Support AMD/ATi hardware betterer.
Now that is an AMD/ATI issue entirely.
Speculation thread: What must linux do to become more competitive in the home desktop
- Thread starter mjdted
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Now that is an AMD/ATI issue entirely.
I have been on Linux (Ubuntu) for my desktop for two years. I do basic CAD (my engineers use Inventor on XPP but I use QCAD), web sites, all office apps, media players, etc. with far fewer hiccups than I ever had under xpp. With no DLLs and no registry I haven't had to reinstall in those two years (though I have updated) because linux doesn't get slower every week with more dlls and registry entries and doesn't suffer registry corruption. On my two laptops I use external monitors and projectors for presentations with no issues.
What linux lacks, IMHO, is D3D for games. There are quite a few good OpenGL games of course, but if wine could handle D3D there would be much faster adoption.
I actually think casual, non-gamer, home users would be far better off with Linux. The cost is zero, stability excellent and it's far harder to hose it if you stay away from "sudo"
In fact, I just cobbled together a laptop for my nephew - 600 MHz celeron with 512mb of ram - and it runs nice with wifi, etc. and he can do all his homework, sync his ipod, etc. all for next to nothing.
What linux lacks, IMHO, is D3D for games. There are quite a few good OpenGL games of course, but if wine could handle D3D there would be much faster adoption.
I actually think casual, non-gamer, home users would be far better off with Linux. The cost is zero, stability excellent and it's far harder to hose it if you stay away from "sudo"
In fact, I just cobbled together a laptop for my nephew - 600 MHz celeron with 512mb of ram - and it runs nice with wifi, etc. and he can do all his homework, sync his ipod, etc. all for next to nothing.Wow, what a mess. I had so many audio problems the last time I ran Linux, and so many compatability problems when I installed multiple media players. Maybe it was all related to sound.
The fact that you may need to know which sound API you're using is a huge deterrent for any non-savy people to use Linux. This is just one example of many where Linux is crapped up as a desktop OS.
you know ive done that.
After getting totally fed up with some woman and and her kids who had had the wonderfull ability to kill a windows box in seconds, I setup the bios to boot from the cd gave them a livedvd and now they have a pc for browsing the internet that they cant f***-up
ps: at the mo one of my pc's runs solaris - if you want a mooch at it there is a live cd eyecandy whores will love compiz desktop
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=home
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I havent read the whole thread, but this will certainly cause arguments.
Run Office 2007 on the desktop, right off the bat. You see, average users use Windows at the office, when they are home, they will most certainly run Windows again.
However, start putting in Linux Desktops at work, which run Windows applications just as well. You'll see more and more people putting Linux in the home.
Oh and please, dont start talking about open office. No one wants to hear noises from 1% or less of the market. Thanks
Run Office 2007 on the desktop, right off the bat. You see, average users use Windows at the office, when they are home, they will most certainly run Windows again.
However, start putting in Linux Desktops at work, which run Windows applications just as well. You'll see more and more people putting Linux in the home.
Oh and please, dont start talking about open office. No one wants to hear noises from 1% or less of the market. Thanks
Oh and please, dont start talking about open office. No one wants to hear noises from 1% or less of the market. Thanks
Yeah, and everyone knows Outlook is the best PIM/email/proprietary attachments program out there! Let's not forget it's insanely bad database and sorting. Find on Outlook used to take minutes with its amazingly crappy database...same email (about 9 years worth) takes fractions of a second with Evolution and the open mbox standard.
Gotta love the new proprietary xml formats too - now you have to use a translator or upgrade when people with 2007 send you a file because they're too stupid to know about compatibility mode.
However dominant, MS-Office (specifically Word, Outlook, Access and PowerPoint) is crap IMHO. Excel rocks.
Agreed. I got really pissed off at work when everything went exchange so I had to use outlook for the calendaring etc. I REALLY wish I could use another mail client.
mjdted said:
Break with the geeks and embrace the average joes.
"Otherness" is generally a problem, but I don't think it matters that much if average users can use it. Focus on real problems and forgot about all the academic issues that part of the Linux community tend to get stuck in. Firefox is a good example that an alternative can be successful and grab serious market share, despite being "other" than the default alternative, and despite the default alternative generally working quite well. MacOS is a great example of where Linux should aim. It's UNIX at the core with all the benefits of that, yet simple to use for average joes. I don't doubt that MacOS could compete very well with Windows if it could be installed on a regular PC (ignoring hacks). Linux could too if they picked up on the MacOS mentality, but I doubt the community is prepared to go that way.
Well, I think MacOS does benefit from the fact that Apple is a tightly structured organization. There is leadership and organization. The open source world is too fractured and unguided, I think, to put together a really clean and cohesive solution to the problems they need to address. People say the open source world is like democracy, but it's democracy without any formal way of making good decisions and without any real leadership. Too many cooks in the kitchen, I guess is the problem.
I wonder if there would be any legal issues with that. In any case, bringing DirectX to Linux would certainly be a good thing.
I think this would be something that would come automatically after becoming more popular. As long as it's a niche OS few hardware vendors will spend any significant resources on supporting Linux.
Works well on Linux.
Definitely true. I even have trouble with my little demos. Just because my app compiles on my Gentoo doesn't mean it'll compile on someone else's Ubuntu. And you just can't rely on much being installed. One Linux machine can look arbitrarily different from another.
No .dll, but they have the equivalent in .so files and they come with the exact same set of problems (and benefits of course).
Linux may not have a registry that can get corrupted, but instead you have hundreds of config files that can each be corrupted in various ways. The registry is generally a good idea and Linux should implement something similar. A centralized database with application settings is a good thing IMHO. Applications writing to random undocumented key in various locations can of course ruin it, but that's an application issue rather than an OS issue, and given the equivalent privileges a poorly written Linux application can screw up equally much in random config files (who btw have nothing resembling a common consistent syntax). I haven't had a registry problem since XP arrived.
I was thinking of back when I tried one of the 64bit Ubuntu distros and there wasn't a flashplayer for firefox. I think I had to install the 32bit firefox and then it worked or something. That was quite a while ago.
Well, I have to disagree, especially on the registry. IMHO it's the single biggest problem with windows.
Now the NeXTStep/Mac .app folder is, IMHO, a great way to go - all the app's resources in one directory wrapped up as an application and independent of the OS configuration.
Unix/Linux OS configs are, again IMHO, infinitely easier to manage than a binary database. You have small, easily editable in a terminal, text files. I've added printers and users to my servers from a dial-up connection in the Czech Republic on an ascii terminal before. No dice with win2k3. Likewise if all hell breaks loose on a Un*x box you can boot to the command prompt and fix it in seconds.
And theres one of the problems people shouldnt have to compile apps
I so agree with this i loved the way with dos to delete an app you deleted its folder and it was gone completely, programs hook in everywhere (as anyone who's tried to uninstall norton and the installer has broke will testify)
I first realised this when i got infected by malware i could not remove it manually i could not find how it loaded it wasnt in any ini file (win.in system.ini ect) not in the run section of the registry, not in services.msc not in autoexec couldnt find it anywhere this shouldnt be allowed to happen, programs should not be able to hide from the user. I wish programs stayed self contained as much as possible having their own ini files in their own folder and maybe a master ini in c:\windows that just points to the other ini files
And, largely speaking, you don't.
I think the only compiled app I'm running right now is Handbrake.
The concept of a registry is fine. The windows registry is just overly convoluted and poorly implemented.
The Mac apps folder is really great though.
Although, IMHO, Nextstep was the first OS to use it. Damn good OS too - much more to my liking that OS X.
On another note Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is out today
Applications - with all their resources, icon, libraries, etc. are in a single directory with sub directories. The topmost directory is given a .app extension. In the GUI this directory no longer appears as a directory but as an application and the .app extension disappears (though ls -l in a terminal will still show it is a directory). No resource are located elsewhere.
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