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German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

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Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#191

Post by vetinari »

a3n wrote: post #123
xrisk wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I am anti communist for the things documented in, for example, The Black Book of Communism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_black_book_of_communism For context, I'm not a McCarthyite, nor a conservative.

It is perfecly fine to be anti-communist, the Churchill quote about communist and conservative is especially apt, but calling out to The Black Book of Communism just dimishes and cheapens your points. Even the co-authors disassociated themselves due to the way the main author framing of the issue - basically turning the book into a simplistic propaganda tool.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#192

Post by reitanqild »

the-dude wrote: post #175
reitanqild wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How has the USSR ended up in horror? What about Cuba? I will give you Vietnam though.

> How has the USSR ended up in horror?

By their own mistakes again and again?

Same way as Maos China until they changed?

> I will give you Vietnam though.

How about this instead, I give you Cuba, that seems like a good example I think, at least I am not aware of any major henocides there and they have been attempted strangled for a number of years so not only their fault.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#193

Post by terminalcommand »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #139
dijit wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. Unfortunately it's hard for me to read more into your argument or position after I read the opening line. Microsoft has the software support it does due to the monopoly position it has enjoyed for 30 years- this is not an argument to continue that lest we crown Microsoft "lord of the operating systems" because people actually pay them attention; Thousands upon thousands of hours of no…

> Microsoft has the software support it does due to the monopoly position it has enjoyed for 30 years Partially, but one must also give a huge amount of credit their efforts at maintaining binary compatibility of the userland for decades. This is something Linux Desktop fails at in spectacular fashion.

Linux software is usually distributed as source code, so I think the comparison does not suit very well. It's the package maintainers' duty to compatible, tested, secure binaries for you. But I imagine this sword cuts both ways. If you are a commercial app developer who wants to keep its source code to itself, maintaining binary packages for each distro and testing it could cost a significant amount.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#194

Post by reitanqild »

asjw wrote: post #184
the-dude wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has the USSR ended up in horror? What about Cuba? I will give you Vietnam though.

What about Chile, Contras, the KKK ... ? What about the Videla's coup d'état supported by US that lead to hundreds of thousands of desaparecidos? One cannot simply point the finger and judge, without taking responsibility for their own wrongdoings

[flagged]

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#195

Post by asjw »

asjw wrote: post #153
Wh1zz wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See general state of development/corruption for all ex-soviet countries versus the rest of the developed world.

[flagged]

To be clear I'm Italian, I don't think life in Italy is worse than in many other western countries, I would say it's generally better, especially for the medium-low income segment of the population

PCI (the Italian communist party) obtadined regularly a third of the votes until it was disbanded in 1992

I don't think it ended up in horror or that it made Italy a place in ruins

Corruption was very popular here in those years, but the government have been anti communists for 50 years straight from the end of WW2 until 1998, when the first former communist, Massimo D'Alema, became prime minister.

He has also been a popular meme

https://pietrodn.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/dalema-meme.jpg

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#196

Post by MayeulC »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #139
dijit wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. Unfortunately it's hard for me to read more into your argument or position after I read the opening line. Microsoft has the software support it does due to the monopoly position it has enjoyed for 30 years- this is not an argument to continue that lest we crown Microsoft "lord of the operating systems" because people actually pay them attention; Thousands upon thousands of hours of no…

> Microsoft has the software support it does due to the monopoly position it has enjoyed for 30 years Partially, but one must also give a huge amount of credit their efforts at maintaining binary compatibility of the userland for decades. This is something Linux Desktop fails at in spectacular fashion.

Yes and no. The Kernel ABI is stable. Userspace is somewhat of a mess, ABI-wise. But most source code is available, so in most cases, you just need to recompile software to have it run, since APIs are more stable than ABIs.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if, given proprietary (no source) software A, you couldn't recompile every open-source dependency of A from their sources around A's release time, and get it running. Sticking to open source software as much as you can tends to be a winning strategy in the long term.

The other day I linked the sdl12-compat project, that allows programs such as UT2004 to make use of modern Linux desktop features. Sure, the original sdl 1.2 might not feel at home on a modern Linux desktop (icculus'demonstration[1] showed it was not much better on mac). But as long as the foundations are open, they can be improved upon.

Windows tend to fare better with binary compatibility. But old software feels more and more alien on recent windows versions, and sometimes just stops working, and there's very little you can do about it then, in most cases :/

[1]https://www.patreon.com/posts/project-sdl12-25321792

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#197

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

terminalcommand wrote: post #193
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft has the software support it does due to the monopoly position it has enjoyed for 30 years Partially, but one must also give a huge amount of credit their efforts at maintaining binary compatibility of the userland for decades. This is something Linux Desktop fails at in spectacular fashion.

Linux software is usually distributed as source code, so I think the comparison does not suit very well. It's the package maintainers' duty to compatible, tested, secure binaries for you. But I imagine this sword cuts both ways. If you are a commercial app developer who wants to keep its source code to itself, maintaining binary packages for each distro and testing it could cost a significant amount.

You don't even need to resort to commercial apps. A lot of older and niche software simply isn't in the repo.

In Windows land you can download a binary and it will almost certainly run, and 10 years of updates later it will still almost certainly still run.

In Linux land you'll probably have to compile it yourself. And 10 years from now you will probably have to make changes to C files manually because APIs have been changed in your dependencies and then compile it.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#198

Post by MayeulC »

longtom wrote: post #146
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why Germany will never achieve widespread adoption. All the citizens wish to go and form their own cities, reinventing the wheel and duplicating effort. They should abandon all their smaller cities and focus their resources on a single city.

What's the problem with duplicating effort?

I read your parent as making fun of the often-used argument against the plethora of Linux distributions.

It's true that entering the Linux world is a bit like entering a shoe shop: why can't they just make two versions, home and professional? ;)

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#199

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

MayeulC wrote: post #196
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft has the software support it does due to the monopoly position it has enjoyed for 30 years Partially, but one must also give a huge amount of credit their efforts at maintaining binary compatibility of the userland for decades. This is something Linux Desktop fails at in spectacular fashion.

Yes and no. The Kernel ABI is stable. Userspace is somewhat of a mess, ABI-wise. But most source code is available, so in most cases, you just need to recompile software to have it run, since APIs are more stable than ABIs. Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if, given proprietary (no source) software A, you couldn't recompile every open-source dependency of A from their sources around A's release time, and get…

I will take Windows's "sometimes there's very little you can do about it" against Linux's "compile it and all its dependencies (probably versions of those dependencies from the same time period, and possibly even their dependencies) from source" any day.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#200

Post by zubspace »

terminalcommand wrote: post #190
zubspace wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's hard to replace a tool which worked for you since many years. You learn all it's tricks and you can build up your workflows around that tool. Maybe I just had some bad luck regarding Linux. I started with Suse, switch to Gentoo, then Ubuntu and Fedora and others inbetween. I remember the fights I had to take to make 3D acceleration work, strange problems with hardware, things which could not be solved easi…

This is it definitely my experience. Those of us who were stubborn to stick with Linux (or BSDs) learned it inside out. It is hard to switch habits after all those years. If all those sleepless nights trying to fix hardware problems were spent on learning the Winapi/NT kernel inside out, it could be hard to switch back. What I found most interesting was that I saw a video of the creators of plan9 who were running it…

Very interesting and kinda funny, that you ended up at Debian :) But I can understand that.

One thing that tells me is, that it is good to have multiple operating systems, open ones and proprietary ones. They can all learn from each other. And I long for the day where Windows will offer me an equal commandline experience like Linux and where Linux will give me a decent desktop environment, where "it just works". In some ways we're really close to that day. In many ways not so much.

The only thing which sometimes gets me is, when I think about all the time me and mankind in general did (and will) waste on learning the intricacies of operating systems. It's funny and sad at the same time :)

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