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

turtle91

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What about running backups over night....or doing disk-defrag. over night(esp. notebooks internal disk defrag. can take hours to complete) or large data-to-USB-disks-transfers(XXX, warez, orbiter-hires-textures-backup, steam-stuff....) ?
I mean....this are tasks which even "home"-users might do.
Esp. full backups and defrag can make a system unuseable during the so called "active hours".
Another point might be, that some people don't like that the computer starts-up in the middle of the night todo udates or whatever (noise...heat...higher electricity bills...).
 

orb

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Personally I like using Oracle's VirtualBox as the hypervisor. :)
Gentoo makes ebuilds some 2-8 times slower for me when launched under VirtualBox, so it isn't for every day use. :p
 

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This morning when I got in work, Windows had restarted :( Now I have 8 Visual Studio windows open all on the start page rather than the solutions they are supposed to have open. FML.
 

Artlav

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Here is a "failure of imagination" part #N+1 - a regular person might leave the computer running overnight to not have to re-open all the stuff and keep working in the morning.
 

4throck

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Leaving your programs open with your workfiles editable is looking for trouble.
Better to close everything and do backups everyday.
That also makes you organize your work into daily milestones. :thumbup:

If your project is too complex that you need to open 10 windows to get started... then you should organized it effectively: separate code/assets to manageable files, better naming schemes, whatever.

Just my 2cents...
 

Majid

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Leaving your programs open with your workfiles editable is looking for trouble.
Better to close everything and do backups everyday.
That also makes you organize your work into daily milestones. :thumbup:

If your project is too complex that you need to open 10 windows to get started... then you should organized it effectively: separate code/assets to manageable files, better naming schemes, whatever.

Just my 2cents...

This wasn't unsaved work. No data loss occurred, code is managed by git. I have a beast dev rig with a lot of RAM so I keep things open for ease of access. I don't necessarily need everything open at once but it's extremely convenient especially when there is a need to context switch to a different project.

Windows closed my command line prompt windows as well as all my gvim windows, slack, couple spreadsheets I had open, putty sessions, etc. A restart tanks productivity.

---------- Post added at 03:12 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:51 PM ----------

Word documents that I had open are now frozen. Blue round cursor of death.
 

Urwumpe

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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.

Ahem. Most CAx software runs on Linux. From many CAD suites to CFD suites like OpenFOAM, including powerful post-processors like Paraview.

For those, there is often no even comparable software for Windows. You can have a very badly maintained and obsolete version of OpenFOAM for windows, but it is not even close to the power of a Linux version. And no, I am not even talking about highly specialized software there. Stuff like Vectis can run on Windows, but you won't find it used that way often.

In anything that approaches number crunching, you won't find Windows or Mac anymore.
 

jedidia

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Ahem. Most CAx software runs on Linux. From many CAD suites to CFD suites like OpenFOAM, including powerful post-processors like Paraview.

True, I forgot about that. Which is a bit ironic, since I was a toolmaker once. I remember many of those programs running on UNIX back in the day, so it's only natural that they'd progress to Linux.
 

Urwumpe

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True, I forgot about that. Which is a bit ironic, since I was a toolmaker once. I remember many of those programs running on UNIX back in the day, so it's only natural that they'd progress to Linux.

Exactly. This is of course historically grown, but I doubt it would make sense to develop software for such tasks on another platform. Even a generic Linux has one of the best kernels today for such kind of software - and there are versions around patched for high-performance computing.
 

Majid

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Try getting Theano to run in Windows with full graphics acceleration or anything using openBLAS. Had to spend a day to get Tensorflow working on my machine. Never could get: https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi to work in Windows. Try installing Keras/Lasagne and use theano in Windows.
 
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Messierhunter

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These all sound like the sort of things that one wouldn't expect to be doing as an average "home" user.

While I agree I don't fit the profile of the "average home user," I don't feel the need to drop another $80 just to be able to force Windows not to close out of my session in the middle of the night for an update that could have waited for the current task to complete. Especially when I can just get the same tasks done in Linux without the hassle, for free.

But it's not just the heavy computational tasks that I would normally do in Linux that present a problem; on more than one occasion I've dozed off while doing all night astrophotography, only to wake up to find that my telescope has been dutifully tracking the sky while the CCD camera has been sitting idle because windows decided the middle of a two hour imaging session on NGC whatever was a great time to install an update and reboot the machine. I don't have any good software for operating my SBIG camera and adaptive optics unit under Linux, so I'm stuck dealing with Windows. 90% of the time my "active hours" are during the day, but when I'm in the middle of a task at night I really, really don't want it interrupted. It's absurd that I need to shell out another $80 when all I want to do is not have the computer erase my work when it's in the middle of an intense task.
 

dbeachy1

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For what it's worth, I disabled automatic reboots by doing this a number of months ago. I haven't had any auto reboots since. I have Windows 10 Pro, though, so I don't know if that method works on Windows 10 Home or not.

Also, this method is similar but uses a different method to prevent Windows from auto-reenabling the auto-reboot task.

So I still install updates regularly and manually reboot, but only when I'm ready to. :thumbup:
 

SolarLiner

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This has been Window's big problem recently, IMHO: they try to do the things other OSes do well, except they keep their existing structure intact. They for example added the Notification Center on top of their "Tooltip" feature: which means half of the app are broken, new apps can't reap all the benefits of having the feature (tbh, most GNOME derivatives, GNOME itself on top, do very badly with notification centers).

But it showed greatest with their implementation of the Windows Store and the inevitable restriction to UWP apps. It's a system that feels "hacked" onto the OS because having software centers are the hip thing now. And the inevitable lockdown is, because, Windows wants the centralized experience many OSes also offer. But again, as it feels hacked in, the restrictions also feel hacked in.

While Linux is designed with the on-the-fly updates that rarely need a reboot, Windows feels unpolished with the layers of features not quite glued together, but rather hydrolic-pressed together.

It's what distingushes Windows and the main UNIX systems in use today. macOS's app store was built in from the start, and the OS is built with it. Linux distros feature a package manager since their first version, and evolved to generally include a GUI, software center application that serves the same purpose as macOS's app store. Then Windows came and said "that looks good" and strapped their UWP / Windows Store as another layer, putting everything to the press again and then to release.
 

Loru

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*this is only a joke.

a6VrdYe_700b.jpg
 

Artlav

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Games are typically 50-100GB today.
Crap.

I didn't quite believe this was possible, but here i am downloading a friggin 30 Gb game.

In the LPs of it it does not look like it should need any more than maybe a hundred Mb, but 30 Gb it is...
 

Urwumpe

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Crap.

I didn't quite believe this was possible, but here i am downloading a friggin 30 Gb game.

In the LPs of it it does not look like it should need any more than maybe a hundred Mb, but 30 Gb it is...

I am also not sure if the 30 GB are really justified for many games... but for some they clearly are... like the Witcher III.
 

Linguofreak

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From the Chatbox last night:

Chatbox said:
[04-03, 15:01]RisingFury Good thing I went for 32 GB of RAM and not 16. I'm using up almost 10 right now and I'm not even being messy yet

04-03, 22:13] jgrillo2002 @RF Im due for an upgrade at the end of this year

[04-03, 22:13] jgrillo2002 Win7 is going to go kaput in 2020

[04-03, 22:14] jgrillo2002 thanks to M$' forceful to it's customers to upgrade to win 10

[04-03, 22:46] Linguofreak Meh, 10 years is a good run. It's equivalent to the span between DOS 2.0 and NT

[04-03, 22:50] Linguofreak But if you're that bent out of shape over it, join the Linux hordes.

[04-03, 22:51] Linguofreak Coincidentally, I've been using Linux as my primary OS for just about 10 years.

[04-03, 22:54] Linguofreak But, if you switch, you'll find that OSes and UIs change even without corporate avarice. It's somewhat easier to keep the stuff you like going for a long time in the open source world, but there are still just as many developers that think they know

[04-03, 22:55] Linguofreak better than everybody else trying to fix what ain't broke.

[04-03, 22:58] Linguofreak You should switch anyways, but Win7 going away isn't because MS is especially evil.

[04-03, 23:53] jgrillo2002 the problem with Win10 is the fact that it is known to be privacy invasive to the point where they take screenshots and key log your entries

[04-03, 23:53] jgrillo2002 and that is scary

[04-03, 23:53] jgrillo2002 and I will not stand for it

[05-03, 01:30] jangofett287 Good thing it does none of those things and most privacy concerns were actually incompetent tech journalists over reacting to the insider builds which are supposed to be full of instrumentation.

[05-03, 01:33] jangofett287 Oh, and windows 7 is not going to magically stop working next year, nor is it somehow going to suddenly become catastrophically insecure.

[05-03, 01:35] Linguofreak Which isn't to say that it won't become progressively more insecure as more and more vulnerabilities are discovered that MS is no longer patching, but it Win7 won't detonate the moment support ends.

[05-03, 01:39] Woo482 Don't they still let you pay a ridiculously high fee for extended support? that could be an option

[05-03, 01:45] Linguofreak There are serious security concerns with putting any proprietary code that talks to the network into a position where that code has access to important things, so I'm not going to say that privacy concerns with windows are overblown, but,

[05-03, 01:46] Linguofreak Bleah, accidentally hit enter before I was dine typing

[05-03, 01:50] Linguofreak ... but "Win10 is currently logging keystrokes and screenshots" does not properly express the very real dangers that Windows, MacOS, iOS, and even most Android systems pose to their users.

[05-03, 02:00] Artlav The thing i didn't like from my brief exposure to Win10 was having to constantly fight the system. It does whatever it wants whenever it wants regardless of what user asks.

[05-03, 02:01] Artlav Then again, i'm a down-to-the-metal kind of user, so it's not necessarily a flaw.

[05-03, 02:13] jangofett287 @Linguo Are you implying that because those OSes were made by large corporations they must be compromised in some way? I won't deny those companies have privacy concerns, but saying that their OSes are "a threat" to their users is hyperbole at best.

[05-03, 02:24] dbeachy1 Feel free to take it to the OS Wars mega thread, all https://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=6430

My reply to jangofett287:

jangofett287 said:
@Linguo Are you implying that because those OSes were made by large corporations they must be compromised in some way? I won't deny those companies have privacy concerns, but saying that their OSes are "a threat" to their users is hyperbole at best.

1) Because Windows, MacOS, and iOS are proprietary, it is not provable, by building from source independently and comparing the result to the distributed binaries, that they do not by design compromise the user's security. This does not just apply to OSes: the firmware on most computing systems is a black box with frightening security implications, especially so on mobile devices and increasingly so on desktop systems, and while the amount of damage that applications can do is somewhat limited by OS-level security restrictions (assuming the OS is secure), any proprietary application that you allow to handle sensitive data has the potential to compromise that data.

1a) While the Linux kernel and the core Android userland are open source, Google succeeded with Google Play where IBM failed with Micro Channel Architecture, in terms of reproprietarizing the open architecture they had unleashed upon the world: While possible, it is very, very difficult for a western vendor to release a successful Android device that does not use Google Play, which is proprietary (and which Google pushes is very anti-competitive ways, I might add). Chinese vendors are having more success with such things in China, but that isn't very reassuring, see 4).

2) Apple and Microsoft are trying to play the ad-driven cloud vendor game these days, and Google started out that way. This gives them a lot of perverse incentives to include outright malicious behavior in their OSes, although considerations of plausible deniability and being able to rationalize their behavior to themselves will tend to prevent them from being too outright about it, which is why the idea of direct keylogging and screenshots is (for the moment, as a matter of what is typically deployed, in the West) silly.

3) The always-on-the-network nature of modern computing requires software to receive regular over-the-network updates to keep abreast of security bugs. The nature of such updates makes the updates themselves a potential threat vector, even for open-source software, though considerations of plausible deniability make malicious updates less viable in that sector.

4) The three most powerful governments in the world are the US, China, and Russia. China is currently the first or second most repressive tyranny that has ever existed, and is known to have a terrifying surveillance regime, Russia was, a few decades ago, the second or third most repressive tyranny that had ever existed, and is currently in the process of backsliding towards that condition, hard, and the US, while still a less-or-more functioning democracy, has been demonstrated to be operating a domestic surveillance regime, in flagrant violation of its Constitution, with the potential to enable grinding despotism. Any of these regimes might, at any time, targeting either a specific user or the general public, coerce a software vendor into including backdoors into their product, and if that vendor's software is proprietary, would be able to do so with perfect plausible deniability.

1) and 3) show that the vendors for the systems being discussed have opportunity to create malicious software, 2) shows that they have a "carrot" motive in terms of their own self interest, and 4) shows that they have a "stick" motive in terms of likely duress from known malicious actors with the power to apply that duress.

---------- Post added at 23:26 ---------- Previous post was at 23:10 ----------

Just an incidental note: It was the early discussions in this thread, 10 years ago, that motivated me to go from complaining about Windows to actually trying Linux. Time flies.
 

jedidia

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Win7 is going to go kaput in 2020

...which is a ridiculously long livespan for any piece of software, much less one that is so essential to security and needs to interact that closely with hardware... :lol:

Bloody hell, in Switzerland most people don't have their cars for that long...
 

Linguofreak

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I'm somewhat shocked, but wish I could say I was surprised, to find myself in the position of likely switching to KDE in the near future. When I started using Linux 10 years ago, KDE was ahead of almost all of the competition, but GNOME at that time was, by a long shot, the best desktop environment that has ever existed. Unfortunately, GNOME has spent most of that time rotting into a festering pile of Apple-esque Fisher Price ooze, and while I jumped ship to MATE years ago, the entire GTK ecosystem has been decaying at a somewhat slower pace since the GNOME project controls GTK. In the past few years, both MATE and XFCE have gone to GTK3, which brings MATE down from world class to merely good. The MATE project really should have forked GTK along with GNOME. KDE, meanwhile, isn't a lot better than what I remember, but unlike practically every other desktop out there (other than MacOS, which was already bad), it hasn't gotten significantly worse in the past decade, so it's it ahead of the pack by default.
 
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