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Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

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Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#101

Post by nix23 »

pjmlp wrote: post #91
alkonaut wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the criteria required for an OS using the Linux kernel to be called a “distribution” then? Including GNU or free software in the definition seems arbitrary... Is there a class of applications (that aren’t apps from a store) that must be runnable? Or do you mean that distro is short for “GNU/Linux distribution”? I’m not arguing for/against (since it’s obviously a long-standing debate), what I’m interested in…

Yes, a distro implies GNU/Linux. Neither ChromeOS nor Android expose the Linux kernel directly to userspace apps, so for them is irrelevant what kernel is being used.

>Yes, a distro implies GNU/Linux

Or BSD ;)

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#102

Post by TeMPOraL »

grishka wrote: post #99
TeMPOraL wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never understand why exactly is it done this way. Because they make a lot of money on enterprise customers. The only way to convince them to upgrade is to guarantee the new OS version won't break their legacy software. But even on consumer market, in the 90s and 2000s it was important old videogames work on new versions of W…

So... why upgrade in the first place then, to solve what? Something I learned as a software developer is that if a piece of code is working properly, the best thing you can do is to leave it alone.

Exactly! And that's what both the corporate executives and your parents are thinking!

So Microsoft has always had to work hard to convince people to upgrade. New features were the natural way of doing that. But not maintaining backward compatibility, in a world where almost all software was an one-time purchase, would be a deal breaker. Why upgrade if it's going to cost $20M to make our ERP suite compatible with the new Windows? Why upgrade if all the software I spent $1000 on over the past few years will no longer work? Hence backwards compatibility with existing software was a top priority (to the point that Windows has a lot of fixes to badly coded third-party software built in).

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#103

Post by nix23 »

quesera wrote: post #68
nix23 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>best linux distro around. If I could easily run IntellJ on it I would switch. It's not a Distro.

> It's not a Distro. Sure it is. It's not a general purpose distro (running on GP/COTS hardware), but it is a software distribution built around a Linux kernel.

>but it is a software distribution built around a Linux kernel

No google Play Store is the distributor NOT Android, Android and Linux is just part of the runtime.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#104

Post by alkonaut »

pjmlp wrote: post #91
alkonaut wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the criteria required for an OS using the Linux kernel to be called a “distribution” then? Including GNU or free software in the definition seems arbitrary... Is there a class of applications (that aren’t apps from a store) that must be runnable? Or do you mean that distro is short for “GNU/Linux distribution”? I’m not arguing for/against (since it’s obviously a long-standing debate), what I’m interested in…

Yes, a distro implies GNU/Linux. Neither ChromeOS nor Android expose the Linux kernel directly to userspace apps, so for them is irrelevant what kernel is being used.

"a distro implies GNU/Linux"

So you mean your definition is "distro" is slang for "GNU/Linux distribution", whereas an os using the linux kernel is not necessarily a "Linux distribution"? Or can it be a "Linux distribution" without being a "distro"?

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#105

Post by WWLink »

thelazydogsback wrote: post #95
znpy wrote: post #89

I really don't care much about the desktop wars thing, but if there's one thing that I honestly thing this is it: In the desktop wars nobody has really won, but all the users have lost. GNU/Linux on the desktop has improved a lot, but it's still very far from being good. Mac OS is very good, but it's extremely expensive because of the hardware. Windows was very good for desktop but had stability problems. Nowadays Wi…

> Windows was very good for desktop but had stability problems. Nowadays Windows is just awful for the desktop user, Microsoft is literally conducting a war against its own users. I don't get this. I've been using *nix since PDP11 and VAX/Ultrix and I have no problems with Win10 at all, stability or otherwise - I'd much rather use it as a desktop dev environment than Linux. When it comes time to deploy something, sur…

>I'd much rather use it as a desktop dev environment than Linux

Yikes! I use Windows on my desktop at home because I like to play games on my computer that tend to not run well in WINE. I cannot program in Windows. I just can't. Even with WSL and vscode, I can't. Maybe I just suck as a programmer, but windows has a way of getting under my skin when I'm trying to get shit done.

I can use a Mac, but stuff like SIP forcing me to have a nonstandard disk layout (god forbid I want /usr/bin/python3 to be a thing because it is on every linux machine I use) pisses me the fuck off. I'm kinda tired of Apple making the computer into an iPad. Which is too bad, because it's been my programming platform of choice for a very long time.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#106

Post by moogly »

grishka wrote: post #66
3np wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those parts are easily removed by doing a vanilla install the first thing you do. Windows (esp 10) still had some built-in things you don't get away from though. And also all the dialogues from self-updating software and plugins.

It is possible to disable or uninstall all the user-hostile components like Windows Update, telemetry, and the app store, but it takes some effort and manual registry editing. The bigger problem, though, is all the legacy that's holding it back in the name of backwards compatibility. The WinAPI is older than myself. You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never unde…

> Apple keeps dropping old APIs to make their OSes better and simpler internally.

Hand on heart, do you really feel OS X/macOS is improving much?

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#107

Post by grishka »

moogly wrote: post #106
grishka wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to disable or uninstall all the user-hostile components like Windows Update, telemetry, and the app store, but it takes some effort and manual registry editing. The bigger problem, though, is all the legacy that's holding it back in the name of backwards compatibility. The WinAPI is older than myself. You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never unde…

> Apple keeps dropping old APIs to make their OSes better and simpler internally. Hand on heart, do you really feel OS X/macOS is improving much?

Honestly, beyond around 10.9, it's been pretty pointless from the end user perspective. Technically, they rewrote the window server to use Metal instead of OpenGL in 10.13 and that did bring performance improvements (and surfaced many bugs in the nvidia driver that they fixed in 10.14 which I'm currently on), but there were no noticeable improvements to anything since. 10.15 aka catalina just brings more restrictions on what you can run. 11.0 aka big sur is a pointless UI redesign.

Apparently, when they run out of technical things to improve and stupid code signing policies to enforce, they redesign the UI because it's a law that if you're making a popular OS it absolutely has to have a major update once a year, no matter what.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#108

Post by simonblack »

mdifrgechd wrote: post #18

I'm buying a new computer. Currently I have only ubuntu linux machines and was just saying to someone that I would actually consider trying windows and WSL because it would let me use the linux tools I want alongside MS office, and it might be interesting to play with windows versions of things. The reason I wont actually do it though is because I'm sure that windows will be filled with commercially oriented intrusio…

it would let me use the linux tools I want alongside MS office

I used to go this route. I used WABI (Windows Application Binary Interface) on Solaris in the 1990s, sort of like a very early WINE. However as time has gone on, I found that the Linux Office Suites (LibreOffice, more recently) have become more and more sufficient for my needs.

I realised recently that I haven't really booted Windows itself more than half a dozen times over the last few years. I got my first Windows 10 a month or two ago with a new laptop. I then proceeded to squeeze it down to under 100 gig on a 1 terabyte hard drive. On my main desktop, Windows 8 is relegated to a mere 50 gig out of 12 terabytes of storage.

I have used Windows 7 on VirtualBox more often for running my HP Scanner's MultiFeed software, just because I can. Though normally, I just run a single-sheet scan most of the time under Linux.

In summary, Windows could completely disappear and it would not affect me adversely at all.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#109

Post by ChrisLTD »

chucky wrote: post #31

I don't think MS is porting Edge to Linux because they want to test the waters for running Windows on a Linux kernel as the author speculates. It seems much more likely that Microsoft recognizes the web is an important platform for them to be a player on in the future, and they want web developers to be able to test stuff on Edge regardless of which OS they use. This is the reason why Edge is available on MacOS and L…

It’s also a trivial port because the underlying Chromium engine already runs on all those platforms.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#110

Post by quesera »

nix23 wrote: post #103
quesera wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not a Distro. Sure it is. It's not a general purpose distro (running on GP/COTS hardware), but it is a software distribution built around a Linux kernel.

>but it is a software distribution built around a Linux kernel No google Play Store is the distributor NOT Android, Android and Linux is just part of the runtime.

I wasn't talking about Android.
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