Windows XP came out 10 years ago and has been superseded twice. it is about to be superseded again in the next few months when 8 comes out (which has an app store, built in PDF support, etc). Installing windows these days = pop in disk (or network boot, at work), install base OS and connect to vendor for driver updates. Apple has built in PDF, trusted app store, along with SSH and the unix tools you like. Of course you need the mac hardware dongle, but the hardware is nice anyway...
And I agree, OS choice these days is becoming largely irrelevant. Standard file formats are where its at. Most of the available operating systems are "good enough" and have been for some time now.
Or, you know you do it the right way, and go to MS and say "we have x,000 desktops, we want licenses for everything on them", you hand over $x00,000 and install whatever you like. Whilst those numbers sound big, the amount of time saved in fucking around with broken shitware and lack of driver support for hardware is more than repaid.
The things 'people' want in a desktop/laptop PC (YMMV): Stability, reliability, security and speed.
You forgot the major one: application support.
Linux doesn't have enough of it. Sure there's a huge GNU software library, but a huge library that is full of crap with a few gems, and a heap of applications for other OSes that simply have no usable equivalent on Linux means that for many people it is a non option (unless you resort to running another OS in VMware, but then what's the point? Pay license for OS, may as well run it as your primary, neither Windows or OS X these days have major problems you can't live with).
Lol. Because E16 is totally comparable to the frameworks you get with OS X that applications can actually use. Point being, OS X is updated, applications can use new features, but the workflow hasn't changed since about 2000. And CDE failed because it was SHITE.
Even if 8 flops (which I reckon it will, as no business will adopt it until home users get used to it first), Windows 7 will be supported long enough for Microsoft to recover with Windows 9.
The other thing that also happened, was that the Mac was in a similar position and got OS X. After a bit of a rocky start performance wise, since about 10.4 it has gone from strength to strength. I certainly agree, the mainstream alternatives just aren't bad enough to warrant a switch any more.
Now now, leave him be. Comparing Linux to Windows XP and claiming superiority (in 2006-2012) is one reason why the state of the free desktop is such a mess in the first place.
Linux isn't really hard to get working these days. The trick is keeping it (and all your existing apps!) working from release to release, and working around the problems where the software simply does not exist for your task at hand. Some BETA app that crashes a lot, has a crummy UI and/or is missing features but is working towards providing functionality you need today isn't really good enough.
Free Software purists require that Linux must Make A Statement(tm) and Prove A Point(sm). If it also happens to work just as well, hey, that's a bonus. But to some of us, that's actually kinda-sorta important.
Yup. And I'm willing to pay for it. Pre-OS X, I had Linux and was far happier than I was on Windows 3.1 or 95. Windows 2000 came around, was stable enough, but I missed Unix. Switched to OS X a few years ago and haven't looked back. Everything works, I have plenty of commercial and free apps, and I have the unix shell if i want it.
No ssh required with powershell, RDP > VNC, NTFS and FAT are usable anywhere (and there's an ext2 driver for Windows anyway), few people other than greybeards run NFS for desktop use (Windows has SMB anyway which is FAR easier to configure), and Notepad++ is a free download away.
Windows has its faults, but to trade driver support for virtually all hardware in existence, a huge software library (including games and business applications that the rest of the world use) for a decent built in text editor and some low level disk utils is a bit of a stretch. I mean the only desktop shortcoming you list is lack of a decent text editor, and there are plenty of free (both beer/libre) ones available. On the contrary, can Linux run Photoshop? Ableton Live? Hmm...
The lack of your criticisms of actual desktop related Windows shortcomings is pretty telling - by their omission you're actually reinforcing the fact that there is little reason to run Linux as a desktop user, unless that's what you're used to. And if you are, then that's fine.
As a former Linux or BSD on desktop user, I gave up a few years ago. I'll still check out Linux or FreeBSD on the desktop from time to time (PC-BSD looks pretty good actually), but it's just too inconvenient.
Why? At work, we're a windows shop, by necessity. We have a large number of custom applications that will cost multiple millions of dollars, and significant risk to migrate. So work is out. At home? Well, most PC hardware sucks, i'm mostly a laptop user now and Apple make the nicest portable machines.
Given that I'm going to run a Macbook, well, OS X just works fine for me for the vast majority of what I do. In fact, I can't think of anything I want to do at home that I can't do quicker and easier on the mac than I can with Linux - I have bash, csh, or whatever other shell there if I need it. I have Python, Perl, Java and a C compiler. I also have some awesome development frameworks.
Essentially, OS X can do anything for me on the desktop, better than Linux, so I see no need to ditch OS X. in fact, there are apps on OS X that I vastly prefer to anything I've seen on Linux. Such as time machine and mission control. There are apps that are not available at all for Linux, such as Ableton Live. And if I really, desperately need Linux, I can virtualize it anyway. Linux can't legally virtualize OS X.
The "win" from running Linux just isn't there any more. Windows got stable, and OS X is Unix with commercial support and a nice UI. Also, despite what many would have you believe, if you ignore paper spec and just want a decent machine that works, apple is not super expensive. I'm old enough and have been around long enough to not CARE if some other machine is.2ghz faster or has RAM that runs at 1600mhz instead of 1333 or whatever. In real life practical use it makes very little difference - the major gains are when you step from one generation of CPU/bus to another, within a generation its much of a muchness. More important to me is the quality of the display and user input devices/software - and OS X multi-touch is the best interface out there, IMHO.
Sure, I can customize the shit out of a Unix desktop environment, but you know what? Since KDE3 bit the dust, I haven't seen one I actually like. No matter how pretty it is, compared to the OS X GUI, which is at least stable and fairly consistent, the Unix desktop is lacking. It is too disjointed, too clunky and lately, too fucking unstable. I like Windowmaker, but the rest of the apps to turn it into a proper implementation of OpenSTEP just aren't there, and are too much fucking around to get working anyway, as no distribution seems to give a shit about GNUSTEP, and are all fawning over Gnome or KDE and their latest hair-brained idea of the month.
So, in short: home desktop = OS X. Work = Windows (with a few BSD machines doing stuff I REALLY don't trust windows to handle). Home servers = FreeBSD. Desktop Linux just doesn't offer me anything significant, given that I'm already buying apple hardware because they make nice laptop hardware (even Linus thinks so). And because it doesn't offer me anything significant, and I already have an OS X license, I can't be bothered putting up with the shit you need to go through (drivers, lack of software like Ableton, etc) to use it.
And that's before I even get into the political games being played over stuff like h.264, linking to binary drivers, etc. As an end user with money, I don't care about your political ideals. I want an OS that works, and am prepared to pay for it. This is why I run free Unix (FreeBSD or Linux) where it works well, and don't run it on my desktop:)
The point of carrying a tablet? So you can continue working during your commute? No more laptop/desktop + tablet. The tablet becomes powerful enough to do both.
The essence of local cloud computing is already here, heaps of people are already rolling out VDI - a VDI client will work just as well on a tablet with appropriate interface devices as it will on a dumb terminal.
However, I think the idea that firefox will become irrelevant if they do not make their way onto mobile is dubious, because desktops will remain the primary means of computing, for many reasons. This is due to the fact that desktops are superior and a better value overall, mobile devices are only good in a niche usage when in a car on in a subway or out and about town. However, at home in the evening, mobile devices provide a drastistically worse usage characteristics and value than desktop. Do we really think that its a good idea to trade in your 20" screen, full sized keyboard and fast, memory expansive system for a 4" screen with a chiclet sized keyboard or some overpriced tablet that gives far less computing power and reliability than a desktop system? It seems absurd to me.
Sorry but you just aren't looking far enough ahead.
In 5-10 years, your mobile device will BE your desktop. Or at least this will be the case for the majority of users.
There will be a tablet like device, with wireless connectivity for keyboard, mouse, display and inductive charging that you pick up, use on the way to work, place down on its charging pad on your desk and start using with your desktop input devices. At the end of the day, you pick up the device and go home.
You will still have your 20+ inch screen, you will still have you input devices - they'll just be used on a way more portable system.
For 99% of desktop users, the iphone or other smartphone has way more power than they need. Just as the PC killed mainframe timesharing, and the laptop killed the PC, the tablet will kill the laptop for most people. Processing that needs significantly more power will be done on "the cloud", be it a public cloud service, or a company's private cloud infrastructure.
The upshot of all this? A company buys ONE device for its workforce. Its data is stored securely on its backend server infrastructure, and the end user doesn't have to worry about syncing data or apps across multiple platforms. The pieces are all there, all that is required is a company to put them all together.
How can you possible be defending Kimble? He's not some patriotic defender of our IP rights
Because, irrespective of WHO it was, the police has destroyed his business BEFORE proving him guilty in a court of law. This is not the way the justice system is designed to work. IF he is found innocent (and its a legally grey area), then how do the police propose to compensate him to losses incurred?
This could, and should have been taken to court without the drama/show for the media, and IF he was found guilty of anything THEN his assets get seized.
I for one, am praying that Kimble is jailed for good, and stops giving a bad name to REAL defenders of IP rights and file sharers.
This is nothing to do with IP rights, it is to do with a man being jailed, and having his assets seized without a fair trial. Whether or not he is guilty or not is irrelevant - due process was not followed and this is a major concern.
So my options are: pay a license to MPEG-LA for royalties (presumably) on commercial gains made using h.264. Or, buy all new hardware, deal with larger file sizes and crappier quality to use WebM, whether or not I'm using it for commercial gain or not. I'll take option A thanks:)
... it's this. Back in the day, you could buy a console, plug a game in, and in 15 seconds, be up and running, playing the game.
These days? Power console up, firmware update required to sign into gaming network. Once you download that, you fire up the game, which then also needs a patch before it will let you sign into the network (and if you don't sign in, it keeps bugging you or just plain won't work).
I'm sorry, but if i wanted to deal with that sort of bullshit, I'd just play games on my PC. The whole point of console gaming is that you can be up and running and in a game in no time flat.
I turned my PS3 on for the first time in a couple of months on the weekend. I needed to do a firmware update plus 1.5gigs of GT5 updates before I could play without constantly being pestered to sign into PSN (but unable to do so without the updates).
Point being: VP8 is not the "open", "free" panacea that many claim it to be. It is legally untested and has been examined to be more than liable to companies implementing it being sued. So, its in the same boat at the moment as h.264. Except its technically inferior.
The reason VLC plays anything is due to the work that has gone into it, not specifically because it is a monolithic blob of software.
If they wrote and released codecs as seperate DLLs/shared libraries, we'd still be able to play just as much content using said shared libraries.
Or perhaps you'd rather we go back to the bad old days, when every game, etc had to have specific support for your video card and specific support for your sound card (and which broke in rather annoying ways if you had something technically far better but not able to emulate say, SB-Pro hardware perfectly - eg a GUS or PAS16, etc), rather than being able to use whatever future hardware you may purchase via a standardized driver framework.
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Windows XP came out 10 years ago and has been superseded twice. it is about to be superseded again in the next few months when 8 comes out (which has an app store, built in PDF support, etc). Installing windows these days = pop in disk (or network boot, at work), install base OS and connect to vendor for driver updates. Apple has built in PDF, trusted app store, along with SSH and the unix tools you like. Of course you need the mac hardware dongle, but the hardware is nice anyway...
And I agree, OS choice these days is becoming largely irrelevant. Standard file formats are where its at. Most of the available operating systems are "good enough" and have been for some time now.
Its worse. I had less software instability under Linux in 1996 than I see today.
Or, you know you do it the right way, and go to MS and say "we have x,000 desktops, we want licenses for everything on them", you hand over $x00,000 and install whatever you like. Whilst those numbers sound big, the amount of time saved in fucking around with broken shitware and lack of driver support for hardware is more than repaid.
You forgot the major one: application support.
Linux doesn't have enough of it. Sure there's a huge GNU software library, but a huge library that is full of crap with a few gems, and a heap of applications for other OSes that simply have no usable equivalent on Linux means that for many people it is a non option (unless you resort to running another OS in VMware, but then what's the point? Pay license for OS, may as well run it as your primary, neither Windows or OS X these days have major problems you can't live with).
Lol. Because E16 is totally comparable to the frameworks you get with OS X that applications can actually use. Point being, OS X is updated, applications can use new features, but the workflow hasn't changed since about 2000. And CDE failed because it was SHITE.
Even if 8 flops (which I reckon it will, as no business will adopt it until home users get used to it first), Windows 7 will be supported long enough for Microsoft to recover with Windows 9.
The other thing that also happened, was that the Mac was in a similar position and got OS X. After a bit of a rocky start performance wise, since about 10.4 it has gone from strength to strength. I certainly agree, the mainstream alternatives just aren't bad enough to warrant a switch any more.
Now now, leave him be. Comparing Linux to Windows XP and claiming superiority (in 2006-2012) is one reason why the state of the free desktop is such a mess in the first place.
So, say I want to remix freely released audio tracks put out by NIN in garageband or ableton live format, how would I go about that?
Linux isn't really hard to get working these days. The trick is keeping it (and all your existing apps!) working from release to release, and working around the problems where the software simply does not exist for your task at hand. Some BETA app that crashes a lot, has a crummy UI and/or is missing features but is working towards providing functionality you need today isn't really good enough.
Yup. And I'm willing to pay for it. Pre-OS X, I had Linux and was far happier than I was on Windows 3.1 or 95. Windows 2000 came around, was stable enough, but I missed Unix. Switched to OS X a few years ago and haven't looked back. Everything works, I have plenty of commercial and free apps, and I have the unix shell if i want it.
Now, I'm no huge fan of Windows, but...
No ssh required with powershell, RDP > VNC, NTFS and FAT are usable anywhere (and there's an ext2 driver for Windows anyway), few people other than greybeards run NFS for desktop use (Windows has SMB anyway which is FAR easier to configure), and Notepad++ is a free download away.
Windows has its faults, but to trade driver support for virtually all hardware in existence, a huge software library (including games and business applications that the rest of the world use) for a decent built in text editor and some low level disk utils is a bit of a stretch. I mean the only desktop shortcoming you list is lack of a decent text editor, and there are plenty of free (both beer/libre) ones available. On the contrary, can Linux run Photoshop? Ableton Live? Hmm...
The lack of your criticisms of actual desktop related Windows shortcomings is pretty telling - by their omission you're actually reinforcing the fact that there is little reason to run Linux as a desktop user, unless that's what you're used to. And if you are, then that's fine.
As a former Linux or BSD on desktop user, I gave up a few years ago. I'll still check out Linux or FreeBSD on the desktop from time to time (PC-BSD looks pretty good actually), but it's just too inconvenient.
Why? At work, we're a windows shop, by necessity. We have a large number of custom applications that will cost multiple millions of dollars, and significant risk to migrate. So work is out. At home? Well, most PC hardware sucks, i'm mostly a laptop user now and Apple make the nicest portable machines.
Given that I'm going to run a Macbook, well, OS X just works fine for me for the vast majority of what I do. In fact, I can't think of anything I want to do at home that I can't do quicker and easier on the mac than I can with Linux - I have bash, csh, or whatever other shell there if I need it. I have Python, Perl, Java and a C compiler. I also have some awesome development frameworks.
Essentially, OS X can do anything for me on the desktop, better than Linux, so I see no need to ditch OS X. in fact, there are apps on OS X that I vastly prefer to anything I've seen on Linux. Such as time machine and mission control. There are apps that are not available at all for Linux, such as Ableton Live. And if I really, desperately need Linux, I can virtualize it anyway. Linux can't legally virtualize OS X.
The "win" from running Linux just isn't there any more. Windows got stable, and OS X is Unix with commercial support and a nice UI. Also, despite what many would have you believe, if you ignore paper spec and just want a decent machine that works, apple is not super expensive. I'm old enough and have been around long enough to not CARE if some other machine is .2ghz faster or has RAM that runs at 1600mhz instead of 1333 or whatever. In real life practical use it makes very little difference - the major gains are when you step from one generation of CPU/bus to another, within a generation its much of a muchness. More important to me is the quality of the display and user input devices/software - and OS X multi-touch is the best interface out there, IMHO.
Sure, I can customize the shit out of a Unix desktop environment, but you know what? Since KDE3 bit the dust, I haven't seen one I actually like. No matter how pretty it is, compared to the OS X GUI, which is at least stable and fairly consistent, the Unix desktop is lacking. It is too disjointed, too clunky and lately, too fucking unstable. I like Windowmaker, but the rest of the apps to turn it into a proper implementation of OpenSTEP just aren't there, and are too much fucking around to get working anyway, as no distribution seems to give a shit about GNUSTEP, and are all fawning over Gnome or KDE and their latest hair-brained idea of the month.
So, in short: home desktop = OS X. Work = Windows (with a few BSD machines doing stuff I REALLY don't trust windows to handle). Home servers = FreeBSD. Desktop Linux just doesn't offer me anything significant, given that I'm already buying apple hardware because they make nice laptop hardware (even Linus thinks so). And because it doesn't offer me anything significant, and I already have an OS X license, I can't be bothered putting up with the shit you need to go through (drivers, lack of software like Ableton, etc) to use it.
And that's before I even get into the political games being played over stuff like h.264, linking to binary drivers, etc. As an end user with money, I don't care about your political ideals. I want an OS that works, and am prepared to pay for it. This is why I run free Unix (FreeBSD or Linux) where it works well, and don't run it on my desktop :)
h.264 came out before vp7/vp8, perhaps the reason On2 haven't been sued is because they weren't a big enough target for the big boys to bother with?
The essence of local cloud computing is already here, heaps of people are already rolling out VDI - a VDI client will work just as well on a tablet with appropriate interface devices as it will on a dumb terminal.
Says it all really. Safari runs fine on iphone with a fraction of that spec. Why should i bother with firefox again?
Sorry but you just aren't looking far enough ahead.
In 5-10 years, your mobile device will BE your desktop. Or at least this will be the case for the majority of users.
There will be a tablet like device, with wireless connectivity for keyboard, mouse, display and inductive charging that you pick up, use on the way to work, place down on its charging pad on your desk and start using with your desktop input devices. At the end of the day, you pick up the device and go home.
You will still have your 20+ inch screen, you will still have you input devices - they'll just be used on a way more portable system.
For 99% of desktop users, the iphone or other smartphone has way more power than they need. Just as the PC killed mainframe timesharing, and the laptop killed the PC, the tablet will kill the laptop for most people. Processing that needs significantly more power will be done on "the cloud", be it a public cloud service, or a company's private cloud infrastructure.
The upshot of all this? A company buys ONE device for its workforce. Its data is stored securely on its backend server infrastructure, and the end user doesn't have to worry about syncing data or apps across multiple platforms. The pieces are all there, all that is required is a company to put them all together.
Because, irrespective of WHO it was, the police has destroyed his business BEFORE proving him guilty in a court of law. This is not the way the justice system is designed to work. IF he is found innocent (and its a legally grey area), then how do the police propose to compensate him to losses incurred?
This could, and should have been taken to court without the drama/show for the media, and IF he was found guilty of anything THEN his assets get seized.
This is nothing to do with IP rights, it is to do with a man being jailed, and having his assets seized without a fair trial. Whether or not he is guilty or not is irrelevant - due process was not followed and this is a major concern.
In the real world, he is innocent until PROVEN guilty, dumbass.
If you read TFA, it is "h.264 BASELINE +". I.e., it does not even have any options to compete with the other better quality variants.
So my options are: pay a license to MPEG-LA for royalties (presumably) on commercial gains made using h.264. Or, buy all new hardware, deal with larger file sizes and crappier quality to use WebM, whether or not I'm using it for commercial gain or not. I'll take option A thanks :)
These days? Power console up, firmware update required to sign into gaming network. Once you download that, you fire up the game, which then also needs a patch before it will let you sign into the network (and if you don't sign in, it keeps bugging you or just plain won't work).
I'm sorry, but if i wanted to deal with that sort of bullshit, I'd just play games on my PC. The whole point of console gaming is that you can be up and running and in a game in no time flat.
I turned my PS3 on for the first time in a couple of months on the weekend. I needed to do a firmware update plus 1.5gigs of GT5 updates before I could play without constantly being pestered to sign into PSN (but unable to do so without the updates).
I may as well fire up my PC.
Point being: VP8 is not the "open", "free" panacea that many claim it to be. It is legally untested and has been examined to be more than liable to companies implementing it being sued. So, its in the same boat at the moment as h.264. Except its technically inferior.
The reason VLC plays anything is due to the work that has gone into it, not specifically because it is a monolithic blob of software.
If they wrote and released codecs as seperate DLLs/shared libraries, we'd still be able to play just as much content using said shared libraries.
Or perhaps you'd rather we go back to the bad old days, when every game, etc had to have specific support for your video card and specific support for your sound card (and which broke in rather annoying ways if you had something technically far better but not able to emulate say, SB-Pro hardware perfectly - eg a GUS or PAS16, etc), rather than being able to use whatever future hardware you may purchase via a standardized driver framework.
Maybe it's aunt tilly...