Posted on 05/08/2012 8:54:21 AM PDT by ShadowAce
I’ll have to disagree with you. Open Office / Libre does at least as good of a job as MS Office and on a number of tasks, better. GIMP is able to handle 90% of Photoshop tasks. The only two applications that I have seen in Windows that I simply cant replicate in Linux is Project and Visio. Both have alternatives but they are not as good.
Computing for Dummies?
Well then, perhaps Microsoft if doing it right, where people don’t really have to think about how to do things, and the tiles interface is intuitive enough that, even a dummy can use it.
Why make things difficult when they don’t need to be?
If any gurus on this list use their PCs for extensive audio reproduction I have a couple of questions.
I have a need for 16 Gig minimum to possibly 32 Gig of RAM which means I need to leave the WinXP Pro 32 bit world. The huge RAM requirement is for audio samples in a Virtual Pipe Organ application and every sample (can be thousands of individual Pipe samples) must reside in RAM for performance issues. When playing there is no time to access these samples from any other storage media other than RAM.
I also must have the ability to run a medium size VB6.0 program linked to an MS Access DB file (no Access actually needed VB does it all) and I had heard Win8 will not support VB6 (.NET sucks for this application by the way). Is that the case or will Win8 run VB6? I know VB6 is old but damn it sure worked well for a bunch of applications and it lost many followers in the transition to .NET (you certainly could not call that an upgrade).
I am using a 10 channel Audio card from M-Audio and I doubt they have a driver available as they were barely able to make one work for XP. I would need a minimum of 10 audio out channels. Does/would Win8 support this?
It seems high end Audio is not on the priority list from Microsoft and that may make all the sense in the world for them as long as the tools are available for 3rd parties to jump in.
The video requirements are minimal for this application so outside of the audio issues a Win3.1 OS could handle it.
Vista is a dog on this 5 year old laptop, too slow to really do anything, straight out of the box.
Unity is pretty slow, too, but at least it is pretty, and in 12.04 the dash is much faster to open, altho I would not call it snappy by any means.
Gnome 2 running compiz was not so bad, def much faster than Vista, and I loved being able to switch desktops or see all my open windows by dragging the mouse to the corner and clicking the mouse button.
But I have finally settled on Xubuntu, untweaked, no compiz. I mostly only use the browser, the terminal, and Gnucash anyways.
Metro just looks confusing to me, but I haven’t tried it. Probably won’t. I assume I will get a Macbook soon, like Linus, and dual boot MacOS and Ubuntu.
I have OpenOffice installed alongside the MS Office on this very computer. However I rarely use OpenOffice (MS Office is faster, among other things.) I need MS Office because of business documentation that I generate and edit. The last thing in the world that I need is the complaint from several people that they can't open my documents, or that something is askew in them. I don't want to take that risk. MS Office 2010 Home & Business costs $199 online, and for a business this is not a concern at all. It's just one of costs of doing business. Saving on that would cost you more.
I used GIMP before, but today Paint.Net is sufficient for most of what I need. I am not a photographer.
I looked into Linux clones of Project some years ago, but they were totally inadequate, more like weekend hacks. Project is a complex beast, and it is probably worth its high price to people that need it. I don't do Project.
Visio could be replaced with Dia on Linux. I tried that, and it kind of worked. But Dia was crude. In the end it became another example of being penny wise and pound foolish.
The problem is that all good software, regardless of the OS, is very complex. This means that a large team of coders has to toil on it for months, if not years. This includes support and new versions. Very few F/OSS people are willing to do that. That's the reason why you can't have an equivalent of Quicken (or QuickBooks) on Linux - the effort to make one, even just the GUI, would be monumental; but then you also need Internet connections to thousands of banks... forget it. The F/OSS mantra is "scratching an itch" - which means that each developer does what he wants because he needs it. If his need is common enough the world gains another useful application. If the need is unique the world ignores it. F/OSS does not develop for an imaginary, synthetic audience (like all ISVs do.) Each F/OSS program has a well defined audience. This means that the application will be developed to fit the needs of only that audience, without much thinking about needs of other people who are not present. Design from requirements is unheard of; as result GIMP was hobbled by its strange interface for years - simply because the developers said "works for me, WONTFIX." If you look into Firefox's Bugzilla you will see many examples of developers sticking to their opinions even when hundreds of users tell them that they are wrong. Ubuntu/Unity is not far from that example either. MS/Metro is also falling into that category, for the same reasons. A big software house often thinks that users will take whatever is given to them.
Commercial developers (for any OS) usually have to actually listen to their customers, and the result is often better. I used some commercial software for Linux (Eagle CAD) and it was just fine. But few companies develop for Linux because the sales are tiny (about 1% of the volume) - so why to invest into the R&D? There are other reasons too; you need to use special libraries like Qt to write code that is portable. But that is a major decision that you have to make before you write the first line of code. And once that decision is made you are locked in. Even if tomorrow the Windows-only .NET 5.0 gives you direct interface to Kinect or brainwaves you can't do anything about it; you bet on a specific horse and you stay with that horse to the end. That's why it's so important to pick a winner early in the game.
but thats a lot of work to make an interface thats already ugly prettier and, when youre done, youre still left with an interface that doesnt look or work the way youve been using Windows for years.
Which was pretty much my response to the change from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3.
Unity, I'm working with.
Not saying I want it to be harder, or even hard. The current way is already easy. I don’t, however, like being patronized, like when they named the local computer icon on the desktop “My Computer”. How precious!
Have to disagree. There are a couple features in MS Office that I use on such a regular basis, I'd consider them indispensable (and I'm running on Office 97 and 2K!), and OO doesn't have an equivalent. Also, what the hell is with unifying the recent files list for all the OO apps?? If you're in Calc, the list shows all the recent files for all the OO apps. Shoot, I'm pissed because I can't turn the list length up past 10 in MS Office, so I sure don't want to waste 70% of the [limited] entries on docs created by other programs.
Whatever the old label was, denoted that clearly without being pedantic. Now I just rename the damn thing “Local Machine” and I’m happy.
Been thinking about looking at Mint though, with all the buzz from the Unity Hate Club being focused there. I'll drop it in a VM box, (hoping that it works better than trying to drop XP into same box expecting to be able to use USB, so sad).
I, for one, welcome our new FondleSlab Overlords /.
Good idea, please ignore it. Bye! :)
So far, I have found one thing I like about Win8. The default dark-blue-green background color (as shown in the posted screenshots here) is more or less identical to the color I've used for many years as my Windows desktop -- plain background color. I find it very relaxing and easy on the eyes compared to the lurid blues of XP or the swoopy-loopy Vista/7 Aero stuff.
Good on them for picking a nice color.
Other than that, my only concern is whether I can force Win8 to present a simple Win2K-like desktop with small meaningful icons of consistent size. If so, fine. If not, I have no use for it and will stick with Win7 until Win9 comes out to correct this apparent mistake.
Depressing. So many pixels, so little information. May as well use ASCII text for how meaning-free the icons are. And that goes for BOTH Win8 and Ubuntu!
What do we see on that Metro screen?
Store, with an "8". 8 what? there's enough room there to express the nature of each of those 8 things.
Xbox LIVE Games. What games? completion status of each perhaps?
Photos. Plenty of room there to run multiple slideshows of recent pics.
Calendar. So tell me already what's coming up next and what's important to plan for!
Maps. Surely it knows where I am, so show me at least a stylized version of that, not some meaningless stylized version of nowhere in particular.
Internet Explorer. Cue the trumpets, we've got the circle-e icon! bah. Show minimized versions of my favorite few, so clicking in that box brings up one.
Messaging. Oh that looks happy. Not. Surely something meaningful can be displayed in that space.
People. Uh, OK. People. Who?
Video. Like Photos, show clips of popular/likely stuff. Give me CONTENT!
Mail. How many unread? total inbox size? Which inboxes are there?
Pinball FX2. Wait...11 icons in, we find something that's not minimalist-white-on-garish-color? Jarring. And meaningless too, showing nothing useful about the game.
Solitaire. Could ya hint at which "solitaire" it is?
Desktop. Wait, what? isn't that what I'm looking at? And what's up with the fish? (does it at least swim for my amusement?)
Weather. You mean I have to tap/click on that just to get what should already be showing there? Temp, forecast, warnings, etc. should just be there.
Camera. Maybe that icon is enough. Aw 'cmon, can't you show me something useful there?
Xbox Companion. 4 diagonal icons away from a related icon?
And you, Ubuntu, are showing just as much nothing.
I'm not calling for cluttering the screen with irrelevancies, but there are ways of slick expressions of meaningful information with a resulting display that feels just as clean and simple as these information-devoid displays.
Millions of pixels, and nothing more to show than Deskmate on a TRS-xyz.
but WHEN do the windows 8 phones come out? I understand a cell phone providers are taking a wait and see on the win 8 phones. It just seems to feed the wait for the next phone loop.
How popular can GNOME 2.x have been if the total user base for the whole Linux family is around 1%? So, a fraction of 1% would make it popular? How about providing context/perspective for what is being talked about?
This is a strange criticism. I hear all the time about popular music, and yet how many people actually listen to that music regularly? How often? What size is their collection, and how eclectic? On a planet of 7 billion we are expected to believe that selling a few hundred thousand copies of a song, or a book, or whatever else is reasonably popular. A few million and it is very popular. And yet we are talking about tiny percentages. Do you protest these assertions of popularity on such grounds?
Sorry, Charlie, most people on the planet will be sticking with Windows 7 or Windows 8 when it comes out.
Likely true, and after they surf the internet many of them will also go out and eat a McDonald's hamburger. What of it? McDonald's is undeniably popular, on a mass scale such as you seem to insist on, and yet it hardly denotes quality. And the preference of the general population doesn't diminish that other sort of popularity which exists among a smaller more select population which takes more interest in the real quality of what they consume or use. The constant and unassailable popularity of McDonald's convinces me of nothing. I am much more interested in the opinions of people who care about how their food tastes.
ATT is all about Windows Phone 7. I believe Windows Phone 8 comes out this fall/winter and Verizon is saying they will jump onboard at that time.
Verizon loses money on iPhone and ATT takes 23 months to make up what it costs them to sell an iPhone. Carriers hate the iPhone, but they have to carry it because consumers want it. Verizon dumped a ton of money in android, but they are spooked now that google is buying motorola, so they now want Microsoft to be a viable alternative.
Once Verizon gets onboard with a real windows phone you’ll see the numbers take off.
Talk about strange criticism!
Your defense and analogies of Linux doesn’t change the fact that, Linux is still a very tiny percentage of usage for computer OSes. You also can’t change the fact that, a fraction of a tiny percentage is even more tiny. Tiny does not equal popularity in the bigger picture of OS usage, and even a tinier percentage of the tiny OS, does not equal “popular”. Like I said, things need to be put into proper perspective. No matter how one wants to look at it, Linux is quite irrelevant in the PC marketplace, and a tiny percentage that a distro occupies in that Linux ecosystem, is even more irrelevant.
Sorry, Charlie, facts are still facts, no matter what spin anyone wants to put on them.
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