General > General Technical Chat

Goodbye Windows, Hello Linux [advice needed for a Linux workstation at home]

<< < (25/46) > >>

soldar:
In my experience WINE will work only with very simple programs which have little or no hardware interaction. MS Paint, notepad work well. Irfanview sort of works. I will try LTSpice and I expect it to work.  But even something as simple as Outlook Express, which I still use with Win XP, will not work with WINE.  Forget about using WINE for anything but the very simplest programs. The again, why would you use WINE to use Notepad when Linux has its own equivalent?

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: soldar on January 20, 2019, 12:01:39 pm ---In my experience WINE will work only with very simple programs which have little or no hardware interaction. MS Paint, notepad work well. Irfanview sort of works. I will try LTSpice and I expect it to work.  But even something as simple as Outlook Express, which I still use with Win XP, will not work with WINE.  Forget about using WINE for anything but the very simplest programs. The again, why would you use WINE to use Notepad when Linux has its own equivalent?

--- End quote ---

WINE works well with more than that, e.g. DesignSpark PCB schematic/layout. But it is indeed hit and miss.

Outlook Express is designed to be entwined with MS Windows "features", so I would be amazed if it was useful in anything other than Windows. Ditto any other MS program, since their business model is based on keeping you paying for more of their stuff.

OTOH, if you want an email program, choose something that is based on MBOX files, since they have been around for decades and will continue to be around for decades, and are operating system independent - and to a useful extent they are application mail client independent.

NiHaoMike:

--- Quote from: rdl on January 20, 2019, 09:38:57 am ---I'm amazed that anyone can say Windows 10 is good with a straight face. My experience has been the exact opposite. It is easily the worst Microsoft product I have ever tried to use.

--- End quote ---
Not as bad as Windows ME, but that's a low bar...

--- Quote from: nctnico on January 20, 2019, 11:53:06 am ---And no, there is no replacement for Hyperterminal. Hyperterminal has a unique combination of features: it can open/close the port with a click on a button, it has file transfer protocols and you can adjust the timing for lines and characters. I have not found a replacement which can do all these things.
edit: tried Cutecom. Doesn't look like a real terminal emulator and it doesn't adhere to the system settings for disabling font aliasing (so I can't use it).

--- End quote ---
My favorites for serial port terminals are GTKterm for Linux and Realterm for Windows. And apparently Realterm works on WINE.

rsjsouza:
I also dislike Windows 10, but saying it is the worst product MS has released... You clearly haven't used other incarnations of their OS, web browser, text editor...

Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: rstofer on January 19, 2019, 06:13:00 pm ---The problem with Linux distros is the number of branches.  It makes the developer's job a lot harder.
--- End quote ---
No, I've never had any issues with that.  Sure, there is a few hours of work to verify the package dependencies for each root distribution and write the package scripts, but it isn't a big deal at all.

The people who have trouble with that, are the ones who cobble together particular versions of particular libraries, and write code that only works with those.  They need Snap or similar, because "modularity" is not something they grasp.

Now, if you had written "You need better developers to do that", I would have agreed.  There is a literal gigaton of programmers good enough to write poor quality Windows/Mac GUI apps, and a lot fewer programmers that can build something robust, and can afford to research how to do things right.  That sort of stuff bites into the profit margins, after all.  Ship early, and ship often, right?

The above isn't intended as snarky, by the way.  It is an observation over the last two or three decades.  In my experience, the quality of software is increasingly dual: you have a small number of brilliant tools -- and that includes both proprietary stuff like Adobe Photoshop, and open source stuff like GCC --, but the median quality is going down.  Code is increasingly buggy and wastes resources.


--- Quote from: rstofer on January 19, 2019, 06:13:00 pm ---that gives them coverage for 90% of desktops, who cares about the 2% [desktop] share of Linux?
--- End quote ---
True. The same can be said for anyone trying to do HPC on Macs or Windows: they're laughed out.  Heck, even Microsoft prefers Linux servers on their Azure platform.

On the other hand, Adobe as a company rejected Linux outright, for reasons they never stated publicly.  They even refused to port Macromedia Software browser plugins to Linux, after they acquired it, and did an utterly piss-poor job with their Flash browser plugin.  That is similar to how Microsoft pumped millions into a couple of HPC clusters, just to get them into the Top-500 list; they knew nobody doing HPC would be fooled by their efforts.  Some things are just political/personal to the business leaders.

A major reason why the device driver situation on Linux has become better, is the efforts by the kernel developers (the Linux driver project and the Linux Foundation efforts), allowing the manufacturers to spend or risk very little to get Linux support for their devices (by contacting developers to do it for them.  The true underlying problem has been that companies are unwilling to treat Linux developers as equals, like they would another business, but insist on treating them as end users.

A very similar problem is occurring with the various Right to Repair movements.  Manufacturers and sellers are not treating themselves as sellers, but as licensors, and their customers licensees, who do not really own what they buy.  This is a business culture problem.

I am all for competition, and businesses making profit.  What I do not like, is when politics (especially personal politics by the CEOs and other nitwits, who only really know money) is mixed in with it.  Software patents, and a lot of the patent system mess, is one of those.  (That might start a flamewar, but fact is, the purpose of the patent system is to ensure new innovations are marketed; not to stop competing products from entering the market, as they are predominantly used today.)

A large part of opposition to Linux, the belief that you cannot sell software on Linux, is based on the decade and half of expensive propaganda by Microsoft.  They spent a lot of money to make people believe Linux is a communist anti-market anti-business trick.  Unfortunately, many people who have never tried to sell Linux software, still believe it today.  (I see the effects of this daily even here in Finland, the birthplace of Linux.  It is like a huge magic trick pulled over the general population.)

I have sold Linux software myself.  A friend does so still, and has done it for a few years now.  If you haven't, but think it cannot be done, just shut up: your belief has no basis in reality.  If you have tried, but failed, then we can talk (why it failed, and how it could have worked).

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod