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Linux Is Not A "Second String" Operating System

Linux has indeed come a long way as far as usability goes.

Ubuntu's HUD is amazing. Personally, I think it's the best addition to any OS since the start menu. It's like a search bar that can do everything, from within programs to launching programs and configuring your OS itself.
 
Disposed said:
There are an awful lot of people in this thread that need to stop acting like they know linux because they checked it out 8 years ago. The last 3 years alone have been massive for linux.
Click to expand...

Also all those that for some reason still think the CLI is the way ahead for all the worlds computer users.
 
pelo said:
Linux has indeed come a long way as far as usability goes.

Ubuntu's HUD is amazing. Personally, I think it's the best addition to any OS since the start menu. It's like a search bar that can do everything, from within programs to launching programs and configuring your OS itself.
Click to expand...

As much as I absolutely hate hate hate Unity, this HUD thing actually looks pretty useful.
 
Disposed said:
There are an awful lot of people in this thread that need to stop acting like they know linux because they checked it out 8 years ago. The last 3 years alone have been massive for linux.

That whole wall of text from Dan can be summed up with just that. The whole "linux is not user friendly" nonsense is from people like Dan that have no real current experience with linux and keep going on outdated information and assumptions. Explain to me how linux is any less user friendly than windows. Unity is easy as shit to use, KDE is so similar to the windows 7 layout its ridiculously easy for anyone to pickup etc. I cant help but look at the mess windows 8 is turning out to be and wonder how people can still go on about linux being less user friendly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltE_ekc8kE8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?annota...&feature=iv&src_vid=ltE_ekc8kE8&v=v4boTbv9_nU

How the hell is windows 8 more user friendly? The old man figures out ubuntu slowly but surely and completely gives up trying to figure out windows 8.

Apps are unreliable and shitty??? What apps are you referring to? Web browsers work the same (Technically better since no worry about malware) VLC is VLC, music players are far better than shitty old windows media player. The gimp may not stack up to photoshop for professional use but considering the monstrous price difference its damn hard to fault gimp.

The statement that "if there was a market someone would be doing it" is so incredibly ignorant and shortsighted i cant believe who its coming from. The same could have been said about every single underrated market before someone changed it. People where saying the same ignorant shit about the tablet market before the ipad. Also given that very argument the fact that devs ARE starting to look at linux seriously should prove that statement false. Valve is not stupid, they see what so many refuse to see, they have seen the humble bundle results and realize there is money to be made there.

Just look at the humble bundle results yourself and it should be plainly obvious. There was quite a bit of money made from linux and how many of those windows sales would be linux sales if people could actually rely on linux as a gaming OS? You hear it all the time in the community "If i could play my games on linux i would be linux 100%".
Click to expand...

I guess my feeling is, when everything works, your drivers are automatically detected upon install, and you use the software in the repositories most flavors of Linux are actually MORE user friendly than Windows.

However, when something goes wrong, (rare hardware, 3rd party application not playing nice with dependencies, etc. etc.) it can take hours of digging through forums and playing around in the CLI to get it fixed.

The latter is becoming more and more rare, but it still happens on occasion. For most people though, they'd seek help in this situation whether they were on windows or Linux, as even the trouble shooting and finding drivers in Windows is probably beyond their abilities.

I really honestly believe that software and driver availability are Linux biggest problems.

What linux really needs is a way to tie in commercial software into the package managers, so that if you need/want commercial software, you can have it install (with dependencies) as neatly as something in an official repository.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039013308 said:
As much as I absolutely hate hate hate Unity, this HUD thing actually looks pretty useful.
Click to expand...

It gets better the more often you use it. It arranges the search queues by what you use the most, so you can often launch an application or flip to the next song with just two or three keyboard clicks. It's like having a search bar in your web browser that does pretty much everything, including act as a search bar for your default web browser :p I'd highly suggest you give it a shot. Unity has gotten much better since 11.04 as well. It's like Metro but without all the suck.
 
pelo said:
That's Mint, Ubuntu doesn't have that issue. 64bit or 32bit, just like Windows, actually ;P

Standardization should be revolved around Ubuntu. It's the most popular platform, built on Debian and quite nooby friendly. Unless you run into an issue (which isn't unheard of but it's rare), you can avoid the terminal completely and go through your GUI for everything.
Click to expand...

Standardization is nice and will help Linux, but why god why the horror that is Unity?

I ditched Ubuntu as a desktop OS as soon as it became non-trivial to opt out of Unity.

(I still use Ubuntu Server edition for my server though).

These days I use Mint.
 
Unknown-One said:
Yeah, and each DVD ISO is only about 800mb...

Why don't they just put them all on the disc? There's more than enough room left over on a 4.7GB DVD. let the user select which UI they want during installation.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that would be pretty nice. Show a picture of each and allow users to click on the one they want as they are installing.
 
Someone on the Mint team should port Unity's Start Menu and HUD to MATE desktop, replacing the old school menu list. Ohhhhhh that'd be awesome for me.
 
Go Xubuntu or Kubuntu :p Personally, I was one of the ones that hated Unity in its initial phase, but it's a long long way since then. It's actually quite good now. It doesn't feel as blocky and forced, with some of the issues that plagued the 11.04 version now gone.

Drivers and applications are sort of a chicken-and-egg matter. It's getting there and standardizing a single distro as the go-to as far as compatibility goes would help immensely. This has more to do with hardware/software vendors and developers than it does Linux, though. Implementing commercial software wouldn't be difficult. You're already sifting through various repositories when looking for applications, drivers and files. If the application appears when searching, a simple link to a package, .tar .zip, whatever, on the official website would suffice.
 
pelo said:
That's Mint, Ubuntu doesn't have that issue. 64bit or 32bit, just like Windows, actually ;P

Standardization should be revolved around Ubuntu. It's the most popular platform, built on Debian and quite nooby friendly. Unless you run into an issue (which isn't unheard of but it's rare), you can avoid the terminal completely and go through your GUI for everything.
Click to expand...

Again, now it becomes a war of Distros :p:D Across many tech sites you see users who say, OMG UBUNTU SUXXOR, UNITY IS THE SUXXOR, MINT FTW. Now a user goes to look at Mint and wtf, 5 isos?!?!? :p
 
soulesschild said:
Again, now it becomes a war of Distros :p:D Across many tech sites you see users who say, OMG UBUNTU SUXXOR, UNITY IS THE SUXXOR, MINT FTW. Now a user goes to look at Mint and wtf, 5 isos?!?!? :p
Click to expand...
More than that, there are variants of both the Ubuntu-based the the Debian-based version up for download.

Without a lot of reading, it's pretty hard to pick which one is best for you. This is an instance where too much choice really is a bad thing...
 
Yet all of them use the same drivers and have access to the same applications.
 
DeathPrincess said:
Gentoo is the only true Linux...
Click to expand...

I used to do Gentoo back when it was new.

It was a good learning experience, but I got tired of the constant maintenance. When I got a full time job, I had to switch, because I was spending too much time maintaining it.

And what's up with Gentoo no longer doing a full boot strap and compile from scratch install? :p Precompiled binaries? That flies in the face of what Gentoo is supposed to be about :p
 
Robstar said:
I've only had problems with 1 wireless card (the one in my x120e) doing that, so I blame the card.

If you want hardware acceleration you can no ati (fglrx is OK.....but not super easy to setup) or ati OSS (radeon driver works well except for 3D). If you go nvidia go nouveau or binary blob. Intel has good support for most of their chips except the newer onboard 1155 stuff and the one that they didn't make (gma950? May not be remembering right). Avoid matrox at all costs.
Click to expand...
I can report that the ThinkPad x120e wireless works fine "out of the box" with Ubuntu 12.04, as it is what I'm using right now. I've pulled down the updates and the AMD/ATI proprietary FGLRX graphics driver but the "(post-release update)" version failed so far.
 
Disposed said:
There are an awful lot of people in this thread that need to stop acting like they know linux because they checked it out 8 years ago. The last 3 years alone have been massive for linux.

That whole wall of text from Dan can be summed up with just that. The whole "linux is not user friendly" nonsense is from people like Dan that have no real current experience with linux and keep going on outdated information and assumptions. Explain to me how linux is any less user friendly than windows. Unity is easy as shit to use, KDE is so similar to the windows 7 layout its ridiculously easy for anyone to pickup etc. I cant help but look at the mess windows 8 is turning out to be and wonder how people can still go on about linux being less user friendly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltE_ekc8kE8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?annota...&feature=iv&src_vid=ltE_ekc8kE8&v=v4boTbv9_nU

How the hell is windows 8 more user friendly? The old man figures out ubuntu slowly but surely and completely gives up trying to figure out windows 8.
Click to expand...
It's user friendly up until something goes wrong or you need to do something out of the ordinary, which does seem to happen more often than it does in Windows. As soon as that happens, the user friendliness goes out the window. Examples might be last time I tried to install Linux on my Mum's PC, the damned thing would not recognise the monitor. It'd display to it, but it wouldn't recognise the type or anything like that so it was limited to 1024x768 even though it was a 1680x1050 monitor. It was an absolute pain in the arse to fix, took the best part of a day to get it working for me who is familiar with Linux but not a pro or anything. Networking issues are an absolute pain in the arse when they arise, which seems to be far more frequently than I'd like. A certain program doesn't want to work or doesn't want to communicate with another program. Random driver issues.

Modern Linux distributions are wonderfully user friendly as long as you're dealing with the front end, as soon as you get away from the front end it's no where near as simple as Windows to deal with.

Apps are unreliable and shitty??? What apps are you referring to? Web browsers work the same (Technically better since no worry about malware) VLC is VLC, music players are far better than shitty old windows media player. The gimp may not stack up to photoshop for professional use but considering the monstrous price difference its damn hard to fault gimp.
Click to expand...
Linux versions of programs always seem to give me more of a headache. Even since you mention VLC, playing videos is linux has always been a bit more of an annoyance. For some reason in linux I'm more likely to get tearing or interlacing or stuttering videos or just shitty looking playback and I transfer the exact same videos to windows and play them in MPC and they work fine. Obviously it's not EVERY video that causes problems, but things just go smoother in Windows.

As far as other apps are concerned, well, if you want to use open source programs, the linux version will usually be better. Lots of good text editors and things. As soon as you want to use something that's NOT open source and NOT free then you're usually in a world of pain. Even a lot of shit that is open source is just a pain in the arse to install and get running if it doesn't have nice built in installers.

GIMP is actually a great program which I use both on Windows and on Linux. :p

The statement that "if there was a market someone would be doing it" is so incredibly ignorant and shortsighted i cant believe who its coming from. The same could have been said about every single underrated market before someone changed it. People where saying the same ignorant shit about the tablet market before the ipad. Also given that very argument the fact that devs ARE starting to look at linux seriously should prove that statement false. Valve is not stupid, they see what so many refuse to see, they have seen the humble bundle results and realize there is money to be made there.

Just look at the humble bundle results yourself and it should be plainly obvious. There was quite a bit of money made from linux and how many of those windows sales would be linux sales if people could actually rely on linux as a gaming OS? You hear it all the time in the community "If i could play my games on linux i would be linux 100%".
Click to expand...

I agree with that, but until developers actually start pumping out good quality Linux alternatives to their programs then really I struggle to recommend going 100% Linux to people who can afford to get Windows instead or in addition to. Personally I just use both Linux and Windows a lot, because Linux certain things are simply easier to do and at my work a lot of people have written in house programs that are Linux based, so if I want to use them I need to use Linux, but even if it weren't for games (which I rarely play these days anyway) I still wouldn't consider going 100% Linux at this point. Even some of the Engineering software I use they realise more supercomputers use Linux, so it has Linux versions but the Linux version is so unusable you still need to use Windows to actually set things up and then just send it to the supercomputer and run it on Linux via putty.

I'd love for developers to start taking Linux more seriously as a desktop machine, and if they do it'll be great to see the MS monopoly start to break down a bit. Personally I don't think MS would have done what they've done with W8 if it weren't for the fact they monopolise the desktop market.
 
dagamer34 said:
I think what you meant to say was "If developers and publishers thought they could make money on Linux ports, they would do it already."

Something isn't better just because it's open source.
Click to expand...

Wrong, the problem is cost effectiveness. 99.9% of game developers have no experience in making games for Linux. All their experience is with PC-Compatible (x86, x64) or Power PC (PPC). It's all a matter of cost, companies never look at long term cost when it comes to these things. They look at how much it will cost to train a porting team in the new programing language. It is a very expensive and takes time. In the long run it is well worth the money, but again most companies focus on the short term. There is also the fact that gaming on Linux is untested waters and most do not want to be the first to try. Once someone succeeds more and more will push their games over.

Porting is a very much more intensive process then people think. It depends heavily on the code used to make the game in the first place. Did they use C++ or did they go the easy route and use Direct X. The latter is much harder to port over and might involve emulation or recoding of the engine. You also can't just throw a game on a PC-Compatible game on a Power PC system and expect it to work. Every game has to be tweaked and optimized to work properly. Most game developers are starting to use an engine which increases what you can do in less time, but they all differ wildly in features, how they can be used, and what code the engine is based on. They all provide differing levels of cost versus reward and none of them can simply be ported over with a simple button push. They reduce the time needed to port a game over sometimes, but that all comes down to what the engine can handle.

It was the same way with Apple PCs, once Valve started porting over others started following suit. Gaming on Mac is not huge, but it is a growing market. All that took was Mac shares of the PC market to increase enough. It will take something bigger for the same to happen to Linux as they are still a small share of consumer PC installs, but that may be already happening with the mistakes made on Windows 8. It has already changed Valves mind about supporting Linux.

TLDR: Just because something currently does not exist does not mean it will not be profitable or if it will work better or worse. We cannot know until someone tries.
 
Bound4Earth said:
Wrong, the problem is cost effectiveness. 99.9% of game developers have no experience in making games for Linux. All their experience is with PC-Compatible (x86, x64) or Power PC (PPC). It's all a matter of cost, companies never look at long term cost when it comes to these things. They look at how much it will cost to train a porting team in the new programing language. It is a very expensive and takes time. In the long run it is well worth the money, but again most companies focus on the short term. There is also the fact that gaming on Linux is untested waters and most do not want to be the first to try. Once someone succeeds more and more will push their games over.

Porting is a very much more intensive process then people think. It depends heavily on the code used to make the game in the first place. Did they use C++ or did they go the easy route and use Direct X. The latter is much harder to port over and might involve emulation or recoding of the engine. You also can't just throw a game on a PC-Compatible game on a Power PC system and expect it to work. Every game has to be tweaked and optimized to work properly. Most game developers are starting to use an engine which increases what you can do in less time, but they all differ wildly in features, how they can be used, and what code the engine is based on. They all provide differing levels of cost versus reward and none of them can simply be ported over with a simple button push. They reduce the time needed to port a game over sometimes, but that all comes down to what the engine can handle.

It was the same way with Apple PCs, once Valve started porting over others started following suit. Gaming on Mac is not huge, but it is a growing market. All that took was Mac shares of the PC market to increase enough. It will take something bigger for the same to happen to Linux as they are still a small share of consumer PC installs, but that may be already happening with the mistakes made on Windows 8. It has already changed Valves mind about supporting Linux.

TLDR: Just because something currently does not exist does not mean it will not be profitable or if it will work better or worse. We cannot know until someone tries.
Click to expand...

Please do not use the terms PC or PC-compatible to refer to Windows computers. Most GNU/Linux users are running on PCs as well.
 
Bound4Earth said:
99.9% of game developers have no experience in making games for Linux. All their experience is with PC-Compatible (x86, x64) or Power PC (PPC).
Click to expand...

Um, excuse me, but when did Linux become non-x86_64 based? :confused:
Do you even know what you are talking about?
 
Red Falcon said:
Um, excuse me, but when did Linux become non-x86_64 based? :confused:
Do you even know what you are talking about?
Click to expand...

Not to mention where are all of these devs with experience making games for ppc? Nothing in that big ass wall off text makes any sense. Ppc is a dead platform wtf is he going on about.
 
Its sort of funny, but getting things running in Windows 3.1 or 95 was also a hassle and not consistent from PC to PC.

I've been messing with Linux again after about 10 years and it has gotten better. Unfortunately a lot of people have this picture from 10 years ago when it was a big hassle so when they bump up against any bit of difficulty today, they flashback to all the difficulty from 10 years ago and say it hasn't changed.

Linux is slowly creeping along. Although its improving at a relative snail's pace, its not static and it will get good enough that the price will win out for the home. Maybe not tomorrow but it will gain momentum as more and more people turn to it. Microsoft's attitude of "you'll take what we give you and like it" isn't going to do anything to slow that down for sure.
 
I'd like to see the evidence for this huge, ready market for linux

these companies that haven't done anything for linux have more information on your and my spending habits than we know about ourselves. it's simply not true that they don't consider long-term investments or that they simply don't know just how many people would up and sudden "convert"

all of that kind of belief is pie in the sky and the corporations have the numbers to back up why they don't do much about it. don't even try and use Valve as a poster-child for linux' viability. Valve is a private, independent company with little to no internal structure and it'd be surprising if this kind of pet project happened within the next decade. Maybe Gabe's doing it himself or there's a cluster of linux heads in there but it's not the kind of place where someone assigns a lead and a team and places a deadline over their work
 
mope54 said:
I'd like to see the evidence for this huge, ready market for linux

these companies that haven't done anything for linux have more information on your and my spending habits than we know about ourselves. it's simply not true that they don't consider long-term investments or that they simply don't know just how many people would up and sudden "convert"

all of that kind of belief is pie in the sky and the corporations have the numbers to back up why they don't do much about it. don't even try and use Valve as a poster-child for linux' viability. Valve is a private, independent company with little to no internal structure and it'd be surprising if this kind of pet project happened within the next decade. Maybe Gabe's doing it himself or there's a cluster of linux heads in there but it's not the kind of place where someone assigns a lead and a team and places a deadline over their work
Click to expand...

Read this. Now imagine what would happen if Microsoft wasn't extorting US/UK based OEM vendors.
 
I read that article.

Do you find it strange that the quoted adoption rate is 160% of... ?
Well they don't say and that's a problem. The article even goes to great lengths to explain where the data is derived from (OEM sales, security updates, and downloads) but even then doesn't provide any actual numbers.

In statistical analysis we call that garbage in, garbage out.
 
Disposed said:
Not to mention where are all of these devs with experience making games for ppc? Nothing in that big ass wall off text makes any sense. Ppc is a dead platform wtf is he going on about.
Click to expand...

They are probably referring to the fact that the Big 3 consoles (XBox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii) use PPC processors. The fact, however, that they use similar processors, does not make porting between them or learning to program one when you know another any easier as they are otherwise very disparate architectures with completely different APIs and hardware capabilities.
 
As much as I want to love Linux, I just can't. There are too many damn variations and annoying quirks. I don't blame game developers for staying away from it. If Valve actually releases something of consequence, and keeps the games flowing (the key) then gaming on Linux may get somewhere.

Disclaimer: I work on Red Hat boxes all day long. I code in KSH and Perl throughout my work day all on Linux boxes. For business I love the OS, for personal use, I wouldn't touch it.
 
Here is the main thing I see wrong with Linux: You can do anything and no one ever tells anyone no.

Can you put Linux/Android on a HP Touchpad? Sure.

Does everything work? No.

Will everything work at some point down the road? Maybe, I think jim or sally were working on that driver for such and such.

Will I know when everything works? Sure install the nightly and test it out.

Ohhh look Jelly bean: Start process over from scratch.
 
gunbust3r said:
Here is the main thing I see wrong with Linux: You can do anything and no one ever tells anyone no.

Can you put Linux/Android on a HP Touchpad? Sure.

Does everything work? No.

Will everything work at some point down the road? Maybe, I think jim or sally were working on that driver for such and such.

Will I know when everything works? Sure install the nightly and test it out.

Ohhh look Jelly bean: Start process over from scratch.
Click to expand...

Funny you say that, I ran into that issue last night with my TouchPad. Seriously.

I've been off the radar with that device for a few months 9just running CM7). I come back to install CM9 and it's utterly a shot in the dark. No install instructions or anything else. Just a crap shoot. The community kills it for me as they are all elitest jerks that can't answer questions without degrading the individual asking the question. All of Linux seems to be this way, even the Admins where I work.
 
Disposed said:
Not to mention where are all of these devs with experience making games for ppc? Nothing in that big ass wall off text makes any sense. Ppc is a dead platform wtf is he going on about.
Click to expand...

I know, right?
The PS3 Cell is PPC-based, as is the XBOX360 Xenon PPC processor and the Wii Broadway PPC.

Bound4Earth apparently doesn't know just how active PowerPC gaming really is.
If he is talking about older PPC processors, then yeah, gaming on them is dead, but from what he said, it sounded like PPC on a whole. :rolleyes:


lol I hate when people think PC means "windows machine". A PC can run more than just Windows.
Click to expand...
This.
 
it looked like he was distinguishing desktops ("PC's") from consoles because in his third paragraph he refers to older Apple PC's (the old PPC's that people thought he was referring to in his first paragraph)

and all of those as distinct from developing software for linux

unless someone puts words in his mouth (thinking his PC only referred to Windows when he didn't write that, for example) it wasn't incorrect the way he segregated the platforms
 
I'll never understand the Linux hate. You really have no grounds as an individual to dislike a free , open source OS.

I get the Windows hate , the fact that MS often ignores the growing problem with its own OS's and continually releases new versions that strip away features that many have come use to. Not to mention the cost ..

The only weak point that I can think of concerning Linux is for gaming purposes and that's not really that fault of the OS but more of industry not wanting to support it. I have a linux box that has been running solid for years and its great as a server and for general OS purposes and usage. Microsoft hates Linux for obvious reasons but that doesn't mean us .. the users .. must as well.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039060691 said:
In fact, if you consider the original definition of PC, even Mac's are PC's. :p
Click to expand...

Really the only definition of "PC" that wouldnt include Macs is the definition Apples marketing team invented.
 
Godmachine said:
I'll never understand the Linux hate. You really have no grounds as an individual to dislike a free , open source OS.
Click to expand...

It's extremely easy to hate the elitist douche Linux community. I remember following a thread of someone wanting to do something in an open source Linux version of a program that they could do in the paid Windows equivalent. It basically went something like this...

dude: "Hey, I read that this program can do X, but I can't figure out how to do it, can someone help?"
community: "You need the new version"
dude: "I downloaded the newest version that I can see"
community: "That's the newest version with an installer, you need the one without the installer"
dude: "Ok, how do I get that version and install it?"
community: "If you don't know how to do that you don't have enough experience to use the program"
dude: "I'm here to try and learn"
community: *silence*

:p

That wasn't it word for word, but that was the basic gist of it and I was reading this a few months after the thread was made because I needed to do the same thing and was reading this thread just thinking "wtf". I never got the new version compiled properly myself (got it installed but couldn't get it to link to packages I needed) and ended up having to reboot into Windows to do it, lol.

I personally like Linux, but occasionally I hate it when I want it to do something and can't figure it out and the best online tutorial is at best a rough pointer in the direction you need to go rather than anything that could be described as a guide. I'd also like to see it as a real competitor to Windows in the desktop market so I could realistically recommend it to people as a Windows alternatively.
 
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