Thread: Could Windows suck any more than it does?

Originally Posted by Mario F.

One of the big reasons I switched to Linux (the other big reason being Microsoft itself), was exactly my growing hunger for stability and predictability. Linux offers me what I consider a perfect computing environment, on which I can expect a good deal of reason and stricter adherence to old and tested workflows. On the other hand it maintains a huge dose of opportunities for intellectual stimulation, by a huge margin to Windows (but huge! it's almost a joke trying to compare both systems on this detail). It's as such the perfect operating system to grow old with, bar none.

None of it has anything to do with webcams or GPUs, or printers or drivers, games or IDEs. I take its strengths and accept its weaknesses. Because it's become obvious for the past 5 years, perhaps more than any other period in the short story of the PC operating system industry, that Microsoft no longer offers a competing product.

And let me tell you, especially on an office environment.

Very much agree. I love my Lubuntu that is completely minimalist and just works, and has pretty much since that flavor of Ubuntu was started. Ubuntu was rough for a while (ran into some desktop bugs, hardware issues with Atheros-based wifi that was very hard to get working), but IMO it's very good now. Just depends on your exact hardware I guess. I have an nVidia Quadro 2000 card at home that works perfectly with the binary blob from nVidia. I can play many 3D Steam games at pretty much the same speed/quality as on Windows. Huge milestone there IMO.

Above all, I love: package managers, regardless of distro, and fantastic boot time. Also peace of mind knowing that it's not sucking up CPU or bandwidth spying on me in some way. Microsoft is just shameful. I can recall times that I did virus scans using their Security Essentials with the sample submission turned off, and the scan would freeze. As soon as you disconnected the internet, scan resumed. Be more obvious.... Just tired of Microsoft's abusive crap. As I said before, these are our computers and we do what we want and only what we want. Sick of companies trying to tie hands with their shenanigans.

Yeah, Windows has bugs and issues. I regularly rag on it at work for its inability to do relatively simple tasks.

But by that same token, in my 6 years of Linux'ing, typically whenever I've had an issue, it's usually a showstopper. Granted, most, if not all, of those issues were driver related. I agree, the vendors should write better drivers. But at the same time, they're a business and they need to follow the money. I don't fault them for that. The web cam thing is also another huge one. It kind of sucks but being under 30, being able to Skype is almost a prereq for a lot of job-related things.

I'd be shocked if MSVS ever became intuitive for me. But maybe I'm just too used to having a raw compiler and generating binaries all willy nilly. And yes, the diverse ecosystem of IDEs does suck. Having one IDE used by everyone else is a huge boon. Which is probably also why it's easier to write drivers for Windows as well.

Basically, my GPU is dead/dying and I'm thinking about a new build. It's gonna have Windows 10 and Ubuntu on it. I love me some Linux but, man, I feel like some of the things I've had to do with that thing... I'm a lot better with a command line than I ever wanted to be lol.

They should follow the money and pay some more attention to the techie types (on Linux) who are more likely to buy one of their high-end, high-profit-margin graphics cards...

Originally Posted by Elysia

I think windows gamers do that too. In fact, since most games are on Windows, I think it's more likely that people who buy those high-end graphics card run windows too.

Obvious comment is obvious.

What I was getting at is that the Linux fanatics are going to go for the high-end graphics cards that have good support on Linux. If you only focus on Windows, you're cutting out some of your potential customers.

To me, high-end graphics cards are only worthwhile because of the general purpose computing capabilities. To make this even worse, Nvidia wrote an awesome but incompatible API with AMD graphics cards. This makes things worse because now you have two camps, OpenCL vs CUDA. And then this problem is only exacerbated by the fact that both manufacturers have to come up with drivers for multiple operating systems.

Truth be told, I do wish that Nvidia in particular would really double-down on their CUDA stuff and focus on Linux more. But every time you wanna buy a GPU, they advertise a free video game. I think if you compare the amount of money they can make with videogames vs some programmers running really cool code, videogames just win.

Linux is amazing because it embodies altruism and Windows is amazing because it's the opposite, it embodies the free market. Altruism vs capitalism, are they mutually exclusive?

Oh, I don't think anyone is saying that it's "acceptable" by any means. Oh God, no.

But I think what we're saying is, we get it why it is the way it is. There's a million things I wish I could code at work but I can't do it because it's either not profitable or there's more pressing things to attend to. It's unfortunate in a lot of ways and sometimes it's just nice to lament...

That being said, I will be looking into Linux compatibility when buying my next GPU. I've heard good things about Nvidia's fork of Visual Studio (anything's better than their Eclipse version) so I may wind up actually switching to developing CUDA on Windows if I can't find a suitable GPU.

It sucks but that's just the way it goes. I love Linux but I love programming more than I do my own operating system. I can't have the best of both worlds so I remain a young man torn.

Originally Posted by Elysia

You have to consider the time of investment into drivers for an operating system only single digits of the market uses compared to one that 90% of the market uses. If the potential customers are too few, it's just not worth the investment. They're companies. They're in it for money in the end.

I understand the point you're trying to make, but as a counter ask: if this is true, then why did nVidia bother to make a driver for my outdated workstation (non-gaming) graphics card? These companies are already putting in the effort in varying amounts, they just need to go further in.

As a graphics card company, I would be recognizing that gaming on Linux is growing more and more popular. Some indie game devs are targeting cross-platform backends to help make this happen, but larger game companies are also making the effort too. I have Saints Row 3 on my Linux machine at home. That's a game that was also on Xbox and PlayStation.

A lot of people don't make the full switch to Linux because of gaming. That may change within the next decade.

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As an aside, I have to comment that I'm surprised at any pro-Windows sentiment from anyone here. Here's why:

Politically, I see democrats/liberals as idealists who think that people are basically good, and conservatives/republicans as realists who acknowledge that a good deal of people are ..........ty to each other and will always be.

In recent discussions, it's pretty apparent that I'm one of the few or only politically conservative people here, out of those who have spoken out anyway. So in being surrounded by idealists, I'd expect others to have the starry-eyed vision of the future where we can tell Microsoft to f itself and have freedom to use our computers the way we want with other operating systems, not necessarily Linux.

History has shown that Microsoft/Windows has become crappier over time, and that trend is unlikely to reverse itself. Similarly, history has also shown that people are ..........ty to each other since the beginning, and that's not likely to change either for many, many reasons. I believe this as a realist political conservative.

However, when it comes to software/OSes, I am a starry-eyed idealist because it is a fact it's just a matter of writing the code and fixing bugs, even if there is a huge amount of it to do. It is 100% possible, through the actions of yourself and others who code, to make Linux awesome and to make things work nicely on it.

You can code anything you want, but you can't change how people think. This is my belief.
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@MutantJohn: to my knowledge, nVidia was market-first with CUDA. CUDA came out in 2007, OpenCL came out 2 years later. nVidia didn't screw up, they helped pave the way for GPU computing. Also, I disagree that Windows embodies free market, they force choices and therefore do not. They change the Windows API nearly every version (and try to force you to upgrade) and make older software not work, forcing you to buy more software for their crap OS.

P.S. For the record, I am not of the GNU camp who thinks all software should be FOSS. I am of the OSI camp that acknowledges and desires FOSS to co-exist with closed-source software.

@MutantJohn: to my knowledge, nVidia was market-first with CUDA. CUDA came out in 2007, OpenCL came out 2 years later. nVidia didn't screw up, they helped pave the way for GPU computing. Also, I disagree that Windows embodies free market, they force choices and therefore do not. They change the Windows API nearly every version (and try to force you to upgrade) and make older software not work, forcing you to buy more software for their crap OS.

Didn't know the history! Thank you for clarifying! I feel a lot better about being a CUDA kid now.

As for the politics, eh. I think I'm a left-leaning centrist. I like to view humans as threads all working for the process of the United States.

I'm also not really stoked on Windows either. It's just... After over half a decade, I'm worn down lol. Linux fatigue is real.

So, the whole "not enough users" argument isn't going to hold for long...

https://www.netmarketshare.com/opera...10&qpcustomd=0

Linux: 2.18%
OS X: 2.74%

Oh boy. That's pretty... Well, that's pretty small. More XP users than Linux ones, ugh.

Maybe we should start introducing Linux to kids at a younger age? I feel like I would've gravitated towards Linux if I had been introduced to it sooner. Of course, the real issue is that kids like games and stuff like that which Linux has only just begun to really support.

But to help rag on Windows, my gf was playing Skyrim last night and I'm convinced she straight-up ran into a kernel crash or other some such thing. Her entire system was brought down and then Windows told her it was creating an error log to send back to Microsoft. In some ways, her crash will prevent another's.