I really want to use linux as my primary OS. but I keep falling back to Windows XP/7 of late for pure usefully.
Linux desktop is boned, and not getting any better. KDE should be killed with fire and gnome is the moes tavern of WMs.
Poll: What is your primary operating system
211–220 of 472 posts
Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> "While being free is a top concern for you and many others, for some (perhaps many) usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability" > False dichotomy. I disagree, he's not stating that there's a correlation between free-ness and usability. Just that what he (and maybe most "normal" people?) consider usable is not currently available in free form. As a result they en…
The only thing the market backs up, is that decades of lock-in, billions of dollars in advertising, pre-installation of the OS and lobby-ism make the difference when the competition has no such resources. The reason people don't switch may very well be that noone except tech-aware people has ever heard of Linux (I'm pretty sure my parents don't). And as this poll suggests, for people that know Linux, it is a very ver…
Sure, for programming linux (any unix, really) is superior (personally I use OSX). But, for just desktop usage (browsing, e-mail, video, music) I much prefer Windows to linux. OSX vs Windows is a bit of a toss-up, I prefer OSX because of the unix environment for programming, but I still keep windows around for games.
Since XP the instability issues have Windows have been a thing of the past and the Windows 7 user experience has been pretty solid in my experience. Granted I don't do anything complicated under Windows (like I said, unix wins for programming), but neither do most "normal" people.
Edit: Also, note I'm not saying that Linux isn't usable, it is just that most trivial desktop tasks take me significantly more effort to get done nicely under Linux. Whether the benefit of other tasks (scripting your system/whatever) taking less effort outweighs this extra effort depends on the frequency of the different types of tasks.
Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I use OS X for browsing the web, web-development, graphic design, video editing, and writing. I use Windows 7 for music production and playing video games. At some point I want to start dabbling in game development, in which case I'll probably go with Windows for that, too. I ssh into various Linux servers privately and at work. In my spare I sometimes play around with Linux distros on my desktop just to learn a…
Out of curiosity, since you sound not like a fanboy of any particular os and just want to use one: What keeps you using osx over windows for browsing the web, webdev and graphic design? Are there any special advantages or is it just software which is not available for win?
Graphic design: not many. Just little things, like the great desktop zoom, the nifty screenshot shortcuts, simple access to special characters. Nothing that Windows couldn't do without some modifications, just maybe not as nicely. Also, I spend most of my time in OS X anyway, and I don't want to boot into Windows just for quickly creating or editing a file in Illustrator or Photoshop.
Browsing the web: font rendering. I don't like Windows' aggressive hinting and the one dimensional anti-aliasing. Some non-standard fonts I find not only ugly, but unreadable on Windows.
Webdev: Unix underpinnings, Rails. Text rendering, again. And I feel like I'm a lot faster at switching apps and searching for stuff on OS X. But that's probably just habits I've built over time.
Overall, OS X gets in my way the least. That's why I would choose it if I had to choose just one OS. But I don't, so …
Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system
#214I've been using Windows pretty much since version 3.1 (though will some time on OS/2 as well) as my primary OS. I have, of course, used Linux, though mostly for servers and not a full-time primary OS. I also have a Chromebook running Chrome OS. Recently, I switched jobs and my team uses Macs so over the last few months my primary work OS is now Mac OS X, while I still use Windows at home. One thing I have discovered…
I would just like to add that there is a valid reason why Linux or the *BSDs are superior to Windows or OS X - they are Free. As in Speech. And I'm sad this doesn't even warrant a mention.
Free, but at the cost of your time.
Everytime I've tried to switch from Windows to any usable Linux Distro, never has it happened that i didn't have to get frustrated due to some driver issues, laptop hibernation issues or some other issues which forced me back to Windows and kept Linux to either servers or a guest OS running in a VM in my PC.
Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I seem to recall it's still a bit lacking Not in the least since Snow Leopard, as Terminal.app has been perfectly fine (with Terminal Colors SIMBL plugin, and MouseTerm if you really want) and even better in Lion. For utmost configurability you could lean towards iTerm2, which you can tweak to no end (and arguably more than most X terminals). Platform-specific tools from pb{copy,paste} to tmutil are truly useful an…
Unfortunately, the terminal on OSX is incredibly buggy. Keeps incorrextly coloring commands, randomly failing... Perhaps it's because of the outdated bash they use?
Ehm, I have been using Terminal.app on OS X for years now, and probably use it > 50% of my time daily (yay for REPLs), and I never really encountered any problem.
The last thing I remember was that in OS X 10.5 I had to change some locale option to have UTF-8 working properly. But that's it.
Could you give examples where Terminal.app fails?
Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't the macbooks over-priced ? Personally I'd rather buy a laptop and a tablet (something like the transformer) rather than get something that costs twice as much or offers lower return on hardware for the same price. Disclaimer: I am from a parallel programming background, so I am biased towards performance rather than form factor or battery life.
I don't think you can get anything with an equal display at the same price point as a macbook pro.
What metric are you using when you say equal display ? I have two laptops that display at 1080p (no, not an external monitor, just the laptop displays themselves).
Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system
#217On my laptop/desktop: Mac OSX on servers, Linux.
Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system
#218I took a leap of faith from Windows to OS X as my main desktop OS back in late 2004, before it was "trendy" to use products by Apple - and long before users of Apple products began being referred to as "Applefags". I haven't looked back once. Besides OS X and Windows, I've been using the *BSDs (mainly OpenBSD) since around 1999.
Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system
#219I'm giving up FreeBSD today. I've built Departments and platforms on the old faithful OS, I even blog about it - but my contracts demand skype or even Oracle and whilst you can sort of get those things working I no longer can afford the extra time to make it work Ubuntu just managed to auto install X on a chipset I could not get working manually, and so I am going to Linux land for my workstations. The contracts will…
You might try PC-BSD for a Ubuntu-like experience with a FreeBSD base. I know it autodetects graphics/sound during its installer and can setup stuff like Skype/Flash for you pretty easily.
That said, I did the same thing and now use Ubuntu on my laptop and workstation. The only apps I really want are a terminal and Skype since I can run Konsole+tmux/Firefox/Chromium/Okular/etc remotely displaying locally via X.
Re: Poll: What is your primary operating system
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't the macbooks over-priced ? Personally I'd rather buy a laptop and a tablet (something like the transformer) rather than get something that costs twice as much or offers lower return on hardware for the same price. Disclaimer: I am from a parallel programming background, so I am biased towards performance rather than form factor or battery life.
The last one I bought (a 13" about 18 months ago) wasn't. Yes, you could buy a Windows laptop from Dell or HP or someone for half the price, but it would have less than half the battery life, it would be larger (albeit probably not heavier; Macbooks are the densest laptops I've found) and it would have a plastic shell instead of aluminium which feels worse when new and won't age well. It would also come laden with cr…
Dell 15z: $1200
http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-15z/pd.aspx?~ck=mn
Macbook Pro: $2100 (Battery life 7hr) http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...
15z review. Battery life: 7.5hr. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4711/dell-xps-15z-sincerely-fl...
Just saying. Used the 15z for comparison, because I think it is closest in terms of form factor.
If you are going to use linux anyway, why waste the extra $900 to buy an OS you dont use.