...yeah. from a server standpoint, ms is so insanely BAD that anyone forced to use NT or 2000 when linux could make everything so much easier... it's pretty easy to see how that would make someone anti-ms.

again tho, ms's strength doesn't lie in the intelligence of the average user. it lies in their ignorance.

Brotha, I couldn't have said it better.

I'm not anti MS. I'm not a dumb user, but regardless, I tend to get more done with my windows box than my Linux box in a shorter period of time, although I like figuring stuff out with Linux. Sure microsoft pumps out products relatively quickly, but most of the products they sell are pre installed on computer makers machines (I know, I'm in the computer retail biz). Computer suppliers want and push for new products because their customers want those new products to help them sell computers. Fact is, if I had to sell computers that weren't able to take advantage of USB, 1394, just about every audio device, video device, etc, out of the box, I would not sell many computers, and I certainly wouldn't sell many extra devices. In a lot of ways, people should be thanking MS for all they have done for the industry. Without them, I wouldn't be in business, and parts wouldn't be as inexpensive as they are today.

I also hear a lot of talk about their business practices, but their OS prices haven't changed for as long as I can remember, but I would guess their operating expenses have gone up dramatically. Are they out to make a profit, and the biggest one they can? Yes, of course, they are a publicly held company. Investors wouldn't remotely put up with a company that didn't try to continue increasing revenues. That is the way of America, and while they are the biggest software company in the world, and deemed to be a monopoly, they can't just roll over and let everyone widdle away at their foundation. You want more choice with an OS? Then you likely want less quality, compatability, and you like learning everything over because the OS of the month has just released. Think about this logically from a business standpoint, and it makes a lot more sense.

From a business stand point Microsoft licensing is making less since. They will now longer sell Office97 site licenses so if a business is using Office97 they will have to upgrade. They cannot contenue to use there exicting lincese because it has expired and they cannot get a new one. So they will be forced to upgrade or move to another suite, either way it means a lot of money. I think we will see WPA trying to do the same thing with XP is years to come. They are making it so we cannot use their older software if we choose.

GeOph, I see your point, but think about how much money it costs a company to support old software. I have had lots of software by different companies that they no longer support, and will not provide updates for. I am sure that the software which was purchased before now can continue to be used, but they can't purchase new office 97 site licenses; that makes sense. I would suspect that all the old software will work with the new anyway, so what's the problem?

They cannot renew their Office 97 license so to continue to use it would be illeagle. That's how they are forced to upgrade and that's what I have a problem with. I can continue to use my single license of 97 but large company's don't have that choice because they bought the site license. I don't need support for it and I am sure the large company's don't need support either. But they can't even run the software without support if they wanted to. They must upgrade or move to another suite.

I agree entirely with entm - but for sancho5 & isajera from the desktop workstation point of view I can't see that there is any virtue in Linux being so crummy at installation. Its taken literally weeks of downloads of non-working drivers and e-mails and reconfigs to fail to get my Matrox eTV card to be recognised as a valid display card by Linux (I don't mean to get it to work as an eTV - I mean just to be able to see the screen).

By contrast to Linux I've just installed XP (over the defunct SuSE Linux partition of one of my machines) with less than five minutes input (mainly opening the box and typing in the stupid reg code ). Sadly I think you would be *dumb* not to go this way as an individual user.

I'm familiar with hardware and software right back to the stage as a kid I had to stand on the IBM 1130 manuals to reach the card hopper, through using the first generation TRS80s, Apple IIs, BBCs (wow) and later the original SUN Sparc stations - I've also taught microcode at University level and I've got to say - there is no way Linux is going to make it on the desktop the way it is presented. It has either got to be pre-loaded by a big manufacturer or have REAL 24/7 support available.

This is quite serious as I don't think a desktop monopoly not just on OSes but eventually on apps for x86s is going to be good for anyone.

Well I have not had any trouble with installing lilnux. As a matter of fact I just installed RH 7.1 to this laptop I am on now. It took about 15 minutes, then I ran the registration program and ran up2date. Now I have the 2.4.9-6 kernel. It could not have been easier, I just went with defaults, laptop install, dhcp, I am dual booting win2k.

As a comparison I will say that the win2k will not see much use on this laptop.



KDE rocks on this Dell Latitude 750MHz with 256 MB RAM

I am very happy with it.

And it was free.

It seems to go on smoothly if you have a generic machine with nothing odd about your hardware. The 'European' (BT) ISDN card in this machine through it completely (which is why I'm using W2K to write this), The Matrox eTV means I can't use my other 'modern' machine, the Cyrix chip stopped it on the 'library' machine. I'm guessing it would work on my Viao or out Aptivas but my wife won't let me near them with Linux.


Well I paid £49 which is about $75

I can sympathise with the user that has had difficulty installing linux. I had one HELL of a time getting Caldera 2.4 to install the first and second time I tried it too. Third time was a charm, however, as I found some material that helped straighten out the wrinkles. Point is, all I needed to do was take the time to realise what the difficulty was, research it, and hit the fix.
And I am willing to bet, the same thing has happened to you windows users time and again. I mean, take a look at the friggin' Microsoft Knowledge Base and tell me there's not worse issues in there.
One place I will agree with you is that Linux does not yet have enough of a place in the desktop world to pose a threat to Windows. However, that is changing drastically every day. With the advent of new Office Suites (yes, fully compatible with your precious MS Office), KDE 2, gaming, etc... you will see within a short time that OEM manufacturers will find it in thier interests to include Linux preinstalled. The only problem they will face is ignorant users breaking things when they insist on logging in as root.
The thing I think you will see if MS slowly killing themselves with a lust for greed, and the dismissal of quality. When windoze users talk about quality, I have to laugh.

wow, you couldn't get more US vs THEM if big scary thigns depended on it could you sancho?? :-)

I'd say there certainly needs to be a lot of work done in the desktop area, but the more i think about what needs to be done, the more it turns into windows, form the outside at least. I think that from a newbie point of view the freedom of linux is what's holdnig it back. Obivously once you know what you're doing everythigns ok, but until you get to that stage, you have so much freedom, the consequences of which are largely unknown at the time, that it's far too easy to get confused. Bit of a paradox i guess. You'd get many more conversions if you could start out with a very restricted system that people can be dominated by, until such a time that they feel able to take their stabilizers off, so to speak.

Annoyign things like X menus being handled in each WM's own way. so in Gnome i have system distro menus, gnome menus, kde menus... duplicating things and getting very confusing from a simple POV. I'd say a certain level of abstraction is ideally needed, so as to make things such as that more standard, but then of course once you get that, it's easily a slippery slope to you know where...

I guess developers need to find the lesser of ALL evils to try and create a system that doesn't keep treading on WM rivals toes etc...

True that. I guess I get a bit overzealous at times, eh?

check out this quote:

--------
One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How
enthusiastic is our support for LINUX?
Linux was written on our machines and for our machines many
years ago. Today, much of LINUX being done is done on our machines.
Ten percent of our VAXs are going for LINUX use. LINUX is a simple
language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for
students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for
interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of
its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good LINUX on
VAX and good LINUX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will
run out of things they can do with LINUX. They'll want a real system and
will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
With LINUX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and
quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With
VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of
documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the
difference -- the beauty of LINUX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS
is that it's all there.
-- Ken Olsen, President of DEC, 1984
---------

This was around 15 years ago, and I can just imagine 15 years from now how people will be laughing at the Linux vs. Windows thing. Linux will prevail; all good things always do.

i am a bit confused, where did you get that quote from? cause as far as I know, linux was created around 1991, so this guy talking about Linux in 1984 could not have happened. Maybe its a misprint and they meant in 1994.
Linus Torvalds in 1984 would have been in junior high or grade school at the time if it was created before 1984.

good call. that one slipped past me.

it was probably from adequacy.org ..