Why that? What can you do with Photoshop that you can't do with the Gimp? Gimp now has the CMYK color scheme, so the only real pro-Photoshop argument has faded...
Actually, Gimp's layout is a lot better for multi-monitor (or multi-desktop) layouts (yes, for those who insist on using a single-window layout can use the new dockable feature, so Gimp can do both) so I'd say it's already somewhat better than Photoshop, especially in the usability department.
Actually, I think Taylor made a big mistake by bringing that up. Not because Linux is a "free lunch" (it isn't, at the very least you need hardware to run it which isn't free. You have to look at the complete package which is hardware + software + support.), but because people will realize that most Microsoft products are crippled on purpose (like Win XP home for example which has connection limits, doesn't run on SMP, etc.) while with open source you always get the "full" version.
Microsoft advocates will deny it, but license costs are not irrelevant and the fact that the "full" version of Microsoft products is overpriced while the crippled versions may include massive hidden costs in the future (What do you do when your connection limit doesn't hack it anymore? By the "full" version, reinstall everything and cross your fingers that everything will run?) is a big problem that Microsoft simply cannot resolve without losing massive amounts of profits.
IMO, the KDE people should stop listening to the KDE-haters who will bash them no matter what they do.
4 years ago: "Bahh, KDE is too much like Windows, it sucks, real men use Gnome because it can use all my 3 different windowmanagers!"
Now: "Bahh, KDE isn't enough like Windows, it sucks, it doesn't even have a registry-knockoff, you should use Gnome because it's even more dumbed down than Windows XP!"
It doesn't matter what KDE does, there will be always the KDE-haters who will hate it by heart.
Also the anti-KDE retoric seems to depend more on Gnome than on KDE itself, it changed by 180 degrees in the last years.
They have to do with cleanliness. I'm a developer, and I understand what just about any GUI option you throw at me does, or am quite capable of figuring it out. That doesn't mean I want to wade thru page after page after page of options which have no relation to what I want to do to find the one option I'm looking for.
So you save 30 seconds once (or how often do you configure your desktop?), but you lose configurability and flexibility.
Doesn't sound like a good deal for me. I'd rather have the desktop behave the way I want every day.
Could the Soviet explorers have found primitive life there and for fear of starting widespread panic decided to keep the whole thing quiet.
The most stupidest conspiracy theories are governments keeping alien life "quiet".
If there would be any evidence for alien life - or even intelligent life out there, the governments would profit the most because it's a good reason to raise taxes for military, etc.
The thought that the government would keep the cover over something that a) clearly isn't their fault, b) is possibly an external threat for which c) only the government has an adequate fix, is pretty dumb, IMO.
I'm all for conspiracies, but there must be some kind of motive behind it.
A story about SCO that would be over 5 pages long when printed on paper that doesn't mention
that no normal being (meaning any non-anonymous entity and not some "anonymous donor") was so far able to buy the SCO license. In fact SCO won't sell you the license at all. Because SCO knows that they will get sued left and right if they would really sell them.
that SCO hasn't sued any Linux users so far despite promising (remember the 90-day ultimatum?)
that SCO's claims are pretty inconsistent (varying from millions of lines of code to dozens, changing from contract dispute to copyright violation and back)
So no, you don't have to be a Linux zealot not to want to hear such a crappy work of journalistic spin.
Fact 1. Windows was only cheaper because of Ballmer's special discounts. It is very naive to think that Munich will get those discounts at every upgrade.
Fact 2. Linux is a multi-vendor technology which makes it much easier to change Vendors in the future. Any company will only offer discounts when it fears to lose the contract. With Linux it's much easier to switch contractors so contractors will have no other choice than to work with thin margins.
Fact 3. Linux can be supported locally which means that about half of every Euro spent locally will come back in the form of taxes.
Fact 4. Windows TCO studies lie about hidden costs, most importantly the cost to maintain anti-Virus technology and of course the cost of worms and viruses themselves. Even Microsoft was hit by Slammer, so everybody who says that a large Windows installation can be immune against worms or viruses is lying
Fact 5. Cost wasn't the main reason for the switch in the first place. Munich wanted more flexibility, security and no longer being dependent on a vendor. Another reason was to create more competition between vendors in the whole area, including the private sector which is inspired by Munich's switch. Munich switching will cause millions of discounts because of increased competition (see fact 1). Sorry, but even with Windows being offered for nothing, it still can't fullfill these requirements.
Computerwoche is a pro-Windows magazine happily spreading anti-Linux FUD.
Hell, the project didn't even start yet. But what Microsoft fears more than anything else is a fair comparison, that's why they try to stop every Linux-project BEFORE it starts. Because they know very well that they will have lost forever once the transition is complete.
For my money, I would have bet on OS X providing a better system from these perspectives. [stability and compatibility]
You got to be kidding, eh?
To be on the mercy of one company on software is bad, but it's still better than being on the mercy of one company on software AND hardware is a lot worse.
Also, I don't see the big usability improvements in MacOSX (yes, I did try it), it's mostly nifty animations (which become annoying after a while), nice pictures and eyecandy.
For example, the icons in MacOSX are very beautiful. Big, nice rendered icons with thousands of colors. But the reasons we have icons in the first place, is to have a SMALL representation of a program/feature/task that are easily distinguishable. Yes, KDE's classic icons are ugly, but they do the job.
When I first used MacOSX, I was impressed, yes. But after a couple of hours all the eyecandy was growing old, only slowed me down and I really started to miss advanced features like multiple desktops.
Ability to run more software is an advantage if you can do that well. Linux does NOT emulate win16/32 application environment well. If it did, IBM would not have suggested to port MS Office.
Well, I never claimed that it did emulate Win32 (Win16 is irrelevant by now) well. But it should.
Now, back to the points I was making: I think the ability of Linux to use Windows drivers through 'wrappers', Windows applications through WINE and other emulators, etc is a BAD thing for Linux because it introduced another unreliable link in the program 'chain'.As I said, emulation is good as long as it is reliable. But it is not, and never will be with companies like Microsoft which would do anything to break away from compatibilities with OpenSource software.
Well, that's only partly true. Since Win32 dates back to Windows 95 and (almost) all new software has to run on Windows 95 or at least Windows 98, it would be sufficient to emulate this 9 (or in case of Win98 6) year old API. OK, Microsoft purposely breaks their stuff on older Windows systems and requests at least Windows 2000 for some of their stuff, but Windows 2000 is also 4 years old by now.
It is certainly possible to keep up with the Windows APIs.
The Problem with Wine isn't changing APIs, it's just that it's still incomplete and whenever a program runs into a function not yet implemented, there are problems. But there are many examples of programs running very stable under Wine.
Linux has already gathered a critical mass to be taken into consideration seriously. It is time to stop emulating, it is time to start building - so I am agree with IBM on their latest move.
On the server, I agree, Linux has everything that is needed and that natively. But on the desktop we need reliable and easy emulation of Win32 programs, especially games, to attract users.
That's complete nonsense. Being able to run more software is an advantage.
OS/2 was too late, too expensive, by IBM and didn't offer any significant advantage.
Lateness: Linux is also late
Expensiveness: Linux is beer-free:-)
Vendor: While OS/2 was a failure from the very beginning because PC-vendors would have been pretty stupid to include software made by the competition, Linux is a true vendor-neutral standard
Advantage: Linux does offer a significant advantage, being open-source. For all those morons who think that this doesn't matter: If it weren't open-source we wouldn't have a version for AMD64 and would still have to wait for some fat arrogant software vendor to port it, just as an example.
So compared to OS/2, Linux has very good cards.
To go back on-topic: Emulation is a big advantage because it offers a way to do a smooth upgrade. According to your logic all software on Windows would be DOS-software because Windows offers DOS-emulation. Of course that's nonsense, without DOS-emulation, Windows wouldn't have been accepted by the masses so fast, without Windows-emulation, Linux won't be accepted by the masses very fast.
Microsoft just surfed on the wave of success that was generated by the open PC platform.
And in the times when DOS/Windows was the only serious x86-OS, it was the most open option out there.
Now with Linux things have changed, everybody who understands the business (including Microsoft, that's why they are so afraid of Linux) knows that Linux will take over, because openness always wins (another example is Beta vs. VHS - VHS was open to all vendors, Beta was for too long a Sony-only technology), it's just a question when because the huge market-inertia of the Windows-desktop platform will keep it going for quite some time - but not forever.
Actually when you look at the security track record, WinNT/2K/XP is already in a world of hurt compared to Win9x.
Blaster was the biggest worm - ever. And it worked only on NT, not on 9x...
That Windows 2000 (or NT or XP) is "more secure" than Windows 98 has been repeated so often that most people started to believe it, even though the security track record shows the reversed situation.
Re:The only feature which is better in Windows...
on
Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 1
last time I tried Linux [..] on a 14" monitor
That was either very, very long ago or you used some really really outdated machine, or most likely both.
If you really want to try Linux (having seen some of your comments this seems unlikely, you seem to be the type who really installs it on the most crappy machine he can find only to complain how much it sucked...) you should try it on your main machine on an extra harddrive.
That's great, but at the current rate, you're forced to upgrade Linux every few months to get any kind of support. If it takes me that long to garner any kind of productivity out of countless "features", I'd better damn well be able to use those features for several years.
Of course even you know that those features are still there when you upgrade, so how often you upgrade is irrelevant. Second if you pay for an enterprise version, you get years of support or if you use a cheap/free version you can upgrade whatever you need yourself (it's not that hard) and third you don't get any real support with OEM-Windows either.
But of course for somebody who hates Linux by heart all that won't make any difference...
They didn't know C++, and didn't want to learn it.
I can't imagine that C++ is harder to learn for a C programmer than some OO-workaround.
Re:The only feature which is better in Windows...
on
Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 1
That's a big drawback to "configurability"... complexity.
Not really. If you are afraid of configurability, just use the defaults, end of story. What's so complicated about that, huh?
I don't know what Windows could do to make me more productive.
That's what I thought before I tried a DE with multiple desktops, too. No, the productivity improvements aren't obvious after 5 minutes, it takes weeks or months until you really get it and you can really take advantage of multiple desktops.
The same goes for Unix-style copy/paste which is much faster in many occasions. In a minority of cases, MacOS-style copy/paste (which was copied by Windows, too) is better so I'm glad that KDE supports both, but if I had to choose, I'd choose Unix-style.
First of all, KDE/Konqueror has sessionmanagement and Mozilla has not (neither on Windows nor Linux), meaning that all your Konqueror-Windows reappear on the respective desktops, meaning no more temporary bookmarks.
Secondly, multiple desktops allow you to run much more apps at a time and allows you to switch between tasks much more easily and faster.
Thirdly, all the viruses and security problems make WindowsNT/2K/XP a pain. (ironically we have never seen such huge problems like MS Blaster on Windows 9x, even though most people believe the contrary, security has become a lot worse with WinNT/2K/XP although stability improved)
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Why that? What can you do with Photoshop that you can't do with the Gimp? Gimp now has the CMYK color scheme, so the only real pro-Photoshop argument has faded...
Actually, Gimp's layout is a lot better for multi-monitor (or multi-desktop) layouts (yes, for those who insist on using a single-window layout can use the new dockable feature, so Gimp can do both) so I'd say it's already somewhat better than Photoshop, especially in the usability department.
And I don't think that everybody who checks the code is in the changelog file.
Microsoft advocates will deny it, but license costs are not irrelevant and the fact that the "full" version of Microsoft products is overpriced while the crippled versions may include massive hidden costs in the future (What do you do when your connection limit doesn't hack it anymore? By the "full" version, reinstall everything and cross your fingers that everything will run?) is a big problem that Microsoft simply cannot resolve without losing massive amounts of profits.
4 years ago: "Bahh, KDE is too much like Windows, it sucks, real men use Gnome because it can use all my 3 different windowmanagers!"
Now: "Bahh, KDE isn't enough like Windows, it sucks, it doesn't even have a registry-knockoff, you should use Gnome because it's even more dumbed down than Windows XP!"
It doesn't matter what KDE does, there will be always the KDE-haters who will hate it by heart.
Also the anti-KDE retoric seems to depend more on Gnome than on KDE itself, it changed by 180 degrees in the last years.
So you save 30 seconds once (or how often do you configure your desktop?), but you lose configurability and flexibility.
Doesn't sound like a good deal for me. I'd rather have the desktop behave the way I want every day.
The most stupidest conspiracy theories are governments keeping alien life "quiet".
If there would be any evidence for alien life - or even intelligent life out there, the governments would profit the most because it's a good reason to raise taxes for military, etc.
The thought that the government would keep the cover over something that a) clearly isn't their fault, b) is possibly an external threat for which c) only the government has an adequate fix, is pretty dumb, IMO.
I'm all for conspiracies, but there must be some kind of motive behind it.
Darl also said that SCO would sue a Linux user by now.
Darl also said that millions of lines of code were their property.
In fact quite some people tried to purchase licenses and SCO wouldn't sell them any (because then SCO could get sued for racketeering(sp?))
So no, you don't have to be a Linux zealot not to want to hear such a crappy work of journalistic spin.
I think you are a bit optimistic about that...
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/10/203121 9&mode=nested&tid=109&tid=126&tid=172&tid=185&tid= 187&tid=190&tid=201
True, but some systems are more secure than others.
So please cut down the FUD a bit.
Computerwoche is a pro-Windows magazine happily spreading anti-Linux FUD.
Hell, the project didn't even start yet. But what Microsoft fears more than anything else is a fair comparison, that's why they try to stop every Linux-project BEFORE it starts. Because they know very well that they will have lost forever once the transition is complete.
You got to be kidding, eh?
To be on the mercy of one company on software is bad, but it's still better than being on the mercy of one company on software AND hardware is a lot worse.
Also, I don't see the big usability improvements in MacOSX (yes, I did try it), it's mostly nifty animations (which become annoying after a while), nice pictures and eyecandy.
For example, the icons in MacOSX are very beautiful. Big, nice rendered icons with thousands of colors. But the reasons we have icons in the first place, is to have a SMALL representation of a program/feature/task that are easily distinguishable. Yes, KDE's classic icons are ugly, but they do the job.
When I first used MacOSX, I was impressed, yes. But after a couple of hours all the eyecandy was growing old, only slowed me down and I really started to miss advanced features like multiple desktops.
Well, I never claimed that it did emulate Win32 (Win16 is irrelevant by now) well. But it should.
Now, back to the points I was making: I think the ability of Linux to use Windows drivers through 'wrappers', Windows applications through WINE and other emulators, etc is a BAD thing for Linux because it introduced another unreliable link in the program 'chain'.As I said, emulation is good as long as it is reliable. But it is not, and never will be with companies like Microsoft which would do anything to break away from compatibilities with OpenSource software.
Well, that's only partly true. Since Win32 dates back to Windows 95 and (almost) all new software has to run on Windows 95 or at least Windows 98, it would be sufficient to emulate this 9 (or in case of Win98 6) year old API. OK, Microsoft purposely breaks their stuff on older Windows systems and requests at least Windows 2000 for some of their stuff, but Windows 2000 is also 4 years old by now.
It is certainly possible to keep up with the Windows APIs.
The Problem with Wine isn't changing APIs, it's just that it's still incomplete and whenever a program runs into a function not yet implemented, there are problems. But there are many examples of programs running very stable under Wine.
Linux has already gathered a critical mass to be taken into consideration seriously. It is time to stop emulating, it is time to start building - so I am agree with IBM on their latest move.
On the server, I agree, Linux has everything that is needed and that natively. But on the desktop we need reliable and easy emulation of Win32 programs, especially games, to attract users.
OS/2 was too late, too expensive, by IBM and didn't offer any significant advantage.
So compared to OS/2, Linux has very good cards.
To go back on-topic: Emulation is a big advantage because it offers a way to do a smooth upgrade. According to your logic all software on Windows would be DOS-software because Windows offers DOS-emulation. Of course that's nonsense, without DOS-emulation, Windows wouldn't have been accepted by the masses so fast, without Windows-emulation, Linux won't be accepted by the masses very fast.
We need Win32 emulation, the sooner, the better.
And in the times when DOS/Windows was the only serious x86-OS, it was the most open option out there.
Now with Linux things have changed, everybody who understands the business (including Microsoft, that's why they are so afraid of Linux) knows that Linux will take over, because openness always wins (another example is Beta vs. VHS - VHS was open to all vendors, Beta was for too long a Sony-only technology), it's just a question when because the huge market-inertia of the Windows-desktop platform will keep it going for quite some time - but not forever.
Also, Win9x was once the big mainstream OS, too.
And finally, as Nimda and the Code Reds show, you don't have to run the majority to attract a worm.
Blaster was the biggest worm - ever. And it worked only on NT, not on 9x...
That Windows 2000 (or NT or XP) is "more secure" than Windows 98 has been repeated so often that most people started to believe it, even though the security track record shows the reversed situation.
That was either very, very long ago or you used some really really outdated machine, or most likely both.
If you really want to try Linux (having seen some of your comments this seems unlikely, you seem to be the type who really installs it on the most crappy machine he can find only to complain how much it sucked...) you should try it on your main machine on an extra harddrive.
That's great, but at the current rate, you're forced to upgrade Linux every few months to get any kind of support. If it takes me that long to garner any kind of productivity out of countless "features", I'd better damn well be able to use those features for several years.
Of course even you know that those features are still there when you upgrade, so how often you upgrade is irrelevant. Second if you pay for an enterprise version, you get years of support or if you use a cheap/free version you can upgrade whatever you need yourself (it's not that hard) and third you don't get any real support with OEM-Windows either.
But of course for somebody who hates Linux by heart all that won't make any difference...
I can't imagine that C++ is harder to learn for a C programmer than some OO-workaround.
Not really. If you are afraid of configurability, just use the defaults, end of story. What's so complicated about that, huh?
I don't know what Windows could do to make me more productive.
That's what I thought before I tried a DE with multiple desktops, too. No, the productivity improvements aren't obvious after 5 minutes, it takes weeks or months until you really get it and you can really take advantage of multiple desktops.
The same goes for Unix-style copy/paste which is much faster in many occasions. In a minority of cases, MacOS-style copy/paste (which was copied by Windows, too) is better so I'm glad that KDE supports both, but if I had to choose, I'd choose Unix-style.
I have never seen claims like "Windows is a cancer" or "Windows is illegal" or "Windows threatens our way of life" here.
Secondly, multiple desktops allow you to run much more apps at a time and allows you to switch between tasks much more easily and faster.
Thirdly, all the viruses and security problems make WindowsNT/2K/XP a pain. (ironically we have never seen such huge problems like MS Blaster on Windows 9x, even though most people believe the contrary, security has become a lot worse with WinNT/2K/XP although stability improved)