Ok, let me rephrase what I said - cheap VPS are probably more vulnerable securitywise, and mantained by a less skilled crew than a specialized provider. That translates to "I can't actually trust in any data in or out the VPS, because I don't know if they were hacked, or if they are even able to determine if they were or not". For you that may not be a problem, but for me it is.
If I install Ubuntu, I'd still have to install a ton of programs that I use, that may or maybe not compatbile with that specific release. I like to install my software one-by-one. because I like to know what is in the system and what dependencies the packages have. Blindly installing stuff just because it's available on the repositories is a dumb idea.
As for Windows, there are some tools available to create packages of most-used freely available software, such as http://ninite.com/. I can't vouch for warez in pornsites, as I tend to buy the commercial software that I use, but I don't really see the difference between buying for Windows or for Linux. The software still has to be installed, right?
Gimp has done colour management just fine for quite some time
Gimp isn't by itself a color-managed environment. While it has basic (working) color profiling support since 2.4, you'd still need your monitor to be calibrated, your DE and probably graphic card drivers to be colormanagement-aware (Gnome is, to some extent), have your printer to fully use ICC profiles (the same ones you use on Gimp for softproofing), and being aware of eventual limitations when buying professional monitors (I really don't know how well a Linux DE behaves with a 10-bit monitor). And yes, being able to calibrate it all using the usual tools.
Cinelerra has been used on professional big budget movies before, however if that doesn't float your boat the lightworks linux port is just about stable.
Please name one big-budget movie that was edited with Cinelerra. Have you actually ever tried to use it? I had, and it is so far behind the curve that is more of a fancy transcoding tool than a non-linear video editor. You probably would be better trying to do video editing with Windows Movie Maker than with Cinelerra.
Google is your friend.Linux is used in professional design environments you know. Can't vouch for autocad support but that is like asking for microsoft word support, not relating to the problem of creating documents or in this case designs.
Varicad seems more of an alternative to SolidWorks than to AutoCad. When you need to project buildings, it is nice to have all the schematics (mechanical, electrical, pipelining, etc) under the same format/program. Not to mention actual timesavers such as Revit or Autocad Architectural suite. And how bad for your job can it be when you reply to a multi-million building proposal with a document that may barf because someone isn't using AutoCad.
Or a word processor that won't barf when you are editing a 10,000 page document.
Maybe Latex works fine (I have very little experience with it), but does a Latex WYSWIG editor works well with that many pages? And how about database integration? I don't know if Word dies at 20k pages (never tried past 15k), but I've used some linux-compatible alternatives (such as OO) that won't even get close to that number.
Or a professional-grade multitrack sound editing software that actually take advantage of expensive hardware.
Jack itself isn't a Linux technology, as it can be run on other unixes and both Windows and OSX. And while Ardour is an excellent program (from the little that I've used it), and probably is a good alternative to Adobe Audition and casual ProTools users, if you have specialized hardware, you'll have driver problems. I actually don't care much for latency problems, but they seem to be a recurring issue with Linux kernel, so I'd be conservative when declaring it "fixed".
I'm sorry to inform you, there's no "engineering mindset" in using the wrong tool for the job. I call fiddling around system knobs and debugging drivers so the thing actually works just to not use a tried-and-true solution a waste of time, unless your job is actually engineering the system you're fiddling with. Shure, you can do everything I mentioned with Linux, given enough time, knowledge and patience. Maybe that makes sense for you, but I have actual work to do, so paying for a tool that will allow me to focus on my work and do it faster or effortlessly doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.
There are some cases when opening a 10,000 page document is needed/it's the easiest approach. Mail merge is one of them. But while I use Open/LibreOffice, I've had problems with hundred-megabyte documents of about 500 pages (books with pictures and diagrams), that are perfectly usable on MS Word.
Yeah, I also can't install Windows on my ALIX board. It's not compatible, as there's no graphics card. If you don't have enough RAM, it's not really compatible, is it?
Also, when you buy cheap VPS you get wthat you pay for. A cheap, crappy and overscribed service. Why would you want to add windows to the mix?
Actually, I believe most enterprise-grade VM systems already split RAM between systems, with some sort of deduplication technology. If pages are equal between VMs, the hypervisor will map them to the same page. Of course, operating systems already do some sort of this, with COW.
Not every distro installs a GUI by default. Even those that are install a GUI, not everyone of them uses gnome or kde. But hey you already know that.
Linux is a kernel. Every single program you run is external. Even those who provide base funcionality and wrap syscalls on a text-based command, such as mount and many other part of the util-linux package.
If you rebuild everything, you are doing a fancy reinstall. And if you actually use your computer for working, waiting a couple of days until you have your working environment back is not possible, and wasting hours correcting a procedure that should be done right anyway it's not my idea of fun.
Explorer.exe is just a shell, you can replace it with whatever you want (you even have a blackbox version for windows). If your machine is really screwed up by Windows Update (never saw it happen and I've worked with hundreds of desktops on the last couple of years), you can just rollback any alterations made. It actually works quite well. As a last resource, you can pop your Windows CD and reinstall your operating system without losing any of your data or your configurations, so it's pretty much like any other Unix.
The automatic reboot feature of Windows is absolutely annoying, but you can choose to not run it, and have the system notifty you of available updates. On the other hand, if your linux distro doesn't reboot after kernel upgrades, base library upgrades (such glibc, libjpg, libpng, libzip, perl, etc) that may be in use won't be refreshed in memory. Binary patching for running kernels seems to work, but AFAIK it's a 3rd party feature.
You can create them easily either by using a shellscript or an alias command. Maybe it is a good idea for desktop-oriented distros to provide them, but then again if you build some sort of automation in top of those "custom commands", that automation will be distro-dependant.
Not every file is mountable. In fact, very few files are actually mountable, so why should mount care for a fringe case?
The "everything is a file" charade works well to explain the system to end-users. The reality is a bit different - everything can be accessed with a file-like interface. Raw block devices aren't usually files (but yes, in my example they are), they just can be accessed as one, and sometimes with limitations.
The point is that not everyone uses mount the same way. Most modern linux distros with GUI usually allow the mounting of ISO files without recurring to the commandline, and they even create the appropriate temporary mountpoint folders as needed. Most users that are actually aware of mount funcionality probably don't need it to guess automagically the file format, but need it to be consistent and allow a certain degree of freedom.
My ZFS example is a good one - automatic filesystem detection could expose the file volumes to corruption, and I use them on a mountpoint with enough available free space, so/mnt or/tmp is out of the question, and predefining folders is not that of a good idea (I actually use FreeBSD and not Linux, and usually have dozens of/dev mountpoints and dozens of nullfs mountpoints on each machine). If a user wants an automated dumber version of the mount command (instead of using the GUI options available), it is easy to create it as a shellscript of even as an alias command, so its a non-issue.
And how conveniently you ignore most desktop Linux distros actually allow you to mount ISOs without recurring to the commandline or being a privileged user. But hey, don't let facts interfere with your rant against mount.
I've had my fair bit of problems with Windows update, but saying that Linux updating is better is absolutely hilarious. I've got problems ranging from completely fucking up gome and X, to buggy kernel ethernet drivers on a security update. Everyone I know that uses linux has had some kind of problem with updating.
Shure. Show me a photo editor that runs on Linux on a color-managed environment. Or where I can specify printer profiles for different papers supported by my expensive printer. Or a professional-grade video-editing suite that actually works (Smoke used to run on RedHat, but it seems there are no recent versions for Linux). Or a word processor that won't barf when you are editing a 10,000 page document. Or a graphical file manager with thumbnail visualization that actually works. Or a decent CAD suite (2D and 3D) with full AutoCad compatibility and plotter support. Or a professional-grade multitrack sound editing software that actually take advantage of expensive hardware. Or a DTP package with decent font hinting and rendering (Xara is very good, but not that compatible). And the list goes on and on and on.
Shure, you can do all this stuff on OSX, if you want to pay the Apple tax. At least with Windows machines, you can install whatever you want if you're fed with it, including Linux. (For now).
Actually, k3b and gnome's equivalent are part of some linux distributions, not all.
Even mount itself is an external program, and may not be available at all (embedded/customized systems, etc).
So, if you can't memorize the basic commands (and given that DOS and command-line interfaces were all the rage a couple of decades ago, and everyone - from kids to old people - used them without a problem), I'd say you have far greater problems than a demanding operating system.
If you double click on your network adapter, it will open a properties window with the current IP address, gateway, dns info, connection type, and more. The method is the same used by many Unix GUIs that have a panel for network administration.
On the other hand, in Linux you actually use 2 commands on the commandline to get the same adapter information - ifconfig and ethertool. On BSDs (and maybe other Unixes), ifconfig will give you all the information you need.
Suppose you have 3000 JPGs of pictures taken with a 10Mpx camera, and you need to find some photos you took of your friend with a blue shirt. Now browse the folder with Windows Explorer, and then with Gnome or Kde equivalent, and pray it won't crash. Or browse it via command line.
If you're worried of the time you'll spend opening windows, you can memorize their keyboard shortcuts, or even define new ones yourself. Yes there's no real match for find, bourne shell scripting, grep with regex and a whole lot of other commands that blow away what would be a visually complex task, but you also have a whole lot of other operations you do better visually. Multimedia file browsing is one of them.
Everytime I try to use Windows search I give up. If you actually think the crappy Windows search is a match for unix-like utilities like find, I pitty you. And I actually use Windows as my primary desktop operating system and like it, but I almost don't use Windows Explorer (except when I need to browse a folder visually), but instead I use a program called Total Commander, that not only provides me with a familiar two-panel interface, but also allows for tabbed browsing.
As a side note, the automated document conversion capabilities of OO are probably the most underrated feature of the suite. The only problem is the somewhat spotty documentation and a complex API (if you try to use it directly), but it is an absolute killer feature.
You can have GUI on a headless machine, so you don't really need to use the commandline, if you want. Even on "real" headless machines, such as those old servers with serial terminal connections and no real graphics card, you can run X on a framebuffer and forward the connection.
That said, I've never seen a Windows-compatible machine that couldn't be managed remotely. Some manufacturers even include KVM funcionality on the machine, so you can actually manage the BIOS and such remotely (such as HP's iLO).
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I've used Gentoo, but I'm not really into Linux. Almost all my unix machines are BSD (FreeBSD mostly), and I usually build everything from ports.
Ok, let me rephrase what I said - cheap VPS are probably more vulnerable securitywise, and mantained by a less skilled crew than a specialized provider. That translates to "I can't actually trust in any data in or out the VPS, because I don't know if they were hacked, or if they are even able to determine if they were or not". For you that may not be a problem, but for me it is.
If I install Ubuntu, I'd still have to install a ton of programs that I use, that may or maybe not compatbile with that specific release. I like to install my software one-by-one. because I like to know what is in the system and what dependencies the packages have. Blindly installing stuff just because it's available on the repositories is a dumb idea.
As for Windows, there are some tools available to create packages of most-used freely available software, such as http://ninite.com/. I can't vouch for warez in pornsites, as I tend to buy the commercial software that I use, but I don't really see the difference between buying for Windows or for Linux. The software still has to be installed, right?
Gimp has done colour management just fine for quite some time
Gimp isn't by itself a color-managed environment. While it has basic (working) color profiling support since 2.4, you'd still need your monitor to be calibrated, your DE and probably graphic card drivers to be colormanagement-aware (Gnome is, to some extent), have your printer to fully use ICC profiles (the same ones you use on Gimp for softproofing), and being aware of eventual limitations when buying professional monitors (I really don't know how well a Linux DE behaves with a 10-bit monitor). And yes, being able to calibrate it all using the usual tools.
Cinelerra has been used on professional big budget movies before, however if that doesn't float your boat the lightworks linux port is just about stable.
Please name one big-budget movie that was edited with Cinelerra. Have you actually ever tried to use it? I had, and it is so far behind the curve that is more of a fancy transcoding tool than a non-linear video editor. You probably would be better trying to do video editing with Windows Movie Maker than with Cinelerra.
Google is your friend.Linux is used in professional design environments you know. Can't vouch for autocad support but that is like asking for microsoft word support, not relating to the problem of creating documents or in this case designs.
Varicad seems more of an alternative to SolidWorks than to AutoCad. When you need to project buildings, it is nice to have all the schematics (mechanical, electrical, pipelining, etc) under the same format/program. Not to mention actual timesavers such as Revit or Autocad Architectural suite. And how bad for your job can it be when you reply to a multi-million building proposal with a document that may barf because someone isn't using AutoCad.
Or a word processor that won't barf when you are editing a 10,000 page document.
Maybe Latex works fine (I have very little experience with it), but does a Latex WYSWIG editor works well with that many pages? And how about database integration? I don't know if Word dies at 20k pages (never tried past 15k), but I've used some linux-compatible alternatives (such as OO) that won't even get close to that number.
Or a professional-grade multitrack sound editing software that actually take advantage of expensive hardware.
Jack itself isn't a Linux technology, as it can be run on other unixes and both Windows and OSX. And while Ardour is an excellent program (from the little that I've used it), and probably is a good alternative to Adobe Audition and casual ProTools users, if you have specialized hardware, you'll have driver problems. I actually don't care much for latency problems, but they seem to be a recurring issue with Linux kernel, so I'd be conservative when declaring it "fixed".
I'm sorry to inform you, there's no "engineering mindset" in using the wrong tool for the job. I call fiddling around system knobs and debugging drivers so the thing actually works just to not use a tried-and-true solution a waste of time, unless your job is actually engineering the system you're fiddling with. Shure, you can do everything I mentioned with Linux, given enough time, knowledge and patience. Maybe that makes sense for you, but I have actual work to do, so paying for a tool that will allow me to focus on my work and do it faster or effortlessly doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.
Does it have mii-tool?
At least on CentOS, ifconfig won't show you the link connection speed.
There are some cases when opening a 10,000 page document is needed/it's the easiest approach. Mail merge is one of them. But while I use Open/LibreOffice, I've had problems with hundred-megabyte documents of about 500 pages (books with pictures and diagrams), that are perfectly usable on MS Word.
Yeah, I also can't install Windows on my ALIX board. It's not compatible, as there's no graphics card. If you don't have enough RAM, it's not really compatible, is it?
Also, when you buy cheap VPS you get wthat you pay for. A cheap, crappy and overscribed service. Why would you want to add windows to the mix?
Actually, I believe most enterprise-grade VM systems already split RAM between systems, with some sort of deduplication technology. If pages are equal between VMs, the hypervisor will map them to the same page. Of course, operating systems already do some sort of this, with COW.
Not every distro installs a GUI by default. Even those that are install a GUI, not everyone of them uses gnome or kde. But hey you already know that.
Linux is a kernel. Every single program you run is external. Even those who provide base funcionality and wrap syscalls on a text-based command, such as mount and many other part of the util-linux package.
If you rebuild everything, you are doing a fancy reinstall. And if you actually use your computer for working, waiting a couple of days until you have your working environment back is not possible, and wasting hours correcting a procedure that should be done right anyway it's not my idea of fun.
Explorer.exe is just a shell, you can replace it with whatever you want (you even have a blackbox version for windows). If your machine is really screwed up by Windows Update (never saw it happen and I've worked with hundreds of desktops on the last couple of years), you can just rollback any alterations made. It actually works quite well. As a last resource, you can pop your Windows CD and reinstall your operating system without losing any of your data or your configurations, so it's pretty much like any other Unix.
The automatic reboot feature of Windows is absolutely annoying, but you can choose to not run it, and have the system notifty you of available updates. On the other hand, if your linux distro doesn't reboot after kernel upgrades, base library upgrades (such glibc, libjpg, libpng, libzip, perl, etc) that may be in use won't be refreshed in memory. Binary patching for running kernels seems to work, but AFAIK it's a 3rd party feature.
You can create them easily either by using a shellscript or an alias command. Maybe it is a good idea for desktop-oriented distros to provide them, but then again if you build some sort of automation in top of those "custom commands", that automation will be distro-dependant.
Not every file is mountable. In fact, very few files are actually mountable, so why should mount care for a fringe case?
The "everything is a file" charade works well to explain the system to end-users. The reality is a bit different - everything can be accessed with a file-like interface. Raw block devices aren't usually files (but yes, in my example they are), they just can be accessed as one, and sometimes with limitations.
The point is that not everyone uses mount the same way. Most modern linux distros with GUI usually allow the mounting of ISO files without recurring to the commandline, and they even create the appropriate temporary mountpoint folders as needed. Most users that are actually aware of mount funcionality probably don't need it to guess automagically the file format, but need it to be consistent and allow a certain degree of freedom. /mnt or /tmp is out of the question, and predefining folders is not that of a good idea (I actually use FreeBSD and not Linux, and usually have dozens of /dev mountpoints and dozens of nullfs mountpoints on each machine). If a user wants an automated dumber version of the mount command (instead of using the GUI options available), it is easy to create it as a shellscript of even as an alias command, so its a non-issue.
My ZFS example is a good one - automatic filesystem detection could expose the file volumes to corruption, and I use them on a mountpoint with enough available free space, so
And how conveniently you ignore most desktop Linux distros actually allow you to mount ISOs without recurring to the commandline or being a privileged user. But hey, don't let facts interfere with your rant against mount.
I've had my fair bit of problems with Windows update, but saying that Linux updating is better is absolutely hilarious. I've got problems ranging from completely fucking up gome and X, to buggy kernel ethernet drivers on a security update. Everyone I know that uses linux has had some kind of problem with updating.
Shure. Show me a photo editor that runs on Linux on a color-managed environment. Or where I can specify printer profiles for different papers supported by my expensive printer. Or a professional-grade video-editing suite that actually works (Smoke used to run on RedHat, but it seems there are no recent versions for Linux). Or a word processor that won't barf when you are editing a 10,000 page document. Or a graphical file manager with thumbnail visualization that actually works. Or a decent CAD suite (2D and 3D) with full AutoCad compatibility and plotter support. Or a professional-grade multitrack sound editing software that actually take advantage of expensive hardware. Or a DTP package with decent font hinting and rendering (Xara is very good, but not that compatible). And the list goes on and on and on.
Shure, you can do all this stuff on OSX, if you want to pay the Apple tax. At least with Windows machines, you can install whatever you want if you're fed with it, including Linux. (For now).
Actually, k3b and gnome's equivalent are part of some linux distributions, not all.
Even mount itself is an external program, and may not be available at all (embedded/customized systems, etc).
If you are using VNC over a slow link, you are doing it wrong. Try with FreeNX.
So, if you can't memorize the basic commands (and given that DOS and command-line interfaces were all the rage a couple of decades ago, and everyone - from kids to old people - used them without a problem), I'd say you have far greater problems than a demanding operating system.
If you double click on your network adapter, it will open a properties window with the current IP address, gateway, dns info, connection type, and more. The method is the same used by many Unix GUIs that have a panel for network administration.
On the other hand, in Linux you actually use 2 commands on the commandline to get the same adapter information - ifconfig and ethertool. On BSDs (and maybe other Unixes), ifconfig will give you all the information you need.
Suppose you have 3000 JPGs of pictures taken with a 10Mpx camera, and you need to find some photos you took of your friend with a blue shirt. Now browse the folder with Windows Explorer, and then with Gnome or Kde equivalent, and pray it won't crash. Or browse it via command line.
If you're worried of the time you'll spend opening windows, you can memorize their keyboard shortcuts, or even define new ones yourself. Yes there's no real match for find, bourne shell scripting, grep with regex and a whole lot of other commands that blow away what would be a visually complex task, but you also have a whole lot of other operations you do better visually. Multimedia file browsing is one of them.
Everytime I try to use Windows search I give up. If you actually think the crappy Windows search is a match for unix-like utilities like find, I pitty you. And I actually use Windows as my primary desktop operating system and like it, but I almost don't use Windows Explorer (except when I need to browse a folder visually), but instead I use a program called Total Commander, that not only provides me with a familiar two-panel interface, but also allows for tabbed browsing.
As a side note, the automated document conversion capabilities of OO are probably the most underrated feature of the suite. The only problem is the somewhat spotty documentation and a complex API (if you try to use it directly), but it is an absolute killer feature.
You can have GUI on a headless machine, so you don't really need to use the commandline, if you want. Even on "real" headless machines, such as those old servers with serial terminal connections and no real graphics card, you can run X on a framebuffer and forward the connection.
That said, I've never seen a Windows-compatible machine that couldn't be managed remotely. Some manufacturers even include KVM funcionality on the machine, so you can actually manage the BIOS and such remotely (such as HP's iLO).