Thread: Unix Popularity
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Old 7th July 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TerryP View Post
I guess you could say that I view unix as a system for developers and windows as a commercial product.
I agree with that, though in the early 1990s there was a push to make Unix commercial too. My impression is that Cutler and his crew did a very good job on the NT kernel, but that it is now rather dated. The "update" to Vista is a mixed blessing. Many of the other "features" were added to ensure a large market penetration. Many of these things you can remove (like balloon help), but other things cannot, like the strict tying of the OS to its original hardware (without a call to MS at least), the infernal registry, limiting the desktop to a single user, and various and sundry interface quirks that can't really be changed.

Regarding the earlier comment on stability and API, I've not had any troubles with W2K or XP stability, and by and large they are more stable than my FreeBSD desktops. There is one glaring exception: XP crashes when you use a network printer, and you lose a connection anywhere along the way. I had a dodgy network cable, and rather than store the output until the device becomes available, the computer crashes. That ins mind-numbingly stupid. On the BSD side, the system itself is very good (if you overlook the early 5.x releases). However, X11 recently has not been particularly stable, and Wine causes occasional crashes. Other things do too. It is not particularly heinous, and it recovers gracefully, but it really is less stable than my W2K development box, which has never, ever crashed.

On APIs: Windows may change it a lot, but they bend over backwards to ensure backwards compatibility. I can still run Office 2K on the latest XP box. Solaris has done the same traditionally, but you can't on BSD or Linux. There is no equivalent of a gettext upgrade.
Quote:
What Oko has described is actually what most people I know use their computers for, aside from work/school related stuff and "pleasure" (games, p2p, porn, etc).
That may be, but I think the "desktop" discussion suffer from this assumption. Most people in that camp would need Flash, yet many here say they do not. My granddaughter spends countless hours using a home-design CAD program; that certainly is a desktop application. Many people connect to work from home, and do work "stuff" at home. scottro needs a virtual machine to use VPN for that; others do stock trading.

How people use computers really varies a lot. Certainly OSS should cover the common uses like those mentioned, but to restrict what a desktop might be to only those applications seems rather limiting.
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