Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#41

Post by halo » Sun, Sep 13, 2009, 4:17 PM UTC

ciupicri wrote: post #38

flogic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of OpenOffice.org... People need to stop pushing it as equivalent to MS Office. It is so obviously inferior that people write off your opinion. It's ugly. Complex formats break. Last. I checked the was no grammar checking. Calc is similarly useless when comared to Excel. The only reason I use it is I run Linux.

Maybe OpenOffice.org doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but I was pretty happy with Writer. I wrote my girlfriend's thesis in it and it looked very good. I admit that I had some issues with it, but they were caused by the fact that Fedora shipped a beta version; the older version worked fine. At one workplace we were using Word (2003 IIRC) and I can say that when it comes to styles it sucks. It doesn't reall…

Word has had full proper support for styles for a couple of decades - its implementation isn't very difficult to use, it's just that most users tend not to know about them because they haven't been taught as they aren't worthwhile unless you're writing a long document.

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#42

Post by jfarmer » Sun, Sep 13, 2009, 7:31 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #31

jfarmer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience was the opposite. I started programming with C and Perl. How are you supposed to do that on Windows? Setting up the system to be able to run compiler commands from the command line is very hard on Windows. On Mac/Linux/UNIX you get that all for free, out of the box, and every tutorial on the web makes sense. With MS it's always some crazy proprietary thing that is hard to find good documentation for (at…

I've done lots of windows command line programming, mostly in Ruby but some Perl . That was in the last 2-4 years, so it has gotten better but I also did Python programming seven years ago and it wasn't hard at all. Scite is free and more or less the same on all platforms. Windows C++ command line programming is a bit of a pain but it's just the same setting-your-configuration-pain-in-the-neck that everyone is compla…

Sure, but were you learning how to program? At the time I didn't know what a compiler was, let alone the nuts and bolts of installing one and getting it running. I was a self-taught 15-year-old and the only one in my hometown interested in this stuff.

Making that happen on Windows was very difficult, IMO. I remember using something called LCC-Win32?

Moving to *ix made a world of difference for me from a programming and sysadmin perspective. Everything works "out of the box" and the space is less fragmented because everyone uses gcc/g++. There are a million tutorials explaining step-by-step how to write a C/C++ program and compile it.

Installing a printer on the other hand... :)

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#43

Post by joe_the_user » Sun, Sep 13, 2009, 8:36 PM UTC

jfarmer wrote: post #42

joe_the_user wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done lots of windows command line programming, mostly in Ruby but some Perl . That was in the last 2-4 years, so it has gotten better but I also did Python programming seven years ago and it wasn't hard at all. Scite is free and more or less the same on all platforms. Windows C++ command line programming is a bit of a pain but it's just the same setting-your-configuration-pain-in-the-neck that everyone is compla…

Sure, but were you learning how to program? At the time I didn't know what a compiler was, let alone the nuts and bolts of installing one and getting it running. I was a self-taught 15-year-old and the only one in my hometown interested in this stuff. Making that happen on Windows was very difficult, IMO. I remember using something called LCC-Win32? Moving to *ix made a world of difference for me from a programming a…

For command-line workability, I suppose there have been many levels of problems in the nix and the PC world.

Going way back to when I was learning to program, I couldn't get Unix working at all. The folks at the college who understood it loved to make that understanding a mark of their superior condition rather than helping in any way.

This was well before Linux. Unix terminal configuration is pretty much the most screwed-up, evil thing in the world. At the college where I was learning to program, most of the terminals were irrevocably mis-configured at the server level (or at least some level we had no control over) but the admins pretended it was the student's fault.

And the present screwed-up configuration of the various flavors of desktop Linux can be traced to their support of the various archaic terminal flavors as a default.

And it really shouldn't be assumed that Unix was step forward from UI's that existed in the really old systems. I learned my hatred of vi from a truly old school programmer who went back to far before Unix existed and could verify that there was no excuse for it's pathological absurdity - it wasn't a "step forward" from the editors that existed before - rather, it's popularity has to do with accidents of markets and college sysadmin culture.

Here DOS (not Windows) was great. I just got a simple compiler and did a did of command-line stuff. The Borland c++ ide was great back in that day...

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#44

Post by jfarmer » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 5:23 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #43

jfarmer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but were you learning how to program? At the time I didn't know what a compiler was, let alone the nuts and bolts of installing one and getting it running. I was a self-taught 15-year-old and the only one in my hometown interested in this stuff. Making that happen on Windows was very difficult, IMO. I remember using something called LCC-Win32? Moving to *ix made a world of difference for me from a programming a…

For command-line workability, I suppose there have been many levels of problems in the nix and the PC world. Going way back to when I was learning to program, I couldn't get Unix working at all. The folks at the college who understood it loved to make that understanding a mark of their superior condition rather than helping in any way. This was well before Linux. Unix terminal configuration is pretty much the most sc…

I don't think Unix was a step forward in terms of a UI, but as a programming environment it's a lot easier to go from zero to something than Windows (IMO). That's all I'm saying.

Now I use a Mac and have the best of both worlds!

Re: Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software

#45

Post by natch » Tue, Sep 15, 2009, 3:17 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #25

natch wrote: post #15

I dumped Linux, although I still use it in the cloud. And rather than saying "dumped" it would be more accurate to say I decided to NOT use a PC laptop with Linux, instead getting a Mac. Why? Not for any of the reasons mentioned. One of the big things that convinced me was a little thing, the magsafe connector. I've seen laptops slammed down on the floor, and it's not pretty. Endless driver issues were another reason…

How did MagSafe -- a hardware feature -- convince you to switch to OS X? Plenty of people run Linux on Apple hardware. Not to discount your decision, but MagSafe wasn't really the deciding factor. > Endless driver issues were another reason Really? Not to discount your problems, but if you choose your hardware wisely there aren't that many problems. That said, a lot of 'driver issues' are to blame on the manufacturer…

Assigning blame (to NVIDIA, or anyone else) doesn't interest me, if it doesn't help me solve my immediate need: get shit done.

Why do I not run Linux on Apple hardware, you ask?

Actually I do run it on Apple hardware. I dumped it as my main OS, but I run it under VMware. As to why not wipe OS X and use only Linux, well, OS X gives me a lot of stuff I like, so I'm not about to wipe it. OS X is like a superset of Linux, in effect, at least according to my most important metric which as you may recall is getting shit done. It's like a new Swiss Army knife that has more blades, if you like analogies.