What's your main operating system? (Poll)

[c4757p]

I didn't realize i3 was so popular!

It probably isn't. This is a skewed sample of users. More than average technical literacy and willing to respond to such a survey. I am not surprised i3 users are more likely than others to be vocal about it.  Particularly if they weren't happy with changes to their previous window manager.  Any long time forum member would have easily predicted the responses. We've seen them before.

Oh, I know, but I still wasn't expecting that. We haven't heard from users of xmonad, dwm, ratpoison, or any of the other tiling WMs - I didn't realize i3 was more popular on average than they were.

[MarkL]

I've been running some form of *nix for my work environment for 30+ years.

At the moment I'm running Centos 6.5 with fvwm on several machines, and before that Fedora.  I got off Fedora because I needed stability.  I'm currently evaluating Mint because I'll need to move off CentOS eventually and I'm tired of working around RedHat's software policies of what they'll include.

Why fvwm?  Again, stability and consistency, but it's also highly configurable and programmable.  It's tailored to *my* look and feel over the years, and not to the latest new paradigm that someone else thinks will "enhance my work experience".  I take fvwm with me from distro to distro.

I don't run windows and I don't have a machine that even boots it.  But it seems I still pay my involuntary microsoft tax with everything I buy.  Irritating, but it's a reality.

Edit: Fix typo.

[free_electron]

Buy an Apple with OSX. OSX is Linux which works out of the box 

no it's not. it is based on BSD but uses the MACH kernel. it is much closer to nextstep than to linux.
OsX is to linux as water to oil. it's closed  as can be and can only run on sanctified hardware ( ok ok you can make a hackintosh but it's not really official , nor easy to do )

That being said : it is solid and works , although it has its quirks ( screenshot hotkey is finger cramp inducing )

Linux is not finished. too many distro's too many incompatibilities. x uses a as installer , y uses b as installer. at least in windows and OsX that idiotry doesn't exist.
the same goes for all that ui stuff. why do we need twenty different window managers ? this one uses gnome, that one kde another one something else. why do we spend such effort on make duplicating something that already exists and works ? it's like make a photocopy of a photocopier ... that effort woudl be better spent making things compatible, having solid drivers and stability.

[c4757p]

Linux is not finished. too many distro's too many incompatibilities. x uses a as installer , y uses b as installer. at least in windows and OsX that idiotry doesn't exist.

Huh? Install via the distribution's package manager. and it's all the same installer. Pick a Debian-based distro and a huge number of third-party software will provide .deb packages for you. Download and install. You could also go with something like Arch, which has the AUR (Arch User Repository) where users have created packages for everything under the sun - though Arch is definitely not a beginners' system.

As for Windows - everything uses a bloody different installer, what the hell are you talking about?

I'll give Mac points for a consistent installer setup. Haven't used it in years, but I remember it being generally pleasant.

the same goes for all that ui stuff. why do we need twenty different window managers ? this one uses gnome, that one kde another one something else. why do we spend such effort on make duplicating something that already exists and works ?

Because twenty people decided to make a window manager. You can ignore them. The major ones are KDE and GNOME, how bloody hard is it to pick between them?

The GNOME guys even decided to make that decision easy for you by making GNOME suck.

that effort woudl be better spent making things compatible, having solid drivers and stability.

"That effort" is spent by different groups of people. It's like complaining that artists' time would be better spent performing surgery.

Linux is not an operating system, it's an ecosystem of many different software packages that operating system builders can use to make a system. The operating systems are the distributions. Want a shiny, prepackaged solution? Pick a nice distro like Ubuntu or something that made all the choices for you. You get all the software selected, some nice interface candy thrown on top to tie it together, a unified support system, etc etc.

Don't like Linux? Fine, use Windows or Mac or whatever, nobody's forcing you to use it. But don't bitch that it gives you too much choice. Do you also complain that the supermarket stocks more than one brand of beer? More than one type of breakfast cereal? Do you pitch a fit when a restaurant presents you with a menu? "Just bring me food, dammit!"

[Maxlor]

Linux is not finished. too many distro's too many incompatibilities. x uses a as installer , y uses b as installer. at least in windows and OsX that idiotry doesn't exist.
the same goes for all that ui stuff. why do we need twenty different window managers ? this one uses gnome, that one kde another one something else. why do we spend such effort on make duplicating something that already exists and works ? it's like make a photocopy of a photocopier ... that effort woudl be better spent making things compatible, having solid drivers and stability.

Odd seing this argument on an electronics forum.  Why are there a gazillion different power supplies, after all, a good power supply has been constructed decades ago already, why doesn't everyone standardize on that? What's worse, some people even build their own!

Same for microcontrollers really, there thousands of different models, all incompatible to each other of course, the manufacturers must be crazy. The effort would have been better spend on developing just one single chip, but making that one really good...

[SeanB]

Good thing about Linux is window managers (mostly) work together. I have some KDE mixed in with GDM, and in general it mostly is only visible by a colour change and slightly different icons and themes. I could get them the same with a little work, but it really is not a problem in most cases. Slightly more memory use, but other than that no problem.

[mamalala]

Linux is not finished. too many distro's too many incompatibilities. x uses a as installer , y uses b as installer.

You mean, like on Windows? Where there are a wide variety of installers, in various versions available? Where some packages use the Windows installer with .msi packages, others their very own installer, and even others use one of the many installer programs out there? Where you can have fun stuff like installing package X, which uses Y as installer, which in turn also installs the uninstaller stuff. Now you install Z, which uses the same installer stuff. Next you uninstall X, which also uninstalls it's uninstaller. Leading to you no longer beeing able to uninstall Z, because now some components are missing?

Yea, totally easy, unified and logical. Oh, did i mention that quite some stuff doesn't even show up in Window's installed-programs-controlcenter? And the stuff that shows up can't always be uninstalled from there? And if stuff is uninstalled, it more often than not leaves files and registry entries on the system?

the same goes for all that ui stuff. why do we need twenty different window managers ? this one uses gnome, that one kde another one something else. why do we spend such effort on make duplicating something that already exists and works ? it's like make a photocopy of a photocopier ... that effort woudl be better spent making things compatible, having solid drivers and stability.

Neither KDE nor Gnome are window managers. They are complete desktop environments, which happen to have their own window manager by default. Which can be changed, if one wants to.

See, that is the difference: One can try and chose the WM that best suits the needs and workflow, instead of beeing tied to a single way of doing things for all programs. But then, this isn't really the case on Windows either. Lot's of programs that have their very own look&feel, their own UI paradigm. It's not as if everything on Windows has a unified style/look. Some use the GUI elemts that Windows provides, others implement their own. Same for window-decorations. Input methods. Etc.

Oh, and it is no problem to run, lets say, a Gnome application under KDE, or vice versa. And neither of which really demand a specific WM to make their apps work. Plus, the machine running the application and the machine where the user actually is at can be different ones, and that functionality has been in there for decades.

Greetings,

Chris

[kingofkya]

Linux is not finished. too many distro's too many incompatibilities. x uses a as installer , y uses b as installer.

All i have to say is have yo used linux for more than a day... Just go look up Windows apis for setting an ip address in windows... There is a half dozen of them and most wont work it some random case. As someone who has to automate windows install from empty disk to ip setup, updates installed and RDP working, its is a mess, and can take hours. Vs Debian where it installed the updates as its doing the intial disk install and wiring to 2 text files(settings)..


Anyways i use a mix of windows and linux, and this makes it very convenient to work on both:)
http://synergy-project.org/

I will say in general when i need to get work done I am in linux terminal, or in notepadd++ in windows.


As a side bar X11/Xorg is annoying in a lot  of linuxes especially when it is automagicly setup... then breaks, when you switch gpus or a driver updates etc.

[Sigmoid]

Linux is not a product. It's a kernel. GNU/Linux isn't a product either. If you rant about "linux not being finished", it's a very good indicator that Linux isn't what you're looking for.

As for Ubuntu, I believe it's a pretty horrid poster child. I'm a veritable UNIX nerd, and can install ArchLinux as a free action (yes I'm a DnD nerd too), but I've never had much luck with Ubuntu. It installs fine, but when I get to using the damn thing, it always makes my life miserable.

Imagining what it must be like for people with no UNIX background, I have to admit it's not ready for widespread use.

Anyway, currently I'm using OSX, but am kind of unsatisfied with the direction Apple (or, more generally, the world) is headed in, and have been eyeing PCs for some time now... also, Windows 8(.1) is an atrocity against mankind, so if I ever go PC, it will be a Linux boot with Windows in a vbox for Windows only stuff.

[Mechanical Menace]

Linux, I'm a codemonkey and *nix's are just a better environment for the task. Generally Ubuntu just because it's the distro most tools are aimed at now.



I do have Windows for gaming though, but I'm not having to use it as much since Steam hit Linux.

[jeremy]

For those who feel like ubuntu is close but not perfect, I'm quite fond of Xubuntu, it's Ubuntu without gnome and XFCE added. I can run many VMs of the OS at the same time without the graphics chopping up in them, I can't say the same for plain ubuntu. And you get all of the packaging and compatibility goodness that comes with ubuntu.

I've also heard interesting things about elementary os (it's based on ubuntu iirc)

[Howardlong]

MacBook Pro 13" with maximum specs. I switch between oses regularly (I use all three basically every day) and have many vms under VMware.

VMware never changes my MAC addresses. Not sure why that is happening to you. All commercial licensing systems work fine as well as all usb hardware.

It's surprisingly easy to accidentally and inadvertently change MAC address, it doesn't always happen, but it can:

o Move guest;
o Fiddling with guest virtual network assignment;
o Fiddling with host's virtual networks in the Virtual Network Editor;
o Upgrade VMWare Workstation (this reinstalls all the virtual networks);
o In VMWare Fusion, switching between running as a VM in OSX and natively in Bootcamp always messes with the MAC address, quite understandably!

I still run VMWare Workstation on Windows primarily for cross-platform testing among eight different Windows versions and two Linux versions. For OSX, I reboot and test natively. One further reason for running natively in Windows is that M$ use Hyper-V for cross-platform development which doesn't play at all well with VMWare. I have to do a fair bit of fiddling around if I want to switch between using VMWare and developing cross platform stuff for M$, but that's a whole other story.

[jeremy]

MacBook Pro 13" with maximum specs. I switch between oses regularly (I use all three basically every day) and have many vms under VMware.

VMware never changes my MAC addresses. Not sure why that is happening to you. All commercial licensing systems work fine as well as all usb hardware.

It's surprisingly easy to accidentally and inadvertently change MAC address, it doesn't always happen, but it can:

o Move guest;
o Fiddling with guest virtual network assignment;
o Fiddling with host's virtual networks in the Virtual Network Editor;
o Upgrade VMWare Workstation (this reinstalls all the virtual networks);
o In VMWare Fusion, switching between running as a VM in OSX and natively in Bootcamp always messes with the MAC address, quite understandably!

I still run VMWare Workstation on Windows primarily for cross-platform testing among eight different Windows versions and two Linux versions. For OSX, I reboot and test natively. One further reason for running natively in Windows is that M$ use Hyper-V for cross-platform development which doesn't play at all well with VMWare. I have to do a fair bit of fiddling around if I want to switch between using VMWare and developing cross platform stuff for M$, but that's a whole other story.

Well specifically, the MAC change will only occur if you copy the vm, not move it. It even asks you "did you copy or move it?". Anyway, in fusion I regularly fiddle with the networking, and I have been using it since version 4.0 (now 7) without an upgrade ever messing with my mac addresses. Must be a workstation thing.

Can't help you with the bootcamp one though 

[free_electron]

maybe i'm expressing it wrong as i don't know all the 'nix' jargon but here is my gripe with the thing.

download altera software and look at the install notes. only supported on red hat yadda yadda
get some other program : only installed on distro y

sometimes installing the required patches to run one program breaks another.

as for different installers : in windows there is always a setup.exe that does the rest. Same on mac. it's a dmg file.

In linux if the program is not packaged with an installer that your system has you are shit out of luck. there are competing installers, not all of em are avaialble on all flavors and not all programs are available with all installers.

i had a linux install (suse) and wanted to install Cinellera. sorry bub. no installer for suse. ( this was a couple of years ago)

And whenever you get some real piece of software it is almost always : red hat only. we don't support other distro's . There is a reason for that. becasue suppporting 25 different flavors is just too much overhead.

that is why i claim that linux is not 'ready'. choice is good. too much choice is problematic. i get pissed off if at a sandwich place they guy in front of me stalls the line for 15 minutes cause he can't decide out of the 300 different sandwiches. It's all bread with meat and veggies dammit. we're hungry. want food . now. i don't need to hear  that a spoon is not compatible with my soupbowl.

[Monkeh]

maybe i'm expressing it wrong as i don't know all the 'nix' jargon but here is my gripe with the thing.

download altera software and look at the install notes. only supported on red hat yadda yadda
get some other program : only installed on distro y

sometimes installing the required patches to run one program breaks another.

as for different installers : in windows there is always a setup.exe that does the rest. Same on mac. it's a dmg file.

In linux if the program is not packaged with an installer that your system has you are shit out of luck. there are competing installers, not all of em are avaialble on all flavors and not all programs are available with all installers.

i had a linux install (suse) and wanted to install Cinellera. sorry bub. no installer for suse. ( this was a couple of years ago)

And whenever you get some real piece of software it is almost always : red hat only. we don't support other distro's . There is a reason for that. becasue suppporting 25 different flavors is just too much overhead.

that is why i claim that linux is not 'ready'. choice is good. too much choice is problematic. i get pissed off if at a sandwich place they guy in front of me stalls the line for 15 minutes cause he can't decide out of the 300 different sandwiches. It's all bread with meat and veggies dammit. we're hungry. want food . now. i don't need to hear  that a spoon is not compatible with my soupbowl.

Frankly, all these problems are caused by gross incompetence and ignorance on the part of the developers of the software. They simply do not know what they're doing.

How did I know you'd manage to turn this thread into yet another argument?

[jeremy]

I think if software devs provided an RPM for RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and a DEB for Debian/Ubuntu, then you would cover 95% of users. You can't cover the Gentoo-style users if you're these companies I guess.

The other option is just to open source the software (doesn't necessarily have to be GPL). Then people can package it themselves.

and for the record, I run Xilinx Vivado/ISE, Altera Quartus and Lattice Diamond in separate Xubuntu 14.04 virtual machines without any issues. I would actually like to share them to saveothers the work, but I don't think the companies would be very happy with me.

[c4757p]

download altera software and look at the install notes. only supported on red hat yadda yadda
get some other program : only installed on distro y

Supported, not compatible. If you run it on something else and it doesn't work, it's not their problem. That doesn't mean it won't work.

Hell, here on Arch I can just install the "quartus-free" package from the AUR and it pulls down everything automatically. Wraps it in a nice package so I can uninstall it the same way, and handles upgrades. If I don't want to do that, I grab the Quartus package directly from Altera, and guess what - it's a single-file installer, much like your favorite "setup.exe". I just run it and it figures out where to put everything. Same with Xilinx ISE - I'm happily running both packages here on a quite "unsupported" system, no trouble whatsoever. I also work on about 45 machines at school running Debian, also unsupported by Xilinx, on which a few hundred students manage to operate ISE with no trouble.

[nctnico]

that is why i claim that linux is not 'ready'. choice is good. too much choice is problematic. i get pissed off if at a sandwich place they guy in front of me stalls the line for 15 minutes cause he can't decide out of the 300 different sandwiches. It's all bread with meat and veggies dammit. we're hungry. want food . now. i don't need to hear  that a spoon is not compatible with my soupbowl.

Frankly, all these problems are caused by gross incompetence and ignorance on the part of the developers of the software. They simply do not know what they're doing.

I agree. Linux is a bit of a showcase of what happens when programmers get to decide what to do. Backwards compatibility is often broken. Most commercial Linux software comes with it's own set of libraries just to make sure there is no chance to run into an incompatible library. And even then things can break. But... these kind problems are easier to fix on Linux than on Windows.

[Monkeh]

that is why i claim that linux is not 'ready'. choice is good. too much choice is problematic. i get pissed off if at a sandwich place they guy in front of me stalls the line for 15 minutes cause he can't decide out of the 300 different sandwiches. It's all bread with meat and veggies dammit. we're hungry. want food . now. i don't need to hear  that a spoon is not compatible with my soupbowl.

Frankly, all these problems are caused by gross incompetence and ignorance on the part of the developers of the software. They simply do not know what they're doing.

I agree. Linux is a bit of a showcase of what happens when programmers get to decide what to do. Backwards compatibility is often broken. Most commercial Linux software comes with it's own set of libraries just to make sure there is no chance to run into an incompatible library. And even then things can break. But... these kind problems are easier to fix on Linux than on Windows.

And just to be clear, I was talking about the proprietary devs trying to release software, not the distros..

[nanofrog]

download altera software and look at the install notes. only supported on red hat yadda yadda
get some other program : only installed on distro y

Supported, not compatible. If you run it on something else and it doesn't work, it's not their problem. That doesn't mean it won't work.

Hell, here on Arch I can just install the "quartus-free" package from the AUR and it pulls down everything automatically. Wraps it in a nice package so I can uninstall it the same way, and handles upgrades. If I don't want to do that, I grab the Quartus package directly from Altera, and guess what - it's a single-file installer, much like your favorite "setup.exe". I just run it and it figures out where to put everything. Same with Xilinx ISE - I'm happily running both packages here on a quite "unsupported" system, no trouble whatsoever. I also work on about 45 machines at school running Debian, also unsupported by Xilinx, on which a few hundred students manage to operate ISE with no trouble.

Great (built my share of working, but unsupported systems). 

Just keep in mind not everyone wants to/or can deal with the problems an unsupported system carries with it when things do go wrong (perhaps they don't have the time, don't want to spend it on software issues, or just don't want to deal with the aggravation involved regardless of the time it takes to fix).

[jeremy]

...
Most commercial Linux software comes with it's own set of libraries just to make sure there is no chance to run into an incompatible library. And even then things can break. But... these kind problems are easier to fix on Linux than on Windows.

To be fair, almost all installers on windows package a version of at least one of the following:

- MSVC runtimes
- VB runtimes (old style)
- .net runtimes (many different versions)
- directx (many different versions)
- java (many different versions)

[Monkeh]

Frankly, all these problems are caused by gross incompetence and ignorance on the part of the developers of the software. They simply do not know what they're doing.

Where is this "gross incompetence"?

There are two reasons to choose a Linux distribution. One is because it contains what you want built in and you feel comfortable it will continue to. Not certain by any means. The other is to learn about life away from the mainstream. Where it is more difficult than just going with the flow. You carve out your own niche lifestyle. A more independent frontier life.

I look at Linux as a Darwinian experiment in evolution. Lots of mutations all competing for supremacy. Don't like one distribution? You can try another. Don't like one window manager? Try another. Don't like one file system? Try another. Don't like one package manager? Try another.

Don't like Windows 8.1?  Tough. Get used to it.

What  else in the world would you be happy with if you had no choice. Cars? Shoes? Ink colour? Pencil lead hardness? Food? Restaurants? ISP? Phone company? Political party? Christmas trees? What? An OS perhaps. 

About 90% use Windows and probably 90% of Linux users also keep a toe in the Windows pond. I know I do.

Why even bother complaining. Don't like Linux? Don't carry on like you feel your missing out. Just make your choice.

Who's complaining? Once again, not talking about the distros, talking about the poorly packaged, distro-specific proprietary software..

[Howardlong]

MacBook Pro 13" with maximum specs. I switch between oses regularly (I use all three basically every day) and have many vms under VMware.

VMware never changes my MAC addresses. Not sure why that is happening to you. All commercial licensing systems work fine as well as all usb hardware.

It's surprisingly easy to accidentally and inadvertently change MAC address, it doesn't always happen, but it can:

o Move guest;
o Fiddling with guest virtual network assignment;
o Fiddling with host's virtual networks in the Virtual Network Editor;
o Upgrade VMWare Workstation (this reinstalls all the virtual networks);
o In VMWare Fusion, switching between running as a VM in OSX and natively in Bootcamp always messes with the MAC address, quite understandably!

I still run VMWare Workstation on Windows primarily for cross-platform testing among eight different Windows versions and two Linux versions. For OSX, I reboot and test natively. One further reason for running natively in Windows is that M$ use Hyper-V for cross-platform development which doesn't play at all well with VMWare. I have to do a fair bit of fiddling around if I want to switch between using VMWare and developing cross platform stuff for M$, but that's a whole other story.

Well specifically, the MAC change will only occur if you copy the vm, not move it. It even asks you "did you copy or move it?". Anyway, in fusion I regularly fiddle with the networking, and I have been using it since version 4.0 (now 7) without an upgrade ever messing with my mac addresses. Must be a workstation thing.

Can't help you with the bootcamp one though 

VMWare aren't so keen to back that up, although I agree that in practice you are right. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=507

To be fair I am not criticising VMWare, I'm really criticisng the way that  flakey licensing managers break software so often.

[mamalala]

Just keep in mind not everyone wants to/or can deal with the problems an unsupported system carries with it when things do go wrong (perhaps they don't have the time, don't want to spend it on software issues, or just don't want to deal with the aggravation involved regardless of the time it takes to fix).

Well, it's not as if everything is rosy on Windows either. Having some version of  a driver or certain apps installed can make the program to refuse working properly. Good luck with customer support then ("Oh, you have X and Y? Well, we can't have that if you want to run our great  software!"). In other words, you won't get any software vendor to tell you that your specific machine and windows plus all the apps you ahve installed is supported, either.

Would be fun though if they  add phonebook sized "compatibility lists" for systems and software combinations they support

Greetings,

Chris

[nanofrog]

Well, it's not as if everything is rosy on Windows either. Having some version of  a driver or certain apps installed can make the program to refuse working properly. Good luck with customer support then ("Oh, you have X and Y? Well, we can't have that if you want to run our great  software!").

Definitely not perfect (wasn't my intent to indicate Windows comes up all roses, so I apologize if that was the impression you got  ). But there's the potential for support in instances that aren't possible/realistic under Linux IMHO, especially when it requires detailed investigation (bug report).

And I'd love to see a compatibility list like that.