which changes with each new hardware installation.
More than that: it changes with network device configuration. If your wireless card changes, or you insert a new one, or they get renamed or whatever, you have to get them to reactivate it. I've only bought Mathematica once--the student version several years ago, and I've not bought a new one since.
No, wait. I'm wrong. I bought 5.1 or 5.2 because I had 4.something, because 5.whatever had been released and therefore switching notebooks would have cost me $40 all because they were now shipping 5.x and it was an "old" version. I kid you not. I've had to call them several times because some network device was renamed differently (funny, nothing else on my system seems to care what I call my wireless card, and I've switched the name around a few times) and they couldn't cope with the fact that my ipw2100 card was now "ipw2100" instead of "eth2".
This, however, is only slightly less annoying than Matlab, which requires the effing documentation CD to be mounted in order for it to run thanks to craptastic gaming CD checking technologies. I've not bought another license from them.
Say what you will about IDL (wow I hate that system) but at least its licensing is straightforward. Heck, I bought it 4 years and a whole notebook (not to mention a plethora of network devices) ago, and it is still running off of the original license file.
I'm looking into Maple (can anyone tell me what their licensing scam looks like?), but so far the only math/graphing system I've not absolutely hated is the one I've not yet used....
But Microsoft's OEM licensing limits you to the box on which it was installed (amongst other assinine limitations). If you buy a retail Vista license, you can transfer it to other PCs. Hence, you need only buy one Vista license and don't have to keep buying new ones for each new PC you buy--you just transfer the license when you upgrade.
Actually, I would wager that it's very much the other way 'round: Windows is best for the power user (who is generally used to Windows and knows all of its little quirks and tricks and would have to relearn these on another OS). Linux is best for the highly advanced user (who can tweak it as much as they want) or for the beginner user (who just clicks and takes what they're given, because they don't have much to relearn). The main problem is 1) software support and 2) hardware support (especially vendor-customized installations which can work around the quirks and breakage of each individual piece), which is due to market inertia (i.e. Windows is 95% of the desktop market), not innate superiority or inferiority of the platform. Of course, if Windows were not a monopoly, then even the power users would like linux, since they'd already be familiar with it, not Windows.
it is impossible to get it to do what you want without some serious tweaking, and that usually requires you to either type something in a terminal or edit a file.
I humbly disagree.
You can edit files if you want, but you dont' usually have to. The Windows equivalent is editing the registry. What, you've never had to tweak some obscure registry setting to make things work 100%?!
It's not the fact that my grandma can use it, it's the fact that my grandma can *install* and use it that's important to me (or at least that I can guide her through the phone). Linux cannot yet do that effectively.
So, your grandmother cannot install Linux. Not news. But she can install Windows?! Or does she just use what she gets with her PC and what is provided her by her techie granddaughter? I would suspect the latter rather than the former.
it's hell getting things to work in Linux.
How many notebooks have you installed retail Windows on? It's not a valid to compare OEM-customized Windows to vanilla Linux.
Want the widescreen resolution? Wireless? Sound? Video card? USB? Firewire? That printer? At least a few of those would require me to tweak the system to make things work, if at all.
Funny that, it works 100% with me out of the box for the last three releases of Ubuntu (well, I had to use the GUI printer manager to make the printer work, because it's a networked printer and so ubuntu can't just detect it as it would the dwl-g650 or other attached device). Maybe you're still stuck in 1993?
The system should never mess up to the point that I will have to open terminal and do something.
I totally agree with this statement and would add that no system should ever mess up to the point where you have to boot into safe mode or tweak registry keys. Unfortunately, stuff does screw up and you do have to fix it, be it commandline or obscure registry keys.
The moment that happens, it just isn't really user-friendly.
Mod parent up! As a Linux user, the members of the community represented by the grandparent are what give us the bad reputation. There's reasonable middle ground (no, you can't expect Linux to be 100% like Windows), but neither should one have to go through unneeded pain (xorg config file modifiation) either. [It should also be noted that Windows zealots have similar members of their community, so it's not just the Linux community, although we have the reputation for it.:[
Good news, however. Xorg 7.3 will be moving toward a configless (and dynamic screen plugging) system, although hardware that lies to you (unfortunately way too much of the hardware out there) will still be a problem for some time to come.:(
because they are the central evil empire around which all opposing viewpoints, practices and communities can clearly see as the colossal against which they're flinging the rocks of their own progress and movements.
No, then the KDE vs GNOME flamewar will go to a whole new level. Linux is all about competition.
Of course. If I disagree with your position, it logically follows that I'm a zealot.
I want stuff to look like native. That rules out out most of the cross platform stuff.
Unless you use Swing, or gtk+ with the wimp (windows impersonator) theme. Don't let me catch you using Office 2k7 or WinAmp or Windows Media Player or anything else that doesn't use stock Windows widgets either, then, if the native look is critical to you.
But I can see if you consider XML 'programming',
Except that it's not. XUL is XML + JavaScript, which is arguably a programming language.
It's a pity for you that the world is full of Indians and Chinese who are smart enough to figure out stuff like this if that's what it takes to produce an efficient end result.
If you say that I have no experience with C and C++, it must be true. Of course, it's not, but that hasn't stopped your opining yet.
MB Hello World applications.
Sounds bloated to me, sure. OTOH, BeagleDaemon.exe (the GNOME data indexing daemon) takes up 23552 bytes.
What produces Windows applications that are as small as WTL/SDK, and don't "look like Ass" to quote another poster?
Good question, given that "look like ass" is highly variable from person to person. I think Windows apps look like ass. YMMV.
Mono is like a third rate knock off of.Net, which seems pointless to me since the original produces bloated applications.
"Third rate knock off" ignorance aside, it's a cross-platform development framework. Just one more example. I can't vouch for how bloated or not the applications it produces are.
XUL seems to be some Mozilla internal XML handwaving used by Firefox, and not be much to do with developing small GUI applications.
For your reading pleasure, a book on programming with XUL. If you know XAML, XUL is what Microsoft was ripping off to create XAML.
If portable GUI class libraries didn't suck so much, people would use them instead of the non portable Microsoft solutions
But, if Microsoft didn't have a stranglehold on the market, there'd be even better cross-platform solutions than there are now! You're taking current market conditions and extrapolating out from there which isn't a valid assumption (even if existing cross-platform tookits actually did suck!)
Looking more at WTL (links here), I am so very glad I'm learning gtkmm instead of it.
But I can knock up a tiny (
Sure, but you could also do the same with XUL or Mono or other technologies. You see, wxWindows was an example, not the full set of cross-platform solutions.
and most of the time 100% of the people that are going to use it use nothing but Windows.
It is not that expensive if done from the initial stages (Yes, MFC->wxWindows or whatever will be, of course). It'd be much cheaper if Windows weren't superdominant.
The difference is that Linux distros provide the support for Dell, e.g. Red Hat, SuSE, and Ubuntu. Microsoft makes Dell do the support. Seems like it'd be smart for Dell to ally with one of those distros. Heck, choose two and flip a frickin' coin. I don't care.
The other thing is that Dell can ship with spyware, adware, AOL, Yahoo! toolbar, etc... to get a price reduction, unless they can do the same for Linux, they might actually be loosing money by not shipping Windows depending on how much these packages pay Dell.
Except that that is only true of consumer machines, which the ones being compared are not. The business PCs (the only ones that even have a Linux option) do not come with the crapware, according to posts I've seen, although I've no first-hand experience.
tick with Microsoft and you're in a proprietary language on a proprietary platform (C#,.NET)
nother proprietary platform (Objective-C 2,
Dude, neither of these are 100% proprietary technologies. Cocoa/Carbon certainly is, but significant chunks of.Net are not (significant chunks, OTOH, are, which is why it's only somewhat of a tarpit).
If you target Mono's.Net implementation, then you can be sure of cross-platform. And you can code in objective-c on Linux (though maybe not Objective-C 2?)
Linux has a non-trivial marketshare, possibly comparable to MacOS (if not greater than it)
The productivity software on Linux is quite adequate for most users
No, X doesn't really need to go crawl off and die.
Mentions of any one of these points are sure to cause any non-Linux-loving person to fly into fits of rage and/or wax eloquent on why you are so full of it.
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More than that: it changes with network device configuration. If your wireless card changes, or you insert a new one, or they get renamed or whatever, you have to get them to reactivate it. I've only bought Mathematica once--the student version several years ago, and I've not bought a new one since.
No, wait. I'm wrong. I bought 5.1 or 5.2 because I had 4.something, because 5.whatever had been released and therefore switching notebooks would have cost me $40 all because they were now shipping 5.x and it was an "old" version. I kid you not. I've had to call them several times because some network device was renamed differently (funny, nothing else on my system seems to care what I call my wireless card, and I've switched the name around a few times) and they couldn't cope with the fact that my ipw2100 card was now "ipw2100" instead of "eth2".
This, however, is only slightly less annoying than Matlab, which requires the effing documentation CD to be mounted in order for it to run thanks to craptastic gaming CD checking technologies. I've not bought another license from them.
Say what you will about IDL (wow I hate that system) but at least its licensing is straightforward. Heck, I bought it 4 years and a whole notebook (not to mention a plethora of network devices) ago, and it is still running off of the original license file.
I'm looking into Maple (can anyone tell me what their licensing scam looks like?), but so far the only math/graphing system I've not absolutely hated is the one I've not yet used....
So It seems they've finally caught up to the 21st century....
I see that the student license still goes away when you graduate. Yuck.
Where did the parent say anything about "[not wanting] to pay for the OEM license"?
And I've rarely had to make config file changes or run commands to make Linux work. Seems that the two are even, then.
Actually, I would wager that it's very much the other way 'round: Windows is best for the power user (who is generally used to Windows and knows all of its little quirks and tricks and would have to relearn these on another OS). Linux is best for the highly advanced user (who can tweak it as much as they want) or for the beginner user (who just clicks and takes what they're given, because they don't have much to relearn). The main problem is 1) software support and 2) hardware support (especially vendor-customized installations which can work around the quirks and breakage of each individual piece), which is due to market inertia (i.e. Windows is 95% of the desktop market), not innate superiority or inferiority of the platform. Of course, if Windows were not a monopoly, then even the power users would like linux, since they'd already be familiar with it, not Windows.
I humbly disagree.
You can edit files if you want, but you dont' usually have to. The Windows equivalent is editing the registry. What, you've never had to tweak some obscure registry setting to make things work 100%?!
So, your grandmother cannot install Linux. Not news. But she can install Windows?! Or does she just use what she gets with her PC and what is provided her by her techie granddaughter? I would suspect the latter rather than the former.
How many notebooks have you installed retail Windows on? It's not a valid to compare OEM-customized Windows to vanilla Linux.
Funny that, it works 100% with me out of the box for the last three releases of Ubuntu (well, I had to use the GUI printer manager to make the printer work, because it's a networked printer and so ubuntu can't just detect it as it would the dwl-g650 or other attached device). Maybe you're still stuck in 1993?
I totally agree with this statement and would add that no system should ever mess up to the point where you have to boot into safe mode or tweak registry keys. Unfortunately, stuff does screw up and you do have to fix it, be it commandline or obscure registry keys.
Indeed, Windows is not ready for the desktop!
Just choose one and go with it!
The other question is power consumption.
From a Red Hat hacker
Mod parent up! As a Linux user, the members of the community represented by the grandparent are what give us the bad reputation. There's reasonable middle ground (no, you can't expect Linux to be 100% like Windows), but neither should one have to go through unneeded pain (xorg config file modifiation) either. [It should also be noted that Windows zealots have similar members of their community, so it's not just the Linux community, although we have the reputation for it. :[
Good news, however. Xorg 7.3 will be moving toward a configless (and dynamic screen plugging) system, although hardware that lies to you (unfortunately way too much of the hardware out there) will still be a problem for some time to come. :(
Looking more at WTL (links here), I am so very glad I'm learning gtkmm instead of it.
"unsubstantiated, inflammatory, and ignorant" i.e. "Goes against what I want to believe."
If you target Mono's .Net implementation, then you can be sure of cross-platform. And you can code in objective-c on Linux (though maybe not Objective-C 2?)
My list of 5 things you can't say about Linux modded -1 Troll within seconds of posting it?
Wow. My point was made but fast!
In my experience, The List is as follows:
Mentions of any one of these points are sure to cause any non-Linux-loving person to fly into fits of rage and/or wax eloquent on why you are so full of it.