Auzner wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

Could you tell me who exactly, that is a general computer user, is going to ever switch to a non-GUI interface?

Sure you can do a ton of things without a GUI, but 99+% of users have no need and no desire to even try to learn how do do stuff from the command line.

Computing tasks, not desktop environment setup. There are a lot of repetitive tasks easier to call from the shell with a few args than what a Windows user would find a solution for. And most users don't have "computing tasks" required of their machines. They just open word, facebook, itunes, and netflix. So OS doesn't even matter since they all do that.

Yeah I agree with this, I've moved my father over to Linux Fedora and told him how to update and whatnot and he hasn't had one complaint. It runs silky smooth and it does everything he wants. His only complaint is he can't run the old games he'd like to on it (Total war games). 🤣 I think 99% of people out there would be delighted with linux if it came packaged on a computer straight from the store.

RMS koolaid phase. You'll get past the stages of grief pretty soon

keenmaster486 wrote:

Already, using Microsoft software is unnecessary.

I've been a Linux lover for years and enjoyed the freedom and simplicity of it. My main machine was a Slackware-based Thinkpad and I used it for browsing, writing, simple gaming (with wine), listening to music and all the great things one can do in his spare time.

Then I started to work for an advertising agency and things changed quickly.
First of all, I have to be able to open up the documents my customers send to me and I cannot do that with LibreOffice. To this day, it is not fully compatible and breaks formatting on some documents. I am aware that MS Office runs on Wine, but it's not reliable and might crash when using certain features. I cannot use half-broken implementations if I use the software to earn my income.

I also need to be able to use Adobe programs and the latest versions of Photoshop and Illustrator do not work on Linux. Using CS6 is not an option. Of course there are great programs like Inkscape and GIMP, but again - I have to be able to open files from other agencies and that is not possible with free software.

Then there's this great program from Microsoft called OneNote. I have yet to find an open source alternative for it. It's THE easiest tool for taking notes on a tablet PC. I can send mail from Outlook with one click to OneNote and then draw on them using my stylus. This greatly improves my workflow because whenever someone sends me a long checklist via mail I can transfer it to OneNote and tick it from top to bottom.
With free software I would probably have to copy the text or make a screenshot of the e-mail, open it up in GIMP and draw on that which is terrible, to say the least.

Don't get me wrong, it's great that we don't have to pay for an operating system and very extensive software anymore. It's amazing that we have so many powerful programs that do not cost a cent. But that doesn't mean it's good enough for everything. There are still many limitations when you force yourself to stick with Linux only - ultimately, Linux doesn't cut it in a corporate environment, because everyone else doesn't use it. At least in my business.

The only alternative to that is Apple with overpriced hardware and an archaic operating system.
It puzzles me that so many people in my business always say that MacOS is the most userfriendly OS ever. The file explorer is terrible and seems like it hasn't been updated for 20 years, your mouse cursor has to travel for miles because of the "great" decision to only use one menu bar for all programs and I cannot even tile my windows automatically. Microsoft can do this since Windows 7 and that came out 9 years ago. 🤣

So after a while, I shifted from Linux to dualboot and then to Windows 10 only on my notebook. I really like the latest build. They've started to include Linux programs, optimized the whole OS for touch and pen support and thus, it becomes more and more userfriendly to me. It's an easy operating system, but it's not holding your hand if you don't want it to and this is exactly what I need. After all, it makes my life easy and that is what a computer is supposed to do.

Yep MS aren't going anywhere - they do so much more that "Windows" and they're getting better at adapting to modern trends too it seems to me. Open sourcing stuff, Windows 10 IoT for RPi, supporting git, etc.

I'm a .Net dev so might be biased, but MS dev tools and the backwards compatibility they've maintained for their frameworks is impressive. We upgraded our version of node.js at work recently and it broke stuff - I can't remember the last time that happened with .Net.

I've tried to break my dependency on Office, etc but last time I checked - and not long ago - there's always something annoyance or incompatibility that makes me throw in the towel and go back to what I know works. And I'm relatively computer literate compared to the general user.

I used to like Apple but ever since Jobs passed away they've been going steadily downhill. Understandable they're more focused on the mobile and social media world these days, but it really seems they've forgotten about the users that made Apple great... professional designers, media makers, video editors, musicians, etc.

I don't want a $1500 laptop with two USB C ports and have to carry 3 dongles everywhere. I like being able to upgrade my laptop/desktop's components if need be and having easy access + maintenance. OS X has become bloated and tries too hard to be somewhere in between a mobile and desktop OS.

Oh and their desktop lines, especially the Mac Pro trashcan, are woefully outdated.

As a software developer, linux is the more friendly platform.

As for when people will abandon microsoft software, when other pieces of software are forced on them. My non technical girlfriend has used linux for some years after I installed it on her new computer. Also has android on her tablet that she got from someone. 100% linux adoption from going with the flow.

badmojo wrote:

Yep MS aren't going anywhere - they do so much more that "Windows" and they're getting better at adapting to modern trends too it seems to me. Open sourcing stuff, Windows 10 IoT for RPi, supporting git, etc.

Does anyone actually use Windows 10 IoT?

badmojo wrote:

I'm a .Net dev so might be biased, but MS dev tools and the backwards compatibility they've maintained for their frameworks is impressive. We upgraded our version of node.js at work recently and it broke stuff - I can't remember the last time that happened with .Net.

The .NET frameworks have been somewhat better than much of what Microsoft made in the past, but comparing to Node.js is such a low bar.

badmojo wrote:

I've tried to break my dependency on Office, etc but last time I checked - and not long ago - there's always something annoyance or incompatibility that makes me throw in the towel and go back to what I know works. And I'm relatively computer literate compared to the general user.

Much depends on what, exactly, you're doing. Some functions, such as nasty VBA scripting and heavy macros, will almost always have compatibility issues as they're almost certain to expose corner cases that simply can't be tested for. To be fair, transporting files between different versions of MS Office will also have this kind of trouble.

The biggest preventable issue I see with Office is straight up misuse. For example, attempting to use Word or even Powerpoint as a typesetting system for publishing is a kludge at best. As another example, think of all the engineering projects which have been designed using Excel as the mathematical underpinning. It's actually frightening when lives depend on software whose numerical representation and accuracy are, to put it charitably, meta-stable.

leileilol wrote:

RMS koolaid phase. You'll get past the stages of grief pretty soon

Who me? He hasn't been using Windows since XP when I moved all the home computers over to linux.

Errius wrote:

Apple has eaten Linux's lunch. It's a huge company now, bigger than Microsoft and IBM put together.

Apple may be bigger them Microsoft, but not because of its desktop OS. And let's be honest, corporate users doesn't give a damn about their mobile iOS. They tried to disrupt market with iPads, and even tho they are immensely powerful, tablets are slowly dying. And I'm not surprised, given how much iOS is restricted, and how unusable any compute device is without keyboard and mouse for me any many other users, who actually have to work on their compute devices.

And regarding Microsoft itself, I don't think, that they are going away any time soon. And I don't think, that anybody can jeopardize their position, until some new major architecture came, which will reset plain field to zero again. HW manufacturer won't support newcomer to x86 market, just because it's new and cool, until there would be enough user base. And there won't be enough user in the user base without HW support. Classic chicken and egg problem...

And from this topic (especially OP) I can see, that there are some people, who likes to build their PC around strictly given HW, who likes control their PC's from command line, and who want to (at least in some cases) use inferior programs, just because they think that some SW is automatically better because it's open, it doesn't mean, that everybody else likes that too. But in reality this group of brave warriors, its really (and I mean REALLY small). Most of other people just want to use (not tinker) their PC with familiar interface, and don't even think about switching to other OS, which they don't even know, that exists.

schmatzler wrote:

I also need to be able to use Adobe programs and the latest versions of Photoshop and Illustrator do not work on Linux. Using CS6 is not an option.

Really? I always considered CS6 to be a fantastic Illustrator version. Even nowadays.

vvbee wrote:

As a software developer, linux is the more friendly platform.

What makes you say that?
I personally could never get used to *nix platforms for development, because I find them particularly unfriendly.
DOS had nice tools like Turbo C++/Pascal, Watcom, CodeView and whatnot. Windows has Visual Studio of course, and various others, like Delphi.

But the tools on *nix, I always found them to be lacking. The IDEs/debuggers I've tried were always just GUI wrappers on top of gdb, which reminds me most of the crappy old debug.com from DOS. These wrappers always come apart at the seams. Slow, clunky, unstable.
The tools themselves are also generally very crappy. There's no nice SDKs with proper documentation. Instead you often get little more than some sourcecode with a 70s makefile dumped over the fence, and some crappy man pages.
Usually shit doesn't build out-of-the-box because you happen to have a slightly wrong revision of the kernel, gcc, simply the wrong distribution or whatever.

So no, as a developer, linux feels like a particularly amateuristic environment for development, cobbled together from random stuff that doesn't work particularly well together, and isn't following best practices.

schmatzler wrote:

Then there's this great program from Microsoft called OneNote. I have yet to find an open source alternative for it. It's THE easiest tool for taking notes on a tablet PC. I can send mail from Outlook with one click to OneNote and then draw on them using my stylus. This greatly improves my workflow because whenever someone sends me a long checklist via mail I can transfer it to OneNote and tick it from top to bottom.

For me, OneNote is probably the most under-utilized MS Office application. I feel that if I spent some time getting acquainted with it and accustomed to using it, I could boost my efficiency in certain workflows. But somehow I never make that first step...

gdjacobs wrote:

The biggest preventable issue I see with Office is straight up misuse. For example, attempting to use Word or even Powerpoint as a typesetting system for publishing is a kludge at best.

While still in college, I once had a debate with a friend regarding tools to produce math papers. His claim was that Word can never match TeX in the ability to produce beautiful documents, which I challenged, and set to prove him wrong. The bottom line is: Word absolutely can produce beautiful documents, but the features that enable it to do so are very well-hidden and not trivial to master. 😀 All the default settings of the program are geared toward quick-n-dirty typing, not any kind of professional type-setting.

gdjacobs wrote:

As another example, think of all the engineering projects which have been designed using Excel as the mathematical underpinning. It's actually frightening when lives depend on software whose numerical representation and accuracy are, to put it charitably, meta-stable.

Are there actual problems with the math in Excel? The final formatted output is indeed, meta-stable, as you put it, but I think that the underlying data should be very solid. Like in the previous example about Word - I believe that Excel experts can absolutely use it in a very precise and 100% correct way - it's just not on the surface.

dr_st wrote:

His claim was that Word can never match TeX in the ability to produce beautiful documents, which I challenged, and set to prove him wrong.

There actually is a TeX plugin for Word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathType
The standard Equation Editior is a simplified version of MathType, which can convert LaTeX statements to its native format: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Line … b4-8d17f25754f8

everyone should just use EDIT for DOS. Who needs word processors, honestly?!

Errius wrote:

Apple has eaten Linux's lunch. It's a huge company now, bigger than Microsoft and IBM put together.

It's success is fragile however, and could disappear overnight if something "cooler" comes along. Nobody needs iMacs and iPhones and iPads like they do Windows and IBM mainframes.

bahahaha what? What lunch is that? Nobody runs Apple servers.

Well, Steam really did try to push Linux as a main distribution platform for the games, but Linux just couldn't replace Windows as the main distribution channel.

Some companies like Dell, did try to sell configurations with Linux, but I guess they too didn't take off.

Ease of use is Windows' main attraction. Installing a downloaded software in Linux can be a pain, compared to doing the same in Windows. And the main advantage in using Windows is the majority of software written for it and the high compatibility of software running natively.

Yes, command line tools are powerful, especially when dealing with batch processes. But other than processing batch of commands, the route via GUI is easier. And let's not forget Windows has CLI too.

I too have a flavour of Linux installed in all my modern systems, but my main OS is always Windows.

And I'm not a fan of Apple's MacOS or iOS and their closed ecosystem with proprietary hardware configurations with that ecosystem, so can't comment on that.

Malik wrote:

Well, Steam really did try to push Linux as a main distribution platform for the games, but Linux just couldn't replace Windows as the main distribution channel.

That's generally the fault of people not trying to natively port their games in the first place. It's going to be really amusing when I finally get a grasp on the engine I wanted to use and produce a game that does not run natively on Windows but on Linux.

Thankfully though there's some dedicated indie developers atleast, there's also the fact most if not all of Valve's first-party games run on Linux natively. (though mod support hinges on people compiling their mods against the Linux version)

One can debate how 'native' the Valve games are.
Valve asked NVIDIA for help, and they developed the 'ToGL' layer, which is basically a D3D9->OpenGL translator:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ToGL
See also here: https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/fi … 0to%20Linux.pdf

DracoNihil wrote:

That's generally the fault of people not trying to natively port their games in the first place.

No, that's problem of Linux, which is unable to attract bigger user base. I checked on HW survey on Steam, and only 0,25% (that's quarter of one percent!) users are running steam on Linux. I'm kinda surprised, that so many games are available on Linux, even with this pitiful user base...

DracoNihil wrote:

...and produce a game that does not run natively on Windows but on Linux.

I can already tell you, what will happen. It will sell something like 5 copies, +-3...

Srandista wrote:

I checked on HW survey on Steam

How many people actually submit their survery? How many people run Steam through Wine rather than natively so they can access the games that aren't actually natively ported?

Srandista wrote:

I can already tell you, what will happen. It will sell something like 5 copies, +-3...

And who said anything about me selling the game?