this kinda reminds me of firefox when people are like what do you need tabs for -- too confusing. now that ie7 has tabs it is like the most useful feature ever. i feel other os's will incorperate these features (a good thing for the sake of techno progress -- a feature that eventually everyone will take for granted). e.g.: ten years ago only premium cars had abs, now they pretty much all do. the sales person doesnt even try to sell you on it, the presumption is that it is there. and pretty soon all os's will have these premium features.

its not innovative until it is mainstream.

I have used micrososft based systems from as far back as I can remember I actually started with DOS 5, The only thing that still that still keeps me on windows is the Gaming. Most games are built for the windows platform and to get equivalents on Linux is almost a myth.

Hi all,

Honestly, M$ makes money and UNIX makes technology - this is where Linux and M$ part their paths but I can't understand why M$ wants to sue Linux.

I have had Debian,Red Hat,WinXP and Vista installed on my PC.

Let me tell you my obeservations:
1. Debian is 100 times powerful and flexible than XP,
2. Debian is 10 times more stable than XP,
and,
3. XP is 100 times better than Vista.

These are my observations and you may come to your own conclusions.

Vista is a bag of bull**** - if you don't trust me try using it. Even updates from M$ makes the OS go haywire. So I use caution and just download the update the check on the net if people are complaining about the updates - well if they are not complaining after a week then I go ahead and install the update. God have mercy on people who install the updates directly.

If I was Mr. M$'s legal adviser (thankfully I am not) I would have sued my employees (esp. the programmers) who failed to make Vista atleast as good as XP. And if I was Mr.M$ himself (again I thank God I am not) I would have thrown myself out of the 'window' for letting Linux outpacing me.

For all those people who can't switch from Windows to Linux because of:

-gaming or applications they rely on try Wine. This is for creating Windows applications compatibility under Linux. Go here to see if your games/applications work under Wine. Here you can get Wine packages for various distributions. If your application is not yet supported ask here if there are Linux-counterparts. If you are unlucky stick with Windows XP and install service pack 3 in January and wait for Wine to support your application.

-lack of hardware support send a email or a letter to hardware manufacturers where you ask them for Linux support. When you buy your next PC built it with Linux compatible hardware or ask a salesman for a Linux compatible pc. You can also buy an Ubuntu laptop from Dell which is fully Linux compatible.

-other people who send you the new Microsoft Office 2007 document (SalesDocument.docx) do this: Now wait for OpenOffice.org to suppert it in the future. Tell the people who send you this format to send .doc formats in the future.

Thanks, V!NCENT, for the tip about the document converter. I'm going to try it. Unfortunately the link you provided is incomplete, but here's the complete one.

http://download.novell.com/sendredir...ror=AkamaiHost

As for the comment about application support, I think part of the Linux learning experience is discovering that a favorite app or game doesn't work and so you spend some time searching the 'net and reading documentation to find an answer. It becomes a trial to test our dependence on M$ - "Do we give up and go back to Windows because this program doesn't work in Linux, or do we continue using Linux and search for a compatibility solution so we can leave Windows behind."

It's true Wine will work for many win32-based things, especially games. For the ones that it doesn't work for, there are plenty of virtualization options - DOSBox is great for win3.x and DOS apps and VirtualBox is good for Win32 stuff that doesn't need D3D or OpenGL.

zahirk9, I, too, have a computing background dating back to the days of DOS5 on a Tandy 1000RLX (and a little Commodore 64, too). The only thing I still have a Windows partition for is Mechwarrior 3 and 4 since 1 and 2 work in DOSBox.

No problem. I have fixed my post with the link you gave me. The .docx howto came from someone in the Ubuntu forums. I can't recall who I copied it from but the credit doesn't belong to me.

We are very close to beating Microsoft at this point. Linux is now already ready for the desktop but it doesn't have a userbase that is large enough yet. When we gain enough user then that's when I call out the 'Linux year of the desktop'. Ubuntu keeps simplifying Linux more and more with every release. Let's just keep 'fighting' so we can finally beat Microsoft and put fun back into computing.

Are these ([3 and 4]) Windows apps? You could become a maintainer or a tester on Wine's Appdb webpage. Please support information on what works and what not and provide bug reports. Maybe later you can get completely rid of Windows.

Just a couple of questions I wish to bring up that no doubt have been discussed before. As far as security, Linux wins because it's market share for home application is extremely low (there are other reasons, I know.....). Why crack/hack linux when the windoze audience is so great and ignorant. If more people used linux it would have the same problems. No IT uebermensch can deny that social engineering is the biggest tool to hackers, that and wide spread user ignorance. Put that into a 1000X bigger linux community and you get disaster. I rely heavily on the community to learn about linux (e.g. forums such as this), an easy weakness for a SE to prey on. For instance, "Just use this repository, it's safe." when you want a codec or new tool badly enough. Linux could be a breeding ground for this type of behavior. I do understand that there are a huge number of variables that could and would affect an outcome of this nature, so it's impossible to really say what would happen. I do think there is a strong likely hood of this happening.

its like saying if you are using something potentially dangerous then you have to boot into your linux while with everything else you can continue using your windows system ...

potentially dangerous tasks like networking(especially those concerning networking to the outside , for example games and internet) applications , documents(whatever types of documents) creating , editing and sharing applications ...

use windows systems for images/sounds/videos/animations creations , editing and playback only , like those adobe products , ipod/iphone and cd music playing ...


[EDIT ::]linux is like "fighting 1,000,000 players" ... ^_^



.

hmm ...


.

Indeed, something similar was happening on the Ubuntu forum, whereby users were posting dangerous commandline instructions. All in an attempt to have newbies erase most (if not all) of their system. This could just as easily be advice that would make the user disable security features etc. It is important to research and ask questions, and not blindly trust that the person giving you advice or directions automatically has your interest at heart! For me the major advantage is the openess of GNU/Linux, this makes it very difficult to hide malicious code or to get away with giving bogus advice for very long.

Well the wonderfull thing about Linux is that when a hacker breaks in he still has the same limitations of the user. When a user is not logged in as root all that hacker can do is erase his homefolder when he doesn't have file security in it. And if he wants to install something via Ubuntu he still needs a password to change things. When it comes to repository's: a stupid user can't add them becuase he has no knowledge to do so and he can only download from the standard repository's and those are secured by people who do know a lot about security. What people seem to forget when they say that Linux is only more secure because it doesn't have as many users forget about the security model with user privileges and file security. They only think about bugs. And even beyond all this Linux is so much more secure because of tons of reasons.

I agreed with all the things I removed, but pay attention now:
- How about WIRELESS networking? See my sig. I'm super pissed off and know it's not Linux' fault, but hardware support on this area is clearly better in Windows.
- VLC runs also in Windows & Windows also gets Media Player Classic, which is IMO more functional than VLC. I haven't experienced lockups (Vista 32bit).
- Nothing is idiot proof!!! UAC made a great step forward. My computer illiterate aunt has Ubuntu running, installed & configured by me, and I told her that if it asks her password to not type it unless she is absolutely sure about it. Same can be done in Vista now by giving the idiot an user account.
- Yes certainly, unless they encounter daily stuff like websites with wmv or just happen to get iPod for mothersday.
- Not necessarily. My workplace still has three Win95 laptops for specific tasks.

That's it.

i understand what you mean about social engineering.

but you should keep in mind that the market share that m$ has in the home desktop market (approx. 85 %) is equivalent to the market share that *nix (unix, linux, bsd, sun) has in the enterprise server market (approx. 85 %). and bank-national is a far bigger target for password crackers and black-hat hackers than larry lester from shermer, illinois would ever be.

What about it? Take a step back and look at the bigger picture and you'll see that Linux isn't the only OS which has difficulty in this area. A simple Google search (or two) will verify this fact.

That said, most wireless networking hardware is supported by Linux these days. Furthermore, if you know what you're doing, troubleshooting this sort of thing under Linux is easier, because Linux actually gives useful information in it's error messages.
Actually, you could do this under XP as well. Of course, nobody ever did it, but the functionality was there.

As for UAC being a "great step forward" ... I dunno... Can I have some of your pot? Let's be honest here. UAC is only there to protect one thing: Microsoft's collective butt. "Oh, you've disabled UAC? Too bad, you brought this on yourself. We can't help you. Goodbye."
I hope they aren't connected to the internet!

Points to consider:
1.) Is it guaranteed to work or plenty stable? There is quite a bit of difference. I could say Linux is plenty stable and you seem to infer that it isn't guaranteed to work.
2.) Good for MP3, but a pain to configure drivers.....?
3.) Envy for Ubuntu, easier than any Windows drivers. Granted it's one driver and "only" for Ubuntu.
4.) apt-get with safe/good repositories, easier than a windows install/upgrade.
5.) Billions of USD, underhanded, cheating, stealing, shady, monopolizing, business vs. a community effort without pure capital/dominance in mind.



XP stable?

-$2k on brand new laptop with decent specs/gfx card run with a Product, as you have stated, good for gaming, and guaranteed to work.
-BSOD randomly while gaming, or other random activities.
-acknowledged driver problem and 'fixed' it by running my once glorious fullscreen res into a 4"x4" box centered on my 16.1" screen. Perfection! I chose to role back and deal with BSOD. Much more convieniant.
-Degraded performance over time

-Using that $2K machine, putting linux on it for 'free'
-installing wine, spending little time in FAQs or forums
-playing the same game; NEVER crashing, with better framerates, from a driver installed by a newb via a cheesy download.
-Never getting spyware from clicking links, or worms from reading an email
-performing approx 90% of the productivity I had on windows, not MP3 related.



fiddling is your problem here....


oh yeah. steps for linux driver install.
1.) Install linux kernel/headers
2.) plug in your gfx card
3.) go to nvidia.com
4.) download the driver
5.) install
I got those steps from a FAQ btw.


When M$ implements it it's a bloated memory/resource hog. Vista (default) used well over a gig. with beryl(default), working extremely well, it added maybe an extra 100MB of RAM usage on top an already light OS (totaling say 300MB). Plus added more functionality. Vista looks like a joke compared to a well operating compiz-fusion setup. WITH LESS CPU/GPU/RAM usage. On top of that, compiz is configurable down to every minute detail, displayed on your screen.


I've had better success, thanks to FAQs and forums, with wifi on my linux box; better performance and more control. Games, ok but that is what global computer dominance offers. Printing? You would have to be more specific as I have had no problems.


All said and done I've boiled it down to a simple philosophy, It had to happen this way for this to have happened.




Without windows I would have never, found computers, or found linux. Thank you for that, no matter how many lives you stole from, or businesses you undermined to get this computer in my hands today. Thank You, Mr. Gates.