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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?)
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
also, excel on windows is extraordinary useful if you're a power user. there's nothing like it on other platforms, and don't say excel for mac or even worse numbers for mac.
Excel...the Windows killer-app.
You Sir^H^H^H"Power-User", made my day.
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Excel...the Windows killer-app. You Sir^H^H^H"Power-User", made my day.
Sorry that it hurts so much, but so, so true in the business world.
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?
Quite simply, Linux sucks ass as a desktop OS. Some of that doesn't count as its own fault, but rather, that of a Windows-centric world. Others (like getting something as basic as sound to work reliably), I consider a major shortcoming. Either way, sorry, but I just can't call myself a desktop Linux user. And I say that as someone who would switch in a frickin' heartbeat if it really counted as a serious option.
For home use, I could probably get away with it. But at the office, no way in hell.
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 [...] fell in love with the aspects of free software
> in 2013 I stick with Windows
Eh..yeah. That sure seems legit.
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Pssst.
That whooshing noise isn't from the Cloud.
1. metro is not a useability improvement for desktops.
2. snap is obnoxious for people who actually want more than one window on their screen at a time. Just because a user moves the window to the top doesn't mean he wants it full screen. that's what double clicking the window bar is for.
3. search is a crutch for a crappy interface. The whole point of a gui is to have resources easy to find and arranged in logical order. metro does none of this...even the vista/7 interface is clunky, being full of white space and, compared to 2k/xp, extremely generic descriptions...especially in places like the control panel.
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/
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.
How do you do something as basic as copy a file securely to another computer? I use scp on Linux.
On Windows it's much simpler. You connect using RDP and then use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. The RDP connection itself is encrypted.
I remember one time I was getting a medical diagnostic scan and the computers for operating the equipment were running some flavor of Linux or Unix. Not exactly what I'd call a toy.
No, desktop Linux isn't there yet, but it has made *huge* strides since it's infancy. I still remember ongoing forum threads of people excited that their computers *actually* worked ran Linux! Today, Ubuntu runs on pretty well anything other than maybe high end or obscure hardware.
Really, the only thing preventing mass acceptance at this point is good software. If Microsoft keeps chugging down the Metro koolaid, we may actually see some Linux desktop adoption.
It is a bit more complicated. I work in the analytical division of well-recognized company. Most of our vendors design instrumentation to work with Windows. There are rarely drivers for other OS choices. Most is also designed with an over-emphasis on graphical user interfaces, the bane of reproducible research.
I see way too much abuse of spreadsheets. According to Baggerly and Coombes, part of the problems in the Duke scandal were caused by off-by one index errors with Excel. Similar spreadheet blunders arose in the recent Reinhart-Rogoff problem.
I hate Excel. It is hard to do simple things efficiently. Try and do a scatterplot with multiple series. How many keystrokes will it take? Once you get your analysis done and your report written with Word, how difficult is it to fix if the client wants to add one more sample? Then consider the changes in VBA. We have 3rd party code that are locked and won't even open on current versions of Excel.
Over the last few years, I migrated all of my back-end data processing to R/Sweave/LaTeX. For some projects I use markdown instead of LaTeX. Everything is scriptable, plays well with version control (code is mainly text files), and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. I use (and contribute) to Open Source whenever feasible. Solving problems is easier and I find community support better than most vendor support.
If I could get my hardware to play nice with Linux, I'd switch in a heartbeat. There is only one application I would miss - the debugger in Visual Studio. RStudio is pretty good at what it was designed for, but that does not include debugging the C++ code that needs to be written to speed up some computationally intensive parts...
That still sounds inferior to the available Linux options. If I don't like the command line with SCP, then I can just use the Linux file manager to make that connection and access the remote files just like local ones.
This even works for Android devices and jailbroken Apple devices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What is really 'funny' is that is probably easier for the NSA to get access to your e-filed tax return via your email account than from the IRS directly, and with less oversight.
Ah! I didn't really think about that. He's an Excel user, that explains it. My wife is an Excel wizard and she hardly knows how to use a computer at all. It's just something to boot into Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
The thing is, everybody by definition in IT 'gets in the way.' Because you're just there to move and shove the information around. And since this is an IT centric site there is a preponderance of people who see the computer and IT tech as an end-all in and of itself.
Everybody else, including most of the other people in the businesses that you work in, find the data more important than the tools used to shuttle the data about.
IT people in a sense are the electronic equivalent of filing cabinet enthusiasts. Ranting about whether Steelcase makes the best filing cabinets, whether manilla is the best color for file folders, etc. It's easy to get in the way of the people designing, building, and shipping the real product of the company when you're preoccupied that way.
If you're a gamer you'll run Windows. That's clear. Does that speak to Linux as a viable desktop system? It depends what you want to get out of your desktop. If you want to do typical office work, Linux surely seems viable. On the other hand, if you absolutely require MS Office compatibility, maybe not.
However, I sometimes question two things. First, the necessity for absolute MS Office compatibility seems to apply only at the boundaries. Libre Office is "mostly" compatible, but the compatibility will fail at the boundaries, when more advanced features are "required."
Which brings me to my second point: I can accept that there are Excel users who really push the limits and must have all the features and functions. But I suspect that the count of people who really fall in this category is low.
And that brings up my third point (even though I only had two, but this third one is a little tangential).
At the sort of very advanced level we're talking about above, Excel can be evil. Finding a modeling error in a spreadsheet can be very hard; even knowing that it's there can be very hard. Build a complex spreadsheet that uses the most advanced functions and keep it error free? You'd better be really good, and more than a little lucky. (LibreOffice etc. are subject to the same thing, of course.)
Spreadsheets are abused. At the most complex levels they can be abused seriously. They are not a substitute for something like Octave, SciCalc, or SageMath, where at least all the formulae are out in the open and not inside cells.
Compatibility with VB macros. And if you think that's not a necessity in the business environment think again.
I worked in a business environment for a long, long time and this was in no way a necessity. It comes about when people try to build ERP-like functionality out of desktop tools like Word and Excel, which are not the right tools for the job.
You really put over a million records into a single excel spreadsheet and this was a good thing?
Just cause you have a hammer doesn't actually mean all the world is nails.
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
It always makes me wonder if I'm the only one that has zero problems with sound?
No, you're not. My guess is that the OP is a Windows fanboi regurgitating anti-Linux talking points from over fifteen years ago. I'm surprised that he's not also complaining about how hard it is to configure X and getting it running properly or to find a printer that works with it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Ah yes, the old "I dont like what hes saying so Ill just call him a shill" technique.
Ubuntu is not "the be all and end all" of Linux, it is simply a distribution designed to be usable by the average Windows user if they want to give it a try.
Yes, by all means state that it can take a lot of time and effort to get a desktop Linux distro working exactly the way that you want it but others will state that is simply a trade-off for having the flexibility to combine countless desktop environments and window managers in pretty much any way you want. Ubuntu's Unity is merely one facet of that flexibility, I personally couldn't think of a more horrific desktop environment to use but if others like it, so be it, it doesn't affect me doing stuff the way that I want to.
Although I've used both Windows and Linux extensively over the years, XP with the Classic desktop was, for me, the closest Microsoft got to a perfect desktop environment, that's why I'm still using Gnome 2 at the moment because it works very similarly to Windows Classic.
I tried Windows 7, I even bought a shop copy and played with it for 2 weeks but I found the Aero interface ugly and cumbersome to use, even the Classic interface in 7 was just a poor approximation of the one in XP.
"Sabotage" is the wrong word to have used in this instance. If you're saying that the Gnome and Ubuntu devs made some bad design decisions with Gnome 3 and Unity respectively then I couldn't agree more, and I've never liked KDE full stop. But there's plenty of other alternatives out there and whilst it may need some time and effort to slot everything together, it's perfectly possible to have a nice slick Linux desktop system to work in.
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
I can't comment on Ubuntu, I don't use it, I do use Gentoo Linux and I spend a lot of time editing text files to get stuff working - but I like tinkering so I'm okay doing that.
However, I've used Windows a lot over the years but never myself witnessed this "just works" panacea that you describe. If I've bought a PC with an OEM Windows license on it, then the first time it's powered up, I need to update all the drivers and put on Windows updates. More than likely, I then need to strip out a load of software that came pre-installed that I don't need. On some occasions, even then I don't get the Windows performance I want, so I go buy a proper license and do a slipstreamed build of only the stuff I want to be running on it. Not a problem, I'm anal about customising OSes and a tinkerer.
In addition to that, I have to do other maintenance on a Windows PC that I don't need to ever do on a Linux PC to keep it running nicely - the Windows PC needs to be de-fragged regularly, I need do remove crap out of the Registry, and then I have to virus scan it. Again, not a problem, system administration is necessary on any PC running any OS.
The problem I do have is that too many people take their knowledge of Windows for granted like it was "just there in their head" when they emerged from the womb, All this stuff needs to be learned, all this stuff took time to learn in the first place and all takes time to do on a regular basis.
Sorry, "just works" doesn't exist for me...
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
Okay, here's why, for me, Windows won't do:
1. I'm a control freak when it comes to the computers I use. I want to know exactly what is running on them, when it's running and why it's running. I want the ability to customise it completely to my requirements, I want to be able to remove anything I don't need and add anything that I want to add. If, with that level of control, I mess things up then I accept full responsibility for doing it, I don't need to place that responsibility into the hands of some corporation to manage on my behalf.
2. The Windows registry essentially makes the OS unusable to me and is a poor design decision on the part of Microsoft. It uses obfuscated entries that defy common sense and you really have no way of knowing until you try it whether or not changing a Registry setting will crash your system when you do it. On the other hand, UNIX/Linux uses common sense for configuration - if the config affects everyone on the system, it will be somewhere under /etc, if it affects a specific user it will be a "dot file (or in a "dot" directory) in that user's home directory. All the configuration is stored in flat text or XML files, I can copy them onto other machines at my leisure to copy settings across, I can make a backup before I change it, and I can write scripts to change it automatically. I can also change configuration for a test user and test the settings before rolling them out system-wide, there's little or no chance of me crashing a system completely when I do it that way.
3. In Linux, if I migrate or backup a user, I just copy across or archive their home directory - done. In Windows, I've never been able to do that. If I try to copy across everything under the user's "Documents and Settings" or "Users" directory, it invariably fails because of some file or directory permission somewhere not letting me do it.
4. In Linux, I have full control over how I configure the kernel in terms of deciding how I want to use a single OS image across multiple machines. I can use a lowest common denominator configuration, for example, such that a Linux OS image running on, say, a modern multicore 64-bit AMD CPU can be imaged straight onto a old 32-bit Pentium-based machine, it will boot up and start working. Do that with Windows and the second machine will usually blue screen on boot up because the CPU is too different from the first one - not to mention having to mess about with license keys or, alternatively, spending hours or days making and testing a slipstreamed image with all the settings installed from boot.
5. I can build a base Linux installation that loads up certain core services on every machine but then, say, boots up a GUI environment entirely appropriate to the device it's on - for example, I can use a lightweight DE on a low-power device, or I can have an X86-based computer have an identical look and feel to an ARM one. I get to decide how that looks, not Microsoft.
For what I need computers to generally do these days, there is very little difference between the capabilities of a Windows PC and a Linux PC and my desire to control all of my computing is clearly at odds with Microsoft's desire to control all of the computing on a Windows PC. That makes Windows useless to me, apart from a half-dozen or so killer apps that run fine on a virtualised XP instance within Linux.
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.