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bfg-9000
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 7:56 am

But... is Linux a REAL consumer OS?

Or is it just a developer OS for cultists?
 
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 8:08 am

bfg-9000 wrote:
But... is Linux a REAL consumer OS?

Or is it just a developer OS for cultists?

It's definitely a consumer OS in its Android form.

For general desktop use I'd say Ubuntu, Mint, and other similar distros are there provided your use case is amenable (i.e. no requirement for apps that are only available on Windows). I would not recommend a more "techie" oriented distro like Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, or Arch to a non-technical user.
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:14 am

whm1974 wrote:
How hard is it to read a few documents or play around the system? Or for that matter use a freaking search engine?


Can't tell if serious...

So, try to imagine the average Windows user's level of interest in reading documents.
A subset of those will play around with the (Windows) system.
A subset of those will install Linux.
A subset of those will actually use Linux.
A subset of those are interested in the inner workings of Linux.
A subset of those will learn something about the inner workings of Linux. -> These are the people that form the pool of potential Linux evangelists who won't soon migrate back to Windows.
 
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:18 am

Yeah, users reading documentation or "working around the system." Let me know when you meet those outside of forums like these.

No offense, though, I do understand your point but it simply doesn't correlate with reality. And in all fairness, should it? It's 2017, and much like a car will drive you from point A to point B, a computer is merely a tool for X. We care about computers, users don't. Nor should they. People can drive cars and use phones just fine without knowing how they work.
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:30 am

morphine wrote:
Yeah, users reading documentation or "working around the system." Let me know when you meet those outside of forums like these.

No offense, though, I do understand your point but it simply doesn't correlate with reality. And in all fairness, should it? It's 2017, and much like a car will drive you from point A to point B, a computer is merely a tool for X. We care about computers, users don't. Nor should they. People can drive cars and use phones just fine without knowing how they work.



+++ on that. I get so tired of reading post's from tech people who smugly declare that the average user is an ignorant moron who understands nothing about computers. They were sold the computer or phone or tablet, etc. as an appliance, so they use them as such. Few people undertake deep study of the inner workings or technical level operational procedures of the appliances in their home or lives, they just use them as they need and want.
"If you take up a starving dog and feed it, it will not bite you. This is the primary difference between a man and a dog." Mark Twain
 
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:34 am

Flipping that point on its head, all of us are no strangers to tons of situations that could have been avoided if users would just have some common sense about their computing devices.

But that's an actual social problem entirely: put diesel in your gasoline car, your friends will mock you mercilessly for years. But have no precautions against data loss or do something bone-headed to your computer, and "yeah I don't know anything about computers lolz."
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Thin Man
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:36 am

Redocbew wrote:
Thin Man wrote:
Let's be fair, I kinda like penguins...Although I do have to say I've never found a six foot one that could run a hundred miles an hour...But then again, I'm not Finnish or Swedish...I guess it makes a difference...


Little known fact: There is a species of subterranean penguin living underneath the Bonneville salt flats. Now and then small dust clouds can be seen there which are often mistaken for prototype vehicle testing. It's the penguins, and they bite.



I have heard rumors about them for years. The last I heard was that it was believed they were driven into hiding because they refused to turn over 10% of their herring to the Mormons. That was never substantiated though.
"If you take up a starving dog and feed it, it will not bite you. This is the primary difference between a man and a dog." Mark Twain
 
Thin Man
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:52 am

morphine wrote:
Flipping that point on its head, all of us are no strangers to tons of situations that could have been avoided if users would just have some common sense about their computing devices.


Ohh I agree, however, "common sense" is a strange thing. I once witnessed an auto mechanic asking a lady if she ever checked the oil in her car, her response was "They put that in at the factory, don't they?" Turns out that this woman was a successful pediatrician with a large practice.
"If you take up a starving dog and feed it, it will not bite you. This is the primary difference between a man and a dog." Mark Twain
 
Thin Man
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:58 am

Redocbew wrote:
Thin Man wrote:
Let's be fair, I kinda like penguins...Although I do have to say I've never found a six foot one that could run a hundred miles an hour...But then again, I'm not Finnish or Swedish...I guess it makes a difference...

Little known fact: There is a species of subterranean penguin living underneath the Bonneville salt flats. Now and then small dust clouds can be seen there which are often mistaken for prototype vehicle testing. It's the penguins, and they bite.

I hear they're also venomous. The livers of the subterranean herring on which they feed contain small amounts of a potent neurotoxin; the penguins have evolved the ability to concentrate this toxin in their salivary glands.

It is rumored that the military started a top-secret program to weaponize the toxin back in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Leaked documents (authenticity of which cannot be independently verified) state that harvesting of salivary glands (which was generally fatal for the penguin) nearly wiped out the wild population, until a captive breeding program was started at Groom Lake (the infamous "Area 51"), roughly 400 miles to the southwest. Subsequent development of a device to harvest the toxin without removing the salivary gland made it possible to obtain the toxin without causing permanent harm to the bird, substantially increasing production rate; toxin can be harvested repeatedly from the same bird, at roughly 4 month intervals. The military has denied the existence of this program, though an anonymous source claims it was still in operation as of 1988 or 1989, and that to this day the military maintains a substantial cache of the concentrated toxin in cryo-storage.[/quote]

Makes sense that they would have to breed them themselves, they probably developed from Gentoos. And as we all know, you have to compile gentoos from scratch to be successful
"If you take up a starving dog and feed it, it will not bite you. This is the primary difference between a man and a dog." Mark Twain
 
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 12:49 pm

morphine wrote:
Flipping that point on its head, all of us are no strangers to tons of situations that could have been avoided if users would just have some common sense about their computing devices.

But that's an actual social problem entirely: put diesel in your gasoline car, your friends will mock you mercilessly for years. But have no precautions against data loss or do something bone-headed to your computer, and "yeah I don't know anything about computers lolz."

Or, worse, they blame whichever company sold the HDD that crashed. Seagate has a bad rep with many because they dominate the consumer market...and all drives die eventually.

"But my WD drive from 1993 is still going! Seagate sucks!" :lol:
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morphine
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 2:19 pm

Well, I'm not getting into that particular discussion. Between me and friends, I've seen a ton of Seagate drives go, while WD failures are much fewer and farther between, so... vOv
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 2:37 pm

Seagate hit a couple of rough patches a few years back, and had a few problematic SKUs. Outside of those, their reliability doesn't seem to be significantly better or worse than the rest.

They're off my "avoid" list now, though all else being equal I'll still go for WD or HGST instead.
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morphine
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jun 26, 2017 3:01 pm

Yeah, I didn't mean to say I've blacklisted Seagate forever. According to all reports, they've been having good reliability records in these past few iterations.

Another issue is that WD's support is nothing short of fantastic. I still prefer to buy from them because I know that it something goes wrong, they'll actually look into it. Had a couple or three non-standard issues and they were always a pleasure to deal with.
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Re: The positive parts of Linux.

Mon Jul 03, 2017 1:12 pm

JustAnEngineer wrote:
Airmantharp wrote:
But what really gets me are the Linux gaming evangelists. Square peg, round hole, and 'building their identity around it' is just getting started.... that religious fervor that the Linux faithful apply to anything computing works overtime to push people away and toward the Windows solution that just works.
whm1974 wrote:
You can play games just fine with Linux...
just brew it! wrote:
You've just reinforced his point quite nicely.... Until new GPUs routinely get feature-complete and stable Linux driver support, Linux will be a second-class OS for gaming.

If I had more time this morning, I would link to three or four previous whm1974 threads where we've covered this topic before.

Three decades ago, a friend of mine was delighted to show me an IBM PC/XT software emulator running on his Amiga 1000. It ran rather slowly, but it played the X86 MSDOS version of Moria faithfully on the Amiga's 7.2 MHz Motorola 68000, providing the performance of a 1.1 MHz Intel 8088. My friend told me that "It's now how fast the bear dances--It's that the bear dances at all."

For the hundred dollar cost of Microsoft Windows, you could avoid a tremendous amount of headache and have a much better gaming experience.
I used to be quite the OS/2 enthusiast, setting up my systems to dual boot WinNT or Win2K with OS/2 and eventually even with SuSE linux. But with every release, microsoft made it harder to set up multi OS systems and I finally gave up and went with windows because I needed Excel (as primitive as it was and remains). I'd have to say, Linux was more interesting back when coding your own dos batch routines resembled unix or linux utilities. Back when people would actually buy file managers and code editors because the ones in windows sucked.
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