rreagan wrote:Don wrote:.
Windows has these horrible kludgy solutions based on installing some sort of funky software that let's them share someone else's desktop. To do the most basic things you must be burdened with a heavy duty GUI transmitted over the Internet.
That was true, in 1999.
Out of curiosity, what are examples of the downside of Windows?
The list is huge. We could start with cmd.exe. I won't use the word horrible but let's just say it's awkward to use, cannot be easily be resized and even resizing it has serious limitations. The bash shell - compared to writing batch scripts - no contest. Bash is horrible itself as a high level language but it makes batch scripts look primitive in comparison. But bash as a shell is pretty awesome.
No awk, sed, grep, sort and many other basic utilities that have come by default on unix for years. If you install Linux you get several different programming languages by default and they are properly configured and installed. Such as a C compiler. Hello? You cannot write programs in windows without dowloading and installing something. Also, about 10 different editor choices that are installed by default.
A huge thing is code repositories. It's rare you have to find something you need and go through the pain of downloading and installing it yourself, all the distributions allow simple installation with thousands of software packages. I use emacs, if it's not on my system I do this:
apt-get install emacs
Ditto for a million other packages.
I can get many different programming languages this same way if they are not already installed. Fortran, perl, python, ruby (actually most of those will already be installed on most distributions), lua, haskell, lisp, scheme, and 20 or 30 more.
A serious problem with Windows is that it was never intended to be used in a non-graphical way and not everything is best done by grabbing a mouse. I think that was the vision and dream, but it's a bad vision. It's like never learning to read because you can just watch television. I sometimes refer to windows as a dumbed down operating system for grandma and uncle Joe and that is big part of the reason but by no means the only part of the reason.
Multiple desktops - there is only a single desktop on windows. This is not a fundamental Unix concept but it has been in Linux for years now.
Someone will probably say all of this is just a matter of software. In fact when I work on windows I generally try to install software to make the system saner - but it never feels like a seamless part of the OS like it does in Linux - there are always some limitations or glitches. And then I have to do something on someone else's system and I'm once again on my own with a broken system.
We could talk about the superior abstractions that Unix has, such as a unified directory structure. In windows you have to think in terms of which drive you are using, i.e. c:\ d:\ etc. So a file path artificially includes this extra information which is unnatural. In Unix that is abstracted away as you only have the root / and any device can be mounted anywhere and you don't have to even know you are working with multiple drives. In unix just about everything is treated in a unified way, in Windows everything "feels" like an add-on hack - the file system is just ONE example of that but by no means the only one.
On linux I can forget which machine I am on and I have even printed documents on printers in other states by accident. That could NEVER happen in Windows because you are painfully aware that everything is different.
I was trying to solve a problem with windows in the past couple of months with creating files atomically. In unix this is handled by the OS, you create a file with a temporary name, build the file and then move it to the name you want to use. The move is handled by the kernel as an atomic operation. I browsed the web trying to find a solution and I got many pages saying that "there are no guarantees" but I later discovered some recent versions of windows provides awkward ways to do this but it won't work on all windows machines. Awkward because that way of doing it was not accessible from the high level language I was using anyway and even if it did it was not guaranteed. Now you might think that is just one thing I am picking on, but it was no surprise to me, windows always provides obstacles and hurdles to doing simple things because to this day it reflects its DOS roots - where muti-tasking was considered something to be avoided.
There is also this determination to always do things in a non-standard way in windows in order to make hurdles for anyone that doesn't use Windows hoping to bully them into using windows. The browser is one example, java used to be another example although I think that has finally been solved.
I have many more thing but I'm going to stop here for now. I don't want this to become an OS war thread. I admit that not all of these things are core windows flaws (such as the browser issues) but it's all part of the windows mentality and lack of flexibility. That is probably the phrase I would use to describe the difference more than anything, a lack of flexibility.
I'm not going to say that windows has NO strengths but most people I know of who have done substantial work on multiple operating systems agree that Linux is a far better development platform. One-off things - forget it, if you have a simple one-off task you probably have to write a program if you are windows but if you are in linux you can probably do it with simple tools.
Please refrain from empty words like "horrible", that doesn't tell us anything. Also please spare us any of the "it's not Linux" reasons like the one above. Windows has quite a nice remote access approach. Very lightweight and very useable over slow connections. And it's built in, client and server. So in your statement above I really only see, "I haven't used windows in ages and it's horrible because it's not what I'm familiar with".
Obviously cost, but for the overwhelming majority the cost is trivial compared to time lost on the learning curve of a free alternative. Even for most of you, I wonder how much you would have in your pocket for all the hours you spent towards tweaking Linux, even at minimum wage for all of those hours. Maybe it's not so obvious.
Then there's malware. This is definitely a drawback, for now. Virtual desktops will put an end to this before long. Besides, anyone who can install and be productive on Linux will have no problem avoiding malware infections, even without any antivirus software.
Yes I'm poking fun at some if you Linux fans, but in all seriousness, I am curious what the drawbacks are, with examples
I'll start. I have no doubt in my mind that if I had a Linux box with no GUI, I would be many times more productive in life. As it is there are too many distractions between surfing the Internet and playing games. Have you seen how many cat videos are on the Internet?? How could anyone with a GUI possibly be productive?
Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.
