I've been using Windows pretty much since version 3.1 (though will some time on OS/2 as well) as my primary OS. I have, of course, used Linux, though mostly for servers and not a full-time primary OS. I also have a Chromebook running Chrome OS. Recently, I switched jobs and my team uses Macs so over the last few months my primary work OS is now Mac OS X, while I still use Windows at home.
One thing I have discovered in this transition is that I find the fanboism illogical and pretty much pointless. I've found that I can, for the most part, do about the same sorts of things in one OS as another, though the process is different. Yes, there are some applications available on one but not the other, but I have not found anything that forces me to believe that one OS is superior in all ways to another.
I can appreciate the differences and pros and cons to various operating systems, but I honestly get annoyed by people that attack or bash another OS with broad statements like "Well what do you expect from Microsoft?" or "Well I can do that on Mac why can't I do it on Windows?" Worse, it's never appropriate to associate an OS choice with a personal character flaw of an individual as often happens in flame wars. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux varieties are all tools and should just be seen as such.
I would just like to add that there is a valid reason why Linux or the *BSDs are superior to Windows or OS X - they are Free. As in Speech. And I'm sad this doesn't even warrant a mention.
Maybe I'm the only one... But as a professional developer working on everything from device drivers, embedded systems, up to your average LAMP stack and other web frameworks the "Freedom" of the operating system is worth exactly bupkis to me, ziltch, zero, nada.
There are a whole host of reasons to use one OS over the other but this "Free as in Speech" is simply not a very good one. I'm far, FAR, more concerned about "Getting Shit Done" than I am about the free-ness of my OS. For some tasks the right tool for GSD is windows, for others it's osX, and for still others it's some Linux / *BSD (I'm a NetBSD fan myself).
It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another. I guess it's a matter of what sort of things you grade on, For my personal OS grading metric there is only one item, "Helps me Get Shit Done". Nothing else matters, I just want to be productive.
It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another.
It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks. I'm assuming that that's what you mean by "short sighted"? Well, that's a bit snarky.
I chose OS X above (though I'm moving more and more in the direction of Linux on the desktop again). I guess it just struck me as odd to use "short sighted" to describe the people who, for idealistic reasons, are willing to take a short-term hit to productivity to ensure long-term capability.
> It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks.
But what's the point then? If it's just an academic process then that's fine, but for the purposes of determining a useful day-to-day primary system, it seems like 'It's free software' is a terrible metric on its own. All else being equal, of course, I'd rather free than closed, but all else is not equal.
It feels sometimes like this sort of 'free therefore better' ideology blinds the people doing the actual development to the fact that if they made the system more productive and intuitive for people to use, then more people would use it, and that's a net benefit to everyone. Perhaps if they DID focus on 'whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks', then their project would reach more people, and through that more people would be exposed to the (legitimate) benefits of free software.
Isn't that equal to always optimizing locally, as in a greedy algorithm, and therefore ending up at an suboptimal destination? Why isn't a short-term productivity loss acceptable if it improves things in the long-term?
I think it boils down to the difference between idealists and realists. Realists are always optimizing locally whereas long-term change is always brought by the persisting efforts of the idealists.
I also sense that you speak to FOSS as in "us vs them". You want to wait till their products become better than anything else while they are looking for comrades in their campaign to reach there.
Sorry, I didn't communicate well. The FSF movement is surely thinking "long term" and these people aren't necessarily "short sighted". What I do think is short sighted is using that as the primary metric for the quality of an Operating System; That leaves and awful lot of pretty important bits and pieces out. Admittedly, some people just prefer Linux / BSD... and thats fine. However, the parent comment I was replying to gave me the impression that, for them, the Free Software aspect was the "end-all, be-all" of metrics for measuring the quality of the OS.
Use whatever metrics is most important to you when deciding which OS to run. Some is "free as in speech", some focus on "does this help me git shit down a lot faster" ... some, well, who knows. Who cares for that matter.
I pick a Mac laptop as I can run OSX, Windows, and any necessary flavors of Linux (Metric #1). Plus, it has a nice physical shell and for me, that's worth paying some extra cash (Metric #1). But that is me. I assume no cary over in what works for me with other people.
Laptops are as diverse and affordable as shoes (or any other commodity consumer product) and people pick these things based on whatever suits their fancy at that time.
In regards to getting shit done, I can pretty much get shit done on any distro for the most part once past any learning curve (if there is one).
Just out of curiosity, what is making you move towards Linux?
The huge appeal of OS X to me is, as someone said on here recently, it's basically *BSD with a fancy window manager and 1-to-1 hardware/software integration.
The way OS X is being locked down. In 10.8, signing is optional and even if you tell your system not to allow unsigned, you can bypass it on a case by case basis. In the next OS X, we'll probably move a bit farther in that direction, and at one per year, the OS X of 2016 will probably refuse to run unsigned applications at all, for excellent reasons involving security and malware, etc. I'm sure there will be a way to turn it off, but when it's basically impossible to get more than a few users unless you submit to signing, applications like Bittorrent will either submit or find themselves reduced to developers-only status. If they submit, Apple will be able to remove them at any time (for the vast majority of users, who won't know how or want to "root" their Macs). Even if Apple never chooses to use this maliciously -- and I don't think they would for a long time, if ever -- it's going to be only a matter of time before some group sues them to use it to stop infringement or something.
I don't want to run a system where, by design, the manufacturer can remove my ability to run applications I've installed after the fact. So, even though I'm happier in general with the polish and fit of OS X than current desktop linuxes, that's where I'm headed.
I did mention those benefits in passing: "for excellent reasons involving security and malware". I don't disagree that this can provide those benefits; I just don't feel that they're worth the cost to me, personally. Also, I don't have any notion of how they could provide what I and other technically savvy people want and what the main base of computer users need at the same time.
The only thing you seem to be saying you want is to be free from the fear of unintended negative consequences of code signing.
It's tautological that nobody can both provide something and freedom from the fear of the unintended consequences of that same thing simultaneously.
On the other hand, since the only way to judge the trustworthiness of code is to know its provenance, I don't see how we can avoid some kind of signing becoming ubiquitous.
To me that means that free software must eventually develop a decentralized code signing scheme.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the package managers of all popular Linux distros (except for Arch Linux, who are moving to bring it in soon) have had code signing for years now. It's not decentralised however the package management system isn't either.
I don't really expect them to take it away completely. So, a simpler version is that I expect the capability to silently disable applications on user machines will be misused (through third-party insistence if nothing else; see the _1984_ debacle at Amazon). A similar system which could only throw up scary warnings when starting an unsigned application wouldn't bother me much, since it wouldn't be such attractive lawsuit bait. But I agree that I'm only speculating that Apple will carry this through to its natural end of being iOS-like. I can't imagine any reason for them not to do it, and I think that for the majority of their users, it will actually improve the experience.
Right now I'm using XMonad, but there are a number of other tiling WMs under X that actually manage windows for you instead of placing that burden on the user.
I'm decrepit enough that I remember the bad old days when proprietary OSes had a lock on things. I remember the number of times I ended up fucked because I couldn't look at the source of some crucial component, couldn't change it, and could only plead with a vendor to unbreak their stuff. And the standard response to my pleas was, "How many more units will you buy if we change that?"
I'm way more productive now thanks to the open source movement. My minor problems often turn out to be somebody else's big deal, so they end up fixed as if by magic. And if not, I can dig in myself, or hire someone instead.
No thanks to people like you, of course. But I owe a great deal to people who made the "irrational" choice to adopt an open platform and make it the most productive choice.
>Maybe I'm the only one... But as a professional developer working on everything from device drivers, embedded systems, up to your average LAMP stack and other web frameworks the "Freedom" of the operating system is worth exactly bupkis to me, ziltch, zero, nada.
And Linux is the top system for ease of acquiring development tools. Compilers, debuggers, IDEs, version-control systems, scripting languages... you get it all on Linux.
Actually, in my experience, it's quite difficult to get Unix-style development tools running on OS X. There's a whole basis of Unix software and development headers you have to install first, whereas Linux has a package manager for that.
I primarily use Linux, so I'm most productive there, but I understand your sentiment. I would use a nonfree OS if it increased my productivity.
That said, I think Linux and all the other FOSS OSes and software keep costs down. Without Linux, could you imagine what a Windows license would cost? I can't picture that we would have the same price points.
Do you think a similar argument could be applied to Android or any other free/commodity software/platform?
Perhaps the proximate cause of low Windows license cost is that there are alternatives that are free as in beer, but it's obvious to me at least that the only reason such "free as in beer" alternatives exist is because a lot of people work very hard to make sure that there are "free as in speech" implementations of fully fledged operating systems.
I am a GSD metric guy as well. I have two laptops , one mac for apple development (iPhone etc) and a windows machine to do blackberry development.
When im doing multimedia stuff , say using progs like xtranormal i have to use my windows because again, no port for mac is available. If im coding on an xterm connected to my amazon instances im using my macbook because its just alot nicer and basically all the tools i need come installed with the mac.
The thing i never understood is, if you are a mac fanboy and would never use windows or visa versa how do you manage to develop properly. How can an apple fanboy who refuses to use windows do blackberry development and how does a windows fanboy do any iPhone development, do they just restrict themselves to programming in objective C and dot net respectively ?
Yeh you could use a VM but i just found it easier to have two separate laptops with whatever OS i needed to run to get the job done
I guess you can have a preference , me i prefer my macbook when im doing general stuff because again all tools are included and if i need to fire up an xterm, run some network tool, quickly whip up a shell script or try some random thing its just easier on a mac but to be a fanboy who refuses to use the other OS makes no sense to me.
What you just explained is simply your arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology that makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another.
Proprietary software - i.e., software you can not modify to suit your needs - can actively inhibit your ability to "GSD". That's kind of the point.
I'm not one who has produced a many exploits in comparison to the real pros, but if I had to find a hole in an OS or browser these days I'd much go after Linux or Firefox than Windows.
3rd party apps on Windows are a different matter however.
Well said. I agree. I work in a 99% Windows IT shop, therefore Windows is the OS that will help me get the most work done in the shortest amount of time. I run Fedora and FreeBSD virtual machines in my spare time, but for most of the day, I need to get things done and Windows 7 helps me accomplish the tasks set before me.
I guess your value system is just different than mine and a lot of other people who feel like decisions should not just be made on practical expediency.
By default, the next version of OSX will only allow you to install software from their app store. In 3 years, (or whatever their release cycle is) they might decide to remove the option to disable this restriction all together. Obviously, this will be broken very quickly. However, for corporate users or people who don't want to void their warranties, "Free as in Speech" might very well become synonymous with "Getting Stuff Done".
Freedom also carries a cost. At the end of the day, the best OS for any given individual is the one that gives them the largest net increase in utility, for their personal utility function.
My experience suggests that a Free OS isn't worth it to me, but it's been about six years since I gave it a go full-time. The last time I gave Linux a good go round (as in using it as my primary OS for everything I did), I still had to invest time in getting my touchpad to work correctly with X or getting decent sub-pixel anti-aliasing. All of the freedom to tinker in the world is worthless to me if I can't get the basics sorted without a significant investment of my time.
You would hope that on a site like Hacker News, there would be a good percentage of users who would get a lot of utility out of being able to tinker with their operating system in ways not sanctioned by the creator of said OS.
In my experience this hasn't been true of (some distributions of) Linux in several years. I've talked to a lot of people who hold this opinion and they generally haven't tried Linux in 5+ years.
I think for the general case yes, but there are still some rough spots on certain hardware (e.g. power management on macbook pros and so on).
Some other smaller things, like attaching an apple keyboard to ubuntu creates up with pretty weird mappings for a couple of keys. Configuring the keyboard under those conditions is pretty confusing.
Yes, if it's your hobby. If you need to get something done (time = money) but have to stop to fix something in your free operating system then it is no longer "free" (as in money) I'm not talking about the openness of the system in relation to code etc..
If you have to change something in a closed system, it will either be impossible, or cost zillions of dollars (whatever it takes to convince Microsoft or Apple to do it for you).
A number of years ago, working on a semi-embedded system, I hacked the way Linux boots from USB devices to speed it up, which made the people I was working for quite happy. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about - I would expect to find a lot of people with similar stories on a site like this.
Also, configuring Linux machines is not really that onerous in this day and age. I suspect more time is wasted complaining about it than in actually doing it. There are certainly still some exceptions, and if you want the ultimate in "mom friendly", Mac OS is probably the way to go. But for a 'hacker', the ability to explore and modify might trump that need for ease of use.
What cost? You're stating this as a fact, when it certainly isn't. As I've pointed out in another comment, the claim that usability is an orthogonal concept to Freedom is a false dichotomy.
Yes, there are quite some issues at the moment, I'm not going to deny that. The thing is, a lot of those, like missing hardware support, are not the fault of the Free Software community, it's the fault of the very things we're trying to stop: closed/locked hardware, proprietary drivers, non-open file-formats or Freedom-denying practices like DRM or tivoization, and finally plain and simple FUD (named as the single most critical problem GNU/Linux faces in an infographic released by the Linux Foundation last year[1]).
Before someone points out that shifting the blame doesn't make the problems go away, let me add that I'm perfectly aware of this. I just want to make it clear that it's unfair to blame Free Software for a lot of the problems it faces, when in fact we fought and tried to prevent a lot of them for more than two decades.
This IS clear to everyone; it's simply irrelevant. Life's not fair. We all have to deal with unfair problems. Emphasizing the unfairness of your problems only makes the FSF look less "idealistic as in principled" and more "idealistic as in naive."
Relatedly, your most critical problem is not external, it's that the FSF is now associated more closely with non-issues like "GNU/Linux" nomenclature than solving serious problems.
Suck it up, grit your teeth, and press on. That's what it takes to be successful in just about any field of life. Anything else ends with you sitting on the sidelines, impotently complaining about how unfair it all is and how bad all the successful organizations are.
It's us hopeless dreamers that have built the world you say has no place for us. And we will continue to dream, and make our dreams reality, no matter how much you tell us we should accept defeat and just face the "reality of life", whatever that is.
So no, we're not going to "suck it up", but we're going to press on, to make a better world for future generations.
Don't misread me as a visionless hack. I would never discourage dreaming. My point was not that you are thinking too big, but rather exactly the opposite: that the FSF so often gets caught up in trivial distractions.
"Suck it up" does not mean "accept defeat," it means to accept the blows that come with contesting the arena of ideas, and get serious about effectively pursuing your mission. You don't get to just pretend the arena of ideas doesn't exist.
Free software is an ideology, and as an ideology it badly needs a prophet, someone who can inspire reverence for the cause the way that Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson can inspire reverence for science.
rms is wasting his influence. Just look at the primary GNU Project About page; it's a disaster of anxious dissembling, fussing over terminology, scolding people who only 95% agree with him, and taking pages and paaaaages to do it. That is not how you lead.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
When the FSF has a message other than "the waves are choppy and all the boats are unsound so you better stay close to shore," maybe they'll find that people start listening.
One more thing: A terminal as a first class citizen. Definitely not on Windows, and while the OSX one is orders of magnitude better, I seem to recall it's still a bit lacking. What ruins OSX for me isn't the terminal, though, it's that X apps aren't first class.
Regarding the Terminal - I never really got what people meant when they said the terminal was lacking. Maybe it's lacking some obscure features, but it absolutely nails the core features. The OSX terminal is, in my opinion, the single best terminal I've ever used (and I split my time fairly equally between OSX and Linux as my main desktop OSes and have tried pretty much every Linux terminal app I can get my hands on).
Unlimited scrollback, the ability to copy and paste using the keyboard, key bindings to clear scrollback, change font size, etc., separate keybindings to scroll the buffer vs. send scrolling commands to the terminal, double-click on parens/etc. selects a range from there to the corresponding other one, and I could probably go on listing more-or-less unmatched _usability_ features for quite a long time. On the other hand, if it's functionality people are referring to then I guess I just don't know what I'm missing because I've never found it lacking in that department either.
Well, the Mac terminal used to suck (especially before Leopard) so maybe people are talking about it pre (Leopard|Snow Leopard|Lion)? All the last three releases greatly improved Terminala.pp so it is in many ways superior to the Linux terminals I have used.
Not in the least since Snow Leopard, as Terminal.app has been perfectly fine (with Terminal Colors SIMBL plugin, and MouseTerm if you really want) and even better in Lion. For utmost configurability you could lean towards iTerm2, which you can tweak to no end (and arguably more than most X terminals).
Platform-specific tools from pb{copy,paste} to tmutil are truly useful and improved at each new release. Tools like brew give you all the package management love you could want, and xorg support is as first class as it could get without OSX being X-based itself.
I guess that if you want to go further than what OSX currently support, then you're looking for getty VTs, tiling window managers or Compiz customizability. As such one should probably not try to shoehorn Linux into OSX and rather use Linux (or some *BSD) directly.
Unfortunately, the terminal on OSX is incredibly buggy. Keeps incorrextly coloring commands, randomly failing... Perhaps it's because of the outdated bash they use?
Ehm, I have been using Terminal.app on OS X for years now, and probably use it > 50% of my time daily (yay for REPLs), and I never really encountered any problem.
The last thing I remember was that in OS X 10.5 I had to change some locale option to have UTF-8 working properly. But that's it.
That's more of a toolkit problem. For most X apps, there's no way to figure out (for OSX) what part of the app is the Main Menu. And what functions to call when a drag/drop happens, there's no interface for it. Under X, every toolkit has it's own solutions. The only solution is to embed support for compiling to native Mac apps into the toolkit.
There were projects to pull that off for KDE and Gnome, but somehow nobody continued working on them. I had the KOffice running first class on my Mac in 2004, and also Inkscape and GIMP a couple of years ago, but these native interfaces were buggy, and somehow there wasn't enough leverage to really finish them. Sad.
Have you tried PowerShell? It provides many more features, and has been a default install since Windows 7. Microsoft has been pushing it by making it possible to use PowerShell to configure a lot of the server products - and sometimes requiring the use of PowerShell for some configuration tasks.
I've tried PowerShell a few times. The thing that puts me off every time is not being able to bind keys. I find it so painful not being able to use emacs shortcuts at the prompt.
Because it operates at the object level rather than the files and strings of nix shells, Windows Powershell is more or less "one ring to rule them all."
I use the terminal heavily on OSX and Linux and I don't see a difference. It sometimes can be perceived as inferior on the Mac because of the lack of package management and issues with dependencies especially when working with Ruby tools. But as far as capabilities go my experience has been that the OSX and Limux terminals are equally equipped.
I agree with you. That's certainly a 'pro' on the side of Linux. I stated that every OS has it's pros and cons, but my goal wasn't to list what those are.
To say unilaterally that it's better for all people at all times in all use cases is, at the very least, an overstatement. While being free is a top concern for you and many others, for some (perhaps many) usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability, and that's a choice we should all be free to make.
>usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability
While some argue that this is the current situation, I want to point out that's a false dichotomy. Freedom and usability aren't orthogonal concepts like some make them out to be. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we need to lock everything down to make it "usable".
Also, Freedom of software (and hardware) ultimately has greater implications on society as a whole, which is why I raised the issue. It's not merely a feature, a pro or con, it's something which at least people like here on HN should be greatly concerned about. Computers play an incredibly important role today, and will only become even more important in the future. It's important to retain control over them on a fundamental level, and that requires Open Standards, Free Software and Open Hardware.
> While some argue that this is the current situation, I want to point out that's a false dichotomy. Freedom and usability aren't orthogonal concepts like some make them out to be. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we need to lock everything down to make it "usable".
Nobody is making this claim, so why are you trying to refute it?
For the virtues of locking everything down, I would switch from free v not to mac v windows. These are the two dominant operating systems, dislike it as I think we do. Apple locks down everything. Apple hardware, on the iphone Apple Software, Apple plugins and addons, everything, to the greatest extent possible, is controlled by Apple. This yields benefits. Driver installs giving you problems? Not with Apple. Screen display no working properly? Not with Apple. They control everything, and they make it all perfect. Windows makes a "something for everyone and everything" strategy. It gives you more options, but it also gives you more headaches. I don't think it is possible to increase options endlessly without costs.
OS X is hardly customizable. The user interface, for example, is pretty hard to customized while on Windows, numerous patches exist to modify completely the user experience (it might be because it is less needed on OSX..). Also, SIMBL allows to patch applications and add features, but it is far from being trivial. I do think Windows is more customizable. Concerning Linux, you can just do what you want with it.
I don't feel like these are a major issues today, or that they have been for some time, but back in the day I know a lot of hatred toward Windows/Microsoft stemmed from Linux users feeling slighted by the lack of support from ISVs and hardware manufacturers, the relatively immature state of Wine, and above all Microsoft's constant FUD / aggressive (and often illegal[1]) politics / lawsuit threats / etc.
Throw debacles like Silverlight, OOXML, IE, and Vista into the mix, and it's not hard to justify a lot of the resentment toward the "Evil Empire" from back then.
Today (though Microsoft had to be dragged here kicking and screaming), Microsoft actively supports open source (CodePlex), open standards (ODF is officially supported by Office), and the open Web (they're clearly genuinely trying with IE9+); on top of that, they're rolling out some pretty solid products (Kinect, Win8, MSE, WP7, Azure/AppFabric, all the random stuff MS Research does, etc.). Mind you, I still wouldn't be caught dead using Windows or any other Microsoft product, but it's nice to such an influential tech company changing for the better.
"To say unilaterally that it's better for all people at all times in all use cases is, at the very least, an overstatement."
Yes. Just better for hackers who want to alter anything about the code they are working with.
"While being free is a top concern for you and many others, for some (perhaps many) usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability"
>> "While being free is a top concern for you and many others, for some (perhaps many) usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability"
> False dichotomy.
I disagree, he's not stating that there's a correlation between free-ness and usability. Just that what he (and maybe most "normal" people?) consider usable is not currently available in free form. As a result they end up with a choice between "better usability" and "worse usability" and it just so happens that the entire former category happens to be non-free.
Now I know a lot of linux fans disagree and say that linux is just as usable as OSX/windows, but I personally disagree and the markets appear to be backing me up on this. Unless you are supposing there is some other important reason for people not to switch?
Theoretically linux and the important applications can be made just as usable, but it hasn't happened yet...
The only thing the market backs up, is that decades of lock-in, billions of dollars in advertising, pre-installation of the OS and lobby-ism make the difference when the competition has no such resources.
The reason people don't switch may very well be that noone except tech-aware people has ever heard of Linux (I'm pretty sure my parents don't). And as this poll suggests, for people that know Linux, it is a very very good alternative to Windows, even better than that ;)
Do you honestly think so many people here would use Linux instead of Windows when it's not "usable"? You know, i'd like to get my work done, so i'm using what makes me most productive. Certainly not Windows.
Sure, for programming linux (any unix, really) is superior (personally I use OSX). But, for just desktop usage (browsing, e-mail, video, music) I much prefer Windows to linux. OSX vs Windows is a bit of a toss-up, I prefer OSX because of the unix environment for programming, but I still keep windows around for games.
Since XP the instability issues have Windows have been a thing of the past and the Windows 7 user experience has been pretty solid in my experience. Granted I don't do anything complicated under Windows (like I said, unix wins for programming), but neither do most "normal" people.
Edit: Also, note I'm not saying that Linux isn't usable, it is just that most trivial desktop tasks take me significantly more effort to get done nicely under Linux. Whether the benefit of other tasks (scripting your system/whatever) taking less effort outweighs this extra effort depends on the frequency of the different types of tasks.
I'd argue that specifically for the standard tasks Internet, Mail, Video, Music, Linux is just as fine from a usability point of view. Of course the user doesn't have a benefit of using Linux if his Laptop comes preinstalled with Windows/MacOSX. But that was my point ;)
Wine for games is still a massive crapshoot.
Firstly you will get compatibility problems with many DRM systems which is a killer if you plan or running your legally licensed games without cracking them.
Assuming you can then get the game to work , expect graphical glitches a plenty , occasional/not so occasional crashes , slower performance and issue with the audio and visuals being out of sync.
There are a bunch of older games (GTA3 etc) that work fine in wine, and some indie games that have been built for it to begin with but I couldn't recommend it to anyone as a gaming experience that is close to that available in Windows 7.
Completely agree with you. If you are a gamer, the only solution is Windows, there is no alternative.
Steam on OSX brought some hope, but performances are just not there yet, and in any case, as long as developers will stick to Direct X, there won't be any other choice than having a Windows installation. I cannot blame them, Direct X seems to be largely above OpenGL, notably accessibility wise.
Besides that, while I'm not sure it's still a valid concern:
When I switched from Windows to Linux in the mid 90's it was a transition from a box with an illegal copy of MASM and a not-really-working copy of a C++ compiler to a box with a plethora of PL's, databases, code-examples and whatnot with an enormous educational value for me. On the winbox I learned Assembler, on the linbox I learned to program, that made the big difference for me.
Is it still that way for others or is the current situation on windows better? (not considering OSX as you can install pretty much anything there nowadays)
There are various ports of the GNU tool system and Microsoft has been making recent compilers available for download (and use, the free editions include redistribution rights).
Lots of other programming systems also enjoy at least decent Windows support.
Before I start, what follows is my personal opinion, based on my own experience. I'm not saying my way is right. I'm saying it's right for me.
Superior (i.e. free) will not make me use it (Linux, or anything else that's free).
Every January 1st I refresh all of my personal PCs and laptops. Every January 1st I kick off Windows installs on three of them while I give a Linux distribution a go on the fourth - a stock Sony Vaio P-Series.
Never, ever has the install run smoothly. And I have to admit that a single bump in the road is enough for me to delete the partition and put Windows back on. Because I need stuff to work. I'm productive when I program, not while I debug installations.
The kind of freedom you mention is not a reason why they are superior in some absolute way.
It's a factor which, in the real world today, makes them better for some purposes and worse for others.
There are reasonable but unproven conjectures that this kind of freedom could become the most important factor over time, but the existence of conjectures doesn't demonstrate any inherent superiority.
Everytime I've tried to switch from Windows to any usable Linux Distro, never has it happened that i didn't have to get frustrated due to some driver issues, laptop hibernation issues or some other issues which forced me back to Windows and kept Linux to either servers or a guest OS running in a VM in my PC.
I think ReactOS is what are you waiting for. It suppose to offer you the freedom of any other free and open source OS while holding the benefits of Windows. But it also awaits contributions. Spread the word.
ReactOS is poorly supported, incomplete, and user-hostile. Very little actually works on it--the software support is mostly limited to fairly old software, the only development happening for it is OS development (which is fine, but that's not a lot of use for normal people, or even software developers who don't have a burning desire to reinvent the wheel), and its UX decisions are a noted step backwards from Windows itself.
I don't intend to be rude, but recommending ReactOS as a legitimate Windows alternative is reality-averse.
"ReactOS is incomplete" = still needs development attention, which is what I've said - "it also awaits contributions". "user-hostile" as much as Windows has ever been. "Very little actually works on it" is actually more than what works on Linux + Wine, which at it's turn (like many would claim) do cover enough needs already, and that's only the "alpha stage" we're talking about here. ReactOS is getting better and better at the fastest pace relative to the rest of the OSS. You see, even if the ReactOS project had to start right now, it would still have a guaranteed chance of succeeding thanks to it's principles: it is free and open source like any other "free-as-in-speech" option out there, plus the one thing that makes the difference - it avoids alienating the users by breaking the backward binary compatibility for the sake of whatever reason. It offers the Windows simplicity.
"Free - as in Beer" has always been the more important point to me. This is followed closely by the ability to screw around with anything I want which, I suppose, is close to the "Free - as in Speech" argument, but for me it has always been about pragmatism rather than ideology.
On the contrary, it couldn't be more relevant. It's a fundamental issue of technology, and becoming increasingly important as we face the war on general purpose computing, a possible new advent of trusted computing with UEFI, and the list goes on.
I would go as far as to say Free Software is on of the most important things of the 21st century. We're moving towards an information society, and if we don't free the means to create, process and transmit information (as well as information itself), we will lose control to a few big corporations. I'm not planning to let that happen.
>When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel?
I haven't done that yet, but I occasionally poke around in the sources for things like the coreutils, read them, try to understand them and learn from them. I plan to do that with the Linux kernel at some point, too. You simply can't do that on unfree operating systems.
You're thinking free as in beer. Free as in speech means open source. As a developer you gain more from that as you can tweak/maintain your own software if needs be.
Wow. I'm getting quite of a down votes. I'm not opposed to Open Source software, actually I'm contributing to one of them. What I meant is that when the price tag is so small comparing to your earnings (since you are going to use the software for work), why would you make it a decision factor when picking an OS?
I disagree. You are entirely correct that fanboism is detrimental to any healthy discussion. But sweeping any discussion under the rug as fanboism isn't much better.
I use all three operating systems, and one major argument for me when doing development is the terminal. I know there are emulators on windows, but I have had moderate success with them. Ubuntu and osx give me much more power in that area.
At work where I'm forced to use Windows, I have Cygwin installed. It's great to pop open a terminal and be able to pipe things around as you would on Linux. It makes Windows a little bit more comfortable, although Cygwin still feels like a second-class citizen (especially when it comes to the file system).
One thing that bugs me about putty is its cramped GUI, which isn't even resizeable. (The terminal screen is, but not the windows in which you configure the connection parameters).
Ah, gotcha. Yes, this is a huge gripe of mine as well. I don't want to have to launch RDC just so that I can then launch a cmd.exe instance and pscp something to a remote machine.
In my experience I've found OSX somewhat better suited for development and Windows somewhat better suited for gaming but otherwise the main differentiator is hardware polish. The unibody Macbook Pros/Airs is just levels above anything I've experienced in the Windows world.
I've just switched back to Windows and its the hardware I miss more than the software. I bought a fairly expensive Dell but it isn't a patch on the old Macbook Pro.
Windows globally runs great on MBPs. During the early days of SL, I was spending more time under my bootcamp partition than SL as it was buggy and unresponsive.
Agreed on the hardware. This is why I bought a MacBook and installed Windows on it. I still hate the damned keyboard, but I hate all non Model M keyboards, so I've learned to live with it.
You'll never eliminate flame wars or any of it's derivatives.
You simply can't for the sole reason that the people that participate in those or are offended enough to start those
silly subjective "debates", are probably suffering from lack of identity.
Therefore they lash out at anyone that dislikes or doesn't share the exact same preferences, it makes them feel personally responsible to "defend" their choices in life.
Flamer wars are inevitable, the internet was made for venting and complaining that people are complaining is a big waste of your valuable time.
I've honestly found developing on Windows a much bigger pain in the arse until you spend a lot of time setting it up. It's not that you can't do things on Windows - anyone with skill can do anything on anything, however it just makes it significantly less easy, it just feels like an OS set up for consumption as opposed to creation.
I'm not sure that's actually the case, but if it were then deliberately using one that was locked down / charged for / oligopolistic would be a bad choice, not a neutral one.
One thing I have discovered in this transition is that I find the fanboism illogical and pretty much pointless. I've found that I can, for the most part, do about the same sorts of things in one OS as another, though the process is different. Yes, there are some applications available on one but not the other, but I have not found anything that forces me to believe that one OS is superior in all ways to another.
I can appreciate the differences and pros and cons to various operating systems, but I honestly get annoyed by people that attack or bash another OS with broad statements like "Well what do you expect from Microsoft?" or "Well I can do that on Mac why can't I do it on Windows?" Worse, it's never appropriate to associate an OS choice with a personal character flaw of an individual as often happens in flame wars. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux varieties are all tools and should just be seen as such.