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[psxphill]

You know what? You're right. Better to spend 40 bucks on a product that you will never get a look at the source code for without an NDA. Better to support a company who threatens hardware vendors who install anything but OEM windows on it. Better to support a company who has proven itself for more than twenty years to be a vicious monopoly who will buy, litigate or outright steal its way to market saturation.

The irony is that you are saying those things on a message board dedicated to a machine made by commodore, who were way worse than Microsoft when it came to dodgy business practises.
 
I'm not that bothered about seeing the source code.

[TheBilgeRat]

The irony is that you are saying those things on a message board dedicated to a machine made by commodore, who were way worse than Microsoft when it came to dodgy business practises.
 
I'm not that bothered about seeing the source code.

The irony is not lost.

[runequester]

You know what? You're right. Better to spend 40 bucks on a product that you will never get a look at the source code for without an NDA. Better to support a company who threatens hardware vendors who install anything but OEM windows on it. Better to support a company who has proven itself for more than twenty years to be a vicious monopoly who will buy, litigate or outright steal its way to market saturation.

This would be the same company that lied to Congress in order to get more immigrant visa's, for low-paid Indian programmers by the way.

[commodorejohn]

The market has consistently rejected open operating systems.  Linux, BSD, etc have failed to gather more than a small fraction of desktops.  People like closed systems, end of story.  Even Android, which is a Unix distro and open source has locked down the OS.

The market has rejected open systems because the current open systems suck for anybody who A. doesn't like to make a hobby out of OS maintenance, or B. needs more than the default install and a few packages out of the tidiest corner of x distro's repository. Once open-source manages to come up with something that's as usable out-of-the-box as the commercial alternatives and doesn't require a correspondence course to maintain, then we'll find out what the market thinks about it.

[TheBilgeRat]

This would be the same company that lied to Congress in order to get more immigrant visa's, for low-paid Indian programmers by the way.

But hey, If Shuttleworth integrates amazon into local searches then responds to the outcry by allowing it to be disabled, he is a lying manipulative sack of s***.  If android has to restrict some source code to be released to protect their hardware vendors IP, then they are also a bunch of lying manipulative sacks as well.  If Google (and linux) allow some binary blobs to allow hardware to be used properly, they are a bunch of misrepresenting jerkwads.  I really don't understand this mindset.  When they respond with "I don't care that I can't see the source code" and then somewhere bitch somewhere else about why their identity was stolen or find out that their hardware manufacturer had a rootkit installed from the factory (Sony anyone?), or even worse, decide that that sort of behavior is not a DEAL BREAKER, I have no hope for the future.  Enjoy the Soma.

[TheBilgeRat]

The market has rejected open systems because the current open systems suck for anybody who A. doesn't like to make a hobby out of OS maintenance, or B. needs more than the default install and a few packages out of the tidiest corner of x distro's repository. Once open-source manages to come up with something that's as usable out-of-the-box as the commercial alternatives and doesn't require a correspondence course to maintain, then we'll find out what the market thinks about it.

A.  not true.
B.  not true either.

I'm guessing that the last time you tried installing a linux, it was more than 5 years ago and was a distro like gentoo or slax or LFS.

[partycentralpartygirl]

A.  not true.
B.  not true either.

I'm guessing that the last time you tried installing a linux, it was more than 5 years ago and was a distro like gentoo or slax or LFS.

Did someone say "install gentoo" ?

http://i.imgur.com/oy4JJ.png

Freedom, bros, freedom.

[TheBilgeRat]

Did someone say "install gentoo" ?

http://i.imgur.com/oy4JJ.png

Freedom, bros, freedom.

[commodorejohn]

A.  not true.
B.  not true either.

I'm guessing that the last time you tried installing a linux, it was more than 5 years ago and was a distro like gentoo or slax or LFS.

As I said in the two-part rant I wrote when I finally gave up this past November, I've been trying for the last...oh, seven or eight years to get into Linux, and with multiple distros, none of which have been tech-head stuff like Slackware. If you want to insist that what I'm saying is false, that's your business, but I am speaking from personal experience here - Linux is just plain not suitable for people who want to install and use more than a web browser, LibreOffice, and a handful of whatever games come in the repository that don't require mutually exclusive sound libraries unless you build them from source.

I've tried moderately technical distros like Fedora and run up against the fact that Linux, as an operating system (so let's not get bogged down in "it's just a kernel,") has as its underpinnings a writhing, labyrinthine mess of intricately inter-dependent toolkits, libraries, and scripts, any one of which can fail without warning or explanation the moment you change anything in any part of the system. I've tried "friendly" distros like Ubuntu (ugh) or Debian (yay,) and all they do is sweep that mess under the rug of a very nice package manager and pretend it's not there, until something goes wrong, somewhere in the works, and failure symptoms start crawling out of the walls and you realize, like a Lovecraft protagonist, that the madness was here the whole time.

Unix is forty years of cruft accumulated in turning an operating system for time-sharing mainframes with VT-100s into an operating system that can do modern desktop kind of stuff. Linux is those forty years of Unix cruft painstakingly ported to PC, and apparently at no point in the process did anybody stop and say "hey, guys, maybe some of this stuff is more complicated than it needs to be?" Except: oh wait, lots of people said that the whole time and nobody listened to them. Because the people behind Linux (and yes, I know there is no central agency - that's the problem, it's a whole culture of this disease) don't care about simplifying the needlessly complex. They thrive on needless complexity. They codify it, canonize it, worship it, appoint themselves its high priests and make their living handing down bits of its functionality to the unwashed masses, and call you a heretic if you question it.

It's too damn complicated and it's never going to get fixed until the people who steer it finally own up to that. Google had the sense to do it, but that only helps people on Android systems. As for Linux at large, the biggest change it's looking at at any time in the near future is Wayland - and don't get me wrong, XWindows is a ripe candidate for an overhaul, but that does nothing to address all of the other insane complexity.

[spirantho]

While I dislike any Windows vs Linux arguments (I run an OS called "AmigaOS"), I do feel my own viewpoint as being valid.... this is all my own opinion, and my own perspective on it.

I've run a lot of OSes to varying amounts from GeOS to Windows 8, via UN*X systems like Solaris 7 thru 9. I've run Linux on my A4000 APUS as well as on PCs and my wife's laptop.

My impression is this:
Linux is just great as long as you do what they expect you to do. If you want to web-browse, it's great. If you want to install an Ubuntu package (I use Ubuntu as that's what I have most experience of these days) then it's fine.

But as soon as you want to run something a bit ... different... things go a bit pear-shaped. All of a sudden you're wondering about what versions of the various different libraries you're running. Then you find out that one lib doesn't like another lib, because it's expecting a newer version....
then you realise that there's static libraries and also dynamic libraries. What you're running may be compiled with a static library which conflicts with another library you have - so you need to recompile, because your system isn't the same as the one which compiled the program you want to run, because that was a few years ago and the OS has changed since then. Then you need to recompile other libraries to support that. Which may conflict with another library you have, so you need to update that. And so on.

All that isn't an actual situation - it's just describing some of the thing that have happened in the past. However, if I've found myself descending into Linux lib hell, I can't be the only one. If I - with experience of SysAdmin'ing my own Sun machines and a CompSci degree - find Linux frustrating, then how do "normal" people find it? I can almost always sort it eventually but it can take ages sometimes. I don't have this problem with any other OS - not even Windows (which is incredibly brain-dead with its versions, but at least it all mostly "just works" ... these days) or Solaris (which is also a Unix system).

Once it's set up - it works, yes. I have Ubuntu on my wife's Compaq laptop and it runs fine. She has no problems. But then she's not doing much with it apart from simple things.
I also run it on my EEE-PC 701. It's a bit slow but works ok as long as I don't do too much "under the hood"... but as soon as I try something a little odd like running xawtv with my USB Win/TV card, or running an old version of MAME from a few years ago, or some other weird thing, I suddenly can find I need a library which I don't have. Occasionally it even tells me which library - if I'm lucky. Then I need to see if it's in the repository. If it isn't, I need to recompile it. Which probably needs another dependency I don't have, so I have to track down that one.

Overall, I find Linux the most frustrating system to run.
I like tinkering - it's quite normal for me to do something daft on my Amiga, but then I manage to fix it - I know where everything is. I know the libs: directory is my libraries. I don't have /lib and /usr/lib/ and /usr/local/lib and /opt/lib and /var/lib and everythingelse/lib. I know where my path is from a no-ss boot: it's in C:. Not /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin/, /usr/sbin/,/usr/local/bin etc. etc. etc.

This is why I don't recommend Linux to people unless I'm going to be there to look after it. When Windows goes wrong, it can normally fix itself (these days). When AmigaOS goes wrong, I can fix it. But when Linux goes wrong it can be a nightmare to fix.

I don't pretend to be the most experienced Linux user in the world. But I do know there must be some reason why I don't enjoy it in the same way as AmigaOS or even other OSes (not Windows - don't like that either but that's a different story ). And if I have this trouble with Linux, I dread to think what Joe Public thinks of it.

It seems to me that many people think of Linux as being for tinkerers and people who like to play with the insides of their OS. But for me, I spent more time fighting against the OS than playing in it. I can tinker with AmigaOS, and it lets me do it. With Linux, it fights me all the way.

That's why - for me - Linux still isn't accepted by the general public. Like it or loathe it, Windows "just works" these days, and where it doesn't work, most of the time it tells you why and gives you a solution. That's what's missing from Linux. The other extreme is AmigaOS - things often don't work, because you're missing this or that - but it's easy to find out with a little knowledge of the OS why it doesn't work, and fix it. Hence for me, Windows = best option for Joe Public, AmigaOS = best option for tinkering hobbyist.

[commodorejohn]

(very many words)

It seems to me that many people think of Linux as being for tinkerers and people who like to play with the insides of their OS. But for me, I spent more time fighting against the OS than playing in it. I can tinker with AmigaOS, and it lets me do it. With Linux, it fights me all the way.

That's why - for me - Linux still isn't accepted by the general public. Like it or loathe it, Windows "just works" these days, and where it doesn't work, most of the time it tells you why and gives you a solution. That's what's missing from Linux. The other extreme is AmigaOS - things often don't work, because you're missing this or that - but it's easy to find out with a little knowledge of the OS why it doesn't work, and fix it. Hence for me, Windows = best option for Joe Public, AmigaOS = best option for tinkering hobbyist.

Well said.

[Iggy]

Well said.

Um, yeah, IF you're using a current version.
AND btw, even WinXP SP2 isn't current enough for Windows update to work with correctly.
As I've mentioned before, in order to use a 2005 copy of Win XP Media Center I had to manually install SP3, then let the system install 119 software patches, then install Java, Flash, a PDF reader and a bunch of audio and video codecs (so that I could play DVDs and work with video and audio files).
 
So no gentleman, it doesn't "just work".
 
I can install Ubuntu just about as easily as Win7 and get similar functionality.
 
But like ANY OS, if I want to do something that isn't mainstream I'm going to have to work on it.
BFD.

[partycentralpartygirl]

Um, yeah, IF you're using a current version.
AND btw, even WinXP SP2 isn't current enough for Windows update to work with correctly.
As I've mentioned before, in order to use a 2005 copy of Win XP Media Center I had to manually install SP3, then let the system install 119 software patches, then install Java, Flash, a PDF reader and a bunch of audio and video codecs (so that I could play DVDs and work with video and audio files).
 
So no gentleman, it doesn't "just work".
 
I can install Ubuntu just about as easily as Win7 and get similar functionality.
 
But like ANY OS, if I want to do something that isn't mainstream I'm going to have to work on it.
BFD.

To be honest/fair MS can't include too much in the base OS because of anti-trust lawsuits. Imagine if Windows came with Paint.Net, VLCPlayer, SumatraPDF etc. (imagine MS bought those companies) all the anti-trust lawsuit lawyers would cream their pants, because OMFG MICROSOFT IS TRYING TO MONOPOLY!!!!!

Already there are mumblings of a lawsuit due to including MSE in Windows8 and the App store in "Metro". I wouldn't be surprised either.

In closing MSE is pretty damn good, anyone who runs a Windows system and wants Virus protection is well advised to pick up a copy (for free)

In double closing: Java.... ewww.... burn it off your computer because **** Oracle.

[Iggy]

In double closing: Java.... ewww.... burn it off your computer because **** Oracle.

Actually, Java has never been a problem for me. Now ActiveX, that was just stupid.
I forgot about VLC Player. Thank God, that's available (its one of the packages I downloaded), plus with it onboard I now have additional codecs for Media Player.
 
And I'm not likely to adopt Win8 any time soon as there are no features that it provides that I desire.

[partycentralpartygirl]

Actually, Java has never been a problem for me. Now ActiveX, that was just stupid.
I forgot about VLC Player. Thank God, that's available (its one of the packages I downloaded), plus with it onboard I now have additional codecs for Media Player.
 
And I'm not likely to adopt Win8 any time soon as there are no features that it provides that I desire.

Yeah not going to go and upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. I do want a Surface though, but at the moment I'm not going to buy one. I'll wait until another manufacturer releases a decent x86 tablet for under $500. I heard AMD mumbling about having a decent processor in the works for tablets, I like AMD because their RADEON line is great.

Being able to walk around my store using a handheld scanner to enter/order items directly into my POS/inventory software will be a pretty nice thing to have.

edit: Some people don't like VLC, Windows Media Player Classic is pretty good as well. I do like winamp for music though, the classic interface makes me be able to pretend I am using AmigaAmp.

[Iggy]

Not sure I'm ready for this yet (I don't own a Smartphone or any other multi-touch device).
Who knows? Maybe in the future.