Most of your post is just the same tired back and forth, but this is the important bit:
Personally I think you'll find Distro companies are more concerned with getting your mom to use Linux than for you to give up Photoshop. There are more clueless people than educated people so why go after the smaller market will probably won't change because their job depends on something where as average person doesn't really care as proven by Mac's increasing popularity.
That's fine, they're more than welcome to go after them (because I have a workflow that works for me, and Linux has no part of it on the desktop), but they're going to keep failing at it. Why? Because open-source developers don't know how to go after the clueless people. That's really what it boils down to. Even Firefox, one of the few cases where an open-source product demonstrates definite advantages, has a small market share (although with Chrome and IE8 coming, Firefox is looking fairly fucked). The open-source community does not, in many cases, want users. They want contributors. The two mindsets (targeting clueless people and contributors-not-users) are fairly incompatible.
Linux still has some issues, no doubt, a lot of which have to do with accessibility which, again, doesn't affect most people.
You mis-spelled "usability." Linux--or GNOME, at least--is remarkably accessible, to the point of making programming for their platform a huge pain in the ass (anyone who's ever had to create a custom GTK+ widget knows exactly what I mean). What Linux is not is usable, for most people. Put someone passably familiar with a computer at a Linux desktop, and to do anything beyond open up Firefox, they will be at a loss. (Most people don't learn the concepts, they learn by rote. Which means that you'd better be copying Windows, or you've lost a lot of them right there.)
What companies need to do is start funding game development that is OS neutral or on Linux. It will be a loss at first but if they push that's what'll bring people to Linux.
Why would they do that? When consoles are right there and when closed-source programming for wide distribution on Linux is fucking insanely difficult? When OpenGL is, to be frank, shit on Linux, compared to Direct3D on Windows or the Direct3D-lite-ish API on the XBox 360? Not to mention that sound systems, among other areas, are so horrible as to be almost not worth even considering.
Companies should go against their own interests in hope of a vague future payoff? Sorry, but magic fairy wishing won't get you far.
(My favorite line from the freetard-brigade comments in that post I linked: "Time to put on your humility hat, not your ridiculing asshole hat. You need us, we don't need you. There is a lot of black magic and dragons in linux development, and one of them will eat weeks of your time if you aren't careful." WRONG! Instead, Jon just said screw-you to Linux and saved himself some time. And if there was a credible attempt to get users to Linux, wouldn't they first make developing less of a chore...?)
That's the whole reason MS decided that maybe it should eat its own lunch by killing off PC gaming to promote the 360. Gaming is the only thing windows has that most people care about and can't find some sort of acceptable alternative elsewhere.
If you think people will magically switch to Linux for games, you're out of your tree, sir. Exchange (Exchange clients on Linux are terrible, Evolution is the best of them but it's a crashy mess) and Office (OpenOffice isn't a seamless drop-in replacement, so yes, for many people it is out) alone are enough reason for companies to stick to Windows. And where business goes, consumers follow.
As an ex-Eclipse user I'd say it works the same across both systems.
It doesn't. It lags when trying to render a tooltip--a tooltip--when you're using Compiz, probably because it's trying to create another X window.
But Eclipse in general isn't that great, imo. I prefer Netbeans which has better performance on both Windows and Linux, imo.
Netbeans isn't what my clients who hire me for Java work use--so it's easier for me to use Eclipse like they do. And I don't do Java development for any other reason, so I don't really care.
Open Office works just fine which is why I use iton my Windows and Linux machines.
"Fine" is not the same as "well." You say OpenOffice works fine (I disagree), whereas I say that Office 2003 works well.
Plus it creates PDFs out of the box unlike MS Office.
I own Adobe CS3. Acrobat works fine for my purposes.
Give your aggressive stance, I suspect you're the type of person that gets upset and gives up quickly when you don't get something straight away and just go on claiming that Ãoeproduct xà sucks.
You suspect very wrongly; I simply don't have the time to waste on products that waste my time. Linux remains such on the desktop when Windows just works. The Linux-on-the-desktop types don't understand this. "But Linux is better!" Is it better enough to waste time re-learning what I already know and am productive with? At one point, I thought it might be. Then I realized "holy shit, it's not, I made a mistake."
Running Dreamweaver and PS in Linux is just dumb when Dreamweaver doesn't offer you anything of value anyway unless you need a helping hand in coding. All its generated code is absolute rubbish. I prefer to either use Jedit or Notepad++ and sometimes Netbeans for larger PHP stuff now that it supports that language.
I use Dreamweaver as a glorified text editor with IntelliSense and quick-preview (and a bit of the CSS builder functionality, which works well). There may be better, but they don't integrate as well with the rest of my tools, and I'm not interested in screwing up my workflow for arbitrary reasons.
The only benefit to PS is if that's all you know and the fact it's easier to pick up thanks to the fact people think it's cool to steal PS so there's an army of kids writing tutorials for it. Gimp is just as powerful, not as bloated and doesn't include lame software like Bonjour. In fact Hollywood uses Gimp too so if it's good enough for the movies we watch then I don't see how you can be doing something that it can't handle.
Oh, I love this line. I truly do. The GIMP is not as powerful (CMYK says what? Even the new release doesn't really support it--and yes, I do print work as well, so this is something of a vital feature). The GIMP's user interface is unpleasant to work with; the MDI paradigm is more comfortable. (And the majority of film work done is with CinePaint, which forked from the GIMP way back in version 1.x. It's considerably less annoying than the GIMP because they listen to users and implement suggestions. I still prefer Photoshop.)
This is another example of the kind of mindset that leads to (wasted) "Linux on the desktop" advocacy: "but GIMP is betterrrrrrrrr than Photoshop!" If you say so--but it sucks to use (and no, don't bother arguing, I'm telling you that as a user of Photoshop that the GIMP is unpleasant to use) and I already own Photoshop, so why the hell should I switch?
What little experience I have of C# and other.Net technologies is that C# is ok but I think people like it thanks to Visual Studio's point and click programming.
There is very little "point and click programming" in.NET; there's visual composition for some bits (and let's be honest, if y
That's funny. Obviously I must be retarded for calling your holy OS unusable for a desktop. I mean, I was only using RH back about as far as version 4, I totally have to be clueless.
When Ubuntu rolled around, I even went "I'm going to try to go Windows-free." And you know what? It worked, for small values of "worked." Sure, Eclipse worked--but it was slower than a dog on Linux when it was entirely snappy on Windows. Sure, it worked--when I wasn't starting WINE for Dreamweaver or Photoshop or Office (because OpenOffice sucks, thank you very much, and KOffice, while having potential, is still not very good). Sure, it worked--but I had to run a VM to work in.NET, because Mono wasn't there yet (it is now, mostly, but with all due respect to mhutch and his crew, MonoDevelop is nowhere near as good as Visual Studio). Sure, it worked--when my xorg.conf file wasn't magically disappearing (and given that I have an ATI card, that makes it doubly special!).
Eventually I realized that I got more done in Windows than I did on Linux. So I switched back, and the problems went away. 'Mazing, that. Windows is, for most normal people, the path of productivity and least resistance. Whining that people aren't using your alternative when it is more difficult to use is moronic.
Here's a guideline for the desktop: if you ever have to open a terminal outside of truly exceptional error cases, you have failed to make a good enough desktop. The fact that Linux desktop aficionados don't get this makes "why does Linux on the desktop suck?" a question that is much easier to answer.
None are drop-in replacements (which would be necessary); none are as good. Exchange has no open-source competition worth mentioning. Zimbra is closest, but it's not as good.
The BSD license is working as intended here. Unlike the stupidly restrictive GPL, the BSD license lets people make choices that you might not like, for the sake of developer freedom.
(Incoming downmods, how dare I question the GPL--!)
That's pretty much how I look at it. Those laptops were stupid to begin with; in high school I was pressed into helping deal with the damn things because the school's (middle school/high school) two IT people couldn't handle the load of "I AM RETARDED AND WANT MY COMPUTOBOX TO DO SHINIES!".
Currently I'm more pissed about UMS, though, being a student in Orono. Yes, let's chop the budgets even further!
Arguably, ODF is not as good as OpenXML. ODF has some pretty gaping holes (hello, spreadsheets) and some very ugly failures (encryption, for example).
OpenXML isn't great either, but ODF is really not "better" than OpenXML. (Don't give me the tired BoycottNovell-tard line about OpenXML not being implementable--it simply isn't true.)
Maybe when Linux actually works well for basic desktop use (it currently doesn't, though I like it on my servers), this would be a reasonable stance to have. As it is? Fuck you. When you don't offer an alternative that, quite simply, does not suck, you don't get to bitch and moan.
There's nothing M$ has to offer that free software competitors don't do better.
Active Directory and Exchange. Nobody in the open source world really comes close. There are good open source programs out there to do most of it, but the integration with other layers of the software stack is fairly shitty.
Horizontal integration really means very little, contrary to what people would like you to believe in order to gain purchase for their pet office suite; vertical integration--easy vertical integration--is key.
Somehow SecondLife manages on one-time membership fees, I'm unsure exactly how they keep a revenue stream.
Second Life has monthly subscriptions that give you some perks and stuff. There are also "tier fees" for virtual land (own X m^2 of virtual land, pay USD $Y).
Or you can write it in a language that abstracts that stuff away. There are not many platforms these days where you're a) writing interesting code, and b) not able to use the JVM or Mono's CLR. (Yes, I realize both are written in C++, but that's the point--they do it so you don't have to. There's a place for C++, sure, but it's not that big and it's not in portability.)
He's saying he pirates because there's DRM and other bad stuff--then if he's a reasonable person, he'd be buying CDs without DRM or from no-DRM online stores (or buying from Amazon's MP3 store, which is what I do).
But I'd bet strongly he isn't doing that, because it's not about the freedom--it's about getting something for nothing.
People use it because it's easy and integrates really well with their iPods. (I have a Sansa Express and Winamp, and use Amazon's MP3 store, so...meh to them, really.)
The language may be, but doing most anything remotely interesting is going to create platform-specific issues. Such is the curse of a bare-metal language.
Most modern architectures, though, have some level of Mono (or, for that matter, Java) support; I don't see why you'd go to C++ unless you're writing highly fugly elevator controller code or something (and even then, it'd be smarter to go to C).
Re:One of the most widely used languages?
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I work for a router company that's building Linux-based embedded solutions and using Mono for the high-level parts of its firmware. On Linux. Using C#.
Good job not having a clue about how what you're talking about works, though.
Re:amazing what doesnt get asked
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This just in: preexisting apps with huge established codebases didn't switch to a new programming language! Film at 11.
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Paint.NET is a special case; a hideous whack of code is native and being used via interop.
This is one of the few sane posts about Linux I've read on /. -- my hat's off to you.
Most of your post is just the same tired back and forth, but this is the important bit:
Personally I think you'll find Distro companies are more concerned with getting your mom to use Linux than for you to give up Photoshop. There are more clueless people than educated people so why go after the smaller market will probably won't change because their job depends on something where as average person doesn't really care as proven by Mac's increasing popularity.
That's fine, they're more than welcome to go after them (because I have a workflow that works for me, and Linux has no part of it on the desktop), but they're going to keep failing at it. Why? Because open-source developers don't know how to go after the clueless people. That's really what it boils down to. Even Firefox, one of the few cases where an open-source product demonstrates definite advantages, has a small market share (although with Chrome and IE8 coming, Firefox is looking fairly fucked). The open-source community does not, in many cases, want users. They want contributors. The two mindsets (targeting clueless people and contributors-not-users) are fairly incompatible.
Linux still has some issues, no doubt, a lot of which have to do with accessibility which, again, doesn't affect most people.
You mis-spelled "usability." Linux--or GNOME, at least--is remarkably accessible, to the point of making programming for their platform a huge pain in the ass (anyone who's ever had to create a custom GTK+ widget knows exactly what I mean). What Linux is not is usable, for most people. Put someone passably familiar with a computer at a Linux desktop, and to do anything beyond open up Firefox, they will be at a loss. (Most people don't learn the concepts, they learn by rote. Which means that you'd better be copying Windows, or you've lost a lot of them right there.)
What companies need to do is start funding game development that is OS neutral or on Linux. It will be a loss at first but if they push that's what'll bring people to Linux.
Why would they do that? When consoles are right there and when closed-source programming for wide distribution on Linux is fucking insanely difficult? When OpenGL is, to be frank, shit on Linux, compared to Direct3D on Windows or the Direct3D-lite-ish API on the XBox 360? Not to mention that sound systems, among other areas, are so horrible as to be almost not worth even considering.
Companies should go against their own interests in hope of a vague future payoff? Sorry, but magic fairy wishing won't get you far.
(My favorite line from the freetard-brigade comments in that post I linked: "Time to put on your humility hat, not your ridiculing asshole hat. You need us, we don't need you. There is a lot of black magic and dragons in linux development, and one of them will eat weeks of your time if you aren't careful." WRONG! Instead, Jon just said screw-you to Linux and saved himself some time. And if there was a credible attempt to get users to Linux, wouldn't they first make developing less of a chore...?)
That's the whole reason MS decided that maybe it should eat its own lunch by killing off PC gaming to promote the 360. Gaming is the only thing windows has that most people care about and can't find some sort of acceptable alternative elsewhere.
If you think people will magically switch to Linux for games, you're out of your tree, sir. Exchange (Exchange clients on Linux are terrible, Evolution is the best of them but it's a crashy mess) and Office (OpenOffice isn't a seamless drop-in replacement, so yes, for many people it is out) alone are enough reason for companies to stick to Windows. And where business goes, consumers follow.
As an ex-Eclipse user I'd say it works the same across both systems.
It doesn't. It lags when trying to render a tooltip--a tooltip--when you're using Compiz, probably because it's trying to create another X window.
But Eclipse in general isn't that great, imo. I prefer Netbeans which has better performance on both Windows and Linux, imo.
Netbeans isn't what my clients who hire me for Java work use--so it's easier for me to use Eclipse like they do. And I don't do Java development for any other reason, so I don't really care.
Open Office works just fine which is why I use iton my Windows and Linux machines.
"Fine" is not the same as "well." You say OpenOffice works fine (I disagree), whereas I say that Office 2003 works well.
Plus it creates PDFs out of the box unlike MS Office.
I own Adobe CS3. Acrobat works fine for my purposes.
Give your aggressive stance, I suspect you're the type of person that gets upset and gives up quickly when you don't get something straight away and just go on claiming that Ãoeproduct xà sucks.
You suspect very wrongly; I simply don't have the time to waste on products that waste my time. Linux remains such on the desktop when Windows just works. The Linux-on-the-desktop types don't understand this. "But Linux is better!" Is it better enough to waste time re-learning what I already know and am productive with? At one point, I thought it might be. Then I realized "holy shit, it's not, I made a mistake."
Running Dreamweaver and PS in Linux is just dumb when Dreamweaver doesn't offer you anything of value anyway unless you need a helping hand in coding. All its generated code is absolute rubbish. I prefer to either use Jedit or Notepad++ and sometimes Netbeans for larger PHP stuff now that it supports that language.
I use Dreamweaver as a glorified text editor with IntelliSense and quick-preview (and a bit of the CSS builder functionality, which works well). There may be better, but they don't integrate as well with the rest of my tools, and I'm not interested in screwing up my workflow for arbitrary reasons.
The only benefit to PS is if that's all you know and the fact it's easier to pick up thanks to the fact people think it's cool to steal PS so there's an army of kids writing tutorials for it. Gimp is just as powerful, not as bloated and doesn't include lame software like Bonjour. In fact Hollywood uses Gimp too so if it's good enough for the movies we watch then I don't see how you can be doing something that it can't handle.
Oh, I love this line. I truly do. The GIMP is not as powerful (CMYK says what? Even the new release doesn't really support it--and yes, I do print work as well, so this is something of a vital feature). The GIMP's user interface is unpleasant to work with; the MDI paradigm is more comfortable. (And the majority of film work done is with CinePaint, which forked from the GIMP way back in version 1.x. It's considerably less annoying than the GIMP because they listen to users and implement suggestions. I still prefer Photoshop.)
This is another example of the kind of mindset that leads to (wasted) "Linux on the desktop" advocacy: "but GIMP is betterrrrrrrrr than Photoshop!" If you say so--but it sucks to use (and no, don't bother arguing, I'm telling you that as a user of Photoshop that the GIMP is unpleasant to use) and I already own Photoshop, so why the hell should I switch?
What little experience I have of C# and other .Net technologies is that C# is ok but I think people like it thanks to Visual Studio's point and click programming.
There is very little "point and click programming" in .NET; there's visual composition for some bits (and let's be honest, if y
That's funny. Obviously I must be retarded for calling your holy OS unusable for a desktop. I mean, I was only using RH back about as far as version 4, I totally have to be clueless.
When Ubuntu rolled around, I even went "I'm going to try to go Windows-free." And you know what? It worked, for small values of "worked." Sure, Eclipse worked--but it was slower than a dog on Linux when it was entirely snappy on Windows. Sure, it worked--when I wasn't starting WINE for Dreamweaver or Photoshop or Office (because OpenOffice sucks, thank you very much, and KOffice, while having potential, is still not very good). Sure, it worked--but I had to run a VM to work in .NET, because Mono wasn't there yet (it is now, mostly, but with all due respect to mhutch and his crew, MonoDevelop is nowhere near as good as Visual Studio). Sure, it worked--when my xorg.conf file wasn't magically disappearing (and given that I have an ATI card, that makes it doubly special!).
Eventually I realized that I got more done in Windows than I did on Linux. So I switched back, and the problems went away. 'Mazing, that. Windows is, for most normal people, the path of productivity and least resistance. Whining that people aren't using your alternative when it is more difficult to use is moronic.
Here's a guideline for the desktop: if you ever have to open a terminal outside of truly exceptional error cases, you have failed to make a good enough desktop. The fact that Linux desktop aficionados don't get this makes "why does Linux on the desktop suck?" a question that is much easier to answer.
None are drop-in replacements (which would be necessary); none are as good. Exchange has no open-source competition worth mentioning. Zimbra is closest, but it's not as good.
Money is worthless? Oh, that's a good one.
You can get enough money to keep doing what you want to do, lots of different ways, from lots of different sources.
Yeah, all those PayPal buttons on open-source project sites are getting a ton of activity...
"High-minded ideals" and "ethics" are nowhere near the same thing.
The BSD license is an encouragement to take a project and do whatever you want with it. This company's actions are ethical.
the booby traps of BSD licenses?
The BSD license is working as intended here. Unlike the stupidly restrictive GPL, the BSD license lets people make choices that you might not like, for the sake of developer freedom.
(Incoming downmods, how dare I question the GPL--!)
A non-compete clause like that would be laughably unenforceable.
A lifetime ban is almost certainly not enforceable, at least in the USA. This is almost certainly all a bunch of bullshit over nothing.
That's pretty much how I look at it. Those laptops were stupid to begin with; in high school I was pressed into helping deal with the damn things because the school's (middle school/high school) two IT people couldn't handle the load of "I AM RETARDED AND WANT MY COMPUTOBOX TO DO SHINIES!".
Currently I'm more pissed about UMS, though, being a student in Orono. Yes, let's chop the budgets even further!
Arguably, ODF is not as good as OpenXML. ODF has some pretty gaping holes (hello, spreadsheets) and some very ugly failures (encryption, for example).
OpenXML isn't great either, but ODF is really not "better" than OpenXML. (Don't give me the tired BoycottNovell-tard line about OpenXML not being implementable--it simply isn't true.)
Maybe when Linux actually works well for basic desktop use (it currently doesn't, though I like it on my servers), this would be a reasonable stance to have. As it is? Fuck you. When you don't offer an alternative that, quite simply, does not suck, you don't get to bitch and moan.
How many people really buy an OS as a boxed copy? People still buy OEM Vista, and people don't care.
There's nothing M$ has to offer that free software competitors don't do better.
Active Directory and Exchange. Nobody in the open source world really comes close. There are good open source programs out there to do most of it, but the integration with other layers of the software stack is fairly shitty.
Horizontal integration really means very little, contrary to what people would like you to believe in order to gain purchase for their pet office suite; vertical integration--easy vertical integration--is key.
Maine has been slightly less than completely retarded as of late.
That doesn't make up for gutting UMS or continuing that idiotic laptops-for-kids program.
Somehow SecondLife manages on one-time membership fees, I'm unsure exactly how they keep a revenue stream.
Second Life has monthly subscriptions that give you some perks and stuff. There are also "tier fees" for virtual land (own X m^2 of virtual land, pay USD $Y).
Or you can write it in a language that abstracts that stuff away. There are not many platforms these days where you're a) writing interesting code, and b) not able to use the JVM or Mono's CLR. (Yes, I realize both are written in C++, but that's the point--they do it so you don't have to. There's a place for C++, sure, but it's not that big and it's not in portability.)
He's saying he pirates because there's DRM and other bad stuff--then if he's a reasonable person, he'd be buying CDs without DRM or from no-DRM online stores (or buying from Amazon's MP3 store, which is what I do).
But I'd bet strongly he isn't doing that, because it's not about the freedom--it's about getting something for nothing.
People use it because it's easy and integrates really well with their iPods. (I have a Sansa Express and Winamp, and use Amazon's MP3 store, so...meh to them, really.)
So I assume you buy CDs without "bad-ware and other anti-user software" when available? Or are you just a hypocrite?
The language may be, but doing most anything remotely interesting is going to create platform-specific issues. Such is the curse of a bare-metal language.
Most modern architectures, though, have some level of Mono (or, for that matter, Java) support; I don't see why you'd go to C++ unless you're writing highly fugly elevator controller code or something (and even then, it'd be smarter to go to C).
I work for a router company that's building Linux-based embedded solutions and using Mono for the high-level parts of its firmware. On Linux. Using C#.
Good job not having a clue about how what you're talking about works, though.
This just in: preexisting apps with huge established codebases didn't switch to a new programming language! Film at 11.
Idiot.