What program keeps you from being a full time linux user?

[numb]

I know a few people who have one program they just can't live without. If there was a port, they'd go linux 100%.

Personally, I -need- photoshop. I find that the gimp does not do the sort of things I do in photoshop on a daily basis.

So, what can't you live without?

 

[Chaotic42]

Grand Theft Auto 3 and Bryce 4

 

[Tiger]

A few Ham Radio apps that have no Linux alternative and don't look to anytime soon.
There are a few that have some of the functionality of their Windows counterparts, they just miss the mark.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

nothin...

 

[clockhar]

An office suit that works right!.
By "right", I mean able to read/write word docs correctly (i.e. handle pictures, tables, graphs, and all the extra stuff like that). OpenOffice 1.0 is close, but still not there.

"emulating" MSOffice on wine, works mostly (its flaky here and there)

 

[jcmkk]

The only thing I need windows for is games. I don't play games much anymore except once a month at a LAN party, so I rarely boot into windows.

 

[Chooco]

there's a few things right now
-i just can't get Perl or CGI to work on Linux (i have no clue why)
-MySQL gives me an error when i try to run it on Linux (too lazy to ask for help because my dad's replacing the hard drive with Winblows in a week anyway)
-can't setup an FTP server because it's super hard and that makes it very impractical for quick editting of my website
-games
-computer has ATI card in it, ATI has like no Linux support (it's SUPER LAGGY when i scroll so i'm forced to use non laggy windows in this case)
-Half-Life
-i don't know how to setup printers or anything with Linux (again, the 1 week of time thing makes it not worth learning just yet)
*edit*
and Macromedia Dreamweaver.....lol i'm such a lamer i don't know that much about HTML, doing my website manualy would have taken literaly years

 

[dude8604]

*Sound Blaster Audigy Drivers
*Ease of use (Linux seems a lot more difficult than Windows)
*Various Games (no good games are released for Linux, ie GTA3)
*A lot of other things I can't think of now

 

[Nothinman]

Chooco, nothing you mentioned was because of lack of a port of something. All your problems stem from your inability to read documentation. Except for the video driver support, which I must say ATI has decent driver support, atleast for 2D in X.

 

[Chooco]

nothingman, here is how you are not entirely true
-there is no manual for proftp and pureftp
-i did exactly what the manual said for MySQL and it gives an error about something in /var/(something)
-ATI does NOT have drivers for Linux, it actually says on their website that they don't have Linux drivers but Linux distros are including them, my Linux distro did not have drivers for my card so it's brutaly slow. again, that's another reason why i hate ATI - they don't have drivers for Linux or Windows basically (the windows driver tampered with crucial DLLS and made the performance drop over 50%)
-there is no Half-Life for Linux
-there is no DreamWeaver for Linux
-documentation on installing printers is long and beats around the bush in terms of the steps, it doesn't flat out say "do this and this and this", they jsut say "change this to suit your settings" and give no explanation for what you are supposed to fill in there
-my buddy actually examined my computer through Webadmin i think it's called to see my Perl/CGI configuration, he had absolutely no clue why Perl would not work on the Linux computer.....even the guys at other Linux forums and other technical forums were stumped as to what was wrong. PHP works fine though so i guess i'm a PHP man now (good thing i bought that PHP book instead the Perl one eheheh)

i could probably get that MySQL thing to work but there's only a week of Linux left so it's not even worth trying just yet. it's a shame though, if i had the forum running on Linux i would be able to have it send email when people get replies to forum stuff eheheheh

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Chooco
-there is no manual for proftp and pureftp

-there is no Half-Life for Linux

 

[Chooco]

fooey have you actually checked Valve's website and loki games and counter-strike forums and planethalflife? they ALL say that there is no Linux version of Half-Life

those FTP thing really didn't come with instructions, they say how to install it with the command of configure, make and make install but that's all, there is no info on how to configure it or setup users or change access.

 

[TheOmegaCode]

Seriously Chooco other than games (which is an ambiguous term at best) and the Macromedia products, you're arguments are shady... If you read and hang out in a few linux irc channels, then you'll learn a lot...

 

[Nothinman]

-there is no manual for proftp and pureftp

http://www.proftpd.org/docs/ must only exist on my local network then.

-i did exactly what the manual said for MySQL and it gives an error about something in /var/(something)

MySQL works just fine for me, any errors it produced were always verbose enough to figure out what I did wrong. And MySQL also has really good manuals on their site.

-ATI does NOT have drivers for Linux, it actually says on their website that they don't have Linux drivers but Linux distros are including them, my Linux distro did not have drivers for my card so it's brutaly slow. again, that's another reason why i hate ATI - they don't have drivers for Linux or Windows basically (the windows driver tampered with crucial DLLS and made the performance drop over 50%)

I can't comment much except I have a Rage128 at work that works just fine. I'll probably be putting Linux on my Inspiron 4100 which as a Mobile Radeon so Ill see then.

-there is no Half-Life for Linux

I've seen enough HL on Wine documents to believe it works.

-there is no DreamWeaver for Linux

That's the only valid point you posted. But you can find HTML editors on Linux, DreamWeaver isn't the only one out there.

-documentation on installing printers is long and beats around the bush in terms of the steps, it doesn't flat out say "do this and this and this", they jsut say "change this to suit your settings" and give no explanation for what you are supposed to fill in there

I really don't think they should have to lay it out like that, it's just people are nice enough to do it on other subjects. Printing on Linux differes depending on the system you're using (CUPS, lpr, etc) but it's not voodoo.

 

[Chooco]

Wine does not really count as a distro of Half-Life, yes it works but only after you configure it until you eyes bleed.

by beating around the bush i mean things like "fill in the IRQ port of your video drivers", this may not make sense but just play along with me. instead of saying HOW you find out what that setting is, they just say to set it....ok then....that helps a hell of a lot

Dreamweaver is not the only one and i know that but it's the best one there is

when KDE closes, the last line is "no hardware acceleration", ATI does not have drivers on their website so what do i do? there's no drivers and the maker does not have drivers so what does that mean? it means the card is virtually useless.

 

[TheOmegaCode]

What are these?
I also found this...

 

[Electrode]

<< What program keeps you from being a full time linux user? >>

NOTHING! There is absolutely nothing available for Windows that something on Linux can't do better. The only exception is Photoshop, and it'll run on Wine.

The only reason I am dual booting Linux with Windows 2000 on ONE of my systems is to play the few decent games that haven't yet been ported to Linux. And before anyone says that there aren't any good games for Linux, let me list a few of the games in my launcher dockapp:

Quake
Quake 2
Quake 3 Arena
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
SimCity 3000

And a few of the upcoming Linux releases:
Doom 3
Neverwinter Nights
Unreal Tournament 2003 (maybe)

And, of course, the endless supply of free games, many of which are very, very good, and most of them don't run on Windows.

 

[Sunner]

A bunch of games mostly.

I've messed around with WINE, but the documentation they provide is quite possibly the worst documentation I've ever seen(and I've seen some pretty crappy docs).

Maybe it's improved since I had a go at it last time, but it will be some time before I try again, considdering the hideously sour taste it left in my mouth last time.

 

[aircooled]

I'm at the point where I want to run linux on a machine that's as powerful as my main windows rig (but still don't want to replace it). Right now I run it on a lower end box.

I was able to setup proFTPd in one evening using the documentation provided on their website. Granted, it was not as easy as a windows app, but I did get it functioning (and I am a linux newbie).

I'm not really waiting for any one application, my problems with linux are me. I just don't know it as well as windows (but I am trying to learn it).

The little things I have trouble with are knowing where I'm supposed to install programs (apparantly anywhere, but I don't know the proper "protocol" yet). Also installing a new hard drive as extra space to install apps on. I have 2 extra harddrives that linux 'sees' but isn't using. My brain is just so full of "C: drives and D: drives" that hda's and sda's havent sunk in yet.... I'll figure all that out eventually, but right now I'm just taking it one step at a time.

I'd like to see apache integrate an FTP server with it (ala IIS but without the security problems). I'd also like to see samba become easier and more seamless, but again, these are things that are only hard because of my lack of linux knowledge.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[thornc]

...well a part from games... nothing......
Mozilla and Evolution closed the last issues.... KDE3.0 helped a little but I do prefer XFCE!

At work I still have to use windows due to some weird catalogs and apps we need, but I have Cygwin and a Xserver
on at all times and most things I do are in them!!

 

[Tiger]

There is "hardware acceleration" for the Radeon vid cards.
I still haven't heard what distro caused Chooco all the problems. Anything with v 4.2 of X supports the Radeons.

 

[Nothinman]

Wine does not really count as a distro of Half-Life, yes it works but only after you configure it until you eyes bleed.

It works, but it doesn't count, nice logic.

by beating around the bush i mean things like "fill in the IRQ port of your video drivers", this may not make sense but just play along with me. instead of saying HOW you find out what that setting is, they just say to set it....ok then....that helps a hell of a lot

Finding your hardware settings is seperate from setting up the user-land tools, if every set of docs discussed the same topics they'd be a lot larger and probably end up conflicting as there's different ways of finding out that information depending on what OS you're using (and a lot of unix stuff like printing systems run on more than just Linux).

when KDE closes, the last line is "no hardware acceleration", ATI does not have drivers on their website so what do i do? there's no drivers and the maker does not have drivers so what does that mean? it means the card is virtually useless.

"no hardware acceleration" could be any number of things, from hardware mouse acceleration (yes, most video cards can draw the mouse in hardware) to DRI for GLX applications.

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but in the Linux world we rely on each other to get things done, not big companies. Just because ATI doesn't do drivers for Linux doesn't mean someone else didn't. Infact 99% of the drivers in Linux were done by someone other than the manufacturer of the hardware, and IMHO most of those drivers work better than their Windows counterparts.

I'd like to see apache integrate an FTP server with it (ala IIS but without the security problems).

Why? There's already several ftp daemons to choose from that work just fine, and adding FTP to apache just makes more potential for problems.

In the unix world there's a motto (for lack of a better word because it's early and I can't think) K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid). Having lots of little simple tools is much easier to work with, and fix, than one big complicated tool when noone remembers how it works. Each tool should have 1 job to do well, it can then be combined with multiple other tools to do a bigger more complicated job.

I'd also like to see samba become easier and more seamless, but again, these are things that are only hard because of my lack of linux knowledge.

Depending on what you mean by 'more seamless' this may happen by the time Samba TNG becomes stable. They're working on things like getting uid/gid info from an NT domain so no local unix accounts would be necessary to login and use the box interactively.

 

[Rainsford]

Certain games I play. I know that many of them can be made to run in Linux, but I've heard they don't run very well (and some, like GTA3, don't run at all). Also, installing programs in Linux could use a ton of work IMHO. RPMs don't give you very much flexability and while hardcore Unix people might like compiling software themselves, it's too much work every time I want to install a program. Not saying that these are impossible obstacles (I use Linux as a server OS), but I just find using Windows easier. I suppose if I didn't play games I might give Linux more of a try in the desktop area.

 

[Armitage]

I spent alot of time booted to Win2K this spring because Linux doesn't have a good 3D/Architectural CAD program for a reasonable price.

I'm forced to run Win2K under VMWare @ work because they insist on Lotus Notes for e-mail :disgust:. I've heard that you can run the notes client under Wine, but the last time I tried that the config was so painful that I ended up bailing out for VMWare just to get some capability in the near term.

 

[steell]

I am in the middle of switching all my machines from 2k/XP to Suse Linux, so I guess MS does not offer me anything I can't live without.
I did an FTP install of 8.0 and it probably took about an hour, start to finish. Easiest distro I've ever installed and setup!