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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!
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.
Excel...the Windows killer-app.
You Sir^H^H^H"Power-User", made my day.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
"ugly" is in the eye of the beholder - frankly, I find KDE and Gnome to be ugly (especially the font rendering... shit, it's 2013, can't you figure out how to render fonts yet?) As far as flexibility, Windows is a lot more flexible that any Linux I've tried when it comes to multi-monitor setups without me having to muck with configs. And my settings don't randomly get lost.
No doubt. It's a serious issue. However, can you imagine hell that everyone would raise if Microsoft wanted to offer such a service? They catch flak for almost everything they do.
Windows 7 has made tremendous strides forward when it comes to security. I'm no Microsoft apologist, but when they try to improve things three things bite them in the ass: (a) backwards compatibility (aka "my Windows 95 program can't do X! Why doesn't it work, stupid Microsoft!"); (b) users who insist on running with elevated privileges. (c) complaints when good stuff gets implemented (such as PatchGuard, which antivirus vendors went crazy about).
And cars don't come bundled with gasoline. And houses don't come bundled with furniture. And groceries don't come bundled with chefs. You are seriously complaining because Windows doesn't come bundled with stuff? And wasn't bundling stuff what got Microsoft into trouble before?
"The esoteric feature that I want is missing. It serves no practical purpose and isn't needed in the product's target market, but I want it. And it's not there. Why is it not there!?!?"
NTFS is a pretty decent filesystem. It doesn't have flashy features and it's not hip, but it gets the job done, it's reliable and you know what... those are the two primary considerations for a filesystem. At least for most people.
You're joking, right? Windows hardware support is excellent and it comes bundled with not only a boatload of drivers, but offers a way of automatically downloading and installing drivers for new devices. Don't blame Windows if some vendors don't want to allow Microsoft to ship drivers, or if their hardware requires a super-special driver to set a hardware register to the length of the lead hardware engineers penis before it will work. As for the driver discs, you'll find that they almost always bundled with crap - the vendor's "custom" scan toolkit, a copy of Acrobat, a manual in PDF form, etc.
Don't take this personally, but your programming skills almost certainly make that a good thing. And let's be realistic - for the overwhelming majority of computer users, the computer is an appliance. They don't need or want to know how it works. They just want it to work. So you can imagine how they feel about "hacking source code."
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.
His first point was that the interface was ugly and inflexible. Most likely his main reason to not look further into the OS.
To be honest I don't know why the Windows 7 GUI receives so much hate, I get it that W8's metro GUI isn't quite the right thing for desktop computers, but where does Windows 7 fail in that discipline so horribly?
The interface might take up some computer resources you could use otherwise, but we live in 2013. Our PCs have plenty of CPU cores that most of the time are 'bored', we have 32GB of RAM and multiple terabytes of HDD space. Who is actually still counting bits and processor cycles on their desktop computer?
As for drivers, I often have problems with USB devices like external hard disks or flash drives on Windows 7, then I usually have to troubleshoot the problem via a rather complicated process for non computer savvy people or simply plug in the device again and again until it works on its own.
This combined with the somewhat outdated filesystem NTFS (prone to data fragmentation) are the only true downsides of Windows 7 for me as a user. And as long as I get my Windows copies for free and 100% legally from my university I will stick with it as my main OS, although I've omitted W8 so far, which I didn't even do with Vista.
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.
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...
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"