What Keeps You On (or Off) Windows in 2013? 1215
Five years ago today, reader J.J. Ramsey asked what's keeping you off Windows (itself a followup to this question about the opposite situation). With five years of development time gone by for Windows as well as all the alternative OSes, where does Windows stand for you today? (Is it the year of Linux on the Desktop yet?)
windows 7 (Score:4, Interesting)
It works (Score:5, Interesting)
I created this name 12 years ago because I was young, immature, and hated Microsoft with a passion.
(typical slashdotter at the time in 1999)
Windows crashed and DOS was horrible though slashdot had its loyalists I should not by 1993 create autoexec.bat files for Monkey Island and another to play Doom because of expanded vs extended memory?? WTF this is a 486 not a 8086?!
Around the time they were asked 10 years ago on what kept me off Windows questions
I tried Linux then and fell in love with the aspects of free software, tons of apps on cd (I was on dialup then), I did not have to pay $$$$ for compilers for game development, could get any gui I wanted, I could get paid a shit load of money if I had Unix on my resume.
I fell in love with FreeBSD. It was stable, never changed, just worked, unless I did something stupid to it. I started disliking Linux. It was beta quality and kept crashing compared to FreeBSD and Solaris. I felt it was the Windows version of Linux where crapware and hardware are thrown on it and it is not tested well.
I took a java programming course and gave up on FreeBSD as I needed Java 5 in 2004. I reluctantly started using XP.
Why in 2013 I stick with Windows
It works and no longer blows and sucks. For the slashdotters who have ran Linux for 10 years you have to ask yourself if your memories of IE 6 and WindowsME still apply today?
Windows 7 is stable, IE 10 is a modern browser and has 90% of Firefox's HTML 5 features, Office has its issues but it still is professional, and Adobe products are nice to have but they also exist on the Mac as well. Windows Server 2012 is ok. It is finally catching up and is finally VM ready.
Linux never just works and has problems with updates with my ATI and AMD hardware due to the lack of a stable ABI. It doesn't have Microsoft Office. Java is butt ugly as the fonts are broken in Debian/Ubuntu distros as the bug is 6 years old now! WTF. FreeBSD is out of the question today as 5.x and 6.x were horrible! I stuck with the 4.x all the way until 4.12 which was now quite stale by 2005.
My exwife asked me (no not flamebait moderators but her real opinion and words) why I use such an inferior system? My response was WTF Windows sucks, Windows blows, Windows is unstable, and went on and on. Her response was well you are the one who always has to reinstall your operating system. My Vista just works? Whose is better now?
She is right. World of Warcraft was a pain with Wine, then I had to get Ventrillo to work, and then Office. In the end it just is not worth it.
I keep CentOS around in virtualbox and VMWare. It rocks as a server
In 2011 after gnome 3 I gave up. Sorry guys. I put Windows 7 on and it just works. I have reinstalled it a few times but that is it. Compared to Windows 3.1 it is certainly tolerable.
Linux for years (Score:4, Interesting)
What keeps me off Windows? Apple and Microsoft! (Score:1, Interesting)
Viruses drove me from Win7 to Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not gonna pretend that viruses and malware don't exist on Linux. They do.
However the final straw that drove me to Linux over Windows 7 was a very, very nasty Java virus that managed to disable my antivirus program outright, disable my administrator account's admin privs, and even manage to corrupt some core DLLs required to boot Windows. At that point, I literally said "fuck it" and downloaded the then-current version of Linux Mint and gave it a whirl (after a few months I settled into Arch Linux and never looked back).
Also, I realized that I only really needed Windows 7 to play games, and I just don't have as much time for games as I used to. I still keep it around on a separate hard drive, ready to boot into at any time, but it is no longer my primary OS.
A host of things (Score:5, Interesting)
In rough order of importance:
1) Games. I am a gamer, I'd rather play video games than watch TV for entertainment. I also find that the games I like the best are either PC only (like Civ), or better on the PC (like Skyrim). So a PC it is. Well, Windows is far and away the best for games. Any other platform has way, WAY less games. So all other things equal, I'd be on Windows just for that.
2) Pro Audio. I like to play with audio creation and production. This is something I could do on a Mac, though not with my prefered tool (Cakewalk Sonar). I couldn't do it on Linux though, the audio production software there is abysmal, and even if it wasn't all the samples I own are Windows and Mac only, and I do not wish to rebuy them, nor have I found any for Linux remotely close in quality.
3) Price. This relates only to switching to a Mac, but to get what I want, that being a tower unit with some good hardware, it would be monkey-fuck retarded expensive compared to PC hardware. I am not a rich man, so while I'll spend a good bit on computers, I can't afford to just blow money for no reason.
4) Hardware support. Linux in particular has issues with much of the hardware I choose to use. I really don't feel like compromising on that, I don't want to have to say "Man I'd like to use that, but it won't work on my OS." Thus far, no piece of hardware I've want has not had Windows support.
5) Ease of use. Perhaps it is just my lack of familiarity with it, or my somewhat odd requirements for use (like pro audio and good 3D acceleration) but I seem to be able to find an unsolvable problem in Linux rather quickly. When I've tried to use it at work I'll find something I can't get to work that even stumps the Linux guys. I feel like I have to fight with the OS to get it to do things, and often the solution is "Oh just write a script," or "Just modify the code and recompile," which isn't an option. I'm not a programmer and have no wish to become one.
6) It works. I'm not big on change for change sake. Were I to move to another platform, someone would have to convince me of the superiority. They'd have to show me what it is I could do there I can't do now, or how I could do what I do better. Even if it is just equal, I've little interest in changing.
That's my reasons at home. At work, well I'm the Windows lead, so of course I use Windows. I need to be familiar with it and be able to easily administer the Windows servers because that's what I'm expected to do.
Too used to GNU/Linux to switch (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it's better (Score:4, Interesting)
There is something to be said about using an OS 90+% of the population uses. There are intangible and tangible benefits, like hardware working properly and to full capacity (not the lowest common denominator support Linux often boasts), like MS Office working well, saving you the effort of mucking about with Libre/Openoffice, Strange IE-only sites not being a issue, not worrying about updates breaking your system (updates are much more likely to break things under Linux), A stable video-editor (Linux has nothing compared to the windows side), being able to connect to a projector.
There is also the stability you get when you buy a complete desktop OS from the same vendor, with everything from the kernel to the UI because closely coordinated. This is better than the Linux approach of fiefdoms with everything being plugged together by the distros, praying that updating one package won't break another package because it's often impossible to test all the possible configuration variables.
When MS introduced UAC, discouraged the use of the registry (preferring a local approach to settings management), and separated the update manager from the browser windows and began offering a decent AV, all in vista, windows became a superior option. Linux offers litter benefit to the user because MS has largely addressed their problems.
Re:Microsoft Hired People To Make Positive Comment (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: because desktop linux is a toy and novelty (Score:5, Interesting)
If you look at msdn you will still see some ancient articles of mine. I have written books about .net and c#. When windows 8 was announced I decided that I will switch. Windows 8'to me was a piece of do do. I switched to osx and Linux. And now I use for the most part Linux.
As I trade the market my main concern was excel. But what was interesting is that I ended up not needing it because I changed the way that I write algos. I used to be my algos would use excel as the front end. Now I use HTML. Let me tell you HTML rocks, and excel sucks. What is more impressive with HTML is its ability to do whatever I want. If I want a grid with spreadsheet like functionality it is possible. Do I want to insert a graph, no problem. It really is an evolution.
What made the switch hard was the leap of faith. I have used Linux since 94, but was always a bit disappointed. However now with both osx and Linux I can honestly say windows is not needed anymore. And if you say you need it, then it is because you don't want to make the leap of faith. Especially with osx around.
if u believe in "the free market"does it matter (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux as a serious OS has been around for what, 10 years ?
Yet almost no one uses it.
At some point, you have to say, the market has spoken.
For whatever reason, people don't like it.
I work with a set of modest geeks, and none of them (not one) uses linux for anything. They all have tried it.
SO, ymmv, but at some point you have to stop blaming the evil MS, and face up to the truth: people have had 10 years to try linux, and they have said NO
(my personal opinion is the silly idea that choice is good, which accounts for all the distros, is a major factor in the lack of linux uptake)
Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty (Score:3, Interesting)
I can do anything I need to do on a Linux desktop and the only place I find the need to use another OS is in video editing.
Nearly identical experience except for me it's video editing and Lightroom 4. I use AfterShot Pro on Ubuntu but like the color tools better in Lightroom. That and Netflix, but that's available on Android now.
It's not going to be Linux that kills Windows, Android is the real killer. And as soon as video and photo editing are available, there won't be anyone using Windows at home and Excel is not going to change that.
Bring on the Microsoft astroturfers. That's the surest sign ever of dead company walking.
Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with you about generation of reports and other things for widely considered submittal. I was extremely productive in grad school and was spending my time on the subject at hand, not on technicalities and drudgery, precisely because for every homework problem or lab report I could do "make submit" and it'd end up where it was supposed to. Even graduate engineering students routinely seem to waste insane amounts of time on clicking their way through the most rudimentary of changes that, once you have scripted the process, become so routine you don't even think about them.
Ansys, for example, is a usability 7th circle of hell until you realize it demonstrably wasn't designed to be used normally in point-and-click mode (maybe it was, but the designers were on crack the whole time). You can point-and-click a bit to get a feel for things, but if you want reproducible analyses, you must script them from the start all the way to generation and saving of the plots. I would not trust any FEA done in Ansys unless accompanied by a script that starts with a system in default state and ends up with output files you're after (raw output, tabular data, plots).
Same really goes for, say, generating plots or generally data-dependent drawings in Office. Once you're down to populating the entire document from a template in VBA, it becomes even less hassle to do it on a Unix system using Latex and makefiles. Never mind the basics like version control. Text-based scripts and formats really mesh well with diff tools used with version control. VBA embedded into Office documents is not handled by normal differs; you pretty much have to whip your own to dissect the OLE compound file and feed the extracted text via diff. The work needed to maintain such a tool (I've had it for a while) is simply not worth it when in the text-based Unix approach it simply works quite effortlessly. Good luck to anyone wishing to develop a blame tool for Excel, for example - good luck dealing with figuring out who did what in to an Excel spreadsheet otherwise.
Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time this type of question comes up someone pipes up with this kind of statement.
It always makes me wonder if I'm the only one that has zero problems with sound? Or pretty much anything? Am I just that lucky and skillful and freaking awesome in selecting hardware?
For other desktop uses I again must just be some kind of freak outlier. The only time I've had problems using Linux in the office was when I worked at places that were outright Linux (really "non-Windows") hostile and would actively prevent you from using anything else or at best just didn't help a lick. If it wasn't that kind of place I had no problems doing everything everyone else was doing. Maybe it was just that my job didn't require me to be some fancy Excel jockey or something.
Am I really alone in that?
Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty (Score:3, Interesting)
My response to the question is simple too: WORKSFORME
Sometimes it seems to me the Desktop Linux developers are actually trying to sabotage Desktop Linux and not make it better. Whenever Microsoft screws up, they try to make Desktop Linux even worse!
So I've given up on Desktop Linux. Server Linux on the other hand is generally better than Windows. Windows is terrible for servers. For example, going through the event logs to find out stuff is such a pain and an often fruitless endeavour. Stuff on unix/Linux somehow tends to create more useful logs.
Maybe I'll switch when Windows 7 is unsupported and Microsoft makes future Windows versions even worse than Windows 8.
I've made a few suggestions to Ubuntu:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/29001/ [ubuntu.com]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693 [launchpad.net]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/148440 [launchpad.net]
Microsoft is disappointing too. With their billions of dollars and thousands of smart people, they give us disappointments like Vista, Windows 7 and Metro?
Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty (Score:4, Interesting)
You do if you pay for it. Trust me on this, I've got 18+ years of blue chip financial IT experience to back this up.
(My CV [mattowen.com] )
The proper support that Corporate IT get with MS is exactly the reason why Linux and Open Source/Free Office apps will never become de-facto on workplace desktops.
These days, all Corporate IT departments care about when choosing software from a new vendor, is how good the support is. If the support model isn't up to scratch then the tender will often go to an inferior solution that has better support (I've seen this way too many times...).
-Jar