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[commodorejohn]

You're a bad consumer. Please turn on your TV for re-education.

I'm afraid I never bought an HDTV converter box...I may have to report to the Ministry of Consumer Re-Education directly... :eek:

[commodorejohn]

Oh my.  Please tell me you at least watch the Hulu Plus and let them know which ads are applicable to you!

...umm...uh...no?

[commodorejohn]

Photoshop?  For what most of us do, GIMP is actually more than sufficient.   I know many professional photographers who do the majority of their post processing in GIMP.

GIMP's functionality is aces, but its interface sucks. It's a halfway clone of Photoshop that doesn't actually finish the cloning and is thus not nearly as usable. I haven't gotten a chance to try "single-window mode" in GIMP, but I would be very surprised if it was much better, given how braindead the UI was before - though at least it shouldn't be spraying windows all over creation and not even showing enough intelligence to keep its own document windows from overlapping its tool palettes, anymore.

These are fantastic software packages, not half-arsed buggy 'compile from source', 'lib dependency hell' packages.   Most software you could ever want is available in standard (or extended) repos.  It just works.

And as long as "most software you could ever want" (read: whatever software the maintainers have felt like adding) is good enough, then you only have to worry about the baffling number of packages that, say, Synaptic concludes are mutually exclusive even though they have nothing to do with each other, or that depend on libraries that will muck up existing libraries that other applications depend on (yay, PulseAudio!)

And when the program you want isn't in the repository, well, it isn't. You get to build it from source anyway, because the developer might have one old compile for one of the eleventy billion deprecated ABI versions on whichever architecture they happen to use, which is invariably different from whatever your setup is. And of course you'll have to install all the prerequisite libraries, hopefully they're in the repository, and in versions that are compatible with the program you're trying to build!

As for drivers, I've not had any driver issues for years.

Why is it that so many people think "well I've never had any trouble!" is a meaningful response to the people who have?

Check out these packages, then their windows (or OSX) equivalents (and their costs) and you may find yourself reconsidering Linux.

GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/

GIMP is the last straw that drove me away from Linux.

Your decade (or more) worth of Windows experience may not be easily transferable, but then this would be equally true if you moved to OSX (which is also rock solid with superb applications), or any other desktop OS.

Actually, I've had a much easier time of it acclimating to OSX merely on a hobby basis when using my PowerBook for writing purposes than I did in my multiple attempts to fully switch over to Linux on a daily-driver basis.

[commodorejohn]

Also, how hard is:

mkdir /media/myISO

(sudo) mount -t iso9660 myISO.iso -o loop

Harder than installing Daemon Tools, that's for certain.

Edit: or was that sarcasm?

[commodorejohn]

Yes.  Five years was long enough.  Although I find this sort of comment hard to believe.  Does this mean that you stuck with the same computer and linux OS for Five years and were completely unable to get it running?  That nowhere in that five year span did you learn to use a terminal shell?  That you couldn't bother to read a man file?  That sounds like an awful time.

I think more realistically that every once in a while, lets say every 6 months or so (or every release cycle of a new flavor) you burned a live ISO, slapped it on an available partition, spent the time getting dual boot going, booted into it once or twice to mess about, got frustrated with the fact that there is a learning curve involved and wiped it off again.

Wow. Way to ask for clarification and then impugn someone's honesty without even letting them answer in the same post...

[commodorejohn]

Not liking linux or not getting it to install has nothing to do with your geek cred, or penis size, or IQ.

...what.

People are ranting against linux in a microsoft thread on an Amiga forum.  Obviously there must be some emotion behind these sentiments.

Uh, yes? Emotions contributing to such opinions would include: frustration at the needless, Byzantine complexity of the operating system, irritation at the way simple tasks can balloon out into huge projects merely because library X doesn't like library Y and library Z isn't even in the repository, despair of ever getting the system into a state where it both has a complete complement of software needed for the end-user's daily workflow and is working and stable, and anger at zealots who respond to every criticism of their favorite operating system with "you didn't really have that problem," "it works for me," "these issues don't exist," "you don't need that missing feature," "RTFM," "it's really not as complicated as you're pretending it is," "if you don't want hassle why don't you just go back to Windows, you whiner," and so on and so forth.

All of those have been expressed openly in the thread; it's not exactly like anybody was trying to keep it a secret. (And as for the fact that it's being discussed in this thread, the Linux advocates were the ones who brought it up in the first place; the ranting was in reaction to the constant suggestions that maybe this will be the chance for Linux to finally overtake Windows, as if its failure to do so for the last twenty years has only stemmed from a lack of opportunity, and Linux's perpetual failure to address its underlying issues - except for a few projects that seem to be targeted at mouthbreathing idiots under the impression that that's what ordinary users are - is not a factor at all.)

[commodorejohn]

For acknowledging that all systems suck, you've spent a fair bit of this sub-discussion responding to Linux critics with "you're not really having the problems that you say you're having, and furthermore you probably haven't tried enough and aren't up to date, and also everything you're saying is FUD."

[commodorejohn]

Its one thing to not like Linux or windows due to some bad experience. Its another to say that Linux or windows is inherently flawed, unable to be successful because it is massively flawed, that the many groups who work on aspects of the Linux kernel based operating systems have no knowledge or clue about useable design, or many of the other completely absurd things said by several different people just because it did not work for them.  That IS fud.

Where is the distinction there? Are we only supposed to harbor some kind of arbitrary, unreasoning resentment, and any complaints that address specific issues and posit root causes for them are somehow FUD? That doesn't make any sense. I wasn't saying that Linux has bad UI design because I was frustrated with the library issues and wanted to vent, I was saying it because I experienced many very specific issues with the overall UI design. Similarly, I think that the reason for its failure to make any major impact on the desktop market does stem from the fact that it isn't accessible to ordinary users and is overly complex, and nobody has made any serious efforts to address that in the twenty years it's been in development. I honestly think that, it's not something I'm just saying out of spite. It's not fear because I'm not trying to scare people away from Linux - by all means, try it yourself and see. It's not uncertainty because it is in no way vague or unclear. And I'm not seeking to sow doubt; I'm expressing my own analysis of the state of things.

[commodorejohn]

How long do you end up waiting for an Amiga driver to be released?

Zero seconds. All the drivers I've needed have been out for years, and available on Aminet.

Regarding the comments on Gimp - I don't understand any of the  criticisms.  I wasn't a Photoshop user, instead I migrated from Degas  Elite (Atari ST), to Deluxe Paint (Amiga), to Paint Shop Pro (Windows)  to Gimp (Linux).   The path wasn't at all painful and I can still switch  between Gimp and PSP with very little frustration (basic tools, layer  windows etc are all very alike).   Are you sure it's not Photoshop which  breaks the convention? I've heard people say Photoshop has a learning  curve and can be difficult to get started with - I have no personal  experience here.

Photoshop has no real learning curve for basic use, the only complicated things are a few of the secondary tools that aren't immediately self-explanatory (pen tool, for example,) but once you get past that it's not difficult at all. I can't speak for your pre-GIMP experience, but it's not the layout or familiarity that's the problem with it - it's many, many smaller issues that all add up to a lot of hassle:

• Accelerators in menus and dialogs are an absolute mess - half of them assign the same letter to multiple controls, so that you have to cycle through them, which entirely defeats the point of having them. Tab-stop order is also a nonsensical jumble.
  
• As I recall, half the time there weren't even Enter and Esc shortcuts to submit or cancel a dialog.
• The layout appears to be based on Photoshop for Mac OS, with the menu bar up at the top and palettes floating over the desktop at the sides, but they've overlooked some crucial aspects such as:
• (Most? All?) Linux desktops don't have a Mac-like global menu bar, so they have to keep the menu confined to the document window - which means it gets added to every document opened, which is a waste of screen space they could've avoided if they'd gone with a Photoshop-for-Windows-style multiple-document interface (I understand they finally added a "single-window mode" which is almost like that, I haven't gotten a chance to try it.)
  
• Also, since Alt-Tab on (most?) Linux desktops switches between windows and not applications, having a dozen images open in the GIMP means having to cycle through a dozen image windows to get to, say, a web browser with a reference image, or the MP3 player so you can queue up the next album, or whatever. Another aggravation that could've been avoided if they'd just gone with the design paradigm that suited what most Linux environments are actually like.
  
• Furthermore, the document windows get opened wherever, completely irrespective of the application's own windows, so you can quite easily wind up with document windows overlapping (or underlapping) the tool palettes you use to work on them, and have to relocate them manually. That's just braindead. It's not like the GIMP doesn't know where its windows are.
  

There's a lot of that kind of stuff. It all feels like the symptoms of a project where everybody wants to work on the (admittedly cool) backend functionality, and the part of the program that actually faces the user gets back-burnered until it can't be ignored any longer, then hastily slap-dashed into a basically feature-complete state.

The GIMP is an extreme example, but in my experience that kind of problem seems to be endemic to the Linux developer community - in an open development environment, programmers want to work on the stuff that interests programmers, and without some kind of additional driving force, they really have no interest in boring stuff like usability except in that it gets the program into a state where others can appreciate the cool backend stuff they put all the real work into.

My surprise at defending Linux on an Amiga forum?  Perhaps I should have  worded that as my surprise people are so pro-Windows on an Amiga forum.    The reason I felt so at home in Linux was due to years of experience  with the Amiga.   Amiga (AmigaDOS?) to Linux (BASH) seemed a natural  progression, certainly a lot more natural than Amiga to Windows.

Well, not all of us are fighting the same old grudge-match from decades ago. I like the Amiga because I find the Amiga to be neat, but I don't have the time or energy to be mad at Windows for beating it, especially when what actually killed it was managerial ineptitude and a few of the bigger scoundrels at Commodore poisoning the well.

Also, huh? AmigaDOS to me looks a lot more like MS-DOS with the design issues fixed than anything like a Unix shell...

[commodorejohn]

I thought it was bloodline (or Karlos?  I forget) who had a thread here showing a lot of the unix-y goodness in the amiga shell.

I'd like to see that thread. Still, AmigaDOS tends strongly towards expanded, human-readable command names (copy instead of cp, format instead of mkfs, and so on - also, dir instead of ls, though both are abbreviations there,) has only limited pipe support, has no global directory-tree structure comparable to the Unix / hierarchy, instead addressing individual volumes by appending a colon to either the device name or (thankfully) the volume label, and so on.

Certainly it's not a perfect 1:1 correspondence, it looks more like an expanded RT-11 than either, and I have my suspicions that that's due to TripOS originating on the PDP-11. Still, it certainly looks a lot more like it takes after the side of the CLI family tree that Microsoft also inhabits.

[commodorejohn]

I may be looking back with nostalgia clouding my judgement but I'm sure the Amiga CLI was much more capable than DOS.

Oh, no question there. Even just the ability to specify disks by volume instead of physical drive number puts it leagues ahead. I'm just saying that in terms of lineage, it looks to have more in common with the RT-11 -> CP/M -> MS-DOS tree than the classic Unix shells.

[commodorejohn]

My bet is that you'll end up running it and you won't hack anything.

I'll bet you a dollar that it never touches a single one of my machines.

I'll bet you a $1 they drop the horrid Metro  interface and go back to legacy Windows desktop look and feel.

Gonna have a hard time finding someone to take that bet, even for a dollar, my friend. It's a sure thing.

I think once MS realizes that 8 is a dead pigeon they'll start forcing people off Vista and 7 at bayonet point with DX.

A.k.a. "the DX10 gambit." The sad thing is that it's worked once before...

I think they capped at 10.

9, actually. 10 was the carrot to get people who wanted Bioshock to look as pretty as possible to switch to Vista.

[commodorejohn]

The Metro name was a code name during development.  The UI doesn't have a real name other than Windows 8.

Calling Windows 8 Metro is akin to calling Windows 7 Vienna or calling Windows XP Whistler...

Right you are, that's clearly a very crucial distinction. I suggest that, in the future, we refer to the Officially Nameless Windows 8 Interface as "AOL Circa 1996."



You were right, that sleek new look is much less (ugh!) twentieth-century than the Win95 UI. By a whole year.

[commodorejohn]

So, you know how I was saying that Windows 8 was going to make Vista look like a success? Well, gosh golly, check this out: Windows 8 adoption rates are trailing at about 55% of Vista adoption rates, month-for-month.

Oh, and you know that whole tablet market that this was a last-ditch attempt to break into long after iOS and Android had firmly established themselves as the only games in town? Yeah, that's not working out so hot.

Bravo, Microsoft, you are truly visionaries.

[commodorejohn]

Well good for you. You're that much more future-ey than the ignorant masses for using the newest version-of-Windows-nobody-wanted.

And yes, they did have tablets before Apple did, and nobody wanted them then, either. Perhaps somewhere in the years and years of failing to make this work, they should have taken a lesson from their years and years of failing to make this work.

[commodorejohn]

In ~20 years of using UNIX/Linux both personally and professionally I've never had any problems to speak of. It does exactly what I tell it to do and nothing more.

That's really great for you, but it doesn't mean a thing to those of us who have had issues with it.