Linux as an everyday OS ?

v0n said:
"You can have blackbox, fluxbox and it runs fast" is not really a good case. Windows desktop is bloated and fast, linux desktop can be either minimalistic and fast or fully featured and much slower.
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I would say gnome is just as fully featured as windows. The thing is the developers want to keep it simple and not go overboard with the configuration options, because the hardcore users who need this can edit the configs, the normal users do not need this. Windows GUI is one of the worst areas of it. Im not really a fan of KDE my self. I agree on it being bloated.

You got to understand that the developers do this mainly as a hobby (although shuttleworths money is changing that) and they have day-time jobs. Its not like anyone is paying them for the development of the OS. Yes anyone can hack away at the codebase, but the changes still need to be approved by the relevant devs.

v0n said:
Once again - no matter how personal you gonna go against me - the truth is - thanks to linux coding community having their heads stuck up their a-holes and padding each other on the back the current situation is - at this day and hour there is very little that XP box with cygwin or Interix/Unix Services for Windows (whichever way you want to go) can't do faster, easier and with better interface than linux box. As a desktop it looses to all, as a server it begins to loose as well. And any amount of tea bagging me across forehead with "you should get some linux training" won't change the fact I've seen it before. It's the fall of SGI and Sun once again. And once again the industry hardheadedly responds - "that's not true, look - if we strip it to bare minimum - see how nicely it runs". Not the point. Shortsighness is worse than a plague....
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So we are talking about servers here then? I would like to see any mainframes/supercomputers/massive parallel architectured systems run windows to a reliable and functional level.
I don't have any numbers to hand but I think you will find the majority of webservers run on *nix as well. Maybe there is a reason for this?

M0KUJ1N said:
never worked in a scientific computing environment then I take it?

I cant really imagine producing papers in latex under cygwin to a high standard tbh
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Miktex is a pretty decent windows tex editor.

One thing I would like to see is games studios developing more for *nix as well. Having said that with m$ buying a lot of the studios in england, I don't have high hopes. Idsoftware have always been good in this respect.

The driver situation is getting better but the onus is on the manufacturers. There is only so far reverse engineering will take you, and with acts like the DMCA removing rights this is getting harder and harder to do without legal action.
 
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tbz_ck said:
The biggest is multimonitor support with the presentation package.
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OK, cool, thanks for replying to me.

I must admit this is something I don't use (at least, not to present with, i'll knock up the odd presentation to mail round, etc) so not noticed the particular deficiency, but it's certainly one I can buy :)

Gav.
 
v0n said:
"You can have blackbox, fluxbox and it runs fast" is not really a good case. Windows desktop is bloated and fast, linux desktop can be either minimalistic and fast or fully featured and much slower.
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Haha, are you trying to be funny? Have you ever actually used fluxbox or even better openbox? They have about a million more features and useful tricks than windows/sawfish/metacity/compix/kde's window manager.

I would say windows managers are one of the areas where linux is way ahead of windows (don't know about OSX having never used it, but I assume that some of the ideas come from there).

Here's an interesting fact for you. Once I have booted to my desktop, conky reports (i have buffers removed from the calc) my total memory usage to be ~70mb. Thats with services like mpd, slim, mpdscribble, as well as my desktop. I've got a whole 1Gb of ram to play with, so I don't care how much it uses, I have a 2.2Ghz Athlon 64, so I dont really care if it is resource hungry. I have tried many different desktops. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Windows, Flux, FVWM, Pekwm. But I always go back to my trusty combination of openbox, pypanel, conky. Not because I'm a stikler for resources, but because it is amazingly fast, very powerful, and allows me to work in a fast natural way.

If you have a browser, and email client, a couple of filemanager windows, a couple of text editor windows, maybe a console, perhaps gaim, gmpc, maybe a dvi viewer, the gimp, maybe a specialist app like maple. Now try that in windows. Tell me how fast it runs, tell me how easy it is to find what you want, switch windows, and work efficiently. Then do the same in openbox. Thats a real example of what my desktop is like when I'm creating a lab report.

To sum up, I really think above example demonstrates, that lightweight window managers such as openbox, are more powerful and produce a better desktop environment that most "bloated" desktops.
 
So what you basically said is that minimalistic desktop under linux can be fast. And that is different from what I said how? :D

I think we strike major problem here - you all presume the topic was "Linux as an everyday OS for geek" I presumed the topic was "Linux as an everyday OS". Just because I can make my fluxbox desktop pretty, fast and full of conky numbers and flashing graphs from gkrellm2 doesn't make it any more functional as everyday OS as it is.
Scenario: Your typical first time user wants to open mail from his boss, with Word attachement. If he digs deep enough, if he's persistant enough he will find his way to term app, yum, apt or maybe even emerge packages he needs. Presuming he will pick easy enough distro and won't get into trouble with unresolvable dependacies and burried by daftness of rpm or something else apps needed for mail and office documents. What installation won't do for him however is produce usable additions to GUI in any of the light and fast desktops. Installed apps will be ready to be invoked from shell. But that's not really GUI way, is it, calling progs from shell? Will the new packages appear as program groups to a start button equivalent? Not likely. Icons on desktop? Not likely. Fast launch anywhere on bar? Not really. For such divine simplicity he would have to reach for megaheavy desktops and spoil the fastlopezness and swishiness of the fluxbox. In fast desktop manual edit will be required. Perhaps even in some custom format. Things will get complicated. Simple installation might get frustrating. Geek end user will have something to play with. Regular end user will simply get annoyed....

Another fun example. Multimedia box. Give a regular guy Windows and, for example, Media Portal and then give him Linux box and tell to get MythTV working. Beauty.

Is linux ready to be everyday OS, for just about anyone. Hell no. And the longer I listen to arguments like "it's something done after hours by guys that aren't paid for it" the longer I think it will never be. You wouldn't want half working car or half built house, why insist on the idea of others trying to their work on half working desktop? Just because someone out there was rumoured to actually have E17 properly working it doesn't mean there is something to beat Vista with...
 
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