On 2014-06-20, mike wrote:
On 6/19/2014 5:53 PM, DoN. Nichols wrote:

[ ... all of my previous text snipped -- not needed here I think ... ]

We're in high agreement about the state of linux.
Difference is that you ignore the significant effects of those minor
lacks of support.

99.9% of the time I spend at my keyboard is using firefox or thunderbird.
For those, it really doesn't matter which OS I use.
So the 99.9% statistic sounds like a no-brainer...
but
Statistics rarely tell the whole story.

Granted. Were you the one who posted the original problem?
I've lost track there. If not, does *he* really want to do anything
which linux can't do for him?

My VOIP system is not supported by linux.
When I run linux, I don't have a phone. Kinda defeats the purpose
of having a phone.

O.K. I don't use VOIP so did not consider that.

But there are times when I consider a state of "no phone" to be
a *benefit* when trying to work on something. :-)

I have four TV cards that I use to time-shift TV.
None are supported by linux.
When I run linux, my TV doesn't record.
Kinda defeats the purpose of having a TV recorder.

O.K. Again not something which I do.

If I edit a text file in one system and then another, it inevitably
merges all the lines into one long line. Not cool.

*Plain* text? Hmm ... you do know about the dos2unix and
unix2dos programs? Convert the CRLF pair that MS-DOS uses to the
LF which unix uses and back the other way. Interesting, they are not
present in my Ubuntu box.

O.K. "apt-get install unix2dos" got them both, so I don't even
have to bother compiling them from source.

Most word processors seem to like to keep each paragraph as a
single massively long line.

Unix editors like gnu can handle any line length you can fit in
the system's memory.

Jove (my one favorite editor) barfs at over 2K line length --
but an easy change to the source and a re-compilation turns it to some
thing more reasonable. I forget whether the max is currently 32K or 64K
but somewhere around there is enough to deal with the e-mail with the
"paragraph is a single line" disease. :-)

I don't write many programs, but they're all in Visual Basic.
Or PIC basic pro.
Or Palm basic.
NEVER in C.

O.K. I've never used VB. I'll bet that the PIC basic pro (or
an equivalent) is available from somewhere. (It didn't *come* with the
Windows box, did it?) Perhaps even the Palm basic as well.

I've written in a number of BASICs, (the best two were HP's
Rocky Mountain Basic, and MicroWare's BASIC-09 for OS-9.)

Assembly language for motorola's MC6800 and MC6809.

A little FORTRAN.

Quite a bit of Pascal.

Different strokes for different folks.

I've amassed a number of utility programs that I'm not willing to port.

O.K. Your choice. I ported a bunch of utilities which I wrote
from DOS-68 to OS-9 to Unix with C only being an option in the latter
two.

Rebooting doesn't sound like much until you realize that you loose
coherency among
all your bookmarks and history and passwords and all the other stuff
automagically maintained by the OS and apps. No problem, build yet
another linux machine to be a mail server...yeah, right!!

I find FireFox offering to sync my bookmarks and the like
between systems -- though I don't know whether that translates to
storing it offline somewhere *they* own. :-)

Bookmarks can easily be exported into HTML and then read into a
browser on another system.

If you're gonna run windows in a VM, you still have all the activation
issues plus another layer of confusion/configuration for the apps.

Right -- with the benefits that the virtual environment can be
stable while you add or change hardware, since it is all emulated
anyway, so once you have it configured, you don't need to worry about
re-activating it.

Remember that most of the really good stuff developed for/by linux
has been ported to windows.

Yes -- even the command-line stuff. I used a batch of unix
utilities in a Windows machine at work to make myself happier. Trying to
remember who the vendor was. And later, there is the CYGWIN.

Another way of looking at the situation is exemplified in Firefox.
The user interfaces are different enough to be annoying.
Look at the configuration menu. Different places.

O.K. Since I don't use Windows, I didn't know about that. Same
thing between Any of my unix programs and the Mac Mini with OS-X. The
Mac moves all the stuff which was in the top bar of programs into its
own top bar, which changes depending on where the focus is. (The Mac
does have a unix under the GUI, and I go to that level frequently,
because *I* am more comfortable in that environment.

OK, stand on your soapbox and scream that linux does it the "right"
way.

Nope! It is more a matter of the comfortable way.

Now where I would scream about the right way vs the wrong way
would be on keyboards -- in particular the location of the "Control" key.
For me, it really needs to be to the left of the 'A' key, and I could do
without the "Caps Lock" totally. But this is because a lot of the
programs I use require frequent use of the "Control" key. As a result,
I tend to collect Sun USB keyboards and use them with the ex Windows
boxes, and the Mac Mini, and everything where I can.

That's not the issue. The issue is that the minority linux
version defies convention and thumbs it's collective nose at the
incumbent majority. It may be right, but it's a lousy strategy
if you want more linux desktop users.

Actually -- it is more that it follows a *different* convention,
formed by the X11 community, and things like SunTools and other
windowing systems which preceded X11. For those of us who prefer unix,
it is a very comfortable convention.

And -- a lot of that is selectable by which GUI you use. There
are a number of them, including those which people who came to the unix
world from Windows wrote to look like unix.

And the Mac can easily claim that their convention is the
*original* one, as they got the windowing system from the Xerox Star,
and Microsoft got Windows by trying to copy Apple's Macintosh. (Not
to mention how they got MS-DOS -- by ripping off (through a third party)
CP/M-86. Go early enough in the MS-DOS world, and you will find Digital
Research (CP/M) copyright notices compiled into the utilities. :-)

The only valid reason that typically shows up is the malware issue.
And it's WAY overblown for those of us with the restraint to watch where
we are and avoid clicking on everything shiny...and use firewall/malware
apps.

Well ... I recently got an e-mail which I *know* carried the
"CryptoLocker" malware. It didn't do anything, because my system:

1) Does not try to run everything in e-mail attachments. *

2) Does not know how to run a ".exe" or a ".scr" file.

3) Does not know how to run Intel code. I'm typing on an
UltraSPARC system. :-)

* Outlook Express at least used to (unless carefully configured
from the default shipped) try to preview attachments, and would
often execute malware in the process.

Of course, if you don't use Microsoft's e-mail clients, you are
less likely to trigger something like this -- except by careless
clicking.

I don't think I've EVER had a malware problem. I've had a few alerts
from the virus scanner, but most of them were false positives.

My biggest problem from malware was on day-one of one in
particular, which was infecting Windows machines around the world, and
they were *all* trying to send me copies to infect my systems too. My
systems could not be infected, but 900+ large binaries really brought my
e-mail system to a crawl, until I activated the "databytes" limit on
qmail -- which rejected anything above the limit set in that file.

The rest
were where expected malware and ran on a separate machine. If linux
ever achieves major use on the desktop, you can be sure that the malware
will catch up. Security of the OS is a minor issue. The careless clicky
finger is the bigger issue. And that's OS independent.

Absolutely. But if you can keep people from reading e-mail as
root the damage which it can do is minimized. And not having e-mail
clients which happily try to "preview" attachments by (possibly) running
them is another big help.

And for systems exposed to the outside net, I run OpenBSD -- a
unix flavor which is aggressively security conscious.

So, if you gotta run windows for anything, you might as well run
it for everything. You can always run linux in a VM if you ever
find anything that must have it.

While I have a dedicated Windows machine which is almost never
booted. Perhaps once or twice a year.

I boot a live linux CD for online banking.
Otherwise, haven't fired off my linux VM
except when I was really, really bored and needed more
frustration in my diet. Ditto for the other three linux
machines sitting gathering dust. The effort required to walk
across the room to push the power button far exceeds any benefit
to be gained.

One of the other things I like about my unix systems -- I can
log into any of them around the house without having to walk to where
they are. I use ssh to log in (encrypted data transfer, and doubly
encrypted during the login phase), and once logged in, I start a program
on that system, and it pops up a window on the system from which I
connected, and accepts the keyboard and mouse form that system. (There
is a program to let that be done between Windows and Unix (both
directions) -- but while running the Windows system from a remote
machine, the Windows screen duplicates the screen seen by the remote
system -- and anyone who comes by there can play with the mouse and
keyboard to interfere with what you are doing. On the unix systems, not
only is that a different session (no interaction), but I can use it from
its own keyboard and monitor while two or three others are also using
the same system.

Booting a live linux thumb drive is an excellent way to test
used computers. Most people don't do that a lot. Interesting
that I messed with creating that live thumb drive for a long time
using linux. Finally ran the windows utility to do it. click, click,
done! I can multi boot two linuxes, one windows and save a bunch of
files using one thumb drive and a windows utility to make it.
And I had to learn nothing, zero, nada about command line utilities
or partitions or boot flags or boot managers
or anything else operatingsystemy.

O.K. I created a bootable thumb drive to install linux on a
CD-ROM-less machine (larger than a palm-top, smaller than a laptop)
using the Mac Mini. It just happened to be easier at the time.

Linux on the desktop is so close that we can taste it. But with the current
development infrastructure that lets anybody and their dog modify the code
and add a new distro to the chaos, I don't expect it will ever stabilize
and defragment to the degree necessary to displace MS. There's just too
much linux ego involved and no leadership.

This is one reason that I prefer OpenBSD for systems exposed to
the outside net. Serious security focus, single person at the head of
the project.

And yes -- I dislike later versions of Ubuntu linux for probably
the same reasons that Windows users might like it. :-)

There are also problems
with the business model of "FREE as in beer". Hard to make a business
out of that...unless it's a business helping other businesses navigate the
chaos...like redhat.

Some companies *must* have a service contract. For them, RedHat
makes sense.

And, for most of us, windows is "free" too. It comes with the hardware.

Not always. I get some of my hardware from hamfests, and there
may not even be a disk drive in there, let alone an OS.


But it's only been a few decades...see where it goes.
Maybe MS will commit suicide.

They may, indeed.

My first home desktop computer was a Unix system in '89.

And mine were (in order)

1) Altair 680b (raised from a kit)

2) SWTP 6800 (also from a kit).

3) SWTP 6809 (also from a kit, and the first to run a somewhat
unix-like OS -- OS-9.

4) COSMOS CMS-16/UNX (v7 unix on Motorola 68000 CPU).

And gazillions since then.

I've run linux since the days it would fit on a floppy.
I've got more linux distro CD's than I can count...most
have been installed and run over the years.
In all this time, nothing compelling...

While I really liked OS-9, and from there I got access to weird
unix systems at work -- being used for an e-mail system written in
*FORTRAN* of all things. But that prepared me for the unix system from
a hamfest.

And all of this before I every *used* a MS-DOS machine, let
along a Windows machine.

Are we having fun yet?

I know that *I* am. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

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