You post misleading statistics, I point out how they are not "objective" by any non Microsoft Marketing Department meaning of the word, and you return with insults and vitriol. |
Why, does your cult leader tell you that the whole world looks to North Korea err, I mean to Linux desktop as their last best hope? Does Linux Pravda report 101% desktop market share?
I merely disagree with your "sucks", and your absolute statements about the unsuitability of Linux for other people. |
How about this - we get into a GUI app programming contest. Round 1 would use the GNU toolchain (i.e. gcc) with GTK+, round 2 would Visual C++ 2010 with MFC, round 3 would use Java with Swing, and round 4 would use Visual C# 2010 / .NET 4. If you prove yourself to be a better all-around desktop programmer, your opinion on this thread's subject will matter more than mine.
No, A.L. I am not. They are not. I have had exactly the same experience with both desktop and server installs of Linux. In fact, since they are exactly the same code merely differing in whether the keyboard and screen are directly attached, I'm not surprised at all that the stability and frugality of one is found on the other. |
The server-related Linux components received
billions of dollars in funding from governments and companies trying to hurt Microsoft (including "military-industrial complex" cocksuckers like IBM and Oracle), as well as reasonable people who use LAMP technology stack, as do I. The desktop components received considerably less, though the government of
Finnokialand is rushing in to help.
The #1 priority of a good desktop experience is perfect hardware support, and, though Linux has made a lot of progress it's still nowhere close to being ready. Furthermore, Linux font rendering and video codec quality suck for purely software / userland reasons as well.
The #2 priority of a good desktop experience is consistency: all your core apps should share libraries, automation API's, GUI widgets, dialogs, etc. In Windows, if you know how to automate Microsoft Word then you've passed 75% of the learning curve for doing pretty much anything else. In Ubuntu you have half your apps using C / GTK+, but your IDE probably uses Java (Swing or SWT), your browser or podcatcher probably also uses XUL, your torrent client and probably some other apps use Qt, your music manager or desktop search tool might use Mono, some apps are written in perl or python, and don't even get me started on OO.o... All those different API's introduce unnecessary complexity, and all those different VM's fail to share resources and are all MUCH slower than Microsoft's CLR.
And then you have the quality of the available apps. As I already admitted, the FOSS desktop has one major success story - Firefox, which I use myself; but, as noted above - it runs better & faster on Windows! I will also admit that there are a handful of good Linux desktop components, most notably Pidgin, and the only other things that don't suck are little applets like gnome-terminal / konsole. All those run great on Windows as well. That aside, all major Linux desktop components are functionally inferior to their proprietary alternatives!
OpenOffice.org offers most of the features of Office
97, but is 5x slower and has far fewer third party solutions, while newer versions of MS Office apps blow it away! The Adobe flash plug-in has a tendency to crash (I don't care whole fault it is), while it never does on Windows. You find yourself jumping back in forth between a dozen IDE's in hope of finding one that doesn't suck, but you never do. Gimp - ya gotta be kidding me! Etc, etc, etc.
What you cannot seem to understand is that there is no "force". If you don't like the GPL, then don't use code licensed under the GPL. Simple. |
Am I also free not to pay taxes? An invaluable amount of work that has gone into making GPL software usable was funded by governments and public universities, especially in Europe but in US / Canada as well. Of course if Stallman has his way the amount of government spending on "free software" would be multiplied by 100, but he may have to wait until Obama's second term to get that.
What would happen if Microsoft behaved like Linux, like making it as easy to "ms-get" software from public university FTP servers? EU won't even let them bundle a Web browser with their OS!
And since you ignore the Microsoft EULA when you find it convenient to do so, why such an over-reaction to one particular type of software license? |
No client has ever asked me if my copy of Windows, Visual Studio, or any other MS / Adobe / Borland / etc software was legitimately licensed (and for much of the time most of them were). But if some libraries I'm linking are GPL'ed (i.e. strong viral copyleft), then we can have a serious legal problem...
How about IBM, Google, Novell and RedHat making plenty of money using GPL code? |
Novell is making money! Wow! Really! Man, I knew I should have renewed my certs...
And, OK, RedHat's revenues surpassed $500 million earlier this year. That's less than Bill Gates spends on pocket protectors, but nonetheless impressive. Now... What fraction of their income comes from desktop-related products and services?
Companies like IBM license their own products as GPL instead of BSD for their own selfish self-interest. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) They want to deploy their solutions on something that doesn't empower their competitor -- Microsoft -- while preventing other businesses from profiting from their code, like Apple has profited from BSD. Their actual revenue comes from other products, which are not only closed-source but often involve NDA's as well!
And they still can't make an OS that doesn't require rebooting to make a change to 3rd party applications. |
Um, when was the last time you've used Windows? The need for reboots has decreased drastically. Some apps recommend reboot as a precaution, but I never had any problems ignoring them. And Windows 7 reboots the whole system faster than Ubuntu reloads X + Gnome / KDE, which get updated quite often. And when you need to update / recompile the kernel - now that's a reboot you can't possibly avoid!
The subject is about how awful Linux is. See, it says it right there. "Linux Sucks." |
Um, do you think Java is an operating system kernel?! The first page of this thread make it very clear that this thread is about the GUI desktop experience, particularly from a developer's point of view.
LOL, arguing on the internet. |
I'm pretty devoted to server-side Linux development, and I'll switch to Linux on the desktop once it catches up. (Of course I've been saying "once KDE 4 comes out" years ago...) If anyone ever calls me a Linux fanatic, I'll be able to point to this thread as proof to the contrary. I calls `em as I sees `em - even if I have to bounce my arguments against someone as obtuse as anti-Microsoft Bob here.
1. Shitty hardware support [...] |
That in of itself is reason enough.