I has Windows 7

[Engels]

Hmm, maybe a company could take a variant of *nix, develop a stable and uniform GUI for it, provide a uniform file system and user directory structure and market that...I wonder who will do that...hmm...

[stray]

hah! apparently that's harder than it looks, because only a couple of companies have done it (done it well at least). those couple of companies are now the same company. and the fact that they were a "company" to begin with helped (as opposed to a loose conglomerate of "neckbeards"). having branding and an overall vision and identity is half of the story. but also, it helps if said company cares about the overall user experience enough to cater and develop that OS to any market (this is where i doubt google. and they know it too. hence why they're only playing to their strengths with the netbook market for now).

in the end, i think only apple has the talent and resources - and even the ability to give a damn - to transform a nix variant into a worthy desktop OS. so what's the point of linux. Apple/Next already did it.

microsoft could do it too if they wanted

[Trippy]

A lot more companies than that have done that. You just don't hear about them cause they weren't meant for the consumer market.

Edit: well maybe not "a lot" a lot.

[Kitsune]

Linux mostly makes me sad.  The nerd in me very much wants to see an open-source OS succeed.  The pragmatist in me loads up an Ubuntu boot disk, sees a 1998-era UI and programs that all require some extensive tinkering to work right, says, "Fuck this." and reboots.  If an OS is too much hassle for a professional IT consultant to work with, it's never going to make the mainstream.  Back in college when I had seemingly thirty hours of free time in every day, I got Slackware up and running on my 386, off of a stack of 3.5" floppies, after lots of tweaking and compiling of the kernel to make it work with my hardware.  Now that I work for a living, I just don't have the time.

Linux is fine, if:

1. You have no money, and I mean NO money to buy an OS, and lots of free time.  Or
2. You only need to do basic web surfing and e-mailing and can get by on the applications that came on the install CD and never need to add or configure anything.  Or
3. You're a programmer and it's your hobby.

I do some volunteer computer work for a charity in my city that gives basic job training to ex-cons and welfare families to try to get them a foothold in the job market.  This one guy there was schlocking together donated hardware into working systems, installing Ubuntu on them, and selling them to the students.  Selling as in charging actual money for computers he was given for free, which was classy.  But the upshot was that all these completely computer-illiterate people were handed Linux systems, and predictably couldn't do a damn thing with them.  One woman came to me and said, "This modem isn't working in my computer."  Unsurprisingly, she hadn't compiled the drivers.  Or downloaded all of the modules the compiler needed to compile the drivers.  Or known the first thing about compiling anything.  So that was great.

[stray]

A lot more companies than that have done that. You just don't hear about them cause they weren't meant for the consumer market.

Edit: well maybe not "a lot" a lot.

Consumer market is a great part of what I mean when I discuss "desktop OS". Sure, you could place some things together purely from open source that presents a decent desktop experience at first, but a desktop OS equivalent to OS X or Windows offers more than just a basic desktop experience. People can install good commercial software on them, for one. Part of that is because there's standardization so developers of these apps can target it, part of it is other things like having a relationship with these developers. Etcetera. All of the little intangibles that make companies like Apple and Microsoft good at what they do, and enable people to work with them. I think these things help make a desktop OS good just as much as the technological end. It all trickles down to the people who really matter.. the users. And if users don't find the kind of products they want on said OS (however polished it appears to be), then it's a worthless "desktop OS".

Otoh, linux's entire infrastructure.. or whatever you want to call it.. it's the anthesis of this. It'll never succeed on the standardization front, nor will there ever be a company developing a distribution that has the reach of MS or Apple to make their shit even worthwhile to developers (and in turn, consumers). Google has the relationships and power make a competitive *nix variant, but like I've suggested, I don't think they even care to have that kind of reach. As big as they are, they limit themselves. They are an internet/communications company. I can't imagine them caring to branch to the gaming world or creative markets, for example. At best, I could see Adobe guarantee AIR runs well on it (but not a full blown CS suite). Or maybe getting blizzard to make a browser game.  

[ezrast]

Linux mostly makes me sad.  The nerd in me very much wants to see an open-source OS succeed.  The pragmatist in me loads up an Ubuntu boot disk, sees a 1998-era UI and programs that all require some extensive tinkering to work right, says, "Fuck this." and reboots.

This. I have Arch Linux installed on both my desktop and laptop, set up as the default option on the boot menu. I want to be a Linux geek. But I can't remember the last time I've actually been able to justify booting into Linux. I enjoyed tinkering with it when I was into that, and I learned a lot about computers in the process, but anymore there's no point in it unless I'm doing serious development work. Which doesn't happen very often because I'm not a developer.

Honestly, if I could just play all my games without rebooting, that would probably be enough to sway me away from Windows semi-permanently. Also, obligatory

[Engels]

Also, obligatory comic

Geeze, god yes. What is -wrong- with Linux that its incapable of using video hardware to render full screen flash? I've tried and tried, never got it to work.

[Numtini]

My video card blew up a little while ago and I took the opportunity to buy/build a new PC. I put the thing together after work while I was making dinner. I finished dinner around 6:30? I put the DVD in the drive and let it do it's thing. Twenty minutes later I had a functioning system, I downloaded the latest video drivers and vent and copied my EQ2 folder from backup and did some tweaks and downloaded a few other programs and I was up and zoning in to Veeshan's Peak 90 minutes after I put the installer disk in my PC.

Call me when I can do this with Linux.

[Tebonas]

The hard disk of my Mac Mini died a few months ago. Lazy bastard that I am I installed MacOS on an external Firewire HDD, the system automatically restored all my programs and settings from the Time Machine partition, and every Program worked just as it did before on my internal HDD.

Reinstallations are NOT the thing you should brag about with Windows. You can't even move Programs from one Partition to another without headaches, let alone the OS itself.

[Ookii]

My video card blew up a little while ago and I took the opportunity to buy/build a new PC. I put the thing together after work while I was making dinner. I finished dinner around 6:30? I put the DVD in the drive and let it do it's thing. Twenty minutes later I had a functioning system, I downloaded the latest video drivers and vent and copied my EQ2 folder from backup and did some tweaks and downloaded a few other programs and I was up and zoning in to Veeshan's Peak 90 minutes after I put the installer disk in my PC.

Call me when I can do this with Linux.

*Ring* *Ring* you can do everything but EQ2, who knows if they have support for that in Cedega.

[Big Gulp]

*Ring* *Ring* you can do everything but EQ2, who knows if they have support for that in Cedega.

EQ2, WoW, Photoshop, Flash (decently, at any rate), etc, etc, etc.  The OSS alternatives to these pieces of software are usually amateurish at best and not as full featured.  True, you can play WoW or HL2 through Wine, but why would I want to fuck around in emulation and get worse results than just running Windows?  What compelling piece of software does Linux really boast?  I don't use an OS to just fiddle with settings and play the OS, I use an OS to run games, tools, etc.  Linux falls down just on that score through a complete lack of support.  That's not even getting into the hardware nightmares (for instance, sound is still a royal bitch in Linux).

It's just not a very good consumer-level OS.  Sorry.  For that you need coherence.

[Sky]

Sound is apparently tough. My Creative X-Fi is the barrier to me dual-booting into OSX on my pc.

[Ookii]

Bah, more derailing, this should be about Windows 7!  If anyone finds out how to bypass the invitation and password for Remote Assistance that would be great, they we could use it on our Enterprise network.

If you want to run Windows applications you shouldn't use Linux.  That's about all there is to it.

[Tebonas]

Something On-Topic:

I love D-Fend reloaded. It basically is just a wrapper for Dosbox, but it did away with my Windows 7 issue that made Adom in Full Screen display the wrong colors.

Now I can play old Dos games without a hassle. Yay!

[Brogarn]

It's just not a very good consumer-level OS. 

I'm the Unix/Linux administrator for my company. I run Ubuntu as my desktop which I installed myself. I vastly prefer both Solaris and Linux over Windows in an enterprise environment. Yet there isn't a Linux box anywhere in my home. I do that shit all day and sometimes over entire nights and weekends because unless I'm on vacation, I'm on call. When I get home I want to be able turn the PC  on, log in to whatever game I'm playing, and just not have to think too much about it outside of the occasional defrag. Linux just doesn't allow that. While in a server/enterprise environment, it usually just runs and will typically run for as long as you want without reboot (although if you're running Oracle, I wouldn't recommend it), it just can't compete on the desktop when it comes time to play.

Oh, and while I refused to run Windows Vista, I preordered Windows 7. Just to throw out a semi topic related sentence.   

[Trippy]

A lot more companies than that have done that. You just don't hear about them cause they weren't meant for the consumer market.

Edit: well maybe not "a lot" a lot.

Consumer market is a great part of what I mean when I discuss "desktop OS". Sure, you could place some things together purely from open source that presents a decent desktop experience at first, but a desktop OS equivalent to OS X or Windows offers more than just a basic desktop experience.

No that's not what I'm talking about. SunOS with NeWS, Sun Solaris with OpenWindows and then Open Look, IRIX with IRIX Desktop, and others were all Unix OSes that had well-defined UIs that met Engels qualifications. Apple and Next are not the only two companies to have done this.

Edit: SunOS

[Kitsune]

When I get home I want to be able turn the PC  on, log in to whatever game I'm playing, and just not have to think too much about it outside of the occasional defrag.

Windows 7 (and Vista) run a scheduled defrag in the background automatically.  Enjoy your new worry-free life.

[Checkers]

Windows 7 (and Vista) run a scheduled defrag in the background automatically.  Enjoy your new worry-free life.

I don't trust Vista's scheduled defrag.  After noticing declining performance on my PC a few months after buying it, I defragged manually and found everything was much improved.  Maybe there are some settings that I need to play with?

[Teleku]

I'd just like to further state I'm in love with how fucking smoothly Windows 7 runs.  I've had zero problems with it, and it just seems to run so smoothly.  I could feel the bloat when using vista (slow down, bad load times in some cases, etc), but 7 is just smooth.  Also thank you thread, for making me realize that I can set rotating desktops in Windows 7.   

[Miguel]

Apple doesn't concern themselves with robust gaming API's either, but WoW is on there, along with a bunch of other games.

I guess you've never heard about OpenGL before?

[fuser]

Windows 7 (and Vista) run a scheduled defrag in the background automatically.  Enjoy your new worry-free life.

But it still sucks compared to something like http://www.mydefrag.com/

[bhodi]

Is that a reskinned jkdefrag? Or a wholesale copy? Because that's exactly what it looks like to me.

Edit; HURRRRR


"The long-awaited version 4 is finally out. The program is now called "MyDefrag", because it has a scripting language and you can customize just about every aspect of it. It is no longer the "JK" (Jeroen Kessels) defragger, but "my" (your) defragger!"

[Yegolev]

I'm reading this whole thread and wondering why I would pick OSX over Ubuntu.

Third party apps that are worth a damn?

Such as?  I'm not being obtuse, I'd like to know.

[Yegolev]

Man, this thread is Going Places.  Now that I'm caught up (sort of, I kinda zoned out partly into Page Four), I'm curious how needing to determine the version of glibc is any worse than needing to determine a DirectX version?  Or a .NET Framework version?  Or hell, if you're using 64-bit Windows?  Maybe OSX is more monolithic; this would be good and bad, I suppose, depending on what you want.

Brogarn, I'm with you on the "just play" point, which is why I only just recently installed Ubuntu; specifically it is because Ubuntu will "just install" and "just patch"... I swear that Synaptics Package Manager is one of the big reasons I pissed on linux for a while.  I view it as a utility, and the partition I have installed is just there to do funky things to my machine that I cannot do with Windows.  Also it's a lot cheaper when it comes to having non-primary computers, meaning the ones I don't play games on.

It's just not a very good consumer-level OS.  Sorry.  For that you need coherence.

I agree with One but I'm not sure about Two.  I think it's only important that a normal user know where is his shit is, and if that is consistent then Success.  Now, if the OS is so cobbled together that the user spends all his time trying to figure out shit, you're into Neckbeard Territory and that won't fly when it's time to watch some porn.

[Jherad]

Bah, more derailing, this should be about Windows 7!  If anyone finds out how to bypass the invitation and password for Remote Assistance that would be great, they we could use it on our Enterprise network.

If you want to run Windows applications you shouldn't use Linux.  That's about all there is to it.

MSRA /offerRA not work in Windows 7? I'm not able to check myself, I'm assuming there would be a GPO that needs to be set also.

[Big Gulp]

Such as?  I'm not being obtuse, I'd like to know.

Photoshop, TurboTax, MS Office, AutoCAD, Soundforge, Premiere, etc, etc, etc.

And whomever brought up OpenGL, I'd hardly call it a "robust" API when compared to DirectX.  That's not even mentioning that Apple has little to nothing to do with OpenGL, they use it because it's (wait for it...) "open".

[stray]

I'm reading this whole thread and wondering why I would pick OSX over Ubuntu.

Third party apps that are worth a damn?

Such as?  I'm not being obtuse, I'd like to know.

Hate to jump in, but OS X is pretty much toe to toe with Windows with most major apps. Anything worth a damn in any creative area is on the Mac (all Adobe stuff, tons of pro audio/video hardware and software, RAW editors from camera manufacturers, color managers, Quark, cad software, even niche shit like Final Draft or Manga Studio ). Reliable MS Office interoperability; EndNote; speech dictators; random home design, cooking, and educational apps like Rosetta Stone; LoJack; blu-ray disc ware; tax software; and the occassional mainstream game .. Blizzard, CoD4, the Lego games, Sid Meier to name a few (and most of the major stuff from EA gets a simultaneous release.. i.e. Sims, Madden, Tiger Woods, C&C, etc.. ).

So basically, you're not completely shit out of luck, say, if you have a Line 6 POD, want to edit the sound library, patch it, fire up your multitrack suite of choice, create a guitar track, drag out your midi keyboard, create 63 other tracks, finalize a whole goddamn movie score, open up the screenplay your buddy was working on, animate it all in CS, burn it to a blu-ray disc, get on a plane and fly to Cannes, work on your taxes and learn French while you're at it, get your notebook stolen at the airport, bust the motherfucker with lojack, gallivant around Europe with a DSLR and process your RAWS on the spot, lose Cannes, dictate a hearty "Fuck you all" speech, fly back home, fire up the Sims and create some lonely bearded motherfucker trapped in one room with a Linux PC, laugh as he goes insane. Or something like that. :P

[stray]

Windows 7 Wallpapers vs. Snow Leopard Wallpapers (download links for images included in articles)

Ready, set, fight!

Hmm, yeah, very few of those Mac ones make good wallpapers imo (either too noisy too sparse). That's the best version of Hokusai's wave I've seen though (been looking for one!)

[Trippy]

And whomever brought up OpenGL, I'd hardly call it a "robust" API when compared to DirectX.  That's not even mentioning that Apple has little to nothing to do with OpenGL, they use it because it's (wait for it...) "open".

OpenGL is a very robust graphics API. It's why Carmack and some others choose to use OpenGL back in the early days instead of Direct3D which was a piece of crap. It wasn't until DirectX 7 that Direct3D was just "okay" (first version with hardware support for T&L). With DirectX 9 Microsoft finally achieved parity with OpenGL if not actually surpassing it slightly. Carmack is still using OpenGL in his latest engine (id tech 5) and it's the graphics API on the PlayStation 3 so it's not just "weird" platforms like OS X that use it. The "mobile" version, OpenGL EX, is also what's used on the iPhone and Android devices.

[Big Gulp]

OpenGL is a very robust graphics API. It's why Carmack and some others choose to use OpenGL back in the early days instead of Direct3D which was a piece of crap. It wasn't until DirectX 7 that Direct3D was just "okay" (first version with hardware support for T&L). With DirectX 9 Microsoft finally achieved parity with OpenGL if not actually surpassing it slightly. Carmack is still using OpenGL in his latest engine (id tech 5) and it's the graphics API on the PlayStation 3 so it's not just "weird" platforms like OS X that use it. The "mobile" version, OpenGL EX, is also what's used on the iPhone and Android devices.

Oh, it's more portable, but from everything I've read it pales in comparison ease of use-wise to DirectX.  I have no experience in this area, but I've got to imagine that so many developers use DirectX for a reason.

ETA:  Oh, and using Carmack as a star developer???  10 years ago, maybe.  Now, not so much.

[Trippy]

OpenGL is a very robust graphics API. It's why Carmack and some others choose to use OpenGL back in the early days instead of Direct3D which was a piece of crap. It wasn't until DirectX 7 that Direct3D was just "okay" (first version with hardware support for T&L). With DirectX 9 Microsoft finally achieved parity with OpenGL if not actually surpassing it slightly. Carmack is still using OpenGL in his latest engine (id tech 5) and it's the graphics API on the PlayStation 3 so it's not just "weird" platforms like OS X that use it. The "mobile" version, OpenGL EX, is also what's used on the iPhone and Android devices.

Oh, it's more portable, but from everything I've read it pales in comparison ease of use-wise to DirectX.  I have no experience in this area, but I've got to imagine that so many developers use DirectX for a reason.

ETA:  Oh, and using Carmack as a star developer???  10 years ago, maybe.  Now, not so much.

Microsoft made great improvements in the usability of Direct3D starting around DirectX 8.1. Carmack himself has said that DirectX 9 is easier to use now than OpenGL. But that doesn't mean OpenGL is hard to use.

People use Direct3D because that's the vendor supported 3D graphics API on Windows and they don't care about cross-platform stuff. Or if they do care about cross-platform portability they'll license an engine that is already cross-platform.

As for Carmack not being relevant anymore take a look at the id tech 5 engine examples (Rage, DOOM 4) and read about their work on id tech 6 (e.g. spare octree voxels).

[Big Gulp]

As for Carmack not being relevant anymore take a look at the id tech 5 engine examples (Rage, DOOM 4) and read about their work on id tech 6 (e.g. spare octree voxels).

And Doom 3 was going to be the mother of all engines, and yet somehow only Prey wound up using it.  I'll wait until they actually put a product out there.  To be honest, I just don't like Id games.  The last game of theirs that I actually enjoyed was Doom 2, so yeah, we're going back a ways.  They definitely aren't on my radar as anything special.

[Trippy]

Yes that's true there weren't many games that licensed the Doom 3 engine (it's more than just Prey, though). At the time, though, Doom 3's pure dynamic-lighting system was far beyond what competing graphics engines could do. So Carmack has and continues to push the frontiers of real-time 3D graphics rendering. Also the Doom 3 engine was never meant to be the mother of all engines as it was specifically designed *not* to support wide open spaces like the Unreal Engine 2 could. It wasn't till later with the addition of MegaTexture (another Carmack innovation) that you could make open environments with the Doom 3 engine.

Edit: lc doom

[fuser]

Reliable MS Office interoperability

I gotta pick on this because finally today Entourage Web Services Edition came out that snaps in with OWA. 

[Kitsune]

Given that this is a gaming forum, I don't think that claiming that Apple OS has the same app robustness as Windows is going to go far.  A lot of the major titles are available for OS 10, yeah.  But a lot aren't.  And a lot of the ones that are come out months after the Windows version, and aren't supported for shit.  I'm thinking ahead to the games that I'm expecting to buy in the next year, Bioshock 2, Borderlands, FFXIV, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2, and I don't expect any of them to see an Apple release.

For, y'know, real work, you should be able to find ample applications to run on OS 10.  But it unquestionably lags behind in entertainment.  Both in shoddy support for necessary video hardware and limited availability of games.  It's gotten better, much better in the last decade, but it's not there yet.

Which is sort of sadly ironic, given that the Mac had fucking sweet games way back in the day.  Through the Looking Glass, The Dungeon of Doom, Dark Castle, back when the early mac graphics were considered cutting edge and the use of a mouse a novel and exotic interface.