Thread: Poll and discussion: When/Will Linux become a major contender in the OS market?
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cheve is offline cheve
2010-05-08 , 04:58
Posts: 362 | Thanked: 143 times | Joined on Mar 2008
#66
Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
As a computer scientist, Linux is interesting for its Unix roots and as a source of code to look at for ideas and solutions to problems.
In the past, progress in science was fuelled by sharing/free-flowing of idea - I wonder how much of these free-idea were taken/used in the closed-source/commerical O/S where this same group of people tries to patent everything in sight(suggesting that they have put untold amount of resource/money/etc to obtain the result). I do not really see this as being good for science or human-progress.

Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
As a developer, there is no substitute for Visual Studio 2008, and the beta 2010 has me only using 2008 when I need to create 2008 .sln files to send files to other people not using the 2010 beta.
there is no substitue for for visual studio 2008, of course not - MS controls the APIs, interfaces to all system level stuff. Do you really think that MS will give other vender the same chance to build a competing compiler/IDE?

Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
Also as a developer, C# is one of the best languages ever created. Hands down. If you are dissing it, you obviously haven't used it or you are working on projects close to the metal. Even for those projects though, this might prove you wrong.
no single language is the best. Every one of them has its strenghts and weakness. Beside, what critiera do you make your claim? By the way, if you can not use all the wonderful classes/objects that are prebuilt with the visual studio - will you arrive at the same conclusion?

Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
As a political scientist, I wonder about the overt socialist nature of the GPL and wonder if the same problems that brought down socialist governments will bring down or restrict the adoption of socialist software.
I will take the social benefit of GPL anytime of the day than the current push of patent-everything and the 'nice' EULA approach. By the way, this so call 'overt socialist nature' is the very nature where much of science discovery/development progress depends upon. GPL is about sharing and preventing stopage of such sharing. GPL for s/w in this new age/centry is like the Printing press and books of the old.

Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
As a gamer, I have absolutely no use for Linux. People who say they use their consoles are only getting 1/3rd of the possible gaming experience. Windows computers are the best gaming machines known to man. If you disagree with this, you obviously haven't tried PC gaming.
Agree, games are awesome


Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
As just an end-user, I hate the Ubuntu interface. KDE is much more to my liking. Even still, the Linux directory structure is confusing and downright stupid. This makes doing simple file tasks hard.
People with other O/S background, can also complaint about where things are in windows and how confusing things can be(why DLLs have to be in system32:-). It is just the way things setup, so you just have to deal with it.

Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
Under Windows I know that my programs will always be under C:\Program Files. Under linux, the executable itself will be in one place, the startup script in a completely different place, and other files will be god knows where. Not only that, but between different distributions, sure there's the same basic directories, but they put the program files in different directories than other distributions. Its crazy.
it is different and it makes troubleshooting difficult sometimes; but I do not think it is crazy. The truely crazy thing about windows is the now, generally accepted practice of reboot-machine-when-all-else-fails as the mean to 'resolve' issue.

Originally Posted by mmurfin87 View Post
Finally, as a tech geek with an eye on the future, I wonder whether Linux's chances at widespread non-server/embedded will survive the era of cloud computing. You can be guaranteed that Microsoft will have a cloud ecosystem and that linux will not be a part of that. Microsoft has the money to fund a massive cloud ecosystem. Where will linux get that money from to build and run a similar (knocked-off) cloud ecosystem to give linux users all the great things that Windows user will enjoy?

Food for though.
sorry, for me, the 'cloud' is an extended version of the good old of mainframe. A cool thing would be a quantum computer driving by linux kernel
Last edited by cheve; 2010-05-08 at 05:17.