6 replies to this topic

[banj0]

I mean this with all due respect for personal preference and all that. Just wondering why people that don't engage in PC gaming use Windows or OSX as their primary OS?

What does Windows or Leopard give you that a free OS like a *nix distro doesn't?

I have no ulterior motive, just wondering why folks that don't game or require DirectX keep using an MS or Apple OS. T.I.A. for the feedback.

Edited by banj0, 01 December 2009 - 09:26 PM.

[Nvyseal]

I'm one who is not a gamer.

Driver availability is one of my main reasons for using Windows (Tiger Woods take note ), and why I skipped Vista for the most part. I test many different peripherals old and new, and need these to work.

At work, Printer, Customer file compatibility and networked machine compatibility is a must. Graphic design, fonts, prepress and variable data are also very important, and are all accomplished on a Windows platform.

I'd like to use a free distro, but the lack of coordination, too many Chiefs and not enough Indians makes it almost impossible to get fixes.

[banj0]

Nvyseal, on Dec 1 2009, 01:32 PM, said:

Driver availability is one of my main reasons for using Windows (Tiger Woods take note )

lol. that guy is in a world of hurt right now.

thx for the reply Nvy, makes sense. Obviously I have nowhere near the level of expertise you do in the field of graphics and stuff so I didn't realize doze made that easier on a professional level.

[Nvyseal]

banj0, on Dec 1 2009, 01:25 PM, said:

lol. that guy is in a world of hurt right now.

thx for the reply Nvy, makes sense. Obviously I have nowhere near the level of expertise you do in the field of graphics and stuff so I didn't realize doze made that easier on a professional level.

A long time ago (on a planet far far away) a Mac was commonplace in the graphics field. Since Windows 98, the PC has pretty much pushed the Mac aside in our work because it's just much more affordable and easier to upgrade.

I really would hate to have a large graphics department and have to upgrade all the Macs whenever there is a big change in the OS

[brewin]

Here's a rant for you...

No viable replacements for any Adobe products. Some will argue that the GIMP is a viable replacement for Photoshop, but it's not. Ubuntu even decided to drop the GIMP from their next version. Also, the Flash player for Linux is still nowhere near the quality of the Windows version. I still get random crashes sometimes when viewing Youtube, although it's much better than it used to be.

Poor support for printing and especially network printing. CUPS and SAMBA are very hard to configure.

Very buggy WLAN drivers. My Atheros wireless card is unusable in every distro I've tried lately, which includes Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12, and Arch Linux. The connection cuts out every few minutes. It's a known bug that just never gets fixed. It works perfectly in Windows 7.

Hardware autodetection has improved, but will never be as good as Windows.

Font rendering is not as good as Windows. I think it's a patent issue.

Poor media codec support. Again, much better than it used to be, but still sucks. This is another legal issue. There are a lot of legal issues that prevent distros from providing a better user experience.


I could go into detail about other problems I've had in Linux that I haven't experienced with Windows, but I'll leave it at that. Linux is free and open source. In some ways, it's better than Windows and OS X. In some ways it isn't. I dual boot Windows 7 and Arch Linux. Right now I'm in Arch Linux. (But if I wanted to take my laptop off my desk, I'd have to use Windows because WiFi doesn't work.)

[banj0]

brewin, on Dec 1 2009, 05:33 PM, said:

Here's a rant for you...

rant away bro! lol

brewin said:

No viable replacements for any Adobe products. Some will argue that the GIMP is a viable replacement for Photoshop, but it's not. Ubuntu even decided to drop the GIMP from their next version.

Definitely agree that Gimp is nowhere near as advanced as PShop. But I'm running CS2 with Wine on Ubuntu 9.10 and it works well. Just wanna say again that I'm not advocating against doze in any way as I'm happy dual-booting 7 and 9.10 but this feedback can really help me on a business I'm looking to start so thx for everyone's feedback.

brewin said:

Also, the Flash player for Linux is still nowhere near the quality of the Windows version. I still get random crashes sometimes when viewing Youtube, although it's much better than it used to be.

I remember having some tough times with Flash on OpenSuse and it being a b*tch to configure properly so I hear ya. Again, just my experience, but haven't had any problems with youtube or random .flv or .swf files on my media disk since U 9.04. One thing I definitely notice lacking on nix is an Opera or Ffox extension that allows for downloading and saving a flash vid from youtube or whatever.

brewin said:

Poor support for printing and especially network printing. CUPS and SAMBA are very hard to configure.

Sorry to hear but good to know. An area with which I have almost zero experience.

brewin said:

Very buggy WLAN drivers. My Atheros wireless card is unusable in every distro I've tried lately, which includes Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12, and Arch Linux. The connection cuts out every few minutes. It's a known bug that just never gets fixed. It works perfectly in Windows 7.

Again, little experience with that issue but thx for letting me know. I have a Hawking pci card that seems to work ok but thx for letting me know about Atheros stuff. Any experience with Broadcom-based cards, 32 or 64?

brewin said:

Hardware autodetection has improved, but will never be as good as Windows.

I've had the same experience. Any opinions or thoughts on why that is? My best guess is that vendors work more closely with Redmond on their stuff knowing that the vast majority of their customers will be on an MS platform.

brewin said:

Font rendering is not as good as Windows. I think it's a patent issue.

Damn, lol, never knew there could be patents on fonts. Again, thx. Definitely had to deal with font problems, especially between browsers on nix. Usually had to work with the browser to set fonts, sizes, and override sites' fonts.

brewin said:

Poor media codec support. Again, much better than it used to be, but still sucks. This is another legal issue. There are a lot of legal issues that prevent distros from providing a better user experience.

Definitely experienced some problems with plugins or whatever with nix default media players but, maybe just lucky, between VLC and now Miro never had that issue. Again, not arguing or advocating but I remember MO had to help me with something in doze about my BSG files and it turned out to be a CCCP pack but I had to tweak my version of ffdshow. Maybe we can all agree that lossless codecs should (finally) be standardized across operating systems?

brewin said:

I could go into detail about other problems I've had in Linux that I haven't experienced with Windows, but I'll leave it at that. Linux is free and open source. In some ways, it's better than Windows and OS X. In some ways it isn't. I dual boot Windows 7 and Arch Linux. Right now I'm in Arch Linux. (But if I wanted to take my laptop off my desk, I'd have to use Windows because WiFi doesn't work.)

I appreciate the feedback and the time bro. many thx. :thumbup:

[brewin]

banj0, on Dec 3 2009, 01:33 AM, said:

But I'm running CS2 with Wine on Ubuntu 9.10 and it works well.

I've never tried Wine. I just reboot or use VirtualBox if I need to.

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I remember having some tough times with Flash on OpenSuse and it being a b*tch to configure properly so I hear ya. Again, just my experience, but haven't had any problems with youtube or random .flv or .swf files on my media disk since U 9.04.

I just installed OpenSUSE 11.2 yesterday to test it out. I like it a lot. It definitely has the best KDE4 implementation I've used and YaST is great. Unfortunately, one of the first Youtube videos I watched crashed Firefox. It must be an unstable driver my hardware is using.

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Sorry to hear but good to know. An area with which I have almost zero experience.

Here's a related article I read yesterday about printing on Google Chrome OS: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10407264...torsPicksArea.0

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Any experience with Broadcom-based cards, 32 or 64?

Nope, only Atheros.

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I've had the same experience. Any opinions or thoughts on why that is? My best guess is that vendors work more closely with Redmond on their stuff knowing that the vast majority of their customers will be on an MS platform.

Bingo. From a business standpoint it's only logical.

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Definitely experienced some problems with plugins or whatever with nix default media players but, maybe just lucky, between VLC and now Miro never had that issue. Again, not arguing or advocating but I remember MO had to help me with something in doze about my BSG files and it turned out to be a CCCP pack but I had to tweak my version of ffdshow. Maybe we can all agree that lossless codecs should (finally) be standardized across operating systems?

Yeah, it's a big problem on Windows also. But it's just going to get worse. They can't even agree on a standard codec for the HTML5 <video> tag. Every browser will probably use a different one.

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I appreciate the feedback and the time bro. many thx. :thumbup: