When Linux has a dominant share of the market place, and games are put out strictly for Linux, then I'll switch. Until then, Microsoft will still be king.
Good. Call me back in about seven years. I'll be the guy eating your lunch because I familiarized myself with the next big thing instead of burying my head in the sand of the last big thing.
Sure, along with the standard "compare default Linux install on some goofy fucking laptop with cracked-out hardware to an OEM Windows installation on hand-picked hardware." What is your point?
Yes, I do know what FUD means. Blatent lying about a point to scare people from a product. Such has a high cost.
Although it must be nice to live in a world where the numbers we've discussed don't qualify as "high cost," a lot of people would disagree with you.
My argument is that its not nearly as expensive as the OP was claiming just to use Word.
I concede that I pulled $3xx from the Super-Duper Mega Ultra Office Edition, but it just happened to be the first thing a search turned up. OTOH, I wasn't including the cost of Windows in that, which, if we're talking about the cost of "using Word," should be in there.
I'd rather pay $124, get something that will work properly...
I don't know what you're talking about here, but I've never seen the "works properly" version of Office. I can't get the damn thing to get out of my way and let me work. It's all in what you're used to, I guess....is compatabile with what most others use...
Oh, like Office '97? Nope. '95? Uh, no. It's not even compatible with earlier versions of their own product! OOo, on the other hand, is compatible with damn near whatever format you can think to throw at it....and I can actually get support for.
Oh, that's right. Because so many people get Office support from Microsoft. When was the last time you called them?
Just because something is free doesn't mean its worthwhile.
And just because you got suckered into paying through the nose for a half-assed version of what should by 2007 be commodity software, don't take your bitterness out on the rest of us.
for some the idea of injecting some excitement into their computer usage by exploring a new OS with different strengths and weeknesses is quite attractive compared to relearning Windows in order to go back to what they already new.
OpenOffice: $0 Office 2007, right now on Amazon: $389
That might not be an issue to you, but trust me, it is for some people. Way to pass judgment when you don't know shit about shit. You're exactly why many people hate douchebags.
How can you scroll through 400 albums quickly with the joystick (this is my largest concern with non-ipods)
It's surprisingly fast, just hold down and let it fly. You don't have to "click click click," just click and hold. It's a little less quick to scroll when music is playing, but still more than satisfactory. The only time it'll ever really slow up on you is on startup if you've added a bunch of stuff, but once the scan is done it's business as usual.
How about 5000 songs
I have 8000+ on mine (mostly in ogg with some in flac), and there is no noticeable lag.
Last I looked deeply at iAudios you could only browse by directory structure, not database (is that still true?)
Yes, this is true for at least the X5, I'm not sure about other models. This doesn't bother me because I'm obsessive about my directory organization, but I could see it being an irritant for some people.
If iAudio uses a database that allows browsing by album or artist I will reconsider them, but still on pricing and flipping through thousands of songs I am guessing I am uninterested in the joystick.
I find myself doing that with iPods too, though, and I find it much more irritating to have to flip through 5000 songs with the wheel.
That tends to be what it comes down to with me and the iPod; I just hate the interface. It makes no sense. Just last night at my girlfriend's place, I was trying to navigate her iPod to play an album, and I kept hitting the "right" button to go into an artist, and it wouldn't go. She had to come over and hit the middle button for me. Okay, there's a goddamn right arrow on the screen next to the artist name, and I'm not supposed to hit the "right" button? WTF?
Right this moment on newegg.com, searching for "ogg" within audio players brings up 12 entries, ranging from $29 to $277. My iAudio X5 plays ogg, flac, mp3, wav, and wma. It was not expensive, nor hard to find.
Lucky for you, there is Ogg Vorbis, which is technically superior to MP3 anyway, in terms of quality per byte.
Superior or not, that doesn't help me with all the music I have in mp3 (and no, I'm not about to re-rip it).
That is nobody's fault or problem but yours.
The OP's point is valid - the experience is not as good out of the box as that of OS X or Windows, with regards to music playing.
Amarok vs. WMP vs. iTunes? First-round knockout. Let's pose a hypothetical: someone who is brand-new to computers (or alternately, brand new to music management on computers) has three computers on a desk. One has Vista with WMP. One has OS X with iTunes. One has Kubuntu with Amarok. Give them a stack of audio CDs and and an audio player that supports both ogg and mp3 (of which there are many, so don't try to jump on that) and absolutely no instructions whatsoever. Which computer do they stick with?
Add fstab to this. I upgraded to the RC last week and it hosed my fstab, nothing would automount and it completely forgot my cd drive existed at all. My roommate upgraded at the same time with no issues whatever. So if you've got a custom fstab, back it up. Otherwise you should be fine.
What would you recomend as a replacement for the iPod?
Check out Cowon's iAudio line. I have an 60GB iAudio X5, and after a year and a half I am still absolutely thrilled with it. It beats the piss out of iPod for functionality (FLAC/OGG/WMA/MP3 compatibility, video, an interface that doesn't suck ass, text file reading, FM radio, audio in/out, recording from radio/audio in/internal mic, and on and on and on), and is substantially cheaper than an iPod of comparable size. I didn't see the X5 on their website, maybe they're phasing it out for the newer models, but check them out. Anecdote: I dropped it in a pile of melting snow one drunk night in my front yard and didn't find it until the next afternoon. Turned right on, no water under the screen or anything, good as new. True story.
the touch round scroller appears to me to be unmatched
I hate them. There is no tactile feedback, so I can't operate it without looking at it, which is a total dealbreaker for me. I bike a lot, I can't be pulling the thing out and trying to look at it in traffic. With my X5 (which has a mini-joystick), I can navigate the whole thing without looking at it.
With Ubuntu, if the package doesn't exist, it gets considerably more painful.
In two years and four version upgrades with this desktop, I have had to go outside of the Ubuntu repos under 10 times, and hand-compile something exactly twice, and I work my desktop machine a hell of a lot harder than 90% of the public.
You're not wrong in theory, but I'd like some examples. Specifically of stuff that "average user" would look for that aren't in the Ubuntu repos.
If you want something that can install most programs you'll want to install, don't go Linux.
"Most programs" like what? Name three Linux applications that you can't find a deb for. Take all the time you need, I'll wait....Don't worry, I'm still waiting. No rush. Unless by "most programs you'll want to install," you mean Windows applications, in which case I would like to point out: NO FUCKING SHIT. In other news, I can't install Kontact on my Windows partition (I know, KDE 4 is coming, I'm just using the example to make a point). Honest, I'm not trying to heckle you. But yeah, if you really really really need platform-specific applications, then you buy that platform. That principle has not changed in 40 years.
You said it yourself in your conclusion, but I'm gonna go you one better: the repository system is the easiest, safest, most idiot-proof method yet devised by man to install applications onto a computer. Apt-get is the killer app. I've been banging this drum on/. and elsewhere for a while now and getting shouted down, but time will bear me out.
Isn't one of the goals of Ubuntu to introduce Linux to the average home user? The people that currently muck around in iTunes, playing their MP3 files, and download videos off the intertubes that are encoded in WMV, DivX, and Xvid formats?
Yes. And show them a better way. If you don't do that there is no point.
To get people to switch, you need to provide them with a just-as-easy-as-it-is-now path to do everything that they do currently.
If you are referring to tasks, that's done. I listen to lots of music on my computer, transfer it to my audio player, watch pr0^W^W^W videos. All these things.
Now, if you're referring to formats, that's trickier, for reasons you've mentioned, and I don't disagree. Here's my "perfect world" solution. When you download Ubuntu, you actually download two things. The ISO for the install disk, and a.exe utility for running on Windows before you install Ubuntu. This utility gathers all your personal files, music, video, documents, the whole ball of wax, converts them to open formats, and prompts you to save them somewhere, be that a flash drive or an optical disk or maybe making a folder somewhere in the Windows filesystem and saving them there, to be later found by the Ubuntu installer and automagically moved into the/home partition. The shitty format problem thusly solved and the user's data all intact, we move on to burning and installing the system and we can all get on with our lives. (Honestly, I totally pulled this out of my ass, but damn that's a great idea, what do you think?)
A few other things I wanted to comment on...
Where would OpenOffice be today if they didn't support MS Office formats?
A hell of a lot further than they are now. My opinion on this is well documented, I made several comments to this effect yesterday in the OOo discussion. Instead of quixotically chasing the moving goalpost of MS Office compatibility, a war that can never be won because Microsoft can change the rules at any given moment, maybe OOo could actually, y'know, be innovating. Just a thought.
FOSS has been working overtime for the last X years to get people off of Windows onto a more secure, stable, and standards-compliant platform. If it means embracing these formats for the time being, I'm all for it.
Emphasis mine. I don't think "let's do the opposite of what our ultimate goal is in hopes that people magically stop being lazy one day" is a winning strategy. I'm much more enthusiastic about "let's do it better, and people will come."
You're a car company that doesn't put radios in their cars, despite the fact that all consumers want it, and you personally don't listen to music while you drive. And you wonder why your cars don't sell, and tell your unhappy customers that they should go buy the competitor's cars instead!
This is a very bad analogy, and I hope you're being tongue in cheek with it. I'm going to run with it anyway. As noted above, my car has a radio that works great. Better, in fact, than the competitor's radio. What it does not do is play the competitor's subscription-only XM channels. If you want to listen to those channels, common sense dictates that you buy that.
They can mod you funny all day long, but you're right. My desktop problems universally revolve around shitty binary nVidia drivers (not anymore thank God, I got a new rig with Intel graphics), or only getting the audio stream on.wmv files, or my resume coming out wrong because everyone wants it in.doc format.
To contrast: since I got rid of the nVidia card, smooth sailing..ogg or.flac files, smooth sailing..odf files, ditto, they look right everywhere I go. So who's got the problem here, really?
Slightly-above-average Ubuntu user here. (Geek, not a coder.) My OS works out of the box for all kinds of tasks, including "media tasks." However, I do not consider "plays nice with other companies' legally questionable, undocumented, hassle-ridden, non-standard formats" to be a necessary prerequisite for "works."
I realize that some people do equate those, and I'm not trying to pass judgment on that stance, that's reasonable (especially depending on the field you work in, or what you use your PC for in general). If that's what you need, there is a system that provides it. It's called Windows.
Summary: I'm sick of all the bitching about proprietary formats. Fuck 'em. Don't go to Burger King and get pissed off that they don't serve Big Macs.
Wow, deja vu. Allow me to cut and paste my reply to a post up the page (except the apologetic bit at the front where I tell them I'm not trying to attack them - I'm leaving that out, because you're just being a prick.)
Absolutely everybody bitches about [this] absolutely all the time, and I for one am sick to death of listening to it. I don't know who at Sun decided that "we're going to take it on as our responsibility to properly handle our competitor's proprietary, binary-only, completely undocumented file formats," but they should be dragged out into the streets of Santa Clara and unceremoniously shot. I mean, come on. When I come out and say it like that it sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
And furthermore. Not only is this a completely unreasonable expectation, and patently impossible when faced with a moving target like the.doc or the.xls format, but this idiotic tilting at windmills is pulling talented people away from what the real task should have been all along, innovating with regards to the way a modern office suite can work for you and what we should expect from our productivity software in the 21st century. And make no mistake, the upper echelon at Microsoft loves every single developer that's wasting their time on it. From the bottom of their black hearts. After all, they're obviously incapable of that innovation, so the next best thing is making sure no one else has the time or manpower to do it either.
Okay, before I really get going here, let me first say that the following is not an attack on you. FTR, I'm out of work right now and everyone wants my resume in.doc format, so I'm in your boat. I feel your pain, and I'm on your side. Okay, here we go.
it still falls short when it comes to rendering and printing docs and having them look the same as in MS Office... it still falls short when it comes to rendering and printing docs and having them look the same as in MS Office.
You're not looking very hard, then. Absolutely everybody bitches about it absolutely all the time, and I for one am sick to death of listening to it. I don't know who at Sun decided that "we're going to take it on as our responsibility to properly handle our competitor's proprietary, binary-only, completely undocumented file formats," but they should be dragged out into the streets of Santa Clara and unceremoniously shot. I mean, come on. When I come out and say it like that it sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
And furthermore. Not only is this a completely unreasonable expectation, and patently impossible when faced with a moving target like the.doc or the.xls format, but this idiotic tilting at windmills is pulling talented people away from what the real task should have been all along, innovating with regards to the way a modern office suite can work for you and what we should expect from our productivity software in the 21st century. And make no mistake, the upper echelon at Microsoft loves every single developer that's wasting their time on it. From the bottom of their black hearts. After all, they're obviously incapable of that innovation, so the next best thing is making sure no one else has the time or manpower to do it either.
If it ended up in court, Red Hat would have an awful lot of help. Here's a short list of organizations that I can think of off the top of my head that would have a vested interest in that case: Sun, Google, the FSF, the OSI, Canonical, the Mozilla Foundation, IBM (I hear they have some money). While Microsoft would stand alone. Don't kid yourself, that's really what's keeping this out of court. MSFT knows they'd be hogpiled in court. It'd be a massacre. Their only real defense is to buy competitors off one by one, but even with all their money, that strategy will only go so many miles before the wheels fall off the wagon.
The sad part is that they can halt Linux growth just as quickly, and just as effectively, by never actually taking this to court. They're already off to an amazing start with the "IP deals" they've made with various vendors.... PHBs will definitely err on the side of caution and try to "protect" the business by staying out of the murky waters. Better to deploy Windows and have receipts and licenses to prove it, than to deploy Linux and get sued later.
While I agree with your analysis, I don't think it proves your point (about halting Linux growth). FTR, I'm talking about the desktop here. Linux owns the server space, MSFT's hardly even a relevant player, that's not going to change. Money talks, and while MSFT's got a lot of it, so does IBM. So does Sun. So do lots of other very large and well-regarded companies. Shit, I'm drifting away from my already drifted point! Which is this:
The great big boulder that will be desktop Linux will never start rolling with business. Regardless of lawsuits, IP deals, FUD, or counter-FUD. Not gonna happen. There will always be an excuse somewhere up the corporate ladder to "play it safe" and stay with Windows. Whenever someone tries a "from the top down" push for Linux, MSFT buys them off or scares business away from them, and that's not going to change anytime soon either. Linux on the desktop, therefore, must come from the ground up. Which is good, and inevitable. That's how Free Software works. That's how Free Software has always worked, and it works well, and even though it's slow, it's a steady growth. The Linux userbase grows every year, while MSFT has nowhere else to go. It'll happen. Not only will it happen, basic economics dictates that it must happen.
If you want to run Linux, you run it on compatible hardware. If you want to run Windows, you run it on compatible hardware. If you want to run OS X, you buy a Mac. This is not shocking news.
Last week, I fixed two malware-ridden XP boxes. One I fixed by installing Ubuntu. Took me an hour. One I fixed by installing four different malware detectors, waiting five fucking hours to scan through a 20GB drive, and then cleaning out the registry by hand, and then booting to a Linux live CD to deal with a few nasty self-reproducing files, then running all four of the antivirus scans again while I slept. Would you like to talk to me further about what my time's worth?
Slashdot Mirror
When Linux has a dominant share of the market place, and games are put out strictly for Linux, then I'll switch.
Until then, Microsoft will still be king.
Good. Call me back in about seven years. I'll be the guy eating your lunch because I familiarized myself with the next big thing instead of burying my head in the sand of the last big thing.
Sure, along with the standard "compare default Linux install on some goofy fucking laptop with cracked-out hardware to an OEM Windows installation on hand-picked hardware." What is your point?
Yes, I do know what FUD means. Blatent lying about a point to scare people from a product. Such has a high cost.
...is compatabile with what most others use...
...and I can actually get support for.
Although it must be nice to live in a world where the numbers we've discussed don't qualify as "high cost," a lot of people would disagree with you.
My argument is that its not nearly as expensive as the OP was claiming just to use Word.
I concede that I pulled $3xx from the Super-Duper Mega Ultra Office Edition, but it just happened to be the first thing a search turned up. OTOH, I wasn't including the cost of Windows in that, which, if we're talking about the cost of "using Word," should be in there.
I'd rather pay $124, get something that will work properly...
I don't know what you're talking about here, but I've never seen the "works properly" version of Office. I can't get the damn thing to get out of my way and let me work. It's all in what you're used to, I guess.
Oh, like Office '97? Nope. '95? Uh, no. It's not even compatible with earlier versions of their own product! OOo, on the other hand, is compatible with damn near whatever format you can think to throw at it.
Oh, that's right. Because so many people get Office support from Microsoft. When was the last time you called them?
Just because something is free doesn't mean its worthwhile.
And just because you got suckered into paying through the nose for a half-assed version of what should by 2007 be commodity software, don't take your bitterness out on the rest of us.
for some the idea of injecting some excitement into their computer usage by exploring a new OS with different strengths and weeknesses is quite attractive compared to relearning Windows in order to go back to what they already new.
+1
FUD? Do you even know what that means?
Have it your way. $339, $124, or $0.00. I'm not at all sure what your argument is, but I don't think you're helping it.
OpenOffice: $0
Office 2007, right now on Amazon: $389
That might not be an issue to you, but trust me, it is for some people. Way to pass judgment when you don't know shit about shit. You're exactly why many people hate douchebags.
How can you scroll through 400 albums quickly with the joystick (this is my largest concern with non-ipods)
It's surprisingly fast, just hold down and let it fly. You don't have to "click click click," just click and hold. It's a little less quick to scroll when music is playing, but still more than satisfactory. The only time it'll ever really slow up on you is on startup if you've added a bunch of stuff, but once the scan is done it's business as usual.
How about 5000 songs
I have 8000+ on mine (mostly in ogg with some in flac), and there is no noticeable lag.
Last I looked deeply at iAudios you could only browse by directory structure, not database (is that still true?)
Yes, this is true for at least the X5, I'm not sure about other models. This doesn't bother me because I'm obsessive about my directory organization, but I could see it being an irritant for some people.
If iAudio uses a database that allows browsing by album or artist I will reconsider them, but still on pricing and flipping through thousands of songs I am guessing I am uninterested in the joystick.
I find myself doing that with iPods too, though, and I find it much more irritating to have to flip through 5000 songs with the wheel.
That tends to be what it comes down to with me and the iPod; I just hate the interface. It makes no sense. Just last night at my girlfriend's place, I was trying to navigate her iPod to play an album, and I kept hitting the "right" button to go into an artist, and it wouldn't go. She had to come over and hit the middle button for me. Okay, there's a goddamn right arrow on the screen next to the artist name, and I'm not supposed to hit the "right" button? WTF?
Right this moment on newegg.com, searching for "ogg" within audio players brings up 12 entries, ranging from $29 to $277. My iAudio X5 plays ogg, flac, mp3, wav, and wma. It was not expensive, nor hard to find.
That is nobody's fault or problem but yours.
Amarok vs. WMP vs. iTunes? First-round knockout. Let's pose a hypothetical: someone who is brand-new to computers (or alternately, brand new to music management on computers) has three computers on a desk. One has Vista with WMP. One has OS X with iTunes. One has Kubuntu with Amarok. Give them a stack of audio CDs and and an audio player that supports both ogg and mp3 (of which there are many, so don't try to jump on that) and absolutely no instructions whatsoever. Which computer do they stick with?
if you manually edited any files...
Add fstab to this. I upgraded to the RC last week and it hosed my fstab, nothing would automount and it completely forgot my cd drive existed at all. My roommate upgraded at the same time with no issues whatever. So if you've got a custom fstab, back it up. Otherwise you should be fine.
What would you recomend as a replacement for the iPod?
Check out Cowon's iAudio line. I have an 60GB iAudio X5, and after a year and a half I am still absolutely thrilled with it. It beats the piss out of iPod for functionality (FLAC/OGG/WMA/MP3 compatibility, video, an interface that doesn't suck ass, text file reading, FM radio, audio in/out, recording from radio/audio in/internal mic, and on and on and on), and is substantially cheaper than an iPod of comparable size. I didn't see the X5 on their website, maybe they're phasing it out for the newer models, but check them out. Anecdote: I dropped it in a pile of melting snow one drunk night in my front yard and didn't find it until the next afternoon. Turned right on, no water under the screen or anything, good as new. True story.
the touch round scroller appears to me to be unmatched
I hate them. There is no tactile feedback, so I can't operate it without looking at it, which is a total dealbreaker for me. I bike a lot, I can't be pulling the thing out and trying to look at it in traffic. With my X5 (which has a mini-joystick), I can navigate the whole thing without looking at it.
With Ubuntu, if the package doesn't exist, it gets considerably more painful.
In two years and four version upgrades with this desktop, I have had to go outside of the Ubuntu repos under 10 times, and hand-compile something exactly twice, and I work my desktop machine a hell of a lot harder than 90% of the public.
You're not wrong in theory, but I'd like some examples. Specifically of stuff that "average user" would look for that aren't in the Ubuntu repos.
If you want something that can install most programs you'll want to install, don't go Linux.
...Don't worry, I'm still waiting. No rush. Unless by "most programs you'll want to install," you mean Windows applications, in which case I would like to point out: NO FUCKING SHIT. In other news, I can't install Kontact on my Windows partition (I know, KDE 4 is coming, I'm just using the example to make a point). Honest, I'm not trying to heckle you. But yeah, if you really really really need platform-specific applications, then you buy that platform. That principle has not changed in 40 years.
/. and elsewhere for a while now and getting shouted down, but time will bear me out.
"Most programs" like what? Name three Linux applications that you can't find a deb for. Take all the time you need, I'll wait.
You said it yourself in your conclusion, but I'm gonna go you one better: the repository system is the easiest, safest, most idiot-proof method yet devised by man to install applications onto a computer. Apt-get is the killer app. I've been banging this drum on
This is why I continue to read /. even through all the bullshit. Once in a blue moon, even the AC strikes gold.
You mean like this?
http://www.getdeb.net/
Isn't one of the goals of Ubuntu to introduce Linux to the average home user? The people that currently muck around in iTunes, playing their MP3 files, and download videos off the intertubes that are encoded in WMV, DivX, and Xvid formats?
.exe utility for running on Windows before you install Ubuntu. This utility gathers all your personal files, music, video, documents, the whole ball of wax, converts them to open formats, and prompts you to save them somewhere, be that a flash drive or an optical disk or maybe making a folder somewhere in the Windows filesystem and saving them there, to be later found by the Ubuntu installer and automagically moved into the /home partition. The shitty format problem thusly solved and the user's data all intact, we move on to burning and installing the system and we can all get on with our lives. (Honestly, I totally pulled this out of my ass, but damn that's a great idea, what do you think?)
Yes. And show them a better way. If you don't do that there is no point.
To get people to switch, you need to provide them with a just-as-easy-as-it-is-now path to do everything that they do currently.
If you are referring to tasks, that's done. I listen to lots of music on my computer, transfer it to my audio player, watch pr0^W^W^W videos. All these things.
Now, if you're referring to formats, that's trickier, for reasons you've mentioned, and I don't disagree. Here's my "perfect world" solution. When you download Ubuntu, you actually download two things. The ISO for the install disk, and a
A few other things I wanted to comment on...
Where would OpenOffice be today if they didn't support MS Office formats?
A hell of a lot further than they are now. My opinion on this is well documented, I made several comments to this effect yesterday in the OOo discussion. Instead of quixotically chasing the moving goalpost of MS Office compatibility, a war that can never be won because Microsoft can change the rules at any given moment, maybe OOo could actually, y'know, be innovating. Just a thought.
FOSS has been working overtime for the last X years to get people off of Windows onto a more secure, stable, and standards-compliant platform. If it means embracing these formats for the time being, I'm all for it.
Emphasis mine. I don't think "let's do the opposite of what our ultimate goal is in hopes that people magically stop being lazy one day" is a winning strategy. I'm much more enthusiastic about "let's do it better, and people will come."
You're a car company that doesn't put radios in their cars, despite the fact that all consumers want it, and you personally don't listen to music while you drive. And you wonder why your cars don't sell, and tell your unhappy customers that they should go buy the competitor's cars instead!
This is a very bad analogy, and I hope you're being tongue in cheek with it. I'm going to run with it anyway. As noted above, my car has a radio that works great. Better, in fact, than the competitor's radio. What it does not do is play the competitor's subscription-only XM channels. If you want to listen to those channels, common sense dictates that you buy that.
Standard. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
They can mod you funny all day long, but you're right. My desktop problems universally revolve around shitty binary nVidia drivers (not anymore thank God, I got a new rig with Intel graphics), or only getting the audio stream on .wmv files, or my resume coming out wrong because everyone wants it in .doc format.
.ogg or .flac files, smooth sailing. .odf files, ditto, they look right everywhere I go. So who's got the problem here, really?
To contrast: since I got rid of the nVidia card, smooth sailing.
Slightly-above-average Ubuntu user here. (Geek, not a coder.) My OS works out of the box for all kinds of tasks, including "media tasks." However, I do not consider "plays nice with other companies' legally questionable, undocumented, hassle-ridden, non-standard formats" to be a necessary prerequisite for "works."
I realize that some people do equate those, and I'm not trying to pass judgment on that stance, that's reasonable (especially depending on the field you work in, or what you use your PC for in general). If that's what you need, there is a system that provides it. It's called Windows.
Summary: I'm sick of all the bitching about proprietary formats. Fuck 'em. Don't go to Burger King and get pissed off that they don't serve Big Macs.
Okay, before I really get going here, let me first say that the following is not an attack on you. FTR, I'm out of work right now and everyone wants my resume in .doc format, so I'm in your boat. I feel your pain, and I'm on your side. Okay, here we go.
.doc or the .xls format, but this idiotic tilting at windmills is pulling talented people away from what the real task should have been all along, innovating with regards to the way a modern office suite can work for you and what we should expect from our productivity software in the 21st century. And make no mistake, the upper echelon at Microsoft loves every single developer that's wasting their time on it. From the bottom of their black hearts. After all, they're obviously incapable of that innovation, so the next best thing is making sure no one else has the time or manpower to do it either.
it still falls short when it comes to rendering and printing docs and having them look the same as in MS Office... it still falls short when it comes to rendering and printing docs and having them look the same as in MS Office.
You're not looking very hard, then. Absolutely everybody bitches about it absolutely all the time, and I for one am sick to death of listening to it. I don't know who at Sun decided that "we're going to take it on as our responsibility to properly handle our competitor's proprietary, binary-only, completely undocumented file formats," but they should be dragged out into the streets of Santa Clara and unceremoniously shot. I mean, come on. When I come out and say it like that it sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
And furthermore. Not only is this a completely unreasonable expectation, and patently impossible when faced with a moving target like the
If it ended up in court, Red Hat would have an awful lot of help. Here's a short list of organizations that I can think of off the top of my head that would have a vested interest in that case: Sun, Google, the FSF, the OSI, Canonical, the Mozilla Foundation, IBM (I hear they have some money). While Microsoft would stand alone. Don't kid yourself, that's really what's keeping this out of court. MSFT knows they'd be hogpiled in court. It'd be a massacre. Their only real defense is to buy competitors off one by one, but even with all their money, that strategy will only go so many miles before the wheels fall off the wagon.
While I agree with your analysis, I don't think it proves your point (about halting Linux growth). FTR, I'm talking about the desktop here. Linux owns the server space, MSFT's hardly even a relevant player, that's not going to change. Money talks, and while MSFT's got a lot of it, so does IBM. So does Sun. So do lots of other very large and well-regarded companies. Shit, I'm drifting away from my already drifted point! Which is this:
The great big boulder that will be desktop Linux will never start rolling with business. Regardless of lawsuits, IP deals, FUD, or counter-FUD. Not gonna happen. There will always be an excuse somewhere up the corporate ladder to "play it safe" and stay with Windows. Whenever someone tries a "from the top down" push for Linux, MSFT buys them off or scares business away from them, and that's not going to change anytime soon either. Linux on the desktop, therefore, must come from the ground up. Which is good, and inevitable. That's how Free Software works. That's how Free Software has always worked, and it works well, and even though it's slow, it's a steady growth. The Linux userbase grows every year, while MSFT has nowhere else to go. It'll happen. Not only will it happen, basic economics dictates that it must happen.
Patience, grasshopper.
If you want to run Linux, you run it on compatible hardware. If you want to run Windows, you run it on compatible hardware. If you want to run OS X, you buy a Mac. This is not shocking news.
You should be modded down, for you are dumb.
Last week, I fixed two malware-ridden XP boxes. One I fixed by installing Ubuntu. Took me an hour. One I fixed by installing four different malware detectors, waiting five fucking hours to scan through a 20GB drive, and then cleaning out the registry by hand, and then booting to a Linux live CD to deal with a few nasty self-reproducing files, then running all four of the antivirus scans again while I slept. Would you like to talk to me further about what my time's worth?