Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux on desktop is pretty amazing. Haven't looked back in 3 years.
Is there a laptop you would recommend?
Try to avoid any with optimus graphics (eg a dedicated GPU) if you can.
The End of Windows
241–250 of 617 posts
Re: The End of Windows
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah sure, let's not wonder why maybe developers don't want to develop for your platform or anything.
Nothing to wonder, it's easy to understand why they prefer to invest in 90% of the market, but they shoot themselves in the foot by investing in non-free platforms at the end of the day.
You're ignoring how they got to be 90% of the market. It is a comforting lie to say that it was all shady business practices and marketing, though those certainly played a role. Here's a clue:
"One of the things, none of the distributions have ever done right is application packaging ... making binaries for Linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass. You don't make binaries for Linux, you make binaries for Fedora 19, Fedora 20, maybe even RHEL5 from 10 years ago. You make binaries for Debian Stable…well actually no, you don't make binaries for Debian Stable because Debian Stable has libraries that are so old that anything built in the last century it doesn't work. …and this [“Don't Break Userspace!”] is like, a big deal for the kernel, and I put a lot of effort into explaining to all the developers that this is a really important thing, and then all of the distributions come in, and they screw it all up. Because they break binary compatibility left and right."
--Linus Torvalds, DebConf 2014
Re: The End of Windows
#243It isn't really the end of Windows - it's the end of Windows' dominance of Microsoft mindshare. Windows 10 was the giant step in that direction - an always updating, maintenance mode, single OS that MS will need to support. Arguably until Win 7 dies out they won't be entirely there but once they are, maintaining Windows is a much simpler affair than yesteryears. None of this means Windows itself is dying - it only me…
You can see a nice graph showing (Firefox) users steadily upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 from Mozilla's Firefox telemetry: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-os-and-architectu...
That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways.
* In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category.
* In 2018, the most popular memory amount for users of Firefox is still 4GB, trailed by the also disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum, but at least with memory I haven't been deluding myself—I know many people economize on memory. Still, I would have thought 8GB was the most common memory size by now.
* A surprising number of people still have Flash installed.
I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768. Can you imagine the user experience of today's modern over-JavaScripted web pages on such underpowered hardware: not simply slow because of their grotesquely large transmission payload but also because they caused your computer to start swapping memory pages to disk?
Re: The End of Windows
#244I still can't wrap my head around everything that was wrongheaded about Windows 8, and I was working there for most of its dev cycle. One wonders what would have happened if they just sort of let Windows be Windows. I.e. if they had continued iterating on core stuff but left UI and general philosophy resembling Win7's trajectory and not tried to force people into WinRT/UWP/store. Even though Win10 attempted correctiv…
They bet the farm on “store”. Why? Because they must have done the math and realized that the enterprise and “creative pro” desktop with classic expensive desktop apps is a dead end. Was that calculation correct? Who knows. But I have to think they did that analysis very carefully.
I think they saw Apple’s success with the iOS App Store, saw Apple trying to do the same on desktop and tried to leap ahead of them by forcing the pace. Of course when app stores on desktop, for both Apple and Microsoft, proved much more problematic to implement, ramming it through like that proved highly damaging.
Re: The End of Windows
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft could kill Linux's foothold in the server + SMB space right now just by simplifying licensing. Get rid of CAL's. Charge a fixed price for a certain # of simultaneously running Windows instances, no matter how you run it. Even charging an ongoing subscription for this would be acceptable. Simplify the licensing situation for SMBs wanting to run an on-premise redundant systems, without needing diagrams to exp…
This is blatantly false. You're assuming that people only use Linux because they don't want to pay or deal with licensing complexities of Microsoft which is not the case.
That's not the only reason. If the Windows platform brings more to the table than Linux, then for a developer that would weigh more heavily than the complexities of licensing it.
I've supported several Windows-centric SMB accounting platforms, including QuickBooks and trying to figure out the right way to license just Windows, in order to support High-availability or redundancy is headache-inducing at the SMB-sized server level.
Re: The End of Windows
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Without those two there would have never been a PC in the first place. Can you clarify that statement? My memory of computing history include other types of personal computers during and around that time.
Yes, but the market was super fragmented with each and every platform trying to lock in their customers as much as possible. The PC changed all that by virtue of the clones, which offered compatible systems and components from a large variety of vendors. Compaq arguably was the biggest force in establishing the clone market and even though as a brand they are gone today (though some of their legacy lives on in HP's s…
What do you think of http://opencompute.org? They provide open blueprints for whitebox servers and network gear, for manufacturing by ODMs, with cloud provider purchases driving economy of scale.
Re: The End of Windows
#247You can have my windows when I can game properly somewhere else (and no, no you can’t).
Xbox and PlayStation. The "problem" is that you want to game on your PC, not that there isn't another viable option.
I’d be happy with console gaming if there was a $2000 console with mouse and keyboard controls. I don’t want to play with a controller and I don’t want 3yo hardware.
Re: The End of Windows
#248> Smartphones first addressed needs the PC couldn’t, then over time started taking over PC functionality directly
I still don't understand how anybody gets any real work done on a smartphone.
Has work suddenly gotten so simplistic that most people really don't need a keyboard? They're dragging and tapping and writing IM-like sentence fragments riddled with autocorrect typos? And this is acceptable? Seriously?
Re: The End of Windows
#249Ballmer must be the #1 executive who has gotten the farthest on the least intelligence.
Ballmer had a perfect 800 score on his SAT math section. He kept the company expanding revenue and profits for a decade and a half, which is an eternity in Internet time. His Windows on mobile strategy was a few years late from being a huge success (agreed, that is also an eternity).
Re: The End of Windows
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outside of Dev work unfortunately Linux is not that much fun. If you need to do accounting, graphics or other work there are options on Linux but they are usually way behind what Mac or Windows are offering.
Even as an desktop developer, often Linux is 2% of the user base, very vocal, used to software being free, and with infinite OS variations. That's not very compelling.
Infinite variations is the bane of free/open software. It is the primary reason it hasn't taken over everything, IMHO.