Windows is crap

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Linux is nice and efficient. I like it. I hated Ubuntu, though, I thought it was slow and bloaty, but after switching to Crunchbang Debian, fast as I need it to be.

My biggest problem in Linux is repositories when installing programs, and just in general the amount of setup it takes to get it running right. Once it's running right, it's great, and stays running right for the most part. Windows is the opposite, easy to setup, but will go to hell instantly with viruses and bloaty programs autostarting and whatnot, and just needs constant maintenance to do anything, whereas Linux I feel once you get what you want right, it's quite good.

People who try to go all the way with philosophy, without any regard to practicality, lose. I don't have anything more to say about that.

If Wine enjoyed 100% functionality, how would it be messy? I would imagine the definition of 100% perfect would include not being messy or badly integrated.

Don't get me started on OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Tried it. Too many issues. Stopped trying it. This is a frequent problem with open source desktop apps and GUIs. None of them are fully baked, and nothing you can say will convince me that they are. In a lot of cases, it's blatantly clear that the GUIs were never wireframed by professional UI designers at all. They were done by the programmer.

That said, there are a number of things about Gimp that are actually superior to Photoshop, and about VLC that are superior to Windows Media Player. I try to be fair.

Until Wine is fully baked, Linux still doesn't have a chance as a desktop OS. Linux users may or may not purport to care about this, but I think with increased popularity would come increased development and quality.

This is true. That's why I do my builds on Linux machines. For example, the filesystem in Linux is *many times* faster than Windows for large numbers of small files.

Well, I don't think Windows requires much constant maintenance these days.

I'm just saying that that's the reason there aren't more resources invested into Wine. I use some proprietary stuff (Flash, some proprietary codecs, Skype), but the people in charge of developing Linux are much more vehemently open source. If you think that should be changed then you need to get involved or switch away from an opensource operating system, because that's just how these things work.


I just find it messy how it creates a sort of virtual Windows file system in your computer and that the Windows software won't be put in the same places in your file tree as the Linux software. No amount of integration can change that. It's not a serious practical objection, just my instinctive desire for neatness.


[Shrug] Other than the poorer autocorrect features I've never had a major problem with Open/LibreOffice. A minor complaint is that I don't know how to set a key-combination to insert symbols, although since I'm not taking French any more and do mathematical stuff in LaTeX that isn't a big problem. And I actually prefer their equation editor feature--it's harder to learn but once you know how I find it's nicer since you can just type everything and your hands don't have to leave the keyboard.


I find that the quality is pretty good right now. And I rather like the community feel of Linux and the fact that I don't have to pay for most of the software. I like that sometimes you have to get down-and-dirty with the OS and software to get it to do things that you want (it's a fun challenge). The increased development that you mention would mean we'd loose some of that, I think.

Last edited by AstroGeek on 24 Jun 2012, 9:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Don't feel like manually editing quote tags. f*****g WP.

I understand the perspective of the people in charge of developing the Linux kernel, and sure they make a great kernel (albeit one that's getting old in a number of places) but the people in charge of distributions are not the same people and some of those people care about popularity. I also don't really believe the kernel developers don't care about popularity. I think people for whom popularity is a priority should invest in Wine. I personally will spend my time developing things that will pay me, and while fully developing Wine could be lucrative, I don't have a team of 24 to make it lucrative. Working on my own would be like pissing on a bonfire. I use Linux for very specific things. I do not use Linux as a desktop OS, and in fact I boot my Linux machine in command line mode. I think it's a shame that Linux cannot be used as an adequate desktop OS. I would like it if one OS would serve all my needs.

You are right the file system support in Wine is messy. I don't agree with the way they implemented it. I think they could have made it smarter, e.g. using C:\ to represent the root of the entire filesystem and using UAC to control access to subdirectories. Physical drives could still be mapped to D:\, E:\, etc in addition to their /mnt mappings. These things can and should be corrected to be more transparent.

I wouldn't be satisfied with Wine until it becomes hard to find apps that don't run flawlessly in it.

I don't think the presence of e.g. Photoshop on Linux will detract from development of e.g. Gimp.

I got Ubuntu recently, dual boot with Vista (I probably should have gotten 7...) Ubuntu works great so far, I love it, and I only use Windows for Photoshop and games now. Its nice how in Linux the command line is actually meant to be used, and is generally used a lot, rather than in Windows where its hidden away and only the really advanced users even know it exists.

Someone asked about W7 programs running on W8? Most of them will work, but not all. I use Finale 2010 and Cubase 5.1 on my W8 machine. In fact most of my W7 programs worked. The only holdout were the drivers for my USB TV antenna by Spectare. I'll have to wait for updated software for that. Thankfully, ATI made a W8 video driver. I'm sure Nvidia did the same.

Interestingly enough, I had both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas on my W7 system. Fallout 3 won't work, though, on W8. Waahhh!

The compatibility issues could be due to issues in W8 that haven't been ironed out yet. I doubt MS wants to leave compatibility issues, regardless of whose fault they are. Obviously drivers are more susceptible than apps.

If I like...cared more, I'd dual boot on this machine. As for Fallout, I just play it on Xbox, for worse, but still. Not like my machine would handle it, it's 2ghz single core, 1 gig DDR1 RAM, and my friend gave me a good graphics card, but I've not installed it yet, as I've not messed around trying to install the Linux driver. Oh well.

I've had W8 for about a month now. It's the Release Preview but it feels kinda complete. I've posted before about some of its incompatibility with a few W7 & XP programs. To that list I'd like to add select a few office suites, namely MS Office 2010 and Corel Word Perfect 5 or 6. MS Office 2007 works fine, though. What MyFutureSelfnMe sounds about right: W8 still has issues which needs ironing out.

I also took 1000Knives suggestion and now occasionally dual boot Ubuntu 12.04 from a flash drive. Works well except for some minor internet & mouse issues.

I still firmly believe W8 is the OS I was hoping for because it contains quite a few built-in programs I don't have to 3rd party add. Obviously that helps in computer stability. MS is planning (threatening) to get rid of Aero once the final release candidate comes out. Even though it's kinda silly, I have gotten used to it. I probably won't update this version of W8, though, because it's stable and works fine. Since I got it for free, I'm definitely not complaining.

Last edited by redrobin62 on 30 Jun 2012, 5:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

i hate how each windows iteration blocks out so many programs that ran on the last iteration, it is a racket, i tell you! to get people to buy upgrades to all their software.

MS actually goes well out of their way to avoid compatibility issues with programs written for previous Windows versions. I suspect the poorly planned and defined Windows API itself has made this task harder for them (it's a downright herculean task for the developers of WINE, who aren't affiliated with Microsoft). It's not in their best interest to release new versions of Windows that screw users of existing versions. In another thread I had a small debate with someone in which I enumerated what I think are the ingredients necessary to get people to switch or upgrade an OS, and app compatibility was one.

Is there any reason why they can't provide IE9 and DirectX10/11 for Windows XP?

IE9 uses Direct2D for rendering, which is part of Windows 7. Similarly, DirectX 10 and higher rely heavily on OS features that are not present in XP. While it would be reasonable to surmise MS could develop an alternate rendering path for IE9 that uses Direct3D in an orthographic projection, just uses GDI, or whatever, I think it would be impossible for DX10/11 to be completely ported. A partial port, or an alternate rendering path for IE9, would probably/definitely be possible, but on the other hand you have the cost and time involved, the fact that MS doesn't sell IE or DX and in fact sells Windows upgrades, which people are *more* inclined to do when there are new cool things only available on the newer OS, and they're just not going to do the ports. In other words, while they would never deliberately do anything to make things stop working for existing users, they aren't going to go out of their way to give access to the latest and greatest to those users either. It's one more reason for them to upgrade.

I don't think it makes sense to stick with XP anymore. 7 has proven itself and barely has higher hardware requirements. I remember bringing a laptop with Whistler, the beta of XP, on a trip to Europe I took in 2001, so it is old.

i beg to differ on the point of higher hardware requirements. i ran all my audio restoration software and internet explorer/outlook express quite fine on wxp, but when i tried to run them on a celeron w7 machine it just acted like a big hot paperweight, crashing 1/2 of the time. and forget about websurfing, that little circular "wait a minute" thingie was just sittin' there circling itself for minutes at a time [while waiting for a webpage to load, that was laden with java and other sys. resource sappers] until the screen would go white and eventually a box would pop up saying "windows is not responding," sometimes- mostly the computer just sat there doing nothing in a locked-up state blocking my attempts at a soft-reboot until i was forced to hard-reboot the infernal thing. i could only get decent performance by getting a pentium multicore 2.3 with 6GB of RAM, merely to run the same apps that ran just fine on my old xp machine with 1/12th the RAM and 1/2 the effective cpu throughput speed. celerons mighta been ok with xp or 98se but when they're bundled with w7 they are good for nothing. so that is my experience which tells me that w7 is a huge resource hog compared with earlier windows versions such as XP and millenium and 98se.

From my point of view, the main job of an operating system is to run other programs, therefore if you're not using any apps the apps that run natively on the OS you're not really using the OS. I think it's fine if you're using an emulator like WINE or a virtual machine to only run a few programs that don't have native counterparts but if you don't use any native programs at all then I don't see the reason for using a different OS. It would simply be better to use the OS where those programs run natively. For example, if you're using Linux while all your apps are really running in Windows installed on a virtual machine then why do have Linux installed in the first place? You are not really using Linux, you are still using Windows. If, however, they were the same apps that were natively ported to your new OS rather than ones that needed a virtual machine or emulator to run then that would be a different story.

As for why I would choose to switch OSes, I usually judge OSes based on how they do what I think is their main job, that is providing platform for running other programs and managing the resources to run those programs. For example, would rather use Windows XP instead of either Windows Vista or Windows 7 because the newer ones use up 4 GB RAM while the older one uses up less memory and I would rather use the extra RAM of newer hardware to run more recource intensive programs. I know that the usual excuse is "Well Windows XP is 10 years old, what do you expect!", however given that were other OSes such as Mac OS and Ubuntu that used much less resources when the OS was released, I hardly see what the advantage is. Newer versions of Mac OS, unfortunately, also uses a large amount of RAM which is a step backwards for that OS I think and it's why I'm still using Snow Leopard.

One could also like one OS over the other due to having a more intuitive GUI or being more user-friendly but those are secondary to what I think is the main function of an OS and user-friendlyness is a matter of perspective anyway.