Posted on 08/11/2011 5:48:55 AM PDT by ShadowAce
I’d love nothing more than to switch to Linux. But I’m trapped here in a windows shop. And the brain drain is so bad these days, that I am completely spent by the time I get home. Help!
I stopped reading when he said he prefers virtualdub on windows. Clearly he hasn’t reasearched the commericial/paid apps.
This is a perfect example of someone who thinks they’re competent to write about technology, but ends up parading their ignorance, instead.
I can understand that very well.
I'm in a good situation here--while the official desktop is Windows, I am allowed to use my Linux laptop. My business case for it is that (since I am a Linux admin) I can connect to the servers I'm responsible for a lot easier. It makes my job more productive.
My official work desktop is sitting on my desk, running headless, mouseless, and keyboardless. I remote into it whenever I need to use the one and only Windows app that I can't get running on Linux--Lotus Notes (the only reason I can't get it running on Linux is that I don't have the install disks available).
Running a PC shouldn't require maintaining an active balance on one's credit card.
So perhaps he is limiting his comparison to the lower end of what everyone can afford, rather than spending $600 on a piece of software.
Win7 has offered nothing of value to the end-user in my opinion.
Really? I guess he hasn't really used windows 7 beyond listening to other linux users complaints. Application virtualization is pretty cool feature, improved UI, but the biggest feature is the security.
I'd say that is a "yes." I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux at work, along with XP for mundane/routine office stuff. (company policy) But serious development is on RHEL. At home it is a combination of Ubuntu on a couple of machines, PCLinuxOS on another, and Debian on one. That's the beauty of Linux - try a distro. Oh, and you can keep/collect cast-off machines that others don't want. Even if they lack the horsepower/resources to run Vista or Win7, most Linux distros are right at home on them. I do use Win7 at home for a couple of things. So I'm not casting stones at Windows without having some familiarity with it.
So, do I dislike windows now? Yes.
I prefer the Linux user interface, though honestly I'm not sure about Ubuntu's unity just yet.
I prefer Linux's ease of finding/installing/trying applications (couple of clicks away). And just a couple of clicks to make them go away if you don't like them.
I prefer Linux's ease of working with devices. Installing a new printer last week and getting Ubuntu to recognize/use it was even easier than getting my son's Mac laptop to do the same. (even with a driver disk from HP for the Mac/printer)
I prefer not having to give up a fair amount of disk space and CPU cycles to an antivirus program to protect a fragile OS and application suite from the wilds of the Internet.
I prefer not having to upgrade or outright replace my computer every time a new version of the OS comes out. (typing this on a 6 year old Dell, that was at best middle of the road for performance when it was new)
I prefer getting updates and upgrades to the OS and applications automatically and in a timely manner.
I prefer the lack of crashes, blue-screens-of-death.
Being a certified computer-weenie, I prefer knowing what's going on inside the OS, rather than relying on some black-box solution.
I prefer the lack of onerous end-user license agreements.
In short, for me Linux works better than windows. That certainly won't be the case for everyone. But since Linux is so easy to try, I don't see why more people don't try it...some will like it. And that competition will drive windows, Linux, and Mac OS/X to be better.
For what he wants the FREE windows live movie maker is better than virtual dub.
So if that’s the case, he missed that obvious choice. But even his link to the linux competitor says the guy that wrote it made next to nothing and it was a lot of work—more people should be like that (not what I’m saying what the video said). Yes more people should work for free. It’s not exactly a model that links up with capitalism really well. That’s why Linux went so long without a decent video editing program.
the only Linux program I used was Puppy when my laptop crashed (I’ve reformatted it twice so far) and luckily recovered current college files. I really haven’t studied it at all, but was wondering if, since college papers turned in (online classes) must be in Word Doc format, is it possible to still use Linux?
I found some of those tools indispensable with my last company. I prefer the latest version of Gimp to Photoshop/Illustrator, And the power of ImageMagick for batch image processing is unique. Powerful command line tools like Grep are also ported for Windows. And if you process text data and need RegX find/replace in spreadsheet data, Gnumeric is the only spreadsheet that I am aware of that will do that.
Yes, you can. Every document I use here at work is in Word format—and I open/read/edit them in Linux using either OpenOffice or Libre Office.
So I used Linux for many years, developed both used-mode and kernel-mode software for it, ported it to various embedded systems, spend whole days single-stepping through its kernel in a hardware debugger, all Linux all the time.
But then, I got tired of it. At a certain point, you have solved all the problems, and you have seen it all. And you want things to just work. But they won’t. You start having to solve the same problems over and over again, and it gets tedious. And tiresome. And boring.
So I went back to Windows. On Windows, things just work. If they don’t, a quick Google session is usually enough. Even if not, reporting bugs helps. Even to Microsoft. They actually accept bug reports, react to them, and fix them. I wonder how many of those who keep whining and bitching about Windows all the time ever tried reporting their troubles.
Programming on Windows is actually more, not less, interesting than on Unix. There are some old quirks, but a lot of stuff that I used to think was stupid 15 years ago, actually wasn’t so stupid, after all. Just over my head at the time. And a lot of parts of the Unix interface that seemed to brilliantly simple ten years ago, turned out to be awfully oversimplified. And Windows has .NET! Just being able to write for the .NET platform should be reason enough now to return to the Windows platform.
Yup. His second-to-last paragraph pretty much agrees with your post.
I agree. I built my first PC in 1982. Have run all the Microsoft OS's (except ME and Vista, never owned them but worked on them). In 1998 I installed my first Linux OS, it was a UMSDOS version of Slackware. Used Mandrake and Redhat (from 5.0 on).
When Redhat 8.0 came out I discovered XFCE windows manager and fell in love with it's simplicity, efficiency and speed. This machine is running Xubuntu 11.04
Got a PC question....my PC’s running slow and occasionally freezes even tho I regularly defrag,disk clean,update and scan. I’ve heard lots of ads on doublemyspeed.com....are these online programs really that good? Is there anything i’m not doing to improve the speed/performance? I use Registry Mechanic and Avast to keep things clean. I’m running windows XP home ed. Any ideas? Thanks!
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