Science Forums 2

[alexander]

Originally Posted by geoker

1. Retraining. There is quite a jump from the Windows environment to anything else for average users.
2. Less featured, less user friendly, less documented, less mature applications. A perfect example is the seemingly reverse-engineered Sun OpenOffice tractor which I despair of every time I'm forced to use it because someone sent me an Excel file etc.
3. Poor hardware support. I have tweaked my Linux Nvidia drivers to within an inch of their lives and peformance still doesn't touch Windows XP (which was bad anyway).

Sooo incredibly mistaken, soooo incredibly wrong, sooooo incredibly false, soooo incredibly accusing, sooooo incrediby dissing the better.

1. Retraining. There is quite a jump from the Windows environment to anything else for average users.

That is the least ignorant thing you have said in the entire post, however Linux learning curve, even for average users is waay steeper then other operating systems; the design of Linux GUIs is made to be more user friendly and actually to make sense, location and naming of folders, the entire linux system itself generally makes 1000 times more sense then Windows. Dont beleive me? Please, I'd like to hear your take on the concept of registry... Besides, I've switched plenty of "average" users to Linux to know that this accusation is false. I've converted my manager at work to Ubuntu, took him about 2 days to be able to do anything that he would generally do on his system, and be completely comfortable, oh and no i did not show him how to use anything, i just recommended the distro. Not bad for a person who has not used anything but windows before, ei? My friend took about a week, but in that time he has learned how to do more stuff in Linux then he could do with windows period. Thats another thing, you can do so much more stuff with the Linux, things that you dont realize you could do with windows, and things that most people dont do with OS X, but are otherwise possible there as well.

Less featured, less user friendly, less documented, less mature applications. A perfect example is the seemingly reverse-engineered Sun OpenOffice tractor which I despair of every time I'm forced to use it because someone sent me an Excel file etc.

First of all, Microsoft stole every single idea that you so easily assign to them, second of all Excell is a closed-source proprietary application, their formatting will never get realeased by Microsoft, and for reverse-engeneering, OpenOffice is a perfect example of how an open-source community can come together and provide an alternative a perfectly good office applicarion and make it available free to anyone who wants to use it.
User friendliness was not at the core of Linux as an OS, but companies like Ubuntu and before that Mandrake, made the install a breeze. Big interfaces like KDE and Gnome make the OS really easy to use, and the beauty is in the fact that those interfaces are engineered to actually make sense to any human.
Less mature applications is also a false accusation, there are more products with more support for linux then there ever will be for windows. There are more applications for linux then you can imagine, because there are millions of programmers who contribute to open-source.
Not well documented, you must be confusing the OS there buddy, aside from documentation of every program and every possible argument and thing you can do with it in the man pages, there is documentation on every project's website, as well as 24/7 support where you get to talk to the developers, not people at the help desk that barely know what a computer is, and if you need a patch, one will be written for you asap only to be released in a few hours to the remainder of people, unlike with any piece of proprietary software, where they are looking for a certain amount of requests before they even consider fixing anything. Infact Linux has the most advanced flight simulator that actually simulates how the plane flies by for example looking at the shape of the plane and simulating how air flows over the plane, unlike microsoft flight simulator, if you read about it, sound like a toy, lol...

3. Poor hardware support. I have tweaked my Linux Nvidia drivers to within an inch of their lives and peformance still doesn't touch Windows XP

And you are claiming that it is the operating systems fault? Thats great, you made me laugh, FYI there is more support for hardware in Linux then there is for Windows, because of generic drivers that are otherwise not there in Windows, so if there was a new network card released, chances are that Linux will be able to use it right away, unlike windows people that gotta wait for the right and working driver to be written. Your Nvidia problems are your fault, my friend gets about 5600 FPS, just compare, in Quake 3 in Windows he gets 400FPS , under Linux, the same graphics setting, same card and everything, over 1000 (FPS counter maxes out at 1000). Another thing is that thoose Nvidia drivers are generic, if Nvidia was to actually write a driver for Linux for their graphics cards and noone would have to reverse engineer it, rest asure that those cards will perform better then they do in windows.