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?)

Comments

because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[noh8rz10]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[fisted]

Excel...the Windows killer-app.
You Sir^H^H^H"Power-User", made my day.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[pla]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[Anonymous Coward]

The opposite for me. I use Linux for actual work and stuff. I use Windows for games.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[MarchHare]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[epyT-R]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[Anonymous Coward]

what can excel do that libreoffice calc can't? answer that truthfully and sincerely and you may convert me. till then i refuse to pay for supposed extraordinary power user features that i can't find to take advantage of.

Compatibility with VB macros. And if you think that's not a necessity in the business environment think again.

Re: because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[SerpentMage]

If you look at msdn you will still see some ancient articles of mine. I have written books about .net and c#. When windows 8 was announced I decided that I will switch. Windows 8'to me was a piece of do do. I switched to osx and Linux. And now I use for the most part Linux.

As I trade the market my main concern was excel. But what was interesting is that I ended up not needing it because I changed the way that I write algos. I used to be my algos would use excel as the front end. Now I use HTML. Let me tell you HTML rocks, and excel sucks. What is more impressive with HTML is its ability to do whatever I want. If I want a grid with spreadsheet like functionality it is possible. Do I want to insert a graph, no problem. It really is an evolution.

What made the switch hard was the leap of faith. I have used Linux since 94, but was always a bit disappointed. However now with both osx and Linux I can honestly say windows is not needed anymore. And if you say you need it, then it is because you don't want to make the leap of faith. Especially with osx around.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[Samantha Wright]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[Nagaru]

Ahhh spoken as a true excel power user. For everyone else, including non power users, sounds just works. And it has for over 10 years.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[FuzzNugget]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[jrminter]

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...

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[jedidiah]

That's funny because just the other day I had trouble with a spreadsheet in a genuine copy of Excel that didn't display right until I took that file and converted into a CSV.

If it's so important that you would worry about some other program buggering things, then you can't trust it to the real thing either. Problems between Microsoft products are so common that an actual LibreOffice issue won't be recognized as such.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[Dahamma]

And... I apologize for the "duh", that was am unnecessary thing to say and wasn't helpful.

I should have just said: Eclipse uses the GNU compiler to compile and generate warnings/errors, so, to fix something like that you may need to upgrade g++ and set include paths appropriately... http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/t/261489/

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[amiga3D]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[armanox]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[amiga3D]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[Bing Tsher E]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[chipschap]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[chipschap]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[tibit]

I agree with you about generation of reports and other things for widely considered submittal. I was extremely productive in grad school and was spending my time on the subject at hand, not on technicalities and drudgery, precisely because for every homework problem or lab report I could do "make submit" and it'd end up where it was supposed to. Even graduate engineering students routinely seem to waste insane amounts of time on clicking their way through the most rudimentary of changes that, once you have scripted the process, become so routine you don't even think about them.

Ansys, for example, is a usability 7th circle of hell until you realize it demonstrably wasn't designed to be used normally in point-and-click mode (maybe it was, but the designers were on crack the whole time). You can point-and-click a bit to get a feel for things, but if you want reproducible analyses, you must script them from the start all the way to generation and saving of the plots. I would not trust any FEA done in Ansys unless accompanied by a script that starts with a system in default state and ends up with output files you're after (raw output, tabular data, plots).

Same really goes for, say, generating plots or generally data-dependent drawings in Office. Once you're down to populating the entire document from a template in VBA, it becomes even less hassle to do it on a Unix system using Latex and makefiles. Never mind the basics like version control. Text-based scripts and formats really mesh well with diff tools used with version control. VBA embedded into Office documents is not handled by normal differs; you pretty much have to whip your own to dissect the OLE compound file and feed the extracted text via diff. The work needed to maintain such a tool (I've had it for a while) is simply not worth it when in the text-based Unix approach it simply works quite effortlessly. Good luck to anyone wishing to develop a blame tool for Excel, for example - good luck dealing with figuring out who did what in to an Excel spreadsheet otherwise.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[noh8rz10]

I built a model to calculate the fuel consumption of locomotives on 24 routes crossing the nation. on each route, i had a record every tenth of a mile that calculated instantaneous speed, acceleration, and power. rolled it all up to aggregate fuel economy, horsepower, etc. metrics. more than 10^6 records. power user, bitch.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[tibit]

Presumably many games use game engines, and those things abstract DirectX/OpenGL away and simply run on both. Unreal engine would come to mind. I mean, come on, that thing even runs in a browser (seriously).

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[atriusofbricia]

Every time this type of question comes up someone pipes up with this kind of statement.

It always makes me wonder if I'm the only one that has zero problems with sound? Or pretty much anything? Am I just that lucky and skillful and freaking awesome in selecting hardware?

For other desktop uses I again must just be some kind of freak outlier. The only time I've had problems using Linux in the office was when I worked at places that were outright Linux (really "non-Windows") hostile and would actively prevent you from using anything else or at best just didn't help a lick. If it wasn't that kind of place I had no problems doing everything everyone else was doing. Maybe it was just that my job didn't require me to be some fancy Excel jockey or something.

Am I really alone in that?

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[atriusofbricia]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[techno-vampire]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[staalmannen]

I built a model to calculate the fuel consumption of locomotives on 24 routes crossing the nation. on each route, i had a record every tenth of a mile that calculated instantaneous speed, acceleration, and power. rolled it all up to aggregate fuel economy, horsepower, etc. metrics. more than 10^6 records. power user, bitch.

Model building like that is probably better done in R anyway

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[bemymonkey]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[JohnnyMindcrime]

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.

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[Jaruzel]

You do if you pay for it. Trust me on this, I've got 18+ years of blue chip financial IT experience to back this up.
(My CV )

The proper support that Corporate IT get with MS is exactly the reason why Linux and Open Source/Free Office apps will never become de-facto on workplace desktops.

These days, all Corporate IT departments care about when choosing software from a new vendor, is how good the support is. If the support model isn't up to scratch then the tender will often go to an inferior solution that has better support (I've seen this way too many times...).

-Jar

Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty

[camperdave]

Excel, no. What keeps me from wiping windows and going full on Linux is a second-rate Wiki that uses binary blobs in place of HTML.

That's just sad.

What's sad is that people just fire off disparaging remarks without constructive advice. So, feel free to suggest a suitable alternative.

Among my requirements:

• WYSIWYG editting.
• Highlight and click formatting (bold, italics, color)
• nesting numbering that stays nested (ie, If I highlight a block and un-indent by one level, it doesn't change all the numbering within the block to the same level).
• Continuous automatic saving. I don't want to go through a File>Save process.
• Tables
• Easy way to paste date and time
• Drawing tools
• OCR

Hey Slashdot! What happened to my bullets? They don't show up on the preview.

windows vm for tax software & work related mat

[iggymanz]

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.

Apps

[GodfatherofSoul]

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?

"Is it the year of Linux on the Desktop yet?"

[lesincompetent]

If i hear that question again i'm gonna start swimming head first in concrete.

Taxes in the cloud

[tepples]

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.

Re:Taxes in the cloud

[Soylent Beige]

Watch out. With the NSA and PRISM if you move your taxes to 'The Cloud' the government will have all of your data.

Re: Taxes in the cloud

[SeaFox]

Pssst.

That whooshing noise isn't from the Cloud.

Re:Taxes in the cloud

[PopeRatzo]

Watch out. With the NSA and PRISM if you move your taxes to 'The Cloud' the government will have all of your data.

I know, right?

This year, the government even asked for my address and social security number when I filed my taxes! I showed them, though. I just filled in "9"s all across.

You know, that reminds me. I still haven't gotten my refund.

Re: Taxes in the cloud

[93 Escort Wagon]

What the hell? Govt already has all your tax data and can force you to reveal as much as it wants.

Not mine - I encrypt my tax returns before sending them in.

Re:Taxes in the cloud

[theycallmeB]

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.

Windows problems

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Windows problems

[avxo]

I know that these are your specific complaints against Windows, and that's fine, but I am going to piggyback on this to talk more generally since most of your complaints are fairly generic or can be generalized.

1. Windows has a terrible interface, both Windows 7 and 8 have ugly, inflexible displays.

"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.

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.

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.

4. Malware and adware is thick on Windows.

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).

5. Windows doesn't come bundled with common tools I use, such as a compiler, OpenSSH, productivity suite, etc.

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?

9. Windows lacks containers/jails.

"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!?!?"

10. Windows lacks a good, advanced file system like ZFS.

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.

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.

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.

12. I can't hack on the Windows source code.

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."

Re:Windows problems

[fazig]

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.

Gaming console

[devent]

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.

Not on it or off it ...

[MacTO]

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

[superwiz]

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.

It works

[Billly Gates]

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.

MS Access

[maz2331]

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.

Re:MS Access

[glwtta]

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.

Bet you could do it in, like, 17 lines of Perl.

Linux for years

[JonathanP.Bennett]

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.

why not?

[DogDude]

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.

See why 2014 won't be like 1984.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

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.

lots of laptops have windows only drivers for some

[Joe_Dragon]

lots of laptops have windows only drivers for some of there parts / chips used.

Viruses drove me from Win7 to Linux

[MarioMax]

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.

A host of things

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Too used to GNU/Linux to switch

[xiando]

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.

XP will be pwnt in April

[tepples]

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.

Re:XP will be pwnt in April

[LordLimecat]

THis is so much nonsense. Windows 2000 is of the same vintage as Linux 2.2. Whens the last time you got a security patch for (or even saw) a non-embedded 2.2 box?

XP is of the same vintage as 2.4, which is already EOL'd and not really maintained; yet XP is STILL maintained.

The idea that MS doesnt support their software for as long as Linux is hogwash.

Because it's better

[enter to exit]

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.

Microsoft Hired People To Make Positive Comments

[Anonymous Coward]

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]

There will never be a "year of desktop Linux"

[erroneus]

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.

Re:windows vm for tax software & work related

[Billly Gates]

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.

Re:windows vm for tax software & work related

[AceofSpades19]

WINE Is Not an Emulator, surely you must know that by now

if u believe in "the free market"does it matter

[cinnamon colbert]

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)

Re:windows vm for tax software & work related

[Guy Harris]

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.

Develop ability, manageability, stability

[anthony_greer]

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.

Wow a whole 126

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

So in other words

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

With regards to package management

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Ease of installation

[JohnnyMindcrime]

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...