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I know I'm opening up a can of worms, but oh well.
I was reading cgrinker's latest blog and couldn't help but notice how many people said "XP SP2/3 is the best OS."
Whenever someone says "XP/Vista/OSX/Linux is the best OS" I always have to ask: "Have you ever used any other operating system, and if so, how long?" Sometimes they'll answer "yeah, I have a lot of experience in both OS X and Windows and I feel [insert OS here] is better" but more often the reply is "No, I've never used the other operating systems because they're crap."
So, I pose this question to TL: How many of you use either Mac OS X or Linux on a regular basis?
For those of you who haven't tried either OS X or Linux, I definitely encourage you to do so. What do you have to lose? Desktop Linux distributions can be downloaded freely, so all it will cost you is a blank CD, time, and some hard drive space.
So, share your experiences with other operating systems, either OS X or Linux. If you want to pitch in something about a Windows OS, feel free, but please don't flame other posters or turn this into a debate about which OS is better.
TL:DR - Linux: It's so easy a Mac user can do it.
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I've used quite a bit of Linux and a bit of OSX and i definately prefer Vista. I'm into hardware, not software, and it took me literally a week to figure out how to install Arch when i had no bash experience at all because of the incredibly technical installation guide which is full of unnecessary commands and unclear explanation. I installed linux to get away from resource hogs, and the only Linux that an educated layperson could possibly use without studying for weeks would be ubuntu, which has nearly the same resource usage as vista.
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Canada9720 Posts
ubuntu has made a lot of advancements in their UI. you don't really need to use the terminal at all to set anything up, and on the latest ubuntu installation (9.04), everything that isn't automatically configured, will pop up and automatically ask you if you it to search for the proper software -- from drivers, to the non-free packages not included in the installation
of course, once you taste ubuntu, and lose your shell cherry, you can move to more tasty linux selections like debian. and then on one depraved, mad day, you might even go so far as to try compiling the kernel and running gentoo
regarding the resource usage of ubuntu: i run ubuntu 9.04 and vista on this machine (for bw), and linux handles my computer much, much, much nicer than vista does. it's not even close, on a 2ghz dual core machine with 1gb of memory
edit: and i've got all the compiz-fusion candy enabled
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in my experience, OSX looks nice, but it's so damn hard to do anything efficiently, especially with limited customization and counter-productive mouse acceleration
pretty animations really cap the speed you can work at, and it doesn't help that things seem to load so slowly (even on the MBP)
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congratulations, you have just waved a red flag in front of the ubuntu-using, slashdot-reading, php coding idiots.
enjoy your misinformation and recycled outdated irrelevant facts
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On August 24 2009 06:14 vAltyR wrote: For those of you who haven't tried either OS X or Linux, I definitely encourage you to do so. What do you have to lose? Desktop Linux distributions can be downloaded freely, so all it will cost you is a blank CD, time, and some hard drive space. TL:DR - Linux: It's so easy a Mac user can do it.
Seriously whats the point? I'm so lazy and I don't do anything technical that would require Linux. Why is it worth the pain in the ass when windows has been working fine for ages? I remember running redhat when I was 13 and wanted to be a 1337 hacker but, what's the fucking point when I just use the computer to browse the internet and stream movies to my playstation.
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Canada9720 Posts
On August 24 2009 06:29 uberMatt wrote: congratulations, you have just waved a red flag in front of the ubuntu-using, slashdot-reading, php coding idiots.
enjoy your misinformation and recycled outdated irrelevant facts what's the point of this post? to vaguely come off as knowing more than the OP without really posting anything? there's nothing wrong with ubuntu, slashdot is fine if you like low-level dev, and php runs the site you're being a douchebag on.
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I use XP, Vista, and Ubuntu on a regular basis. I've spent considerable amount of time on a Mac as well.
Ubuntu is convenient if you don't rely on a lot of application. This is true when I do development work, and all I need is the terminal (putty is crap). While it has made a lot of advancements on UI and drivers in recent months, it's still lacking on the application front, which probably north of 90% of computer users still heavily rely on these days (please don't compare open office with MS office...)
Mac OSX is very nice, and I would actually use it if it wasn't so ridiculously overpriced. They should also tone down their intuitiveness push as well ("Enter" to change the file name does not make any sense).
Windows simply works. It's been around for so long, it actually defines what's intuitive and what's not. On the contrary, I don't understand why so many linux users (and Mac users too) bash (haha!) windows. Yea, putty is crap, random keys don't work, copy and paste are dumb; yea, some programs crash on windows (a lot of programs are extremely quirky on Linux too); but guess what, to 90% of computer users, these things are irrelevant or insignificant. Windows works.
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Also, the thread is titled: "why you should try it" but you gave absolutely no reason for trying it. You just said it was easy. Doing nothing is easier.
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On August 24 2009 06:31 MiniRoman wrote:Show nested quote +On August 24 2009 06:14 vAltyR wrote: For those of you who haven't tried either OS X or Linux, I definitely encourage you to do so. What do you have to lose? Desktop Linux distributions can be downloaded freely, so all it will cost you is a blank CD, time, and some hard drive space. TL:DR - Linux: It's so easy a Mac user can do it. Seriously whats the point? I'm so lazy and I don't do anything technical that would require Linux. Why is it worth the pain in the ass when windows has been working fine for ages? I remember running redhat when I was 13 and wanted to be a 1337 hacker but, what's the fucking point when I just use the computer to browse the internet and stream movies to my playstation.
Exactly. Linux does not offer anything more (in fact, probably considerably less) than windows if you are a casual user (a very loosely defined term).
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On August 24 2009 06:17 ghermination wrote: I've used quite a bit of Linux and a bit of OSX and i definately prefer Vista. I'm into hardware, not software, and it took me literally a week to figure out how to install Arch when i had no bash experience at all because of the incredibly technical installation guide which is full of unnecessary commands and unclear explanation. I installed linux to get away from resource hogs, and the only Linux that an educated layperson could possibly use without studying for weeks would be ubuntu, which has nearly the same resource usage as vista.
Which desktop environment were you using? Ubuntu uses GNOME as their standard desktop environment; I would try something running the Xfce desktop environment. It's supposed to be much more lightweight than either GNOME or KDE. I don't know exact usage statistics, but it could be worth looking into. Xubuntu is a version of Ubuntu that uses it, and I know Fedora also has live CDs with Xfce available.
Also, Arch Linux is not one I would recommend for people just starting Linux. I should probably caveat that installing Linux is simple if you use the right distribution! Installing Fedora or Ubuntu is simple; Gentoo or Arch, not so much.
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United States3824 Posts
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The problem with Linux is that some games don't work on it. And that's not something you can overcome for some(me).
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the problems with linux and me is that my wireless card does not work and without it i cant do anything. but yeah i want to work soon on some php/mysql projects so linux could come handy.
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I feel like this blog is aimed at me since I started the SP2 derail in that blog so this is fair.
Regardless, I have nothing against Linux - it does exactly what it sets out to do which is the give the user full access. Still as far as applications go and stability with hardware and applications there still isn't much it has on top of SP2. I can't go from an IDE to gaming for a break on a linux kernal without some grease work.
On a side note Ubuntu is nice consumer friendly kernal and I'd put it on the top of list with other OS's but if thats the case, I think that should be the kernal being discussed. A lot of the name brand linux based OS has differing qualities and shouldn't be lumped as one. Unless of course we're just going to argue about UNIX and non-UNIX which is something totally different.
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Germany2762 Posts
i own a pc and a macbook so i use both, windows and osx daily.
*edit: this post was made under OS X ^^
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On August 24 2009 06:48 Shikyo wrote: The problem with Linux is that some games don't work on it. And that's not something you can overcome for some(me). QFT. The sole reason I still have windows is because of games.
On August 24 2009 06:56 jhNz wrote: i own a pc and a macbook so i use both, windows and osx daily.
*edit: this post was made under OS X ^^ Currently running Fedora 12 alpha. :D
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I have been using OS X for some time now (From January to June, and from now), and I can say with certainty that OS X has some very odd gimmicks about it that just don't make sense. I'm running it on one of the newer MBPs with the new sleek metal look, and though it doesn't often crash, almost everyday when I'm running SC/WC3 in the background with Firefox and a few other apps in front, it starts to lag down and do the little rainbow circle thing. It also decided to crash once or twice in the period ;|
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Of course If people actually explored OS's they'd find one they liked better. Whatever you like, theres a Unix based OS that can do it better than any other OS. Id have to say Windows 2000 had the most intelligent design out of any other OS I've seen. Very simple to use but not hard to fix. Sure Mac's dont break often, but when they do its a pain to fix.
To ghermination : If you really care about hardware, you wouldn't use Vista. It is just as easy to do in OSX and OSX uses WAY less resources. Plus using Linux is very simple once you do it for a few months.
Idea: Linux needs to expand and make a few specific OS's that can interact with each other. Like a Game OS, movie OS,music OS, and buisness OS.
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I use Linux on my home computer primarily for ideological reasons (I'm part of the crowd that thinks free software is the future).
The main practical advantage of Linux today is its ease of management and the lack of licensing costs if you use Linux. That is, Linux is probably the best OS on every office computer, including both workstations and the servers.
For a home computer, especially a gaming pc, Windows is easily a better choice.
Why anyone would ever pick Mac over Windows or Linux is beyond me (every use case I can think of where I would pick Mac over Windows, I would pick Linux over Mac).
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United States3824 Posts
Oddly enough I'm running all three at this point (as well as KDE over backtrack for the haxx0rs ) and they all offer something different for me. OSX in my laptop provides me with the GUI stuff that I want for ease of access as well as Terminal and X11 for my Unix/Linux needs. I mean they all have cool stuff, you know?
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i've installed Ubuntu for the GCC compiler i had to use for my programming class, and it reminded me why i hated Linux compared to XP... i couldnt just press a "Compile" button like i do in Visual C++... instead i had to type out commands and shit...
i mean really? typing commands for me is the olden days... back to DOS... it just blew... and having to look hard for a driver to get my wireless network card to work just plain out sucked.
And the kicker, there's no decent games for Linux without having to use Wine...
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as a desktop environment linux is so far ahead due to the amount of customization it allows. for example if i want some programs to run at startup you just learn a few commands and type it into the config or whatever. and if your computer is fairly old you can tell it to wait Xamount of seconds so it doesnt bog down. i found vista to be lacking this very desirable feature.
oh yeah and virtual desktops are so good. i cant believe windows hasnt implemented it yet.
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On August 24 2009 07:27 cgrinker wrote:Oddly enough I'm running all three at this point (as well as KDE over backtrack for the haxx0rs ) and they all offer something different for me. OSX in my laptop provides me with the GUI stuff that I want for ease of access as well as Terminal and X11 for my Unix/Linux needs. I mean they all have cool stuff, you know? Do you run those on separate machines? I'm running all three from my Macbook Pro, and man, I could write pages about how frustrating that was before I finally got it figured out.
On August 24 2009 08:03 jello24 wrote: i've installed Ubuntu for the GCC compiler i had to use for my programming class, and it reminded me why i hated Linux compared to XP... i couldnt just press a "Compile" button like i do in Visual C++... instead i had to type out commands and shit...
i mean really? typing commands for me is the olden days... back to DOS... it just blew... and having to look hard for a driver to get my wireless network card to work just plain out sucked. GCC is a compiler, not an IDE like Visual C++. There's several IDEs available for Linux that offer similar functionality to Visual Studio.
I don't mind the command line so much. It's actually quite handy for some things; In windows for example, I can look up the IP information by going into control panel, then navigating my way to network stuff, opening up properties and getting the IPv4 properties... or i can open up the command prompt and type "ipconfig /all." Much easier.
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I've used many versions of Windows, OS X, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and some edu Linux distro's and I've never been inclined to stop using Windows as my main os. 7 is great, I liked Vista as well, never had any issues with it.
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btw I know mac users that wouldn't be able to set up linux
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On August 24 2009 08:03 jello24 wrote: i've installed Ubuntu for the GCC compiler i had to use for my programming class, and it reminded me why i hated Linux compared to XP... i couldnt just press a "Compile" button like i do in Visual C++... instead i had to type out commands and shit...
Hahahahaha, you just made my day.
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United States3824 Posts
On August 24 2009 08:56 writer22816 wrote: btw I know mac users that wouldn't be able to set up linux
I think that the majority of mac users aren't using OSX for its nice Unix stuff and being able script in bash.
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I laugh hard at this XP > Vista faggotry because i remember when people were swearing that they would never switch to XP when it first came out because of how terrible it was (and then they all fell in love with SP2) Now everyone is praising Vista SP2 (windows 7) when they don't realize that Microsoft has been pulling that marketing ploy forever.
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United States22883 Posts
On August 24 2009 08:53 GogoKodo wrote: I've used many versions of Windows, OS X, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and some edu Linux distro's and I've never been inclined to stop using Windows as my main os. 7 is great, I liked Vista as well, never had any issues with it. This is exactly it for me. I'd go with some Linux distro if I were using a netbook or I needed to run kiosks (part of my job atm), but it's too much time investment at home, especially when 7/Vista have always run like a charm for me. I think XP is horribly overrated though (every reported speed test is done on an empty hd with a fresh install) and I don't find 10.5 very appealing.
Part of it is the hardware, since I have to fix/upgrade them as well and Macs are a bitch to open up, but there's nothing in the OS that's useful for me besides Exposé, which I've got working on Vista. And from my own experience, the stability argument is bullshit. In the past 3 months, I've had 4 OSX install failures out of 20 machines and other crashing issues. If it were as good as most people claim, DiskWarrior wouldn't be doing so well.
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United States47024 Posts
On August 24 2009 08:03 jello24 wrote: And the kicker, there's no decent games for Linux without having to use Wine... Screw you, Dwarf Fortress kicks ass.
I've found Linux native versions of HOMM3 and Alpha Centauri as well.
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dunno man, but Windows 7 rocks
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On August 24 2009 09:16 ghermination wrote: I laugh hard at this XP > Vista faggotry because i remember when people were swearing that they would never switch to XP when it first came out because of how terrible it was (and then they all fell in love with SP2) Now everyone is praising Vista SP2 (windows 7) when they don't realize that Microsoft has been pulling that marketing ploy forever.
Vista actually has a SP2 and it's not windows 7.
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I use Windows 7 but I have used Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Gentoo Linux and openSUSE before. I never took a liking to linux partially because I'm into game programming and to be honest, I don't really want to program games for linux...even running starcraft was a drag on linux..installing wine and then looking despair as starcraft ran at like 10 fps . Ah well. I might've just had a bad experience but who knows but i am considering slapping Backtrack on my laptop for...educational reasons
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Sydney2287 Posts
On August 24 2009 06:26 paper wrote: in my experience, OSX looks nice, but it's so damn hard to do anything efficiently, especially with limited customization and counter-productive mouse acceleration
pretty animations really cap the speed you can work at, and it doesn't help that things seem to load so slowly (even on the MBP)
That's interesting, I have much the opposite experience. As a web designer and developer I find the workflow I've got on my MBP to be far superior to any setup I've come up with (And I've tried multiple times) on Vista, XP or Ubuntu. This is due to three things, OSX being unix underneath, the apps that are available that you just cannot get quality replacements for on Vista, XP or Ubuntu, and then the level of integration the apps have with each other and the OS makes things so much faster and more productive.
Examples of Apps that I really, really missed when I spilt milk on my laptop and was without it for 2 weeks:
- Things
- Billings
- Coda/Textmate (These are 2 that could conceivably have replacements on another OS, but in my experience in terms of the user experience, they are better)
- 1Password
- Quicksilver
- Not really an app, but spacebar preview in finder is ridiculously useful (Select any file and press spacebar, small window pops up showing you the file, then spacebar again removes window or you can scroll up and down files using the up and down arrows)
Things: GTD style todo list manager. Integrates with Calendar, system wide shortcut for collecting todos. At any point I think of something which I need to do, think might be a good idea or want to explore further, ctrl alt space and then type a few words describing the todo, and it's chucked in my inbox for sorting later on in the day.
Billings: Project timer and invoice generator. Puts a little timer in the silver bar at the top that you can start/pause as you work on specific parts of a project. Swap the timer for different 'slips' on your invoice, so when you change between say designing and then developing. Allows custom invoice templates. Also sends emails to your clients (emails found in address book) automatically with the invoices , and tracks payments. There are web versions of this but having tried many, none of them achieve the same level of integration with the OS to make it a seamless part of my workflow, which is important for my productivity.
Coda/Textmate: Everyone has a favourite text editor and swears by it so I wouldn't try and convince anyone of this.
1Password: Password manager and generator for all my passwords, very useful because I am regularly (at *least* once a day) having to make a new password or store in some way a new password from a client or friend. Again, not the first of its kind but it's the integration with the OS and other popular apps that you just do not find on Windows that makes this so much more powerful.
Quicksilver: The most important one here, ctrl space and then start typing the name of the app you want. Works for every app on your computer, even files. Doesn't just open apps though, has open with, run with, etc etc, so you can for example type pho (photoshop comes up) and then drag the files you want to open with it onto the popup window and it opens them with photoshop. Then it has plugins which allow you to call terminal commands instead of opening apps, or plugins to integrate it with other apps, so you might have a plugin which lets you type "/g starcraft strategy" and it'll open safari/browser of choice and search for "starcraft strategy" in google. With only 5 keypresses besides the term you want to search for, from any point that you are in the OS. Without Quicksilver I feel like I'm using an OS from 20 years ago.
The whole point of that was to demonstrate that the apps and their integration with other apps and the OS itself (widgets in the top bar, dock functionality) are what make my OSX experience far, far, far more productive than any setup I've tried on other OS's.
And to top it all off, if/when I eventually get an iphone, most of the productivity apps I have will be/are sync-able with iphone versions.
I'll be the first to admit that some of this might be possible with linux, but I sincerely doubt that without some serious custom coding, could I get the same level of integration covering all areas of my workflow.
Also this is very obviously specific to my requirements as a web designer and developer, for example someone else might not have the same requirements as me and can't find the apps to appease them. There are of course apps for other industries/areas of interest but I'm not aware of them because I'm not involved!
TLDR: OSX is the most productive environment I've ever had and it's in part due to the applications available, but largely due to how it allows them to integrate with the OS and other applications. I have had a lot of experience with all versions of windows except 7 and some experience with ubuntu.
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I'm using mac OS X and it's definitely crap. BWchart doesn't work on it. Nothing works on it and I still can't figure out how to alt-tab switch to the desktop while playing SC. I also use Linux at work.Debian. Ok, it's stable but I'll never use it at home. No game, no fun. And guess what, Flash sux on Mac OS and Linux.
Long Live Microsoft Windows. And the 7 is great.
PS : and if you are one of these crazy people who absolutely adore the Terminal, go back to the 80s and leave us alone
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Sydney2287 Posts
On August 24 2009 10:37 MK wrote: I'm using mac OS X and it's definitely crap. BWchart doesn't work on it. Nothing works on it and I still can't figure out how to alt-tab switch to the desktop while playing SC. I also use Linux at work.Debian. Ok, it's stable but I'll never use it at home. No game, no fun. And guess what, Flash sux on Mac OS and Linux.
Long Live Microsoft Windows. And the 7 is great.
PS : and if you are one of these crazy people who absolutely adore the Terminal, go back to the 80s and leave us alone
That reminds me that I forgot to mention, Being able to SSH without having to use cygwin is amazingly good.
Also, if you're trying to play games, OSX is probably not the choice for you. I am lucky in that I can use my PC for games and my MBP for work.
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On August 24 2009 10:42 Bockit wrote:Show nested quote +On August 24 2009 10:37 MK wrote: I'm using mac OS X and it's definitely crap. BWchart doesn't work on it. Nothing works on it and I still can't figure out how to alt-tab switch to the desktop while playing SC. I also use Linux at work.Debian. Ok, it's stable but I'll never use it at home. No game, no fun. And guess what, Flash sux on Mac OS and Linux.
Long Live Microsoft Windows. And the 7 is great.
PS : and if you are one of these crazy people who absolutely adore the Terminal, go back to the 80s and leave us alone That reminds me that I forgot to mention, Being able to SSH without having to use cygwin is amazingly good. Also, if you're trying to play games, OSX is probably not the choice for you. I am lucky in that I can use my PC for games and my MBP for work.
yeah. absolutely. Mac OS X has great potential and is very good when it comes to office work, design, video editing, blogging etc. BUT : 1-everything is f-expensive 2-no game, no fun 3-everything is F-EXPENSIVE
And when I pay 2000 EUR for a Mac, I'm looking forward to having something that will run everything without having to pay for additional contents.
Mac is overrated and definitely overpriced.
(Good point for Linux, it's free so I'm cool with it... but it's lame too since no game) (omg, I forgot to mention FreeBSD... my dad tried to force me to use this piece of F. omg, how the hell people can use that ? Oh... wait... ah, dad's from Berky... that's why. I knew he was a red. Damned)
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I have a macpro that I run OSX on for 3D development.. I'm not an expert but as far as I can tell its easier to make good software for mac, and a lot of the software out there is superb. I have not used windows very much but from what I've seen of XP it doesn't seem that bad.. I boot into it to play SC and other games, and just from the experience of setting it up the way I like it seems fine. I used a program called AutoHotKey to switch the control and windows keys so copy and paste are the same on win as on OSX, and it was pretty neat. I created an exe with it and found the startup items location, put it in, and it worked. Nice!
I feel like its not about how "good" the operating system is as much as how good the user is at adapting and using it efficiently.
That said, I wouldn't recommend any mainstream PC hardware after all the problems my friends have had with Dell and the like. Plus, windows is inferior to osx in some ways, like the inability to do two things to a file at once like run it and move it or delete it while its open.
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I would love to try OSX but I don't want to own a Mac. I would love to ban Windows but some of my favorite apps/games won't run anywhere else. I love Linux for respecting my Freedom(tm).
On August 24 2009 10:37 MK wrote: And guess what, Flash sux on Mac OS and Linux. Flash sucks in general. It just happens to suck even more when not run on Windows.
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i used to use windows only but i started to like linux
but i use cygwin nowadays haha
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On August 24 2009 06:40 Cambium wrote: I use XP, Vista, and Ubuntu on a regular basis. I've spent considerable amount of time on a Mac as well.
Ubuntu is convenient if you don't rely on a lot of application. This is true when I do development work, and all I need is the terminal (putty is crap). While it has made a lot of advancements on UI and drivers in recent months, it's still lacking on the application front, which probably north of 90% of computer users still heavily rely on these days (please don't compare open office with MS office...)
Mac OSX is very nice, and I would actually use it if it wasn't so ridiculously overpriced. They should also tone down their intuitiveness push as well ("Enter" to change the file name does not make any sense).
Windows simply works. It's been around for so long, it actually defines what's intuitive and what's not. On the contrary, I don't understand why so many linux users (and Mac users too) bash (haha!) windows. Yea, putty is crap, random keys don't work, copy and paste are dumb; yea, some programs crash on windows (a lot of programs are extremely quirky on Linux too); but guess what, to 90% of computer users, these things are irrelevant or insignificant. Windows works.
yeah this guy speaks the truth. for an average user, windows is just better, period. ubuntu (nevermind the non-newbie distros) is just not good enough yet (and yeah i've used ubuntu for months myself). misc related link: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:uWWjQZbluBoJ:contentconsumer.com/2008/04/27
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Rereading that article, the problem with it is that the complaints are all essentially: "Ubuntu doesn't do X like windows does, fix pl0x" or "GIMP uses a windowed system instead of tiles, make it more like photoshop pl0x" or "Make linux see windows partitions and name them appropriately pl0x". Does he even realize that windows will see linux partitions as FREE SPACE (maybe this has changed since I was shown this, but my friend's linux partition literally showed up as free space in the partition list in windows)? At least linux lets you see it and even access it.
Of course Ubuntu is in the wrong here too by trying to shove linux down people's throats. The average user clearly isn't going to find linux better than windows because they've been raised with commercial software and when the free software isn't EXACTLY like the commercial software (see above) they're going to complain that it's unintuitive and bad.
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i own both windows and mac and i definate prefer mac os better than windows, though you cant play al the games and stuff, but boot camp does its job.
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United States47024 Posts
On August 24 2009 06:14 vAltyR wrote: Whenever someone says "XP/Vista/OSX/Linux is the best OS" I always have to ask: "Have you ever used any other operating system, and if so, how long?" "Best OS" is overly broad, seeing as there are a lot of ways an OS can be "good", many of them irrelevant to the everyday user.
The best OS is Bell Labs Plan 9.
On August 24 2009 06:40 Cambium wrote: I use XP, Vista, and Ubuntu on a regular basis. I've spent considerable amount of time on a Mac as well.
Ubuntu is convenient if you don't rely on a lot of application. This is true when I do development work, and all I need is the terminal (putty is crap). While it has made a lot of advancements on UI and drivers in recent months, it's still lacking on the application front, which probably north of 90% of computer users still heavily rely on these days (please don't compare open office with MS office...)
Mac OSX is very nice, and I would actually use it if it wasn't so ridiculously overpriced. They should also tone down their intuitiveness push as well ("Enter" to change the file name does not make any sense).
Windows simply works. It's been around for so long, it actually defines what's intuitive and what's not. On the contrary, I don't understand why so many linux users (and Mac users too) bash (haha!) windows. Yea, putty is crap, random keys don't work, copy and paste are dumb; yea, some programs crash on windows (a lot of programs are extremely quirky on Linux too); but guess what, to 90% of computer users, these things are irrelevant or insignificant. Windows works. I agree with this 100% (and seem to share Cambium's experiences).
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I use many linux distros and XP everyday.
I think linux is the right way to use a computer, i use xp to play games. Any linux distro is many times more intuitive than XP. When you have any problem you can always find where it is with few command lines and filters. The pipetube is the better thing that any OS can have built in, and with cat, awk, grep and sort you can find any file at just 1 line, even if you dont remember anything about it.
For develope use any unix based OS (FreeBSD, any Linux, even Mac or gnu hurb) If you want gaming go with xp.
EDIT: right now i am using debian and gentoo-
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On August 24 2009 10:37 MK wrote: I'm using mac OS X and it's definitely crap. BWchart doesn't work on it. Nothing works on it and I still can't figure out how to alt-tab switch to the desktop while playing SC. You can run BWChart using Darwine and X11. It's a real pain, but you can do it. Until the developers decide to release a mac version, yeah, we're SOL there.
As for alt-tabbing out of starcraft, command-m switches to windowed mode, and from that you can minimize it or do whatever you want. Also, the equivalent of alt-tab on OS X is command-tab. That's not so much a feature it lacks as a difference from Windows.
On August 24 2009 12:45 Hamster1800 wrote: Rereading that article, the problem with it is that the complaints are all essentially: "Ubuntu doesn't do X like windows does, fix pl0x" or "GIMP uses a windowed system instead of tiles, make it more like photoshop pl0x" or "Make linux see windows partitions and name them appropriately pl0x". Does he even realize that windows will see linux partitions as FREE SPACE (maybe this has changed since I was shown this, but my friend's linux partition literally showed up as free space in the partition list in windows)? At least linux lets you see it and even access it.
Of course Ubuntu is in the wrong here too by trying to shove linux down people's throats. The average user clearly isn't going to find linux better than windows because they've been raised with commercial software and when the free software isn't EXACTLY like the commercial software (see above) they're going to complain that it's unintuitive and bad. You make a great point here, and goes along the same lines that MK brought up. This is why I don't like it when people say "I've used [insert OS here] for about 15 minutes, and I hate it because everything is different." Well, yeah. Switching an OS can bring about some major differences, and it does take time to get used to them, but there's a difference between a flaw and a difference. Unfortunately, most people don't seem to see it that way.
Another thing I've noticed from reading this thread is the number of people who've said "I'd use something else, but I need Windows for this application." If you ask me, that pretty much sums up why Windows is popular, the sheer volume of *third-party* software available.
A clean installation of Windows XP can't even open PDF files. There's no AIM application, just Windows Messenger. Part of the massive pain of reinstalling windows is having to redownload and reinstall all of the other software needed to get it useful again. I don't know if the situation has improved with Vista or Windows 7. Mac OS X, there's a competent application for most basic stuff from the start. It may not be the most sophisticated or the best, but it'll get the job done. Same deal with Linux. Unfortunately, you can't really make a comparison without the third party software because it makes a huge difference to practically everyone.
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I've used Linux and I have no real problem with it, I'm simply better acquainted with the Microsoft OSs. What I do have a problem with is the Linux fanboys who won't even speak to you simply because you use Vista or whatever -_-
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vAltyR you make a really good point. For using a computer frm a clean installation windows is clearly the worst choice. Even for listening some music you have to do some shitty configuration and someupdate to the horrible WMP.
The two things that i hate most in windows are: 1. there is NO WAY on having a clean computer, from the registry to the HD it eventually became full of crap to the point where is usually faster to format and reinstall than clean it. In my 6 years using LINUX i have formated 0 times the 80% of my file system. Only the binaries and the kernel when i switch from distro to distro. Not even my boot, always the same home, my gnome configuration is the same for about 4 years now. Windows XP cant avoid the crap mainly because the uninstalation information and the prefetch, a feature that is suposed to speed up your frequently applications, and works fine if you use not many of them, but lets face it is not our case. i use like 50 app at the same time on any moment (linux and Mac users just open a bash console and type `ps -A` to see the complete list of running apps) and that makes the hd go like crazy... and after a while any ntfs disk with xp is really fragmentated.
2. Fixing a problem in windows is like a blind next to a everruning train. You have no clue, you have no idea and you cant ask anyone. Then someone says in some anonymous forum "i did this and this in the registry, i did this and that" and you try it and it doesnt work at all and you read "I have the same problem, anyone knows how to fix it?" and you start to progress on it, to understand it, and when you know where is the problem, wich one is the fucken file, or the fucken registry key, someone gives you a solution like a fucking code for a game, like a fucken password, a cryptic shit that doesnt makes any sense. And you tell me that fuck is intuitive? my balls are more intuitive than that. Once you understand unix structure there is NOTHING out of place. And you can understand 100% of what is written on the config files for anythihng.
My 2 first linux troubles took me like 2 months to solve. Now i solve any problem in less than 1 hour,
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Modern Linux distros are much much better than XP but not necessarily better than Vista (Don't knock it, Vista is a decent OS). I'm a Linux guy running Debian or Ubuntu on all my computers.
But Let's be realistic here. Linux is definitely not the perfect solution for everyone. If you are a gamer and don't know too much about CLI commands and wasn't trained in software / coding then maybe Linux isn't the way to go for you.
Let me just list a few areas where Linux currently suck.
Package manager is restrictive. APT is probably the best in terms of package manager for Linux but as soon as you start installing packages outside of their repositories you are running the risk of breaking dependencies. I guess package manage exist to manage the chaos that come with the freedom.
Sound and Graphics suck balls. NVidia drivers are buggy as well and require distros to implement their own mods to make it stable. ATI is just hopeless. Sound as in ALSA/OSS has been a mess ever since I can remember and only recently it starts to get better but really the problem is that there are only a handful of developers who have knowledge to write kernel level implementations on devices and most of them either can't be bothered or too overworked to give a damn.
There is also the fundamental problem with developers jumping ship on projects when more interesting thing grab their attention.
So you see? The biggest problem and the reason why Linux on desktop still suck after all these years is due to the distributed nature of their software development. Open source is disorganized and always will be.
Blu-ray, Itune? nope they are proprietary technologies and thus they will never settle on Linux. Thinking about playing games? nope most of them lags or require tweaks to make it playable.
With that being said. Linux excel in other areas.
1. Stability. I'm not talking about application software here. I'm talking about their kernel and file system stack. My current uptime is approaching 230 days and it could have being longer if I didn't trip over the powerboard.
2. Security. AppArmour, SELinux, free firewall apps that actually work.
3. Free manuals and tutorials everywhere. Some of them do suck (lazy developers) but it won't get in the way of learning. Build in system commands are awesome to manage your computer.
4. UI is customizable (Even if X system is a mess). 5. fast and efficient file system such as EXT3/EXT4. I wouldn't say that they are actually better than NTFS since I don't know too much about NTFS internals but hey it's free and it's fast.
So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that Linux require you to learn, it require you to gain a deep understanding of the system to make it wonderful. A stock Ubuntu is ugly but after heavy customization it can be beautiful. If that sounds like too much work for you then please by all means stay in window land or Mac (I think of OS X as a polished version of Linux, Yes I know it was based on bsd, which is based on UNIX blah blah).
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On August 24 2009 21:37 jello_biafra wrote: I've used Linux and I have no real problem with it, I'm simply better acquainted with the Microsoft OSs. What I do have a problem with is the Linux fanboys who won't even speak to you simply because you use Vista or whatever -_- Trust me, I have a problem with those people too. I don't care which operating system someone prefers, but when they bash everything else without even backing their argument or treating it as some immutable fact that I get annoyed.
haduken, I'm not exactly a developer, but from what I've heard about sound and graphics, you're right. The situation has improved, but it's still a mess for developers and for end-users, performance isn't exactly up to par with commercial OSs. Example, in Fedora, when I get a system alert, the alert sound comes a few seconds after the alert window pops up. Clicking the play/pause button on audio players has about a one-second delay as well. That just shouldn't happen. I think it will eventually fix itself, though, as will the graphics stuff. Nvidia drivers are crap because Nvidia wants to keep their drivers proprietary, and their open-source drivers are obfuscated to hell. I know freedesktop.org is working on better drivers for nvidia, though, and whenever those are finally mature, hopefully things will get better. Since I don't have any ATI graphics cards, I don't know much about the situation there.
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Nvidia is actually better driver-wise than ATI with linux support. As far as I know, both have proprietary linux drivers, but the ATI drivers for linux suck massively (I switched from ATI to Nvidia for that reason).
Also, I'm using gentoo linux and to be honest I can't see most of the microcomplaints that people have about "linux". As an example, there was an xkcd recently that "complained" about lack of full screen flash video support. I had no idea what it was talking about and went to the forums, where people said that they couldn't play youtube videos in full screen. A few days ago I went to youtube, played a video in full screen, and it worked fine. Maybe that's just because I'm using gentoo (so my system is very different from other distros that come with "base packages" since I compiled my own kernel and basically installed packages myself).
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i like unix. i use unix. windows is perfectly fine for an average user. i would like to think that their time is important enough to not have to learn a new os for no gain. never understood why people try to get others to try unix. who cares? :3
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On August 24 2009 12:45 Hamster1800 wrote: Rereading that article, the problem with it is that the complaints are all essentially: "Ubuntu doesn't do X like windows does, fix pl0x" or "GIMP uses a windowed system instead of tiles, make it more like photoshop pl0x" or "Make linux see windows partitions and name them appropriately pl0x". Does he even realize that windows will see linux partitions as FREE SPACE (maybe this has changed since I was shown this, but my friend's linux partition literally showed up as free space in the partition list in windows)? At least linux lets you see it and even access it.
Of course Ubuntu is in the wrong here too by trying to shove linux down people's throats. The average user clearly isn't going to find linux better than windows because they've been raised with commercial software and when the free software isn't EXACTLY like the commercial software (see above) they're going to complain that it's unintuitive and bad.
actually no, they're not we can go down the list if you like 1-she figured out 2-this is a pretty bad one. completely unintuitive, completely not user friendly. 3-no limewire or whatever, that's pointless i agree, it's not installed on windows either. the naming of transmission though is a perfectly valid complaint 4-this one is pretty bad as well, vector editors definitely shouldn't be the default =x 5-ok this is the first (and only) one i am willing to pin as a user fault. 6-8 she figured out 9-pretty funny (albeit still bad) problem 10-the gimp complaint can easily swing both ways but i'm sure you can see how making the initial arrangement similar to photoshop can only help users. 11-well no real problems there, she figured it out 12-ditto
stuff like #2 is my main problem. the ubuntu team needs every now and then to have a nix newbie sit down and point out all the problems they encounter when trying to use the system exclusively over, say.. a month. sure some you cannot really fix like #5 above.. but stuff like #2, #3, #4, #9, can and should be fixed (and for all i know, they could be, i haven't used anything later than 8.04)
in fact maybe i'll do something like that when 9.10 comes out although i don't really classify as a nix newbie
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2 - The author of the article pointed out that this in fact was more of an issue with youtube than with linux/firefox since if youtube had just displayed the video without checking whether or not you have flash support firefox would be able to automatically install it. 3 - Sure the naming of transmission may be a bit opaque, but she figured it out eventually anyway. 4 - I'm not really sure what happened here...she found GIMP in task 10 and so I don't see why she didn't find it here. It's hard to say that oo drawing is the "default." Personally I would say GIMP is. 9 - I think if you close the window and then go back to the screen resolution dialog box it will open to fit on the screen (at least that's my guess - I use xrandr directly from the command line when I need to change resolution so I have no idea). Also double clicking on the title bar maximizes in gnome (I think), which would make it fit on the screen. Really what do you expect when you make your screen resolution smaller than a window that's on the screen? Of course it's not going to fit... 10 - I see that making GIMP look like photoshop would make the photoshop->GIMP transition easier, but so would making photoshop look like GIMP. There's no reason to blame one or the other. Also the fact that he's directing his complaints at "linux" shows that he has no idea about what's going on. GNU is not "linux". They just happen to produce the best image editor for linux. Besides, GIMP has a windows version too, so to direct the complaints at "linux" is completely ludicrous.
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On August 25 2009 06:52 uberMatt wrote: i like unix. i use unix. windows is perfectly fine for an average user. i would like to think that their time is important enough to not have to learn a new os for no gain. never understood why people try to get others to try unix. who cares? :3 Compassion. We don't like other people to suffer through the unimaginable terror that is Windows.
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On August 24 2009 06:14 vAltyR wrote: For those of you who haven't tried either OS X or Linux, I definitely encourage you to do so. What do you have to lose?
Music software.
I'd be running Linux no question if only my DAWs, VSTs and other music software would run properly. Unfortunately, "finicky" doesn't even begin to describe some of these tools. In extreme cases, they start humping the failstick if they just go off windows XP SP2/3, much less to another operating system entirely.
Linux is still great, though. I would second vAltyR's statement and recommend people try it out. Without a doubt the overall best operating system.
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On August 25 2009 11:03 ven wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2009 06:52 uberMatt wrote: i like unix. i use unix. windows is perfectly fine for an average user. i would like to think that their time is important enough to not have to learn a new os for no gain. never understood why people try to get others to try unix. who cares? :3 Compassion. We don't like other people to suffer through the unimaginable terror that is Windows.
ive never had a problem on windows
seems like a fine, gentlemenly os to me either im extremely lucky or everyone else complains way too much dont get it
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On August 25 2009 15:41 uberMatt wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2009 11:03 ven wrote:On August 25 2009 06:52 uberMatt wrote: i like unix. i use unix. windows is perfectly fine for an average user. i would like to think that their time is important enough to not have to learn a new os for no gain. never understood why people try to get others to try unix. who cares? :3 Compassion. We don't like other people to suffer through the unimaginable terror that is Windows. ive never had a problem on windows seems like a fine, gentlemenly os to me either im extremely lucky or everyone else complains way too much dont get it
fact is 99% (or 90% ? Forgot) of the global computer users have Windows and the majority never tested any other OS so when they have a crash, because they read on the Internet that Windows sucks, they automatically say : omg, it crashes, blame Microsoft F-Windows of my A !
Well... I have some terrible crashes under Mac OS X too
and yeah, agreed, GIMP rox.
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On August 25 2009 15:41 uberMatt wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2009 11:03 ven wrote:On August 25 2009 06:52 uberMatt wrote: i like unix. i use unix. windows is perfectly fine for an average user. i would like to think that their time is important enough to not have to learn a new os for no gain. never understood why people try to get others to try unix. who cares? :3 Compassion. We don't like other people to suffer through the unimaginable terror that is Windows. ive never had a problem on windows seems like a fine, gentlemenly os to me either im extremely lucky or everyone else complains way too much dont get it No, you already are in what I call the "spiral of terror" (actually this is the first time I called it that). In case you haven't noticed, Microsoft is bullying you into using and staying with Windows. There's nothing "gentlemenly" in that.
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Windows is fine. NT kernel is mature and well tested; I think everyone would agree that on a technical level the modern Window OSes are at least as good as any other out there.
The problem is their methodology. problems and blue screens are never easy for users; I'm not saying that Linux or OS X is better at coming back from errors but how many times do you see a message on your screen in Windows and wondering what is the point of that message?
I still don't understand why Windows don't include something like the unix syslog in their stock installation. I guess they are just doing market separation so power users buy their server product -_-
Personally I don't consider Linux guys to be more smarter or something but at least it's easy to find help on errors (If you actually try to read them, most of the man pages actually make sense). I would think someone who have access to Window's architecture and code can do the same on Windows but hey you probably have to pay for the code. Pretty much for every feature outside of their standard install you have to pay extra for. So wait a minute, I have to pay cash for a missing feature in a product?
Windows 7 is coming out with more tools etc but I would think that most people would still need to buy a few apps to ACTUALLY make the OS useful.
That's my biggest beef with Windows. The whole OS is designed to suck you dry. As soon as you buy Windows, you have to buy more and more things. You can call me a commie but I just don't like to ripped off like that.
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On August 25 2009 20:24 haduken wrote: Windows is fine. NT kernel is mature and well tested; I think everyone would agree that on a technical level the modern Window OSes are at least as good as any other out there.
The problem is their methodology. problems and blue screens are never easy for users; I'm not saying that Linux or OS X is better at coming back from errors but how many times do you see a message on your screen in Windows and wondering what is the point of that message?
I still don't understand why Windows don't include something like the unix syslog in their stock installation. I guess they are just doing market separation so power users buy their server product -_-
Personally I don't consider Linux guys to be more smarter or something but at least it's easy to find help on errors (If you actually try to read them, most of the man pages actually make sense). I would think someone who have access to Window's architecture and code can do the same on Windows but hey you probably have to pay for the code. Pretty much for every feature outside of their standard install you have to pay extra for. So wait a minute, I have to pay cash for a missing feature in a product?
Windows 7 is coming out with more tools etc but I would think that most people would still need to buy a few apps to ACTUALLY make the OS useful.
That's my biggest beef with Windows. The whole OS is designed to suck you dry. As soon as you buy Windows, you have to buy more and more things. You can call me a commie but I just don't like to ripped off like that.
Well, when you buy Mac, you have to buy stuff too. And it's not cheaper.
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Not the things that I've mentioned.
The only program you have to buy is MS Office for MAC (And that is because of Microsoft's monopoly) Adobe CS4 and else are not really for what we consider the majority of users. When you really get into it I believe the total cost of ownership for a MAC is not significantly more than a Windows PC.
Mac even include their ILife suite for free these days. System management tools etc are included by default (It is a unix clone after all).
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On August 25 2009 20:21 ven wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2009 15:41 uberMatt wrote:On August 25 2009 11:03 ven wrote:On August 25 2009 06:52 uberMatt wrote: i like unix. i use unix. windows is perfectly fine for an average user. i would like to think that their time is important enough to not have to learn a new os for no gain. never understood why people try to get others to try unix. who cares? :3 Compassion. We don't like other people to suffer through the unimaginable terror that is Windows. ive never had a problem on windows seems like a fine, gentlemenly os to me either im extremely lucky or everyone else complains way too much dont get it No, you already are in what I call the "spiral of terror" (actually this is the first time I called it that). In case you haven't noticed, Microsoft is bullying you into using and staying with Windows. There's nothing "gentlemenly" in that.
i don't use windows at home i have used windows at school and work its seems perfectly fine as an os i am certainly not on a spiral of terror also i love the condescending tone of your post my dad's os could beat up ur dad's os nerd
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Canada9720 Posts
On August 24 2009 06:53 Railz wrote: Regardless, I have nothing against Linux - it does exactly what it sets out to do which is the give the user full access. Still as far as applications go and stability with hardware and applications there still isn't much it has on top of SP2. I can't go from an IDE to gaming for a break on a linux kernal without some grease work.
just wanted to point out that that's the opposite of linux's intentions. use of the root account for anything other than administrative work is really discouraged, and in ubuntu, you can't even log in as root (the root password is disabled by default). contrast this with your average XP installation, where every user has administrative privileges
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On August 26 2009 00:29 CTStalker wrote:Show nested quote +On August 24 2009 06:53 Railz wrote: Regardless, I have nothing against Linux - it does exactly what it sets out to do which is the give the user full access. Still as far as applications go and stability with hardware and applications there still isn't much it has on top of SP2. I can't go from an IDE to gaming for a break on a linux kernal without some grease work.
just wanted to point out that that's the opposite of linux's intentions. use of the root account for anything other than administrative work is really discouraged, and in ubuntu, you can't even log in as root (the root password is disabled by default). contrast this with your average XP installation, where every user has administrative privileges
if i'm right, Vista actually tried to prevent users from being root.... and everyone yelled. So root is back in W7 :D
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Well yea, only beacuse stuff didn't work if you didn't run programs as an administrator. :D
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I will make a new comp and i don't really want to buy a vista licence.
Just wanted to know if there are some versions not too hard to use compatible with bw / poker softwares and basic stuff like that.
That's a really nooby question i know :D
TL;DR: I want a linux version for newbies.
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United States47024 Posts
On August 26 2009 07:21 Boblion wrote: TL;DR: I want a linux version for newbies. Ubuntu
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On August 26 2009 08:30 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On August 26 2009 07:21 Boblion wrote: TL;DR: I want a linux version for newbies. Ubuntu It is better ( for noobs :o ) than Mandriva / ArchLinux / Suse ?
I'm asking this question because i have read stuff and all those versions are labeled as "noob friendly". Just wanted to know the differences :p
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arch is in no way noob friendly
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I was reading something wrote by Neal Stephenson, he is a programmer and a SciFi writer
This is from 1999, so this discussion is everything but new. Is long, but is good, i recomend it to anyone who wants a professional opinion, these are some quotes selected by myself.
MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES + Show Spoiler +
Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.
The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.
Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.
Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.
With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.
Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.
Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.
The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player.
The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:
Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"
Bullhorn: "But..."
Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
all the next is from chapter 11
+ Show Spoiler + Back in the days of the command-line interface, users were all Morlocks who had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric symbols and type them in, a grindingly tedious process that stripped away all ambiguity, laid bare all hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and imprecision. Then the interface-makers went to work on their GUIs, and introduced a new semiotic layer between people and machines. People who use such systems have abdicated the responsibility, and surrendered the power, of sending bits directly to the chip that's doing the arithmetic, and handed that responsibility and power over to the OS. This is tempting because giving clear instructions, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it without thinking, and depending on the complexity of the situation, we may have to think hard about abstract things, and consider any number of ramifications, in order to do a good job of it. For most of us, this is hard work. We want things to be easier. How badly we want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates's fortune.
...
The overarching concept of the MacOS was the "desktop metaphor" and it subsumed any number of lesser (and frequently conflicting, or at least mixed) metaphors. Under a GUI, a file (frequently called "document") is metaphrased as a window on the screen (which is called a "desktop"). The window is almost always too small to contain the document and so you "move around," or, more pretentiously, "navigate" in the document by "clicking and dragging" the "thumb" on the "scroll bar." When you "type" (using a keyboard) or "draw" (using a "mouse") into the "window" or use pull-down "menus" and "dialog boxes" to manipulate its contents, the results of your labors get stored (at least in theory) in a "file," and later you can pull the same information back up into another "window." When you don't want it anymore, you "drag" it into the "trash."
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So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors. Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a process of learning new definitions of words like "window" and "document" and "save" that are different from, and in many cases almost diametrically opposed to, the old. Somewhat improbably, this has worked very well, at least from a commercial standpoint, which is to say that Apple/Microsoft have made a lot of money off of it. All of the other modern operating systems have learned that in order to be accepted by users they must conceal their underlying gutwork beneath the same sort of spackle. This has some advantages: if you know how to use one GUI operating system, you can probably work out how to use any other in a few minutes. Everything works a little differently, like European plumbing--but with some fiddling around, you can type a memo or surf the web.
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Most people who shop for OSes (if they bother to shop at all) are comparing not the underlying functions but the superficial look and feel. The average buyer of an OS is not really paying for, and is not especially interested in, the low-level code that allocates memory or writes bytes onto the disk. What we're really buying is a system of metaphors. And--much more important--what we're buying into is the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the world.
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So we are now asking the GUI to do a lot more than serve as a glorified typewriter. Now we want to become a generalized tool for dealing with reality. This has become a bonanza for companies that make a living out of bringing new technology to the mass market.
There is plenty more where this came from. http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
enjoy!
edit:cut some things, was too long...
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I have ubuntu on dual boot. But since bw cant run smoothly on it, im in XP all the time.
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On August 24 2009 06:14 vAltyR wrote: So, I pose this question to TL: How many of you use either Mac OS X or Linux on a regular basis? I use Solaris 10 regularly. I can safely say that I prefer Windows 7 for daily usage. :D
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On August 24 2009 06:14 vAltyR wrote: For those of you who haven't tried either OS X or Linux, I definitely encourage you to do so. What do you have to lose? Time (which you mentioned).
I say this as someone who used linux (Debian: Sarge to Squeeze now) exclusively for 3 years. I haven't had to reinstall, the OS I installed in 2003 is still on my machine, through several upgrades, moves to different hard drives and two new machines (I moved the already installed OS rather than install from scratch). Despite it's ability to continue running longer term without needing a reinstall and other positive factors, I rarely use it today.
See this thread on OSnews for why: http://www.osnews.com/thread?363568 or check out these paragraphs out of context: + Show Spoiler +And really it was symptomatic of the whole constant reinvention thing that has been bothering me. I went through supermount and dev to udev/hal/hotplug. I went through OSS to ALSA. Now hal is being replaced, PulseAudio is stuffing things up, and I have to wonder about a resurgent devfs, all the while waiting for the DE I use to regain some features that were in its previous incarnation years ago. This is to say nothing of the glacial pace of GEM/DRI2 (stuff that's meant to bring the free stack into more feature parity with the nVidia proprietary stack. OpenGL 2+? Memory management? whoo!) and the horrible performance regressions currently reigning in Intel Graphics Decelerator land as a result.
Add to that frustrations with a USB hub not working with mixed 1.1 and 2.0 devices until I got a new kernel. This new kernel however has broken drivers for my webcam, and my previously working *driverless, hardware* RAID device (which works fine on OSX and Windows and why shouldn't it) broke forcing me to roll my own kernel despite getting reassurances from the responsible kernel dev that it would be fixed only for it not to be and I got sick of wasting my time. One of the replies: + Show Spoiler +Heh, I feel your pain. I've gone through those changes just like you, and some of them gave me the same pain they gave you. I must say the current graphics situation is the worst I've seen in years. The previous changes (from supermount to hal & friends) were clear improvements which took about a release to work out - while this is taking longer already. And they should kill Pulseaudio right away.
Well, I guess that's the nature of a FOSS world - many changes with temporary regressions. Then again, I just bought a laptop with Vista, and despite some nice features it regresses in many ways compared to XP and linux. So maybe it's just a software thing... So yeah, software regresses and crap happens. My favorite OS right now is Windows Server 2003. Solid, faster than XP, runs everything I want it to. Any free software I care about can be made to run on it too.
/edit: version fail
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I wrote a wall of text and then I realized it could be summarized in about ten lines.
Facts: - Win7 boots in about 15s on my not-so-recent computer, and gets the job done for just about everything I encountered so far, ranging from old games to recent 64-bit software - I use Unix systems at work and it fucking rocks, I'd take it over Windows any day So basically it all depends on what you want to do: - Do you want to only do one or two things, but do them perfectly? Then use some Unix-based OS and tailor it to suit your precise needs - Do you want to be able to do and run about everything ok-ishly? Then use Windows
I never installed any modern Linux distribution on my home computer because I can't see how any of them can beat Windows at #2 (do and run everything ok-ishly), especially since Win7.
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On September 02 2009 21:29 MamiyaOtaru wrote:Show nested quote +On August 24 2009 06:14 vAltyR wrote: For those of you who haven't tried either OS X or Linux, I definitely encourage you to do so. What do you have to lose? Time (which you mentioned). I say this as someone who used linux (Debian: Sarge to Squeeze now) exclusively for 3 years. I haven't had to reinstall, the OS I installed in 2003 is still on my machine, through several upgrades, moves to different hard drives and two new machines (I moved the already installed OS rather than install from scratch). Despite it's ability to continue running longer term without needing a reinstall and other positive factors, I rarely use it today. See this thread on OSnews for why: http://www.osnews.com/thread?363568 or check out these paragraphs out of context: + Show Spoiler +And really it was symptomatic of the whole constant reinvention thing that has been bothering me. I went through supermount and dev to udev/hal/hotplug. I went through OSS to ALSA. Now hal is being replaced, PulseAudio is stuffing things up, and I have to wonder about a resurgent devfs, all the while waiting for the DE I use to regain some features that were in its previous incarnation years ago. This is to say nothing of the glacial pace of GEM/DRI2 (stuff that's meant to bring the free stack into more feature parity with the nVidia proprietary stack. OpenGL 2+? Memory management? whoo!) and the horrible performance regressions currently reigning in Intel Graphics Decelerator land as a result.
Add to that frustrations with a USB hub not working with mixed 1.1 and 2.0 devices until I got a new kernel. This new kernel however has broken drivers for my webcam, and my previously working *driverless, hardware* RAID device (which works fine on OSX and Windows and why shouldn't it) broke forcing me to roll my own kernel despite getting reassurances from the responsible kernel dev that it would be fixed only for it not to be and I got sick of wasting my time. One of the replies: + Show Spoiler +Heh, I feel your pain. I've gone through those changes just like you, and some of them gave me the same pain they gave you. I must say the current graphics situation is the worst I've seen in years. The previous changes (from supermount to hal & friends) were clear improvements which took about a release to work out - while this is taking longer already. And they should kill Pulseaudio right away.
Well, I guess that's the nature of a FOSS world - many changes with temporary regressions. Then again, I just bought a laptop with Vista, and despite some nice features it regresses in many ways compared to XP and linux. So maybe it's just a software thing... So yeah, software regresses and crap happens. My favorite OS right now is Windows Server 2003. Solid, faster than XP, runs everything I want it to. Any free software I care about can be made to run on it too. /edit: version fail That kind of thing is bound to happen with every development progress, you just won't see it unless its development is open. If you don't like it stay with stable software until the development on the new features reaches stability itself.
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i'm using windows xp sp3 right now. i used to use ubuntu but there were so many issues with drivers+compatibility stuff that i switched back to windows. it's not hard to fix all these problems but it's a little troublesome having to troubleshoot a problem like once a week though.
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windows XP is most compatible OS ever and therfore the best. Everything else is subpar "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
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