaming seems to be headed the way of the arcade. If you're a serious gamer, you're on Windows.
2) Cross-platform apps tend to be best on Windows. Chrome and Firefox generally work better on Windows than on any other OS. GIMP works better on Windows than on OS X. Blender. Komodo. LibreOffice. Code::Blocks. All work just slightly better on Windows, in my experience.
3) A handful of other apps make it more attractive. Notepad++ is the best light text editor I've ever found. Paint.NET is a great lightweight image editor - good for scaling, cropping and rotating images, while being far faster than the feature-filled GIMP. And hell, Windows Media Player is the best music player I've ever found, as far as "show me my music and let me listen to it" goes. Every other OS I use (except OpenBSD) has some similar set of exclusive programs, but Windows has these.
4) Designated Windows Guy. At work, I'm one of three people who uses Windows on their work computer (we've got two Linux desktop users and a majority number of Mac users). So whenever someone finds an IE-only CSS issue, or a Javascript problem that only happens on Chrome on Windows, or so on, there's a pretty good chance they'll call on me to help test it. And if we ever get into Windows mobile development, I guess I'll be called on for that as well.
An interesting comparison is what keeps me using other systems as well:
OS X I keep around for a few exclusive programs, mainly GarageBand. It's also pretty responsive on limited hardware (OS X on a fast hard drive feels about as snappy as Win7 on a slow SSD), and it runs a surprising number of programs, even games.
Linux is the only logical choice for servers, since it can be trivially virtualized and can be stripped down and secured properly. It also tends to get experimental stuff far before other OSes get the same, which is one reason to try it on the desktop. It can also run on much worse hardware than any recent Windows or OS X, or on much more exotic hardware. It's a bit hard to justify on the desktop (main reason I haven't done anything with that reserved-for-linux partition is that there's no *need* for it), but it absolutely owns the server space.
Lots and lots of terminal windows.
System $ Costs
My main system at home has been Linux since 2004 and an early beta of Ubuntu. Several hard disks and a few processors and motherboards later it is still Linux, never booted Windows, never reinstalled but currently running Raring.
Over the same time to keep 1 windows desktop operational has required several reinstalls and at least $300 in operating system license fees for failed hardware and both hardware and software upgrades.
Administration Costs
With 7 of us in the house there is 1 Mac, 1 Windows desktop, 2 dual-boot notebooks that mostly run Linux, 2 Linux desktops, 1 Linux server (and several embedded Linux appliances not to mention 1 iOS and several Android mobiles). It is trivial to remotely admin all the Linux workstations and servers even over a slow 'net. It is possible to do the Mac. Windows is an exercise in frustration and doomed to fail.
Employment Costs
My current and previous employment centers/ed around developing on and for Linux. My secondary system at both jobs was licensed to run Windows but did so only when necessary to access some corporate app (rare access to clearcase on the previous job, even more rare access to Microsoft Project on this job).
Conclusion
Windows? It's a choice, not a requirement. It's a choice that takes too much pain and expense to keep operational.
And I would LIKE to be 100% linux, but can't.
Windows does not cut it on the desktop for me- I do a lot of photography and my workflow tools are just better in linux- and not all of them are free, btw.
I also do some light-weight video editing- again, the tools in linux are better than the tools in Windows unless I pay a LOT of money.
EVERYTHING I do for myself is just easier and faster with fewer hassles using linux.
Due to work-related requirements I am forced to dual boot Windows 7 on my laptop:
I can USUALLY just use KRDC (KDE remote desktop) to administer windows desktops and servers but occasionally not.
Some of the training materials I use do not work well in Windows but not at all in linux.
Microsoft has done some solid work on many aspects of Windows in recent years- Windows 7 became quite good as a desktop after a year or two, and Server 2008 was a massive improvement over 2003- and is actually fairly good for some uses.
I use the tool that is best for the job at hand- 90% of the time that means linux.
... for games, if every mmo and steam was useable (with out being banned for hacking) in linux, I'd never boot windows again.
Course, it's been like that for 5 years.
Shadus
The software I run most frequently is
1. Firefox
2. AutoCAD
3. Borderlands 2
4. MS office
5. Skyrim
Only one of these will run on Linux. When they day comes that Linux will run all 5 I will happily switch, but for now windows is my only option.
Starcraft 2
Where is moderation: -1 False?
Same as everyone else on Windows, probably:
Games.
Battery life on my laptop.
A steady paycheck fixing* problems that could never exist on UNIX.
*"Fixing" is perhaps too strong a word. "Working around" or "teaching people to live with" might be more accurate.
I am not a professional using a computer.
I am a computing professional.
First off, I don't suggest running Linux. I do it one one of my computers because I like Linux, but I also have a Mac and my Linux box dual boots into Windows.
Second: software freedom is important, but it comes after being able to make effective use of your software. More simply put: use free software if you can. If you can't use free software, don't feel guilty about it. More complexly put: I am more than happy to do "word processing" in LaTeX, but I acknowledge that isn't everyone's cup of tea. Use Microsoft Office until you have learned an alternative (such as LibreOffice) to make your computing experience comfortable.
Third: usability is important. Don't feel guilty about using OS X because stuff just works. Don't feel guilty about using Windows because you can figure shit out. If Linux is not working out for you because it's too complicated, it's Linux's fault and not yours. (Linux users can always switch to a different distribution if they want it to be more complicated to use.) If Windows is too much work for you, it's Windows's fault and not yours. If OS X's not powerful enough for you, it's OS X's fault, not yours. You decide on what makes a system usable, not the vendor nor popular opinion.
Fourth: freedom is the most important thing of all. Contrary to the opinion of the FSF, and other likeminded organization, freedom means striking a balance between what you want and what you get. Sometimes the choice is obvious: you can get everything you want without sacrificing anything. Other times, the choice is harder: you will have to pay for what you need, and even face restrictions upon how you use the software. Most of the time, you will have to strike a balance between software freedom and the software that meets your needs. Choose what fits your needs best, and you will truly understand freedom. (Freedom is truly defined by potential rather than ideology.)
At the end of the day, I mostly use non-Free operating systems on desktop computers and I mostly use Free software to perform everyday tasks. That allows me to learn the internals of the system software, while still being productive with application software. It also allows me to learn how to use non-Free application software. (Let's face it, most of the world uses MS Office and Adobe's DTP/graphics software.) Yet I still use FLOSS operating systems on a regular basis because I appreciate the Unix shell, I love development tools that were developed with Unix in mind, and I understand the relevance of Unix-like systems as servers and special purpose desktop systems. (If you're wondering what I mean by special purpose, I mostly mean in scientific applications.)
Feel free to be wishy-washy, particularly in your personal use. You'll be better for the experience, in both knowledge and understanding of software freedom (along non-ideological lines).
> Windows does not suck like it once did.
Windows 8 fixed that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For a Home Theater PC, Windows 7 is great. I'm always switching between 23.976 and 59.94 Hz refresh rates when I'm playing a Blu-ray disc or watching ATSC. I've setup a shortcut to switch refresh rates in W7. WMC is easy to setup use as a DVR, but there are plenty of things I bitch about in its interface. You can bitstream the audio whether it is Dolby Digital, DD+, DTS, DTS-HDMA,or DTS-HR. Suspend (S3 sleep) and resume work great, and it can even set a timer to wake itself up to record my TV shows. And it rocks if I want to do any gaming. But at the office, all the real work is done on Linux machines. We do have Windows and Office and we have to use Exchange for email (puke), but the serious work is all done in Linux and will never move to Windows.
Only that most of the products we use at work run on it. At home, I use a combination of Linux, Windows and Android. But there's no need to upgrade any of my current systems beyond Windows 7. I've tried Windows 8 and loathe it. The confusion between Apps and Programs, the mysterious tendency toward fixing things that weren't broken.
The next system I'm considering is the HP X2 Slatebook http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ads/x2/slatebook-x2.html . I'm already own a few Android phones and tablets, am more than happy that I can do what I need to with them. Having a real keyboard on one to me is a great idea.
The Windows 7 shell is good. The only Linux GUI to rival it, IMO, was Ubuntu between 8.04 to 10.04.
I've been a Linux weenie since 1999 (Debian from '99 to '05, Ubuntu from '05 to '12, now Mint) but in the past couple years I've been spending less and less time booted to Linux, with more time spent running Win7 and having various Linux distros in VMs or sshing into my file/media server. I'd really like it if Compiz would integrate into MATE as cleanly as it did a few years ago with GNOME 2, because stuff like live preview is just wonderful.
Another reason is goddamn PulseAudio. My sound generally Just Works in Windows but stuff kept breaking in new and exciting ways after each new release of Ubuntu.
Last is the video driver stack. Multi monitors also Just Work in Windows, and to be fair Linux distros have made big strides here, but it can still be a huge pain if you've got dissimilar GPUs and multiple monitors.
I miss having a good package manager with dependency resolution, and Cygwin just isn't the same as the Linux terminal environment. If I was still childless (kids take up gobs of time I could use to tweak things) and didn't have as big a Steam habit as I do, I might still be using Linux daily despite those gotchas.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
was that a question or a statement?
For myself, nothing keeps me on Windows, I had never any use for it. But I see reasons why coworkers must keep using Windows despite local IT being quite hostile to it: Windows-only ERP. We even have an ERP application with a java applet as front end, which can be used with a browser over the internet, but it only works on Windows clients! It does not even works on a mac.
and one (very long) line in APL. Unless it's really lots of string processing then LISP or SNOBOL might be better choices.
For submitting tax for Australia online, you need to use the eTax application, which runs only in Windows. Otherwise, mail in a paper form.
The same thing that's kept me off Windows since 1995 - Linux is better.
As several people have mentioned nothing nix/freeware can compare with Excel. Someone commented about using html instead of excel. I actually laughed audibly about that. I am the Senior Network Implementation and Design Engineer for a large enterprise. Utilizing Excel magic, we have fully automated the documentation upgrade process for all of our switching. Datacenter, User network, Core, Dist and Access layer. Same thing for IP Address Management. You show me a way to do vlookups, macro's, conditional multi sheet formatting (VBA backend), multi user editing (through SharePoint 2013), programmed parsing and displays (pivot tables) within html and you will have done something miraculous. I would buy you a new Volvo or something... If all you use Excel for is making graphs, save the install time and use Paint because you are not using Excel right. Do you really need the capability for over 1 million rows and 4000 columns for making graphs? My wife is an Excel demi-god, and can do things I don't even understand, of course her life is excel as a Business Analyst.
Next giant reason why I could no go without Windows would be Visio. Diagrams are key in my position, and the simplicity of Visio makes it king. Not to mention the fact that every reputable vendor in the world has Visio stencils for their equipment so you can properly diagram.
Down to the base OS, yes Vista had it's issues, Windows 7 (Really most of the issues were fixed in SP2 for Vista) fixed it. We have been using Windows 8 since about July of last year for the entire IT Team, minus 1 person who jut upgraded to Windows 7. Server 2012 has been in production for about 9 months as well. The server platform has made leaps and bounds in the past 12 years, but I do admit we have a large number of Linux servers as well. Windows in the enterprise will always exist. Enterprise solutions in Windows 7/8 make it beyond unjustifiable to even consider an Open Source platform. Group Policy, Direct Access and Terminal Services are at the top of my list and just the tip of the iceberg... Please don't tell me VNC works just as well. I can RDP over a 384k link, or from my cell phone, with nearly the same experience as I would have from a desktop. Did I mention Terminal Services Gateway?
Linux has bash. I LOVE bash. Perl also gets a sad panda face for me. If I could write easily executable bash/perl scripts for Windows servers, I would be the happiest minion in the entire world. Powershell is getting close... +1 for Linux here.
I laughed about the ZFS comment. NTFS is simple, maintainable, not to mention that with enterprise integration tools it blows the pants off ZFS. In a proper enterprise, DFS, DFSR and Branch Cache make fileservers what they should be. Not to mention the ability of Windows 8/Server 2012 to do "online" check disk...
Outlook. Another think Linux cant touch. When you get about 1000 emails a day, rules and the automation Outlook offers is a must. MAPI integration and folder delivery automation... yes...
SSH. Yea, I use it all day. 2 great options, putty (SuperPutty Wrapper is awesome for tabs) and Cygwin. Nothing lost on the Windows workstation.
So what else would I use Linux for? Vulnerability scanning? No thanks, I'll outsource what I don't want to do from Windows. Do I have a Linux install sitting around? Yup, I run CentOS in a Workstation VM. I maintain a large number of our Linux Servers, also CentOS or RHEL depending on support requirements.
I will continue to use Windows until someone forces me to change. Linux most definitely has its advantages and its uses, but not for an enterprise desktop...
--B
There are two major reasons that I do not always use linux 24/7. Games, which has been talked to death so I won't elaborate on. If I'm just playing one or two games that I know work well enough in wine then I will sometimes switch back to linux for a while, but it's nice to not have to worry about it.
The second is multi-gpu support. Right now, if you want an accelerated desktop that spans multiple gpus without having seperate X screens.. well, you can't. I've spent a LOT of time making sure that it's not possible. I have hopes for both wayland and/or randr sorting this, but for the time being it makes using Linux rather painful for me. I've also had issues with messed up xinerama hints when using two gpus with one in twinview (or any other way of having two monitors on one of the gpus with acceleration), such that things were annoying to use.
I love linux and having the options it brings me, but not being able to set up my system correctly is a frustrating roadblock that i'm often not interested in working with. Sure, I can have a semi-usable setup where I have to force apps onto the seperate x screen and can't maximize windows correctly, but it's kinda sucky.
Windows is dead, I run Linux on all but one of my servers, I run Windows on none of desktops and I've never missed it. I'm not going to preach about Linux on the Desktop but I have to admit that I haven't needed a Windows Desktop in a few years. Now what keeps my Mom on Windows, simple, she doesn't have the computer skill to learn a new OS, what keeps my Dad on Windows, he's lazy and doesn't see the need to learn anything different.
I did read somewhere that the XBox One will have a mandated phone-home function for the software run on it... ...which kinda sucks for those without a landline. ...or cable/DSL. ...or MiFi.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
my biggest reason is that I can't afford hardware to run a recent Windows release. I'm still using XP-level hardware. my own fault for improper budgeting. that being said, XP sucks and I decided that I'd like to be a legitimately-licensed software user. Linux made sense. It runs reasonable well with a light window manager and suits my basic computing needs. If I ever decide to edit video (have tried and failed with linux) I will try out OS X or maybe bite the bullet and get a windows machine. I would hold out as long as possible though. There is nothing appealing about windows to me.
...for everything Microsoft and its "technology" are about.
Oh, and other systems actually are useful for productive work.
Well what was it? Please tell me you understand the difference. Sun used to do things in the medical imaging business.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Switched 5 years ago except for one last machine to run quickbooks. All the other desktops, servers etc. are linux. Switched about half a dozen people over to it also. Few hated it, most loved it and won't ever run windows again. Funny thing in my experience.... the less you know about computers, the more you love linux.
use it for server - mail, web, backup to tape etc.
But when it comes to running all the necessary applications - accounting, tax, GPS data from/to device, HR monitor support and what else have you, fiddling with Wine or VMware under LX just takes too much time to get it going right and then there are quirks.
Disappointingly, Picasa under LX is stagnant - something I hold against Google amongst other things...
Just switched to it, does everything I need so far. I'm not a power-user, just a retired guy at home. It installed with no fuss, everything works-hardware, codecs, etc.
I don't have a dog in the Linux-Windows fight, I just needed a basic home operating system that works out-of-the-box (so to speak) and was cheap.
>" where does MS-Windows stand for you today?"
The same place it has been since version 3- not on my machines. I think I have XP in a virtual machine somewhere, but otherwise all my desktops, servers, and laptops at home and at work all run Linux (Mageia, Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL).
My last purchase was a Lenovo Twist convertible notebook and it had version 7 of the MS-Windows tax preloaded on it. I did play with it for a few hours of TOTAL FRUSTRATION just to see what all the complaining was about before I wiped it and installed Fedora 17 (now 18) on it.... which works a million times better. Even the touchscreen works fine under Linux.
Of course, my setup isn't for everyone.
>"(Is it the year of Linux on the Desktop yet?)"
Not only has it been for 15 years, but my phones all run Android Linux, my DVR runs Linux, two of my TV's run Linux, my tablets run Linux, my cable modem runs Linux, my car entertainment system runs Linux, my copiers at work run Linux, my security and video systems run Linux, my electronic signs run Linux, my phone system runs Linux, all my routers run Linux, even my timeclocks run Linux.
There is so much more out there than just desktops...
why would you run Firefox in WINE when there's a perfectly good fork (Seamonkey) native on GNU/Linux?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Look at me I'm so unique, I've never even seen a Windows box in person. I bet you don't own a TV either and pride yourself in telling everyone? Win95 sucked hard, I'll give you that. It gave me problems as well. Well not long after a little thing called NT4 was released and suddenly everything worked great.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Hardware drivers. Everything else can be.. or is - virtual.
Games follow, but in the end, it all comes down to hardware drivers. RMS had that one nailed.
..don't panic
What can any other OS offer that I need or want that I don't already have on Windows? And no, warm fuzzy stick-it-to-the-man feelings don't count. It supports all my hardware, runs all my apps and games, and is extremely stable if you don't treat it like rest stop toilet.
As for Office suites, sorry, but no powerpivot equivalent, no care (and do say "Libreoffice has pivot tables!" It is not the same thing). I use it way too much.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
GAMES. That is all.
Until I can play natively all my games on Linux, I ain't making the switch to Linux... Which is unfortunate because I would ditch Windows in a heart beat. (VM and things like Wine don't count, that's not native and it flaky at best)
For actual work and play I use windows. Everything works best on it.
You might be able to make a pretty nice business on consulting -- I know my employer, and as far as I can tell the rest of the semiconductor industry, are still using Linux for all of the design flow. Our corporate masters would love to move us to Windows, though, if you can show them how.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I stick with GNU/Linux and other FOSS software because it is an investment in our future. If you are forced to use MS products for your job, then you have little choice. I make my living with GNU/LInux, partially because I understand it well enough to be an expert. I understand it that well because I have the source code for everything, including the kernel.
Microsoft only cares about customers to the extent that they can exploit them for profit. Compare that to ethics of the Free Software Foundation.
Surely you're not serious about Windows Installer. Yes, it is possible to author a decent MSI, but nobody does that. Especially not Microsoft products. When people say they want better package management for Windows, they're usually talking about package dependencies. On Linux/Mac, installing something prompts the package manager to install all of its dependencies first. And uninstalling something warns you that it will have to uninstall the dependencies. That's what people want on Windows.
I worked as a contractor for Microsoft, where it was my job to maintain a WiX-based installer for a server product. Management was not open to fixing the real issues; they were more concerned with pretty graphics and localization. Our product handled our dependencies by checking the registry to see if the other product was installed; if not, it popped up a pretty GUI that said you have to install the other thing first. And yes, very bad things happen if you uninstall the other thing after you install our product, so after bug reports started rolling in the feature team "solved" that problem by doing the registry check at our product's startup to see if the other product is still installed (and then throwing a hissy fit in event viewer if not).
p.s. Another thing you probably don't realize is that MSI's do not support checksums. Filename matches? Leave that bitch alone! This means that "repair" installs have no choice but to uninstall and then reinstall, and that can mean having to re-apply N different patches. Would it have killed them to generate a proper manifest for MSIs, so that you can verify the install without running an hour-long reinstall script?
MSI = Broken by design.
Solidworks, SolidEdge or ProEngineer (PTC Creo): If any of these packages worked on something other than Windows, I could be potentially be free of the Windows OS: Until then,...
All what come with gedit only? The KDE-based distributions probably don't come with gedit only.
I don't talk about Android either.
Though you have to admit that dealing with IE can be a pain. Hell, just to get a decent ad blocker for it you have to pay a fair bit extra or mess around with the less efficient hosts files. It's even worse on Windows 8 where you can't use browser addons at all so you have to hack your router and do it that way.
It's just a matter of time. There are already quite a few Android laptops. And that's the only way Linux will ever get to the desktop in any significant numbers: when it's promoted by major corporations--like Google in this case.
"Classic" Linux--the free-for-all jumble of distros with varying levels of sophistication--needs a champion to succeed. In the case of Android, Google says what goes in, and what doesn't. They, and device manufacturers, spend lots of time and money making sure that it actually works. Google uses its immense marketing clout to push the products. The formula has been wildly successful. "Pure" Linux has no shepherd, without which it will never become a common sight on a desktop.
But if you count Android, then yes, Linux is coming to a desktop near you, soon!
I'm a Trisquel GNU/Linux user at the moment. Here's some reasons why GNU/Linux works for me, and why I'd never go back to Windows:
Conveniences (for me):
.
Freedoms and other advantages I get by using GNU/Linux as a user:
ever since I got my first FreeBSD shell account back around 1995 or so and set up my first 386 with FreeBSD 2.2.1 (and moved through Solaris and IRIX workstations, and eventually linux on the desktop) *nix and free software have been ready for my desktop. I have never owned a general purpose computer that has run anything else primarily since. I may boot into windows (and even then usually in a VM) when I need to run something that will only work under windows. but 99% of my day (unless netflix is involved) is spent on a Linux desktop for both work and play and I would never have it any other way.
I like to customize my system to suit me rather than conform to someone else's idea of how things should be, and I love all of the tools I can get on a GNU/Linux envrionment. (really I love any unix or uniix like system though, not just Linux, but Linux is the easiest platform to get most modern open source software running on these days)
So, Yeah the year of the Linux desktop started for me back in 1996/1997 or so and it's been ever since. I'm sure I don't count though since for some reason people think it's a good idea for the unwashed masses to run *nix on the desktop. (seems to work out for Apple at any rate, but still) I really don't give two shits what the majority runs I will stick to what works well for me. If I need windows for something I can just spin up a VM or boot a small native windows partition (mainly for running things like lenovo's fingerprint reader software to update pre-boot authentication fingerprints and things like that, which is the main reason I even have a windows partition at all...)
Now, get off my lawn!
Software like:
Photoshop
Lightroom
3DS Max
Softimage
Maya
Zbrush
SoundForge
Rhino
Just to name the ones off the top of my head. While SOME of them will run on Linux ( very specific distros only if at all ) they all require you to buy another license to run it on the other OS. Considering the cost of the license the first time around, um . . . no.
It's the same reasons I don't buy Canon photography gear, I have over $20k invested in Nikon lenses and it would be a major pain in the ass, not to mention expensive as hell, to switch flavors now.
sort of agree, but I'd go one step further and say "Because Apple are under no obligation to cater for cook-your-own-Mac, much like Ford are under no obligation to provide engine blocks for Mercedes."
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Yes, that's when I run it. The funny thing is even there it's a horrible experience for gamers. Multi-monitor STILL sucks on windows, random freezes from high priority system processes getting in your way, popup windows, and system updates that force FUCKING REBOOTS in the middle of a game or watching a movie. Sure, you can tinker your way around it, buy an SSD so that bursts of IO from stuff that really should wait until the game is over doesn't get in your way, but I can really see why console sales picked up.
What has happened many times over the life of MS Office is that such people get clobbered by the next release when major or minor incompatibilities in a new version break most of their work. I've been that person several times when MS did things like switch to a different scripting language so that NONE of the old macros would work. There's an Office2k machine in my workplace dedicated to running some complex house of cards built around bits of MS Office that changed, the guy that wrote it is long gone so a rewrite would be difficult (and hard to justify since the thing is used rarely). Such "power users" have to be ready to do rewrites if their workflow is to be viable in the long term (eg. from 2000 to 2003 in the case above). Some of them wake up and suddenly understand that they are using the wrong tool for the job even if it can be twisted into shape to get results for a while.
Some places use linux on the desktop - no big deal, in some workplaces people even use Macs.
The applications are what matter and in my workplace the primary applications where running on a cluster and displayed on people's desktops with X. Win2k + hummingbird Exceed could do it on MS Windows but nowhere near as well as linux, and Netscape + openoffice filled all the rest of the gaps on linux so that's what happened.
(Yes, I know it works on Apple. I was initially on Macintosh, but switched to Windows when Apple and Adobe began their pissing contest awhile back. I don't trust the platform now.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I have mad fun with compiz and Emerald I have my gkrellm themed all thos goodies when I have read the news the facebook reddit slashdot digg and nothing left to surf what do you do with your windows computer?
On Linux I am always reinventing my machine. In fact I am disappointed more has not came down the pike getting a little stale lately.
the problem is 1001 distros with all the associated egos.
If linux's to take over the desktop, then make ONE freaking distro, with security updates. Pick a window manager already. Force ati/nvidia to give out OS or even closed source linux compatible drivers.
As things are right now, by the time I figure out which drivers I have to install and apply all the hacks to make my canon scanner work, there's another flavor of the month distro up and about.
I'd rather be in than cool.
I use both linux and Win7 daily at work and home. Linux is great for coding and in embedded applications.
In my opinion the fundamental problem keeping Desktop linux from mass adoption is the feature that the hard-core users adore the most :
the flexibility and plethora of distributions and interfaces. e.g. Gnome versus KDE, etc.
The great thing about Windows is lack of flavors, the same reason iOS succeeded wildly (for a while) : commonality and simplicity (in the iOS case).
In the linux destop world, every few years there is a new trendy distribution that part of the community jumps to. ... for some ... but this is just a pain for everyday common users.
This flexibility to tweak Linux to make it better and meet the needs of a niche is awesome
If the linux community would finally band together, make a distribution that gets mass acceptance, and stick with it over the long term, then newbies wouldn't be scared off. Hard core users would have to accept a distribution / UI that has some flaws for their specific use-case in the name of common good.
But the fundamental question is it worth it to do this? Niche distributions make the core linux user-base happy and productive...
maybe it is time to stop wasting effort dreaming of Linux Desktop reaching mass adoption.
What more needs to be said?
In Germany, the government uses ELSTER, which is an online tax form. It only works reliably under a 32-bit Windows browser with 32-bit java. It doesn't work (at least in my experience) under OS X or Linux. There are some workarounds with WINE running IE though.
Oh boy, what a mess Winders is. In the last few months, I've been able to introduce folks to Linux in the form of Ubuntu 12 & 13. They bring me their winders laptops and I dual boot them to win/Ubuntu. Now, this audience is special. These are boaters - liveaboard boaters. All we really need is Navigation (OpenCPN) w/ a GPS, weather (Ugrib & zygrib), Skype, a photo cataloger (Shotwell is ok) and an external Wifi setup (Ubiquity Bullitt HP2 w/ ~8dbi antenna mounted high on the mast). They are all laptops. On all these flavors(XP, Vista, 7 & 8) I've been successful, mostly. 1st 2 w/ Ubuntu 12.? and Win7 w/ Ubuntu 13.?. Haven't got the last one working yet. (In fact we went back to da Geek Squad and got it replaced for other problems today...) In all cases I load the NOAA charts and store the GIRB files on the Win partition so both sides use the same data. Win looses the GPS and always have to load drivers for the Wifi. Ubuntu just works. Loaded LibreOffice on a couple machines, both sides and it just works, too.
What I see on the Winders side is a slide into hell for the interface. W/ the loaded bloatware they don't know to get off, multiple wierd toolbars everywhere, the taskbar on the bottom, and goofy locations for libs and such. Even a .doc is megs where an .odt is a few k for the same essay or article.
Now these folks are playing with both systems whilst they're in the boat yard here. They're tellin' me that Ubuntu is so much easier to use. And these are older folks, already set in their ways. These folks just don't believe they can learn a new OS but none of them like Winders for all the reasons listed in these comments and see no alternative except Apple (Too expensive, exclusive aura, lack of Nav and weather s/w, etc but never about the DRM. (Oddly, many folks here have iphones but never sync anything.)) And as we all sit around on the porch (after a days work or sitting around on the porch) and chat about these things, the word is carrying.. Showing them is working. I refuse to work on winders machines. I will help them get connected to our boatyard Wifi and I'll take a look but I rarely fix anything... Now that they know, actually see and feel the alternative, they're interested and getting others to see.
Now the nightmare is with this last computer. It's a new Dell w/ Win8 and this Uefi(sp?) bios thingy. Won't even see the USB stick to boot from with a BIOS fiddle. And the icons on the start screen! Eeeek! that's a real mess. Bland, oversized, and uninformative. At least Win-E still works... Even the local Winders guy here can't understand Win8. He's been exclusively Win since Win95. (My best advertising for a different and better way?)
for me, I've used one flavor or another of linux since '98. I even remember install fests every Wednesday night at the local Make shop (though we didn't call them that then). Even got YellowDog to run on the 1st G4 to come to Atlanta (except the sound). Why would Iuse anything else? Just last week I needed to take some chicken scratched electronic schematics and turn them into drawings of some sort. Install a couple CAD packages professing to be good for this and try them. 30 hrs later I had finished diagrams using eeschema. Learned the package and made the drawings in that time. Ever tried doing that with something like AutoCAD?( I remember writing printer drivers for v2.1 in Lisp back in the late '80s). And it didn't cost me anything. (But I'll send 'em a check if I use it much more.) RhythmBox is falling over on me but I've found a couple alternatives I'm liking better. See, choices are available under linux. And the UI is simple and easy to learn. Things are in fairly logical places.
so if ie6 was defacto standard, why would microsoft give in the the w3c? (which would be like goliath bending over and letting david fuck him up the ass)
or is "defacto standard" just another way of microsoft falling flat on its face, getting up and saying "yeah we meant that"
Rock solid, fast, has all the applications I need (including MS Office suite and Adobe CS), and also has a complete GNU command line environment and toolchain via MacPorts to run all my old handmade codebases and shell scripts.
On top of that, wife uses Win7 and I find it to be cluttered and fiddly—many more clicks to get done most of the common UX tasks (launching an application, changing a setting, enabling a service, etc.)
And on top of that, OS updates do not cost as much, nor do they involve nearly as much change/instability/unpredictability.
I was a SunOS user in the '80s and early '90s, then a Linux user from 1993-2010. In 2010 I switched to MacOS and I think that's where I'll stay until the desktop is dead (which is real soon now).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Ever since I switched to Mac I have been so much happier. My work flows have drastically improved and I am far more productive. I haven't used Windows for anything other then testing a site in IE or pure gaming on a Windows box in many years now.
I have Windows 7 installed for a few games (DCS for one) and I tell ya the UI is a train wreak. It is a cluttered mess that you can't ever find anything. Hell just launching an application is painful. Where did this application install ? Did it install based on the company name or the product name ? Did it install in program files or some other random directory ?
With OS X it has a very clean system layout that makes sense. Where are my apps installed ? /Applications. Where are my pictures, movies, music. In ~/
The system settings page is well organized and I can find what I am looking for very easy. The single navbar makes life a lot easier as well. No guessing where this app has the menu or digging through confusing ribbon menus.
Linux ... is just as bad as Windows on the desktop. There is no unity or no organization. It's just a hot mess.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
From the very early days of Windows, ie DOS, I knew that technology is not for me. To begin with, I preferred the Motorola assembly language / chip topology, compared to Intel and its segmented memory, LSB first etc... Then, the cumbersome, ugly, counter intuitive, and often weird DOS commands and BAT language didn't win any more sympathy - neither to me, nor to my friends at the time.
Then... came Windows. Just the name. Say, you create a new car - how do you call it? Pistons? Wheels? Really, looks like the MS guys has to throw a name [and an OS] in a hurry... Everything in Windows (3.x), from the design, to the OS implementation, was a disaster. We had to work on Windows, because it was - already - everywhere (fortunately, important work could be done on SunOS, and later, Linux).
What keeps me on/off Windows? I've never been "on", and I don't see how I could be nowadays (thanks to clouds, Internet, Macs and Linux). I even gave a try, after years of abstinence, to Win 8 (had to), and really, MS didn't change much in they way they look at how to implement things.
Some people are really "on" Windows... the only tangible reason for that is beyond me - maybe because thanks to MS propaganda, MS schools injection, etc... some people know only one OS well, Windows, they built a business on that, and they don't want to change now. Understandable.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Ah yes, the old "I dont like what hes saying so Ill just call him a shill" technique.
i've been using Linux for about 15 years now. So I basically have the same knowledge and confort with Linux that most people have with Windows.
There is a lot of social presure to use windows in my day to day life. The situation is getting better every day. But here is my reasons I have not moved to windows yet.
1. There is up till now no Windows OS that can support my workflow. I have not tried Windows 8 yet. But starting your PC's up and starting all the apps that you use on a daily basis and running those apps for several weeks at a time just simply do not work on Windows. As I said windows is getting so my standard workflow boggs down Windows 7 in about 50 minutes vs the 10 for Windows 2000.
2. I have and am still using Linux to solve Windows short commings.
3. I have problem paying R1000 ($100) for Windows. At some stage I used windows to play games once a week on Sundays. (Got the license with my laptop). But have since simply removed it.
4. When using windows the GUI actually confuses me. I'm used to the way that Unity works. Most of the work I do on windows is configuration for end users. This is confusing and hard to follow.
5. I personally believe the only reason people are still using windows is because of social presure and legacy knowledge. I have problem with people trying to force me to us something.
6. I have spend month trying to solve problems on windows that eventually required a upgrade from one windows version to another. The same problem in linux was solved with a quick Google.
7. Linux desktop at it's worst is still faster and more responsive than windows. I've had clients with the same hardware asking me with surprise how did I get my computer to work so fast while I was cursing my laptop for being unresponsive and slow.
8. Linux is like the human brain even if you have been using it for 15 years you are probably still using 10% of it capabilities. Window is more like a dogs brain you need to use special training techniques to get it to do simple tricks.
9. It is simply faster to solve problems on Linux than on Windows (this is causing a slight problem for me at the moment as I gain experience the hours I can bill to clients decrease while the same clients windows support is increasing).
Oooo I can go on but why bother. Yes a lot of it is subjective but a lot of this is objective. Understand that I mostly work in the server and mission critical space and as such use Linux on servers. This makes me very bias toward O/S's that is stable, fast, reliable and feature rich.
nothing, I ditched windows for GNU/Linux in 2010 completely and haven't looked back.
No regrets.
dunno where ur based but in the uk there are web based providers like xero.com - if you are in the states there are bound to be many more options.
are there any that really require IE(like activex), or simply just check browser versions and refuse to work with anything else.
If they just check version numbers, you can always use this:
http://forums.chrispederick.com/categories/user-agent-switcher
and pretend to be IE.
TurboTax has a lot of weird Dot Net and other types of dependencies that seem to be part of the problem.
I just bought a new Thinkpad. I went with Intel hardware because I know they put effort into Linux driver support. Guess I should have looked a little closer.
I installed Ubuntu 13.04 and immediately ran into an ethernet bug (yes, fix released, but not actually available in the distro yet) and a wireless bug (looks like it might have been fixed, then unfixed, but it's hard to tell. It's broken now, anyway.) ... And that's leaving aside how the touchpad behaves worse under Linux, or how I have to screw around with kernel boot options for decent power management (that will still be worse than Windows.)
The kicker is that these are the same problems I've been having for years, every time I try to run Linux on a laptop, despite the huge advances that have been made. It feels like one step forward, two steps back.
Maybe next year...
At the office, I'm on Win7, which actually isn't too bad for Windows. With it I run WindowsPager to get multiple virtual desktops. It's reliable and pretty solid.
That said, at home I now have Macs. I got tired of testing a half dozen Linux distros every six months to figure out which one will work on the current update. OS X is solid, and I can do anything I want with Unix, supplementing with MacPorts. Not only can I work, I can haz fun. ;)
I have work to do. Windows is lame; Unix is easy.
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
The problem with linux desktops is the same problem with all open source. You get what you pay for. There isn't much open source software at all that is very good, except for that which finds it's self used in paid-for software and services. Building good UI's takes a lot of time and programmers and UX designers have families to feed. On top of that you need strong marketing via cutting deals with big manufactures and advertising.
I don't know why we expect an awesome Linux desktop to be made available to us for free and delivered with the marketing support to attract mainstream products.
I wouldn't mind shelling out the same cash for a solid Ubuntu disto if it had the simplicity of a mac without having to pay for mac hardware. It seems like desktop linux software should stop trying to compete with windows, and instead try to offer a cheaper and more open mac. Windows would either wither away and die, or M$ would start building their own desktop, apps, and dev tools to run the linux kernel and drop their own POS.
I would love to see the day M$ creates a supported .net run time for linux. They seem to be happy to drop their own junk here lately in regards to support of jQuery, Node, and Git.
- Investment or trading programs (i.e. Amibroker)
- My favorite game prototyping environment (Unity)
- More consistent vertical and horizontal scaling for mouselook in games
- Software to connect to a scanner/printer or logic analyzer or oscilloscope or radar detector or scanner radio
- Hassle free DVDs and Blue Ray playback
- COM object integration
If I can find alternatives for all of the above, then it would be a done deal
I have not been using Windows since 2007 (luckily, at my job I can bring my own laptop and basically the only little issue there is is that I am using Zotero with Libre Office and most of my colleagues Endnote with Microsoft Office... In those cases I will have to take responsibility for smooth working and compatibility. I always do my presentations in PDF (hate animated crap anyway)). Basically, every time I now get in front of a Windows machine, the first two words that strike me are "confusing" (the ribbon stuff in Office) and "boring" (Windows feel like a box with just a few buttons to press, very limited) - on the other hand, I am a pathological distro-hopper (although being hopping-free for a few years thanks to Arch... but starting to get the feeling that I want to try something new again... perhaps Alpine) so I am not representative of the typical computer user.
What keeps me ON windows (at work):
What keeps me OFF windows (mostly) at home:
I have the budget to choose either. After being a DOS/Windows/Linux guy for 20 years (in that order), I find OS X has the easiest things to deal with that piss me off about it, and plenty of things that are "oh, that's cool" that I discover from time to time the more I use it.
In fact, I think that's the big difference between OS X and Windows - In windows I am constantly trying to do things or diagnose things and run into brick walls (and coming up disappointed). On OS X or Linux I am more often than not discovering something cool in the process.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Take Ubuntu for instance. A large amount of software out there isn't on their repositories. The "supported" way to get it is something called PPA.
Here's how you install a PPA: https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPA/InstallingSoftware
Basically a bunch of command line crap where there should be a simple desktop client and hyperlinks. Sure it's not hard but it's still the wrong way to do it.
I haven't had problems with Windows for a long while (I'm on 7 now, but it was true for Vista too). It has the software I want and I'm used to using it.
I haven't tried Linux lately. When I did, it was a little bit of hell, closest in my experience to a beta of Vista. It didn't like my hardware, I had to edit text files to get it to work correctly on a second drive, installing a display driver was a bit of hell and killed the display, GUI programs silently failed, printing their errors only to a console, ...
That was maybe 3 years ago. I tried again later, and at least hardware-wise it was better, but the OS was still a little too rough. Perhaps these days the experience will be better, but I just don't have the time to waste on trying to get a non-Windows system to work just for the hell of it. Sure, I like alternative OS's, but I see no practical benefit for the switch and enough drawbacks.
I started using GNU/Linux in 2005 and the only thing I regret is not starting sooner. Never going back to windoze.
http://www.gnu.org/
My workplace is pretty modern and is OK with windows alternatives. This keeps me stuck with Windows:
1) Our mandatory Java-based VPN software failed to work --it does expect redhat, but someone else had it running in an Ubuntu 10 setup in 2011. I'll say that it is glitchy even under some random Windows installs. I use this when telecommuting every month.
2) Outlook is a must for meetings, tons and tons of email filtering and troubleshooting. I had briefly used Thunderbird elsewhere 2 summers ago, but it didn't feel very flexible. I'd try to use it again, but just realized that my actual mail and archive files will probably will be a pain to synchronize between both programs in a work crunch.
3) Active directory administration tools are Windows only. I wonder what has happened with whatever replacements were supposedly making progress in those grounds a few months ago (SMB 4 / LDAP or something)
I use VirtualBox with an Ubuntu 10 setup once in a while. Donno if our PC admins would be willing to convert their image into a virtualized HD or support my Windows problems if I flipped to linux and ran Windows from a VM to get around problems 2 and 3. I don't think it would solve #1.
When did you last try this? I found the Opposite true. Unlike Windows, you can try a Live CD or DVD (or ISO on thumb drive) and try it before installing.
Don't belive the lable on the box. Much of the Windows only Hardware works great with Linux. I even booted and tested Linux on a new Windows 8 Lenovo Yoga Ultrabook. Multi-touch screen worked fine. I suspected it would be a problem. This was a nice surprise. I use Linux regularly to boot unbootable crashed Windows PC's and Laptops to save user data before doing a Windows Recovery which destroys user data. Not many laptops have problems with any hardware. Sometimes sound is an issue and sometimes Wireless does not work out of the box, but that is most often an easy fix. Google it.
I use Logitech USB headsets. I use Guitar Hero USB Microphones. I use Microsoft Sidewinder USB Joysticks. I use several brands of Bluetooth USB Dongles. Most USB printers including Fax and Multifunction devices work. I don't even need to download drivers for older ones like you do for Windows (Via Windows Update). I had to Google how to install an older printer in Windows 8 LOL.
The truth shall set you free!
But I can't live without :
That article was a load of crap. One person on reddit made an unsubstantiated comment, which was picked up by Business Insider, which was then linked by reddit as proof of the original comment. It was circular journalism at it's finest.
here is our website: www.tcsindustry.com i think it's ok!
...there may be some ppl attempting to "manage" Microsoft's reputation (downwards) too.
That'd be a bit like "managing" water to be wet, don't you think?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I recently assembled a computer around a used motherboard I found at Goodwill with the intention of swapping it out for a better motherboard in 12 - 24 months. The cost of trying to legally license a new copy of Windows (>$100) encouraged me to install Ubuntu first and see how far I could get. The first challenge was trying to get Eve Online to work. After that, LibreOffice and Firefox/Chrome took care of most of my other needs. Eventually, Gimp and Inkscape satisfied the need for graphics creation. Ubuntu took some elbow grease in the beginning to get it to work with my graphics card. After that it has very smoothly scaled with my professional and gaming needs with the large number of ready to use applications.
The cost of Windows was particularly high because I would need to obtain a full version (>$200) rather than a systems builder version since I intended to upgrade the core of my system in a few years. Since Windows was particularly costly for system migration, it just didn't make sense. Windows only begins to make sense for OEM appliances where it's cost is greatly discounted. Installing and updating software on Windows is also a huge pain.
Well, as far as Linux on the Desktop -- although I continue to be impressed with what Ubuntu and others have done in this area, Linux on the Desktop for the masses seemed to be pretty much killed by Apple's brilliant move to go to an operating system that would eventually draw an absolutely massive number of people who would have otherwise been a part of that migration to desktop Linux. As much as Apple contributed to open source from that time on, I can't escape the fact that Linux on the Desktop adoption definitely suffered. I know I never seriously considered Linux on the Desktop again.
However... a couple of years ago, after having been a Mac desktop user for about a decade, I found myself working at a Microsoft shop, and they handed me an HP with Windows 7 on it. I was really quite worried about how well I would do, even though I had, of course, run Windows as a desktop prior to Mac's move to OS X (Windows 95, Windows 2000, etc).
With the exception of certain things that Windows 7 does very poorly (WebDAV client? Hello?!?), I've been overall fairly happy with both the OS and -- even more so, I think -- Office 2010.
But the best improvement that has come on the Windows platform in recent years is the continuous improvement of Cygwin, most notably a decent terminal in which to run it, mintty. If not for mintty, I would probably have struggled much more with Cygwin, and therefore with Windows. The Windows/Cygwin power punch may be the most productive setup available (aside from those environments where no MS interoperability is necessary at all, in which case I would still want a Mac).
Music production companies and makers of audio interfaces used by musicians really need to work with the Linux driver people to make audio interface support rock-solid. I have an Alesis Firewire 12 mixer which in theory can do multi-track live audio recording at 48/96 to separate tracks.. except even their Windows drivers SUCK. Supposedly OSS-compatible DICE II chipset but Alesis never followed through on promised support. (The FFADO guys actually managed to support the Alesis FW16, but the FW12 is identical hardware with slightly different device ID and thus isn't supported).
That's just the driver side. The recording/mastering software vendors need to step up and work with the JACK devs, put pressure to fully support VSTi API support in Linux, etc. There's no good reason why anyone should have to be tied to Windows for music production.
I'd run my studio in a VirtualBox VM running Win XP, except VirtualBox (and every other solution like VMWare) decided FireWire isn't worth virtualizing! Incredibly frustrating.
In my opinion, there are a lot of valid reasons to switch to Linux.
Mine was simply curiosity and boredom with Windows, I like the fact that I can configure everything and I do not mind the time involved - for me my computer is as much a hobby as it is a workstation. I have gone from Debian to Ubuntu to Arch Linux and from Gnome to KDE to Xfce to Awesome and every time I had fun setting everything up just right.
No that I got everything like I want it, I also noticed that everything is much, much more comfortable than windows. From the obvious speed boost to easier software installation, from workspaces to a tiling window manager...
And now that I've gotten used to it, I feel that the terminal is actually superior compared to mouse driven GUIs for most things. I like to work efficiently, and once you got the necessary practice the keyboard just trumps the mouse.
Of course all of the benefits above take a lot of time to get to - practice and simple set-up time. Not everybody can or wants to put that time into their computer system.
But you don't have to. Not every distribution is Arch Linux/Gentoo/LFS. Ubuntu or Linux Mint do most of the stuff for you and still offer a lot of the niceties of Linux - Package Managers, Workspaces etc. Recently a lot of my friends had to start installing Linux too because they needed it for their University courses and none needed more than an hour of introductionary time to get the basic hang of it.
Of course one of the main problems is that the most big, propietary software suits and games do not have Linux ports. Yes, Wine and VMs can alleviate that, but not a lot of people (me included) want to spend 3 hours to get a buggy version of a program working. Don't get me wrong, lots of software runs great with Wine, but some just doesn't and that's where the problem lies.
But all of that is not an inherent advantage of Windows and if that is your only reason to stay, maybe try some dual booting.
Oh, and just a short note about the people complaining about there being too many distributions: How is that a problem? Just think of it as seperate Operating Systems if you must. Most people probably don't even notice the differences between distributions on a lower level, just the different default Desktop Environments they use and how big their package repositories are.
After the latest days of NSA-spying news, and which companies that served data to them I wouldn't trust an Microsoft O, or Mac OS. Less so, any cloud services from them. That's one good reason to run Linux instead, even for a company.
You're still voluntarily giving up your hard earned money to the banksters? LOL!
There's one thing I've learned from people who perform data recovery and that's the excellent support for NTFS in recovery tools. Support for HFS, ext*, ZFS is like rolling the dice but improving.
I've been using computers since '86. Was a huge fan of DOS back in the day. Didn't like Windows 95 much, but eventually installed it in '98. That didn't last too long - around April or March '09 I figured I should try out Linux. First I went with slack, which didn't work out for me. I seem to remember that I first went for Debian, and then later on for SuSE for some years. Then it was a series of SuSE->Mandrake->SuSE->Ubuntu.
I had to fiddle a bit with Win2000 as a window desktop, and then later fiddle a bit with I think it was Win2000 or was it 2003(?) on a few servers. The main bulk of the servers were Linux and Solaris.
I very seldomly had to help out some XP users. I've barely touched Vista, and I don't think I've seen more than one computer w/Win7 ever. Anything newer than that and I haven't seen it at all.
Now; why won't I touch Windows? Quite simple - I have no clue how to do stuff with them. Family has been converted to Linux (and some Mac) years ago. I wouldn't know a thing about how to get stuff done. I've heard rumors that powershell is kind of cool - but I'm familiar with bash that I guess my only option for windows would've been cygwin - but that feels kind of bastardized instead of just having a desktop I immediately feel familiar with.
I'm pretty sure windows is quite cool for those who knows how to use it, but it ain't me.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
I'm just more used to Photoshop and find the UI more friendly than GIMP's for example. Not much a reason but hey.
Office on the other hand is a must, I use LibreOffice when I have to but I feel like I'd need to relearn everything.
1. netflix - I know there is a hack for linux but there are too many bugs with it. And I know Amazon will work with linux but have too many buffering and freezing issues them as opposed to having no problems netflix.
2. wifi adapters - too cheap to purchase two new ones that will work with linux.
Is this supposed to be relevant?
"no serious personal tax software to run on GNU/Linux" That is very easy to solve. Just move to a state where there is no personal tax.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
In Finland, government sends you a pre-filled report of your taxes. You can request changes for it, but I have never had to do anything. If I have paid too much, they pay the money to my account. If too little, they send me a bill. So there is no need for personal tax software in here and it is great from my point of view. I only wish that other countries would realize how effective it is and how much time it saves in total to do it this way.
This week I bought a new Lenovo laptop that came with Windows 8. I'm mostly a Linux user, I've always liked XP, never understood the value add of Windows 7 (simply a 64-bit port of XP with everything moved about a bit and an unnecessary accelerated and cluttered GUI) and don't plan on using Windows 8 ever. With that said, if I could have got Windows 7 on the laptop, I'd have used it and built a Linux dual boot.
Of course, there was no chance of getting a downgrade to Windows 7 due to the Microsoft dicatorship - after a few emails to Microsoft and Lenovo trying to get a downgrade and just getting canned responses to the emails, I blew Windows 8 away completely and just built the machine with Gentoo Linux. It took me a few days of messing around but now it boots damned fast, uses EFI (with Secure Boot turned off) and the only thing I can't get to work yet is the Ethernet NIC due to it being new hardware - but wireless networking was no problem to get working.
Yes, it's taking a lot of my time to do it and I'm no sloth when it comes to Linux, but with tweaking a lot of things, it's running pretty much anything Windows did, including games - and with Steam appearing on Linux that's pretty much killed Windows for good for me now. I like XP, it runs fine in VirtualBox (it actually runs better in VirtualBox than on some of the modern multi-core hardware I have) and still lets me have access to the handful of killer applications that I use Windows for.
A bit more flexibility on behalf of the vendors and they would still have had a (dual-booting) Windows user who might have eventually got to like Windows 7, but I wasn't being forced down the Windows 8 path, so now I run nothing current.
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
I use windows for:
At work (in part due to support, I should use windows since that is what most of our customers do).
Outlook, basically the same reason as above.
Vsphere.
Games, it's the best gaming platform by far.
Better experience with flash, especially video players.
Why I prefer gnu/linux:
Scrolling, pasting and general navigation on a laptop is far superior to windows, I always feel stunted on windows both with trackpoint and trackpad.
Workspaces, fully essential on a laptop and all solutions on windows are crap.
Flexibility in general is something I adore, so many small things that I do like to do (like having good keybinds to my mpd client, changing what keystrokes do and so forth).
Good terminals, in windows, I use a virtual machine to get a decent terminal, heck, I even ssh from that machine to my windows machine when using powershell.
Many of the games I play are old ones and can be played through wine.
So, I'm not keeping away from windows and I'm partly locked into having it due to professional constraints, basically.
Moving back from running only Linux for a few years to running both Linux and Windows, I was genuinely surprised how bad the Windows driver experience is. Windows 7 usually needs a round or two of searching for the driver download (the CD in the box is always some way out of date), installation, remove crapware, reboot, remove more crapware. Using older devices under Windows is often impossible. Usually I just plug stuff into my Linux machine and it works. Being able to type apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade is magic. Windows is so far behind here. Funny, when the target audience (less computerate users) would benefit the most.
Slashdot, don't just up-vote a comment just because it's anti-Microsoft. Even the reddit mods have come to the conclusion that it was all one big troll:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1fyjgr/regarding_xbox_one_and_allegations_of_voterigging/
Fucking hell /.'s, you're supposed to be smarter and more critical of things than the general public.
I used to have a dual boot setup for ages, finally switching over to Linux as my main OS with a Gentoo 1.4 RC.
Back then, still being a cheapskate student, I really became a Linux enthusiast, one of those fanatics who literally spent hours in forums after having the gcc manuals for perusal every night to squeeze out the last percent of performance with custom linespanning make arguments. On the GUI side I had KDE (3.x was a real charm at the time!) and Fluxbox and used what seemed the better fit for the day. At that time with my Gentoo stage1 build set up and other fun things like my OpenBSD-powered home router on an old Pentium PC, you would have never convinced me I would ever churn from FOSS. It was also then I gained the invaluable knowledge that helped me great deal to get my first job. Good times.
Fast forward a few years. I'm sitting most of my daytime in front of computers now, in my office and in the afternoon. Tweaking configs and waiting for builds to complete was not the exciting pastime anymore, it became simply hassle. So I went from Gentoo to Kubuntu. I never liked *buntu-based Distros as much as Gentoo, so M$ had me in a weak moment.
Windows 7 with its 30-day-trial was too tempting, and it simply worked. It was sleek. It brought great improvements. And I went to the store and bought it. (Fun fact: the /. quote of the day below my input box right now is "We are Microsoft. Unix is irrelevant. Openness is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.")
Today I'm still sticking with Windows 7 as my only OS on both my desktop and laptop. Linux distros only reside hibernating inside VMs for me to tinker around with sometimes.
Sometimes I ponder whether I should go back, as I'm afraid I'm narrowing down my own IT skills with the way I use computers nowadays. But, to summarize my excessive storrytelling, you have to want to invest time and effort into Linux. And after some life advances I just don't want to invest the time. Windows is as easy to use as ever and it got rid of the better part of its design flaws and downsides.
However, there's still that Debian powered server running ownCloud and some other stuff keeping me attached to Linux. And, of course and without much notice, my Android powered phones.
Windows XP allows me to do what I want (I'm not the power gamer I used to be). Pretty much every PC program runs on it.
Don't have a huge budget so don't buy Apple computers. I would use Linux if there were a similar level of apps to PC. Even iOS might not have a broad enough range of apps to satisfy my needs.
I did not find the Mac easy to use the last time I tried, even something as simple as opening a new tab in the background with the mouse was a nuisance. Maybe I would like a modern Mac if I got used to it but XP/2000 was Microsoft's crowning achievement in the OS arena and I'll keep using it until I want an OS that can utilise more than 4GB of RAM. Which might not be too far off.
I have a laptop that came with Windows 7. I installed Ubuntu but the Wi-Fi driver was vastly inferior to the windows one, only booted it up a handful of times.
I need colour management and Photoshop. They were the things that drove me back to Windows when I got seriously into digital photography, after years of using Linux.
I then used Windows as my main OS for years (having been Linux from about 1999 to 2006, Windows before that). I'd always had an itch to try OSX though, and finally jumped ship this year. Sorry to sound like a fan boy, but I'm a convert. All the command line goodness I had with Linux, and all the tools I need for photography. I'm happy.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Hi, I'm from Poland, the one thing that keeps web application I'm maintaing (data entry, government sector) tied to Windows is Electronic Signature.
Unfortunately, out of 4 Certification Authorites that provide "Secure Electronic Signature" sollutions in Poland, just one has any support for Linux, and this support is inadequate for online use.
In Windows there is MSCAPI, where user installs his/hers smart card drivers, and application programmer needs no knowledge, what library does the actual signing or encrypting.
On Linux, there is no such common API, application programmer is responsible for choosing appropriate PKSC#11 library, this is PITA if you're programming an applet or browser plugin, and 99% of your end users are computer illiterate.
Simple: I've found something better that does everything I want it to do.
There's still a bootcamp partition on this iMac, originally installed and used for games. But 2013 seems to finally be the year I don't even need it anymore. I can't remember when I booted windows up the last time, must have been months ago. All the games I really want are available for OS X now.
For all I care, windows can go the way of the Dodo bird. I wouldn't even notice.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm off Windows on my laptop because I think Max OS X is the best operating system for regular use, and I'm on Windows on the desktop because of a few games I still can't get for the Mac.
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I have been using computers since the Commodore 64. First PC was 386 33mhz etc with DOS and Windows 3.1. The windows 3.1 rarely got used until I needed a web browser for the "new" thing called the internet that normal people were just starting to use (1995ish). Early on I was introduced to Linux (slackware and debian), I have ran many flavors of it over the years. I ran it as my desktop for about a year back around 1999. I ran 95,98,ME (very briefly), 2k and I was a very long time XP user and besides the general lack of 64bit support I find it a great OS (better than 7 for me personally). Most of 7's "features" were things I disabled right after installing the OS. Superfect was one thing i was looking forward to, but I also ended up disabling since it really offers no benefit if you have a fast SSD. I ran servers for years at my home, mainly for popular websites.
As of today if I go to setup a server I will be installing some flavor of linux/bsd/linux without question. I have tried Windows Server OS versions many times and every time, they were unstable, used more resources than linux, etc. I'll admit I haven't tried a Windows Server OS in the last 6 years and I hope not to for at least another 6.
Desktop? I'll install Windows 7. I am not a big gamer, but there is no comparison game wise between any other OS. I also have a lot of apps I am just used to using. Yes most might work in Wine or whatever and I have made most work it just isn't worth all the effort, at least in my eyes. To me setting up Linux as a desktop and getting it to where I would want it for my taste is a lot of work and headache. I have done it a few times on a dual boot and at some point I end up booting back up Windows and that partition with Linux just sits there eating up space on my SSD.
Windows 8 metro UI whatever, as everyone here already knows is designed for tablets and touchscreen. Windows 8 + (one of the many start menu replacements) really isn't bad, but I'll stick with 7 which I really do not think is really any better than XP.
Linux is fast, stable and just amazing in many aspects.. I think if we ever see the "Linux Desktop" it will be in the form of Android or something Similar.
s/©//g
First of all let my start by pointing out that developing on Linux is much easier, I think most of you guys didn't even look at all the available development tools we have on Linux. I'm a student developing (primarly) Embedded software. Normally I'm a power user using Arch Linux, but because ubuntu has this handy unity DE (which really improves my workflow, though I admit there are some serious design flaws too) and I've actually haven't had any issue developing embedded with Linux. I primarely code in python (server backend, although python is only more a proof of concept language, because of the accelerated development speed), C++ or the superior C++ Qt framework (and really Qt is so much better then any Microsoft developed languages), C and off course some PHP. Concerning device drivers Linux is just the best, I have a much better experience with drivers using Linux then windows. Just plug in your android device, instantly works. Plug in a USB-TTL converter serial board, usually a Arduino programmer, NEVER had to install a driver. FULL OUT OF THE BOX EXPERIENCE, whereas with windows you have to wait on the Microsoft driver search and so on, and let me point out that I personally feel that windows driver searchup takes up too much time for what it's installing. I have a Microsoft mouse, and when I boot windows and I have plugged in my mouse a different usb slot then I previously used the mouse on then windows will have to download every driver installer ( for the microsoft mouse) ALL OVER AGAIN. So on my part the linux offers a real out of the box experience, allthough I admit that Canonical really has done its best for improving the situation. 7 years ago drivers were a big issue in linux and now every 6 months this situation improves a fast rate. What sets Linux apart is Freedom, freedom to know what's going on with your computer, freedom to actually modify something that isn't working for you. Every serious developer sees a partner in Linux. And in the embedded world there is no way you're not using Linux, most embedded boards are running Linux (or Android) , look at the Beaglebone Black, Raspberry Pi, Parallella, Udoo, ODROID. You just can't get around Linux nowadays. Now let me say that I'll never say that this will be the year of Linux on the desktop, I really don't care if the majority (or minority) is running Linux on their desktop, features and functionality is what got me into using Linux and these tools are still improving! Also I'd like to thank all the developers, users and advocates in the Linux ecosystem (direct and indirect) for all the love and work they've put into the whole Linux ecosystem. THANK YOU!
Hopefully someone will put me straight on this or advise a solution I have missed through lack of google-fu. 10 colleges (music and media production), 1000+ Macs, 10 mac servers, 3 Centos servers (from xserve to mac mini depending on the size of the college) 50 - 60 XP machines making up some of the lesser important areas of the colleges but with 10.6 server they join the mac provided domain with a few clicks. I have tried a few times to find an easily deployable Linux distro to replace the Windows machines as the majority of them will do everything the students need and more, however there seems to be lacking a simple and dependable way to join any linux machine to a directory server without having to run through a vast array of config files and manually tweak them. If there was the same sort of "wizard" to join OD or AD built in to the linux desktop as there is on both Macs (one or two clicks) and Windows (a few more) then I for one would welcome my new Linux based Overlords and embrace the linux desktop. Regardless of whether it is OD, AD or some other LDAP server there doesnt seem to be anything established to make Linux Desktop in a small/med/large enterprise environment viable or attractive, the licence cost for us isn't a huge issue but the ongoing maintenence and admin ease of use is (who wants to be answering a barrage of support tickets when they could be gaming in their work hammock). Build a wizard to allow easy integration into existing environments, then make it easy to manage and maintain them without learning 100 new command line packages and I think admins will take it more seriously with the knockon effect of introducing it/forcing it on to more people in the workplace which in turn may just inspire more home use. For an enthusiast, Linux desktop is fine but for a sysadmin dealing with lots of non techie staff its a no go in so many ways, address that first and I think it may move forward of it's own accord.
I hate that.
Linux comes unencumbered with Digital Restrictions Management, without the need to paff around with anti-virus software.
All the software on my Linux system comes with source code. I can change that. I can fix it when it breaks for me. I can share my changes with any one else. I'm not stuck with hanging on the phone sending the vendor data I know they won't need to solve the problem. I love all that freedom.
OSX just works. Windows and Linux are both behind, in different ways.I happen to like tinkering, so Linux is attractive to me. I don't really understand why anyone would still choose to use Windows (I am forced to use it, for some critical software I can't get for the other platforms).
If it stinks of paid shill, check the posting history of the user. In this case, GP (pla) seems to be a quite normal user. He posts about a lot of different things, only some of them related to Microsoft.
My verdict: pla is not a representative of Microsoft
C - the footgun of programming languages
The same for me. Happy with Linux for many of my use cases, but still have XP VMs:
*one for Tax
*one for Watching movies
*one for EDA/embedded programmer software (e.g. Xilinx, TI MSP430)
* Luckily the "movie watching" part will be taken over by my android devices.
* embedded -> Arduino, Linux
I use both Linux and Windows as desktop operating systems (and *ix as server operating systems).
Annoyances that I see no sign of being fixed in the near term:
- Proper multi-display support. Configuring more than one display on Linux is always a pain. If they live on the same graphics card there is usually a way to make it happen and not hamper performance, though you may need to resort to the blob drivers. If you want displays on more than one graphics card, you are f***ed. Xinerama is an ugly hack without acceleration, multi-X-server is just broken right off the bat, and if you get either working you have just emerged from a long and frustrating session of "tweaking" the config files. The desktop also tends to forget display placement very easily, if it works.
- Graphics drivers. For AMD/nVidia, the fast ones are the binary blobs, which are at the same time the ones missing features, being unstable, and inscrutable little sh**s when there is a problem -- the error messages nVidia produces on hangs are extremely unhelpful, for instance. Only Intel has decent open source drivers which do what you expect them to and are reasonably fast, but of course their graphics hardware is a few generations behind nVidia and AMD in speed and features. AMD is "contributing" to their open source drivers, yet they still suck, bad. And nVidia? Let's just say Linus' outburst at them was justified. Plus you get regular breakage of the blobs with kernel updates (which happen regularly for instance with Fedora).
Using vendor-supplied OpenGL applications (let's take Google Earth for instance) is a gamble. It will break, and break often.
You can pretty much forget playing games with performance competitive with Windows on the same hardware unless using the binary drivers.
- Level-headed UI design. Gnome 3 is what the gnome developers think a desktop needs. It's bad beyond comprehension. Every new version brings new removed features, less customizability, and more brain-dead additions. Yes, it's got a few good spots, but it is not at all a good desktop, especially not compared to what other operating systems do. The developers of Gnome don't think this criticism is warranted, they are of the opinion that they are producing polished diamonds and anybody who disagrees can do their own fork. Bleh.
Other choices come with their own idiosyncracies. Sound on KDE is a nightmare still -- although it does have decent customizability in general. When I need a dependable desktop, though, I tend to prefer the simplest stuff without bells and whistles (XFCE, MATE, etc.) since while they do look ugly and have problems, at least they are dependable and logical. Unity is a dead end. It suffers from the same kind of mistakes Gnome 3 does, although it does have more polish (and less compatibility outside of Ubuntu).
- Printing. Gah. Better than 10 years ago, not anywhere near good for the end-user.
- Network file sharing. Yeah, sure, NFS has a nice legacy and some nifty features and it's ubiquitous. Compared to what Windows implements with SMB, it is also broken when faced with intermittent outages, server reboots, etc.; It's very, very easy to make a Linux machine hang when something is accessed via NFS, and not at all easy to clean up that mess without a hard reboot; rebooting NFS servers is a nightmare. On Windows the share may disappear, but the system remains usable. It is comparatively a lot harder to make the entire system hang.
On the upside, NFS is very easy to set up; Getting SMB to work between different versions of Windows can be a royal PITA.
- Installation. The Windows installers are simply simpler; and of the Linux installers, some are passable and many are bad beyond comprehension -- plus over time it's not necessarily improvements that happen -- Again as an example, Fedora. The Fedora 17 installer was a LOT better than the Fedora 18 installer (which made it impossible to see whether what you are about to do is going to destroy existing data for instance, and the UI has taken giant steps b
It's been the year of Linux on the desktop for me since around 2003, when the guys I shared a flat with deliberately set the anime server so windows users couldn't access it (I was dual booting at the time, and decided I didn't really need to stay in Windows any more).
Nowadays I'm a postdoc research assistant working in mathematical epidemiology; I do a lot of programming and writing (mostly in LaTeX), most people at work use Linux, and having it at work and home makes my life very easy.
Yes, there's occasionally a game I can't play under Linux that wine can't handle, so I do still have a partition for Windows, but I'm now so unused to Windows that it feels alien and clunky, and I miss all the features I've become accustomed too. Given how it can be just as difficult to fix problems when they occur in Windows, if it weren't for Windows massive market share, I'd question if it were ready for the desktop yet.
Windows has the gaming industry, Linux does not.
Steam for Linux is a nice start.
Bugs in Linux are endless and quite maddening, otherwise I would switch today if it were not for these two things.
I use Linux for my primary home OS, and have done for 9 years. In that time I have found that Linux will do 90%+ of the things I can do in Windows. Likewise I have been in situatons where I am forced to use Windows, again 90%+ of the things I do in Linux I can do in windows. So which OS I use forms very little diffrence to what I'm trying to achieve. In the last year I have finally bitten the bullet and returned to having a Windows machine (Windows 7 dual booting with openSuSE 12.3, on my laptop). My desktop still runs Linux exclusively.
Reasons for needing/liking Windows .NET script which ties into LTspice. LTspice itself works great in wine but I could not get the script to work in Wine/Linux.
>My university has free student liscences for software that are windows only (the software is availible for Linux but would cost me €100s if not €1000s to aquire legally on linux, some libaries are held under NDA and I have to have a the university build (windows) and VPN to the university to use them.
>Some software is tied to the OS and is of benefit - Actually there is only one peice of software that I use frequantly that I cannot use in linux, this is a
>University support is better for windows - (e.g. connecting to University WiFi took 2 mins with a guide, same task took 30 mins on Linux - included reading man page to connect to a network type/authourization I had never used before, and reading the windows guide to extract the infomation needed).
>Most genral use PCs are windows, not just at university but in companies and the public libaries, knowing how to use windows becomes essentially.
>MS office is better than any alternative I have used (LO/OO/Abiword/Gnumeric), but I so rarely use office applications this makes little diffrence to me.
>Better hardware support - You don't have to reaserch if drivers are available you buy the hardware and install provided drivers if needed.
Reasons for needing/liking Linux
>Better command line, for me this is the biggest advantage. Quick bash scripts save me loads of time, being able to manipulate text streams is invaluble. When I am using windows I feel clipped WRT these features, I know they are acheivble in windows, but I am yet to come across a Linux install that does not have these tools where these features on Windows are rare.
>Large trustworthy source of free(gratis) software. I know there are plenty of of free/low cost software for Windows (I don't mind paying a small amount but I can't afford €50+ for an applications all the time). I feel I can trust the large collection of software availible in my repos, I have less trust of windows installers.
>Better documentation - In my experiance at least the documentation for Linux software seems better, alot of people seem to find the opposite.
>Software works as expected - I think this is just what I am used to, I often spend time working out what I am meant to be doing in windows or what a button actually does (actually this is more a GUI thing - I have the same problem with Gnome and KDE apps), where as on Linux/Bash I know what to do and what it is actually doing.
>Choice of desktop, I like tiling WMs I use xmonnard on my desktop, there is no simple way to do this.
>Lower overhead - my experiance is that Linux runs perceptivley faster on the same hardware (depending on DE)
Most Damage is done by people who are AWAKE
Findstr
Signtool
Etc
I have gone from 8 computers running Windows back in the Windows 2000 days, to two computers running Windows and four computers running FreeBSD and two computer running OpenBSD. The Windows computers are all notebook clients, while the BSD boxes are the servers. I've stayed with Windows for clients because I have not seen any real desktop alternative available. Ubuntu was a fore-runner, but that distribution has since gone bad. I am using BSD's for the servers because, well, they just work.
The only time I use Windows is fixing Windows... Either: a) Fixing someone else's machine. b) Legacy servers at work. It is remarkable how fragile Windows systems are sometimes. That said, they mostly work, and there is some very useful Windows only software out there. Made the switch to Linux in 2008, got a Mac recently... and mostly run Kubuntu on it. The best feature is that I don't lose days of work to service pack updates or get stuck at work because I have 28 updates to install when I try to shut down my laptop (or restart a server).
-- Mike
I have two computers equally available, one running Ubuntu, the other Windows 7. What keeps me on the Windows machine primarily is that package installation just works. On the Linux machine, about 1/3rd of the time once I apt-get the thing I have to spend hours editing configuration files and reading web pages before the thing works. The last time this happened was when I wanted to start an svn server.
At this point the linux fanbois will jump in and blame me, the user. This is just another reason why I don't like *nix. At least when Windows blows everyone agrees it does, whereas after you waste half a day tweaking permission files just write, you still get the "pleasure" of hearing fanbois blaming it on you.
I think the arguments about platforms are a waste of time. I use what my clients use and am buying a MacBook Pro and running windows 8 on it using fusion because I need to be versant in .net and iPhone apps.
I'm agnostic: I use the platform I need to use to get the job done with the least amount of friction. This isn't religion - it's just a friggin OS.
What makes it noticeably worse than a Chase savings account that pays 0.01 percent APY?
Currently I'm running one core AMD Athlon, that can run Win Xp sp3 and play few games with it, but windows always wanted to upgrade flash version, to one my video card isn't supporting, so I use Xubuntu (cause of XFCE in first) with openbox (even less RAM needed) with older flash version (that sometimes has problems, but atleast I can watch video without stutter.). My other PC is Intel i5 ASUS K35e laptop, that has superiority in processing power - so I use it mostly for work, school, stuff that mathers - on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, currently this laptop is in service center cause of shitty partition manager Windows 7 have inside, and problems with trying to delete my linux partitions (I made too many by installing several ubuntu versions), so I have learned to never trust windows 7 if it's already built like a module to the system - it's just bad. About cloud, I can say - I can see bad and good parts, but I would use portable hard dirsk for some stuff - but never had money to buy it- and that's how I lost all off my files with damn Windows partition manager. Altought I couldn't hate on Win 7 interface - it was superior to KDE, gnome, but I like it on the same level as Unity in Ubuntu. Yeah I know Ubuntu isn't first Linux - as it gets hate on interface, but I have learned to install all the things I need on it, and it still counts as Linux.
82 results fo Social Media Marketing at Microsoft jobs
https://www.linkedin.com/job/q-social-media-marketing-c-microsoft-jobs
Social advertising has become a staple of the media mix as marketers look to leverage their campaigns to drive valuable word of mouth and influence. Microsoft Advertising has helped some of the world’s biggest brands tell their stories
http://advertising.microsoft.com/en-us/social-media
Case Study: How Does Microsoft Do Social Media Marketing?
http://socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=SMC/200414
Starbucks, Microsoft are mighty in social-media marketing
And let’s not forget: Social media are free to use. That saves Microsoft some money in getting out its targeted marketing messages. Though the social-engagement report found a correlation between social marketing and a company’s financial performance, it was not definitively a causal relationship.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2009/10/12/starbucks-microsoft-mighty-in-social-media-marketing/
Communication –Blogs, discussions groups, and Twitter were used to provide continuing updates to the company’s followers during the development process for Windows 7. By providing frequent updates, Microsoft was able to build hype for Windows 7 among technology innovators. By increasing excitement of the innovators segment, Microsoft was able to encourage this segment act as brand ambassadors, willing to use their own social networks to pitch Windows 7 to early adopters.
http://suite101.com/article/social-media-marketing-strategies-a220285
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I switched to Linux about 15 years ago and since then I did never regret this move. I am not happy with Linux on the desktop, but though I don't use Windows at all, I sometimes get a glimpse on it. Funny thing is I know more of the features of Windows of any of those friends and family who ask me for help, though some use it on their job.
For me Windows is a no-go for several reasons. I switched to Linux back in the 90ies, because I was fed up with the system almost permanently asking me if I really, really had a properly licensed copy and asked me to buy one. I know this copy was a legal copy as I had purchased it from a regular vendor AND had its license confirmed by Microsoft.
During the next years I was happy to have full access to the source code of my system so I could change it's behaviour on my own, fix bugs and get rid of other annoyances on a level I would never have had on a Windows machine.
Some years ago I learned why I was so upset with my desktop, a KDE 3.5 installation. The issues I had never got cleaned out and from my point it even got worse. So I am not happy, indeed, today I work on a new desktop myself. I do so as I didn't find a desktop system which addressed my issues, I even tried Mac OS and Windows. The last try on Windows was just a couple of weeks ago and though I think Windows 8 isn't that good, my problems with it hadn't been addressed by any review I got my fingers on and as I had watched these issues closely and had tried them myself on actual machines I am convinced development will further go into the opposite direction for the time being.
So at least from my experience, there is no reason for me to switch to Windows. It would be a drawback on most aspects and not having access to certain programs vendors still provide Windows-only wasn't more than not getting a candy I don't like.
Wow there's a butt-tonne of comments, so I may as well be talking to myself, but...
Windows on my desktop because I am a gamer, and Microsoft has me by the testicles.
Linux Mint (KDE atm) on the notebook because I fucking love Linux.
Android on the phone because I fucking love Linux (and fuck you Apple).
For a standard home or development desktop, it's really not an issue or a choice. Linux is the best.
Like others noted in this thread, if video editing is needed, you likely have a Mac or Windows installed.
For work, it's Outlook. It's the killer app at work for those places Exchange is the standard.
If you don't buy a laptop from System76, you are in for a surprise. Out of the box, synaptic touchpads and separated graphics cards really don't work at all. The touchpad is way too fickle and battery life is awful using the more powerful GPU by default. Configuring or switching the GPU is extremely painful (restart X server!?). On Windows, it's seamless.
If all you want is something like Quicken, not something that actually prepares and files the return for you, then Shaman's answer should work for you.
I see more continuity from one version of Linux to the next than from one version of Windows to the next for one simple reason: The upgrade from LInux 2.2 to LInux 3 is free of charge. So is the upgrade for all the GNU and GUI stuff that sits on top of it. In terms of your pocketbook, a major upgrade to GNU/Linux feels more like a service pack for Windows than like a new named (and therefore priced) version of Windows.
Windows is little more than a container for the programs that I launch. What I actually use is a browser, email client, chat client, MP3 player, video games and so forth.
I don't understand how people can get so worked up over which OS someone uses when most people spend 99% of their time interacting with applications, not the OS.
The OS has two jobs:
1) Provide a solid framework for the applications you want to run.
2) Stay the hell out of the way.
As long as it accomplishes those two jobs, the OS you're using doesn't matter.
Thank you. This anti-XBox-One rant from just last week might have put the nail in that particular coffin, if most people had bothered to look. ;)
I use Windows. I also use computers with Linux desktops regularly and have tried to use Linux as my the only OS on my desktop PC a few years ago (2009), but I switched back when Windows 7 hit. I'm definitely not against giving Linux an another try as my primary OS, but things have to improve before that happens.
1. To my knowledge, Linux still doesn't have proper multi-monitor or multi-GPU support. My desktop has 2 graphics cards with 4 monitors connected between them. Some of the monitors are rotated. Trying to set them up properly was the single biggest frustration I ever had with Linux. I never expected it to be easy, but good god was it hard to set them up for a relative noob. While things have improved since then (it's now actually possible to do stuff without running a separate X server on each monitor), I'd still rather not spend hours upon hours editing X config files by hand to make things work. .NET developer and use tools like Visual Studio. I like being able to work from home and do so quite often, and I'm not sure if I want to run something as heavy as a couple of VS 2012 instances virtualized.
2. I work as a
3. I have a big collection of games on Steam and the vast majority of them only work on Windows. This, luckily, is improving.
4. To me, Windows still has a lead on Linux WMs and DEs on usability. Things like Aero Peek and Aero Snap are pure gold.
5. This isn't really Linux's fault, but some programs (Office, Skype (even before Microsoft acquired it, I haven't tried it since but I'm not very hopeful) and Spotify come to mind first) are just better on Windows.
I read a lot of articles about people keeping on Windows because of Support and Games, the interesting thing is that those 2 things keep me on Linux.
I have been working on Linux since 2004, first as a dual boot (Ubuntu), used OpenSuse for a moment and now on Debian (since Canonical started to screw things up).
I always have been tinkering with Wine, and although i agree it can be tedious from time to time, it has improved a lot over the years, and always proved worth of my time.
With games like Oblivion or Skyrim, I heard a lot of people complaining about random crashes and weird bugs.
I had the game running on Wine since day one, and never experienced issues with crashes and weird bugs.
The performence was also a lot better then running on native Windows.
If you look at the article "faster zombies" from valve (*link http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/) it is quite clear that Linux is capable of better performance on linux, and this is one of the things that is keeping me on Windows (other then the usual things, no viruses, more customizability without crappy 3rd party software etc).
With the case of Support, I had a issue once where a Windows 7 system had a problem with a particular video card, it flickered a lot and changed resolution over time.
While first suspecting that it was a hardware issue, i tried with a linux live distro.
It worked and gave no problems at all.
I searched on the internet for solutions and found out that this would be patched in the next version of the driver, which would be released in 1.5 month time.
This is the problem with closed-source, if you need something fixed today, it will simply not happen.
If i had this same problem on linux, just google for the issue, drop by on IRC or look on a forum, and you will get things done in minutes!
I ended up installing Fedora on the system with compatible open-source alternatives of the software, and 1 program in Wine, which ran without a hassle.
More and more games are getting native Linux support (about 50/60 added to steam in the last month) and valve is pushing this every day (since they despise Windows 8), so if we can just fix the issue about closed source operating systems and support, Windows might finally become competitive again as a Desktop OS.
I use Windows XP only for downloading ebooks. I wish Adobe had followed up on its promise to implement ADE for Linux as well as Mac and Windows.
thunderbolt is only pci-e X4 and needs high cost cables + a pci-e cage and it's still a laptop CPU and laptop ram.
for the price of the TB cable and cage you can buy a nice video card.
Office is definitely part of it, Photoshop in combination with a dislike for OS X as well. Not to mention all the games I own for the platform. Especially Minecraft. That shit's fun.
The last copy of Windows I ran on a personal computer of mine that I owned was Windows ME. I don't guess I'm ever switching back.
Prolly just a matter of personal pride as much as anything else. And now that I've been running debian for ages and have gotten use to maintaining it at the desktop and server level on my home LAN I just prefer it over any microsoft product.
Serenity now, insanity later.
Let's face it, if your a developer on windows, you're stuck with having to use visual studio. I'd rather not have to wait so long for my development environment to boot. I spend 90% of my time in the command line. Windows command line doesn't have near the flexibility of the linux command line.
As for servers, at my job all the servers aside from my linux boxen are windows servers. Most of my servers have uptimes of 200+ days. Almost none of the windows servers have uptimes more than 2 weeks. Most of the time it's just plain easier to reboot the windows server than to try to diagnose the issue.
Gaming keeps my gaming desktop on Windows, everything else runs Linux, including my phone. Real GNU/Linux too, not Android.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The fact that I already run Linux and installing Windows would require much more work. Plus, why would I want to when all my apps run better in Linux?
It's her stripper name.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Games. As far as I am concerned, Microsoft Windows is the best platform for computer games, and has been for years. For other things I do with computers, I prefer other platforms, though.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Working during one's leisure time isn't something to be proud of. In America people already are way, way too over focused on work and not enough on quality of life. If you don't play games because it gives you more time to work, then you need to reevaluate your priorities (unless finances make it necessary). That isn't to say "you need to play videogames!" just that you need to have things you enjoy and that relax you to do in your down time, not more work.
At work we have Windows XP. We'll probably "upgrade" to Windows 7 later this year. Funds for software are in short supply. We have many specialty programs that aren't available for other platforms. Processes have been designed around these programs and around unique features and add-ons of MS-Office. Most of this stuff could have been done better on open source platforms and probably with less expense. But reinventing everything for other platforms would be a major undertaking for my entire industry. No one firm could do this alone. It would be like unilaterally switching all of our firm's operations to Esperanto. Besides I do not dare to recommend open source software for my workplace. I think someone might retaliate against me if I did.
Windows is not installed on my personal computers. My main laptop multi-boots several Linux and BSD based OSes.
I quit using windows because windows 2000 was perfect blend of speed and stability. But they quit supporting it past directx 9. So gaming was out after a time. Then they quit supporting the updates. So servers were out then too. When all in all XP,2003,2003r2,2008....were just upgrades to the 2000 model. I consider NT 3.51 and 4 to be betas to the 2000 modell.
Switching to Linux. I've been looking at a new machine and they almost invariably have Windows 8. How anyone believe a tablet based OS is going to be effective on a standard laptop or desktop machine I don't know. Windows 8 is meant for a touch screen, not a mouse.
So I may just say fuck it, throw Ubuntu on a machine and kiss MS Office goodbye.
Same thing as always; Games, Visual Studio, Application compatibility and Ease of use
Windows is the easiest platform to do anything on. From gaming to looking up dark sky sites. Nothing else comes as close, especially on mobile. OS X is roughly equal in this regard.
Once windows tablet form factors get better , I will see no reason to use anything but windows. Despite windows 8 getti g lots of bad press, it is by far the easiest platform to use. I am not a fan of iOS four finger swipe gesture to switch apps, or pressing that single button twice. Android has a pretty good manager , but the platform isn't performant. Using Windows 8 or RT is smooth quick and feels similar to iOS devices.
Windows works. Microsoft came a long way from the insecure , unstable past. It is still the largest developer platform out there. It is undergoing some transition now, but I expect people will continue to embrace it. I will.
There are only three reasons I have been using been using Windows in the past 5 years... Gaming, Work (due to all of the Windows Servers they had) and Adobe software (horrible, horrible software). Now that I work else where and with the end of my university dutes means I only now only use Windows for games. Software development is mainly my number one reason for constatnly using GNU/Linux (Kubuntu is my personal choice), and now year over year, most distros out there are getting more compatible and easier to use for casual and professional users. I'm pretty sure you can do almost anything you want on GNU/Linux now (well supposedly not excel stuff). Another reason for switching is down to performance and speed, I find that Windows tends to slow down over time (and I do know how to take care of my PC's), I don't really see that in GNU/Linux, especially now that I have an SSD
Do you think you can learn a new joke in time for your 13th birthday?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
To the OP's question
Windows 7 was/is rock solid. Windows 8 is more so but... there's the catch.
With Windows 8 is phones home every 24 hours. I have had the system on more than one occasion lock me out because it couldn't authentic itself during its it's scheduled check-in. (problem - Installed Outlook 2013). I love Microsoft tech, but hate Microsoft management decisions that make the tech obey stupid policy.
If there were an Outlook alternative that integrated all my game, business, personal email accounts, calendars, contacts lists, et. as good as Outlook I would have one less reason to support Microsoft - and trust me, I don't want to support Microsoft executives and their policy making decisions but dammit their developers do make good tech.
What keeps Windows in my home is Outlook, OneNote and the many programs from other vendors that simply aren't available on Mac or Linux. When I hear from others that there's a program X that does something similar on Linux, I check those out and 99.9999999 percent of the time they simply aren't up to snuff. Windows has the application base and by application I mean well written, good UI and has ample support, not just a group of devs somewhere in the ether that wrote something they hope you will contribute to.
It'll never be, until you can buy it in the high street computer shop. And that won't happen because of the secret, restrictive and onerous contracts Microsoft makes the OEM manufacturers sign.
AccountKiller
"Every now and then I boot into the latest linux distro currently in favor and give it a spin. And I've always ended up disappointed."
..
With comments like that, it's understandable why you would want to remain anonymous
AccountKiller
At home, I use a Linux desktop and a MacBook Pro laptop, and am quite happy with both. However, for our small business, I am reluctantly planning to get a Windows computer instead because I want to create a small database in Microsoft Access, and Access is not available in the Mac version of Office.
For the most part our business is not computerized, but we do want to replace a card file with an Access database. It will be just a simple database with a one-to-many relationship between the two tables.
When we recently hired a new employee at work, I had problems trying to use my new MacBook Pro on the U.S. government's Social Security Online Services website. I attempting to log into that website to use their social security number verification service for verifying the new employee's social security number.
As soon as I tried to log-in, I had problems, so I called the technical support number for Social Security Business Services Online. With slight irritation, the woman told me that I had to use Internet Explorer when accessing their website. A few minutes later, I also talked to a guy at their technical support number, who told me that I could not use any Apple products to access the Social Security Online website. I did not bother asking him about using my Linux computer.
I complained to him that my only Windows computer is an old Windows XP computer which just barely runs, and which has had a virus and malware removed from it in the past. I said that I would be irresponsible of me to enter our new employee's social security number from our least secure computer. After becoming slightly angry with me, he said that I should use a computer at the library instead.
I do not feel comfortable doing that at the library, with other people at the library looking over my shoulder, and our new Windows 7 computer will not be arriving for another week. Since, at the moment, I do not have Internet Explorer available from a trustworthy Windows computer, I will try to do the required social security number verification over the telephone with them instead.
well.. you could do it with obscure commands and scripting in windows just as well.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
There aren't many at all that "require" Windows for use. A few ago there were many systems whose wireless cards had "Windows-only" drivers, but any more that isn't much of an arguement for anything. Overall, driver problems with Linux or Mac are a whole lot less frequent than under Windows, and you'll never had to pull apart an "installer" to get the real driver files that then let you manually add your devices after failing to work via the installer.
Regarding PVR functionality for OTA broadcasts...
I really cannot comment on Linux (I have heard of MythTV), but a Mac Mini platform running OSX and EyeTV suck for a variety of reasons. The most problematic is a known issue that OSX cannot handle being plugged into the AV receiver via HDMI in an "always-on" scenario (check avsforum.com in the mac htpc section)
Now install Windows (version of your choice) on that Mac Mini and install/run Windows Media Center and everything works perfectly. The UI is great. The setup is great. Then you can install the following programs side-by-side with WMC to complete an awesome HTPC experience.
And, while not unique to Windows, it's nice to know that the browser experience on Windows does support (as one would expect):
DOTA 2 is keeping me on Windows, that's it!
Linux is here for that ... in Android.
I would prefer an Android based distro if anything with keyboard and mouse support. Yes it is more limited but man non server apps really reak in 2013. In 2002 KDE 2.0 rocked! Amarok rocked! Things were looking up if it were not for hardware support.
Today it has regressed to the point where I gave up and consider Linux a server technology.
http://saveie6.com/
"I love Linux. I use it for servers, I've rolled my own kernels, even my own embedded distros (and I mean back before Knoppix remastering made that trivially easy). But for day to day desktop use?"
..
I've been totally Linux only at home for over three years, and haven't noticed the loss and I've never had to compile a kernel. I don't 'love' Linux, I find it just works.
"Quite simply, Linux sucks ass as a desktop OS"
To which desktop are you referring to:
Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4?
Linux Media Centre
Ubuntu 13.04 Review
A Desktop Tour of Lubuntu
Linux vs. Windows Boot Times
AccountKiller
Former linux user/C++ developer here.
I have always kept a linux and a windows machine around at the same time, last year was the first time I STOPPED my linux investment. Why? Everything I've desired to accomplish can be performed on a customized windows machine. The support for keyboard functions for window manipulation, uniform control interaction and core development tools is a major speed boost and one of the most frustrating things missing in linux (I used to use ratpoison distro)
Powershell is a big one here. Shell scripting support has come a long way in windows, while it is missing a simple GRED/AWK commands its ability to pipe objects provides lots of power.
APT-Get is missing, but I dont find that to be a major problem because most MSI installers do a good job. People have told me Choclatey is a substitue for apt-get but I havent tried it.
Visual studio has support for C++, web development, node, python, so most of my work needs are covered in a single tool. Jetbrains software covers anything missing.
If you use the keyboard and avoid the mouse, windows 8 is a snappy more tolarable OS. Yeah I know Im not the average user, but the speed and keyboard support make me a happy camper with this latest version.
Exchange, Active DIrectory, Lync, MS SQL, Visual Studio, .Net, and everything else. Nothing I've messed with even comes close to comparing to all of this.
I have some old devices such as printers, camcorders, etc. They only came with the windows drivers. I also have some old games which only runs on windows. I know windows has a lot of problems. But, in the end, I use the applications, not windows. And there is an important advantage of choosing windows, it gives you a peace of mind that every important applications have or will have an windows version. It means, I only need one machine to handle all the tasks. Every other options, no matter how good they are, only covers say 90% of what I need. Which means, I need to have two machines, one for 90% of need and one windows for the rest 10%. Which is obviously more expensive.
I press it all day. When I heard Microsoft took it away I wanted to press it even more.
Windows XP forever. Same version frozen in time forever. I don't care if my dot-net is screwed beyond repair or Windows Update keeps offering the same hotfix over and over, it's like a worn out recording of a favorite song.
I want to be buried with Windows XP.
And paperclip man, that huggable veracious knid.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
10bit anime
Media Player Classic Home Cinema
Touhou and other games from Japan
Foobar
Pale Moon Browser
Last I checked, Windows doesn't have sed, grep, awk, etc. /etc -mtime -2
Nor is the OS designed to allow such tools to work. How would you:
find
You can't. There simply no way to find recent configuration changes in Windows. In Linux, it takes less than a second.
That powerful DOES mean you'd need to have learned how to use "find". (or just use the GUI like you would under Windows.)
If you spend some time learning the command line, ordinary tasks can be done ten times faster and tasks that are impossible under Windows become possible, if not trivial.
There's also native and official version of Firefox for Linux.
In my house right now I have a NAS which runs a custom Linux install, a Media PC which runs XbmcBuntu, an Android tablet with CM10.1, 2 laptops with Windows 7 and 2 desktops with Windows 7. I generally prefer to use Linux for any device that has a dedicated task where the hardware won't change. I prefer Windows on laptops though due to ACPI as generally it just works better on some of the odd chipsets used. I like Windows on a desktop for a few specific apps and for gaming. Yes I could use a combination of Steam for Linux and Wine to play games but there is a small performance penality in Wine and compatibility issues still. My current plans are to stick with Windows 7 SP1 on my home desktops/laptops until it is no longer supported as I have a burning hatred for Windows 8's Modern UI. Once Windows 7 SP1 is no longer supported I will see what each platform (OS X, Windows and Linux) have to offer and decide what to do from there. If I had to switch tomorrow? I'd probably put Debian on all of my devices.
I switched to linux from CP/M (ZCPR) when a linux distribution became available. One gets settled in one's ways and finds it difficult to switch to an OS using a completely different paradigm.
Best wishes,
Bob
The main think keeping me off Windows at this point is the complete and utter lack of any meaningful ability to customize how the GUI works. I mean, you can change the colors and, umm, pin different stuff to the taskbar, so I guess that's something. But it's not enough. I like being able to change how my OS actually *behaves*, in addition to the appearance.
Oh, and also panel applets, and drawers.
On the plus side, I do wish the clock panel applet in my current OS had certain of the options that the Windows one has. The ability to show both local time and another timezone (or, usefully, UTC) in the hover tooltip, for instance, would be nice to have. So Windows does get some things right.
But like I said, it's not enough to bring me over.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
what keeps me off windows is the fact I cannot install anything but Vista on this laptop. Debian works OOTB so its a no brainer really.
It's an hp dv5-1108ax for those who are interested. Tried n-lited xp but it bsod's and Win7 doesn't/didn't have drivers. Both work in VirtualBox so I'm not worried or that interested in tinkering any more. As a few others have stated, Linux is a much better development environment IMO esp when one can use that and the openJDK.
YMMV ofcourse, but it works well for me.
Pretty close. Work-related app for VR-driven medical transcription proofing is the only thing tying me to win xp. Otherwise I made the leap away from 'duhs to Linux a long time ago and I'd rather not look back.
Is filling in your tax forms so complicated that you need special software to do it in the USA? In Norway (and probably many other countries), you simply get a sheet of paper summarizing your relevant income, debt etc. as reported by banks, employers etc. Usually this information is correct, and in this case you don't have to take any action. Otherwise, you can add, correct or remove items using a government web-app (or paper forms if you prefer). I've had to do this a few times, and it usually takes a few minutes.
Games. The only reason I have Windows 8 on my machine.
I used Windows until XP, and gradually spent more time on my linux machines and less on the windows machines. I think the main reason for this is the CLI. Linux comes with a good shell by default, and more importantly, linux programs have good support for being used from the command line. This lets me easily automate tasks that would require either tedious manual point-and-click operations in windows, or writing a dedicated program (which would probably end up being a cli program anyway).
My experience is that using the CLI occasionally is inconvenient - one has to open up a terminal, find the path to the file one is interested in, cd there, and then get on with what one planned to do. But this does not happen if one stays in the terminal all the time, as one will already be the correct place.
Examples of things that are trivial to automate in the terminal are: Make a 10% size thumbnail of every image in a directory and construct a html page with the thumbnails as images, each linking to the corresponding image. That's a few echos, a for loop and convert, and is written in about a minute, and can be put in a script file for later reuse. Or how about converting an emulator input file into a gameplay movie by piping the audio/video output from the emulator to ffmpeg? Or doing a regex replace of filenames in a directory? Or swapping the order of two columns in 50 text files? Etc. All of this is much simpler to when you have the combination of a good text shell *and* programs meant to be used that way.
(But I guess I am a bit too late to this discussion - this will probably be post 1000 or something).
It's worse than you think and better than you think at the same time.
Why worse:
Thunderbolt is 10Gbit per channel (which is the most you can strap into any specific device).
Using modern (2011-era+) TB controllers, each port (e.g. plug on your computer) carries two channels, one that can do PCIe, and one that's "hardwired" to only ever carry displayport data from your integrated GPU and is not useful for this discussion)
So if you're putting an eGPU on a thunderbolt link, you can get as much as 10Gbits, but if you have a 13'' retina macbook pro with two TB ports and a lot of cash to burn, you can do SLI over them and get 20Gbit working for you.
A PCI express 2.0 (the PCIe controllers vendors put on TB devices are 2.0, not 3.0) lane is 4Gbits.
Different vendors put different PCI bridges at the end of the thunderbolt pipe.
Sonnet put a more expensive PCIe x4 controller. Thunderbolt (10Gbit) -> PCIe controller (4x4Gbit) = a 10Gbit bottleneck on thunderbolt.
The good'ol TH05 (that used to cost 180$ inc. cable) had a PCIe x2 controller. TB (10Gbit) -> PCIe (2x4Gbit) = 8Gbit bottleneck on PCI.
So you're not getting "PCIe x4" speed. You're getting somewhere between 8Gbit and 10Gbit, depending on your choice of parts.
Why better:
I actually run this rig (I'm typing this on it). The howto I linked above is mine.
I have a sonnet at home and a TH05 on the go. I use the Geforce660Ti (a 150Watt GPU powered by two relatively portable 12V/7A bricks). I chose a 3GB video ram card so as to have more caching ability on the GPU (and a bit less reliance on the link bandwidth)
The pleasant surprise:
You don't actually need desktop-mobo PCI bandwidth for A-grade titles (CoD, Borderlands, Metro, Skyrim etc) with HDTV res, superb framerates and a flawless experience. Ditto @2560 for most.
TB cables are $50.
With $1500 (original requirement), I can set up a killer macbook mini rig from scratch. with GPU.
Less portable but more powerful.
With maybe $300 more, I can build a macbook-air rig instead.
-
Just a couple big ones that don't support any Linux browsers:
gotomeeting (http://community.gotomeeting.com/gotomeeting/topics/use_gotomeeting_online_on_linux)
Microsoft office 365, lync, etc (some are partially supported, but voice/video meetings via lync are not)
I'm sure there's more, but the above suck because they're often foisted upon people by clients and/or the company you work for.
Oh, and many legal movie streaming sites, like:
Netflix (http://movies.netflix.com/WiMessage?msg=51)
vudu (https://vudu.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/319/kw/linux)
Blockbuster (http://www.blockbusternow.com/)
You're posting an article based on a Reddit post that's been discredited and was the cause of the latest run of Reddit doxxings and witchhunts, proving that the Boston bombing mentality is still alive and well there.
Good job.
For work and day-to-day use, I prefer a Unixy OS. My main workstation runs Fedora, and my laptop is a Macbook Pro. I find Windows to be clunky and limited and weird, and its command line is just plain awful. That said, I do sometimes boot into Windows for two reasons: 1. Dota 2 2. Netflix I know I could probably solve #2, but I haven't felt it's worth the effort since I still would have Windows around just for #1. If Steam ports Dota 2 over to Linux then I'll probably kiss Windows goodbye, completely. And I won't miss it.
don't worry, with 8.1 they're going to compile with -DNO_SUCK
there is, but I think Seamonkey is doing a better job of things generally, Firefox went tits up on me several months ago on Windows and on Linux so I've stopped using that. I still use Seamonkey on Linux occasionally, though I prefer Konqueror because of its tight integration and wicked fast ftp-ability.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
or rather, windows' native and automatic ability to remember window positions and sizes from launch to launch, and from reboot to reboot with absolutely no configuration and no user action of any kind whatsoever.
linux SUCKS ASS when it comes to this. period. sure you can jump through a few hoops to kinda sorta have at least a little control over it, but NOTHING on linux can compare to windows in this one regard... and *won't ever* until the developers of the various parts of a graphical linux desktop quit shifting blame and responsibility for this embarrassing omission of simple usability off onto a different group. but because linux developers, projects and distributions are so fragmented and so many are so fucking full of themselves... sadly, that. will. never. happen.
Nothing! I use both as desktop OSs pretty much every day.
Most of my Windows computer usage (both desktop and server) is for business use. I like many things about linux and used it to fill some special needs scenarios, but until it has something comparable to Active Directory Group Policies, I consider using it unless it is a last resort/only option.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
A lot of people are bringing up the whole malware/viruses issue alongside performance issues as well. What I haven't seen mentioned much is that *IF* Linux were the mainstream OS on the desktop you would see a lot more malware and viruses for Linux distro's. I mean hell Android alone has been hit so hard with malware and viruses it's become more of a joke then anything especially when some of it comes from the official google play store hidden in various apps. Same applies to Mac OS/X which also has seen an increase in malware and viruses the last few years.
Hell even MS-DOS back in the 80's and 90's were affected by viruses when that was the mainstream OS and when Windows 3.0x and 3.1x releases came about we started seeing more viruses affecting them and then it took off with Windows 9x releases and so on and so forth. Heck let's even say if Microsoft and IBM had decided to play nice years ago and kept co-developing OS/2 together and had released that in 1990 instead we might have been in a world of Microsoft OS/2 today and still dealing with viruses and malware.
Part of the problem is that Microsoft encouraged bad computer user habits for the average user that unfortunately still exists today for most people who have no interest in learning how to defend yourself from the vast majority of shitware and viruses out there. Automatically clicking on file(s) attached to e-mails if using Outlook, downloading various free, trial, or even commercial programs, especially from CNET, where it's bundled in with so much adware/scareware/crapware/malware you name it, that you have to uncheck several boxes and click through more prompts to confirm that, yes, I do not want this toolbar or this search engine or this software installed. Even now some uninstallers try to install more adware/malware when you remove the original program which is just downright nasty.
Then we wonder why so many people are (or should be using) programs such as Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and at least a half assed decent anti virus like Avast if you need realtime scanning, or Clamwin AV if you just feel the need to scan executable files you download along with a decent firewall such as Privatefirewall or, god forbid if you like buggy pieces of shit firewalls, Comodo or Zonealarm. And linux users arent immune either in that sometimes people who arent familiar with the terminal will randomly copy and paste sudo command lines from various "Linux help sites" to install this program or that and don't verify that what they are copying and pasting is actually what it says on screen. I mean hell you could have it say onscreen "sudo apt-get netflix-desktop" but when pasted into terminal a user in a rush might not realize it says "sudo apt-get malware-sucker-package" and boom your linux box is now targeted for god knows what.
Same goes for the browser too. Too many people still use Internet Explorer which for over a decade now has been so full of security holes its no wonder windows systems get fucked up so hardcore. Using firefox along with Adblock plus, Noscript, Ghostery (or DNT+ if you prefer) goes a hell of a long way on windows to stop a lot of the "visit said website or get re-directed to a website and have software installed without your permission" often through something as innocent looking as flash ads, banner ads, or sites insisting you have to "download codec to play video" when you don't need it to do so.
And finally for performance it's easy enough to tweak in both Linux and Windows. Disable services and startups you dont need in both operating systems, honest to god de-fragment your hard drive in windows once a month even with free programs like Defraggler, keep the registry clean and learn what the hell is running in both operating systems at boot time, and what you have installed. I still have friends who don't bother to learn how to tweak windows or linux, how it all works, how to keep it operating smoothly and malware/virus free especially when browsing even if you use firefox and or chro
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
Use Mint 14 at work and Ubuntu 12.04 at home. Now that Steam is on Linux I have no need for Windows ever again :)
http://www.gibby.net.au
PC at work has Windows installed, so I don't really have a choice. At home, I installed Windows using reg key I stole from work - unused reg key, that is. Yes, I'm a software pirate and proud of it. I'll stop installing Windows when it no longer becomes possible for me to pirate it. I will never buy it because I don't think it's worth the price, especially when I can install Linux for free.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
Their terrible update procedure, horrible window managing, useless composition, outdated software and toolbar installs (even asking to install one is enough to annoy me) that bundle with every fraggin' program out there it seems. (Granted not Microsofts Fault, I hope)
So in short I would say Windows keeps me off by being a obsolete operating system built by people who lost passion and are in it only for the money. Doing various jobs with computers/office over the years, still can't find installing Microsoft products essential for any of my computing needs and quite honestly I get quite mad while using them. I get by better than fine with Libre/Calligra, Linux/Wine and the few ported games on Steam.
Stop the bullshit people, you're just all too narrow minded and support narrow minded ideals if you discard Libre and Open Source. With more day-to-day users on Linux/BSD you will soon notice hardware manufacturers will need to get off their ass and support that non-standard solution. But it's your choice if you rather have Microsoft rule your workspaces. Not anyone else.
Games
All companies do this. They're smart about it, too. They know that the first vote a post gets determines its fate 90% of the time. Say something negative about McDonald's in one of those "random" Reddit threads titled "This wouldn't have happened if he'd just gotten a McRib", and watch how quickly you get that first downvote.
The sad thing is, 90% of people on social media will think you're some kind of conspiracist if you imply that corporations are somehow guiding the otherwise advertising-free and cost-free online sites they're using. Of course these things exist only because people are so awesome!!!
As all of our customers use Windows or MacOS, those are the platform we develop for. Don't think we have ever gotten an inquiry about a Linux version (customers are mainly architects and structural engineers). It may be a "chicken or the egg" situation of there not being a demand for software because nobody is using Linux, or nobody using Linux because the software isn't there, but as a business we need to generate actual real world revenue and until there's real demand for a Linux version we're not going there.
Representatives of Microsoft may be hanging out on the social news site voting up positive comments about the Xbox One, voting down negative comments and adding pro-Xbox comments of their own, Misty Silver says.
While at Microsoft for a meeting, Misty Silver saw and overheard some employees on Reddit. She looked at one of the employee’s screens:
“I noticed he was mass-downvoting a ton of posts and comments, and he kept switching to other tabs to make posts and comments of his own. I couldn’t make out exactly what he was posting, but I presumed he was doing RM (reputation management) and asked my boss about it later. According to my boss, MS have[sic] just brought in a huge sweep of SMM managers to handle reputation management for the Xbox One,” Silver reported.
“Reputation management” is the term social media marketers use to “pose as happy customers” on social media sites. They upvote/downvote and make comments.
http://au.businessinsider.com/microsoft-positive-reddit-comments-2013-6 [businessinsider.com] [businessinsider.com]
So what? This is basically the equivalent of a bunch of neckbeards down-voting Xbox comments just because hey hate Microsoft, or can't get laid, or whatever.
O/S bigotry is bullshit, and most of the time when I meet someone who is constantly bitching about windows, they have no substantial reasons, they are just haters. It really doesn't make sense to me. All of the modern operating systems have a place, and being able to put the right tool in the right place at the right time is a skill that has put me in the top 5% of the IT folks at my organization, with pay to match.
I will bring up a linux box, or a windows server, or a freakin' MAC whenever I want for whatever reason I want. I will read up on the latest techniques to harden the particular O/S I am working on. I will decide what services will run according to the environment the machine with reside, etc.
This is how things get done.
My hole family uses Linux and we only have linux at home. But I just changed job and as I found out they are sort of a microsoft company so I got stuck with it du to that. But I have to say that I miss gaming on windows ... hopefully steam on linux will remedy my craving for gaming ...
If anything, I'm an Anti-fanboi for Apple. Their closed designs, secrecy, denials of problems, arrogance all gripe me no end...rather like the US government (Hi NSA. *wave*)...but I digress...
For a project at work I started using OSX in anger full-time every day.
Reason to stay off Windows: reboot/fiddle/reformat/reauthenticate every so often. I've had a Windows PC sitting on my desk for years. I've done various types of development on it. Got *lots* of games on it, and still use it for games...but "ping.exe" doesn't work, as an anti-virus product deleted it. Same with lots of other built-in commands. I'm tired of fiddling with it.
Linux: I tried using Linux at various points all the way back from version 0.11 that had to be loaded off floppies. It's more solid now than ever, and it's still a ball-ache to use.
OSX: It's got it's quirks and annoyances, but it supports a proper case-sensitive command line out of the box. I liked it so much, I bought my own iMac, sight unseen. That's actually bad thing, as it was one of the new iMacs that I can't upgrade the memory. So, it's better than Linux, and (for work) better for me than Windows, but I hate that I can't upgrade this iMac. They've done so much right, and then go a screw it up. Frustrating.
I guess the upshot is that, for the work I do, I prefer OSX, but only just.
the fact that linux is rapidly becaming another god damned windows -- stupid, monstrous, and misbehaving.
my current usage is about 90% linux (fedora and mint) and 10 % Win7. What keeps me on Windows? Some very specialized games not available on the linux platform.
Hi. I work with PLCs, and (the same as most Electronic Devices) their software development apps are only made for Windows. I have a long history of preferring Mac over Win, and I use it at home, but at work I have no choice. Anyway, these days for the rest of my work all I need is a properly working browser and some kind of "office suite", and these I get on any OS. It is true, maybe because of this, that Windows doesn't seem such a poor choice these days. Not so good, but not really crap anymore.
I'm not a Linux expert by any means. I'd call myself "Noob+". Before switching to Linux about 7 years ago, I'd been what one might call a "Power User" of Windows since 3.1. XP Pro was my last Windows edition on my home system.
I'm not a coder. I'm not a "business professional". I'm just a guy who spends a lot of time puttering around on whatever strikes my fancy on my computer as a hobby. This last year I worked an office job for a construction company..Much of that time was spent on Windows 7.
I also am the local "computer nerd" who helps a bunch of people with their computer problems, and occasionally build systems for folks.. ranging from basic low end machines to some monster performance hardware.
My reason for switching was I got incredibly frustrated with Microsoft. I resented their "What do we want you to do today" approach to software... I got tired of having to install third party apps to get the basic functionality I wanted out of my system.. I got tired of the never-ending game of "whack the malware", got tired of the email spam.. (which decreased 70% within the first *week* of switching to Linux.. I don't know why exactly.)
So I snagged a copy of Ubuntu and took the plunge. I have not looked back. I've mucked around with a few distros, broken my installs with some ill-informed tinkering around "under the hood".. had problems getting various things to work, had to spend some time digging through forums for answers..
But even with the learning curve and my propensity for ill-informed tinkering... I've had probably 95% less problems with Linux. With Windows, I was having to reboot every time I installed a piece of software. With Linux, I basically reboot only when I wipe the drive and install a new distro to play with, or if we have a power failure. My system has uptime measure in months, whereas my Windows experiences needed a reboot about once a day.
Linux does what I need faster, lighter, and more efficiently than Windows ever has. My needs may not be the same as others.. but at present, there's only 1 reason I'd consider a Windows install.. (and I'd go 7 if I ever took that plunge again..) Games.
Games. That's it. Yes, I still have Linux problems.. audio in particular.. The learning curve is still a bit steep at times, especially when it comes to configuring.. But I run into *NONE* of the problems that all my Windows using friends are always calling me over to their houses to fix for them. I've even talked two of them into trying out Linux, and they're both committed Linux users now and loving it.
When I run Linux, once I get things working the way I like them... they do *just keep working* unless I fiddle with things I don't understand fully. Every once in a while and update breaks something.. 99% of the time it's something I "fiddled" with.. and I have to go re-fiddle to get it working again..
But what I love most.. absolutely most.. is that running Linux my system does what *I* tell it to. It doesn't tell me "you're not allowed to do that".. it doesn't try to set things up on its own, it doesn't phone home to some corporate babysitter.. It properly respects the user-OS relationship, and it just keeps plugging along doing its thing very reliably.
The day I decide I no longer care about freedom, I'll probably reconsider and give Windows a try. You know, unless I die first - which is my plan as of today.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Moving back to Mac and to stay - since Ubuntu seems to never get anywhere fast with each "new" release.
Goodbye Win - should have left W7 alone, with some minor tweaks - and missing the entire path to tech on tablets and smartphones (late to the dance) is your demise.
Microsoft.
For actual work and play I use Linux. Everything works best on it. Every now and then I boot into the whatever Windows distro that I have installed or is on a friend/relative's pc and give it a spin. And I've always ended up disappointed.
For more than ten years, I've used desktop linux for everything professional. For a handful of games I can count on one hand, I've had to boot up Windows. I was happy with Windows 7, then strangely, I started getting blue screens roughly coinciding with the release of Windows 8 -- I'm jovially suspicious of that. Then Steam for Linux was released this year, and my Windows OS hasn't seen the light of day. For me, the year of Desktop Linux started sometime around 2002/2003, came into its own in 2005, and completely blew Windows away in 2012/2013.
Employer insists on using Windows 7 as a corporate standard, and all email and documents are in Office. And yes Excel is a killer app at work. But at work I do all my development on Linux, and our products are Linux-based. Although our Linux build server and Git repos run on Windows. So I really don't have much choice about using both.
At home, my wife insists on running Windows 8 for her Facebook and Excel. She hates it so I think I'm going to try to install Windows 7 on her UEFI machine, but she still prefers it to Linux. But I also run a couple of Linux machines, mainly for gaming and development. My kids love it, though really they flip back and forth between Linux and Windows... whatever does what they feel like at the moment.
For me? Windows covers my needs most of the time. Web browsing is more pleasant on Windows, it somehow feels tighter and more polished. I do a lot of hobby work in Excel and Word because, although they can be annoying and obtuse, they are rock solid and get the job done. Linux productivity apps are often sluggish, prone to crashes, lacking polish, and have weird user interface choices. For development, Windows sucks and I use Linux. Or cygwin if I absolutely must hack something together on Windows.
I used to prefer Linux generally. Now I prefer Windows 7, because the latest iterations of KDE and Gnome suck balls. Windows is lame and inefficient, but Linux desktops are far more so. KDE 3 was awesome. Gnome 2 was lame but usable. Now it seems there is nothing that works well. I tried XFCE but found things missing or hard to configure; I tried the various MATE/Cinnamon things, but they sometimes melded in Gnome 3 stupid-isms, or lacked configurability, and I never can keep track of which is which and it gets confusing. Unity is hideously ugly. There is just no consistency, nothing that feels familiar enough to be productive.
All I want is something that works and feels like Windows XP or Windows 7, and is at least as configurable as Windows. Why is that so hard? KDE 3 did it, and did it better than Windows... but now nobody is doing it.
When work forces me to Windows 8, I will probably prefer Linux again for desktop stuff. Frankly it's downright pathetic that Linux has now become my last choice, and it took Windows 8 to force me to use it.
Oddly these days I find myself using my Android phone more and more. Both Windows 8 and the latest Linux desktops have driven me away, and portability is very convenient. Learning Android development is on my to-do list. Phones and tablets just suck for a lot of stuff though, and I end up being forced back to the desktop by the extremely limited screen size and clunky touchscreen interaction. (It's not an Android thing; touchscreens are simply not good for productivity or precision work.)
I'm a bit confused here or maybe I missed it in your links, I saw no reference to windows or a large cluster / data analysis on windows.
I too am curious, I figure just out of sheer numbers there must be at least one outlier.
I've used windows since Windows for workgroups 3.11. Since then I've tried Linux, but, now I'm using Windows 7 and it's like a comfortable old shoe. I've never tried any of the Apple OS's since I am totally against walled gardens. I'm sure they will keep tinkering with Windows 8 until they get it right, like they did with Vista. But me? I'm waiting for Windows 9. I'll bet it will be awesome!!!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
I currently spend the majority of my tech time on my mobile phone. Im in transit or otherwise unable to get on the laptop. Ive used several os-es so I can say I enjoy the layout. Ease of use. And unfortunately I pick up an iOS device or computer and Im actually kinda lost. Seems awkward to me.
I used Linux pretty much exclusively now. For a while I was on duel boot with windows 98, exclusively for games. In every other way, I felt Linux far exceeded Windows (customizablity of the UI, command line utilities, programming tools, free software fancy creative tools like the GIMP and Rosegarden.) Games was a sore spot for me on Linux for a long time, I could get emulators to run and things like dosbox, but not much in the way of Linux native games were available. Then, when my old duel boot windows 98/linux box gave up the ghost (motherboard went) I decided to use just Linux. At first it was hard with the lack of games, but by that time Java had been made completely open source, so people were using it for free software development. I like Java because it lacks a lot of the dependency hunts sometimes found in C and C++ applications and just works on multiple platforms without porting. I found a few Java games that I like, and I am actively developing Wograld, a game that comes with a Java client. Its easy to make graphical cross platform applications in Java. Everyone who complains about a lack of games for Linux should just write a Java graphical game (or fork an existing one). If everyone did that we would have the last Linux Desktop problem solved.
"Reputation management" is the term social media marketers use to âoepose as happy customersâ on social media sites. They upvote/downvote and make comments.
Another term for this is fraudulent advertising. "Posing" as a customer is a form of lying. It's no different from claiming that one can sell somebody the Brooklyn Bridge.
I'd say that a fundamental right arising under the 9th Amendment is the right to have not businesses engaging in false advertising, making this conduct illegal. This right supersedes the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech.
Any legal professional working for a company that engages in such practices has a responsibility under his or her oath to uphold the Bill of Rights to promptly put a stop to this. Failure to do so demonstrates that person's lack of integrity, and disqualifies them from engaging in the practice of law.
I work with MS SQL Server, so I work on Windows (Win7 on my desktop, Win2012Server remotely). Win7 is, mostly, a big improvement over WinXP (Win2K was an improvement over Vista!). At home I moved to Linux about 15 months ago (Ubuntu with xfce on my main machine and Mint elsewhere). I also work from home, so I use Oracle's VirtualBox quite extensively. Aside from work-related things I operate pretty much entirely in Linux, and am very happy. Had MS offered Win8 with a choice of interfaces (a clone of Win7, for example, and Metro) then I would have pushed it at work. Instead, I recommend retaining Win7 for as long as possible, virtualising it if necessary. We are getting new test machines at work and they will be System-76 machines ... not natively running Windows, that's for sure!
The main reason to use Windows is to update the BIOS on old computers.
Old computers don't run Windows anything like a good old Puppy will.
Also with simple distros like Lubuntu you can have a fully heavy duty dev computer on something you could barely surf the web in XP.
Of course you can make an even leaner system with Debian and LXDE or Arch... but Ubuntu has pretty phenominal ppas
I answer those who stay with Windows because of applications like Word and Excel, Microsoft Office, that if it weren't for the 85% desktop penetration aided and abetted by the government not enforcing anti-trust law against Microsoft for getting the power to ship its OS as an OEM, that competition would be stronger.
Still the comeititon has come along and even though Microsoft may be able to stay a bit ahead of it, thus placating those who resist looking at an alternative, that for me the lack of security and performance has decided the issue for me long ago. Linux is superior and always has been. Now because of Microsoft's illegal OEM arrangement with PC makers, I have been able to use every major release since Windows 3.1 alongside several UNIX and Linus systems.
I believe that the security flaws in Windows are there because of Microsoft's business model. That model is to do about 75% of what you need to have a useful and safe system and then third parties like Norton get to extort you to pay more for the security that should have been there to start with, and the fact that Norton and others can nag you to buy their third-party products, means that there is a gaping hole for a hacker.
We may be seeing in the decline of the desktop, the end of Microsoft's control of the market, and because all of the alternative platforms are based on UNIX or Linux, ultimately, the reasons to run Windows might be reduced and very soon.
On the other hand I have run current Linux releases with LibreOffice on systems that were no more powerful than to run Windows XP. I even ran several on a system with only 3/4 gig of ram and no hard-disk at all. I am running Ubuntu 2.04, which is not small at all, in 1/2 gig of ram. There are many legacy systems that won't run Vista or Windows 7 that will run current Linux releases. How may users have trashed their system, desktop or laptop because their NTFS filesystem became corrupted and they didn't know how to fix it? Time for Knoppix 7 and Gparted.
I've been running Linux distros for over 2 years now, a decision I made in principle because of my fundamental belief in the Open Source Community & my fundamental dislike of Microsoft and Apple . I started dual booting Windows & Ubuntu , as most non - I.T. pro noobs do, but I've distro hopped my way up to Arch based derivatives and no longer have A Windows partition Iand have never felt the need for them. The few Windows apps I still use, I just run in Wine. I was beginning to feel the constraints of Ubuntu based distros. Put it simply, I outgrew them. One day, I'm sure I'll just be running Arch, rather than Manjaro. I'm still loving the freedom, privacy, security, efficiency & speed of running Linux as much as the first day I switched and, of course, is all free . Do I miss slow, expensive unsecure proprietary crap from Redmond?.... Not in the slightest!!!
I can't believe that all I read is Excel here and games there. 1) Microsoft office has a great wine compability.If you are to stupid for wine (sorry but if you really got problems with wine+ms office you maybe are) use crossover. 2) Games... The only game I never got running with wine is little fighters.seriously.I even get decent performance out of it (80-110% compared to windows). And if this is all that's keeping you from using Linux you did less evolving than Linux did in the last few years. Ps. God damn it guys stop spilling bs.
Microsoft was the first to cave to the PRISM Meisters in 2007. More likely, they didn't cave, they gleefully jumped aboard. Need I say more?
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
I love linux and use it every day for working, in my office on my laptop. The passion had begun with slackware back in college (2002) and now I'm using kubuntu. I get stuff done: libre office, gimp, inkscape, librecad, vlc, firefox, transcode, openshot and etc.... BUT my biggest disappointment is that linux wont play my games, wont play my rented blu-ray movies, wont play netflix and wont run my Canon EOS software. Raw image software on linux cant compete with canon eos. So even today I have a windows pc on my living room, there is no way around....
I've been using GNU/Linux on all of my desktops since 2007, after seeing it outperform Windows in datacenters since 1997. I use Fedora which is known to have some bugs, but that is what you get with cutting edge. I have wanted to try CentOS or Mint on the desktop and haven't put in the time. Needless to say, I couldn't be happier that I finally made the switch. Many years ago I could not, but now GNU/Linux has so many applications that it can easily replace Windows. Easily. Best of all I am able to replace other proprietary Windows software and get rid of Adobe and other software that was costing way too much.
I like the familiarity/flexibility.
I like not being told I gotsa suck on that iTunes nipple.
I still like stick shifts and hate GQ (aka metro-sexual) , w/the likes of the fruity-clan and the bmw-crowd!
I also like a little longer ROI!
Admit it, the main usage for Windows is playing Games.
In the old times of the home computer area, gaming computers were looked on as low class and not to be used in serious applications.
And today, *the* gaming computer is Windows.
And it's used in every company in the wolrd.
Windows is also the only OS not compatible with anything unix like (except maybe some mainframe stuff).
I use Linux, Windows and OSX on a daily basis. Sure, I have some preferences, but it's possible to get work done on all of them, and each has some features that make it great for particular tasks. However when deploying in a business context, Licensing is by far the biggest issue.
Linux of course is easy to comply with if you're an end user not writing code. You just use it.
OS X is pretty easy too, buy a machine with a copy of the OS, and well, you're done. No activation. No "enterprise contracts". No compliance reports. I'm not even sure I've ever heard of Apple auditing anyone, because well, the model is so simple how could you not be in compliance. I guess running OS X in virtual machines. Even add on software is super easy, buy iWork on the App store, done. Have to machines, you're good to go, install on both.
Windows. Ugh. Every dang bit of MS Software is licensed separately with complex enterprise agreements, discount levels, and points. Every year at renewal there is an audit requiring someone to chase down what is and isn't in use, figure out where someone forgot some bit of paperwork, and generally do a bunch of busy work. Someone gets a desktop and a laptop, well, you just doubled your cost for every app they use.
And don't get me started about the BSA coming to insure your Microsoft stuff is properly licensed.
For home, Linux all the way. Why would I pay for an OS to check emails, listen to music, browse the internet?
For GIS, unfortunately, I am limited to windows for the time being because the software that dominates the industry only works in Windows.
Also for Web development, I need access to a computer that has crappy Internet Explorer on it because for various sad reasons, people still cruise the internet in IE.
Solitaire and Minesweeper are keeping me on Windows
Off? Everything!
0.
The windows command-line is a bad joke. It is, in fat, so bad that I think they in fact made it this bad deliberately to make people afraid of command lines and thus UNIX.
I do most of my work and computer usage on the command line, because I find stuff involving any kind of GUIs just incredibly inconvenient, just in the way of doing what I want, exactly the way I want.
1.
I've not found a tiling window manager for windows that is as powerful as i3. In fact, I have not found a single window manager for Windows, probably due to the lack of an API.
2.
Installing software is just so much harder on Windows. You have to google for some shiny, advertisement-filled homepage and download some binary, for which you have no guarantee at all that it might not contain a virus. On Linux I just have a repository, from which I can install anything I need, having to trust only the distributor, and it just works. There was a short glimmer of hope when Microsoft announced the Windows 8 appstore, but oh well...
3.
I find that the whole spirit of the software on Windows is poisoned; this is not Microsoft's fault (at least not directly).
There is expensive professional software, which is usually pirated (at least for private use); the software creators try (fruitlessly) to fight this piracy with evil DRM schemes which just burden the people who actually bought the stuff. Then there is a shitload of shareware crap (example: WinRAR), which likes to annoy the user with message boxes, overly colorful graphics themes, websites opening out of nothing and such. And then, there is the even bigger amount of completely useless crap, which somehow ends up on most computers anyway - even with 'trusted' software such as the Java Updater: Scareware, Antivirus software, Toolbars, 'Motherboard driver and overclocking GUIs'. A combination of all this results in an incredibly slow, unreliable and insecure system which spams the user with a dozen error messages at boot time. This trans the user to simply press 'OK', 'Cancel' or whatever they found out will make the message go away. This again will cause them to ignore real warning messages... no thanks. Luckily, Open Source has at least partially begun to replace the shareware stuff on Windows.
4. ...)
All the windows-only applications I need (mostly games anyway) have by now been ported to Linux in the current Steam-for-Linux/Humble Indie Bundle efforts, or work way better in wine than they did on Windows (Age of Empires 2, Crysis,
5.
I like to understand my system and be fully in control of it. This is quite hard to achieve with closed-source stuff.
6.
Finally, there is also the whole ideological stuff: Microsoft is evil, Closed source is evil, blah blah. While certainly not the main argument, this point should not be completely neglected.
The whole discussion is missing the point. Let me put it his way. Could you use a car that has no brakes? Would you discuss whether the car with brakes is harder or easier to start and run?
Windows is so broken security-wise it should not be allowed being connected to the internet. Period. The damage "owned" Windows boxes are doing is hard to overestimate. As long as Windows clients are around no UNIX mainframe is secure, because hacked Windows box is convenient to use for legit logins, just break into the bosses computer who has most rights. All recent breakins that made headlines (Sony, etc) were made just like this.
I (heart) my Mac. After supporting Windows Desktops and Servers all day at work, it's so nice to get home, crack open a beer, and fire up my MB Pro.
I read the first hundred or so postings in this thread with special awe. I switched eight years ago and have never had a regret. Sure now and then I use Windows for a few minutes if necessary, but between my Apple Mac OS X machines, and several Linux and Android machines I have, I am very happy staying away from Windows. I think the hardest thing for me about this is that when I see high end vendors proudly displaying their new machines, it just makes me sick to see that ugly array of tiles that Microsoft has coerced OEM's into pushing as the contemporary computing platforms. If we thought there were a lot of machines in the landfill before, just imagine how many lousy Windows 8 machines are destined to go there now. What a terrible waste to build a machine with four or more cores, and gigs of ram, and saddle it with what I consider to be a real stinky piece of malware. In my opinion, Windows most valuable feature is it's ability to convince people they need anti-virus software. And that value is of course for the benefit of Symantec, and McAfee...
I initially decided to stop using Windows in the summer of 2005. At the time, I was nervous about WGA and how it was going to lock the OS right down. As it turns out, that was a really bad joke and to this day I continue to run Windows without any issues. Win7 Ultimate with a SLIC modded BIOS (they call it the DMI method, the SLIC table survives BIOS updates) is actually a half decent OS.
A half decent OS for playing games, which is the only reason I ever boot into Windows. Well, that and tax software for two days every April but that runs fine in a Win7 VM.
When I'm not playing games, my desktop is KDE, has been since 2005. Holy wars are fought over things like KDE vs. Gnome vs. XFCE vs. whatever the fuck, but if you get so passionate about such things that you need to shit talk people who think differently than you, then it's probably time for you to do the rest of us a favor and just kill yourself. Really, go guzzle some bleach.
KDE is my personal preference. Gnome 2 was pretty good too. I hate gnome 3 with a passion. XFCE is pretty cool if you're into that sort of thing. It took me well over a year to get used to KDE 4, but that's because it was presented to the world when it was basically alpha software. The bugs and kinks are pretty much gone now. I just wish they'd take their heads out of their asses and drop akonadi, because akonadi is a fucking abortion.
PIM? Other than the aforementioned akonadi faggotry, KDE has a rock solid PIM. I'd be lost without it.
Web browser? Take your pick between Chromium, FF, Opera, and shitloads of others nobody ever heard of. Flash works since about 2008, and there are multiple java VMs to choose from too. No Silverlight though, and despite what the zealots say, moonlight/mono is a steaming pile of nonworking shit.
Office? Well there's open/libre office but I think it's a bloated piece of shit maintained by people in WAAAY over their heads. I prefer Calligra personally.
Office software can be an issue, thanks to MS and their "fuck you if you don't use our shit" philosophy it can be a pain sharing with Windows people (again, despite what the zealots say, this is 95% of the universe.)
There's K3B for burning CD/DVD/BDs, which I don't even do anymore.
Music/Movies? There's about 50 thousand different media players for audio and video. DRMd shit won't play unless you run a Windows VM, but if you actually use DRMd music, you are a gigantic asshole who needs to embrace free and open formats.
There's bloated shit like Amarok, there's more minimal shit like Audacious, there's plays-every-fucking-thing shit like VLC. MPlayer too, and a bunch of others nodody ever heard of. XBMC also makes for a nice HTPC frontend.
Torrents? Nothing beats utorrent 2.2, but there are plenty of decent clients to choose from. QBittorrent does a good job of impersonating utorrent, including a smallish memory footprint.
You can run skype for linux, at least until MS kills it. Pidgin supports basically every other IM format, even though that software stopped innovating in 2005, it at least works.
Blah blah blah. Bottom line: Windows for games (Borderlands 2 was the last thing I played) and not much else. If I needed Netflix (silverlight) there would be that too. Thankfully I still have torrents.
Works for me, might be different for you.
Basically that's the main one. I'm reasonably OS agnostic these days. Maybe apathetic is a better word. Chrome works about the same on Windows and Linux. Skype works better on Windows than Linux. And foobar2000 is better than any music player that I've used on Linux. But ssh/terminals works better on Linux, and Linux pauses less. Currently my solution is to use Synergy, and have two computers, one Windows, one Linux. Kind of the best of both worlds.
and most Linux's don't. That's all that matters. If you can't view Youtube/Flash on a PC then it's no longer useful.
Linux dumbfucks just don't get this. "Oh, download this module and it will fix it" (it won't), or "Try this..." (that doesn't work either).
Flash/Youtube are broken on Linux. If they are fixed tomorrow, then they will break again on Friday. They don't work, no matter how many Linux fanboys protest. These guys don't know what "robust" means.
Then there's the rejoinder "You don't need Flash". Well, bonehead, what do I replace it with? The other fucking Linux media players don't work either!
So back to Windows again.
They announced a day or two ago that they wouldn't have that feature, basically, because of the uproar that it caused.
Pointing out a likely bogus name? I'd think so
I don't think it was anything to do with the uproar, it was to do with Sony's announcement at E3 that the PS4 specifically *would not have a phone home feature* which immediately upstaged Microsoft at the event.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Actually Internet Exploder is what keeps me coming back to Windows. We need to check in from time to time to see what down-hacks are needed to make sites compatible with incompatible software.
well yeah, internet explorer is a killer app too, but they took the term way more literally
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I've heard this Windows thing has become better, much much better, since Windows 95. I've seen it on other peoples computer and it looks real nice. What's keeping me off trying this Windows thing is that I'm really happy with my computer as it is, I have the software I need and it's stable and I get what I need to get done. I've also got the impression that this Windows this is very limited when it comes to the command line (which I use all the time), multiple virtual desktops, good editors and so on. But I may be wrong, all these things and more may exist in the Windows world - I haven't really paid much attention to what's going on there, but I do have the impression that Windows has become a lot better since I switched.
tnx
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