Thread: Unix Popularity
View Single Post
Old 6th July 2008
Oko's Avatar
Oko Oko is offline
Rc.conf Instructor
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Kosovo, Serbia
Posts: 1,102
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by DrJ View Post
Ugh. I principle I agree, but in practice that is a painful road. I have found wine to be the most maddening program to use in all of OSS. Applications work one day, and not the next when the program is "improved." Many years ago I had Word 2K and Acrobat 4 running under Wine. Neither do any more. IE is unstable for me, but it is useful once in a while.

Codeweavers' support will help with some mainstream applications, and certainly I will welcome what they put out when they release Crossover on BSD.

For many of the things I do a virtual machine just works better. Of course I only do the simple things there, and no games, AutoCAD or things like that. Those are just done better on a Win box.
I have to give you on that one big tamps up. Even though things like Xen might make running a single operating system on a single machine thing of the past I tend to (probably as OpenBSD user) believe that if you need an application which runs only on specific OS you should use that specific OS
and not mess with virtualization.


Quote:
Originally Posted by DrJ View Post
If they can run on BSD I'd prefer it, but beyond serving and simple desktop stuff there really isn't much. That's OK too.
So what is the "complicated" desktop? I thought that a desktop computer was a computer capable of running Web-browser, an email client, and an office suite + little bit of multimedia. Since when the bioengineering software used in Wine industry is must application for the desktop. The same goes for AutoCAD and MatLab. I have not noticed that the Desktop computers sold in the WalMart come with those application.

The only real deficiency of your FreeBSD desktop is that has no flash plug in
and arguably drivers for USB video cameras so you can not do VoIP with video.

Obviously people who write application are catering their customers and if
wine producers happen to be predominantly Windows users the application
written for them will run on that platform.

You join this thread by arguing that any Unix based application is incapable of solving PDEs (although for practical purposes they can not be solved anyway and even if
they could be solved that definitely would not be using numerical computation over 10^60 rational numbers) despite the fact that you know all too well that most simple numerical algorithms were coded in 50s and 60s using Fortran and God knows what operating system. Now you
are arguing that lack of popularity of Unix among desktop users is due to
the fact that there are no Unix specific application for Wine production.
I do not get it.

Most Respectfully,
OKO

P.S. By the way my grandfather was for 70 years ( he lived to be 87) producer
of fine Serbian wines and the plum brandy called Shljivovica. I do not recall
him ever needing a calculator let alone Desktop computer to manufacture those

Last edited by Oko; 6th July 2008 at 08:47 PM.
Reply With Quote