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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?)

4 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.