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He doesn't have to. Why doesn't he stay on message and showcase the strategic benefits to running Linux rather than making his case against Windows in every article. What Mr. Jobs does well (outside of outright lack of truth) is that he presents the Mac platform in the best possible light. It is simply, "Ok, you've used Windows, not lets us show you what our operating system and hardware combination can do.

If you want a lot of specifics of what crap he stirred up of the past, may I remind you he criticized Vista was inferior to Linux because it required a dedicated GPU for Aero as opposed to plain vanilla integrated chips? Or this one time he dramatized a "showdown" between the then-new SLED 10 and Vista?

That being said, I didn't need to read any of his brainwashing crap to decide that, for instance, I sort of like using the latest release of Ubuntu. (like as in enjoy using Ubuntu on my weaker two systems that Ubuntu does not freeze on)

Last edited by rm20010 on 23 Dec 2007 - 00:35

I suppose that's what they were doing with the "Redmond, start your photocopiers." advert?

Sure. Do you see Steve Jobs in any of them? Sure. Do you see Steve Jobs in any of them? Some of his less successful expo appearances were when he focused on the Windows and the x86 chip.

Last edited by bluarash on 22 Dec 2007 - 23:40

When was that? Did you say, "Less successful..."?

I hope so. I don't doubt it'll be a good year for Linux and I do think Windows' days are numbered, especially as people come to see how good Linux is, how important being able to trust your software is (security through open source), and how much of the money they spend on their Windows' computers actually goes into Microsoft's pockets.

It's going to be more like 2010. If something miraculous happens, and I doubt that it will, then maybe 2009 at the earliest.

Agreed, it is way too far behind right now.

Nope. It was 2003 for me.

TBH, I've never understood this statement. Linux is already on many desktops, and has been for years. For the Linux community in general, it's not a competition to "own" the desktop market - leave that to Apple and Microsoft. Linux will just continue to do what it does.

Linux became my desktop of choice in 2005 (I think) with RedHat7. Since then, it has been nothing but fun for me. And it has lead to great projects -Shift Linux.... and experimenting with great distros. Yup.... 2005 was the Year of the Linux Desktop for me!

Last edited by Barney on 23 Dec 2007 - 13:50

For me it was about 6 months ago, with Ubuntu, and now it is a joy to use my system again. No more dreading turning my system on each day....

It's just a meme...

I'm not.

I don't remember when was the year of Linux for me, only that it was 7+ years ago.

Right you are. And the all-powerful IBM will remain so forever.

To say something like that really shows how little you know about the operating system. It already has succeeded as a server OS, general purpose electronics OS (for TVs, routers, etc), and is making a debut as a mobile phone OS. And now, the desktop OS is drawing on the optimizations necessary to run on the aforementioned platforms and applying them to the desktop market. Following the progress of the Linux development team is absolutely phenomenal. It follows an exponential growth model because it is open source. The more popular it becomes, the more developers adopt it. The more developers that adopt it, the more popular it becomes. Linux is here, and it is here to stay.

Xilo is just participating in the "moving goalposts" game.

First, Linux wasn't anything serious, just a hobby OS. Then it started being used as servers.
Next, there is no money in Linux. Then companies like Red Hat formed around Open Source, and acutally make money.
Well, Linux is not usable as a desktop OS. There aren't many of us, percentage-wise, but many people use Linux as their daily OS.

Now the goalpost is at some unknown further number in order to "succeed" as a desktop OS.

Whatever. Linux is here for the long haul. The GPL ensures code will be shared back, so no one can make it proprietary. And, as long as it suits the needs of people or businesses, it will be used.

has in this house 4 out of 6 comps are running fedora 8 if it wasnt for work both the laptops would run fedora 8 too

Last edited by Fubar on 23 Dec 2007 - 13:52

To me and many others it already has succeeded. Our whole house is 100% Linux and it's spreading to relatives and friends and neighbours. It's the best desktop operating system I have ever used. It's remarkable, smart looking, easy to use, fast, very customisable, secure and free. Gotta love it!

LOL! I see you hurt a few feelings here. The truth always hurts. Linux servers are great but not the desktop, that's Mac territory.

You sir are a fine fellow that has seen the truth. /clap

Obviously you have missed his history of trolling Windows threads with "Get a Mac" advertisements. Seriously. Just posting links to the adverts on the Apple site. Seems he is an equal opportunity troll and will troll Apple just about anywhere.

Shows some lack of objectivity when you praise a posting history like that.

I agree. I'd add the fact that there arn't enough ports of Windows apps like Adobe's but that's not anybody's fault except the market's.

File permissions drive me crazy in Windows too, with non-administrator accounts being common in Vista its something they all have to consider.

I agree about number 3, and I don't see a great way around it, unless we could sue Microsoft for anticompetative practices for DirectX?

Number 4 I absolutly agree wtih. Most people I know hate having to buy a new computer with a new OS and learning it all every few years -getting them to upgrade OS every 6 minths?!

Here's another one: too many programs are avaialble only as source (for a given distro), this should be easy to fix with a simple compilation wizard GUI.

I can understand wanting a GUI for fstab, but this is being looked into. PySDM already exists and will be rolled out with future ubuntu versions. As for samba, smb4k and Ubuntu-Config-Samba are both doing well. However, just because you learned to do things the Windows way and can't apply that knowledge to Linux isn't a fault of Linux. Linux isn't as old as Windows and hasn't been focused on the desktop until recently. You have to admit that Linux is making great strides in short amounts of time. This problem isn't really a problem except for advanced users, and even then, advanced users have these GUI tools.



But file sharing front-ends in Gnome and KDE are able to handle these. Permissions don't even really matter as long as all users are part of the group 'users' and the files are allowed to be accessed by the group 'users', which happens by default!



More and more users are turning to consoles for their gaming fix because they don't even want to bother with buggy PC games, update patches, games that have draconian copy protection where the cracked version runs even better than the legit version, games that have updates that break your OS install, or games that require driver updates that cause problems with other applications on your system. It's a pain in the ass to game on a PC in general. Then again, cedega and wine are making gaming easier and faster on Linux. OSX has the same deal, not so many games, but users really don't seem to mind. I agree native gaming would be nice to have on Linux, but it's not a deal breaker except for hardcore gamers. You can't expect Linux to have everything right all at once, but the fact that you want to see this on Linux at least shows where peoples' interests are going. People really do want to see games on Linux, and some developers are already doing so. More will jump on as popularity increases.



Haven't really seen this happen... maybe you're talking about when distros introduce new themes? Anyway, Gnome and KDE have pretty much stayed the same with incremental updates... it's certainly not as confusing as Win9x > WinXP > Vista.

Linux has a ways to go, but it's already made great strides

Agreed!

It's worth it to point out that there are a lot of problems Windows has that Linux doesn't, and I didn't see this brought up in the article or in this thread, so I'll mention it here: When you set up Windows, you have to hunt down a lot of drivers, and not all of your hardware may be supported by the latest version of Windows. The reason so many people are having trouble moving to 64-bit Windows is the lack of drivers. When I setup Linux, I don't have to do any of that. I can even take my hard drive out of my PC and put it in someone else's with totally different hardware, and everything will boot up fine and work fine. For example I did this with an Athlon X2 w/via chipset w/nvidia graphics, and put the hard drive in an intel core2duo w/intel graphics & intel chipset. Everything worked fine when I boot up. Put that same hard drive in an Athlon XP w/ATI graphics & w/via chipset. Everything worked fine without a single config change.

Also in Windows, you have to add-in a lot of simple applications to make the system usable, and you have to change a lot of settings and uncheck a lot of nag screens, go through all of the "welcome" crap, and change a lot of defaults. In Linux, whatever applications, protocols, and codecs I install seem to be detected fine and integrate well with other applications (like cd burning apps, video watching apps, web browsers, email clients, whatever). In Windows, you have to get applications that like to work well together, because it was up to the third party to support the applications you wanted, and if they don't then you're out of luck.

In Windows, you have to hunt down codec packs to get the multimedia functionality you want. In Linux, there's just one big pack with everything that's the same for every distribution, and they work fine with all media players. You can also convert any format to any other format with tools like mencoder.



I understand not wanting to use the command line, but it's not invisible on Windows or OSX either. On both of these OSes, some fixes (caused by broken patches, or bugs in the OS) have required users to drop to the command line to enter cryptic commands. To be fair, the same thing has happened on Linux. However for daily use, neither Windows nor Linux nor OSX require you to touch the command line. I never have to touch the command line and don't see why anyone would have to. I didn't even have to do so while setting up my system.

The nice option though is that you can if you want. On Windows, I would have loved a way to boot into command line mode, or to be able to access the command line simply over a terminal and do what I need to do. Slowly this is being implemented but it's really painful when it's not available... for example when the registry got corrupted and I couldn't boot Windows anymore, I was just greeted by a blue screen saying so. Booting into the install CD and going into the command line didn't help, since even logged in as administrator you don't seem to have elevated enough permissions to replace the registry with a backup copy. When bartPE and other such discs started coming out it was great because users could finally manipulate files on an NTFS drive without booting off of that drive, and so fixes like these could be done. In Linux, such a thing would never have happened, you could just boot off a LiveCD or into the command line and done whatever you wanted on your own system.

Also, if you are logged in to a client via terminal in Windows, you pretty much have to have the GUI to do what you need. A lot of GUIs don't have command line equivilants, so you can't make some changes unless you log in via graphical terminal or are locally fixing the computer. It's really a hassle when things go wrong. A lot of registry functions, and things that require the administrative tools utility and various snap-ins. For example, you can't do the fstab stuff in Windows via the command line, but on Linux you have both GUI and command line. It's just best to have both, just so depending on the situation, you have access to the tools you need.

In the past a lot of functionality in Windows like that had to be supported by Sysinternals freeware apps (MS made a smart move by buying them) and other shareware/freeware applications. Windows still doesn't have the same functionality in the terminal as it does in the GUI, and vice versa.

Another serious problem that Windows has, and Linux doesn't, is that if you change out too much of your hardware, or even just update the drivers it'll deactivate itself and force you to call India to get permission to continue using your system. In fact you'll have to do this from now on afterwards since it makes your key invalidate. Linux is FREE and thus doesn't have this major problem that only really affects legal owners of Windows...... This is the final nail that drove me from Windows in the end.

Last edited by Foub on 23 Dec 2007 - 21:59

Which is something I've never had to do in the years since since XP and Vista have come out. I have experienced Xorg becoming a garbled mess in Ubuntu awhile back, when I was an early adopter of the nvidia 8800, which you said down below that you've never personally seen happen.

Everything is relative.

Well, I'm one among many, many, many with that problem. In fact Microsoft admitted to it not to long ago. It was easy when it happened in XP to bypass WPA. It was just one little sys file that loaded beforehand. I liked to try out many different programs and this would trigger WPA to believe that I had changed hardware, when I didn't, and thus use up my activations.



Maybe because I don't use a nVidia card. I have an ATI Sapphire x1650 Pro.... Anyways it is just an apples and oranges comparison in that yours was a specific cause related to your video card while mine was, more or less, generic (ANY piece of hardware, or even software, could cause it.)..... You didn't have to call Canonical to continue using it either.

I don't know what happy world you live in, but hardware on Linux has worse support than on Windows. I've tried installing several distros with all sorts of different kernels and gone through hoops and bounds to get a suitable version of Linux installed on my desktop. The reason? Most distros didn't include the module I needed for my RAID controller. Thus, it made it impossible to install.


And Linux doesn't either? Almost every single application, interface, etc. could need configuring just to get it to work right, and sometimes is a much bigger headache to do so. And hmm, you must have a different definition of "usable". The only small programs to make the system "usable" I install in windows are the CCCP for video, iTunes for audio, and antivirus.


The CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) is all you need for Windows. Hey, one big pack... Next!


Windows is an operating system designed and targeted towards the end user. You know, the common folk. If you're to the point that you need access to terminal, your system is hosed...

I was hoping when I first installed SUSE that I'd be able to avoid using the commandline.

I've spent weeks in it.

I had to compile drivers for my sound card, at least config files can be edited through the texteditor GUI. I'm contasntly compiling software that doesn't have a package for my distro. I wish the package management stuff could get sorted out -have one generic version of apt-get and one of RPM

There's apt for rpm, and you can convert packages from rpm to deb.
I guess you're doing far more work than needed.

I really never had this problem. However in Windows I have encountered the problem where it didn't have support for RAID controllers, but required a floppy disk for the driver. On a machine that didn't have a floppy drive! Still others that came with drivers, and had the floppy drive, but the driver didn't support that version of Windows. Oh well, guess both have that problem, but before your post I wouldn't have heard of it happening on Linux. Usually it's got great support for server hardware, funny that a RAID controller wouldn't be supported. Perhaps the manufacturer didn't release specifications or documentation. One of the many pitfalls of going with proprietary vendors.



Yeah, antivirus, good firewall, oh and a real CD ripping/burning program, better movie player application with more support for varied formats, something for scanning perhaps, also a DVD player... an IM application that supports all my accounts, a DVD ripping application, gee, the list seems to go on pretty far for Windows.

Also, what kind of applications / interfaces, etc do you need to configure just to get it to work right? Almost every Linux distro has a LiveCD which shows that there is no configuration required at all.



Which doesn't ship with Windows, and there is no default way to install it on the system without hunting it down :/ It's just not as multimedia ready.



Too bad it happens so often on Windows. I guess that's why people are so willing to try alternatives now? These stories didn't used to be that common, but with Linux's stronger focus on the desktop, and Windows' flaws continuing to show, people are now becoming more aware.

Unless X can't configure itself correctly at install time.

In that case you can forget about graphical anything. Better get out that Linux book and start learning CLI commands and how to edit conf files!

Last edited by raskren on 23 Dec 2007 - 15:36

I never said that it was perfect, but it is better than many are willing to admit to. Ubuntu is the most ready for "primetime" distro of Linux that I have come across. BTW, I've yet to come across that problem in the many distros that I've tested so far.

I could never get X to work correctly on my system... Scoured forums, asked several people in IRC, and nothing...

Bummer. Must be because Linux is inferior, obviously.

Of course.

Certainly not a problem with inexperience or errors between keyboard and chair.