There's an intrinsic reason why most gamers are fat bastards (me included incidentally), we don't like to move around much.
If every game had to be played with Kinect, I think I'd give up gaming and go ride my bicycle - because at least I'd still get to sit down on my fat arse while exercising...
...I've played and worked with computers for about 40 of them.
Mouse and keyboard will do me as input devices until the day I die, maybe a little bit of touchscreen and some voice input for the future to waken the good-for-nothing idle teenage carer to empty my bag.
I'm buggered if I'm going to start deleting words in vi by lifting one leg in the air and gyrating my plastic hips three-times in a clockwise motion.
Why? I've never played either but they're both games and can be equally immersive to whoever is playing them.
Just because one happens to be fat cartoon birds and the other happens to be fat gamers pretending to be soldiers does not make one any more or less a game than the other.
What do you mean, "old fashioned way"? You make it sound like a bad thing...
I've gamed regularly for over 30 years of my life and never once felt the inclination to own a console. Every since I've started gaming I've done it on platforms where I can take software and games from just about any source I like and play them. I can choose to go buy certain games, others I could play legally as free/shareware/open source games. Just because they may not have the latest 3D graphics or multi-million dollar development budgets does not mean that for what they are they are less immersive or engaging.
If consoles work for you and others then go knock yourself out. But take the blinkers off and don't just assume that because others get their gaming fixes by not doing it on consoles means that they are either less serious gamers or don't get as much fun out of it - even for an "old timer" like me, it's as much fun as it ever was... if anything, the vibrant indie game and retro gaming scene is creating a return to the "Golden Age Of Computers" where there is far more choice than ever to get a gaming fix.
I couldn't think of anything *WORSE* for my gaming fun than tying myself to one platform where games releases only happen because the games developers are licensed by the manufacturer to release those games...
I think it's a perfectly valid comparison based on the changing nature of gaming anyway. When the PS3 and XBox 360 were released, there was no such thing as Kickstarter projects, the whole commercial PC games scene was much more vibrant with fewer independent releases, and whilst Steam did exist then, there was no thought about making it available for Linux.
The need for closed and specialised hardware these days is lessening, whether it's for telephony servers (the industry I work in) or for gaming. Mobile gaming has meant that the general populace is once again becoming comfortable with small games that don't necessarily have the greatest 3D graphics, retrogaming is enjoying an upsurge and the indie and "less commercial" gaming community is becoming huge with the likes of Steam, Desura and Good Old Games offering games distribution models.
It's now a reasonably straightforward task to buy a cheap "computer on a board", throw on a free Linux build and make a proof-of-concept gaming console (or anything else you can think of), I think it's an extremely dangerous time for Sony or Microsoft to be releasing new consoles.
Not that I use (or particularly care about) Ubuntu anyway, I would assume that being the high profile company that they are in the Linux world, if they made any violations of the GPL or other licenses the software they use, someone would pick up on it fairly quickly.
No, it won't. It's built on Open Source software, the source code is open and subject to constant peer review, any backdoors in their would be noticed.
So you are saying you never bought Windows software, installed and it just worked?
You are using semantics to try and pervert the course of this discussion - I am not talking about Microsoft software, I am talking about Microsoft operating systems. And, yes, I have never bought a Microsoft OS that just worked. I have always had to either install additional drivers from the Internet or an optical disk, apply system updates (because even pre-installed on a PC, it has probably been sat on a shelf for a few months) or build a slipstream installation disk.
None of the above is any different to what I would need to do with Linux - but then I never claimed Linux "just works".
Sorry but this is BS. Windows does that for you, automatically... and so does Ubuntu. And you know what? this part works well in both.
Indeed, you are correct. But you yourself have now contradicted your own "just works" statement.
For example I just reinstalled Windows in machine that changed owner. Insert CD, give it a few hours to download all updates and drivers and it was ready to go, no manually "updating drivers" needed.
And it is always "just working" during these times? You never, say, have to interrupt what you are doing a reboot your PC for new updates to be loaded?
No it doesn't. Automatic disk defragmentation is on by default.
Erm, automatic defragmentation is still defragging regularly. Semantics again.
What is this virus scanning the registry? Again a decent virus software will silently do that for you, by default. No need to manually edit the.config file and chmod permissions of the whatever directory.
Semantics a third time. I was talking about virus scanning the entire PC, not the registry. However, do please note that virus scanners do remove registry entries placed by viruses or malware, so in a semantic sense you are virus-scanning the registry also.
In order to hate something, you need to care about. In never having used an Apple device in 30+ years of work and hobbyist computing, I clearly don't care about - therefore I cannot hate it.
And I found it necessary to reply because I disagreed with your opinion on what is an open message board. If you cannot handle someone holding a different opinion to yours, then don't post on here in the first place.
1. I'm a control freak when it comes to the computers I use. I want to know exactly what is running on them, when it's running and why it's running. I want the ability to customise it completely to my requirements, I want to be able to remove anything I don't need and add anything that I want to add. If, with that level of control, I mess things up then I accept full responsibility for doing it, I don't need to place that responsibility into the hands of some corporation to manage on my behalf.
2. The Windows registry essentially makes the OS unusable to me and is a poor design decision on the part of Microsoft. It uses obfuscated entries that defy common sense and you really have no way of knowing until you try it whether or not changing a Registry setting will crash your system when you do it. On the other hand, UNIX/Linux uses common sense for configuration - if the config affects everyone on the system, it will be somewhere under/etc, if it affects a specific user it will be a "dot file (or in a "dot" directory) in that user's home directory. All the configuration is stored in flat text or XML files, I can copy them onto other machines at my leisure to copy settings across, I can make a backup before I change it, and I can write scripts to change it automatically. I can also change configuration for a test user and test the settings before rolling them out system-wide, there's little or no chance of me crashing a system completely when I do it that way.
3. In Linux, if I migrate or backup a user, I just copy across or archive their home directory - done. In Windows, I've never been able to do that. If I try to copy across everything under the user's "Documents and Settings" or "Users" directory, it invariably fails because of some file or directory permission somewhere not letting me do it.
4. In Linux, I have full control over how I configure the kernel in terms of deciding how I want to use a single OS image across multiple machines. I can use a lowest common denominator configuration, for example, such that a Linux OS image running on, say, a modern multicore 64-bit AMD CPU can be imaged straight onto a old 32-bit Pentium-based machine, it will boot up and start working. Do that with Windows and the second machine will usually blue screen on boot up because the CPU is too different from the first one - not to mention having to mess about with license keys or, alternatively, spending hours or days making and testing a slipstreamed image with all the settings installed from boot.
5. I can build a base Linux installation that loads up certain core services on every machine but then, say, boots up a GUI environment entirely appropriate to the device it's on - for example, I can use a lightweight DE on a low-power device, or I can have an X86-based computer have an identical look and feel to an ARM one. I get to decide how that looks, not Microsoft.
For what I need computers to generally do these days, there is very little difference between the capabilities of a Windows PC and a Linux PC and my desire to control all of my computing is clearly at odds with Microsoft's desire to control all of the computing on a Windows PC. That makes Windows useless to me, apart from a half-dozen or so killer apps that run fine on a virtualised XP instance within Linux.
Sorry, but how many versions of text editor do you need?
It's a fairly simple type of application and someone who needs advanced text editing for, say, programming then probably installs something like geany - or goes and learns all the shortcuts and macro-ing in vi or emacs.
And just how much have you researched this anyway? I use Linux and Gnome most of the time, gedit occasionally, but even I didn't know it was available for Windows - probably because there's a much better free alternative to Notepad I use called Notepad++.
You can't just pick one simple tool and state that is the definitive benchmark to gauge everything else by... I've never once used KDE and I believe they have the Kate (?) text editor built into it - but I couldn't tell you how good or bad it is because I've never had the occasion to it.
Jesus, people, just occasionally form opinions from a position of knowledge and experience, rather than "because the bloke in the pub told me so it must be true".
I use Linux, but never Ubuntu, so cannot comment specifically about package management and PPA's on it. I do understand from others who use it that it's reasonably good.
But WHY the command line hatred? That says to me you don't understand what a command line is for in the first place... it's there for ease of access and for automation, that is the power of the command line and, yes, is precisely the reason why GUI-focused OSes like Windows still have it built in - hell, they even call one of them "Windows PowerShell".
An operating system consists of a large number of tools designed to do certain jobs. Some of them are GUI-based, some are command line based.
UNIX has a philosphy of lots of simple single-task tools that you can put together how you like in scripts, then use those scripts over and over again for tasks you need to repeat. You can even schedule those scripts to run automatically at certain times of day. That's the power you have using a UNIX shell that even Microsoft has copied to some degree.
In addition to that, a shell prompt is much easier to set up and use over remote access than a remote desktop session - for example, it's dead easy to access a Linux shell prompt securely with SSH from a low-powered mobile phone and maybe not even possible to share a desktop to the phone, even if you have the additional bandwidth requirements to do it.
Yes, to be a power user on Linux, you probably need to use the shell sometimes because there's good reason to do so, For example, if you and I had to sit and make identical changes to an identical text file, I pretty much guarantee you I'd be done with the edits in vi at the command prompt before you were even halfway through doing it in your graphical editor like gedit or Notepad, that's because I know the vi shortcut keys so well through long familiarity with it.
The command line is a tool like any other piece of graphical software on the system, and you need to sit and learn about it like with any other piece of software. And that's why people who complain about it don't understand why it's there and what you can do with it in the first place.
In 30 years as a telecoms and computer professional and hobbyist, I've used Windows, Linux and UNIX absolutely loads, but never once found any of them lacking enough in any area to even consider ever buying anything by Apple. I'm not an Apple hater by any means, I have just never found a need to go find out about anything they do on the basis that the stuff they make is at a premium price because it appears to come in a fashionable-looking box usually with a big logo on it.
And to me, a computer is a tool to get jobs done, not a fashion accessory that I need to be seen with when posing in Starbuck's, or to impress someone who happens to be looking over my shoulder...
I can't comment on Ubuntu, I don't use it, I do use Gentoo Linux and I spend a lot of time editing text files to get stuff working - but I like tinkering so I'm okay doing that.
However, I've used Windows a lot over the years but never myself witnessed this "just works" panacea that you describe. If I've bought a PC with an OEM Windows license on it, then the first time it's powered up, I need to update all the drivers and put on Windows updates. More than likely, I then need to strip out a load of software that came pre-installed that I don't need. On some occasions, even then I don't get the Windows performance I want, so I go buy a proper license and do a slipstreamed build of only the stuff I want to be running on it. Not a problem, I'm anal about customising OSes and a tinkerer.
In addition to that, I have to do other maintenance on a Windows PC that I don't need to ever do on a Linux PC to keep it running nicely - the Windows PC needs to be de-fragged regularly, I need do remove crap out of the Registry, and then I have to virus scan it. Again, not a problem, system administration is necessary on any PC running any OS.
The problem I do have is that too many people take their knowledge of Windows for granted like it was "just there in their head" when they emerged from the womb, All this stuff needs to be learned, all this stuff took time to learn in the first place and all takes time to do on a regular basis.
Last week I bought myself a new Lenovo laptop for use with Linux with a nice JBL speaker-based hi quality sound system built in.
Don't get me wrong, once I wiped Windows 8 and started the Linux install (using source-based Gentoo Linux) I knew I'd have some fiddling to do with EFI booting, power management and few other bits and pieces, some of which I am still tweaking now - but I'd planned for that.
Sound was never an issue on it, however. I installed Gnome and PulseAudio as usual, tried a few FLAC files from my collection and it sounds beautiful, better internal sound quality than any laptop, Windows or Linux, that I've owned before.
Is it as good as it would have been under Windows 8? I've no idea, it does what it says on the tin...
I've had sound quality issues on PCs in the past, but generally that's down to in-built sound on the motherboard, a £30 PCI sound card usually fixes it in Linux or Windows.
Ubuntu is not "the be all and end all" of Linux, it is simply a distribution designed to be usable by the average Windows user if they want to give it a try.
Yes, by all means state that it can take a lot of time and effort to get a desktop Linux distro working exactly the way that you want it but others will state that is simply a trade-off for having the flexibility to combine countless desktop environments and window managers in pretty much any way you want. Ubuntu's Unity is merely one facet of that flexibility, I personally couldn't think of a more horrific desktop environment to use but if others like it, so be it, it doesn't affect me doing stuff the way that I want to.
Although I've used both Windows and Linux extensively over the years, XP with the Classic desktop was, for me, the closest Microsoft got to a perfect desktop environment, that's why I'm still using Gnome 2 at the moment because it works very similarly to Windows Classic.
I tried Windows 7, I even bought a shop copy and played with it for 2 weeks but I found the Aero interface ugly and cumbersome to use, even the Classic interface in 7 was just a poor approximation of the one in XP.
"Sabotage" is the wrong word to have used in this instance. If you're saying that the Gnome and Ubuntu devs made some bad design decisions with Gnome 3 and Unity respectively then I couldn't agree more, and I've never liked KDE full stop. But there's plenty of other alternatives out there and whilst it may need some time and effort to slot everything together, it's perfectly possible to have a nice slick Linux desktop system to work in.
The definition of "power user" frequently means "I'm too set in my ways and too bloody lazy to possibly save myself some money by spending a little of my incredibly valuable time to install and play with some of the free alternatives to Windows-only applications."
HEY EVERYONE!!! pla HAS CRACKED IT!!! HE HAS THE ANSWER!!! LINUX IS SHIT ON THE DESKTOP!!!
Here was me, running Linux Gnome desktops and laptops for at least the past 10 years, thinking it ran perfectly fine.... and then you make this comment and all of I sudden I see how right you are!
That's it, I'm finished with this conversation as I scrabble for my car keys and dive to the nearest computer store that is open on a Sunday for a Windows installation DVD.
(Warning: The level of sarcasm in the above comments do not necessarily reflect the level of sarcasm amongst Slashdot contributors in general.)
Not for me, unfortunately, I'm a LibreOffice peon, it does all I need a spreadsheet to do.
I do have virtualised XP installations kicking about for killer apps like MediaMonkey, Tag&Rename, Clrmamepro and Irfanview (they all run reasonably well in WINE on Linux with a bit of tweaking incidentally) but this serves as an illustration of the fact that what you consider to be a killer app is not what I consider to be a killer app.
But a minority of people are power users, that's the entire point.
I'm not a spreadsheet power user, LibreOffice does all and more that I need spreadsheets to do - and if I don't need the power of Microsoft Office, surely it's better I use a free alternative than download a "hooky" copy to my PC because I'm not prepared to pay for it.
Not only that, but lots of people boast about being "power users" when in reality they are no such thing. I have a number of friends who are seriously good amateur photographers who believe they need Photoshop (and sometimes "hooky" versions of it) because they believe they are "power users". Yet when I see some of the, albeit, impressive stuff they do with photos and say "GIMP can do that", they usually look somewhat bemused.
I think people sometimes over-estimate their abilities and requirements, in all honesty....
This is an honest question but can I ask you when the last time you did a Windows (re)install and compared it to a Linux (re)install?
I guarantee you now that if you use a Linux distro aimed at the same levels of user experience that Windows is (i.e. Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) that your Linux system with all hardware fully working will be up long before your Windows one is.
I have never had one single installation of Windows where I have not had to use a provided CD or DVD to install additional drivers, and then had to go out to various web sites to get other or updated drivers in order to get all the hardware working.
Yes, I accept there are such things as integrated Windows installations and re-installations from backup partitions that make it all quicker, but a Ubuntu or Mint CD will usually find all your hardware first time and if there are updates to be put on, you can usually just fire up the included package manager and click on them.
I always get slightly annoyed with people when they quote "time" as a reason for not using Linux. I've administered home Linux and Windows systems for years and in my experience you spend about an equal time on both. Bearing in mind that the intention is to keep my PCs running nice and fast for as much as possible, on Windows I have to do regular defragmentation, registry cleaning, virus and malware checking - all of this is stuff I don't have to do on Linux and all of which adds to the administration time.
But I really like XP a lot. It's stable and trim it down a bit and keep it maintained, it can run nice and slick and fast - plus it supports Windows Classic meaning no valuable CPU cycles are wasted on unnecessary eye candy that only serves to impress someone looking over your shoulder.
I tried Windows 7 for 2 weeks, I even bought a licensed copy of it. I hated it. The AERO GUI is cluttered and the approximation it makes to Windows Classic mode means that one of the speed advantages of XP, namely being able to cram 20 or 30 shortcut icons on the taskbar can't be done in Windows 7 because even in Classic mode, all the icons are spaced out far too much - yes, I know they include the additional functionality of being minimised windows also, but when you're a person who does minimisation and maximisation of windows with shortcut keys, that "improvement" makes bugger all difference.
I was also extremely "annoyed" with Control Panel - all the stuff I had in XP was there but somehow moved about and renamed with all manner of supplementary crap I didn't need also in there too.
Yes, it was as stable as XP and whilst I don't like being treated like a kindergarten kid on a computer, it did ask me lots of times if I really wanted to do something I was about to do, which is probably fine for less experienced people. But after two weeks of using it, I deleted it and went back to a creaky XP installation on my reasonably new hardware because I personally saw no value in Windows 7. It struck me as an OS that didn't want to work the way I want an OS to work but the way Microsoft thinks it should work - and let's face it, Microsoft have pushed that philosophy further with Windows 8!
People laugh at me because on my home multicore stacks-of-memory desktops and laptops, I still run Gnome 2 with no bells-and-whistles and no acceleration. But it does the job I need to do and am used to doing with a computer, and Gnome 3 and Ubuntu's Unity don't - yes, sometimes Linux developers don't listen to their users either.
At some point in the future I may check out Cinnamon to get a more updateable "Gnome 2" experience, and the nice thing is I can probably still run Gnome 2 in parallel until I am ready to make the switch fully. So Linux wins there because at least I get a choice to choose my desktop GUI.
Yes, I don't doubt a lot of inexperienced people feel better inside Windows 7 than XP from a security perspective, but those same people still had to adapt to the changes in Windows 7 over XP and with me being a computer geek, the fact that it ran (in my experience) just as stable as XP was not enough reason for me to be interested in learning where everything has been moved to this time.
In my view, Microsoft made a mistake with Windows 7 and are just making more mistakes as they go forward. If they'd addressed user requirements properly, they have made Windows 7 more modular and allowed the user to attach whatever GUI they wanted to it (even run no GUI at all if they wanted to) to make it scaleable across low and high power systems, exactly as you have always been able to with Linux.
But, of course, that would have meant flexibility and Microsoft don't do flexibility.
Sorry, are we talking about the *SAME* DirectX that Microsoft fragmented across XP and Vista that resulted in most commercial game development moving exclusively to consoles?
Have you been into a games store recently and noticed the size of the PC Games section, assuming they have one at all?
I'm not sure if fragmenting DirectX on Windows was a deliberate act by Microsoft to force developers to XBox, but the end result is that if you want to keep up with modern commercial games (personally I don't) then you buy a console - which ultimately reduces the reason you give above for not trying out Linux.
This week I bought a new Lenovo laptop that came with Windows 8. I'm mostly a Linux user, I've always liked XP, never understood the value add of Windows 7 (simply a 64-bit port of XP with everything moved about a bit and an unnecessary accelerated and cluttered GUI) and don't plan on using Windows 8 ever. With that said, if I could have got Windows 7 on the laptop, I'd have used it and built a Linux dual boot.
Of course, there was no chance of getting a downgrade to Windows 7 due to the Microsoft dicatorship - after a few emails to Microsoft and Lenovo trying to get a downgrade and just getting canned responses to the emails, I blew Windows 8 away completely and just built the machine with Gentoo Linux. It took me a few days of messing around but now it boots damned fast, uses EFI (with Secure Boot turned off) and the only thing I can't get to work yet is the Ethernet NIC due to it being new hardware - but wireless networking was no problem to get working.
Yes, it's taking a lot of my time to do it and I'm no sloth when it comes to Linux, but with tweaking a lot of things, it's running pretty much anything Windows did, including games - and with Steam appearing on Linux that's pretty much killed Windows for good for me now. I like XP, it runs fine in VirtualBox (it actually runs better in VirtualBox than on some of the modern multi-core hardware I have) and still lets me have access to the handful of killer applications that I use Windows for.
A bit more flexibility on behalf of the vendors and they would still have had a (dual-booting) Windows user who might have eventually got to like Windows 7, but I wasn't being forced down the Windows 8 path, so now I run nothing current.
Slashdot Mirror
That one always puzzled me too...
There's an intrinsic reason why most gamers are fat bastards (me included incidentally), we don't like to move around much.
If every game had to be played with Kinect, I think I'd give up gaming and go ride my bicycle - because at least I'd still get to sit down on my fat arse while exercising...
...I've played and worked with computers for about 40 of them.
Mouse and keyboard will do me as input devices until the day I die, maybe a little bit of touchscreen and some voice input for the future to waken the good-for-nothing idle teenage carer to empty my bag.
I'm buggered if I'm going to start deleting words in vi by lifting one leg in the air and gyrating my plastic hips three-times in a clockwise motion.
Oh, and get off my lawn.
Why? I've never played either but they're both games and can be equally immersive to whoever is playing them.
Just because one happens to be fat cartoon birds and the other happens to be fat gamers pretending to be soldiers does not make one any more or less a game than the other.
so does that make me "Anti-Bono"?
What do you mean, "old fashioned way"? You make it sound like a bad thing...
I've gamed regularly for over 30 years of my life and never once felt the inclination to own a console. Every since I've started gaming I've done it on platforms where I can take software and games from just about any source I like and play them. I can choose to go buy certain games, others I could play legally as free/shareware/open source games. Just because they may not have the latest 3D graphics or multi-million dollar development budgets does not mean that for what they are they are less immersive or engaging.
If consoles work for you and others then go knock yourself out. But take the blinkers off and don't just assume that because others get their gaming fixes by not doing it on consoles means that they are either less serious gamers or don't get as much fun out of it - even for an "old timer" like me, it's as much fun as it ever was... if anything, the vibrant indie game and retro gaming scene is creating a return to the "Golden Age Of Computers" where there is far more choice than ever to get a gaming fix.
I couldn't think of anything *WORSE* for my gaming fun than tying myself to one platform where games releases only happen because the games developers are licensed by the manufacturer to release those games...
I think it's a perfectly valid comparison based on the changing nature of gaming anyway. When the PS3 and XBox 360 were released, there was no such thing as Kickstarter projects, the whole commercial PC games scene was much more vibrant with fewer independent releases, and whilst Steam did exist then, there was no thought about making it available for Linux.
The need for closed and specialised hardware these days is lessening, whether it's for telephony servers (the industry I work in) or for gaming. Mobile gaming has meant that the general populace is once again becoming comfortable with small games that don't necessarily have the greatest 3D graphics, retrogaming is enjoying an upsurge and the indie and "less commercial" gaming community is becoming huge with the likes of Steam, Desura and Good Old Games offering games distribution models.
It's now a reasonably straightforward task to buy a cheap "computer on a board", throw on a free Linux build and make a proof-of-concept gaming console (or anything else you can think of), I think it's an extremely dangerous time for Sony or Microsoft to be releasing new consoles.
Not that I use (or particularly care about) Ubuntu anyway, I would assume that being the high profile company that they are in the Linux world, if they made any violations of the GPL or other licenses the software they use, someone would pick up on it fairly quickly.
No, it won't. It's built on Open Source software, the source code is open and subject to constant peer review, any backdoors in their would be noticed.
So you are saying you never bought Windows software, installed and it just worked?
You are using semantics to try and pervert the course of this discussion - I am not talking about Microsoft software, I am talking about Microsoft operating systems. And, yes, I have never bought a Microsoft OS that just worked. I have always had to either install additional drivers from the Internet or an optical disk, apply system updates (because even pre-installed on a PC, it has probably been sat on a shelf for a few months) or build a slipstream installation disk.
None of the above is any different to what I would need to do with Linux - but then I never claimed Linux "just works".
Sorry but this is BS. Windows does that for you, automatically... and so does Ubuntu. And you know what? this part works well in both.
Indeed, you are correct. But you yourself have now contradicted your own "just works" statement.
For example I just reinstalled Windows in machine that changed owner. Insert CD, give it a few hours to download all updates and drivers and it was ready to go, no manually "updating drivers" needed.
And it is always "just working" during these times? You never, say, have to interrupt what you are doing a reboot your PC for new updates to be loaded?
No it doesn't. Automatic disk defragmentation is on by default.
Erm, automatic defragmentation is still defragging regularly. Semantics again.
What is this virus scanning the registry? Again a decent virus software will silently do that for you, by default. No need to manually edit the .config file and chmod permissions of the whatever directory.
Semantics a third time. I was talking about virus scanning the entire PC, not the registry. However, do please note that virus scanners do remove registry entries placed by viruses or malware, so in a semantic sense you are virus-scanning the registry also.
In order to hate something, you need to care about. In never having used an Apple device in 30+ years of work and hobbyist computing, I clearly don't care about - therefore I cannot hate it.
And I found it necessary to reply because I disagreed with your opinion on what is an open message board. If you cannot handle someone holding a different opinion to yours, then don't post on here in the first place.
Okay, here's why, for me, Windows won't do:
1. I'm a control freak when it comes to the computers I use. I want to know exactly what is running on them, when it's running and why it's running. I want the ability to customise it completely to my requirements, I want to be able to remove anything I don't need and add anything that I want to add. If, with that level of control, I mess things up then I accept full responsibility for doing it, I don't need to place that responsibility into the hands of some corporation to manage on my behalf.
2. The Windows registry essentially makes the OS unusable to me and is a poor design decision on the part of Microsoft. It uses obfuscated entries that defy common sense and you really have no way of knowing until you try it whether or not changing a Registry setting will crash your system when you do it. On the other hand, UNIX/Linux uses common sense for configuration - if the config affects everyone on the system, it will be somewhere under /etc, if it affects a specific user it will be a "dot file (or in a "dot" directory) in that user's home directory. All the configuration is stored in flat text or XML files, I can copy them onto other machines at my leisure to copy settings across, I can make a backup before I change it, and I can write scripts to change it automatically. I can also change configuration for a test user and test the settings before rolling them out system-wide, there's little or no chance of me crashing a system completely when I do it that way.
3. In Linux, if I migrate or backup a user, I just copy across or archive their home directory - done. In Windows, I've never been able to do that. If I try to copy across everything under the user's "Documents and Settings" or "Users" directory, it invariably fails because of some file or directory permission somewhere not letting me do it.
4. In Linux, I have full control over how I configure the kernel in terms of deciding how I want to use a single OS image across multiple machines. I can use a lowest common denominator configuration, for example, such that a Linux OS image running on, say, a modern multicore 64-bit AMD CPU can be imaged straight onto a old 32-bit Pentium-based machine, it will boot up and start working. Do that with Windows and the second machine will usually blue screen on boot up because the CPU is too different from the first one - not to mention having to mess about with license keys or, alternatively, spending hours or days making and testing a slipstreamed image with all the settings installed from boot.
5. I can build a base Linux installation that loads up certain core services on every machine but then, say, boots up a GUI environment entirely appropriate to the device it's on - for example, I can use a lightweight DE on a low-power device, or I can have an X86-based computer have an identical look and feel to an ARM one. I get to decide how that looks, not Microsoft.
For what I need computers to generally do these days, there is very little difference between the capabilities of a Windows PC and a Linux PC and my desire to control all of my computing is clearly at odds with Microsoft's desire to control all of the computing on a Windows PC. That makes Windows useless to me, apart from a half-dozen or so killer apps that run fine on a virtualised XP instance within Linux.
Sorry, but how many versions of text editor do you need?
It's a fairly simple type of application and someone who needs advanced text editing for, say, programming then probably installs something like geany - or goes and learns all the shortcuts and macro-ing in vi or emacs.
And just how much have you researched this anyway? I use Linux and Gnome most of the time, gedit occasionally, but even I didn't know it was available for Windows - probably because there's a much better free alternative to Notepad I use called Notepad++.
You can't just pick one simple tool and state that is the definitive benchmark to gauge everything else by... I've never once used KDE and I believe they have the Kate (?) text editor built into it - but I couldn't tell you how good or bad it is because I've never had the occasion to it.
Jesus, people, just occasionally form opinions from a position of knowledge and experience, rather than "because the bloke in the pub told me so it must be true".
I use Linux, but never Ubuntu, so cannot comment specifically about package management and PPA's on it. I do understand from others who use it that it's reasonably good.
But WHY the command line hatred? That says to me you don't understand what a command line is for in the first place... it's there for ease of access and for automation, that is the power of the command line and, yes, is precisely the reason why GUI-focused OSes like Windows still have it built in - hell, they even call one of them "Windows PowerShell".
An operating system consists of a large number of tools designed to do certain jobs. Some of them are GUI-based, some are command line based.
UNIX has a philosphy of lots of simple single-task tools that you can put together how you like in scripts, then use those scripts over and over again for tasks you need to repeat. You can even schedule those scripts to run automatically at certain times of day. That's the power you have using a UNIX shell that even Microsoft has copied to some degree.
In addition to that, a shell prompt is much easier to set up and use over remote access than a remote desktop session - for example, it's dead easy to access a Linux shell prompt securely with SSH from a low-powered mobile phone and maybe not even possible to share a desktop to the phone, even if you have the additional bandwidth requirements to do it.
Yes, to be a power user on Linux, you probably need to use the shell sometimes because there's good reason to do so, For example, if you and I had to sit and make identical changes to an identical text file, I pretty much guarantee you I'd be done with the edits in vi at the command prompt before you were even halfway through doing it in your graphical editor like gedit or Notepad, that's because I know the vi shortcut keys so well through long familiarity with it.
The command line is a tool like any other piece of graphical software on the system, and you need to sit and learn about it like with any other piece of software. And that's why people who complain about it don't understand why it's there and what you can do with it in the first place.
Sorry, what's this "OS X" of which you speak?
In 30 years as a telecoms and computer professional and hobbyist, I've used Windows, Linux and UNIX absolutely loads, but never once found any of them lacking enough in any area to even consider ever buying anything by Apple. I'm not an Apple hater by any means, I have just never found a need to go find out about anything they do on the basis that the stuff they make is at a premium price because it appears to come in a fashionable-looking box usually with a big logo on it.
And to me, a computer is a tool to get jobs done, not a fashion accessory that I need to be seen with when posing in Starbuck's, or to impress someone who happens to be looking over my shoulder...
I can't comment on Ubuntu, I don't use it, I do use Gentoo Linux and I spend a lot of time editing text files to get stuff working - but I like tinkering so I'm okay doing that.
However, I've used Windows a lot over the years but never myself witnessed this "just works" panacea that you describe. If I've bought a PC with an OEM Windows license on it, then the first time it's powered up, I need to update all the drivers and put on Windows updates. More than likely, I then need to strip out a load of software that came pre-installed that I don't need. On some occasions, even then I don't get the Windows performance I want, so I go buy a proper license and do a slipstreamed build of only the stuff I want to be running on it. Not a problem, I'm anal about customising OSes and a tinkerer.
In addition to that, I have to do other maintenance on a Windows PC that I don't need to ever do on a Linux PC to keep it running nicely - the Windows PC needs to be de-fragged regularly, I need do remove crap out of the Registry, and then I have to virus scan it. Again, not a problem, system administration is necessary on any PC running any OS.
The problem I do have is that too many people take their knowledge of Windows for granted like it was "just there in their head" when they emerged from the womb, All this stuff needs to be learned, all this stuff took time to learn in the first place and all takes time to do on a regular basis.
Sorry, "just works" doesn't exist for me...
Last week I bought myself a new Lenovo laptop for use with Linux with a nice JBL speaker-based hi quality sound system built in.
Don't get me wrong, once I wiped Windows 8 and started the Linux install (using source-based Gentoo Linux) I knew I'd have some fiddling to do with EFI booting, power management and few other bits and pieces, some of which I am still tweaking now - but I'd planned for that.
Sound was never an issue on it, however. I installed Gnome and PulseAudio as usual, tried a few FLAC files from my collection and it sounds beautiful, better internal sound quality than any laptop, Windows or Linux, that I've owned before.
Is it as good as it would have been under Windows 8? I've no idea, it does what it says on the tin...
I've had sound quality issues on PCs in the past, but generally that's down to in-built sound on the motherboard, a £30 PCI sound card usually fixes it in Linux or Windows.
Ubuntu is not "the be all and end all" of Linux, it is simply a distribution designed to be usable by the average Windows user if they want to give it a try.
Yes, by all means state that it can take a lot of time and effort to get a desktop Linux distro working exactly the way that you want it but others will state that is simply a trade-off for having the flexibility to combine countless desktop environments and window managers in pretty much any way you want. Ubuntu's Unity is merely one facet of that flexibility, I personally couldn't think of a more horrific desktop environment to use but if others like it, so be it, it doesn't affect me doing stuff the way that I want to.
Although I've used both Windows and Linux extensively over the years, XP with the Classic desktop was, for me, the closest Microsoft got to a perfect desktop environment, that's why I'm still using Gnome 2 at the moment because it works very similarly to Windows Classic.
I tried Windows 7, I even bought a shop copy and played with it for 2 weeks but I found the Aero interface ugly and cumbersome to use, even the Classic interface in 7 was just a poor approximation of the one in XP.
"Sabotage" is the wrong word to have used in this instance. If you're saying that the Gnome and Ubuntu devs made some bad design decisions with Gnome 3 and Unity respectively then I couldn't agree more, and I've never liked KDE full stop. But there's plenty of other alternatives out there and whilst it may need some time and effort to slot everything together, it's perfectly possible to have a nice slick Linux desktop system to work in.
The definition of "power user" frequently means "I'm too set in my ways and too bloody lazy to possibly save myself some money by spending a little of my incredibly valuable time to install and play with some of the free alternatives to Windows-only applications."
Just thought I'd mention it... :-)
Damn! You are SO smart!
HEY EVERYONE!!! pla HAS CRACKED IT!!! HE HAS THE ANSWER!!! LINUX IS SHIT ON THE DESKTOP!!!
Here was me, running Linux Gnome desktops and laptops for at least the past 10 years, thinking it ran perfectly fine.... and then you make this comment and all of I sudden I see how right you are!
That's it, I'm finished with this conversation as I scrabble for my car keys and dive to the nearest computer store that is open on a Sunday for a Windows installation DVD.
(Warning: The level of sarcasm in the above comments do not necessarily reflect the level of sarcasm amongst Slashdot contributors in general.)
Not for me, unfortunately, I'm a LibreOffice peon, it does all I need a spreadsheet to do.
I do have virtualised XP installations kicking about for killer apps like MediaMonkey, Tag&Rename, Clrmamepro and Irfanview (they all run reasonably well in WINE on Linux with a bit of tweaking incidentally) but this serves as an illustration of the fact that what you consider to be a killer app is not what I consider to be a killer app.
But a minority of people are power users, that's the entire point.
I'm not a spreadsheet power user, LibreOffice does all and more that I need spreadsheets to do - and if I don't need the power of Microsoft Office, surely it's better I use a free alternative than download a "hooky" copy to my PC because I'm not prepared to pay for it.
Not only that, but lots of people boast about being "power users" when in reality they are no such thing. I have a number of friends who are seriously good amateur photographers who believe they need Photoshop (and sometimes "hooky" versions of it) because they believe they are "power users". Yet when I see some of the, albeit, impressive stuff they do with photos and say "GIMP can do that", they usually look somewhat bemused.
I think people sometimes over-estimate their abilities and requirements, in all honesty....
This is an honest question but can I ask you when the last time you did a Windows (re)install and compared it to a Linux (re)install?
I guarantee you now that if you use a Linux distro aimed at the same levels of user experience that Windows is (i.e. Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) that your Linux system with all hardware fully working will be up long before your Windows one is.
I have never had one single installation of Windows where I have not had to use a provided CD or DVD to install additional drivers, and then had to go out to various web sites to get other or updated drivers in order to get all the hardware working.
Yes, I accept there are such things as integrated Windows installations and re-installations from backup partitions that make it all quicker, but a Ubuntu or Mint CD will usually find all your hardware first time and if there are updates to be put on, you can usually just fire up the included package manager and click on them.
I always get slightly annoyed with people when they quote "time" as a reason for not using Linux. I've administered home Linux and Windows systems for years and in my experience you spend about an equal time on both. Bearing in mind that the intention is to keep my PCs running nice and fast for as much as possible, on Windows I have to do regular defragmentation, registry cleaning, virus and malware checking - all of this is stuff I don't have to do on Linux and all of which adds to the administration time.
Just for the record, I'm mostly a Linux guy...
But I really like XP a lot. It's stable and trim it down a bit and keep it maintained, it can run nice and slick and fast - plus it supports Windows Classic meaning no valuable CPU cycles are wasted on unnecessary eye candy that only serves to impress someone looking over your shoulder.
I tried Windows 7 for 2 weeks, I even bought a licensed copy of it. I hated it. The AERO GUI is cluttered and the approximation it makes to Windows Classic mode means that one of the speed advantages of XP, namely being able to cram 20 or 30 shortcut icons on the taskbar can't be done in Windows 7 because even in Classic mode, all the icons are spaced out far too much - yes, I know they include the additional functionality of being minimised windows also, but when you're a person who does minimisation and maximisation of windows with shortcut keys, that "improvement" makes bugger all difference.
I was also extremely "annoyed" with Control Panel - all the stuff I had in XP was there but somehow moved about and renamed with all manner of supplementary crap I didn't need also in there too.
Yes, it was as stable as XP and whilst I don't like being treated like a kindergarten kid on a computer, it did ask me lots of times if I really wanted to do something I was about to do, which is probably fine for less experienced people. But after two weeks of using it, I deleted it and went back to a creaky XP installation on my reasonably new hardware because I personally saw no value in Windows 7. It struck me as an OS that didn't want to work the way I want an OS to work but the way Microsoft thinks it should work - and let's face it, Microsoft have pushed that philosophy further with Windows 8!
People laugh at me because on my home multicore stacks-of-memory desktops and laptops, I still run Gnome 2 with no bells-and-whistles and no acceleration. But it does the job I need to do and am used to doing with a computer, and Gnome 3 and Ubuntu's Unity don't - yes, sometimes Linux developers don't listen to their users either.
At some point in the future I may check out Cinnamon to get a more updateable "Gnome 2" experience, and the nice thing is I can probably still run Gnome 2 in parallel until I am ready to make the switch fully. So Linux wins there because at least I get a choice to choose my desktop GUI.
Yes, I don't doubt a lot of inexperienced people feel better inside Windows 7 than XP from a security perspective, but those same people still had to adapt to the changes in Windows 7 over XP and with me being a computer geek, the fact that it ran (in my experience) just as stable as XP was not enough reason for me to be interested in learning where everything has been moved to this time.
In my view, Microsoft made a mistake with Windows 7 and are just making more mistakes as they go forward. If they'd addressed user requirements properly, they have made Windows 7 more modular and allowed the user to attach whatever GUI they wanted to it (even run no GUI at all if they wanted to) to make it scaleable across low and high power systems, exactly as you have always been able to with Linux.
But, of course, that would have meant flexibility and Microsoft don't do flexibility.
Sorry, are we talking about the *SAME* DirectX that Microsoft fragmented across XP and Vista that resulted in most commercial game development moving exclusively to consoles?
Have you been into a games store recently and noticed the size of the PC Games section, assuming they have one at all?
I'm not sure if fragmenting DirectX on Windows was a deliberate act by Microsoft to force developers to XBox, but the end result is that if you want to keep up with modern commercial games (personally I don't) then you buy a console - which ultimately reduces the reason you give above for not trying out Linux.
This week I bought a new Lenovo laptop that came with Windows 8. I'm mostly a Linux user, I've always liked XP, never understood the value add of Windows 7 (simply a 64-bit port of XP with everything moved about a bit and an unnecessary accelerated and cluttered GUI) and don't plan on using Windows 8 ever. With that said, if I could have got Windows 7 on the laptop, I'd have used it and built a Linux dual boot.
Of course, there was no chance of getting a downgrade to Windows 7 due to the Microsoft dicatorship - after a few emails to Microsoft and Lenovo trying to get a downgrade and just getting canned responses to the emails, I blew Windows 8 away completely and just built the machine with Gentoo Linux. It took me a few days of messing around but now it boots damned fast, uses EFI (with Secure Boot turned off) and the only thing I can't get to work yet is the Ethernet NIC due to it being new hardware - but wireless networking was no problem to get working.
Yes, it's taking a lot of my time to do it and I'm no sloth when it comes to Linux, but with tweaking a lot of things, it's running pretty much anything Windows did, including games - and with Steam appearing on Linux that's pretty much killed Windows for good for me now. I like XP, it runs fine in VirtualBox (it actually runs better in VirtualBox than on some of the modern multi-core hardware I have) and still lets me have access to the handful of killer applications that I use Windows for.
A bit more flexibility on behalf of the vendors and they would still have had a (dual-booting) Windows user who might have eventually got to like Windows 7, but I wasn't being forced down the Windows 8 path, so now I run nothing current.