My love/hate realationship with Windows and Linux

[morcar]

As most of you know I have gone back and fore from Windows to Linux more times than I change my underwear (that’s a lot by the way) and yet the problem I have with Linux is how primitive the emulators are.

My first love is playing old games so emulators for me is a must as I cant have a lot of old consoles and computers around the house as there simply is not the space for them. Emulators are on my computer, don't take up space on my desk and it does the job for playing games and using old apps.

Windows does it all for me as they seem more developed, easy to use and you can find the right emulator for the job very easy. My main problem here is that its on Windows and I don't like the feel of the operating system as it feels clunky when it should feel smooth and quick to use. No matter how I configure the system I still don’t like it.

Linux on the other hand is different. Some emulators have a lot to configure with in files and some don’t even have a GUI. You need to have the right files in the right place and it don’t tell you much on what you need. Don't get me wrong I can configure them, but it takes time and its time I would rather spend playing games and such. The operating system on the other hand is smooth and is a joy to use. Its very close on how Amiga Workbench was when I used it on my A1200 which is always a plus in my mind.

I just put my ramblings on her so if you want to comment please do as I think it would be very interesting to hear other peoples views on this and on operating systems.

 

[Justin]

well an OS is a very personal opinion thing.

personally i don't like linux it feels home grown, unsupported and a little elitist.

Miggy OS was amazing and sooo ahead of it's time, but has not aged well.

Windows has gone from great (early XP) to dire (Vista) to awesome (W7) it is well supported feels fast and runs pretty much anything

W7 for me

 

[moijk]

Linux on the other hand is different. Some emulators have a lot to configure with in files and some don’t even have a GUI.

Thats how us *nix folks like it. GUI is slow and cumbersome.

there are however usually seperate gui tools if it floats your boat. not that i know in your case, given i don't like emulators.

 

[Bryce]

I fully agree morcar, my preferred solution is a Dual-boot PC. You can't beat it. Linux for real work, Windows for the few pieces of software that don't work or aren't good in Linux.

Bryce.

 

[robinsonb5]

The thing that annoys me about Linux is the constant churn - every new distro seems to remove some neat feature that I used to use regularly, but which is now too much hassle.
(For example, a mainstream distro that supports XDMCP out of the box? And no, VNC is not even *remotely* comparable to remote X on a LAN.)

My current bugbear is the deprecation of any kind of (working) OSS emulation. It's now much easier to get the Windows version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein running under WINE than it is to get sound out of the native Linux version.

Which leads me to suggest: have you tried running Windows versions of the emulators under WINE?

 

[velikani]

For some odd reason I went for OSX some years ago both at work and home. I stopped using my Windows XP (and later on Win7) and went on using OSX on my office laptop.

Things changed somewhere along the path with release of the latest ubuntu (or 10.x->11.x->12.04LTS), I've started to use my MBP for IRC and spotify. It finally seems to be usable and stable enough to do the job I want it to do.

Though I have to say, using the Unity thing with current Ubuntus is just not working for me. I got the gnome classic thing and now it works like a charm.

anyway, what I ment to say briefly, was that try different things to see what makes you tick.

 

[AmiNeo]

Linux mint + Cinnamon + WINE = Beautiful awesomeness.

 

[jvdbossc]

I am a big fan of Ubuntu and also like other distro's. I'd recommend a dual boot setup so you can transfer more gently.

On my new pc ( a core I5 with 16 gigs of ram) 64 bit ubuntu I run windows in virtual box like it was a toy.. It runs fast enough for most older system emulators including winuae.

In fact classic os's run faster then native.

I recently needed it for playstation emulation and it worked. I installed it in xp in virtual box.

I did not try heavy newest direct x games, I suspect that will be a big no go.

I know linux can be a pain. But it is a good investment. You get a choice. If you dislike parts.. Like I dislike the new looks of ubuntu.. I replaced it with gnome 3.

You are in controle! I did not need to rush to store like others to buy windows 7, to avoid a stupid grill of a software company..



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[Hivernaal]

ohhh the last time i wanted to instal 7, after booting the dvd and after 10 minutes installation he said "oh i forgot, i don't have you're DVDrom driver..."
fabulous XXI century !
Amiga os was the best for me and still the one...

 

[woodycool]

Hmm, OSes are something I love and fall out with on several occasions.

I've never liked the feel of MacOS X, it's OK but I find it limited from a 'configuration' point.

Linux, well depends on distro, I was a massive fan of Ubuntu and just about any other Debian based distro but hate the Ubuntu Unity shell and not digging all that GNOME 3 shizzle at all. KDE seems bloated and LXDE lacks most of the required features (despite it being nice and quick) - not a fan of XFCE either.

As for Windows, well, everybody still seems to love XP so much I now absolutely f*****g hate XP, all down to the fact of all the bloated updates & service packs. Vista always was and always will be god damn awful!
Windows 7, well I'm torn with this, it's a love hate thing with me. It's a serious improvement over previous versions but sometimes all this added security and stuff just 'gets in the way' - UAC being one of the annoying features (I always turn it off)

As for Windows 8, it's slowly growing on me, but still think it's a far cry from being a decent OS.

Bring back AmigaOS ..... AROS ain't half bad but not up to the job of being my main OS as it still alpha/beta/incomplete

That's my rant for this evening.

 

[robinsonb5]

Linux, well depends on distro, I was a massive fan of Ubuntu and just about any other Debian based distro but hate the Ubuntu Unity shell and not digging all that GNOME 3 shizzle at all. KDE seems bloated and LXDE lacks most of the required features (despite it being nice and quick) - not a fan of XFCE either.

Try Mint Mate edition - I tried it a few months ago and it felt like coming home!

 

[woodycool]

Linux, well depends on distro, I was a massive fan of Ubuntu and just about any other Debian based distro but hate the Ubuntu Unity shell and not digging all that GNOME 3 shizzle at all. KDE seems bloated and LXDE lacks most of the required features (despite it being nice and quick) - not a fan of XFCE either.

Try Mint Mate edition - I tried it a few months ago and it felt like coming home!

I take it Mint is Debian/Ubuntu based?

 

[robinsonb5]

I take it Mint is Debian/Ubuntu based?

Yup - and the Mate desktop is a fork of Gnome 2.

 

[joe384]

Debian is probably the best of a bad bunch for me.
What annoys me is the partitioner used by the install is awful (I don't even know what it's called) and there is no easy way of using your own without installing the whole operating system manually.

I've tried pre-partitioning the disk but the debian partitioner just rewrites the table anyway. :roll:

 

[imaga_050]

I recommend GParted live CD (stable) for all your partitioning needs, easy to use and does the job with all in depth options you could need.

 

[Kahenraz]

I think it all depends upon what it is you really like about Linux. For me, it's the console and the development toolchain for programming. These things can be simulated on Windows using Cygwin. So even though I'm in love with Unix, I still stick with Windows for the compatibility.

 

[commodorejohn]

I gave up on Linux after regularly attempting to switch over or even just dabble over the course of about eight years. There's just so much that's so problematic about it:

• The underlying structure is a nightmare labyrinth of forty years of Unix cruft in which any component might fail without warning or explanation when you change something seemingly completely unrelated and leave you having to dig through scripts that call scripts that call applications that call scripts to find out what went wrong.
• Applications all depend on their own particular subset of the minimum of three popular libraries for every conceivable function, and you'll inevitably have at least one conflict where Application X will not abide the presence of Library W which is required by Application Y, but which conflicts with its Library Z, and you will never, ever get the two programs to coexist as a result. Sometimes a program won't even coexist with a newer version of a particular library unless you build it from source.
• XWindows has no standards for UI whatsoever, every application uses one of three popular and significantly different UI toolkits, or better yet, some obscure one you've never heard of, and introduces the programmer's own bizarre eccentricities to the mix, and nobody cares or has a clue about good UI anyway, so nothing works like anything else, unless you use one of the megalithic desktop-environment projects, most of which are bloated as hell, and the ones that aren't are typically missing about half the programs they should have.
• Changing of standards is always done in the most bass-ackwards way possible, deprecating the things that should be left alone merely for change's sake and treating crufty old solutions and designs from the '70s or '80s as Holy Writ.
• Nobody is helpful. Advocates like to pretend that the Linux community is a bunch of friendly geeks who just live for solving other people's problems, but try to get help from a Linux forum, and you'll get a melange of the following: "RTFM noob," "why didn't you think to try (forty lines of Bash script that are in no way self-explanatory and don't solve the problem anyway,)" "you don't need that missing functionality, and you're wrong for wanting it," and "if you're so ungrateful for all the hard work that the developers have put into this, why don't you just fix it yourself, you have the Source!" Along with a half-dozen comments from people who had the problem before you did, got just as little help, and finally gave up on getting it working and switched to some other alternative.

That last one is the crucial point. The reason Linux has every other problem it has is because, being an open-source project, it's defined by its community and developer culture, which is fundamentally broken. Linux developers don't care about coming up with usable solutions; Linux advocates blind themselves to its shortcomings. Neither want to hear anything about how it just plain isn't suitable for general use, for people who just want to get stuff done. To suggest such a thing is heresy!

The commercial OSes have their problems, to be sure, but at least they have a reason to give a crap about the user.

 

[robinsonb5]

it's defined by its community and developer culture, which is fundamentally broken. Linux developers don't care about coming up with usable solutions;

To a large extent I agree. However, I think it's a mistake to think that usability is an absolute, universal quality. How usable something is depends not just on what the user wants to accomplish, but *how* the user wants to accomplish it. I'm a very atypical user, and I find that Linux fits *my* needs better than Windows or MacOS - but I'm also finding that it fits my needs less well at time goes on and it becomes slowly more "usable".

As someone who's written software for Linux (most notably Photoprint and CMYKTool) I can say that it was written to fill a specific need that *I* had, and the user interface is tailored to *my* style of working. If other people use it and find it works for them, great. Where usability improvements don't hamper my workflow I'm happy to include them, but I have no motivation to make changes that don't directly benefit me, or take the user interface in a direction that hampers my way of working.

Due to a printer driver screwup, Ubuntu's "universe" repo now contains a broken package of Photoprint (not made by me) and I get several mails a month from people asking how to fix it. The Gtk2 toolkit on which these projects are based is now deprecated and porting these projects to Gtk3 is way more work than I currently have time for, even if I had the interest (which I currently don't). So it's fair to say I'm rather disillusioned with Linux at the moment - which I'm sure is a big part of why my interest in retro systems surfaced - but I'm still currently more comfortable with Linux than Windows.

 

[commodorejohn]

I'm a very atypical user, and I find that Linux fits *my* needs better than Windows or MacOS - but I'm also finding that it fits my needs less well at time goes on and it becomes slowly more "usable".

Well, naturally I can't speak for you personally, but I have to agree with the second half of this statement - with the sarcasm-quotes around "usable" greatly emphasized, because that's another big problem with the Linux developer community: by and large, they seem to think that "usability" is synonymous with "dumbed down." That isn't the case at all (classic Mac OS and BeOS stand as solid examples of how to design an accessible, consistent, but not dumbed-down UI, even if MacOS lacked a command-line interface and refused to fix its oversight,) but a lot of "make Linux user-friendly" projects seem to think that the way to go about it is to hide all the cruft and unnecessary, Byzantine complexity behind "manager" interfaces designed for the simpletons that they seem to think ordinary users are.

What would actually help would be to refactor the system to remove unnecessary complexity where it can be replaced with simpler solutions without impairing functionality, but that practically never happens, because as I said, they like to change what doesn't need to be changed and treat everything that could actually use it as if it were brought down from Olympus, instead of evolving out of forty years of developing an OS for PDP-11s running serial terminals into a workstation/server OS, and therefore could not possibly be in need of improvement or simplification.

 

[robinsonb5]

... I have to agree with the second half of this statement - with the sarcasm-quotes around "usable" greatly emphasized, because that's another big problem with the Linux developer community: by and large, they seem to think that "usability" is synonymous with "dumbed down."

I'm not sure the developer community in general is guilty of this - just a powerful faction I call the "usability before usefulness" crowd. Unfortunately they seem to have a lot of clout.

What would actually help would be to refactor the system to remove unnecessary complexity where it can be replaced with simpler solutions without impairing functionality, but that practically never happens, because as I said...

The other reason it practically never happens is that it's *hard*! Also, not a great deal of fun - whereas throwing out last year's device-mapping subsystem and replacing it with with hotplug-daemon-du-jour is actually kinda fun to the right kind of geek!