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160 Comments
- flessa, on 05/19/2008, -4/+146Informative for the masses. No brainers for the geek.
- MasteRR, on 05/19/2008, -3/+90The article lists AVG for anti-virus. That is NOT open source. Free (libre) but not open source.
- hungryduck, on 05/19/2008, -1/+43It's smaller than MS Office 2003 and much smaller than 2007.
- porl, on 05/19/2008, -0/+35'It'd be nice to have it all centralized'
you mean like having a central repository where you can browse and install software that will configure itself for you automatically without having to browse and download setup037523.ihopethisisn'tatrojan.exe and cross your fingers? that would be an awesome feature... if only linux developers could come up with something like that... oh who am i kidding, that could never happen....
:P - inactive, on 05/19/2008, -2/+35Software development today is a race between developers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.
- wiredDeath, on 05/19/2008, -11/+41"Open Office is a free alternative to Microsoft's Office programs, and it is the best value freeware we can find. It is a fairly big download at more than 100MB"
Bigger than MS Office? - Inox555, on 05/19/2008, -1/+30Did anyone else here notice the volume control on the streaming video player at the bottom of the article goes up to 11?
Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven. - TacticalPenguin, on 05/19/2008, -5/+30Oh, yea, OO is huge. MS office 2007 is over 300MB......
- GavinZac, on 05/19/2008, -0/+24"The most popular is Firefox, hotly followed by Safari and Opera."
"Hotly followed" must rather blandly refer to ranking positions as in terms of market share it would be flattering to say "luke warmly followed" - tusseyd, on 05/19/2008, -3/+23"Hi. My name is David, and I've been Microsoft free for over two weeks."
- inactive, on 05/19/2008, -4/+21Microsoft Office 2008 is 527.72 MB:
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4011190/Microsoft_Offi ... - inactive, on 05/19/2008, -0/+16Because it's the only way to differentiate free as in free beer and free as in free speech. We French have two different for that, gratuit and libre.
Also @MasteRR, I don't see how an application can be Free (libre) but not open source.... You seem to be confused by the world libre. You should have used "free as in free beer" instead, cause "libre" means that you can modify the code and redistribute it etc. - ryananger, on 05/19/2008, -0/+15I'm sure Open Source is sick of you being the answer for nothing...
- riggs32, on 05/19/2008, -0/+14open source ftw.
- nickgarvey, on 05/19/2008, -0/+14"Linux is the basis for a vast array of other operating systems like Debian, RedHat and Ubuntu. "
That "other" in there made me cringe a little. - JohnnyKdiggs, on 05/19/2008, -7/+20They make it seem as though you must pay for an Ubuntu contract to use it. This is not the case.
You can download it free from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download or request a free install CD from http://shipit.ubuntu.com - LeeSoong, on 05/19/2008, -1/+14Well, here then: Puppy Linux.
The whole OS + Application programs, multimedia,
email, chat, internet browser, and more all in 90MB:
http://www.puppylinux.com/about.htm
And a review of Puppy Linux:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/11150
The whole computer OS + software that fits on
a USB memory stick, no hard drive required...
http://www.puppylinux.com/download/release-4.00.ht ... - teaguecl, on 05/19/2008, -0/+13Have you ever witnessed how a corporation makes it's decision to buy expensive proprietary software? No? Then shut up. The people making the purchase decisions are business executives and IT personnel - NOT engineers. They make their decisions based on:
1. what is least likely to get them fired
2. The warranty and support that comes with it. e.g. "it's not my fault, I'm waiting for tech support from to fix the issue"
3. what they are familiar with
Stating that "90% of corporations choose closed source" is an irrelevant statistic. It's like saying "90% of xbox owners use Microsoft brand controllers". Both statements are true, but neither of them accurately reflect the relative quality of the products being discussed. - NJank, on 05/19/2008, -4/+15From how many places do you download a copy of MS Office? Well, legally, that is...
- bgturk, on 05/19/2008, -2/+13AVG is not open source software.
- JensenSteve, on 05/19/2008, -19/+29I switched to ubuntu, firefox, and OO and will never go back to M$ again.
- inactive, on 05/19/2008, -0/+9Good Morning Dave....
- teaguecl, on 05/19/2008, -0/+9MasteRR, you've gotten it backwards. AVG is free as in beer, it is NOT software libre (or Free for us English speakers).
- xxMarka, on 05/19/2008, -5/+14why the hell did you say libre
- inactive, on 08/26/2008, -1/+10I realize you are new to Ubuntu, so I won't give a sarcastic or "elitist" reply (for the record, I didn't digg you down; in fact, I dugg you up, but only to help negate all the buries your comment received).
First, I agree that Ubuntu needs more polish, but not really in the places that "average Joe" users notice (e.g. the latest Nvidia driver in Ubuntu's repositories has a bug that causes the TTY terminals to not show up as blank screens on my computer).
Second, this may seem like a foreign, or even impossible, concept coming from Windows, but Ubuntu and other Linux distributions/"distros" (operating systems that use the Linux kernel (as opposed to Windows' NT kernel and Mac OS X's Darwin kernel)) have vast repositories/"repos" (centralized databases) of software "packages" (.deb files in Ubuntu, equivalent to .exe files in Windows) available. What this means it that you almost never have to search the web for programs to install. Just install software directly through a GUI (in Ubuntu that would be Add/Remove (Applications>Add/Remove...) or, for "advanced" users, Synaptic (System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager)) or the command line (which I prefer, as it's faster to type 'sudo aptitude install foo' or 'sudo aptitude search bar' than to wait for a GUI to load, especially since I'm a Dvorak typer :) (Dvorak is a faster alternative keyboard layout to QWERTY, for those unfamiliar)). Additionally, once a package is installed through a "package manager" (a GUI or command line frontend to the distribution's repositories), it is automatically kept up-to-date, with the only interaction on the user's part being to authorize the installation of updates and enter his/her password. Don't think that this is anything like Microsoft Update, but with the some additional core applications; most people never need to install anything outside of their distro's official repositories (and even then it's possible to add extra repositories), and with good reason: Synaptic currently lists 24811 available packages for me (however, keep in mind that at least half of these are metapackages and libraries and the like; nevertheless, the number of actual applications available through the repositories is still impressive). Furthermore, if there is something Windows-specific that you need (rare for casual users), you can always try running it in Wine, an open source implementation of the Win32 subsystem on Unix-like systems (Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.), which works very well these days (yes, Wine is in Ubuntu's repositories, but it's not the most recent release, as the Wine package maintainers for Ubuntu apply patches and test for stability; however, winehq.org has its own Ubuntu repository with the most recent Wine releases).
Anyways, you may want to give Ubuntu another look after learning a bit more, and it (and Linux distributions in general) is significantly more polished and advanced with each 6-month release, so if you don't stay with it for now, don't be afraid to consider it in the future (if you boot into 6.06, for example, the release from only 2 years ago and the previous "LTS" (Long Term Support) release, you'll notice that it's A LOT less polished than 8.04, and even 7.10 is noticeably worse than 8.04 (though by all means still a respectable operating system)).
N.B. In Add/Remove, make sure to set it to show all available applications instead of all supported applications, as there are far fewer officially supported ones, and from what I can tell no significant advantage to exclusively using them. - MCA2142, on 05/19/2008, -0/+8Hello David.
- Haydre, on 05/19/2008, -0/+8To build on what Weejay said, you mean free (gratis).
- bennettj1087, on 05/19/2008, -0/+8Hi David.
- DavidYeah, on 05/19/2008, -0/+7There's just no way you could have put up a more uninteresting comment.
- LeeSoong, on 05/19/2008, -4/+11"It looks like you're trying to log-on and actually get some work done for a change. Confirm or Deny ?"
- desuexmachina, on 05/19/2008, -0/+7Don't be sorry. You're allowed to have different experiences than I do.
I'm running it on a crappy Acer miniPC, it seems fast enough to do most of the things I'm doing with it. You might be doing more than just web browsing and screwing around with the GUI. - rasmasyean, on 05/19/2008, -6/+13Yeah, maybe so, but the masses are a much larger market share.
- moges, on 05/19/2008, -0/+7Try again. Most of the advancements 'made' by Windows actually appeared on Linux based systems first.
To see how the window management of the next Windows will look like, try Compiz. Commercial software constantly bombards us with the message that it is better, newer, more inventive, but that is rarely the case. Except maybe their marketing departments.
I don't play with OSX, so I won't comment on what they do/do not do. - desuexmachina, on 05/19/2008, -1/+7Man, this is the third time I've seen the "I can run Crysis" argument today. It's as daft as "linux doesn't need to defrag" who cares. I use Windows because I actually like it, not because it can run the latest video game. If I wanted to game I'd get a console. Crysis is an application, it can be coded for anything if the developers wanted. Not everybody will use it, no matter how many times you spam that you can play it.
- inactive, on 05/19/2008, -0/+6When it comes to size difference between commercial and open source programs, you can't beat Blender and [insert commercial 3D package here].
- Hijack32, on 05/19/2008, -3/+9Go Ubuntu and Firefox Woo Woo!
- ThugThrasher, on 05/19/2008, -0/+6It's not just corporate propaganda that keeps people from looking for free things. It's also the fact that they get told by MANY people who know computers NOT to just download free things will-nilly. Because, if those of us who KNOW what we're doing DON'T tell those that DON'T know not to do that, they'll download anything with the word 'free' near it and get infected. It's not safe to just download free stuff from random sources many times. I usually tell them 'don't download things unless I tell you it's okay or it's from a reputable website' and then show them some good websites
- gritta, on 05/19/2008, -1/+7After you install it it's like 10 gig tho, plus an extra 250 meg for each day you leave it on your system.
- apophenic, on 05/19/2008, -1/+6Computers remain much better for playing FPS games. I hate aiming with a joystick. You don't even need a "gaming rig" to play most games these days, they're not designed to take full advantage of the most powerful machines, because they know that most people don't have those computers.
- WoollyMittens, on 05/19/2008, -3/+8The average person that asks me to "fix" their "virussusses", doesn't have a clue that "free" software exists. If anything, they have been scared silly by stories about spam and free software that comes with said "virussuses". It seems that the corporate propaganda works really really well, if it stops people from looking for free things.
- thepxc, on 05/19/2008, -0/+4I was personally very disappointed that the article doesn't make a distinction between freeware and free software. I know the difference may seem subtle to "non-techies", but the difference is essential, both in terms of philosophy and usually the actual quality of the software.
I hate the ambiguity of the English word "free". If only it had been called "libre software" from the beginning... - sully213, on 05/19/2008, -0/+4You have to love the irony from the caption of the video at the bottom:
"Click interview: Computer Active magazine editor, Paul Allen, recommends the best freeware software available" - desuexmachina, on 05/19/2008, -1/+5Have you ever worked with standard business users? I get questions like "my program won't start" only to find that their icon is mapped incorrectly, if you can't even figure out how to work icons why would they be interested in finding alternative versions?
Most people don't care about computers until they can't do what they need to do and then all they care about is getting people who do care to fix it.
Like trying to get them to use Firefox. If I replaced their IE with Firefox nobody would notice until their badly designed corporate intraweb sites didn't work. As long as they can do their work, they don't care what we make them use. - KISSOLOGY, on 02/16/2009, -0/+4Dugg for honest summary
- maninalift, on 05/19/2008, -0/+4please select:
[Yes, open Excel] [Yes, open MSVC] [No I'll just piss about on the internet] - CWise, on 05/19/2008, -0/+4you forgot to add small penis to your list.
- dvavasour, on 05/19/2008, -0/+4You mean free (gratis).
- staeiou, on 05/19/2008, -6/+10Most people don't download MS Office, they get it on CD.
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