This is why Linux will never take over the desktop...

[you2]

Really Jimmig; how often have you changed a motherboard/processor after 4 or 5 years or added a disk and move all installed program without having to much with 'registry' or drivers or other usesless crap. It occurred to me that if I want to upgrade my sandy bridge system to kaby or beyon; all I have to do is update the kernel, swap the motherboard/process - system will just boot without issue; my windows 7 box will never run on kaby and if I wanted to move it to a skylake nuc I would have to go through all sort of hassles to do the move due to window sloppy registry and management of drivers.

 

[repoman0]

Really Jimmig; how often have you changed a motherboard/processor after 4 or 5 years or added a disk and move all installed program without having to much with 'registry' or drivers or other usesless crap. It occurred to me that if I want to upgrade my sandy bridge system to kaby or beyon; all I have to do is update the kernel, swap the motherboard/process - system will just boot without issue; my windows 7 box will never run on kaby and if I wanted to move it to a skylake nuc I would have to go through all sort of hassles to do the move due to window sloppy registry and management of drivers.

I was quite impressed with how well Windows 10 handled the exact upgrade for me that you are complaining about. I went from a Z68 Sandy Bridge system to a Z170 Skylake and all I did was plug the hard drive in -- my new hardware was detected and installed and working perfectly on my old Windows install within a couple minutes. No messing with kernel upgrades or uninstalling old hardware or drivers or installing anything manually at all.

 

[you2]

can't comment on window 10; but windows 7 is a pia when moving to a new system. linux has been clean for the last 10+ years.

 

[Rifter]

can't comment on window 10; but windows 7 is a pia when moving to a new system. linux has been clean for the last 10+ years.

I agree fully, although i have not tried this with win 10 yet but even if it now does work that still makes them over 10 years late to the party.

I just wish someone would hack DX 11/12 into linux so i could give MS the boot for good.

 

[hrsetrdr]

I agree fully, although i have not tried this with win 10 yet but even if it now does work that still makes them over 10 years late to the party.

I just wish someone would hack DX 11/12 into linux so i could give MS the boot for good.

Well maybe dx 11 so far:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2940...-to-linux-thanks-to-codeweavers-and-wine.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2940...-to-linux-thanks-to-codeweavers-and-wine.html

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've never actually had any good luck getting Linux to boot after a major hardware change. i'm sure there's some serries of commands or steps I could take to get it to boot, but it's faster to reinstall than to try to find an answer in a crippled computing state when my main system is down and I have to use my phone or something to try to do the research. Even going from a physical system to a VM I've never actually gotten that to work properly, it will typically not boot or show some kind of error, or hang at a blank screen etc. End up having to reinstall and rebuild the system. I usually take that opportunity to just upgrade to a newer distro. When I went from Virtualbox to VMware I had to rebuild all new VMs as simply imaging them over did not work.

Windows tends to be 50/50. But usually it will be really unreliable even if it does work, so end up reinstalling anyway.

 

[Rifter]

Well maybe dx 11 so far:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2940...-to-linux-thanks-to-codeweavers-and-wine.html

This is amazing news!

 

[Essence_of_War]

I've never actually had any good luck getting Linux to boot after a major hardware change. i'm sure there's some serries of commands or steps I could take to get it to boot, but it's faster to reinstall than to try to find an answer in a crippled computing state when my main system is down and I have to use my phone or something to try to do the research. Even going from a physical system to a VM I've never actually gotten that to work properly, it will typically not boot or show some kind of error, or hang at a blank screen etc. End up having to reinstall and rebuild the system. I usually take that opportunity to just upgrade to a newer distro. When I went from Virtualbox to VMware I had to rebuild all new VMs as simply imaging them over did not work.

Windows tends to be 50/50. But usually it will be really unreliable even if it does work, so end up reinstalling anyway.

I just booted Ubuntu 16.04 after switching gpus from a 7870 to an rx480.

 

[you2]

One thing about 16.04 is that the amd drivers are weak (performance). I actually switch from an r290 to a mini 1070 when i switched from 14.04 to 16.04; i didn't give the r290 a chance in 16.04 so i can't comment how well it would have worked (fps) with 16.04 but 1070 is sweet. Finished shadow or moridor and working on metro 2033 (the re-released version).

 

[JimmiG]

I've never actually had any good luck getting Linux to boot after a major hardware change. i'm sure there's some serries of commands or steps I could take to get it to boot, but it's faster to reinstall than to try to find an answer in a crippled computing state when my main system is down and I have to use my phone or something to try to do the research. Even going from a physical system to a VM I've never actually gotten that to work properly, it will typically not boot or show some kind of error, or hang at a blank screen etc. End up having to reinstall and rebuild the system. I usually take that opportunity to just upgrade to a newer distro. When I went from Virtualbox to VMware I had to rebuild all new VMs as simply imaging them over did not work.

Windows tends to be 50/50. But usually it will be really unreliable even if it does work, so end up reinstalling anyway.

I'd always re-install the OS when doing major changes to a computer, especially if switching out the motherboard. Even if the system appears to be working fine, there could still be stability issues or sub-optimal performance from left over drivers, modules, incorrect configuration etc. This applies to Linux as well as Windows. If you're an "expert" on either OS, you could probably fix most things (Windows isn't as opaque as many seem to think), but it just isn't worth the hassle.
Re-installing is pretty easy these days because so much is web/cloud based, and storage is cheap. It was worse in the old days, trying to backup a 60 GB hard drive to 700MB CD-R's...

 

[yuchai]

I've recently installed Antergos (variant of Arch) and have been very impressed with how easy things are these days with Linux on the desktop. Possibly my expectations were low because the last time I used Linux was at least 8-9 years ago (kernel version around 2.6.25 or so) and less user friendly distros. The experience was pretty terrible at that time for the desktop, although I had accumulated some knowledge since I had set up a media/file server at the time that worked pretty well (Mythtv, software raid, etc)

I've been on the new system for about a month now and honestly the experience has been so favorable that I see myself using it long term. That said, games just don't work very well. X-com enemy unknown (native Linux version) ran pretty well, but Hitman (newly released for Linux native) is just such a big performance hit compared to Windows that the experience isn't good at all. Pro-evolution soccer 2017 runs fine on Wine, but there's a noticeable performance hit and some minor issues with sound (minor crackling). The issues are enough that it's not a good experience. So I pretty much have to tone down gaming, or live with dual boot.

As far as everyday computing though I have been really happy. Everything was easily installed in the software packaging system. All of my hardware worked out of the box without any configuration (although my system is like 5 years old at this point so that should be a given). Software updates are a snap, and I really like the idea of rolling updates personally.

Anything that I had a question with, a quick google gave me easy instructions that allowed me to fix things pretty easily. None of the issues were things that caused an unusable system. It was more things like customizes things or improves on some usability aspects of the system.

 

[whm1974]

I've recently installed Antergos (variant of Arch) and have been very impressed with how easy things are these days with Linux on the desktop. Possibly my expectations were low because the last time I used Linux was at least 8-9 years ago (kernel version around 2.6.25 or so) and less user friendly distros. The experience was pretty terrible at that time for the desktop, although I had accumulated some knowledge since I had set up a media/file server at the time that worked pretty well (Mythtv, software raid, etc)

I've been on the new system for about a month now and honestly the experience has been so favorable that I see myself using it long term. That said, games just don't work very well. X-com enemy unknown (native Linux version) ran pretty well, but Hitman (newly released for Linux native) is just such a big performance hit compared to Windows that the experience isn't good at all. Pro-evolution soccer 2017 runs fine on Wine, but there's a noticeable performance hit and some minor issues with sound (minor crackling). The issues are enough that it's not a good experience. So I pretty much have to tone down gaming, or live with dual boot.

As far as everyday computing though I have been really happy. Everything was easily installed in the software packaging system. All of my hardware worked out of the box without any configuration (although my system is like 5 years old at this point so that should be a given). Software updates are a snap, and I really like the idea of rolling updates personally.

Anything that I had a question with, a quick google gave me easy instructions that allowed me to fix things pretty easily. None of the issues were things that caused an unusable system. It was more things like customizes things or improves on some usability aspects of the system.

What video card are you using? nvidia right now is the best one for Linux if you use the closed source drivers.

 

[AMDisTheBEST]

At my university, the lab computers which we CS students complete our coding assignments on all use either centOS or Red Hat Linux.(both are sever distributions btw) Outside consumer PCs, Linux is very prevalent. I use Linux mint on my laptop as my daily driver. No windows on there, I nuked it the first day it shipped to me.

 

[Raduque]

can't comment on window 10; but windows 7 is a pia when moving to a new system. linux has been clean for the last 10+ years.

That's what you get for using Windows 7. It's outdated, deprecated and unsecure.

 

[Red Squirrel]

No OS is secure if it's not setup properly. A security model that only relies on updates is failed from the beginning. A system is never up to date, because the minute it is, there are more updates. You can spin your wheels all day updating and rebooting and updating and it's never going to be fully up to date. There's always more bugs and more exploits. Especially with Microsoft products. Though they have gotten better over the years.

I think win 7 will be like XP, where they keep extending support. Companies just finished upgrading to 7, I doubt they're close to being ready to upgrade again. They just spent tons of time and money upgrading and getting their stuff to work. 8 and 10 arn't really business centric either, they're more home entertainment toys. 10 literally is adware and spyware. I just don't see any sane company wanting to deploy that. Yeah you can disable all that stuff, but that adds a lot of extra steps to the deployment process, and also adds more stuff that can break. Companies won't gain anything from upgrading when 7 works. MS seems to be very aggressive at pushing everyone to 10 though, but people are sick of those games. How long until they decide to shove something else down people's throat?

IMO Linux is beginning to make more and more sense as an OS for businesses as Windows is really starting to become trash. The key is to try to make your environment work for your OS instead of the other way around. businesses use so many proprietary apps that only work in a specific version of Windows, but it does not have to be that way if you plan properly from the get go.

 

[yuchai]

IMO Linux is beginning to make more and more sense as an OS for businesses as Windows is really starting to become trash. The key is to try to make your environment work for your OS instead of the other way around. businesses use so many proprietary apps that only work in a specific version of Windows, but it does not have to be that way if you plan properly from the get go.

Businesses use some proprietary apps, but most use MS Office I would think. They cannot realistically do it until there's a usable Linux version of MS Office (most of the Linux alternatives out there are honestly a joke).

I'm guessing MS will never release Office for Linux partly because of your point - they are afraid to lose the corporate business on Windows.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Businesses use some proprietary apps, but most use MS Office I would think. They cannot realistically do it until there's a usable Linux version of MS Office (most of the Linux alternatives out there are honestly a joke).

I'm guessing MS will never release Office for Linux partly because of your point - they are afraid to lose the corporate business on Windows.

Libre Office. It's actually better than the MS one. Less bloated and none of that ribbon garbage where you have to hunt for everything. I often feel that I have to compromise when I'm using something open source, but Libre Office is one of those times where I actually like it better than the paid alternative. For those that use macros and VB scripting and crap - stop it. An office suite is not a development environment.

 

[whm1974]

You know with all of the crap Microsoft has been putting in Windows 10, people may switch over to Linux so they wouldn't have to deal with all of that. In fact I think Linux has become more user friendly then Windows since 8 with the Metro UI was released.

Linux doesn't get in the way like Windows does.

 

[yuchai]

Libre Office. It's actually better than the MS one. Less bloated and none of that ribbon garbage where you have to hunt for everything. I often feel that I have to compromise when I'm using something open source, but Libre Office is one of those times where I actually like it better than the paid alternative. For those that use macros and VB scripting and crap - stop it. An office suite is not a development environment.

I think it's all about compatibility, not functionality. Even if LibreOffice is 99% compatible with Office docs, it just doesn't cut it in a mission critical environment where everyone else out there is using MS Office. For better or worse everyone already knows MS Office and are already using it.

Using Libreoffice for keeping a few docs at home that you use personally is completely fine. For anything else, it just doesn't cut it.

 

[whm1974]

I think it's all about compatibility, not functionality. Even if LibreOffice is 99% compatible with Office docs, it just doesn't cut it in a mission critical environment where everyone else out there is using MS Office. For better or worse everyone already knows MS Office and are already using it.

Using Libreoffice for keeping a few docs at home that you use personally is completely fine. For anything else, it just doesn't cut it.

There is also OnlyOffice which from what I hear has better MS Office compatibility.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I don't even get the whole deal with the compatibility issue, so some text might be slightly different, who really cares. To save millions of dollars in licensing fees it's a rather small trade off.

Actually one thing Linux DOES lack though is proper fonts. Most of the built in fonts are kinda meh, and most of them look the same. I did import all the ones from Windows once and it sorta worked but it was a bit iffy.

 

[ControlD]

Libre Office. It's actually better than the MS one. Less bloated and none of that ribbon garbage where you have to hunt for everything. I often feel that I have to compromise when I'm using something open source, but Libre Office is one of those times where I actually like it better than the paid alternative. For those that use macros and VB scripting and crap - stop it. An office suite is not a development environment.

Rubbish. the VBA capabilities of Excel make it one of the most powerful programs out there. I use LibreOffice at home, but for my work VBA+Excel is absolutely critical. Could I get the same thing done with a full development environment? Probably, but Excel is a much better fit and doesn't require me to have a team of computer science majors rather than the engineers I really need.

 

[Greyguy1948]

The best in Windows is the printer Data Base.
For me printers has always been a problem in Linux.
But I am very fond of a small Linux for example in Raspberry Pi.
Windows seems to be very big and clumsy regarding my needs.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I'm struggling myself with a printing issue in Linux. At random instead of printing the actual document it just prints a gibberish error. Supper annoying. Tempting to just setup a Windows print server.

 

[lxskllr]

Rubbish. the VBA capabilities of Excel make it one of the most powerful programs out there. I use LibreOffice at home, but for my work VBA+Excel is absolutely critical. Could I get the same thing done with a full development environment? Probably, but Excel is a much better fit and doesn't require me to have a team of computer science majors rather than the engineers I really need.

Libreoffice has python. Probably works the same way, and python skills are usable everywhere, not just with MS.

I use Libreoffice at work, and all docs are saved as .odt. Anyone can access the software required to read them, or can develop the software themselves if they chose to. I did send a client a .odt earlier this week, and he said he couldn't open it. I considered being an asshole, and make him download Libreoffice, but re-sent as an OfficeOpenXML, and I guess that worked. Clients usually get a pdf, but this was a wide spreadsheet, and didn't look right as a pdf, so I figured he could do what he wanted with the original.