Maximilian
Lifer
- Feb 8, 2004
- 12,604
- 15
- 81
Spot the linux fanboi :roll:
Its so easy, its all the manufacturers fault, only people with weird hardware have problems etc etc still dosent change the fact linux is hopeless.
Bateluer
Lifer
- Jun 23, 2001
- 27,730
- 8
- 0
Gentlemen, this is Windows fanboi-ism.
No one has ever said that Linux is perfect, far from it. Everyone who uses it knows its caveats. Its the same with Windows. MS has never, and will never release a perfect OS. Same goes for Apple.
There are a number of companies that make money from their Linux distros, Red Hat and Novel chief among them. Red Hat turns a very tidy profit from their Enterprise Linux.
RallyMaster
Diamond Member
- Dec 28, 2004
- 5,581
- 0
- 0
I would consider it if application support were as great as on Windows-based computers. I kind of need my MATLAB...
I've used many linux distros throughout the years, for work and for pleasure. That said, as hard as it is for die-hard Linux zealots to believe, Windows is less buggy than most Linux distros.
OP, your theory has a flaw. Most Windows users don't play games. They check their e-mail and surf the internet, and maybe they use Word or Excel. Linux would be fine for most users. User friendliness has increased drastically over the last ten years, but that takes time to propagate to most people; and there's still the problem with certain hardware incompatibilities (printers being the classic example, but no longer quite as applicable). The percentage of casual Linux users should continue to increase over the years as improvements continue to be made to the average linux distro.
The gaming population is a tiny portion of PC users, and a fair chunk of it is already using linux in a dual boot configuration or at their school/work.
Edit: The most common question in the woot.com forums is "Does it work with Linux?" (followed by the same question, but for Mac). This is an indicator of a hardware incompatibility gap between Linux/Mac and Windows.
OP, your theory has a flaw. Most Windows users don't play games. They check their e-mail and surf the internet, and maybe they use Word or Excel. Linux would be fine for most users. User friendliness has increased drastically over the last ten years, but that takes time to propagate to most people; and there's still the problem with certain hardware incompatibilities (printers being the classic example, but no longer quite as applicable). The percentage of casual Linux users should continue to increase over the years as improvements continue to be made to the average linux distro.
The gaming population is a tiny portion of PC users, and a fair chunk of it is already using linux in a dual boot configuration or at their school/work.
Edit: The most common question in the woot.com forums is "Does it work with Linux?" (followed by the same question, but for Mac). This is an indicator of a hardware incompatibility gap between Linux/Mac and Windows.
Linux has viruses and malware, it just has fewer examples than Windows. The only reason for this is that fewer people use Linux. Viruses and adware would be just as big a problem if we had 100% Linux market share.
RallyMaster
Diamond Member
- Dec 28, 2004
- 5,581
- 0
- 0
This post requires great emphasis. Some Mac and Linux users think they're invulnerable (particularly the misleading Mac ads)...watch and learn...
I suppose you didn't encounter the bug that prevented many users from upgrading Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 without either a completely fresh install or a lot of additional work? There was a major bug in the kernel, and it ended up being independent of hardware configuration. This is hardly what I call a "trouble-free" operating system.
On the whole I'd agree, but I can say the same thing for any of my XP installations that I never have a problem with, except perhaps a little registry rot. This is not an indicator of Ubuntu being a superior OS; if anything the two are just very comparable.
Don't these companies make their money off the support of Linux and not the development and distribution of Linux?
sandorski
No Lifer
- Oct 10, 1999
- 70,785
- 6,345
- 126
Ease of Use. Fix that, I might consider using it. I want straight forward Driver, Software, OS Component Install/Setups with No need to use a CLI or remember a list of Commands{parameters] to make things work. I don't want to have to find the proper Driver File Format for my particular Distro. Download a File, Doubleclick, select a Location(that makes Intuitive sense), click OK. When Linux can do all that, I *might* switch.
That's all well and good, but just about as long as Linux has been trying to make inroads to the desktop market I have heard this. It's always really close, it's always a few years away, it's always 'no problems at all.'
I've switched to OS X myself and at the same time gotten out of the IT business. I have a friend, however, who has switched to Ubuntu on his laptop for full-time use, and while he enjoys it, it's nowhere near a seamless experience even for him. Until it's to the point that my mother-in-law can install it and use it on a day-to-day basis, then it's got no shot.
And considering she couldn't even install Windows if she tried, we've got a long ways to go. In order to convince OEM's to take it seriously in the desktop space, there needs to be a large user base of ordinary computer users removing Windows from their machines and installing Linux but, until then, we're just going to be where we've been for the past 10 years in the Linux space. ALMOST there.
Heh, in fact, it's so native to Linux they don't even have a supported 32 bit client, now THAT is native
Maya used to be Irix native which was a proprietary Unix distro- it has never been Linux native nor is it likely to be.
Absolutely. I prefer Linux to Windows for just about everything except gaming (even in Windows I use Cygwin constantly), so if that became viable on Linux, I'd switch in a heartbeat. On my laptop, which I don't game on, I use Linux exclusively already.
ConstipatedVigilante
Diamond Member
- Feb 22, 2006
- 7,670
- 1
- 0
I would change if gaming was just as easy/simple and the transition wouldn't be too bad (I don't feel like learning how to program a kernel just to say I use Linux).
- Jun 10, 2004
- 14,600
- 6,084
- 136
I ran Ubuntu on a laptop for a while, but only used it 10% of the time. Battery life was much better in XP.
I imagine the MSI Wind that's on the way will remain with XP SP3 as well.
Desktop is Fedora/Vista 64 dual boot, guess which one is used more...
I imagine the MSI Wind that's on the way will remain with XP SP3 as well.
Desktop is Fedora/Vista 64 dual boot, guess which one is used more...
Born2bwire
Diamond Member
- Oct 28, 2005
- 9,840
- 6
- 71
No.
If Linux had as good of driver support, software offerings, and user-interface as Windows, then I might consider it. I rarely touch my Ubuntu partition these days except for the rare chance when I forget to make a choice in the boot loader and Ubuntu loads up by default.
If Linux had as good of driver support, software offerings, and user-interface as Windows, then I might consider it. I rarely touch my Ubuntu partition these days except for the rare chance when I forget to make a choice in the boot loader and Ubuntu loads up by default.
I'm not sure. I have two computers at home - one runs windows xp (games only) and the other linux (everything but games). I prefer the linux system (esp for scripting et all) but games never quite feel right. I guess if they got the interface right I would...
Modelworks
Lifer
- Feb 22, 2007
- 16,240
- 7
- 76
They found linux code left in the L4D demo that looks like it is in preparation for steam having native linux games.
http://games.slashdot.org/games/08/11/29/1443227.shtml
http://games.slashdot.org/games/08/11/29/1443227.shtml
I would definitely. Even if performance was a bit less, performance is cheap these days, and having an OS that just works is nice.
When my Ubuntu screws up (usually because of something I was doing), it takes me at most an hour to fix it, and that's if I have to do a complete reinstall, and everything is immediately back in full working order.
When Windows screws up (quite often on its own), it can take me a good part of a week to restore everything to good working order.
And Linux just runs smoother, easier, and I appreciate apt-get and its bountiful selection of apps and libraries so so much.
Though Linux still lacks support for my desktop wireless card (open source drivers exist, but Ubuntu hasn't packaged binaries in yet and I'm not messing around with installing drivers myself only to be wiped out during a kernel update), and my Canon USB printer is likely to never have Linux drivers.
On the other hand, there's quite a bit of stuff that I own that doesn't work in Vista yet still works in Linux, including old apps (with WINE) and some hardware, like my TV tuner card.
The market should have standardised on Linux two decades ago. A shared driver/software base, yet each company could push their own variant with their own GUI and special apps/features. All apps would run on all versions, but if someone wanted their system looking like Windows, it could be available, if someone wanted it like Mac, it would be available, and if someone wanted it like Ubuntu, it would be available and the same programs would run on all of them.
Though I've got to admit, now that ram is so cheap, and virtualization works so well outside of 3d graphics, I often just run an Ubuntu virtual machine within Vista. I get a resilient, fast general use OS, and just rely on Windows (or SSH into the virtualized ubuntu) for 3d stuff.
Not on ubuntu (and probably debian in general). Apt-get automatically handles everything. For video cards, you need to install an additional app (that integrated fully into apt-get and you never have to see it again) called envyng to get the latest, up to date graphics drivers though. (well, it trails slightly but usually at most a month's lag time)
The latest versions of linux (talking primarily ubuntu but it should apply to any up to date distro) are easier to set up and use than Windows. I don't have to go hunting for drivers, I don't need floppies to install SATA drivers, I don't even need to hunt down basic must-have apps like firefox and an office suite, they're already there. I carry Linux on a USB drive for when I quickly need a full suite of applications on a public computer, and have it setup so I can boot off of it or run a virtualized OS (fits in 50MB of ram). I also have openoffice and opera installed as apps on my flash drive, but a non-admin windows system is so restricted that these don't always work and the windows systems are generally bloated and slow.
As a rule of thumb, WINE is probably 1-3 years behind in Windows compatibility, but I find once it gets it, it handles backwards compatibility better than Windows (and new releases don't break it).
WINE is very focused around nvidia drivers though, it doesn't play as well with Intel and ATI drivers. ATI drivers are getting better every release though, but it wasn't until this fall that I could actually get games to play in WINE on ati hardware, and Intel linux drivers are just so far behind in development. You hear about Intel drivers getting hardware features late on Windows? They never get them on Linux, most of their hardware doesn't support features beyond the DirectX7 level due to drivers. Linux 3d sucks and nvidia completely overwrites the files for it when you install their drivers, so much so that any performance 3d stuff on Linux has basically centralised around nvidia's drivers as the right way to do 3d, standards be damned. (leaving ati and intel in an extra poor spot when the standards suck, and nobody cares to follow them anyway)
Funny you say that, I just installed MATLAB and Mathematica for my roommate in Linux. Unfortunately, COMSOL was Windows only, or at least I don't think there's a Linux version. He's currently running Windows with an Ubuntu virtual machine, as well as an Ubuntu hard boot, but he primarily sticks to Vista ever since I got the virtual machine working. (before that, he seemed to prefer ubuntu, and his laptop runs ubuntu with a windows virtual machine, mainly because old versions of windows have poor hardware support, and new versions have too many catches and too high of performance requirements for his 3 year old laptop)
Partly true, but the Linux security model borrows from the same security model as just about every server in the world. Things are locked down tight, no more permissions are given than needed (unlike windows which is basically all or none, resulting in the defacto default of all), and updates propagate very quickly. Windows, on average, takes nearly a year to respond to outstanding exploits, Mac takes about a month, Linux takes less than a day. I'd say this is the important security statistic. Linux is already well tested for viruses and security since servers have things of value for hackers to want to attack, most servers run Linux, thus Linux is regularly tested and there is big money in breaking into Linux systems. (though the same can't be said for the security of individual linux apps, but since the systems are locked down pretty tightly, they should be OK even if the apps don't follow good security models)
Not my mother-in-law, but my mother. Windows XP got so bloated with the service packs that the computer was unusable (800Mhz, 10GB harddrive, and 256MB ram), so I wiped it and put Xubuntu on. It's not perfect, but it's functional, and basically serves as a firefox machine for her. Occasionally she'll open up a word document in open office, or watch a video clip.
BTW, Linux is easier to install than Windows. Windows updates its installer less frequently and asks lots of questions, Linux (ubuntu at least) it down to put cd in, fully usable OS pops up, double click install, add a user account, start install, browse internet while you wait, you're done, reboot.
What Linux lacks is not an easy installer, but to be preinstalled. Most people can barely install apps, let alone an OS, so it doesn't matter how easy it is. Until it gets a major push from Dell or someone (and dell has given it a decent push with their ubuntu systems) and some marketting (like Apple) to make people want it, it's not going to go anywhere. As it is, people who want mac know they want mac, people who want a PC want windows and not something else, no matter how easy it is. People who want linux, install it themselves, and thus starve the market of any demand for Linux systems.
Of course, ultimately Linux is still in the position that it improves by leaps and bounds every year. It's getting very close, but I think it needs another year (maybe 2) before its as mature as Mac OSX and Windows. It does do many many many things better, including in terms of ease of use, but there are still things that it just doesn't do right or at all that need to be filled in. (Lack of apps mainly, and hardware support that's getting better but still isn't perfect/complete) Though OSX doesn't have much of that either, but gets around it by coming preinstalled on select systems. That, with a marketting campaign, is probably what Linux needs more so.
When my Ubuntu screws up (usually because of something I was doing), it takes me at most an hour to fix it, and that's if I have to do a complete reinstall, and everything is immediately back in full working order.
When Windows screws up (quite often on its own), it can take me a good part of a week to restore everything to good working order.
And Linux just runs smoother, easier, and I appreciate apt-get and its bountiful selection of apps and libraries so so much.
Though Linux still lacks support for my desktop wireless card (open source drivers exist, but Ubuntu hasn't packaged binaries in yet and I'm not messing around with installing drivers myself only to be wiped out during a kernel update), and my Canon USB printer is likely to never have Linux drivers.
On the other hand, there's quite a bit of stuff that I own that doesn't work in Vista yet still works in Linux, including old apps (with WINE) and some hardware, like my TV tuner card.
The market should have standardised on Linux two decades ago. A shared driver/software base, yet each company could push their own variant with their own GUI and special apps/features. All apps would run on all versions, but if someone wanted their system looking like Windows, it could be available, if someone wanted it like Mac, it would be available, and if someone wanted it like Ubuntu, it would be available and the same programs would run on all of them.
Though I've got to admit, now that ram is so cheap, and virtualization works so well outside of 3d graphics, I often just run an Ubuntu virtual machine within Vista. I get a resilient, fast general use OS, and just rely on Windows (or SSH into the virtualized ubuntu) for 3d stuff.
Not on ubuntu (and probably debian in general). Apt-get automatically handles everything. For video cards, you need to install an additional app (that integrated fully into apt-get and you never have to see it again) called envyng to get the latest, up to date graphics drivers though. (well, it trails slightly but usually at most a month's lag time)
The latest versions of linux (talking primarily ubuntu but it should apply to any up to date distro) are easier to set up and use than Windows. I don't have to go hunting for drivers, I don't need floppies to install SATA drivers, I don't even need to hunt down basic must-have apps like firefox and an office suite, they're already there. I carry Linux on a USB drive for when I quickly need a full suite of applications on a public computer, and have it setup so I can boot off of it or run a virtualized OS (fits in 50MB of ram). I also have openoffice and opera installed as apps on my flash drive, but a non-admin windows system is so restricted that these don't always work and the windows systems are generally bloated and slow.
As a rule of thumb, WINE is probably 1-3 years behind in Windows compatibility, but I find once it gets it, it handles backwards compatibility better than Windows (and new releases don't break it).
WINE is very focused around nvidia drivers though, it doesn't play as well with Intel and ATI drivers. ATI drivers are getting better every release though, but it wasn't until this fall that I could actually get games to play in WINE on ati hardware, and Intel linux drivers are just so far behind in development. You hear about Intel drivers getting hardware features late on Windows? They never get them on Linux, most of their hardware doesn't support features beyond the DirectX7 level due to drivers. Linux 3d sucks and nvidia completely overwrites the files for it when you install their drivers, so much so that any performance 3d stuff on Linux has basically centralised around nvidia's drivers as the right way to do 3d, standards be damned. (leaving ati and intel in an extra poor spot when the standards suck, and nobody cares to follow them anyway)
Funny you say that, I just installed MATLAB and Mathematica for my roommate in Linux. Unfortunately, COMSOL was Windows only, or at least I don't think there's a Linux version. He's currently running Windows with an Ubuntu virtual machine, as well as an Ubuntu hard boot, but he primarily sticks to Vista ever since I got the virtual machine working. (before that, he seemed to prefer ubuntu, and his laptop runs ubuntu with a windows virtual machine, mainly because old versions of windows have poor hardware support, and new versions have too many catches and too high of performance requirements for his 3 year old laptop)
Partly true, but the Linux security model borrows from the same security model as just about every server in the world. Things are locked down tight, no more permissions are given than needed (unlike windows which is basically all or none, resulting in the defacto default of all), and updates propagate very quickly. Windows, on average, takes nearly a year to respond to outstanding exploits, Mac takes about a month, Linux takes less than a day. I'd say this is the important security statistic. Linux is already well tested for viruses and security since servers have things of value for hackers to want to attack, most servers run Linux, thus Linux is regularly tested and there is big money in breaking into Linux systems. (though the same can't be said for the security of individual linux apps, but since the systems are locked down pretty tightly, they should be OK even if the apps don't follow good security models)
Not my mother-in-law, but my mother. Windows XP got so bloated with the service packs that the computer was unusable (800Mhz, 10GB harddrive, and 256MB ram), so I wiped it and put Xubuntu on. It's not perfect, but it's functional, and basically serves as a firefox machine for her. Occasionally she'll open up a word document in open office, or watch a video clip.
BTW, Linux is easier to install than Windows. Windows updates its installer less frequently and asks lots of questions, Linux (ubuntu at least) it down to put cd in, fully usable OS pops up, double click install, add a user account, start install, browse internet while you wait, you're done, reboot.
What Linux lacks is not an easy installer, but to be preinstalled. Most people can barely install apps, let alone an OS, so it doesn't matter how easy it is. Until it gets a major push from Dell or someone (and dell has given it a decent push with their ubuntu systems) and some marketting (like Apple) to make people want it, it's not going to go anywhere. As it is, people who want mac know they want mac, people who want a PC want windows and not something else, no matter how easy it is. People who want linux, install it themselves, and thus starve the market of any demand for Linux systems.
Of course, ultimately Linux is still in the position that it improves by leaps and bounds every year. It's getting very close, but I think it needs another year (maybe 2) before its as mature as Mac OSX and Windows. It does do many many many things better, including in terms of ease of use, but there are still things that it just doesn't do right or at all that need to be filled in. (Lack of apps mainly, and hardware support that's getting better but still isn't perfect/complete) Though OSX doesn't have much of that either, but gets around it by coming preinstalled on select systems. That, with a marketting campaign, is probably what Linux needs more so.
Agreed. Linux still has a way to go in some areas, but it's moving ahead at a truly blistering speed. The sort of improvements Ubuntu makes to its' OS in six months are - if Vista is any indication - as great as those Microsoft makes in six years.
The other major advantage, ironically enough, is compatibility. A Windows program will not run on windows mobile, for example, and many low-end systems simply don't have the hardware to cope with anything beyond XP, causing compatibility issues. However, any Linux program will run on any Linux distro, from the 128MB Puppy Linux up to massive Slackware installs on server clusters. A Linux PDA should (in theory) be able to run any desktop Linux application.
There's also the benefit of customization. To build a weird or different sort of PC - say, a super-low-price laptop with an unusual display technology like the OLPC - windows is a nightmare. However, Linux can easily be ported to any sort of system.
Funny thing is, Ubuntu is actually pretty far behind the curve of a lot of Linux software. In the same way that Microsoft and Apple like to bundle everything into Service Packs (or occasionally full fledged releases), Ubuntu does the same on a 6 month schedule. And even then, not everything is bleeding edge. For casual use, and for their own testing and debug purposes, this is fine. They're a compromise between the perfectly stable linux releases (basically guaranteed to be bug free, tend to trail by several years), and the bleeding edge nightly builds. This causes systems to be more up to date than most Windows users (who wouldn't bother to buy the latest version or manually update their software), but may not be good enough for power users, especially in certain apps.
For projects as big and well-tested as Open-Office, Firefox, and video card drivers, I'd rather see cutting edge. Fast developing software tends to take the idea of "Eh, if it's broken we'll fix it in the next release in a week" rather than the exhaustive testing methodology, so using an outdated version often means buggy or lacking features. These are full-featured apps that exist outside of ubuntu afterall, though I'm fine with core operating system programs and files keeping to a less aggressive release cycle.
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