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What Keeps You On (or Off) Windows in 2013?

Posted by timothy on from the corporate-myopia-plays-a-part dept.

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?)

9 of 1,215 comments (clear)

  1. because desktop linux is a toy and novelty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty by MarchHare · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah, in science, it's usually rare to have serious development done on Windows, except for the occasional data acquisition station or for some control computer attached to a commercial lab apparatus. Just have a look at the Top 500 supercomputer clusters, most of them run a flavor of Linux or UNIX. I've worked for genomics companies and now I'm at a neurological institute, and all the heavy duty HPC pipelines are designed to integrate with such clusters, and the scientists themselves work on Linux desktops. We're shuffling terabytes of medical images back and forth, with large data trees on shared filesystems that are continuously updated by scripts in bash, Perl, Ruby, Python, and Java. If Microsoft had the power to force us to switch to Windows for everything, science would grind to a halt for 15 years while we re-code everything, and even then it would probably still not be as functional as what we have right now. There is great beauty and power in command-line processing, when done well.

      Does anyone know of any big science project that's all done on Windows? Really, I'm asking because I'm curious. As far as I know, in physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, medecine etc, any project that requires complex custom HPC pipelines are created on Linux (or UNIX). Windows? Never heard of one. But it might exist, I suppose.

    2. Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 5, Informative

      The integration with GDB and Valgrind is to die for. One runthrough with Valgrind and you're given all of the lines that allocated junk left on the heap at shutdown, and tracing with GDB is much easier than with IntelliTrace, as everything has symbols and the call stack isn't interleaved with weird MS wrappers. Personally I'm also very fond of the C code analysis, which is somewhere between the obsessiveness of the Java analysis in NetBeans (although it still complains about missing return statements prematurely) and the laissez-faire and/or neglectful step-uncle attitude of Visual Studio (which also likes to forget the compiler's warning annotations if an object doesn't have to be rebuilt—say goodbye to all of those stupid threats about casting between float and double that it gripes about endlessly... as well as the warnings you actually cared about.)

      Still, it's not perfect—my installation at work recently went rogue and decided size_t was ambiguous. That took a lot of wrestling to fix, and I think there may still be a few system headers that it's confused about. I'm definitely much happier using it than VS, though.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    3. Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty by amiga3D · · Score: 5, Informative

      If your definition of a desktop OS is running "windows centric apps" then I can see why Linux sucks for you. As a desktop for me it's fabulous. I can do anything I need to do on a Linux desktop and the only place I find the need to use another OS is in video editing. The programs on my Mac are much better than the Linux video applications but things there are improving. Having used Linux as my primary desktop for 14 years I've never been tempted to use windows for my home system but then I don't really play games. If I was a video game player I'd have to dual boot 'cause Linux gaming is really pretty far behind. I don't get the sound problem. Haven't seen that in like 8 or 9 years. Wifi was the last real hurdle I had for a Linux install and that's been about 3 years since I've had to open a terminal to fix that.

    4. Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty by armanox · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, but Microsoft Office fails at that. We had a .docx created in Word 2013 not open in 2007 recently, and macros in Excel 2010 not work in 2007. And don't even try crossing versions of Access.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    5. Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty by bemymonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm the same, unfortunately. I have Mint and Ubuntu VMs for Android stuff and general screwing around, but any time I actually want to work or play, it's plain old Windows 7. Reasons are the following, in order of most to least important:

      1. Battery life. I'm getting about 12 hours per charge of wireless web & office out of a single 9-cell (approx. 90Wh) on my T520. On Linux, I'm lucky to get 8 hours... there ARE people out there who get similarly awesome battery life on Linux, but I can't for the life of me reproduce their settings - either I'm too Linux-Nooby to understand them or they're unable to explain properly. I've tried TLP, all the suggested kernel parameters, using powertop to find power-hogs... so far, instead of the ~6W I'm hitting in Windows, I'm lucky to hit 8 or 9W in Linux when doing the same things with the same display brightness.

      I even bought a Linux-friendly version of the T520 - Intel graphics only, Intel 6300 Ultimate-N Wireless, no WWAN, regular old Bluetooth...

      2. Perfect window and desktop management with the following tools: Dexpot, Allsnap, Winsplit Revolution and AutoHotKey. Linux distros offer many of these features built into its DE, but they're always missing something that the above combination of tools offers, and I haven't found separately installable Linux alternatives to all of them yet.

      3. I quite like my Windows applications - Photoshop, MS Office, Matlab, Winamp... even ACDSee Pro. Running these applications in a virtualized environment on battery life would be stupid...

      4. Windows (at least since Vista/7) seems less prone to breakage than common Linux distros. I can't count the times that a few simple updates have rendered my Mint or Ubuntu VMs unusable because of some setting or package I'd installed beforehand... if someone could tell me WTF I'm doing to keep fucking this up, I'd be very grateful.

  2. Taxes in the cloud by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. MS Access by maz2331 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Microsoft Hired People To Make Positive Comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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]