Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GUI

Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GUI

 

The users how are preferring Windows and don't want to fiddle with the system when something isn't working, can stay with what they are currently using. But as far as I am concerned, there is no better system than Linux speaking from a developer-view. Linux was made by programmers for programmers. The "complexity" newcomers observe is just a matter of how much time you invest. I felt the same when I was first using Linux but then I started to play with the command line and discovered a whole new world and began to see things differently. Not only fundamental questions like: "What's the genuine value of a program?" Previously, I didn't think of programs as a "creation". I had the common mentality, to think of it as a "good" and "material" but in fact code belongs to our culture and is art. I also wondered about licensing. When using Windows, I didn't care about using a software that's freeware which I didn't had the source of. It's like you're getting used to the fact that you can simply browse the code, fix bugs, add features and it's a feeling like the application "belongs" to you. Of course, you're not the legal owner but compiling the source and applying optimizations just feels great. :)

To sum up, nobody should be forced to use Linux. I did this with some friends and it failed miserably. They don't have the same view on computers as we have. They want it just to work, we want to understand things how they work and possibly make it better or make things easy (writing shell scripts etc.). There's no point in discussing Linux with them. They simply don't care on how much servers it's being used and how great it is. They even don't care that Microsoft spies them and that their computers are full of viruses. They don't care until something happens to them, until they get scammed.

Linux is so great because there's the freedom of viewing the source. Generally, developers don't want to make money with it. That's why there are so few GUIs. If we were so desperate in needing a GUI, we'd write it ourselves. That separates us from the "ordinary user". Commercial software does not necessarily mean that the software is bug-free or good but what I've observed so far is that these software are meant to be very easy-to-use having the side effect of losing advanced options. Yes, you're right, there is a customer-client relationship but remember, you bought a software. It's seen as a "good". The users expect to have it. Personally, I've never needed more than a tutorial or man page how to use an application under Linux. That's because the Internet is full of information. Nearly every question I've had so far has already been answered and they are all googlable. Yep, but I am talking again from a developer-perspective.

Linux was never meant to be made money with. Companies like IBM or Novell tried their luck but digging deeper, you'll always notice that it's the passion with code that brings us developers to write applications and put them on the net for free. I've talked to non-geeks about it and they just can't understand it. I tried to explain it to them, but they just see the computer industry as something to make much money with. They are not interested in technical solutions. They have no understanding why we do those things. They give advices to rather sell your code for a lot of money etc. But these are also the people who actually buy the commercial software.

It is but if they're not willing to learn, there's no point in doing all the effort. Remember, you need a license before you're allowed to drive your car. You've got to learn it first, experience some situations before you're ready for the "real world". That's the same with computers.

Yep, like I said, it's just a hackish solution. I don't think it's particularly great or something but it just works and I also didn't want to invest much time into its code because that tool is only meant to serve the purpose of downloading movies, i.e. leisure activities. Like I said, it just works fine for me and that's what's important.

Re: Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GU

 

Linux was made by programmers for programmers, but it is getting popular thanks to distributives like Ubuntu that are user friendly and because many things are similar to Windows.

I personally don't want to browse the code, fix it, add any feature. I just want to have an application that works, stable and easy to use. IMHO most of the rest should be done by feature requests and plug-ins.

Even I'm to code, I would like to earn money from it and spend spare time with with family, travelling, learning,...

I disagree here. I persuaded my sister (and she is not computer savvy) to get a laptop with a trial version of Windows 7. Then I intsalled Ubuntu onto it. I didn't have any questions after that. She can browse the Internet, use Open Office for working with, watch videos, play games without any problem. Other friends and relatives ask me to help with Windows from time to time, because they need an antivirus, caught a virus, have some glitches,....

The problem is that you can write a GUI for a simple program. One can hardly write MS Office, Autocad, Photoshop, Nero and even Total Commander.

• While freeware Open Office is OK, I still think that MS Office is much better.
• Freeware GIMP is OK, but it can't replace Photoshop.
• Freeware k3b is OK, but Nero for Linux still has sales and I do understand why.
• There are several freeware open source CADs, but they are not even close to CADs for Windows.
• There are several freeware open source torrent clients, but they are not as good as uTorrent for Windows.
• I can't replace Total Commander with an open source product either.
• And I haven't found anything that can replace image cropping of Fast Stone Image viewer (I've tried many programs, but all of them don't offer that easy of use).
• I've spent 2 days trying different approaches in syncing my Windows Mobile PDA with Evolution for Linux, although there are several open source programs that are supposed to do it and so many users need this feature. IMHO I didn't learn much while researching.
• ...

I disagree. Companies always want to return their investments. The same thing is with IBM and Novell. They invest into Linux, but then earn money on selling software, hardware and services. Their contribution is great, but it is not just a donation.
I second selling code. The commercial product still can be an open source one.

This is really a good example. You need a license to drive your car, but you don't need to build your car from scratch, not do you have to be a mechanic to use a car. This is for enthusiast and professionals, other just want to get a car and enjoy driving. This is why I want Linux to be more user friendly and to have more commercial applications. I do not mind software to be open source.

Re:Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GUI

 

Yes but not everybody's in favor of this movement. Being a Linux user was meant to be 'alternative' and 'special'. Now it's nothing unusual anymore and professionals see themselves answering the same beginner's questions over and over again. Even though I'm quite new to Linux myself, I think the mass migration to Linux of the technology-uninterested crowd did more harm than good. Why? For various reasons:

1. Developers are less efficient:
   Ever seen a distribution's bug tracker? It's filled with duplicates. Naive people think they might speed up the process of fixing a bug by opening a new bug. Most of them are not even aware of the fact that it's very likely that their bug is already known.
2. Windows-biased demands
   I'd say that most people coming to Linux migrated from Windows. Therefore they are used to certain concepts and circumstances. They expect that Linux handles things the same way. It's obvious that people who've never worked with computers before will prefer Ubuntu over Windows because GNOME is in fact the most simplest desktop environment.

You can earn money from it, sure, but in the Linux community money and capitalism is not the central aspect. People are fascinated by concepts, ideas and by the code. They just want to share ideas and want to develop something great by collaborative work.

Who cares? If you really need those applications, just use Wine. I don't think that MS Office is good. In fact it really sucks. So does Open Office. Both are fundamentally flawed. They are WYSIWYG editors. I only use Open Office to write short texts but when it comes to writing an essay containing only 20 pages but with table of contents, pictures, references, footnotes, it's just too complicated. Open Office and MS Office lack the flexibility. The only application that does this right is LaTeX. I only know the basic commands but it's sufficient to do what I needed so far but with a much fewer time amount than I'd require with Open Office/MS Office.

Please elaborate. Why is it better?

Actually it's Open Source but I don't want to be petty here. :)

Does GIMP say so? It does not aim to replace it but do YOU need the features Photoshop offers?

Why? I'm using cdrecord to burn my disks. I never needed Nero though. Did I miss something?

Is it important? There's still Wine and if that fails, you might be better off using Windows either completely or in a virtual machine.

Where did I mention that Linux has to replace Windows? I said, it's a developer operating system. It has the best tools I could never dream of when using Windows. Valgrind, GCC and lots of others. There are equivalents for Windows but they don't offer the same and don't even implement things the same way as they are meant to be.

Really, I think that torrent clients are something where Open Source really excels in.

By the way, I've even used aria2 for a while and it still downloaded all files at full speed and without file corruption. So they cannot be that bad.

Which features do you miss in other file managers? I'm perfectly fine with Xfe and the shell.

Again, same question. Why is it so great? I can watch my pictures with feh and they get displayed flawlessly without quality losses.

I'm curious, what are your expectations?

No, you're wrong. It really is a donation. If you donated money to the WWF, you'd expect it to lessen the deforestation of rain forests. That's the same Novell does. They contribute code but hope that they can make money with it in return.

But Linux developers belong to a community of like-minded people. Like I said in the other post, developers have the passion for code, of writing stuff on your own, rather than using existing solutions. Most ideas come originally from the UNIX/Linux-department and then were adopted by business men who said a chance of making money easily. But judging from these applications, it does not necessarily mean that they are really superior. Just take Windows as an example. For a long time (and even nowadays), Windows was behind all other BSD's, carrying unfixed bugs from version to version. Protocols were implemented poorly and even their POSIX sockets implementation is very different form the specifications. It's not important to make it right. It's important to advertise it good. Microsoft knows how to make money with crap and people seem to like it because they trust the lies.

I think Linux is very user-friendly. Everything just works great for me. I don't want it to be any different.

Perhaps, you'll be more interested in ReactOS. It's an Open Source Windows but Wine has proven many times how complex and poorly designed Windows' concepts are. There are lots of unnecessary workarounds to restore the functionality of certain applications relying on Windows bugs (!) etc. The whole Windows code is a mess but the UI isn't even better.

If you'd ask me, there's no other operating system than Mac OS X that's easier to use. You don't have to know lots of technical stuff to get things done (tm). That doesn't imply that it's also good for advanced people. In fact, it's horribly inefficient, but as its user base mostly consists of people with lots of money who needs it as a prestige symbol, there's no need for them to do work efficiently.

Re:Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GUI

 

There are so many Linux distributives, that some of them can be targeted to professionals only.

Bug tracking is that bad because of the noobs as well as because of the bug tracking software that is not intelligent enough to offer similar bugs automatically.

The biggest problem is that unless projects are supported by large corporations or have some sort of monetization, they usually just die. Donations from regular users can't support even projects with millions of downloads.

May be in the future Wine will be good enough, but right now I can't use many Windows apps.

I don't really know much about Latex. It might be useful when creating books for printing. It seems that it was easy for me to create a table of contents with it... But it is not difficult for me to do the same with an Office Suite. And I wouldn't create complex spreadsheets with formatting and formulas using Latex.

There are very simple things that annoy me. For example, I can select several cells in the Excel and then just paste them, while in the Calc I need to select the region with as many cells as were in the copied region. Calc doesn't remember the last border I used, so I have to go through dialogs to do a simple task. There are lots and lots of seemingly simple things which allow me to work faster.

Yes, but it is backed by large corporation which sells a "better" variant of it.

I need few things that Photoshop has related to editing photos, but they I prefer them to be implemented at least on the same level :)

I use k3b, but I do understand people using Nero for Linux.

It is important. Why using PCs with Windows in the office, buy antiviruses, firewalls,... and still having lots of problems, when you can install Linux on every computer and forget about the rest?
Using a virtual machine with Windows doesn't really help much, besides you need an admin who knows both Windows and Linux.

Usually you can use old versions of say Autocad with Wine. This is not a good solution. And many CADs just can't be run with Wine.

I don't want Linux to replace anything. I would like to see a healthy competition and more cross-platform applications.

They are not bad. Downloading without file corruption is not a problem at all. It is just that I miss some features and easy of use that I'm used to. They are not critical... I just need to make some more steps.

I miss the same shortcuts the most. Total Commander allows to open archives really fast and I can unpack files with it easily. It allows to see the sizes of the directories, see the contents of the directory with subdirectories, rename files, replace some parts of filenames, open files for editing fast, preview many files including HTML ones without opening any heavy browser, search for files by name or content (showing the list of files which can be opened for viewing and editing really fast), opens disk images.
Some of these features can be done by Krusader, Tux Commander, Gnome Commander or from command line. But Total Commander is the application I miss the most in Linux.

The feature that I need the most is image rotation (without any quality loss) and image cropping (without any quality loss). When cropping I use the rule of thirds, printing size and landscape/portrait switching mode. For me the Crop board of Faststone is the absolutely the best. Correcting white balance, making HDRs and many other things can be done by GIMP, so it is only the fast cropping feature that I really need.
p.s. the developer of Gwenview doesn't think so :)

I just want to connect the phone and sync it without my participation. Nothing else.

I didn't say that they demand something from the developers. But at least IBM expects to return its investments.

Absolutely agree. Giant corporations like M$ and Apple can push anything. Windows 7 and iPad are good examples.

ReactOS and Wine share the same code... I interested not in open source projects, but projects of higher quality. The idea behind ReactOS was wrong right from the start. They just try to imitate bad architecture used by M$ years ago.

I don't like Mac OS. Using Ubuntu after Windows appeared to be very easy, while Mac OS is absolutely counter-intuitive for me. Installing and un-installing kexts is just a nightmare. And why on earth should I press Command+C to copy when I use CTRL+C everywhere else? There are so many simple things in Mac OS that my brain refuses to accept :) Mac OS requires time to learn, while Ubuntu can be used right away without much learning.

Re:Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GUI

 

I don't think bug trackers need to detect similar entries. It's the user's task to verify that the bug does not exist yet.

Sounds like you experience that frequently. :)

All applications I am using regularly are already very stable and are maintained (rtmpdump is one of them). If the developer decides to stop developing, that does not necessarily decrease the application's value. It's still working and if you miss a feature, you're free to fork it. That wouldn't be possible with proprietary software.

Is it just a 'feeling' or do you have any profound numbers backing your thesis?

LaTeX's purpose is not to write spreadsheets. It's possible but it was originally created to write texts with mathematical symbols. Office suites cannot compete with LaTeX.

Another plus of LaTeX is: You can use any editor (VIM here) to write your text. Therefore its footprint is much lower than a bloated WYSIWYG office suite written in Java.

You already said so but what is so great about it?

As for virtual machines, there's no need for an admin. They are not accessable from outside.

Why not? They are working after all.

Image rotation and cropping?! It's both supported by GNOME's default image viewer, eog.

There are also gpicview and Viewnior.

Nah, I meant: What you are expecting from the developers?

Sorry, but you cannot command the developers what to do. Their work is still benevolent in some way.

Despite all that, you're making an impression of being pretty dissatisfied with Linux... :)

Re:Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GUI

 

And just to further emphasize that point - I'm not the original developer of rtmpdump, I forked it after the original project got shut down. I had a bunch of bug fixes for it, and didn't want to just keep them in a private stash forever. Anyone else can do the same if they don't like the direction I've taken it.

Re:Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GUI

 

This is what I see with many applications that I need.

LaTeX is great for math formulas.... But a WYSWIG editor is what I would use for it. Even 10 years ago there was a good one :)

Stability, interface, ... everything that a bloated GUI can offer :)

I might have used a virtual machine that is not accessible from the outside 10 years ago. Now I need Internet, USB drives mounted and unmounted in real time, printing,... If all of these is enabled in a Windows installed onto a virtual machine, then why would I need Linux at all?

some features are working.

I bring 1000-2000 pictures from a trip. Making redundant steps is not a good option for me.

Since it is free, I don't expect anything.

Command??? Even when you pay for a mass product software, you can't possibly command.

It is the lesser of two evils :) IMHO it is only the beginning. The major problem with Linux is that most programs are written for Windows. And since there are so many of them, there is a choice almost everywhere. And there lots of really nice applications for Windows that I like. The only thing I want is to see more software well written for Linux. But I don't really expect this to happen anytime soon. At least the number of installations is growing and this is promising.

Re: Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GU

 

There are many proprietary programs that use plug-ins. You can write a plug-in if you don't like a default one or need some additional functionality. And many proprietary programs just don't need any improvements from the community. They avoid open source only because they don't want any clones using their code.

Re: Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GU

 

Advantages of Ubuntu:

• Free and open source. 100% legal.
• Fast, stable and reliable.
• Simple, frequent updates
• Huge set of software that comes out-of-the-box. Installing, updating and removing most programs is much easier than in Windows.
• Don't need to store 30GB with Windows 7 distributive on your hard drive.
• Easy to intsall from a USB flash drive, CD/DVD
• Live CD allows to test Ubuntu without installing it
• Secure remote administration out-of-the-box.
• Lots of software available (not as much software as for Windows though)
• Interface is similar to Windows, so most Windows users don't have much problems moving from Windows to Ubuntu.
• No need to think about protecting your OS with antiviruses, firewalls, anti-malware,...
• Wine allows to run many Windows applications (without installing a virtual machine; Windows license is not required)
• No need to re-install Ubuntu to make it faster. No system cleaners are needed.
• Works on less powerful computers than Windows 7
• User files are not stores in locations like C:\Documents and settings\User\Application data

Disadvantages of Ubuntu:

• Less hardware supported
• Some applications are much harder to install
• There are no alternatives to some Windows applications

Re: Holy War: Windows vs. Linux, open source vs. propritary soft, command line vs. GU

 

Esar, thanks for the interesting story :)

For the serious and dedicated computer users, i would believe that Linux beats the sh*t out of M$ as*es :p At the same time, me and my (professioinal) work environment are all still on winxp (released in ~ August 2001 *ggggg*) and it is quite easy to use, fast and quite modest in its requirements (Pentium 300MHz, ~1GB hdd space, 64MB RAM. Compare with Ubuntu requirements ), actually as modest as Windows 2000 (released in ~1999). and it helps a lot with Real Rhapsody and stuff ;)

In the past 6 months i purchased a host of software programs (tools, mini applications) in order to support financially their further development. And guess what, none of them is available as Linux version! :eek:

When i really need or want something, then i TAKE IT. :D I guess that as yet i havent really felt the urge or need to cope with Linux trouble.. hehe.

ps. "Esar" = SR :rolleyes: