SubscribeWhy anyone would think that an OS which had it’s start in 1970s AT&T server technology would make a great foundation for a home desktop system is beyond me.And that fact is irrelevant to the home consumer. Other had humble beginnings with QDOS and OS2/NT and yet developed to become quite user friendly. What exactly is it about Linux that can't make it a home desktop system?
Obviously the development community is stuck in a time warp and out of touch with the home consumer. This clueless behavior extends all the way up to corporate entities like RedHat. I spent several weeks at RedHat in 2000 and I came away with a distaste for the Linux zealots... I thought there product was off target then and I still hold that opinion now. Investors seem to think the same too.It was kinda vague, but I really meant "exactly".
If you love the CLI so much, you can get any number of shells for Windows or OSX (4NT or Zsh are my favorites). The CLI is not a Unix innovation (Unix inherited from the dinosaurs, err... I mean from its predecessors); it can hardly claim exclusivity to that.Ah... but the argument against GUI Linux is that there aren't GUI applications for all the things you can do in the CLI. Sure, you can load up a CLI in Windows. A fat lot of good it will do you when you try and use a OS built for a GUI. Try adding a bit of hardware from the CLI in Windows - it's just not built for it. I see the flashing cursor but I have little functionality.
XP may use BSD parts, but that is nothing compared to the huge number of bad copies of windows technologies reused in the free unixes --COM, GUI design, control panels, file browsers, etc-- that came from the proprietary OSs.Oh come on. It's not that open source software taps into the pool of proprietary knowledge and vice versa. They're not two camps. They're just companies and hairy blokes. Microsoft took another proprietary company's GUI who in turn took it from someone else. Sure, open source takes ideas, but that's all software anyway. If you'd like me to name the ideas that XP took from BeOS and Nautilus just say so. If you'd like me to name how KDE took ideas from Windows 9x just ask.
Any good technology is intuitive for its user, it just happens. It doesn't force him/her to know the difference bettween [ ] and [[ ]], or what $$ and $@ mean. That crap belongs in the era of teletypes and 300 baud modems.You know, I trust there's a good reason for that syntax. You haven't said why it should be simpler (or if it could be). To the right user the flexibility of that syntax is probably a god send. I just stick with my KDE interface and I haven't yet had to deal with that (I'd feel similarly lost wandering around the the Windows Registry - how I am supposed to know what this HKEY value should be?).
Windows 2K/XP and OSX are perfectly good OSes and can scale pretty far (further than Linux).URL? I've heard some good things about XP embedded but I've yet to hear about a beowulf cluster of XPs (kidding).
They're back in both Mandrake and SuSE...and outrageously easy to set up.Stranger still, they're both in KDE on Redhat 7.1.
I'm using Windows 2000 to capture audio from an overnight Internet radio show. I put the program's Web page on Windows Active Desktop, added a three-line JavaScript function to make the Windows Media Player ActiveX control restart whenever it stops playing, set the Internet connection to redial if it loses a connection, and use Total Recorder to save speaker output to MP3. Works great.Yeah, but here's my point. You've gone around your GUI and ticked boxes to allow automatic dialing, added the page to your active desktop, configured total recorder, and maybe you had to change some security settings to allow Javascript to restart Windows Media Player (when it stops playing). After your efforts you don't have much in your hands. By this I mean that if you wanted to reinstall Windows, or copy this functionality to another computer (or give a friend a copy) you would need to do this again and tick those boxes. Most things in Unix you do once and can replicate again in one script. Your approach works well for you, but a newbie can't benefit from that approach (as they need to go around following a list of configuration options in each bit of software). Unfortunately as most Windows software has a binary configuration file (with no emphasis on developers to use plain-text where possible), and because run-time configuration of software is far less popular in Windows, it is more difficult to script (admitedly, some windows software allows me to open a file when I start the program). This is through no technical limitation but just a different programmer mindset.
...I'm seriously thinking about what it would take to move onto Linux exclusively for all my real work. The stumbling block remains AppleScript. For non-Apple users, I'll give you an example of the sort of thing I can do with AppleScript: when I see an interesting quote on a web page, I select it in the browser and click a button. The selected text is automatically copied into my quote of the day database in a completely separate application. Is there anything like that on Linux that allows me to go right inside of different applications and get them to talk to each other in ways their authors never intended? If there isn't, there should be.I'm not suggesting that Windows is a superior OS -- I chose Linux as my Internet server, after all. I just think the tradeoff you get for Linux's power, reliability, and price is a difficult OS to learn created by people who don't care much about making it easier.
Linux is great. You need patience for sure. But any shortcoming one may find with it isn't neccessarily the fault of the code, but more, the endless variables of differing computer components.That's pretty weak. Poor hardware support is a failure from any practical standpoint.
Holloway: Windows XP supposedly has a settings migration wizard that lets you move all your custom configurations around from one desktop to another. I don't know if that makes my Total Recorder hack easily transferable, but it sounds like it might.Thanks, I need something like that for work. I'll look into it.
It was fairly clear that the issue was with GUI programs - Roblimo didn't know or use the "easy way" to do things and so was forced to explain the hard way."I [Roblimo] butted in just before the new guy was totally lost, and showed him how to set up his modem connection the easy, point and click way - in about 30 seconds."
Windows scripting can also handle the AppleScript example, about "reaching into" an app and getting text. In fact, with the accessibility support built into Windows, there's very little one cannot do.Reaches in... are you absolutely sure? Don't they just all have the common ground of the clipboard in Windows? You can get the contents of the X clipboard with Xsel. KDE has the DCOP command to access klipper's contents (klipper uses X's clipboard anyway so - unless you wanted to pull out an ancient clipboard item - Xsel would work).
There isn't any LUG in my town and most Linux "experts" like to lord their tech superiority over us poor, dumbass WinDoze users who are actually interested in Linux. I'm exactly the type of user that you should be helping.INSTALL LUNIX!!!1
You're all gonna choke on your own sense of superiority and Gates hatred. What a waste.What a waste that you'd get turned off a system by some of its users. Not that it's better, or worse, or anything, at all, but trying anything different is the best way to understand what you have.
I love this argument. Really, I do.Wow! Thanks! *blush*
Linux would have hardware support rivalling that of Windows if hardware manufacturers would either share how to talk to their hardware with linux developers, or write their own linux drivers. Sadly, however, most don't.Hey, waitta-minute... you were being sarcastic. I remember sarcasm from episode 234 of Ghostwriter. The one where Jamal Jenkins is accused of burning down Mr Smatlocks store. Oooh... I hated that Mr Smatlock.. he was such a weasel... and I hate you too!
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"Most casual users don't want all of this complexity - heck, to most the idea that they need to login to their home system seems absurd. "
posted by GriffX at 5:55 PM on December 7, 2001