How can Linux beat Windows?

azmi said:
yeah, but many external hardwares like printers , modems , routers still windows only stuffs....

I hope more hardwares and softwares are supported by Ubuntu in future plus they (Canonical) got increasing partners for Ubuntu OS for now....
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Well, if manufacturers would stop making devices that rely on specific drivers (which are of course Windows only) to function, then maybe we'd get somewhere.

For example, a few years back there was a craze for making 'dumb' printers - where most of the work was done by the CPU and the printer just did the bare minimum. It's no wonder these don't work on anything but Windows.

Of course, I'll see a flock of flying pigs before hardware manufacturers play ball and release cross-platform hardware/drivers. It's the economics, stupid.
 
The problem with hardware is vendors needlessly placing value on drivers and hiding away the functional specs and source code.

This means they either don't offer linux drivers at all, and if anyone can be bothered, they start an open source project to reverse engineer a working driver, this takes a long time and the results vary in stability. Or the windows driver is used via ndiswrapper, not always possible, rarely stable.

Or the linux driver is written by a small number of the vendor's staff, can often lack significant functionality, and is released as banaries, which need to then basically be hacked into different distros. This produces poor stability,

If the vendor open sources their windows driver and specifications for the behaviour of the hardware, then the linux community will write high quality drivers on its own, sometimes within a project run by the vendor themselves.
 
decmatt said:
It won't make a difference, if it supported every hardware going, still wouldnt make a difference. The majority of people stick to what they know, the majority and going to change their pre-installed OS with an alternative that they will have to learn afresh.
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That and its a bitch to install anything (which is ridiculous)- making it impossible for general public use.
 
Berserker said:
And that would be why I spent ages ripping apart drivers to get a graphics card to work with Windows 7. Ubuntu? It just worked - I didn't do anything.

Horses for courses as they say. Is there any popcorn left? :)
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Just spent my evening trying to get the onboard network drivers going for an old motherboard in XP...bunged the Ubuntu Live CD in, and hey ho it worked!

Generally software and hardware support is poor as it is simply not in the developers' best interests to develop for Linux at the moment.

That said, the open source community does an unbelievable job of getting the vast majority of hardware in particular to work flawlessly, as well as having pretty good (and free) imitations of almost everything needed for everyday use of a PC. If I didn't game I'd be fully switched over to Linux already.

Christo said:
That and its a bitch to install anything (which is ridiculous)- making it impossible for general public use.
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sudo apt-get install x

You're right, it's a shocker :D
 
decmatt said:
It wont, it doesnt have a viable support option for companies, doesnt have a huge corporation backing it, it doesnt have a simple means to get certified, the public dont like change.
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I suggest you take a closer look, Redhat and Canonical are two companies who's business is selling support for Linux. Both of these companies are far from small, they may not be a Microsoft but they are doing well. Linux is in use by millions of companies running backends, it may not be as big in the desktop market but others it is.
 
decmatt said:
What?!? How is the general public using Apache? Look at user market share which is what this thread is discussing and come back.
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By viewing websites hosted on it...

decmatt said:
It wont, it doesnt have a viable support option for companies, doesnt have a huge corporation backing it, it doesnt have a simple means to get certified, the public dont like change.
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Canonical, Oracle, Redhat, SuSE, xandros, IBM, The Linux Foundation...
 
It probably won't, on the desktop market, but that's mainly due to network effects as a result of the microsoft monopoly. There is commercial support available, software is easy to install, hardware is generally well supported, so those are all red herrings.

I don't care these days, as I have a Mac, which is like using Linux that works properly.
 
I don't think it'll be anything Linux does which will allow it to beat Microsoft, it's more likely that it'll be something Microsoft do which allows Linux to take over. Unless Microsoft think carefully about their pricing model for the future I think Linux might steal a move. I've noticed more and more councils, schools, colleges etc. making the move to Linux as they only really use web browsers and Office apps which are freely available on Linux and just as easy to use.

If Microsoft continue to charge £x for a client licence, £x for a server licence, £x for operating system licence, £x for office licence I can certainly imagine that companies looking seriously into Linux.
 
After reading about Linux I want to recompile my colonel. Whatever that means. But Microsoft insists on hiding all the settings away in different places, I haven't worked out how to do it.
 
I install linux, customise it, tweak it and get it how I want to work - it's great for months and months and months. Then I'll try and do something I don't do every day, i.e. rip a DVD, burn a cd, use the RGB output of the laptop, use bluetooth, it'll work, but then something is affected and it completely renders the laptop/OS useless as it's not quite how it was before I tried to do that thing. And trying to fix it causes all sorts of issues, and you end up with a mess of an OS, but hey when you launch firefox the screensaver appears, and when you try and use evolution mail terminal windows start doing a rm -f -r which is always fun. So yeah until you need to do something with it it's great! :D

Seriously though, for a free OS and for how well it works it's brilliant. I'm just really really not familiar enough with it to be able to use it or troubleshoot it well.
 
Pretty much what freefaller says. Linux keeps breaking when I try to do something interesting with it, whilst Windows (since xp anyway) can generally cope ;)

I like using the text-based linux for running game servers on meaning that for server use it's great, but as a general use OS for most home users it kis too difficult to do anything with for the average home user.

Windows will last until they move all the linux commands to the background, increase it's stability and automate more of the underlying operating tasks. Then they need to sort out the compatability. It might happen, but it will take time.
 
That kind of thing can and does change though. 20 years ago it was "No IT manager ever got fired for buying IBM". It can change.
 
I work in IT, I have Ubuntu installed on dual boot with Windows, and have installed Oracle on it, and tbh I much prefer Windows. Installing Oracle was such a nightmare, so many file dependencies that needed to be downloaded before it would work, but there was no documentation about what should be there and it was very much trial and error along with vast amounts of trawling the internet. Installing it on windows was plain sailing, went through no problems. I think it's a long way from being a mainstream OS for the home user, it's too complicated for most of them. Heck a couple of times I've lost all display output due to trying to change graphics settings! lol
 
wannabedamned said:
Dual Booting is the Future. Or the past, Infact I'm doing it at present.

So yeah, Dual Boot, don't choose 1 over the other
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No. I think virtual machines are the future.

I did the whole dual booting thing and that was a pain - since I share the computer with others in the house who prefer windows apps.

I also went through the whole live-cd thing, but got tired of it.

Currently, I'm using a virtual machine to run Slackware within my windows session, so it only takes up a window (can go full screen). I assigned 15gb of hdd space and 1gb of ram for slackware. I must say, I'm really impressed how well it runs and it means that I can launch windows games etc. without having to reboot.

Also, I have a fairly old machine, some kind of pentium 3ghz with 3gb ram and the virtual machine runs very well. On newer machines it would be even better.

There is also the microsoft virtual machine v7 or something - but I found that a little restrictive. Try http://www.virtualbox.org/

Best thing is, you can setup as many of these virtual machines as you like and ditch them as easily.
 
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