What can't you do with linux

JonJ678 · 26 Dec 2009 at 01:24

Presently I can't get flash, wifi or virtualbox to behave. Strongly suspect this to be my own fault and curable by OS reinstallation.

In general there's some cad software which doesn't run well enough under wine or virtualbox yet, and similar issues with games. Issues are exclusively with software written solely for windows though, and linux is taking a reasonable stab at them regardless. Aside from that, there is nothing I can persuade windows to do that I can't get linux to.

The alternative of "what can't you do with windows" might be interesting. My favorites so far are cleanly integrated ramdisks and seperate x sessions on each monitor, but there's a whole host of useful commands that I don't know how to do under windows. Say, find every .doc or .odt file on my computer and copy them to a given directory, then remove duplicates and maintain this via rsync & cron while backing it up remotely.

MotherMayI · 26 Dec 2009 at 14:31

.walls said:
iphone != ipod

Heh, yeah - But Id of thought itd still work for simply managing music/videos?

.walls · 26 Dec 2009 at 15:20

MotherMayI said:
Heh, yeah - But Id of thought itd still work for simply managing music/videos?

You can do it with the older iphones (anything with v1.x firmware), but not any of the newer ones like the 3g or 3gs. Although they are really nice phones, I'll never buy one again because Apple seem to go out of their way to make sure that you can't use third party apps to sync with these devices... which of course means that using an OS like linux is a no-no. Saying that though; on Windows (on your VM?), MediaMonkey can be used instead of itunes which is a small bonus!

PermaBanned · 26 Dec 2009 at 18:48

The point is that none of this is by any fault of Linux. Quite the contrary. It's just not popular enough for developers to create native programs for Linux, although these do exist in most cases. The reason it isn't popular enough? I'll be damned if i know. The latest batch of Linux distro's (Ubuntu 9.10, Mint 8, OpenSUSE 11.2 and Mandriva 2010 to name but a few) are easily advanced and easy to use enough to replace Windows for damn near any user without complaint.

I just hope Microsoft loose their monopoly soon...

Outcast · 27 Dec 2009 at 13:58

I can't quite grasp this iTunes thing ?

My daughters iPods (Plural - She's got the original and the new skinny one) both are seen as USB devices.

To buy Mp3's Amazon works great and works on Ubuntu native

manic111 · 28 Dec 2009 at 12:36

Superewza said:
The point is that none of this is by any fault of Linux. Quite the contrary. It's just not popular enough for developers to create native programs for Linux, although these do exist in most cases. The reason it isn't popular enough? I'll be damned if i know. The latest batch of Linux distro's (Ubuntu 9.10, Mint 8, OpenSUSE 11.2 and Mandriva 2010 to name but a few) are easily advanced and easy to use enough to replace Windows for damn near any user without complaint.

I just hope Microsoft loose their monopoly soon...

You're right that these issues are not the fault of Linux, but this isn't a thread in which we are trying to attribute blame. The OP wants to know if Ubuntu could replace Windows for him, and the answer was "probably not" for the above reasons, particularly those of the iPhone and gaming. The lack of support on both of these fronts isn't the fault of Ubuntu, but they are still things which would stop many people switching to it "full time".

.walls · 28 Dec 2009 at 12:58

Outcast said:
I can't quite grasp this iTunes thing ?

My daughters iPods (Plural - She's got the original and the new skinny one) both are seen as USB devices.

To buy Mp3's Amazon works great and works on Ubuntu native

http://www.upload3r.com/serve/261209/1261847951.jpeg[img][/QUOTE]

As I mentioned before iphone != ipod. An iPhone does [b]not[/b] have a disk access mode, therefore it needs to be jailbroken so that you can access it over ssh. Once that's done, then you can mount the device (sshfs) and write data to it.... this is all good and well if you have an application that can then update the ipod/iphone database, but Apple deliberately make that difficult and every single revision of the firmware they introduce further obfuscation of the hash. to my knowledge, the only people that have it bang on (other than Apple of course) are the guys that do MediaMonkey. libgpod is an excellent project which has attempted to reverse engineer the database hash, but hasn't really gone anywhere since they had the iphone v1 firmware nailed.

Dev2 · 29 Dec 2009 at 03:10

Run games natively.
iPod compatibility is terrible.
Linux fails miserably on Mac hardware compared to OS X and Windows.
Linux laptops have 50-75% of battery life compare to their Windows counterparts.

People are generally over zealous and too attached to their chosen operating system whichever it is and fail to acknowledge that their system is inferior in anyway. I have no idea why this is.

.walls · 29 Dec 2009 at 10:53

Dev2 said:
Run games natively.

You mean like Doom 3, Quake, UT2004, etc, etc? Yeah - I completely see what you mean

Dev2 said:
iPod compatibility is terrible.

And that's the fault of linux how, exactly?

Dev2 said:
Linux fails miserably on Mac hardware compared to OS X and Windows.

Err... does this even need a comment?

Dev2 said:
Linux laptops have 50-75% of battery life compare to their Windows counterparts.

I call BS. My laptop dual boots Linux/XP... and surprise, surprise the battery lasts just as long no matter which OS is running.

Dev2 said:
People are generally over zealous and too attached to their chosen operating system whichever it is and fail to acknowledge that their system is inferior in anyway. I have no idea why this is.

You sound like a troll. I have no idea why this is :rolleyes:

NotAGolf · 29 Dec 2009 at 18:49

Thanks for the replies everyone. Looks like I will be keeping hold of my windows install for now, but I'll try and merge things over gradually and try get as windows-free as possible, then review my options after a few more months!

PermaBanned · 29 Dec 2009 at 21:13

And on that note i'd just like to say that i installed Mandriva over my Win7 install today (was running out of space). I only bought it with the mindset of i'll use it for gaming, but that would mainly be source games that i've got to work with Wine anyway and i must have used it for less than an hour in total.

brad82 · 3 Jan 2010 at 15:02

I work in web dev and that is one of the things that is better to do in linux than windows (so long as you are not planning to do ASP [but why would anyone want to do that])

But yea, the graphics side lacks imo

Smit · 4 Jan 2010 at 09:09

brad82 said:
I work in web dev and that is one of the things that is better to do in linux than windows (so long as you are not planning to do ASP [but why would anyone want to do that])

But yea, the graphics side lacks imo

There's nothing wrong with using ASP or .NET for web design, especially the back end.

SMN · 4 Jan 2010 at 12:19

Siliverlight 2.0 - the basis of Sky player, doesnt work as Moonlight is only 1.9 beta. That annoys me.

Dj_Jestar · 4 Jan 2010 at 13:22

Windows programming, iTunes and gaming are the only reasons I use Windows. Else it's gentoo.

I'm getting tired of the blame game. There are problems when running Linux only. You will be restricted when it comes to using certain devices and software. I don't care who is at fault, be it a vendor refusing to supply drivers, or a monopolistic conglomerate refusing to allow something to work on anything but their own product. That is irrelevant, as I can't use it on my Linux setup, so I boot back to windows for that.