and to that i say:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...8/#post3691837

Yeah, iTunes is the worst on Windows. It's got to be the definition of bloatware when you compare it to the kmplayer or vlc.

I understand that you guys love Linux, but going back to my original post I think that 'Nix nerds shouldn't disrespect Windows and Microsoft. They hired some of the best programmers in the world and thus creating some of the BEST technologies we've ever seen. They have a really great business model for capitalism and you can't argue with the billions, and billions they've produced in the market. The early 90's boom was largely due to Microsoft's success.


Regardless of their business practice(s), every company/corporation in the public mind will have their flaws, and if Linux were incorporated, the general public would have a very different concept of what it means to use a 'nix OS. I have a feeling that they (meaning 98% of all people) wouldn't see the potential and get the spark that a programmer would.

It's true that MS has been scrutinized for their actions and it has really tainted their reputation as a solid company, but the most profitable companies are always going to be targets for lawyers and under the microscope by society, so every little action is exaggerated 10000x, so please keep that in mind. Everybody wants to focus on M$ negatives but think about it, this is a company that provides technologies and education to schools and governments around the world; MS has educated the masses to use computers.

I think that regular people who are switching over to 'nix are probably the users who resent that there is a lot of WPA prompts, updates etc. But these people probably aren't setting up xp/7 properly and most will fail with Linux and won't get it. What you guys don't understand is that your community is TINY (*ironic wording lol), and only make up for a few percentage points of actual hardcore users on the global scale. Linux is truly not for everybody at this point.

Linus is genius in that he managed to stay away from incorporation and created a business model that has no central company to sue or take ownership.

He has flipped around the way we look at business and I appreciate that, but if we're talking about which OS will provide me with the best user-experience in terms of capabilities, SW/HW options, ease of use etc, Windows is CLEARLY the best option.

Well, I have seen both sides. Even though I am a HUGE open source software advocate, really, I'd expect to see Apple at the mercy of the FOSS community and Microsoft in between the two. Consider this:

Apple may FOSS some of their software as Darwin and the like. But has anybody told you the difference between BSD and GPL? They're two starkly contrasting licenses. Apple under BSD can still make most of their code proprietary and still cheat FOSS out of house and home, using FOSS solely to its advantage, especially that under the BSD license. And not only this, but I don't see FOSS simply as the content of free code. I also count the locking to hardware, the oppression of the users' rights to use iTunes without an iPod, the breaking of software on certain hardware using security updates, the killing of jailbroken iPhones, the rejection of apps from the App Store, the constant corruption of political officials, such as Alsup, and the like. Such tactics are far worse than anything M$ does.

I, too, had a pleasant experience when I used to use window$. It BORED me to sleep.
The most BORING OS on the planet.

It has a difference - those drivers need to be downloaded from the manufacturer's website, or installed from a separate CD. Which is a pain in the backside, and makes reinstallation harder.
(The especially awkward case is when Windows out-of-the-box doesn't support your network adapter, and you've lost the driver CD).

Reinstalling from time to time can be a good thing for any OS. In Linux it's generally easier, because there's been a competitive force to make the installation easier since almost everyone using a distro has to install it. Windows installation - counting everything needed to get the system how you want it, so drivers and applications not just the bare OS - is much harder and more time consuming than Linux installation.

"It's a penny-farthing. The front wheel is marketing and is the large essential part. The back wheel is engineering. Small, insignificant, and when it breaks it's easy to replace it with another one". - Jeremy Allison
http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/97

About Apple - they, like many companies, see Open Source, but they don't understand Free Software. And they released the Darwin kernel because of two things. Firstly, they were worried about reputation, but far more importantly, Darwin has little value to Apple. It comes back to the technology vs marketing point I made earlier. People who buy Macs don't buy them because of the nice software engineering in the kernel, they buy Macs because the software looks nice, the hardware looks nice, and OSX is supposedly easier to use. (Part of the ease of use comes from the fact that while Windows expects third parties to provide drivers, and Linux provides many out-of-the-box but the remainder are a pain or not available, OSX has to support a tiny handful of hardware setups.)

Small, but hugely important. Windows has few competitors. Previous versions of Windows are ironically the strongest, MS struggle to persuade people to part with their money to upgrade. OSX competes to an extent, but Apple tying it to the technically worse value Mac hardware hurts it. And then there's Linux. And while the overall proportion is still small, barely a month goes by without hearing about some company, or school, or government department that's decided to switch its employee desktops to some Linux distribution.

Also, since it's often not sold at all, estimating Linux market share is notoriously difficult. The only real way is to do a survey, and it's hard to avoid bias.

you come to a linux site and say that?

activation and genuine advantage demonstrated without equivocation that microsoft has no regard whatsoever for its consumers. genuine advantage was the injury added to the insult of activation.

au contraire. they merely provided a substandard medium for people to struggle with. in-your-face, get-in-your-way nuisance value it has in abundance.

from little acorns mighty oaks do grow. it's impossible to quantify linux usage because the insistence by microsoft that all manufacturers supply each machine with a windows os on board skews the figures and not every linux convert registers their machines on linux counter. even best estimates are probably wildly innaccurate.

there's none so blind as them's won't see.

@ mattd, if you aren't going to reply to the points you dont't need to quote a whole post.

I for one have not registered any ogf machines I installed (I always leave it for some later date), and I have so far installed around (semi-)Desktop Linux-es.

jaydot: "au contraire. they merely provided a substandard medium for people to struggle with. in-your-face, get-in-your-way nuisance value it has in abundance. "

If you consider it to be substandard that's your opinion, but you're right MS has provided a medium for the masses.

Very true. I honestly don't like the fact that most of the world heavily relies on windows based products, for example like most computer companies. By default, windows vista or 7 comes on all computers nowadays (except for a few) and the consumer should be able to tell the company not to ship it with windows to lower the price or whatever. My last computer I bought came with vista, and I tried telling them not to install windows. The lady, very puzzled over the phone, asked why? She proceeded to say that without windows, my computer would not work LOL I had to explain the whole "linux" thing to her, and she was still confused, and then told me without the OS, the price would not change. Weird huh? And for the record, this was from a Dell representative.

I could spout my opinion of things all I want to but in the end that is all it will be, an opinion. How about showing us some "REAL" facts? Hard core evidence that backs up your claims will go allot further than opinion.

From my experiance the facts are:
Linux runs faster on my computer(s) than Windows
I am not insulted by Linux everytime I turn around
Linux does not have any ethical problems for me to over come
I am not restricted on what software I can install on my system

Needless to say, they are only facts to me as they are my own experiance. So that makes their relivancy somewhat conjuncture and opinion.

Their have been many GREAT OS's out there not just *nix based. Many way ahead of their time. Some failed because of poor markiting others failed for various other reasons.

Personally, I like the analigy I read earlier in this thread about McDonalds... Does them selling the most burgers make them the best? Certianly not with me. To me it means they have a dang good advertizing campain. People know that they are not the best but they are garenteed to get an edible product if they go there. The same applies to Windows in many ways. It is not the best but it runs the computer and people can use much of the availible software.

Take for example my brother, he has been a dedicated Windows Administrator for many years. Yet he chooses to use Linux and Mac at home. Why doesn't he convert all the workstations to Mac and Linux at work? People are unfirmilier with it and they would have to lay out big bucks to reinvent the software they use. He uses Linux servers in many places on the companies network though as it has been shown to be more reliable than the Windows servers they used previously.

Your brother is smart. He knows to get the best, you use the best.

That analogy you read earlier in this thread was posted by me actually

In my experience XP runs faster than any other 'nix based OS I've tried. Granted I haven't installed Unix before, but I have no use for it or can afford it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...sage_share.svg

However with this many users, they must be doing something right.

Microsoft has the largest user base because they have created software that accommodates a wide variety of users. They've catered to the end user who will only use it for word processing/no internet access/solitaire, to corporate servers. Linux on the other hand does server work very well, but doesn't cater to any other markets like Microsoft and Apple does.

And to those that say that the pie chart shown is skewed by Microsoft or their marketing groups, by all means go ahead and challenge that wikipedia article.

Some stats regarding user percentages may be rounded up or exaggerated when you read advertisements for example but wikipedia and a few other sites that gather stats are there to remain unbiased.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

I understand that some 'nix systems are unreported but even if you added another 5-6% to the 'nix sections, it is still very far behind in terms of popularity and usage.

Windows is the most popular because average people can understand how it works and can afford a complete Windows system. The McDonald comparison is kind of funny but we're talking about precise electronics and not making burgers. A program/application that is coded amazingly well doesn't lie, and I've yet to test out a 'Nix based OS that can provide with even half of the amount of usability.

With Windows I have the ability to:
-play the most, and best games available.
-take advantage of the new and old hardware (xp for older hw, vista/7 for newer 64bit). And the proprietary drivers can not be argued.
-run the most amount of *high quality applications.

If the user is incapable of protecting themselves from viruses and general planning for fault tolerance in a Microsoft environment then they will still be at risk within a Unix/Linux environment. You are always at the mercy of software/hardware protection regardless of which OS you use. i.e. HD failure.

And I also find it funny how I read so many complaints from the Linux communities that Windows has too many annoying popups and prompts. Well if you took a bit of time to research how to prevent these from occurring if you aren't interested in MSs best-practices/warnings you'd find the answer fairly easily. It's an OS designed for everybody, so keep that in mind, and it can be easily switched in the services, gpo's, or various settings, registry etc, depending on which things you're trying to control/override/manipulate.

I know you are all dying to refute my point about Windows being able to run the most apps, but it's true. There's a handful of billion dollar corporations working with MS and have been for about 10-15 years, so they've matured together and worked out the kinks. We're not talking about tiny little businesses either, these companies are huge on their own like Nvidia, AMD/ATI, Intel, gigabyte/asus, gaming companies like EA, blizzard, etc. MS is partnered with some HUGE names in technologies.

In the Linux world, software titles come and go and they don't have any killer products really worthy of switching. Even Apple has some appealing products worthy of making the switch, Linux is ancient technology in comparison.

Hi,

Here you go again!

M$ has announced the end of XP. It will be supported on small footprint machines; i.e. netbooks and such.

Another bait cast by a troll.

Spew....

Windows has a monopoly position because hardware vendors supply their hardware with Windows. Hardware vendors supply their hardware with Windows because Windows has a monopoly position. The technical merits (or lack thereof) have nothing to do with this. MS only need to make Windows not awful.

And again, the majority of Windows users use it because it's what came with their computer. By contrast, the majority of GNU/Linux users have chosen Linux. Windows can be pretty mediocre, and as long as hardware vendors keep shipping machines with it it will keep being used. Linux has to be good to be used. If it was rubbish, people wouldn't use it. And with so many distros competing with each other, that further increases the need for any individual distro to be good.

Were one to only study educated users, I expect the proportion of GNU/Linux users would be significantly higher than in the general population, even for a pretty low bar of 'educated'. (Ask people "What Operating System(s) do you use?", without giving a multiple choice. Eliminate all the don't knows and answers that aren't an operating system.)

An analogy should highlight the absurdity of your argument. The majority of people have the stock sound system in their cars. Does that mean the stock sound system is better than the several hundred watt systems a minority of people choose to install?