Good article

[pitupepito2000]

I saw this article, and I thought some of you guys might enjoy it:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5211

 

[Sunner]

Read that yesterday, fairly decent article, there's only one thing that I really disagree with.

I'm a long-time shareware fan, and there's far more useful and easily available shareware available for Windows than Linux.

Que?
Ok, there's very little shareware, I'll give him that, but how about just plain free open software? Or doesn't that count?

 

[drag]

Well you also have to keep in mind that their is a lot of shareware you use for Windows, you don't need for Linux.

We are all aware of the dinky little tools that sell for 20-30 bucks that us Linux user can replace with spending 2-3 minutes clobering together a bash script. For instance a tool to download and unarchive 500 or so zip files from a ftp site is a peice of cake for any knowlegable linux user.

Also other things like adaware is very cool to use for Windows, but is unneeded for Linux. We have things like top, lsof, ps, strace, ldd and ltrace for tracking down and disabling bad and naughty programs. Also for fixing broken ones.

For stuff like that most Windows users depend heavily on shareware.

Also their is billions of little apps, toys, and dodads. Like a celebrity qoute/fart machine generator you can't get that for Linux.

But then again there is always Wine.....

 

[KB]

That was way too short a review to be worthwhile. And it included a lot of the same arguments people have made in the past. Nothing to see here, move along.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I skimed that the other day. Nothing revolutionary, but it shows that Linux is on the right path to being a windows replacement.

 

[pitupepito2000]

Originally posted by: Sunner
Read that yesterday, fairly decent article, there's only one thing that I really disagree with.

I'm a long-time shareware fan, and there's far more useful and easily available shareware available for Windows than Linux.

Que?
Ok, there's very little shareware, I'll give him that, but how about just plain free open software? Or doesn't that count?

Complete agree with you. I guess he didn't realize that share-ware is a crappy mix between propietary and free. But of course the pure breed of free is always better 🙂

 

[chsh1ca]

I disagree with the article being good. The guy is judging the operating system after three hours of use. If I were to spend the same amount of time installing and using Win2K Pro or WinXP I'd probably say the same rather ignorant things about Windows. The quote that sorta points out his inexperience:

I'm a long-time shareware fan, and there's far more useful and easily available shareware available for Windows than Linux. And given that we live in a Windows-centric world, it just seems like too much labor and work to try and live in desktop Linux. The one thing going for desktop Linux is its price and the price of applications like the OpenOffice.org suite -- you can't argue with free.

There's more to linux than just $0 cost, there's also choice. He tried Knoppix, yay, he tried KDE from the sounds of it on SuSE, did he try Gnome at all? Did he spend any amount of time on giving the applications a serious chance? Unfortunately no. He didn't even try and install the operating system, instead deferring to his son.

I'm not saying the guy is wrong because he may or may not like Linux, I'm saying he hasn't really given the operating system a fair shake, and commenting on it -- even while mentioning it's only a couple hours experience -- seems kind of biased. Not necessarily fanboy bias, but rather the bias of someone with simply more experience on one platform over another. 1+ Decade compared with 3 hours? His comments about the "Windows-centric world" exemplify what I'm talking about. I've been using linux on my desktop for over five years as my primary OS. I keep a Windows partition around to game in, and do all my work in linux. There is very little labour/work to use it over Windows I have found.