I have never used Microsoft products...

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I looked up rybka on wine's homepage, and it said that someone had tried it on a couple of previous versions and it hadn't had any problems.

I think you are underestimating the power of toys. And what's going to stop the iPod craze? Zune? In how many colorful shades of brown?

If wine and samba were written by decompiling/recompiling, Microsoft, which has access to it's own code as well as the open source code, and is quite paranoid about such projects, would have already sued them into nonexistence. I remember hearing that some developer working on ReactOS (a similar project) somehow or another saw some Windows code (IIRC it was something they had worked on for some company) and they practically shut down development for awhile, to keep it from being contaminated.

He was hardly a "founder". And serial killers, by definition, kill more than one person.

Yeah! Which is why, after five long years in the making, Vista was widely praised on launch as the worst Windows since ME, buggy, incompatible, and with few hardware drivers! Oh... wait.

Well at least Microsoft is great at marketing! Which is why Vista, a product they'd been working on for years and years and years, didn't generate excitement like Windows 95, but rather became cool to make fun of! And then they cleverly did nothing about the bad reputation for months and months, leaving themselves open to a clever ad campaign from Apple that reinforced people's already bad impression! Oh... wait.

I really wasn't intending an MS-on-Apple flame-war here. I have no preference between the two corporations at this point. I was actually trying to find out exactly how disadvantageous exclusively using non-MS OSes really is. So far, since I'm not a gamer, there would not seem to be any disadvantage.

Windows was never 99% market share, and never will be. And Apple has other useful stuff as well. They certainly aren't just "toys" any more than any computer is. Especially given that you can very easily install Windows on it, so any software that might be lacking still works on the same machine. Other computers, in contrast, will never (legally) have access to any Apple software.


OK, some Linux users do tend to break software laws. So do plenty of Windows users and Mac users. Many open-source advocates have a rather different perception of the validity of some of these laws.


From everything I've heard, Mac is even more user-friendly for the common folk.


Um... even a biography of Gates that I once read said that MS products were of inferior quality even when they were new. Gates is a brilliant businessman, but there definitely is not a very strong consensus for asserting the superiority of Microsoft products.

Hm... might be interesting. Rybka 3 just came out, and it is ridiculous strong. But I don't want to buy a $120+ piece of software without knowing for sure whether it will work. I've also heard of Chessmaster working in Wine, which would be even better since it has some training features (endgame training, tactics lessons, etc) and after a certain point the difference in strength between two engines is irrelevant because either is better than any human.

Excellent advice. That is exactly what I did when I got windows XP.

Once I have all the modern OSes, I will be able to give an unbiased informed opinion.