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Originally Posted by
cpjust
...I guess I'll just never understand UNIX people and their fascination with command lines & their hate of GUIs.
Makes two of us and why I also tend to stay away from Linux. That obsession typically creates utilities that are command-line based first, and sometimes not even a GUI is provided.
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Originally Posted by
cyberfish
Good memory is not necessary, too. "[command] --help" will usually give a list of parameters with short descriptions. Commonly used commands will be memorized automatically (how can you not remember "ls" if you are typing it 100 times / day?).
Good memory is required to avoid typing [command] --help every time. If you show me how to do something in the GUI, it clicks directly, but if you do it in the command-line, it takes far longer. That's just me.
Oh and I had completely forgotten "ls". While I have not forgotten how to do view files in the file manager in Linux.
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Originally Posted by
cyberfish
That is the recipe for a flame war =).
I love flame wars! :D
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All the effects are configurable, of course, including the theme, unlike Aero. Oh, and it only requires onboard video, too.
Never said they weren't, and never said Aero's requirements were good either ;)
I merely mentioned that to me, they were jerky, while Aero's was not, and some effects did not play well together, while all of Aero's effects play well together.
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Usability... you will have to define that. Of course Linux is as unusable to someone that has never used Linux as Windows is to someone who has never used Windows.
And by usability, I guess I meant the ease of how to use the OS. From my view, of course.
The only one that rivals Windows in that aspect is MacOS. And it is not just about the command lines, but the pain-staking lack of installers, the recompiling of the kernel if new drivers are installed. This may not affect every program out there, of course, but there are some, and some of those I encountered on my journey, and they frustrated me to no end.
Oh and the fact that you cannot execute applications right-out-of-the-box. Typically you have to go commmand-line and enable the execute bit before being able to run it. Just annoying, and does not sit well with me.
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Compatibility with Windows programs... well, better than Windows' compatibility with Linux programs :).
Hehehe. Now that would be something, would it not?
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On a more serious note, many programs have open source equivalents (in terms of functionality), eg. Firefox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, a few open source IM clients, GCC + the GNU toolchain.
Is Visual Studio / SlickEdit / Word / Excel / Powerpoint / Zoom Player open source? Yes, I know there are alternatives, but those are the ones I tend to use. To me, Open Source is not important.
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Most of the popular commercial Windows programs can run under wine (an open-source implementation of Windows API on Linux).
Can the above mentioned programs run under Wine? ;) No? Too bad. Lots of compatibility for others, but none for me :/
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As for advantages -
Open source and free (both in terms of beer and speech)
Free I agree, open source, I really do not care...
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Security - no worrying about virii and malware. Before people say it's because Linux is not as widely used, no, it's because of the user priviledge system (and Microsoft made a step in the right direction with Vista's UAC, but unfortunately many people perceive it as an annoying feature and disable it. I have never used it myself, so I won't comment on that. The idea is good, though, but it has existed in UNIX/Linux for more than a few decades already. I would imagine the introduction of UAC breaks some applications, too, since many programs assume they have admin access, and do things like writing to "Program Files", and they were right, until Vista). Being open source makes Linux more secure, too, in the sense of actual vulnerabilities/bugs (as opposed, for example, users executing a malware with admin access voluntarily). Linux also includes a sophisticated firewall (part of it in the kernel, part of it userspace). A lot more sophisticated and configurable than the one included in Windows.
Perhaps, but again, this depends on how careful you are. You might download an installer or something that looks like a game, so you go root and execute it. Boom! System infected. Same with Windows. I do not like to put much on that whole security bit. Be careful and know what you are doing. It is not that Linux is more secure, I cannot really agree.
You are right about UAC. It is completely worthless, so I too, have disabled it. It pops up everytime a program wants something. It says nothing of what the application intends. Err, OK - how am I supposed to know if to agree or not?
It pops up every abyssius time. If I dismiss it once for that application, for that action, then I do not want it anymore, usually. They are far too frequent.
And thirdly, they limit access to the hard drive for unpackaging utilities, for example. Mostly because there are applications that still do not ask for UAC privileges out there and thus simply fail...
As for the firewall, do not compare Linux's firewall to Window's default one. It is completely insecure, as much do we know. That is why we use good 3rd party firewalls. You are free to compare to those, if you want. Maybe it is a hassle to have to get a 3rd party one instead of relying on a built-in one, but oh well. We cannot have all.
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"natural" - it just "makes more sense", perhaps because it is actually designed by users. For example, the update script won't restart the computer automatically after installing updates (sure, you can probably change that, but why have it as the default!?!?). It also makes me wonder how much better Windows would be if Microsoft spent all the effort on fighting piracy with all those annoying "features" on actually improving Windows. Perhaps they have figured that they make more money doing those things than improving the software since Windows is the only choice for the average Joe (which constitutes most of the population), and they have to buy it anyways. I know this is largely subjective, but the overall atmosphere is a lot less "commercialized" in the Linux world, which I find attractive. It feels like the good old days when people mutually share their programs open sourced and get excited when other people use them. That kind of relationships between developers and users are, I think, far more enjoyable than between, say, an average Joe and Microsoft. I have contacted a few open source developers about their programs, and most of the replies I got are very helpful and enthusiastic. Some even implemented features just because I suggested them. They are actually enthusiastic about their programs. It's the kind of enthusiasm we won't find in, for example, a support email from Microsoft.
Methinks you are confused on this one. Windows is very user-oriented, in that they design for the users. There are some annoying issues left like things forcing a restart down your throat. And I would rather Microsoft fight these pesky small issues than piracy instead. Maybe they we would have a more usable OS.
I do agree that Linux is slightly better in this regard. No annoying focus steal. No popups out of nowhere. No forced reboots, etc.
And there are commercial programs that are happy to receive your input...
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Productivity - powerful command line tools allow easy automation of many tasks like differential backup, file management (eg. delete files that are older than xyz, with a .txt extension, and with a length that is an odd number), batch image manipulation, and what I have actually done - a script that parses the National Geographic site and download the "picture of the day", remove the black banner, scale it, and set it as my wallpaper. All in a few lines, leveraging the power of wget, a command line file downloader, grep, a utility that searches a file for specific tokens, ImageMagick, a command line image processing program, and the command line interface of my desktop manager (GNOME). Sure, for average Joes this kind of things aren't important, but for computer literate people (people who aren't afraid of learning new things), this is quite priceless.
For the power-users, yes. To me, that is mumbo jumbo, and makes absolutely no sense (sense in that I cannot understand or use it). But it is good that it is there for the power-users.
Of course, me hating that stuff, I could not care less.
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Both OSes have their pros and cons...
And that is what we wanted to say all day long, eh? :)