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My campaign...
BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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Quote:

echo "Bringing down eth0 because M$ Windoze broke it..."

Umm, what? How does Windows break networking in linux?

Quote:

ReyBrujo: I disagree. In fact, a lot of 3D CG films are rendered on Linux clusters. If you mean the drivers are slow, then, again, that's not Linux's fault, that's the hardware vendors fault. One of them (NVidia or ATI), said that because graphics drivers are hard to write, open sourcing them wouldn't help. That's just wrong. There are a lot of good programmers in the FOSS world, and I bet if we got the proper source for the driver, some bright spark would come up with 100 ways to make it run faster.

It takes a cluster to render the films using cpu. :P Drivers being slow IS Linux's fault, there is the possibility of reerse engineering and making drivers worth a crap. Or optimizing the code which helps slow down.

Anyway, I just installed Gentoo w/ KDE, HAL, etc on my laptop, but I don't see me using it for too much. The biggest issue which will prevent me from using it regularly is power support. I have cpufreq and such installed, and it works great, I can get 3 hours out of my battery (I can get a little more on windows), but suspend/hibernate doesn't work, and I'm sick of trying to fix it. Windows suspend/hibernate works out of the box, why can't linux? I recompiled my kernel and modularized all the blacklisted drivers and if I unload them, stop x, etc before trying to hibernate, the kernel crashes. And for suspend, it locks up resuming from it. (using Suspend2 for hibernate, and the hibernate scripts).

CursedTyrant
Member #7,080
April 2006
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I've tried many guides, including the one on ATI's support page. The drivers were installed, but direct rendering still didn't work. It said the screen doesn't support direct rendering in glxinfo. fglrxinfo (or whatever) says something about Mesa tough.

When I install the drivers from ATI's site, X doesn't load after running (I get a black screen):

$ aticonfig --initial --resolution=0,1024x768,800x600

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MiquelFire
Member #3,110
January 2003
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Oh, here's an issue I found with Fluxbox, I can only resize the window from the bottom two corners. Where do I go to allow me to resize from at least the other corners/sides as well? Doesn't appear to be style related, but I haven't had time to fool around with it.

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Febreze (and other air fresheners actually) is just below perfumes/colognes, and that's just below dead skunks in terms of smells that offend my nose.
MiquelFire.red
If anyone is of the opinion that there is no systemic racism in America, they're either blind, stupid, or racist too. ~Edgar Reynaldo

BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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CursedTyrant: can you use ATI's opengl as root? I know I had to use eselect to set OpenGL to ATi, then change the DRI mode in the xorg.conf file so non-root could use non-mesa.

CursedTyrant
Member #7,080
April 2006
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Eselect?

DRI mode's set to 0666, I'm not sure if it shouldn't be 0755.

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Thomas Harte
Member #33
April 2000
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Quote:

In this thread you can list your reasons for not switching to Linux (or other Open Source operating systems), and I (and hopefully other Linux users) will try to help you.

I have no reason to switch, I don't want to switch and I certainly don't feel a positive duty to. I've used various Linuxs over the years (at least RedHat 3.0.3, 5.x, 6.x and a c.2003 Mandrake) and have never been particularly sold. I have subsequently switched to Mac.

My problems are twofold. The first is available software. The second is the maintenance of installed software.

Apps I use "frequently" include iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, Microsoft Word, Xcode and Safari. I am aware of robust freeware alternatives to Safari, Word and probably even iPhoto but have never found anything open source to match the others.

iTunes is far and away the perfect music storage program for me. It lacks the complete turn-off interface of WinAMP and whatever the current WinAMP clone of choice is for the Linux desktop. It also makes syncing with my iPod trivial. I have never bought any tunes from the internet, so I am not tied in by any proprietary file formats or DRM schemes — I just like the software.

iMovie is brilliant. It's the first video editing software I've used in about a decade (the last being Adobe Premier under Windows 3.1, possibly Premier was version 3.0) but it's also fast, easy and intuitive. It integrates flawlessly with iDVD for when I want to burn a disc. I know of no equivalent open source software.

There are plenty of free IDEs, but Xcode is really the best. It is the ultimate justification for the "multiple windows" model of OS X versus the "usually MDI" Windows and most Windows derived Linux models. It links directly to decent maintained and cross linked documentation. The debugger works perfectly and some of the features, like Shark, are very advanced. Shark is a like a real time profiler except that it actually gives you coding advice and breaks things right the way down. I can see, visually, where I'm loosing time due to cache or pipeling stalls and get useful suggestions about areas that would be benefited by vectorisation or different memory alignment, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that the equivalent "professional" development tools on Windows do similar stuff (the increasingly dusty copy of VC 6.0 I use for Windows development doesn't, but if I will insist on using antiquated software then what can I expect?). But I'm not aware of any Linux software that does. And guess what: Xcode is a free tool, so I don't even have to pay to keep up to date.

Maintenance of installed software is, in my opinion, a major pain under Linux. Stuff throws files wherever it likes and the normal UNIX way of things is to have binaries in one place, data in another, etc, etc. Give me application bundles any day, or at least the Windows de facto standard of giving a separate directory to each program. ZeroInstall sounds lovely, but my computer isn't always on a network.

Quote:

MiquelFire: Macs mostly use PPC so you can't run that anyway , there are, however, emulators, but you'd get reduced speed

27.78% of people voting at Mac Polls already use an Intel as their primary machine. The switch over is likely to be much faster than those of the past (i.e. 68k to PowerPC) because it is being accompanied by a relative sales boom. For example, Apple laptops accounted for 12% of retail sales in the USA for the last reported quarter. That isn't necessarily as impressive as it sounds in terms of the big computer market because businesses buy a lot of computers and don't buy retail, but it's quite a step up for Apple.

MiquelFire
Member #3,110
January 2003
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eselect is a Gentoo thing.

---
Febreze (and other air fresheners actually) is just below perfumes/colognes, and that's just below dead skunks in terms of smells that offend my nose.
MiquelFire.red
If anyone is of the opinion that there is no systemic racism in America, they're either blind, stupid, or racist too. ~Edgar Reynaldo

James Stanley
Member #7,275
May 2006
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BAF:

Quote:

The OSS ethernet driver forcedeth 0.40 (the latest version) can't handle an NVidia NForce 4 Ethernet network interface in a dual-boot environment with Windows XP. As XP leaves the NIC in an "unusable state".

Thus you manually have to do sudo ifdown eth0 and sudo ifup eth0 to get network working after booting. It's annoying.

I agree that Suspend/Resume is crap on Linux, as well. I tend to just shut my lid and let the hardware take care of it! And Windows suspend/resume doesn't work out the box. If you install standard non-OEM Windows XP on that laptop, I am 99% sure that it won't suspend/resume properly. It's because laptops are so specialised, Windows is 'tweaked' to run on it.

CursedTyrant: Were the drivers installed, though, that just looks like it configures them. If they weren't installed properly, the X config file will be broken when it tried to configure drivers it can't find, and will result in a blank screen. Type:
cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep Driver
One of the lines should say something like:
Driver "fglrx"
If that doesn't come up, something's wrong. Obviously, check the others to see what there are. Post the output here if you're not sure.

MiquelFire: That's one of the few faults I can find with Fluxbox, but in Linux you're lucky. You now have two paths which you don't have in Windows:
Install a different Window Manager
Modify the source for the window manager so that it works how you want.
You can install a different shell in Windows, but you're not supposed to.

Thomas Harte: For iTunes, there are plenty of apps out there, amaroK is my favourite. I don't understand what iTunes does, as I've never used it, but I understand that it is a media player and archiver (i.e. can save it to disk and media players), so, yeah, amaroK. Again, I don't know what iPhoto does, but there are plenty of photo displayers, Kuickshow is my favourite. Kino can edit videos. I've never used it, and I gather it's not very good, but there are definitely alternatives. I heard on LUGRadio, a while back, that there is some brilliant video editing software that can burn to DVD based on GStreamer, I'd recommend that, but I don't remember it's name. Why on earth do you want M$ word? OpenOffice.org is brilliant. There are hundreds of code editors in Linux, my favourite four being QT Designer, KDevelop, Kate, and Vim. For Safari, Firefox and Konqueror come to mind. Also, UNIX doesn't (or Linux doesn't, generally) have binaries in one place and data in another. It has symlinks in a bin directory, and binaries and data in the software's directory. Some software has config files in /etc, but mainly only system software (e.g. X, init, etc.). Also, I believe XCode is only free as in beer, not speech, all the editors I mentioned are free as in beer and speech. Maintenance of installed software on most distributions is often as simple as 'emerge -uD newuse world', or 'apt-get update;apt-get upgrade'.

Kikaru
Member #7,616
August 2006
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My reason for not switching: I'm used to Windows. And most of the games I like are windows "exclusive." But, I might get a Windows/Linux dual-booting machine for programming. :)

James Stanley
Member #7,275
May 2006
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Kikaru: You can just as easily get used to Linux. The games you know you like are windoze only, but there are plenty of FOSS alternatives.

EDIT:
I'm going now, because I'm tired. I didn't expect so many people to need support! So nobody expect any help from me until the morning, at least. Most of Saturday afternoon I will be away, and nearly all of Sunday. Monday I might help people, on Tuesday I am going on holiday until Thursday.

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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  • Linux is not supported by Photoshop and I'm not aware of an alternative.

  • Linux is not supported by Final Fantasy XI.

  • I'm not sure if my ATi Remote Control is supported by linux.

  • I had a very difficult time setting up a cd burning application. They all sucked bad.

  • Steep learning curve if you want a good installation.

  • I've always experienced clunky UI problems on Linux. Delayed responses and things of that nature. I was suggested to use some sort of pre-emptive kernel, but never got around to it.

  • Lack of time.

Linux is great as a server.. but I couldn't see myself sticking with it as a desktop. I don't really like KDE that much and Gnome wasn't any good back when I tried it (many years ago).
Besides, what is wrong with windows? I don't have any problems at all. I need a reason to switch as well, even if all of these reasons not to switch are met.

Most of the programs I use are compatible with linux (firefox/thunderbird, azureus, etc) but for all of the others I would need to find an alternative and hope it is just as good. DVD/CD-ROM emulation software, MSN (miranda and gaim both suck), I also use Utopia Angel which is windows exclusive. Dual booting isn't really worth anything to me because linux doesn't actually improve on anything that I'm doing.

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

gnolam
Member #2,030
March 2002
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The Zealot said:

Your last argument I could throw right back at you and say Kolf doesn't work on Windows, Kaffeine doesn't work on Windows, Amarok doesn't work on Windows, KMail doesn't work on Windows, Konqueror doesn't work in Windows.

Irrelevant. Allow me to quote you in the OP:

James Stanley said:

In this thread you can list your reasons for not switching to Linux (or other Open Source operating systems)

Oh, and spelling Windows "Windoze"? Doesn't help your cause.

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kentl
Member #2,905
November 2002

Your script wasn't really any help James Stanley. Still thank you for trying to help. I need to do the commands after a while. From my point of view not being able to handle one state of the hardware (which Windows can handle) is a bug. And there is a reason forcedeth 0.4 is at version 0.4.

You didn't have a solution for any of the other issues either. Saying; that is the hardware vendors fault and that is the application developers fault, isn't exactly any news or any help.

I don't want to use Azuerus as it's bloated. And I don't want to use KTorrent for example as it doesn't support some of the nice features which uTorrent has [Multiple simultaneous downloads, Configurable bandwidth scheduler, Global and per-torrent speed limiting, Quick-resumes interrupted transfers, RSS Downloader, Trackerless support (Mainline DHT)]. The most important one highlighted in bold.

BAF said:

Umm, what? How does Windows break networking in linux?

Check what I wrote in my first post about the issue. :)

ReyBrujo
Moderator
January 2001
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Quote:

Linux is not supported by Final Fantasy XI

No problem, FFIII is enough for me ;D

--
RB
光子「あたしただ…奪う側に回ろうと思っただけよ」
Mitsuko's last words, Battle Royale

Trumgottist
Member #95
April 2000
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Quote:

Trumgottist: Have you tried wine?

Not recently, no, since I don't use Linux. (Wine for Mac would be nice, though.)

Quote:

And there are better free (as in speech) alternatives to all (read: most) Windows software available. Post it here and I'll name an alternative.

Sure, for things like word processing (I like Open Office on Windows - too bad there isn't a native OSX version) and internet. And I use Blender, too. But you won't find me an alternative to Finale (music notation software), which is one of the most important programs I use. Then there's the games.

Quote:

Linux is very user friendly now. What version of Red Hat were you using? And if you want user friendly, you should probably go with MEPIS or an Ubuntu.

I don't remember what version it was, but it was the latest available at the time... two or three years ago, I think. It was easy to use out of the box (for the things that worked) but I was lost when going beyond that.

Quote:

Also, just because it's not immediately obvious what to do doesn't mean it's not user friendly. I find editing configuration files is a lot more user friendly than Windows dialogs. For example, configuration files work pretty much the same way for whatever you're trying to configure, so you only have to learn once and all the config files on the system are friendly to the user (you). Whilst with Windows, dialogs are all different. One might have a field in a completely different place to another. One might use a different GUI, or some use tabs and some use Back/Next. That's not user friendly, that's idiot friendly. But most things have a configuration file for the haxxor l33t among us (), and a front end for those who can't be bothered.

The differing GUIs sounds more like Linux to me. In Windows and OSX those things are standardized, while the Linux version I tried there were several different configuration tools that almost worked, and did so differently. (I also couldn't find any good docs for the configuration files, but maybe you get that if you buy a distro in a box? I didn't do that, since I was just checking it out because of curiousity.) But as has been noted, that was a while ago, and hopefully things has improved since.

I'm not really against Linux, I only answered the question why I don't (and won't) use it.

--
"I always prefer to believe the best of everybody - it saves so much time." - Rudyard Kipling

Play my game: Frasse and the Peas of Kejick

LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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Quote:

I'm not really against Linux, I only answered the question why I don't (and won't) use it.

As Gnolam has already pointed out, you're dealing with a zealot. If you're not with them, you ARE against them.

kentl
Member #2,905
November 2002

J.S. said:

Also, just because it's not immediately obvious what to do doesn't mean it's not user friendly.

Actually that's pretty much the definition of user friendly. That you should know what to do to achieve what you want.

Yet you haven't helped anyone. I think you've taken water over your head. ;D

BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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Quote:

Eselect?

DRI mode's set to 0666, I'm not sure if it shouldn't be 0755.

eselect is what I used on gentoo. And my DRI is set to 0666.

Quote:

Quote:

The OSS ethernet driver forcedeth 0.40 (the latest version) can't handle an NVidia NForce 4 Ethernet network interface in a dual-boot environment with Windows XP. As XP leaves the NIC in an "unusable state".

Thus you manually have to do sudo ifdown eth0 and sudo ifup eth0 to get network working after booting. It's annoying.

Hmm, I used forcedeth on here when I tried gentoo, and I don't remember any problems like that.. of course it wans't version 0.40 when I tried it. Unless the Gentoo amd64 live cd had a fix for it.

Quote:

I agree that Suspend/Resume is crap on Linux, as well. I tend to just shut my lid and let the hardware take care of it! And Windows suspend/resume doesn't work out the box. If you install standard non-OEM Windows XP on that laptop, I am 99% sure that it won't suspend/resume properly. It's because laptops are so specialised, Windows is 'tweaked' to run on it.

You are 99% wrong then. Unless it's some really messed up hardware, there's no tweaking needed.* Almost any laptop has APM or ACPI, so you just need a basic ACPI driver, just like on linux.

Quote:

MiquelFire: That's one of the few faults I can find with Fluxbox, but in Linux you're lucky. You now have two paths which you don't have in Windows:
Install a different Window Manager
Modify the source for the window manager so that it works how you want.
You can install a different shell in Windows, but you're not supposed to.

You can change your WM with a shell that supports it. And who says you're not supposed to install a different shell? Personally I like explorer and it works fine for me, I have no reason to screw around with it.

Quote:

Kikaru: You can just as easily get used to Linux. The games you know you like are windoze only, but there are plenty of FOSS alternatives.

Most FOSS games blow chunks. They aren't as in depth or polished as most commercial games.

Quote:

I'm not sure if my ATi Remote Control is supported by linux.

Should work. I know researching remote controls for a MythTV box I may build it recommend ATi RemoteWonder and linked to a few linux setup pages on it.

Quote:

Linux is great as a server.. but I couldn't see myself sticking with it as a desktop. I don't really like KDE that much and Gnome wasn't any good back when I tried it (many years ago).
Besides, what is wrong with windows? I don't have any problems at all. I need a reason to switch as well, even if all of these reasons not to switch are met.

Most of the programs I use are compatible with linux (firefox/thunderbird, azureus, etc) but for all of the others I would need to find an alternative and hope it is just as good. DVD/CD-ROM emulation software, MSN (miranda and gaim both suck), I also use Utopia Angel which is windows exclusive. Dual booting isn't really worth anything to me because linux doesn't actually improve on anything that I'm doing.

That's basically my stand. Add AIM to the list of programs as well, at least for me. :P

[edit]
* About the extent of "tweaking" you have to do in almost all cases is enable hibernation and tell it which drive to use to store the image, if it wasn't already done.

kentl
Member #2,905
November 2002

Quote:

Hmm, I used forcedeth on here when I tried gentoo, and I don't remember any problems like that.. of course it wans't version 0.40 when I tried it. Unless the Gentoo amd64 live cd had a fix for it.

The networking guys at the Ubuntu forum said it was a known issue. I can probably resolve it by using the propriety driver from NVidia. Which I will change into when I have some free time.

Quote:

miranda and gaim both suck

Miranda has been good in the past, then it became bad for a period of time, and now it's good again. :) Kopete on Linux is quite excellent if you haven't tried it.

Krzysztof Kluczek
Member #4,191
January 2004
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I haven't read all posts, but here are my reasons for not using Linux:
- being too lazy to install it
- I can't find text editor I feel comfortable with (vim and emacs are out because of shortcuts I'm not going go learn, mcedit is quite OK, but lacks comfortable copy&paste)
- lack of system-level clipboard (or I haven't managed to find one)
- problems with video drivers (probably can be found after some googling, but I don't want to spend whole night setting Linux up)
- most games don't run under Linux (Wine is out because - as I've said, I'm not going to spend too much time setting this all up)
- I'm probably going to miss Visual Studion 2005 (IntelliSense in vs2k5 rocks)
- I don't trust too much GCC after it compiled my code wrongly (and it didn't happen once)
- "compile-everything-yourself" approach of Linux users, especially with libraries with many dependencies, some of which doesn't compile out-of-the-box (fortunately, Allegro is really nice when it comes to compiling it, but other programs/libraries often are not) - on Windows I have everything what I need as a binary, including libraries I'm using
- lack of Direct3D - I'm using both OpenGL and Direct3D, depending on what suits better for given project and I'm not going to drop any of them
- problems with making Windows binaries - most people still use Windows, so being able to make (and test!) Windows binaries is essential for every game developer

Also, as I've said later, even if some of above problems can be solved after some googling and installing something, I'm not going to spend too much time setting this all up, when installing Windows takes several minutes and it perfectly suits my needs. :)

MiquelFire
Member #3,110
January 2003
avatar

Quote:

- I can't find text editor I feel comfortable with (vim and emacs are out because of shortcuts I'm not going go learn, mcedit is quite OK, but lacks comfortable copy&paste)

I use nano. But for GUI stuff, I use SciTE (well, on Windows at least. I haven't got to the point of needing it on Linux yet)

---
Febreze (and other air fresheners actually) is just below perfumes/colognes, and that's just below dead skunks in terms of smells that offend my nose.
MiquelFire.red
If anyone is of the opinion that there is no systemic racism in America, they're either blind, stupid, or racist too. ~Edgar Reynaldo

Michael Jensen
Member #2,870
October 2002
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It never just works. ML is exactly right about the config files too -- I have linux installed on a VirtualPC at work, and I even had to hand edit a config file after installing it to get it to work with my VirtualPC's "onboard graphics controller" -- thankfully, an editor in a magazine had the same issue and documented exactly what to do to make it work...

In my experience, linux is slower. (yes, even on real PCs I've seen Windows 95 run circles around linux -- on the same machine...)

I Can't develop VB.NET 2.0 based web-applications on a linux desktop machine, or host them on a linux server for that matter. -- So there goes any chance of professional usage for linux.

The games I buy in the store (just recently bought City of Heroes) don't run on linux.

I've never been able to configure, etc, etc, etc a graphics card for linux to actually get Hardware acceleration to work. But of course the manufacturer's website and the driver disk that was provided with the card make it work badassidly on windows...

When ReactOS starts making stable releases I wouldn't mind trying it out and possibly switching. But at the moment, no, it's not a valid alternative.

Linux sure is one hell of an alternative... Do you enjoy watching people in pain? Why are you trying to make them switch?

Mr. Big
Member #6,196
September 2005

My favorite computer games don't run on Linux.

Michael Faerber
Member #4,800
July 2004
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Quote:

Do you enjoy watching people in pain? Why are you trying to make them switch?

On the Ubuntu forums somebody made a very long post which types of people should be convertible to Linux and which not. Very interesting.

One thing he wrote was that gamers are very hard to migrate; you shouldn't try that. Considering that on this forum most of the people play games, making this thread may not have been such a good idea. :-/

And telling people "Go you!" when they try to help / comment isn't very friendly too.

--
"The basic of informatics is Microsoft Office." - An informatics teacher in our school
"Do you know Linux?" "Linux? Isn't that something for visually impaired people?"

ReyBrujo
Moderator
January 2001
avatar

Yeah, gaming people are less likely to switch. Same with designers. Programmers may switch, as those with too much moral to use pirated software :P

--
RB
光子「あたしただ…奪う側に回ろうと思っただけよ」
Mitsuko's last words, Battle Royale



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