OS WARS MEGA THREAD (Now debating proprietary vs. open-source!)

jedidia

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Linux is not actually a sensible alternative to Mac OS or Windows in many cases. Yes, many Linux distros are pretty accessible, and you could be fooled into thinking that it's a decent Desktop OS. The problem is, the range of things you can accomplish with it is very limited.

There are two areas in which Linux excells: As a server platform and as a development platform. In the first case you throw the desktop right out the window, which leaves a very stable and customisable system that can be run at a minimum of maintenance and no license costs. Economically, that's a literally unbeatable combination.
As a development environment it's also pretty good, because it's easier to interact with than windows, and there's some pretty decent IDEs that run on it (most of all InteliJ, which is basically non-Microsoft visual studio for Java. No, it's not "like eclipse". It eats eclipse for breakfast). But if we're honest, what is mostly being developed on Linux are Web services intended to run on Linux. Again, the economical component is quite a factor in the equation.

But what else can you use Linux for professionally? You could potentially do digital art. Blender and Gimp are good programs. But as soon as you need to print something, you go running for Photoshop, which isn't available for Linux, and if you actually need to earn your money making 3d-models, you'll spend some money to get something more geared towards production pipelines and integrating into effective workflows.
What else is there? Like, there's literally nothing. There is no Software available for Linux in any major professional field that could compete with the productivity of equivalent software on Windows or Mac.

And when it comes to free time, well... there's hardly a game on Linux you can't get on Windows, but plenty vise versa. You can browse the Web just as well, but people mostly use tablets and phones for that nowadays. Appart from "I'm a geek and I can handle Linux anyways", there's really not much compelling reasons to use it.

And the situation with "your computer belongs to us" isn't actually that bad. Is there anyone here who has actually paid for their windows 10? Because if you're willing to drop some bucks to get the enterprise edition, you can disable automatic updates. Not that I'd recommend it. Because if you're aware of only a fraction of the crime going on over the wire, your first instinct is to plug the thing out completely and not bother with technological progress after all. Microsoft is not just a thug, it's also a service provider, and overall it does do a decent job at it, recent rants about service availability in the random comments thread be damned. Because that's actually another one of those things: Had I bought a visual studio license, I wouldn't have had that problem. But because I get it for free, they want me to log into my account every once in a while. And honestly, for the quality they're generally delivering without charging me a penny, I think that's kind of ok.
 

Andy44

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As such, given the libertarian political views you have expressed on this forum in the past, and the concern you expressed above with regards to Microsoft acting like they own your computer, I would highly recommend that you read up on the subject and seriously consider whether using Linux, even at the cost of some discomfort, might be more in line with your principals than the other options available. (Though, from the discomfort angle, I think you're likely to have fairly good luck with something like Ubuntu or Mint).

I live in a world where very little "aligns with my principles" anymore. As a libertarian who believes in individual rights and liberties, I may as well believe in Santa Claus for all that's worth these days.

Heck, even using the words I typed in the above paragraph get you labeled as some kind of a nut anymore.

And "fighting the power" by struggling to use Linux and giving up the ease of Windows hardly seems worth the effort, given the huge electronic trail I leave everywhere else through my cable company, cell phone, etc., not to mention all the monitoring of communications taking place.

I sometimes pretend to support Trump in order to drive my liberal friends batcrap crazy sometimes; that's about as much rebellion as I can muster up these days.

But this thread may be interesting anyway. In my OF blog there are a couple of old posts regarding intellectual property rights, which may be tangentially related to this topic.

---------- Post added at 09:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:57 PM ----------

I will add this though: I was in a store the other day and for the first time in a long time browsing computer games.

It seems like a lot of the ones I saw were incomplete and required you to download something in addition to what comes in the box. (It's been a long time since I bothered buying new computer games). I guess even when you buy a game in a box, not only don't you own anything, but you can't even run anything without an internet connection anymore.

So much for gaming. Not that I care; they all look the same now anyway. FPS, MMO, blah blah blah.

I miss the 90s sometimes.

---------- Post added at 09:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:08 PM ----------

Wow, reading what I wrote here I really sound like a bitter old man.

Get off my lawn!
 
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jedidia

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It seems like a lot of the ones I saw were incomplete and required you to download something in addition to what comes in the box.

Most retail versions of games nowadays are just so you have a box to put in your collection. In most cases, the only thing on the disk is just a web-installer. The amount of data your average game needs today vastly exceeds the capabilities of cheap storage media. You'd have to ship them on SD cards or USB sticks, which would increase the price.

And retail really isn't where you want to get games from in the first place. Only the most high-profile games even get a retail release.

SInce you're complaining about DRM and waxing nostalgic about the 90s, you might want to take a look at gog.com. They don't sell games with DRM, and have a lot of the old stuff on sale, usually bundled with a preconfigured dosbox so you can just run them without hassle on windows.
 

Artlav

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struggling to use Linux and giving up the ease of Windows hardly seems worth the effort, given the huge electronic trail I leave everywhere else through my cable company, cell phone, etc., not to mention all the monitoring of communications taking place.
Hm, a lot of the problem is that MS treats Win 10 computers as their own, removing software you installed, changing options, rebooting at will, etc.
Monitoring is a minor concern compared to that.

The amount of data your average game needs today vastly exceeds the capabilities of cheap storage media.
That doesn't sound right. A Blu-Ray disk can take 25Gb, and the largest games i've seen are only about 10 Gb large.

Asking someone to download 25Gb+, especially in a backwater country like USA where you pay per-Gb, is the sort of thing that can get you out of business fast.
 

jedidia

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That doesn't sound right. A Blu-Ray disk can take 25Gb, and the largest games i've seen are only about 10 Gb large.

Most current AAA games punch in somewhere around 30 Gigs, as far as I know. Also, there's not many people who have a BluRay drive in their PC.
 

Linguofreak

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Hm, a lot of the problem is that MS treats Win 10 computers as their own, removing software you installed, changing options, rebooting at will, etc.
Monitoring is a minor concern compared to that.

That doesn't sound right. A Blu-Ray disk can take 25Gb, and the largest games i've seen are only about 10 Gb large.

Asking someone to download 25Gb+, especially in a backwater country like USA where you pay per-Gb, is the sort of thing that can get you out of business fast.

Nah. At least in any urban area, digital download is not a problem. You generally don't pay per GB here unless you exceed some fixed cap on a monthly flat-rate plan, and it's generally video streaming (in households with multiple people each streaming their own movie for hours on end every day), not game downloads, that tends to put people over the cap.

The bigger problem around here with 10 GB plus game downloads is download time for people on slower connections.

Even in the US, Blu-Ray hasn't really taken off: video streaming and direct digital download of software are the order of the day. Our Internet infrastructure is not the greatest, due to issues with lack of competition, but we're wealthy enough that even with our providers over-charging and under-delivering, we still get fairly decent service.

About the only thing anybody uses optical media for anymore is playing old games (if not avaliable on Steam or Gog) and installing Linux (which really could be done with a USB stick).
 

Artlav

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Most current AAA games punch in somewhere around 30 Gigs, as far as I know. Also, there's not many people who have a BluRay drive in their PC.
Ok, guess i'm well out of date too...

Making people downloading 30Gb worth of a game over the internet still sounds savage, however.

It's usually a bad idea to describe reality using your limited experiences.
I had a habit of being up to speed on such things, which silently slipped away and died it seems...
 

Hielor

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Hm, a lot of the problem is that MS treats Win 10 computers as their own, removing software you installed,
Do you have an example of this happening outside of a system restore? That shouldn't happen.

changing options,
Example? Most of the examples I've seen of this have been someone misunderstanding how things work, or being surprised by the settings roaming from one machine to another.

rebooting at will, etc.
Barring actual bugs, which do happen, the machine should not be rebooting during the user's set active hours. The default active hours aren't particularly well set, but users should change them to match their own usage patterns and they won't run into further issues.
 

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That doesn't sound right. A Blu-Ray disk can take 25Gb, and the largest games i've seen are only about 10 Gb large.

Asking someone to download 25Gb+, especially in a backwater country like USA where you pay per-Gb, is the sort of thing that can get you out of business fast.

Games are typically 50-100GB today.

I haven't heard of people paying per amount of data since dial-up.

Edit: Didn't see the last few posts.
 

Hielor

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And if I have stuff that needs to run over night, then what? Sorry, but the concept of "active hours" is a bad one since it forcibly removes user control.
If you're wanting to do professional sorts of tasks with the machine, like things that run overnight, you get the pro version which has the ability to control that sort of thing.
 

Zatnikitelman

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If you're wanting to do professional sorts of tasks with the machine, like things that run overnight, you get the pro version which has the ability to control that sort of thing.
Wrong answer. There are plenty of reasons for consumer-level users to have overnight-running stuff without needing all the pro version has.
 

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And if I have stuff that needs to run over night, then what? Sorry, but the concept of "active hours" is a bad one since it forcibly removes user control.

Well, to be fair it is better, user control wise, than what Windows used to do, which was to put up a dialog with a timeout and reboot if the user didn't select the option to delay reboot by the time the timeout finished.

"Active hours" isn't the correct behavior, which is to notify the user that a reboot is needed and give two options with no timeout on the dialog, "reboot now", and "reboot later", with "reboot later" postponing reboot until the user manually reboots. But it is closer to correct than the old behavior.
 

Hielor

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Wrong answer. There are plenty of reasons for consumer-level users to have overnight-running stuff without needing all the pro version has.
Maybe I don't have a good imagination, but I'm struggling to come up with even a single example of a task that the average grandma sort of person-- who uses their computer for mail, playing bridge, looking at cat pictures, and Skyping the grandkids--would need to leave running overnight. That's the sort of person the Home version is targeted at. Help me out with examples of tasks this kind of person would need to run overnight?

The classic examples of things that are interrupted are running simulations or rendering tasks, which are pretty clearly "Pro" sorts of tasks that the average computer user will never even consider. The other funny example I saw was a karaoke DJ whose computer had rebooted in the middle of a set--if you're using the computer for work and rely on it to make you money, then you're also the sort of person who should have the Pro SKU.

If the name "Professional" bothers you since not all of these tasks are necessarily part of a paying job, just think of it as also being the "Enthusiast" SKU, because their needs are often similar. And really, on this forum, don't we all classify as "Enthusiasts"?

I don't entirely agree with how aggressive it can be--for example, I think that under no circumstances should the computer reboot while it is actively being used, including things like watching a movie that may not necessarily have input activity, regardless of what the machine's active hours are set to. But then, of course, a user could just leave a movie running constantly and never reboot, so that can't be absolute.

I think there's a happy medium somewhere between "reboot for updates as soon as an update is available" and "never update" that simultaneously protects the machine from careless users while also not annoying people too much, but the early versions of Windows 10 weren't there. It has gotten better in more recent versions, however. Still not perfect, but as for myself, I haven't had an unexpected reboot on any of my Windows 10 machines in months.

"Active hours" isn't the correct behavior, which is to notify the user that a reboot is needed and give two options with no timeout on the dialog, "reboot now", and "reboot later", with "reboot later" postponing reboot until the user manually reboots.
This is not the correct behavior, because then the user never reboots and therefore doesn't get the critical patch, and now their machine is part of a botnet or their extensive collection of cat pictures is being held by ransomware.
 

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Nah. At least in any urban area, digital download is not a problem. You generally don't pay per GB here unless you exceed some fixed cap on a monthly flat-rate plan, and it's generally video streaming (in households with multiple people each streaming their own movie for hours on end every day), not game downloads, that tends to put people over the cap.

Ok, I am living an urban area...at the very western part of Germany.
A couple of years ago(2011), I lived just 30 km outside my big city, and the local ISPs was not able to provide me with a broadband-connection.(not even one MBit via phone-line).

So I was forced to use 3G, and the monthly data-limit was/is 5 GB/month.
This costs about 50 Euros.
Now they have a new feature, if 5 GB limit reached, you can "buy" another 5 GB for 30 days for "just" 15 Euros. (so you don't need to sign multiple ISP contracts(=multile 3G SIM-cards), like I have done before, where I was in IT business)

I just want to say that even in urban areas, internet-connectivity is not allways possible, at least...not unlimited.

So in my case, I have to care about WHAT to download and WHEN.

If major updating my OS, I am downloading the updates somewhere for free and let my OS pick-up the updates via my dedicated update-server 127.0.0.1.

So I prefer Linux, where I can decide to download WHAT from WHO...and WHEN.
I don't know for the regular user, developer or gaphics-designer, but from the Enterprise level, there are some serious products running on Linux-servers.
Examples are:
-DB
-WEB
-content MGMT
-Backup
...
In case of problems/crashes, using some of the OS-built-in tools only, there is a good chance to solve the problem without the help of external resources(very lmited at i.e. military, police-orgs, gouverments, banks, "vendors of smartphones,HD's and TVs"....).
Debugging a SW crash in Windows ? Not having internet access or debug-binaries ? Not allowed to install/copy the needed additional trouble-shooting SW ? Good luck.
 

Artlav

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Do you have an example of this happening outside of a system restore? That shouldn't happen.
For apps and settings - only anecdotal second-hand stuff from people i fixed computers for, haven't used Win 10 long enough to encounter that.

Barring actual bugs, which do happen, the machine should not be rebooting during the user's set active hours. The default active hours aren't particularly well set, but users should change them to match their own usage patterns and they won't run into further issues.
The whole concept of "set active hours" is absurd.

I have a server-type machine where i had to use Win10 due to a driver issue with both Linux and WIn7.
It's a Pro version, and there is no easy way to stop it from doing whatever permanently.

There is no "reboot never" setting, only "don't do it for the next 30 days, unless its a critical update to the xbox controller driver" one. There is no setting for "never update because it upsets the high intensity software and causes a BSOD", only "pretend not to update for 3 months, and do it anyway, even with connection set to metered". I have the machine behind a serious firewall surrounded by linux machines in an environment where idiots can't get into, and yet i had to essentially lobotomize Win10 to stop it from updating and upsetting stuff.

There is a world of a difference between things taking care of themselves by default provided user don't disagree and things taking care of themselves in spite of the user.

Maybe I don't have a good imagination, but I'm struggling to come up with even a single example of a task that the average grandma sort of person-- who uses their computer for mail, playing bridge, looking at cat pictures, and Skyping the grandkids--would need to leave running overnight. That's the sort of person the Home version is targeted at. Help me out with examples of tasks this kind of person would need to run overnight?
Simple one - downloading stuff.
It's frustrating to wake up expecting to see the movie, and find out that the machine rebooted in the evening and downloaded nothing.

If that sounds odd for you, remember that most of the world don't have the luxury of high speed internet or comprehension of things like Netflix.

Or they might, and want to download one of these 50-100Gb games that apparently exist nowadays. So you start Steam in the evening, then wake up expecting to play the game, but find that it didn't get downloaded.

And that's a simple example. There might be thousand of oddball cases that don't fit the common pro/user types of tasks.

Maybe someone wanted to find out who was peeing in the elevator by installing a wifi webcam in there, only to find that the computer rebooted and stopped recording.

Maybe someone wanted to get the top score on the "hold the button" online game by putting a weight on the mouse button, only to find that the his record never happened because of a reboot.

Maybe someone wanted to record the conversations in a buggy unlogged online chat with a screencapture program, only to find a blank file in the morning.

There are plenty of things that can happen, most of them unique or unexpected, that would make it necessary to run the computer overnight.

TL;DR: It's not a maybe. You don't have a good imagination.
 

jedidia

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I have a server-type machine where i had to use Win10 due to a driver issue with both Linux and WIn7.

Well, you would be supposed to use Windows Server for that, I guess.
 

Hielor

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For apps and settings - only anecdotal second-hand stuff from people i fixed computers for, haven't used Win 10 long enough to encounter that.
Sounds like misunderstood settings roaming, perhaps.

I have a server-type machine where i had to use Win10 due to a driver issue with both Linux and WIn7.
It's a Pro version, and there is no easy way to stop it from doing whatever permanently.

There is no "reboot never" setting, only "don't do it for the next 30 days, unless its a critical update to the xbox controller driver" one. There is no setting for "never update because it upsets the high intensity software and causes a BSOD", only "pretend not to update for 3 months, and do it anyway, even with connection set to metered". I have the machine behind a serious firewall surrounded by linux machines in an environment where idiots can't get into, and yet i had to essentially lobotomize Win10 to stop it from updating and upsetting stuff.
As Jedidia pointed out, that scenario is covered by the Server SKU, not the Pro SKU.

There is a world of a difference between things taking care of themselves by default provided user don't disagree and things taking care of themselves in spite of the user.
Except that if the machine allows the average home user to have the ultimate say, the machine will find itself the member of a botnet in short order, because the user won't understand why the machine ever needs to be rebooted, and will never reboot it.

Simple one - downloading stuff.
It's frustrating to wake up expecting to see the movie, and find out that the machine rebooted in the evening and downloaded nothing.

If that sounds odd for you, remember that most of the world don't have the luxury of high speed internet or comprehension of things like Netflix.

Or they might, and want to download one of these 50-100Gb games that apparently exist nowadays. So you start Steam in the evening, then wake up expecting to play the game, but find that it didn't get downloaded.

And that's a simple example. There might be thousand of oddball cases that don't fit the common pro/user types of tasks.
Fair enough, although these sorts of complaints don't seem very common--the "it interrupted me while I was actively doing something!" ones seem much more common.

Maybe someone wanted to find out who was peeing in the elevator by installing a wifi webcam in there, only to find that the computer rebooted and stopped recording.
That should be using Windows Embedded.

Maybe someone wanted to get the top score on the "hold the button" online game by putting a weight on the mouse button, only to find that the his record never happened because of a reboot.
For unique issues like this...see below.

Maybe someone wanted to record the conversations in a buggy unlogged online chat with a screencapture program, only to find a blank file in the morning.
Automatic reboots protect your privacy!

There are plenty of things that can happen, most of them unique or unexpected, that would make it necessary to run the computer overnight.

TL;DR: It's not a maybe. You don't have a good imagination.
Thanks for confirming that!

For unique issues, it's a simple enough matter to just check for updates before setting the machine on its nightly task, and then rebooting for those updates if necessary before starting the process. Or, if there are no updates pending, change your active hours temporarily.
 
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