PCMag.com : OS Wars: The battle for your desktop

jiml8 · 03-10-2008, 06:00 PM

Quote:

The field may have leveled, but it's not flat. The OSs still differ in many ways, not all of which are on the surface. We help average users—people with enough tech savvy to install and an own OS and serve as tech support to friends and family, even if they don't consider themselves tech gurus. How do they choose between Mac "Leopard" (Mac OS 10.5.1 after the first automatic update), Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista (pre-Service Pack 1), and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon (Linux)? Easy. Let us pick for you

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2273486,00.asp

DragonSlayer48DX · 03-17-2008, 05:58 PM

In "Interface"

The Ubuntu core, however, is a text-based OS—something Windows spent years getting away from. And unfortunately, you still have to use terminal input to install software or configure settings far too often, even more often than you had to use DOS command lines in Windows 3.1. Until Ubuntu can do away with the terminal for all but the most geeky uses (as the Unix-based Mac OS does), it will never become an OS for the masses.

In "Third-Party Software"

The market for Linux software is all third-party—and a lot of the best is included at installation (as noted previously). The way you install most other programs in Ubuntu is by using package managers connected to Internet servers. Package managers put almost every major open-source program you'd want at your fingertips and install them without resorting to the terminal. Ed Mendelson considers this a major advantage for Linux, describing it as "vastly better" than software installation methods for Mac or Windows.

A bit self-contradictory, don't you think? Hell, I've never even opened the terminal except for the "geeky" uses (education). And the only thing win3.1 was good for was running windows-based software. Even MS system maintenance utilities had to be run under DOS.

Cheers

oskar · 03-18-2008, 06:09 AM

I too disagree with many points in the article... but I think they gave it a fair consideration. The average user doesn't care why the scanner they bought isn't supported, just whether or not it is.
Software selection... Yes... the open source software collection cannot compete with Adobe and Autodesk, but not everyone has a couple of hundred dollars to spend for home use. And once the software costs 10 times as much as the OS, the OS becomes secondary.