Will you use Vista or Switch to Linux?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
Oh please, spare the relativism! I used it for years too, until I realised that it was little more than an intellectual cop-out, a means of staying non-commital.

What on earth are you talking about?

[Skanky Burns]

I'll use whatever has the games on it.
In other words, XP.

[Asher]

XP won't support XNA-developed games.

[Whaleboy]

What on earth are you talking about?

I said that Linux deskto sucks. He said it's just my opinion. That does not invalidate my argument nor its relevance, he should have posted examples of how KDE and the like are superior to Windows XP and what we've seen of Vista. That he doesn't is a poor reflection of his ability to counter someone else's opinion. I know because I used to use relativism a lot, until I realised that it's nonsensical; like saying "My hand is a hand".

Asher, you have any idea how much the Ultimate edition is likely to cost and minimum specs? I can't wait to get my hands on it!

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
I said that Linux deskto sucks. He said it's just my opinion. That does not invalidate my argument nor its relevance, he should have posted examples of how KDE and the like are superior to Windows XP and what we've seen of Vista. That he doesn't is a poor reflection of his ability to counter someone else's opinion. I know because I used to use relativism a lot, until I realised that it's nonsensical; like saying "My hand is a hand".

To be fair, you did not give any specific examples of how the Linux desktop sucks, either. You asserted KDE is bloated - but compared to what, Explorer? You asserted that the interface is inconsistent, but in what ways? And so on.

Criticisms in these general, vague terms don't go down well.

[Whaleboy]

To be fair, you did not give any specific examples of how the Linux desktop sucks, either. You asserted KDE is bloated - but compared to what, Explorer? You asserted that the interface is inconsistent, but in what ways? And so on.

Tons of utlities that are simply piled in with little or no consistency between them. While the central control thingy is good for KDE itself, its layout is confusing and ill-thought out, furthermore it has very little control over the underlying system and the kernel configurator is often broken. On Mandriva, Ubuntu and Slack, it was broken on the default install with source, and I can't get it to work with 2.6. Frankly it shouldn't be there in the first place.

I find qt to be slow as hell, although I'll hang fire there until I get a chance to play with qt4.

In fairness, I neglected to mention that Koffice is promising, though I wouldn't use it on a day-to-day basis. It pwns OOo by a long way though.

For the record, I did explain how the Linux desktop sucks earlier, in that it's inconsistent with too many useless user-level choices, many of which are confusing and dont work.

My KDE desktop took 2 hours after I compiled it to completely strip out the useless little utilities (I shouldn't have compiled them in the first place but there's a couple that are ok like kuser) so I have a barebones system. I'd use Fluxbox except that I like some eye candy, and I like the Win9x/NT/XP-esque interface.

[Urban Ranger]

I agree that KDE has lots of fluff, though Gnome seems to be quite solid.

[Whaleboy]

Gnome is even worse, it looks like Windows 3.11 on acid, in terms of using it to control your system its even more hopeless than KDE. It comes with a few less useless programs granted, but dependency and the library issue is a nightmare. No-one in their right minds would ever use it as a fully-fledged "lets grab a healthy slice of the market" desktop. In order to do that, the apologists and evangelists for ancient, unpragmatic technology need to shut up, and the very concept of a Linux desktop needs to be thoroughly gutted and brought into the 21st century.

That leads us back to my original point that if you're going to make a decent desktop, you need investment. Your investment would make more sense in a BSD-based system... more realistic licence, and better code to boot .

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Verto
I think it is only natural that OS, as time progresses, requires more power, so people who are criticizing Vista or any OS because they think it should run on 12MB of RAM should stick with something like 3.1

Or you can use a stripped-down WM under Linux or BSD . . . . . .

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Asher
Same with Windows 2000/XP...

I forgot to mention that it is still capable of doing something after that .

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
Gnome is even worse, it looks like Windows 3.11 on acid, in terms of using it to control your system its even more hopeless than KDE.

You must use a different Gnome than me, because my experience is nothing of that sort.

Originally posted by Whaleboy
It comes with a few less useless programs granted, but dependency and the library issue is a nightmare.

Why would most people care about dependencies? Even in Gentoo the package manager handles that transparently.

Originally posted by Whaleboy
That leads us back to my original point that if you're going to make a decent desktop, you need investment. Your investment would make more sense in a BSD-based system... more realistic licence, and better code to boot .

No it doesn't, because BSD license lets everybody steal your stuff, and they don't even have to acknowledge your work.

[Whaleboy]

You must use a different Gnome than me, because my experience is nothing of that sort.

2.10

No it doesn't, because BSD license lets everybody steal your stuff, and they don't even have to acknowledge your work.

Then you're suggesting that the GPL is little more than an ego trip. If you really want useful things to happen to your code, you apply the BSD licence it so corporations can pour in investment. It makes sense for them to contribute code back in turn so that it gets tested by the BSD community. Seems to function pretty well, going on the quality of the code wouldn't you agree?

On the contrary to "lets everybody steal your stuff", it allows you as a software developer to maintain your IP rights and not be forced to communistically disseminate your code to the world. If it was essentially stagnant, then the BSD's wouldn't be thriving now.

[Asher]

No it doesn't, because BSD license lets everybody steal your stuff,

What I like about this quote is UR's backing up the concept of intellectual property.

Somebody needs to reconcile his beliefs.

[Asher]

As a sidenote, on my laptop I just used "apt-get dist-upgrade" to upgrade my Ubuntu 5.04 to 5.10 preview, and I get random characters on bootup and a message that says "failed to start the X server" -- the whole system then is totally locked. I can't even switch vterms/ttys.

[Skanky Burns]

Originally posted by Asher
XP won't support XNA-developed games.

Which prevents me from playing what? Games to be released in a year or two? I think hardware requirements alone will do a nice job in preventing those games from running if my current system isn't upgraded before then.