Sigh! As hard as I try to get rid of Windows I am facing an uphill struggle all the way. I will not give in just yet, but my energy is beginning to slowly fade away.

After installing Suse 9.1 on one PC I got a GRUB prompt. Grub did not boot my OS but complained about number of cylinders so I re-installed this time opting for LILO. After I did an online update despite executing /sbin/lilo before booting the system, the OS wouldn't boot any more.

On the other PC is was more plain sailing. My little nephew logged in to cartoon network website to play some games and guess what? There is no shockwave support for Linux.

I persuaded my wife to use openoffice instead of Word. Guess what? She couldn't type her special characters with the ALT keystrokes. She is a Spanish teacher and types a lot of those strange letters with accents and such. Going to the special character chooser every other word slows her down considerably. She didn't give it a second glance. Damn! I posted a request on openoffice.org. Apparently I was not the first.

The biggest drawback is the Intenet Browser Issue. Many sites that I visit vary from distorted layout to simply unusable. I tried Konqueror, then I tried Opera, Now I installed Netscape 7.2 and the Java plugin would not work with my Ameritrade Streamer! Yes I did the symbolic link to the plugins netscape directory ... I am so frustrated.

My thoughts about the browser issue are :-

either
1. Many sites are produced using Microsoft tools and Microsoft are deviating from the latest HTML Standards on purpose (like they know best)
or
2. The other non-MS browsers are not good enough and do not support the latest HTML standards.

If 1 is the case then what does the World Wide Web Consortium stand for? Shouldn't Microsoft be sued for illegal practice? Maybe what they are doing is not illegal, but it sure is abusing its IE dominance. Is there a solution to this? If not then I cannot see Linux picking up in the desktop market.

I have been using Unix for the past 15 years and am not intimidated by the hash sign and I don't know how long I can keep this up. Imagine all the people who are used to clicking setup.exe and voila! Their driver/package is installed in seconds! They even get an icon in the start menu or on their desktop! Re-setting their machine every now and then is just a day-to-day practice. They do it without giving it a thought, just like washing the dishes after eating. I will not give up! I am strong! Repeat. I will not give up! I am strong!

It seems that most of your complaints are mostly to blame the software makers, like shockwave, well, that's Macromedia not supporting Linux, not our fault or any browser developer fault. Grub not loading and Lilo not working correctly, no pun intended but I've never had problems with either, that would be operator error type issues in not setting them up correctly, etc.

Your Ameritrade streamer thingy, blame Ameritrade for making a website not cross browser compatible in which IE breaks about every rule with theirs, not fully complying with W3C standards in which Mozilla, Firefox and Opera actually do.. along with all the other browsers that are fully developed for Linux.

The ALT keystrokes, I'm not so sure about. I don't speak or write spanish but I'm sure in Linux you can map keystrokes to perform different functions but it might just be OpenOffice issue. At least it doesn't cost $500 bucks for the full suite.

But you are wrong on your thoughts. Its MSIE that doesn't stick to standards and its those developers that use their tools and don't think about cross browser compatibility that break the websites layout, format, and so on.

Just cause a company doesn't conform to standards doesn't mean its illegal. ISP's charge for connectivity but its technically free to browse the web, you don't have to pay to visit each site. I don't blame MS for their non-compliance, I blame the stupid web developers that don't design their sites the correct way.

Its funny how some complain that they want a "setup.exe" and have to click "next" a dozen times and the program is installed for them.. but yet I never really run into problems and I can have most applications in Linux installed from source done in 8-10 less steps than the next, next, next.. and so on..

Download
./configure
make
make install
./run_some_program

And I'm done... its not really that hard, most just make it harder than it really is. I'm not saying Linux is for everyone, it wasn't designed to be. Its the distributions that sell Linux that try to make it easier and attract those that aren't ready. Those who can't use Windows shouldn't even use Linux or any other OS for that matter... Windows can be just as hard to most, so I fail to see anyone's point in saying "setup.exe" is a cinch...

If your not happy and Linux doesn't suit your day to day needs cause company X doesn't make its plugin available and only for Windows.. well then, simply put, keep using Windows and stop complaining.

That's my two cents.. and if you started this thread to just cause a Windows vs. Linux flamefest, I'll go ahead and move this thread to General where we've had many of these types of threads posted and closed after a short time, as I don't see this thread leading anywhere near being considered as a technical question or asking for help in anyway!

PS. In the future, use better thread titles, your's does not describe this thread at any level!

Use what is best for you, if that's windows then use it. Lots of people take this argument too far, Windows isn't the devil and Bill Gates doesn't send large men in trenchcoats to kill kittens and baby ducks. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Windows if it suits you best.

I don't have statistics, but I suspect that most websites, particularly large/popular ones, are not produced using Microsoft tools. I think the problem is that far too many websites are designed with apathy; web designers most familiar with a Microsoft platform, or who merely prefer to cater to the dominant browser, tend to disregard potential problems with their site (dependencies on ASP, Shockwave or other proprietary web technologies, dependency on MSIE for correct viewing, lack of HTML standards-compliance) because they know that the vast majority of web surfers use MSIE and won't know the difference. It's partly Microsoft's fault for making such a flawed browser, but I would place most of the blame on web designers for not bothering to do their job well.

The problem is definitely not (2); all the major non-Microsoft browsers (including the Mozillas and Opera) support, and have a history of supporting web standards better than MSIE. The W3C just publishes specifications and standards, so everyone will have a set of rules to agree upon.

There's no question that a good browser is a vital component of an operating environment. Mozilla Firefox is already making inroads towards denting MSIE's dominance, and I suspect that MSIE remains dominant only because it comes with the dominant desktop OS, while one must usually go to a special effort to download an alternative like Firefox. If Mozilla Firefox were the default browser on all Windows machines, I have no doubt that it would be wildly successful, and web designers would have little choice but to do their jobs properly. If you haven't done so yet, give Firefox a try. It has very few problems with most sites; at worst, I've had an occasional cosmetic defect or inoperable "Submit" button due to poor site design.

Now, on to some of your other concerns: For the special character insertion, I can only suggest trying other office suites or word processors available on Linux. AbiWord is quite nice, and much lighter-weight than MS Word; KOffice has KWord, which is nearly as full-featured as OOWriter. There's a brief document explaining how to insert the Euro symbol into KWord documents, which appears to be applicable to other X software as well. Overall, I'd be willing to bet that Linux in general has a broader level of support for non-English text input and output than Windows does. I suspect there's probably a method that would be even better than alt-codes, though you may need to do some digging in order to find it. A few links that may get you started: Introduction to i18n, The Linux Danish/International HOWTO, and the The Linux Internationalization HOWTO.

I can't be arsed to read most of that, but firefox supports all the standards well and is lean and robust.

Really? Not wanting to be da bitc*, but have you _been_ using Unix for 15 years or _used_ for 15 years ago?. I ask this because most of your questions has been asked a lot of times, not only here, but everywhere you point your browser at. Same old story: Hardware developers not supporting Linux for this or that reason, Software developers not supporting Linux for this or that reason, peoples coding pages with a mouse and etc...

Just thought I'd point this out.

Firefox isn't as lean on your system as you may think. Because the other major browsers (e.g. Opera, IE, Netscape(?) ) share a common ancestor in Mosaic, they are all approximately the same in terms of RAM use (at least in Windows).
However, Firefox does not use these Mosaic relatives rendering system, so it naturally must have it's own, which takes up a fair bit more RAM

e.g. on this system in Windows XP, IE with 3 sites open in 3 windows takes approx. 25MB ram. Firefox with the same 3 sites in 3 tabs takes approx 64MB.

This may only be the case on my system, and it is very likely the above info is incorrect somehow, but it's interesting none the less.

But I'm still happy the developers included Firefox in FC3. Now, if ATI could hurry up their new drivers...

Oh, and don't get me wrong, I LOVE Firefox! I couldn't live with out my LQ live bookmark and my tabs.

on windows IE takes much less RAM than anything, because it's half built into the system

but jeez. this is LINUXquestions.org

I don't think that's what it is... I think that Firefox "feels" to consume more RAM then IE, because IE explorer is part of the MS Windows. So basically, MS pre-loads the code. Same goes to the "fast" load of the office package.

Also, IE is/was based in a hell lot of code from Netscape. Today, both Mozilla and Firefox uses Gecko as rendering engines, while IE uses "Trident" in Windows and "Tasman" on the Mac....

MS "tricks" of fast opening and rendering are more into pre-loading code ratter then clean, good code

who cares what "tricks" it uses, it's still faster on windows.

Did I say it was not? What's you point?

wapcaplet thank you for understanding me.
Your post has been greatly appreciated.
I will surely give Firefox a try and fingers crossed maybe get my Ameritrade streamer working.

You know... I had similar problems on Linux ... but I found out there were two real reasons why I had a lot of problems like that:

1) I was using SuSE
2) I simply was not educated enough.

Now, several time later, my system works nearly perfectly ... well, not totally perfect, but 1000 times better then any Windows ever did.

I think one can say, at least in the first half year with Linux, 99 percent of the errors are in front of the computer, not inside.. :-)

I installed Firefox and I must say it is a wonderful product.
However the Ameritrade Streamer gave the same error as Netscape's and terminated just like netscape.

INTERNAL ERROR on Browser End: Plugin instance index out of bounds 17235

System error?:: Resource temporarily unavailable


I took the liberty to also install Firefox for Windows and it worked perfectly!
Netscape on Windows does the Ameritrade Streamer as well.
Now can anyone explain that?? Both my linux and Windows machines have java 1.4.2.

Please don't take this as wanting to compare Linux to Windows. I am doing everything possible
to get all the things that I normally do to start working on Linux and hopefully get rid of Windows once and for all.

I finally managed to get Ameritrade Streamer and their new site to work correctly in both Netscape and Firefox.
The solution is to install Java 1.5 and link (ln -s) the java plugin (/usr/java/jre1.5.0/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so) in the plugin folder of Netscape and Firefox.