On 02/08/15 22:53, Tim Streater wrote:
In article , Huge
wrote:

On 2015-08-02, JHY wrote:

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
On 01/08/15 22:55, JHY wrote:

[26 lines snipped]

And later than that with a Win system you could just plug your
memory stick into the Win system and have it visible auto and
wouldn't have been able to do that with the Unix system.

straw man.

No, its an example of coming up against the OS if you need to do that.

Plugging in a USB stick and having it automounted has worked under Unix
(and its relatives & descendants) for at least 15 years.

Yes, I really don't know WTF Mr JHY thinks he's talking about. Sounds a
bit like my win-fanboi brother and multiple screens attached to a
computer.

Its just Windows fanbois dredging up 15 years old issues.

The far more pertinent linux problem is when hardware manufacturers want
to retain rights to the driver code that supports their hardware. That
means it cant be bundled directly with Linux and has to be installed as
a 'with reservations' add-on.

Which is why there are still issues with some wifi chipsets and some
video chipsets.

And rather a lot of scanner chipsets.

It makes getting those working far far more of a pain than it needs to be.


The other bugbear is the slow rate of desktop penetration due to
inertia: its not worth porting apps for 5% of the desktop market, even
if the user base were happy to pay for them.

Of course of they all did, then there would be no reason not to use
Linux. Its a marketing catch 22 that Microsoft has been able to exploit
- but as you can see with some of the apps, why pay for Photoshop and
Windows when Gimp/Linux does *most* of what *most* people want out of an
image editing program.

Why pay for Quark or InDesign when Scribus does *most* of what you want
from a desktop publishing program..

These guys are cutting their own throats.


And then there is virtualisation: Machiens fast enough and with enough
RAM can now run windows in a sandbox where its vulnerabilities and
instabilities are not exposed, if they actually need to still run legacy
windows apps. Unless those apps need direct access to low level OS
tricks to drive specialised hardware.

OK you still need to pay for windows and the app BUT at least when it
crashes you don't have to reinstall everything: Just roll back to the
last stable snapshot - you did make sure the data you created wasn't
inside the windows environment didn't you?



--
New Socialism consists essentially in being seen to have your heart in
the right place whilst your head is in the clouds and your hand is in
someone else's pocket.