Thread: Could Windows suck any more than it does?

Originally Posted by laserlight

On a more serious note, clearly greater platform support is an overall win, but to say that "everyone thinks they should make libraries for Linux instead of both Linux/Windows" is unfair criticism, when likewise one can unfairly claim that "everyone thinks they should make games for Windows instead of both Linux/Windows", or some other similiar statement.

Sigh. Yes. It would be nice if everything was multi-platform. But what can you do? The world is as it is. I was only taking a stab at some library devs. It was not meant to be criticism, but of course it came off as that.

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

Downloading and unpacking archives is actually one of the easier/better things on Linux for me. Mostly because it comes with all the tools be default and the commands are intuitively named. If not, you can also google a command pretty quickly.

Yeah, I don't use the commands. It's partly because traversing to a folder is slow in CLI (some file managers have a right-click -> open terminal here, but not all of them; some file managers have an address bar, but again, not all of them have), and partly because command lines for "untaring" and certain other stuff can be pretty unintuitive and difficult to remember to me.

Windows on the other hand... I tried to make a zip folder in Windows. That was... Very unintuitive. In Linux, you just type `zip` into the command line. Windows has their idea of a UI, right-clicking over a file and then sending it to a zip folder.

Yeah, not very obvious. But I have my 3rd party set of tools for all this stuff that I always install. Makes it trivial to pack/unpack every kind of archive. Microsoft tools have always been pretty poor. Linux default tools are usually really high quality, though, which is great.

Nope, I'm aware of it. I use it in Windows too, but I still find it to be way more tedious than browsing with a file manager.

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

Btw, I'm only replying so fast not because I'm obsessed with the thread but because I was just perusing the forums at the right time :P

It sounds like you may be unaware that tab auto-completes in the command-line for both Linux (with Bash) and Windows as well. Truth be told, I actually think Windows' tab auto-complete is better because it's case insensitive. So filling out file paths is actually relatively quick. Double tapping tab in Bash also displays a list of the possibilities.

you can make linux tab completion case-insensitive too, by adding the following line to your ~/.inputrc file:

Code:

set completion-ignore-case on

It's true. The package managers is Linux's greatest strength and the one thing I probably enjoy most in the Linux world.

It's an interesting read. Never saw that before. Funnily enough though I found all sorts of parallels with the open source culture once a project becomes big enough. It's not an exclusive of Microsoft, but in fact a recurrent theme in human organizations of all kinds. Under most circumstances (if not all) Open Source ends up promoting the creation of clusters of power that result in very similar problems to that of any work hierarchy. And BDFL organizational models are no better; in fact they only tend to aggravate this. What's worse, contrary to a formal hierarchical organization, the dissimulated and informal hierarchy system of open source, usually means you have nowhere to go to when you wish to replace someone else's code and that person happens to be up there.

I think any possible problems on the NT kernel are best attributed to bad decisions made out of lack of foresight and less to do with the working reality of the company. That insider opinion may claim that companies like Google end up hiring the best brains, but we don't really see the effects of that on their Android platform, which is plagged by more security issues than you could possibly ever dream on a nightmare featuring Microsoft. And these Google problems are only compounded by the unrelated but most insane distribution model in the history of operating systems.

His retraction seems a bit more levelled. And I understand why he did that, because even I thought he was clearly going out of perspective. Problems exist, it is a fact of life and something like the NT Kernel cannot be possibly immune to them. But looking at the evolution of this beast and the impact it has in the computing world, no one can deny how good the damn thing really is. A marvel to behold. If here and there it is punctuated with bad decisions, lack of optimum code or plain wrong choices, then that is no different than any other piece of complex software in the world. My criticism of Microsoft in general and Windows in particular is more superficial than that. I don't deny the quality of their tech and innovation. Instead I simply cannot agree with many of the products that they have been lately shaping out of it.

On the case of deb or rpm packages -- when developers don't host their own repo that you can add to the package manager and the software in question is present on the official repos but with a lower version -- there may be some annoyances here and there when installing those debs/reps from the developer. However with some care things can't go wrong:

1. look inside the deb/rpm and see where it is installing stuff. If something looks fishy, don't install and complain the package is badly built or doesn't respect the target file organization
2. Don't upgrade installed debs/rpms. Uninstall the old one and then install the new deb/rpm with the new version.
3. Keep installed debs/rpms around and stashed in a folder in your home directory. Uninstall by running them and not from tools like synaptic.
4. Generalizing 3, if you didn't install with the package manager, don't uninstall or upgrade with the package manager.

1 and 2 are just common sense and you'll learn when when to trust the developers or package maintainers to do a good job and when you don't need to care. 2 may seem excessive, but like 3 it is just playing it safe. And 4 is how things are.