How can we pass up a title like that? The article takes an interesting approach on practicality. Linux’s pros: it runs on so many kinds of hardware, installing software is easy, variety of file managers and desktop environments. The Mac is popular because is has “strong software titles” and good support. The kicker: “If Linux distributions had the same level of consumer tech support available that Windows and OS X does, we’d see adoption number exploding.” To be blunt, I find this essay unpersuasive. However, if you look at the examples where Linux has been successful in the market, such as embedded systems like set-top boxes and heavily customized OS variants with their own software ecosystem like Android, it’s precisely Linux’s esoteric strengths that made those platforms’ developers choose it. And what did those platforms have that made them successful? Strong software running on top of the OS along with a worry-free onboarding and maintenance process, usually with professional support for end-users. What do you know?
Linux is more practical because it runs on SPARC. That’s a killer feature for the average Joe. Yeah!! Linux for the win!! OSX you are doomed!!
Linux fanboys are incredible… only a nerd living in Mars can write an article like that and take it seriously hahaha
Get real!! The average computer user doesn’t know what a hardware architecture is!!! How running Linux on ARM can be more practical for them?!?! Are you on drugs???
I cannot believe how smart people can be so stupid and shortsighted…
And that stupid nerd mentality is what ruined Linux as a Desktop OS (and almost every other end-user open source project). Linux fanboys live in a parallel world. It’s a shame.
Anyway, he has the ultimate point: Finder is one of the worst file managers right there!
Actually Windows Explorer is far better. In Linux I actually like Thunar: It simply does the work! and in Windows, Total Commander is king.
Edited 2015-07-14 03:29 UTC
The Finder does every job any typical user needs. In contrast, Windows Explorer confuses the hell out of my mother and my wife barely uses it. Both prefer to use the applications and the open/save dialogs to do all their file work. Ask them to create a folder somewhere specific and move a file into that folder and at least my mother would struggle. Windows Explorer completely fails the “Aunt Tilly”-test.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the default file manager should be dead simple, like Finder or Nautilus. If you know enough about computers to find them limiting, you know enough to swap them for something else without bitching about the simplicity of those file managers.
I’ve never understood why some people think that its a good idea to aim for the lowest common denominator.
Could I spend days searching for and then downloading replacements for all the OS X and Linux programs that treat me like a retard? Yes, I could probably technically do that. But I could also just buy a Windows PC where it comes pre-installed with a better file manager.
IMO part of the job of a distribution is to select a reasonable set of default applications and preferrences for me to use. A distro targeting “Aunt Tilly” is not something I personally want to use.
My wife has just switched to a Mac. Watching her struggle with Finder really does highlight how counter-intuitive it is; functionality is difficult to discover and the window manager behaviour in OS X sometimes makes the functionality it does have more complicated than it needs to be (E.g. drag & drop)
Windows Explorer lacks a decent Tree view. Most Linux alternatives are either almost identical to Finder or include so many unused features they are a pain to work with. Finder’s only real problem is its refusual to let you copy the path of a damn file your highlighting.
Has Tree view (check)
Has Column View (check)
Details (check)
Ability to adjust sort order (check)
Go To (check)
Quick access to mount points (check)
I can’t really see why people complain about the application. Before they added cut I would of failed the entire application over that one missing feature, but now I really can’t see what the fuss is about.
Can’t simply copy & paste files. Drag & drop works differently depending on (to the common user) magical conditions. Might move, might copy. Who knows?
Almost all of the “Order by…” options are almost, but not quite, entirely not what anybody actually wants.
Still, you can just arrange the files & folders as you’d prefer them. Oh wait, no you can’t.
“All Documents” is the dumbest thing ever if you have more than 10 files.
Hope you don’t have one file in two different file formats, otherwise you just have to know the subtle iconographic difference between “Presentation.key” & “Presentation.pptx”. Or you can option-click, navigate a menu and pop up a dialog to figure out what file you’re looking at. Convenient.
Home directory hidden by default.
Pixel-perfect precision is required to add new shortcuts. Provided you can ever figure out how to do it.
Labels. Anyone ever use them? Speak up at the back? Didn’t think so.
Hope you remembered to make sure both the source folder window & the target folder window are fully visible before you start dragging those files. OS X window manager won’t help if they’re not.
That’s just off the top of my head.
You can just hold a file/folder you are dragging over another folder for about a second and it will pop open allowing you to go as deep as you want.
Edited 2015-07-15 22:22 UTC
More non-discoverable functionality.
I think the right question is:
Which version of Windows Explorer would that be ?
Because they they look and acts very different. Just try comparing the version in Windows XP with Windows 8 for example.
Yeah, pretty weak article. Its almost as bad as a huff post article.
The average user sticks with what comes one the computer preinstalled. How many do you think ever installed Windows or OS X on their own?
Which goes back to good support. If users would have been getting computers with preinstalled Linux and good support attached, Linux usage would have skyrocketed. Windows and OS X aren’t better or more practical. But they have the benefit of being sold preisntalled in massive numbers with having support.
So Linux ends up being used mostly by those who are up to installing the OS on their own. Which is already a minority. So all this “nerd mentality, Linux is hard to use” etc. is bunk. Preinstalation is the key.
Edited 2015-07-14 04:35 UTC
This is non-sense.
The average user of Macs or Windows systems can do major OS upgrades or move to another hardware and take their data (Windows) or even their old installation (Macs) with them without a problem and without support (heck, on ancient Mac OS, this was as easy as attaching the old computer in target disk mode to the new one and drag the old hard drive to the new – now show me a Linux distro that do the same).
You are completely mistaken if you believe the Linux Desktop problem has anything to do with Linux being pre-installed and supported or not or – the other popular myth – the lake of commercial software for Linux. It’s neither. Linux is just not a user friendly OS.
(I use Windows and Linux at work and a Mac at home – the Linux desktop experience is by far the worst of them – It always baffles me how hard common every-day task are when dealing with Linux such as using a printer – even things that one might think should be easier to achieve on Linux than on a Mac or Windows are sometimes way harder, e. g. getting current version of OSS software running).
It has everything to do with it. You can’t ignore the elephant in the room (Windows bundling), and wave hands at Linux being “hard to use”. The practical problem lies way before that, and it never changed since ’90s (i.e. the obnoxious bundling issue).
Edited 2015-07-14 20:12 UTC
Really Linux desktop is the worst ?
My dad uses Ubuntu with GNOME 2 style.
I can tell you those kind of interfaces are a still a lot easier to use for most users than Windows 8 for example.
This is the 3 step plan for Linux desktop market domination in the US:
1. A Dell, HP, or company of similar stature, adopting Linux as their OS of choice, i.e. that is all they sell. Products are on the shelf at BestBuy, Walmart, etc, with the same warranties and the same marketing machine behind them as all the other PCs. The hardware can’t suck and must be much better than its price tag would indicate. And Linux is customized to the point of it barely being recognizable anymore, otherwise there is no way to distinguish it from the communist open source crap on the internet (remember, these are American consumers we are talking about…)
2. About 5 years to actually stew in the market and hopefully earn enough street cred to be barely competitive with Windows hardware and break 3% marketshare…
3. Profit??? No way in hell…
Sorry. Ain’t gonna happen. Chrome Books are as close as we are ever going to see, and even though they might be somewhat popular, there is no where for them to go. They are eternally squeezed into the cheap and disposable pricing category by virtue of them only selling when they are cheap and disposable…
They make profits on hardware, not on the OS. So not sure what your profit comment was about. If they can’t make profit on hardware – they are already busted, no matter what OS they use.
Edited 2015-07-14 16:01 UTC
And profits on hardware (in the current market environment) are thin as a razor (often virtually non-existent) unless you are Apple. That is kind of the whole point.
Unless you commit to Linux exclusively and market it heavily, you have no chance of getting any real volume, because you will be spending all your time and resources moving Windows PCs (which do sell in volume) and thus no real investment is made into marketing Linux seriously to consumers. Dell sells Linux PCs for example, but only servers sell at any volume worth mentioning…
Selling Linux “on the side” is perfectly doable, lots of OEMs do it, and it has done nothing at all to further Linux use in the desktop space. Investing in a pure Linux strategy, imo, is the only way anyone will really be able to get serious market penetration, but it will take years to come to fruition. Hence no volume. Hence no profit.
Dell (through Alienware) will be now selling Steam Machines (which are custom consolized Linux PCs essentially). That can improve the situation.
Edited 2015-07-14 16:56 UTC
Good point. It isn’t a pure Linux play, but at least it will, by virtue of being a somewhat “special” machine, eliminate direct comparisons to Windows to a degree. They are in effect pulling an Android, slap a different name on it and a different UI so that consumers don’t know it is Linux, and special purpose it a bit.
It will still be a challenge to get sufficient volume, but at least it has a shot. Just slapping Linux on PCs just doesn’t work. Maybe this will. Who knows.
It’s not the problem of letting users know if it’s Linux or not. It’s like you said, the problem of overcoming the network effects.
In this case they’ll be competing not with Windows, but more with Xbox and PlayStation OSes, and since those are tied to their own hardware, it indeed reminds the situation of Android on a range of vendors vs Apple on one device. So they hope to advance by being more open. Hopefully that would work.
Except unlike Android, their SteamOS is a normal Debian based Linux and therefore its success will benefit Linux at large (while Android does nothing in this regard).
Edited 2015-07-14 17:15 UTC
Yes, you are right. I wasn’t trying to say that Linux itself was bad perse, just that you need more than “it has Linux instead of Windows” as a reason to buy the thing.
People will buy this because it plays their Steam games, just like they buy Android phones to run Android apps. It is a marketable product that can distinguish itself from just being another PC…
To be fair: calling Linux Desktop a failure equals to call OS X Desktop a failure too.
Why? Because their usage share are virtually the same (around 2% of desktops)!
I find funny articles like that, who takes OS X as a success, because their are wrote entirely from a American view point. The problem is: Mac desktops are just as rare (usually even more) as Linux desktops outside USA.
Which is a better indicator of “success”, marketshare or profits? Im not taking a side, I just think saying they have low marketshare is kind of missing the bigger picture. You can make up a lot of marketshare by commanding higher prices…
Linux may be 2% of the desktop market but I bet it has an amazing market share among software developers. I wonder what percent of IT is using Linux?
Repeating a lie doesn’t make it true.
Each iPhone sold has a $400+ carrier subsidy. Without those subsidies the iPhone business (and Apple itself) is barely profitable.
But how does that matter? Those “carrier subsidies” arise from Apple’s contracts with the carrier that carriers sign because they find the phone contract business model viable (and it is, as foreign as this model is to me). The resulting profits are real, honest-to-God profits.
Warren Buffett said to never invest in a company that relies on subsidies because the subsidies will inevitably end one day.
If you want to see how important subsidies are to Apple just look at their pitiful market share in non-subsidised markets (pretty much everywhere except the US and China.)
I didn’t read Buffett’s quote in context, but my wild guess is that he meant non-market subsidies, provided by the government. The “subsidies” Apple gets from carriers ultimately come from the market – that is, from the willingness of the carriers’ customers to subscribe to phone contracts. That too may change in the future, but it has not yet.
So? What difference does that make? It is still profit. You have an interesting notion of what a lie is…
Besides, I only added that bit for a bit of context. We are talking about Macs and the PC market… Are Macs subsidized?
No. That probably explains the tiny Mac market share.
My point is still why worry about the marketshare when it is in fact growing year over year, has been for over 5 years, and profits are growing even faster? Especially in a market where virtually everyone else is barely breaking even.
Subsidies are obviously not the explanation in the desktop PC market where they do not exist…
Edited 2015-07-16 21:40 UTC
The Mac has a smaller market share than it had in 1997.
Is there a point your trying to make? My argument is that the market share being small is kind of missing the point, and you bring up their market share nearly 20 years ago like it is relevant or something…
Apple’s entire market cap in 1997 was 2.3 billion. Even adjusted for inflation that is only 3.4 billion or so in 2015 dollars.
They did 5.6 billion in revenue on just Macs in the 1st quarter this year. They nearly made their 1997 marketcap in profits, just on Macs, just in one quarter…
Is your argument that they were more successful selling Macs in 1997 or something? Really?
I was really surprised to see just as many Macs in Europe as I see in the US. This whole discussion is just another OS war B.S.
I think the article title is just click bate and the running on different hardware architectures is pretty silly. Running on older hardware is however useful and I agree with the part at the end of the article:
For the average user that gets his/her system set up by a professional before hand the Linux desktop isn’t harder to use than Windows or Mac OS X.
Saying Linux is better for the average user might be over stating it a bit. But as someone that sets up the machine for them I find Linux to be easier to set up.
I use desktop Linux myself for both fun and work, but I can honestly say such fanboysh articles were boring even 10 years ago.
It lost me as soon as the first point “Linux can run on old PCs, new PCs, ARM powered micro-computers, even on consumer appliances.” Seriously, try to run a so-called “modern” Linux desktop (GNOME, KDE) on anything less than a relatively new machine and then talk about it. Sure, there are Linuxes for old/low powered machines, but don’t call those user friendly desktops.
The rest is equally boring: rolling back a release is described at a full OS install, the installing software part is avoiding the lack of availability of entire classes of apps and so on.
I acknowledge I couldn’t write myself a better article, but that’s because I *never* owned myself an Apple device, but I expect to be the same as a Linux/Windows comparison, each having its ups and downs.
Maybe I am nuts, but I find Gnome far easier to use than OSX. Far more stable even. I haven’t had Gnome crash and completely reboot the system in a long time. I have a very recent 13″ macbook pro from work and I dislike it a lot.
But about the point of old PCs and Linux. I imstalled Debian Wheezy with LXDE on a p4 with 128mb of ram and it was still decently usable. The problem with running gnome or kde on such a thing is the compositing. So it really all depends on the video for a smooth experience. I would also suggest a minimum of 256mb of ram (probably 512mb even).
Apple’s real problem/advantage is their fanboys are very pushy, the products are crap though. New macbook pro rattles if the fan kicks in and I happen to be laying down and holding it at an angle. Plus things like releasing discoveryd before it was ready, Apple Maps, etc. It may look shiny, but the unternals are a mess. Oh and screw their tendency to use uppercase file and folder names….
I’m in the MATE camp, couldn’t stand what GNOME became after 3.0. LXDE may be light on resources, with the price of usability on the level of Windows 98, but as soon as you start a few apps, it does not matter.
Exactly. You can’t really use a lightweight desktop with modern apps. I installed LXDE on an old Pentium 1.8 laptop with 768MB of RAM. As soon as you opened a couple of web pages it was barely usable.
It’s just a matter of where you’re coming from (ie; what you’re used to). I run a MBP but often have a VM running permanently with my preferred Linux distro or OpenBSD installed with a tiling or *box window manager as my default environment. For someone like me, both Gnome 3 and OS X are equally frustrating, though not as much as recent versions of Windows.
I’ve not used Windows seriously in more than a decade and recently got asked to help someone install something on a Windows 8 laptop. I was seriously lost for a good fifteen minutes or so. This whole “shell” environment UX is simply beyond me. Also, Windows multitouch behaviour is just plain weird out of the box. Why the hell do I have to two-finger swipe up for the page to scroll down?! Was the person in-charge of touchpad defaults some sort of flight-sim buff? I’ve got no idea if this is truly what the majority of people are used to, but to me it feels like you’d have to be some kind of genius mad scientist (emphasis on mad) to sanely navigate Windows 8.
Edited 2015-07-15 13:11 UTC
From desktop point of view… if stripped down, even Windows would run nicely on old hardware. In the end it is not relevant for average Joe because the apps are the most resource-hungry part of the story, especially modern web browsers trying to display modern web pages and web apps.
Yes finder is still not much fun. Try copying a file to a network share. Nine times out of ten it doesn’t work.
It always complains after copying. muCommander copies files without a problem.
I do like the printersupport. Got a Kyocera one with airprint or something. On a mac it shows up in the add printer dialog (bonjour) and clicking on it installed it very quickly complete with correct icon image.
It did come with a ppd file for linux on a cd.
You do know Linux uses cups and Apple uses cups and if you have Avahi installed, it works the same as bonjour, right? Printer support generally works better than Windows does.
I did not know that, I usually select a printer by ip-address.
Installed avahi and it does find the printer still asks for the ppd file but that’s do-able
Slight problem with linux is that you’ll have to figure out what things like avahi and vinagre do the names aren’t always helping.
Ubuntu has some helpfull aliases, Mint a bit less and some i10n is a bit weird.
The Samba Server Configuration Tool is nice, could share some stuff without reading the man page
I see this all the time, yet anyone that bothers to use the NDK knows this isn’t 100% true.
Also, Google could release Android 6.0 with BSD or QNX and no one would notice, given that it is like 90% Java.
Same applies to ChromeOS.
Android = Linux Kernel + Shitty Android userland.
That is more accurate. Even if they would include a minimum Gnu userland I think it’d be a better system. I still want a Jolla phone. If they had released one in the US with LTE I would ha e bought one in a heartbeat. People I work with keep wanting me to get an iPhone and I just about vomit at the thought.
You forgot the additional fact that Linux in Android is a modified kernel, which doesn’t even support many POSIX APIs.
As for Jolla, they are gone now unless Nokia buys them back.
No they aren’t, they seem to have gotten big enough to have a software division and a hardware design division. Then there is the whole Russian deal and some of the rumors around that.
Splitting units isn’t becoming big enough, is restructuring, which usually comes around one year before the big bang.
Android’s user space is horrible! I realize they don’t want me in that part of the OS, but damn if they couldn’t make it a little easier to get things done when you get in the weeds.
The manufacturers would certainly notice when none of their device drivers work.
Mac fans tend to pretend that Macs Just Work. However, when they Just Don’t (which happens just as often as on Windows, minus the malware), it’s virtually impossible to get them up and running again. Apparently, single user mode doesn’t work on the latest version of the OS (disabled on encrypted file systems?). The community is entirely useless (‘Have you tried restoring permissions?’), and there’s not a single good resource on the web. At least, Apple’s own pages are not.
Macs “Just Doesn’t Work.”
They are the still the only type of hardware or software I have ever had to call tech support on. A Mac Mini I was borrowing bricked when the internet fell out during an update. It couldn’t reboot, and OS X had to be reinstalled, and I had no internet so I couldn’t look it up on a non shit device like my Linux laptop, and of course nothing is documented or intuitive on a Mac.
First call to tech support: How do I eject the current CD, I need to insert the OS X CD? Hold down right mouse button while booting (because that makes sense)
Second call: Ehmmm… How do I make it book from the CD instead of failing to boot from disk? Hold another random button while booting (because that makes sense)
Versus whatever random key sequence, bios setting, and other incantations you need to do on any other PC to do the same things. Those technique are “intuitive” and “make sense” because PC people are used to them. The PCs operational folklore is just as arcane and arbitrary as the Macs, and to anyone who hasn’t used the other, of course they’re going to appear foreign.
“Those Macs have a different technique for everything” — S. Martin
The Mac keystrokes on boot techniques have been around for, and changed little over the life time of the machines, 20+ years, across different processors, OS’es, and architectures.
The technique to get a floppy out of the drive on a Mac 128K circa 1984? Hold down the mouse button on boot.
t all grows from there.
The big difference here is that Macs hide whatever the special keys are, PCs have a boot up screen that shows the various press f8, f2, delete, etc. They even usually have a separate ‘boot menu’ key.
Versus, clearing out pram on a mac (whatever that even is) requiring someone with either large hands, or a second person.
My hands are quite small (smaller than average) but still having no problem pressing all those key combinations.
Edited 2015-07-14 21:23 UTC
So, essentially, you are complaining because event though PC’s use one of at least 3 different key sequences to enter BIOS (F2 (or some other F key), Delete, ctrl-S and I’ve seen other weird ones on older hardware), and the BIOS itself is different on any given manufacturers hardware, you’re butt hurt because Mac’s all Intel use the exact same firmware and short-cuts, and all PowerPC use mostly the same short-cuts as Intel and all 68K Macs used mostly same short-cuts as PowerPC?? Really? So, because you’re unaware, it’s wrong? Being ignorant of terminology isn’t an excuse to put your prejudices on to others.
On a PC you push the eject button to eject CDs and insert a bootable CD to boot from CD.
I can’t see how that could be any simpler?
Macs do work, if they have a problem there is in my experience something hardware related.
Fixed some macs:
macbook pro keyboard didn’t like water. Replaced with one from ebay. Micro-usb3 connection on external disk went wonky. OSX doesn’t like disconnecting drives so everything went bananas. rescued files and complete reinstall on internal drive. Worked fine. (original quote from shop was new mainboard). Internal sata cable on macbook stopped working. (it is flimsy) put drive in external case and ordered a new cable.
Windows problems are 99% virus and malware related
and the occasional broken powersupply / fried mainboard thingy.
Edited 2015-07-14 19:52 UTC
For me as a longtime occasional Linux user, the OS itself (a complete one like Mint 17.1) is fine. I would gladly use it full-time. Now there are even full-featured proprietary professional CAT tools for Linux that I can use for my freelance translation work. However, there is one crucial need that hasn’t been addressed for a long time and that prevents me from going all Linux: quality GUI-based OCR software.
Forget about Tesseract and Cuneiform – with them you have to recover most or all of the formatting, and the basic recognition quality is not very good. OCRFeeder etc. lack features (no table recognition – no go) and are buggy. ABBYY is the best in the OCR industry; they even have their FineReader OCR engine ported to Linux, and the price is reasonable, but it’s command-line only. This is one of the cases where command line can be intrinsically less productive than GUI. The thing is, I often need to convert PDFs to Word format, and automatic layout recognition routines do not work well for my purposes most of the time. I need to manually select areas of different types for OCR to get it perfect. There is no Linux software, OSS or proprietary, that really provides that functionality.
I guess that’s also the case in many other areas.
Well, not that I use OCR frequently but, when I needed, I used tesseract / yagf /scantailor. It is a quite good combination. Don’t know how they compare to Finereader, though.
Tesseract + YAGF didn’t work for me as a FineReader replacement when I tried them about half a year ago. Thanks for the reference to Scantailor; I don’t scan often, but this seems to be a useful tool.
OCR? That basically started to work on Windows during the Windows 98 days and OmniPage. Nowadays I point my phone at a piece of text and it does a live OCR+translate from Japanase to Dutch in real time while keeping the font and outlining intact
Looooong time Windows/Linux user here. Yes, I use both on my desktops. Everyday.
In technical terms, (GNU/)Linux is the superior operating system. It’s smaller, faster, more stable, has better recovery tools, (far) better package management, better file system support, better core utils, etcetera. You can really feel that Linux was made by engineers based on technical decisions.
By comparison, Windows’ design is only partly based on technical considerations, but is also meant to protect their code and revenue. So, it has all sorts of keys & activations, obfuscation, measures to make reverse engineering hard, and so on. This – in my view – gives it a higher “WTF were they smoking? factor”.
So why isn’t Linux dominant on the desktop? I think because desktops are a “winner takes it all” market. Communication, work, play, is easier when you use the same OS as your boss, colleagues, clients, friends, family. The typical outcome is a clear #1 and a distant #2. On the desktop this is 1=Windows and 2=OSX.
Linux on the desktop is in the same position as Windows Phone on the mobile market: there is just not much room for a number 3. Which has not much to do with quality.
And because Linux on the desktop is so small, there are less (quality) apps developed for it, meaning it will stay less attractive for “granny” to use and for the corporate world.
So basically it’s all about inertion. Inertion is also “loving the devil you know”. Consumers but also clever corporate desktop users take the typical Windows problems for granted, and refuse to use a system that may be better but is slightly different.
Objectively though, Linux desktops such as Mint/Cinnamon, Ubuntu/Unity, openSuse/KDE are fine and easy to use, in my view easier then Windows 7, let alone Windows 8 / 10.
I play with OSX from time to time and recently got an iPad from work (non jailbroken, so with iOS). I can see how iOS was a great innovative mobile OS, but coming from Android it feels like 2 steps backward, old fashioned. I can also see that OSX was easier, smoother, slicker than Windows, 10 years ago. But to me it feels restricted, compared to Linux but also to Windows. And old fashioned, compared to say Ubuntu/Unity. Macbooks have great hardware. But on the software side….ouch. Those file systems. Those window manager animations. That packagemanagement…. And what about Bash, version 0.1 or something?
Edited 2015-07-14 13:00 UTC
That is the first thing that should be objectively addressed.
To me, yes.
To a typical windows or mac user ? No way. Every time I have to support some “typical” user things frequently revolve around MS Office, Adobe Suite (specially Photoshop), Autocad and drivers and these is where complications kicks in.
For the billionth time, people use computers because of applications, not because the OS. They also will refuse to switch to a OS they were not primarily exposed unless something they forcibly must run is not available.
Also, lets not forget that most people don’t care a cent about software “attached strings”. They just want it to make things as smooth as possible, i.e., they don’t want any possible troubles associated to use or documents sharing/exchange.
See, LibreOffice is a wonderful suite (I actually prefer it) but 99 % of time people around you use MS Office and despite all the progress that happened on LO there are still kirks involved on documents exchange. So, most people decline/resist the possibility to use LO.
Gimp and KDE Callligra Krita are wonderful, just don’t ask designers to use them instead of Photoshop.
Autocad, well, there is Bricscad/Intellicad (Open Design Alliance) and DraftSight but, at least around me, never ever had contact with some engineer/architect that was not using Autocad.
All the above cited closed source apps have a Mac version and lacks a Linux one.
So, from my POV, no, even though I prefer greatly linux over anything else, it is not more practical for the “typical” computer user around me.
+1. Shows that Linux Desktop mass adoption depends on a) availablility of more applications/ interoperability
b) drivers for new hardware
Point is, there are less applications, and drivers for new graphical cards etc. come later, because linux has only a small share on the desktop. A vicious circle, basically.
On the other hand, the stuff I have done for years with my Linux laptop is still lacking in e.g. Windows. Live (persistent) distros, multiple desktops, snapshots, rollbacks, and so on.
Was reading this late at night when I saw this on the second page:
“Most people using OS X (non-geeks) retain help from either their local genius bar or perhaps over the phone with via Apple Support. Sadly, Linux users lack any sort of reliable local assistance since techs would prefer users running Windows. So while it’s easier to find support for OS X locally, I’ve found that running Linux is more practical overall.”
That doesn’t make sense! How can it be more ‘practical’ when you admit that you can’t find advice locally? The best observation I have found WRT using Linux is having a second machine available to find out information online.
I now do almost all of my work on Linux (Mageia 5 x86_64, Intel dual core) and the simple fact is that – just like earlier times when I knew and suffered only Windows, the real key is knowing your system and how it works; there is no mystery in this. You are in a much better position for troubleshooting if you selected all the components yourself, installed the OS and then the software and know where everything is and what it does, and where the limitations and ‘gotchas’ lie waiting.
Irrespective of which OS you are using, this should be the bottom line; perhaps we should stop making excuses for semi-interested users insisting upon things that ‘just work’ and insist ourselves that they will never get full use out of the thing until they understand it better, at least to the point at which most troubleshooting is easy for them.
There is undoubtedly kudos due to those who know their Win or OSX well enough to advise others; those are surely the people to go to. But after using Mandrake, Mandriva and now Mageia since about 2005, I would suggest that comments about Linux’ stability and ease of use are quite justified. I am looking to construct a new system soon with Mageia in mind. Should be interesting!
Edited 2015-07-14 14:53 UTC
Plus: a Google search for Linux solutions will yield usable results. Or, you might use your distro’s forum, IRC or Wiki. And, regardless if you use those distros, the Gentoo and Arch wikis are great resources.
A Google search for Windows problems will give windows.microsoft.com in the first results, most of the time. These solutions are without much value, superficial, hints like “start the wizzard and follow those steps” or “please reboot your machine”. Hints for OSX also oftentimes have “power off your machine” as a “solution”. Or how about this one from Apple.com? quote: Solve OS X Mavericks printing problems. Try these suggestions: If your printer is attached to your Mac, make sure it’s firmly connected, plugged into a power source, and turned on.
Linux has technical users, and no vendors who like to keep things hidden, “just working” and so on –> itÅ› much easier to find usable info when Linux troubleshooting 🙂
Edited 2015-07-14 15:18 UTC
My favorite thing I’ve ran into lately, I was looking up why the fan would be rattling in a few month old Macbook Pro 13″ Retina. One of the suggestions on discussions.apple.com suggested that there was a corrupted file on the system….
Nothing about the fact that I launched Total War: Rome II off of steam to see how it’d run, and when I happen to move the laptop a bit (I had it on the edge of my table kind of pointing upward) the fan made this awful grinding noise.
The topic I found was asking about a lound fan noise and heat from the system… caused by a corrupted file? WTF?
Linux is whatever WE make it to be. Mac OS and Windows are whatever THEY make them to be.
The average person doesn’t learn enough and wastes their days with idiotic pursuits.
I think computing is an important skill. Like cooking. A fundamental in our world. So why aren’t more people learning about computing rather than opting for dumbed down abstraction layers?
Think long term. Think of the ‘cost’ of Apple and Microsoft on humanity.
Enough said.
Chances are this will get voted down. I wonder why…
Yes, computing skills are important… as important as medical skills, mechanical skills, musical skills or any other knowledge.
Lawyers, doctors, musicians, physicians must use their time and intelligence to do their job not wasting it trying to repair a stupid OS fighting with drivers and updates!!!
In a nutshell: creating good and usable technology is OUR job as computer engineers and not people’s job.
Hi,
Lots of people do learn to use a computer, just like lots of people learn basic cooking. Few people learn programming, or the eccentricities of Unix or the absurdities of Linux; just like few people learn how to build their own microwave, or become specialised pastry chiefs or butchers, or know how to mass produce 5000 loaves of bread per day.
– Brendan