What is Digg?153 Comments
- mattwade, on 10/12/2007, -4/+44He's written two books on Linux and was the editor in chief for LinuxUser (http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/).
- i440, on 10/12/2007, -9/+47As many Linux experts themselves have said, Linux is not Windows. Linux is built as a quality operating system and intended for those who want to make the most of their computing power. Windows is supported by many, many more corporations and organizations. There are times when one is more appropriate for a certain task then the other.
- darkchild, on 10/12/2007, -2/+37verucasalt your comments show that you have limited experience with Linux and don't know many Linux users. I personally use Linux and FreeBSD for proper work because they meet all my needs. If they didn't I would choose something else i.e. the right tool for the job. I also know many people like myself who hardly run Windows and won't be switching back to it anytime soon.
This guy has obviously had to install Windows so that he can get his job done. I don't see a problem with this. I also don't see a problem with opensource and closed source OSes living side by side, after all they serve people with different needs. - mattwade, on 10/12/2007, -4/+32The reason he is running Windows is because Microsoft Office does not function fully and properly under any type of emulation in Linux.
- mattwade, on 10/12/2007, -3/+29He has used vmplayer and documented his experience here:
http://opensource.apress.com/article/13/running-office-under-linux - redhatcat, on 10/12/2007, -9/+34There's always vmplayer by vmware. It's free and does run XP.
- r00tus3r, on 10/12/2007, -1/+25He's not "switching to Windows", he's using Windows for a particular task while still keeping Ubuntu installed on his system, there's a big difference. I also use Windows at work but, my OS of choice is still Ubuntu, and so is his.
- NicP, on 10/12/2007, -14/+37"***** fanboys. microsoft must have got SOMETHING right or no one would use their software"
Sure! Microsoft got their marketing and business tactics right (creating a monopoly). For the amount of resources MS has at their disposal their software sure is average. - mattwade, on 10/12/2007, -6/+28So, using the right tool for the job disqualifies him as an expert? I'll remember that next time I need to sink a screw in a piece of wood. I'll be disqualified as a hammer expert if I use a screwdriver. Come on, give me a freaking break! His day job requires the use of Microsoft Office. He went through fits and trials to get Office running in Linux. After all the trials he decided that Windows was a much better tool to run Office and that disqualifies him as a Linux expert?
- estvir, on 10/12/2007, -6/+27At least this person seems somewhat reputable (Has books etc) where as every second day there is a link to some random blog about some kid who switches to Ubuntu.
- m3rlinb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+20ok i know im just going to get buried by the fanatics of the 3 main OS, but i run Mac OSx (Tiger), WinXP, WInVista (the public beta), and Linux. Honestly out of the three modern OS (vista for MS) I dont see how any one of them is better than the other two. They all have their pros and cons, good and bad sides. lets just hope we dont see any wars over it.
- cazabam, on 10/12/2007, -9/+29"In my experience, EVERY Linsux user eventually switches BACK to Windows"
You obviously have a very small sphere of experience. Also, some people can't go "back" to Windows because they didn't come "from" Windows in the first place ... - mattwade, on 10/12/2007, -4/+23Sorry I didn't spam the book links....like I said, he _was_ the editor at LinuxUser...not any more.
- Julikaefer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19>Windows will always be the main OS, mainly because the majority of the world
> don't have any reason to switch to something like Ubuntu etc.
The majority of the world don't have any reason to switch to Windows either if they're getting a PC with Ubuntu preinstalled. - pauldonnelly, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Breaking news: Microsoft Office still doesn't run on Linux!
This isn't an accurately presented story. There's a big difference between "Forget this Linux crap, I'm gonna get me some of what Microsoft's got!" and "Well, I guess I'll have to run Windows on my work machine to run Office." - redhatcat, on 10/12/2007, -12/+23Not to troll, but what certifies this man as a Linux expert?
- radiofrequency, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Linux experts don't write memos for a living, so Word and even Open Office are not their working environments. I could never use Windows for work because I spend most of my time in the command line or a text editor for code.
There are excellent low-cost options for running Windows in a virtual machine in Linux: Parallels.
Now, I do appreciate Windows for one thing: video games. I couldn't play Battlefield 2 in any kind of environment but native Windows. However, as Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry lets up, hopefully we will see more game publishers release their games for non-Windows operating systems. Then I won't ever have to use any product from Microsoft.
Now, as I get dugg down for my Anything But Microsoft stance, I'd like somebody to tell me why I should have to use Microsoft products, "like" Microsoft, or appreciate its work. Why should I have to give Microsoft my business or support if I don't want to? - Novagenesis, on 10/12/2007, -5/+16And the windows fanboys are out in full force today, full of lies and *****.
@electromagnetic
Microsoft attained a monopoly because it noticed Lotus Notes didn't have a great patent, bought DOS, and ripped off Finder. It kept its monopoly by using its monopoly as an immense weight, suing competition it could, undercutting those that couldn't, and changing standards. All in all, business genius which is neither good nor bad about the quality of the product.
You ask where the ***** everyone else is when Vista's coming out?
Ever seen Sun's 3d desktop?
How about Novell's?
Oh yeah, both are made for linux.
But then, there was a much less useful 3d desktop out for linux a decade ago...ditto with windows.
I've played in Vista, and crashed it a dozen times.
You know what? All they did was add a few unix security features to XP, and give it a pretty (and useless) 3d gui.
The reason you haven't heard about the competition's 3d desktops is because linux users look at the 3d desktops and say "well that's ***** useless" and stick with XFCE... ok, so it's usually Gnome or KDE they stick with, but still.
"They're the market leader because they were better than the rest"... yeah..tell that to Netscape, they'd love to hear that. The company tries to sell a web browser, so microsoft quickly makes a halfass web browser for free and starts shipping it BUILT IN to the OS...THEN manipulates a change of web standard... vbscript.... goodbye netscape.
I won't say they don't have any good software. At the market level they're at, they'd -better-. But it's not vastly superior than everything else... and your arguments to the contrary are uninformed.
Stop telling the dual-booters to try windows, since they already do...
Why don't YOU try linux, a serious try, for once?
And @ your -second- post..
Total *****. You are obviously clueless about modern linux (the last 5 years?)
In ubuntu and redhat, you don't have to compile ANYTHING. You don't have to hunt down source or anything. You have countless programs and all you have to do is click "install"..and they download and install, already checked for compatibility issues a hundred times over.
And there -is- a learning curve for linux. There -is- also a learning curve for windows.
You grow up on windows, you just don't notice it.
You grow up on linux, you don't either.
My girlfriend picked up linux in a week, and she doesn't have much computer skills... She also now pulls a fit when I reboot to windows for some reason or another.
She likes that linux is easier to run, has less bugs (my sound drivers in windows have always had some issues that nobody has ever been able to resolve), and admittedly has more girl-play games (the fact that women are more likely to play little desktop games than Quake 4 coming into account).
All in all, both your posts were elitist *****.
I dub thee fanboy... Now brb, I'm rebooting back into linux; I'm done writing that VB program for work - sakuraz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12would you get a new job or just get over with one task
- i440, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13``Switching to Windows de-certifies Keir Thomas as an expert on Linux.''
So now he knows nothing about Linux just because he switched? Seems to make sense to me. - YellowBook, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11A new user that has their PC pre-installed with Windows has hardly the motivation or the knowledge to rebuild their PC.
PC manufacturers are of course motivated by profit. If they can charge an extra $100 to ship a PC with Windows and make a few bucks in the process, this is easy money. If they choose to ship a 'free' OS (e.g. any Linux distro) their is no profit incentive for them.
Until PC manufacturers choose to ship PC's with a choice of OS the monopoly looks set to continue. - mattwade, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12Using vmware itself (and having it run well) uses 256 megs of ram. In my book that is a hog to run a single application (Office).
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+13"These are the books. Post them next time."
if you knew in the first place why did you ask? - overmann, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7electromagnetic:
You do realize that OS X has had a hardware accelerated "3D desktop" since 2002 or something? And many of Microsofts other "innovations" in Vista has been in OS X for years. I'm not complaining about Microsoft, I think it's good that they keep up with the times. I'm just complaining at you, electromagnetic. - gspeed, on 10/12/2007, -13/+19better than switching to a mac. he obviously mustn't need that new digital camera from japan.
- olegk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6In our company we recently switched from MS office to Open Office 2.0.2, and it's been a disaster. I'm not a fan of MS either, but рonestly I expected more from OO.
Some problems:
1) It's slow
2) Some images collapse in Writer for no reason to width zero. Like, you insert an image, save the document, open it, and some images have width zero, and if you try to change it, it doesn't work
3) Calc is mad slow sometimes. It takes like 3-4 seconds to build a simple graph. (AMD 3400+, 1GB RAM machine here)
4) Chart button doens't work. You have to go to Insert->Chart
5) If you have lots of columns (like 100), and insert a chart, it inserts it past the 100th column, very far to the right. So you have to find where Calc inserted it.
6) If you want to join several graphs in MS Word, you just copy/paste them together, and it takes care of all the relative data linking. OO doesn't do that, you have to do everything manually.
7) There's no "Paste Special" in Calc when you can paste comma-delimeted (or tab-delimeted) text data, and it would parse it. MS Word does it easily.
There are many other small annoying problems with OO. When I started using it, I thought it was the best thing in free software. Now I'm starting to hate it. - atdigg, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11For me MS Office works perfectly in CrossOver, I can't imagine what problems he had. BTW, it also works perfectly in Windows proper under VMWare.
Anyway I'm waiting for his post where he will describe why he is switching back to Linux or to Mac, anybody who used Linux more than 1 month gets frustrated with Windows sooner or later. - interiot, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Well, with Intel VT / AMD Pacifica and Xen3 here, the time has come to buy a ton of memory. Sure, it's a little extra money, but you get one great stable malware-free OS that runs your favorite apps, and you get another OS that runs your games and allows you to be maximally productive at the office.
- pcgeek101, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9I use Windows XP, and I have a stable, malware-free o/s that runs all -my- favorite applications, including:
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird
Gaim
OpenOffice
Putty
Notepad++
Google Earth
Ethereal
VMware (w/ an Ubuntu vm actually)
....and lots, lots more, including my modern games. I use most of these applications on a daily basis. Why does everyone rip on Windows? It came with my laptop, so I didn't actually go out and buy a license ... : Only desperate people actually run to their local retailer and purchase a boxed copy of Windows; It's cheaper when it comes with the hardware. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10"Windows will always be the main OS, mainly because the majority of the world don't have any reason to switch to something like Ubuntu etc."
Riddle me this, young one: what was the reason to switch to Windows when Windows first came out 20 years ago? Wide variety of computers on the market, operating systems were no big deal, everybody was pretty happy with things the way they were, porting things from one platform to another was a group effort. People were just interested in getting the damn work done. Then the Borg came and said "You MUST do it This Way and This Way only!" and it seems like 95% of the people just dropped their printouts and "Yes, Masteeeer..." and it's still going on today. - upfrontfanatic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Since when was this a Linux site? I know digg has its fair share of zealous fanboys, but since when was this a Linux site?
Oh. And my server runs Windows 2003. It runs fine, ain't "pwned" despite 100k attempts from chinese hackers. And I run that by choice, because for my purposes a Windows-server makes a whole lot more sense than Linux.
What you have to realize is that there is such a thing as "right tool for the job", and Linux aint the answer to everything. - interiot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5There's also a big difference between "My workplace forces me to use a proprietary document format, and I'm forced to buy a Microsoft license for the OS and Office" and "Even though the document format is mostly proprietary, I'm able to use a variety of tools and OS's to edit those documents".
- Novagenesis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5They swapped to windows because, then, it was better.
If you had a PC, the option of getting a GUI was amazing...
Now, there's a dozen OSes with guis, and most of them better than windows' - Leetful, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Linux is absolutely useless for any genre of heavy internet user outside of programmer.
If you think otherwise you're just kidding yourself. Gamers, Designers, Video/Multimedia producers, even web developers and more robust web surfers (read: latest flash version and mainstream browsers) have all but no choice to stick to even OS X over anything Linux can provide.
Linux is not only totally unprepared for mainstream desktop usage, but the fanbase only does it a great disservice by claiming the opposite. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7"I have nothing against using linux"
I call *****...you called Linux users 'Zealots'
Sounds like you have a pretty strong/low opinion of the *nix userbase to me.
As for your 'list':
1) OpenOffice
2) this is as old as the "Mac's suck for gaming' argument. Here is a list of the top games on Linux:
1 Alpha Centauri
2 Tribes 2
3 Return to Castle Wolfenstein
4 Neverwinter Nights
5 Unreal Tournament
6 Jagged Alliance II
7 Majesty Gold
8 Unreal Tournament 2003
9 Civilization: Call to Power
10 SimCity 3000
3) What distro have YOU been using? Are you so misguided that you think everything in *nix is command line? Maybe you should check out Ubuntu, Mandrake, or Suse. - hackwrench, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Maybe he didn't know at first but once it was said that he was an author of Linux books it became relatively easy to search?
Maybe since he is a cat, catty of him? - interiot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Stranglehold letting up? I'd like to be an optimist, but with DX9 and DX10 selling video cards these days, and with the XBox 360 being moderately successful and getting a lot of developer support, it seems like gaming is being even more solidly tied to Windows.
- lidflipper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I completely agree. I recently wiped my HD and reinstalled XP. I decided, for fun, I'd install Ubuntu on 20gigs (I'm a big time linux noob). It installed almost flawlessly and I really like it. I'm sure I'll like it even more when I get a better grasp of it. However, I'll probably hardly ever use it. I have yet to see how it is superior to XP. Especially for tasks that the everyday run-of-the-mill computer user needs. Also, I HAVE to be able to use Adobe products.
- Phyltre, on 10/12/2007, -7/+11valour, I can summarize your comment in one word:
"Turncoat!" - iSEPIC, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Just be thankful your work doesn't force you to use Lotus Word Pro.
- Eoxx, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8to "verucasalt"
"If you want to do anything other than web browse and email (and even that is assuming you can SOMEHOW get your Internet connection working), then you are going to need a real OS... WINDOWS XP"
According to the test I've made on Kubuntu (as a new user of 3 months).. you can do much more than just read mail and browse the web ...
you can play music(mp3, CD etc..) read video DVD, do instant messaging services, create document, PDF, read PDF, and
even play games Tremulous which is getting more an more popular http://tremulous.net/index.php?section=shots
This examples show that you can do everything in (ubuntu) Linux and the result in term of price performance is by far superior in Linux ... The more people will use it the more application will be available on it ...
And yes the Internet connection works fine with ubuntu ... just plug the cable install the OS and it detect the connection alone without any configuration ... (and my server is a Windows server with a share Internet connection !!)
The only problem if you chose Linux is exchanging data with people using closed format such as office ... or working in a collaborative environment where there is a mix of platform ...
The problem seems to be linked to "editing books for Apress" with Ms Office
Why don't these guys use editing tools to do editing jobs
for example use scribus - http://www.scribus.net/
http://scribus.sourceforge.net/gallery/ - mattwade, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"It doesn't surprise me that this company can't make Open Office work for their application, though I don't think that's an endictment of either Open Office or Linux."
Have you ever utilized the commenting feature in Open Office...and tried to do so with 50 or 100 comments in the document? Yes, it is a endictment of Open Office. It is simply not as good as Microsoft Office in that regard. It isn't that we can't make Open Office work. Our templates and process work just fine with Open Office. The problem is that a person's workflow is severely hampered when you have deal with comments in Open Office. Please, please, tell me how that is an Apress problem and not an Open Office problem.
As for your problems with a book, I'd love to know which book it is and what problems you had. You can send me an email at matt AT apress DOT com so we can not go off topic here. Please, I'm not asking you to do it for the heck of it. I'm asking because we really do care if our customers are satisfied. If you have legitimate claims about a book, I'd like to know and rectify them. - affiliate, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4At the end of the day, use what is best required to do the job.
- tunercarzrock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Yes! Finally someone who can look past virulent fanboy hatred and see the truth!
I run a Fedora Core 9 (I wish it was Ubuntu) and Windows dual-boot system at home. It does what I want it to. I use Windows most of the time while I learn how in the world you are supposed to install programs on Linux. Once I learn that, I'll be good to go. And I plan on buying a Mac sometime soon as well. Like m3rlinb said, all of them have good and bad points. I love all three OS's. Now if only someone could make a system that would run all three, I would be the happiest teen on earth. - Novagenesis, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6And @mattus
--
Gotta laugh at all the Linux fanboys suggesting half-a-dozen open-source programs to work round a problem which Windows solves outright. There are many reasons why Linux is superior to Windows, its open-source nature being one of them, but in this situation Windows is the best tool for the job.
--
What great windows-fanboy posturing. If the linux fanboy doesn't suggest the open-source programs that can make windows software work in linux, the windows users says "so you just can't use this program in linux..HAH! GO WINDOWS"
At the same time, many linux programs, some of the best stuff in the market, work in windows because, being opensource, they were ported.
Of course, some haven't.
Either way, linux fanboys never use "well THIS program runs better in linux, and is easier to get running in linux" and not because it's not the case... All in all, they're two seperate operating systems with some level of overlap.
World of Warcraft still runs smoother for me in Cedega than in Windows, and at higher graphical settings. It also worked "out of the box" for me in Cedega.
Abiword does everything I need in a word processor and runs a lot faster using a lot less memory than MS word.
It's all about what you need.
If you NEED a very specific piece of proprietary software, and you don't like linux enough to use wine, then shut the ***** up and use windows... linux users don't care.
If you DONT need that piece of software, there are equivalents in Linux, and often superior software as well. And -that- is the point you get to DEEEE-CIDE. Big word huh? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I guess I'm lucky; Linux has been adequate (to say the least) for all my freelance work.
It really is a problem of mindshare. I reflect that I went through Commodores (the predecessor to Amiga), MacIntosh, early IBM PCs running random PC-DOS and Xtree systems and I forget what else, and OS/2 before I ever saw Windows (and my first reaction on seeing it was "Ick! What did you do to this poor MacIntosh?"). So it was only too easy to leave Windows for Linux, BSD, and Solaris. Operating systems really *have* become invisible for me, with the exception of Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
Me learning Plan 9: "You do this HOW? Why do it that way? OK, I give up on understanding why. So, how do you do this? THAT way? You've gotta be kidding!" Plan 9 really set out to rewrite the book! - mattus, on 10/12/2007, -14/+17Gotta laugh at all the Linux fanboys suggesting half-a-dozen open-source programs to work round a problem which Windows solves outright. There are many reasons why Linux is superior to Windows, its open-source nature being one of them, but in this situation Windows is the best tool for the job.
- Giga, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Why does everyone get so uptight about who uses what operating system? You should choose your operating system that supports your task and required tools, not the other way around...
- randomm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4@meez
CS:S and BF2
Those are two of the greatest games out. -
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