I would just like to add that there is a valid reason why Linux or the *BSDs are superior to Windows or OS X - they are Free. As in Speech. And I'm sad this doesn't even warrant a mention.
There are a whole host of reasons to use one OS over the other but this "Free as in Speech" is simply not a very good one. I'm far, FAR, more concerned about "Getting Shit Done" than I am about the free-ness of my OS. For some tasks the right tool for GSD is windows, for others it's osX, and for still others it's some Linux / *BSD (I'm a NetBSD fan myself).
It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another. I guess it's a matter of what sort of things you grade on, For my personal OS grading metric there is only one item, "Helps me Get Shit Done". Nothing else matters, I just want to be productive.
It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks. I'm assuming that that's what you mean by "short sighted"? Well, that's a bit snarky.
I chose OS X above (though I'm moving more and more in the direction of Linux on the desktop again). I guess it just struck me as odd to use "short sighted" to describe the people who, for idealistic reasons, are willing to take a short-term hit to productivity to ensure long-term capability.
The huge appeal of OS X to me is, as someone said on here recently, it's basically *BSD with a fancy window manager and 1-to-1 hardware/software integration.
I don't want to run a system where, by design, the manufacturer can remove my ability to run applications I've installed after the fact. So, even though I'm happier in general with the polish and fit of OS X than current desktop linuxes, that's where I'm headed.
What would you have them do instead?
It's tautological that nobody can both provide something and freedom from the fear of the unintended consequences of that same thing simultaneously.
On the other hand, since the only way to judge the trustworthiness of code is to know its provenance, I don't see how we can avoid some kind of signing becoming ubiquitous.
To me that means that free software must eventually develop a decentralized code signing scheme.
My point is that the alternatives don't provide the user with the option to choose who to trust to begin with.
The ability to trust code is something that has to be created with engineering and design.
Yeah, I dislike negative consequences. :)
To me that means that free software must eventually develop a decentralized code signing scheme.
I wholeheartedly agree!
I pick a Mac laptop as I can run OSX, Windows, and any necessary flavors of Linux (Metric #1). Plus, it has a nice physical shell and for me, that's worth paying some extra cash (Metric #1). But that is me. I assume no cary over in what works for me with other people.
Laptops are as diverse and affordable as shoes (or any other commodity consumer product) and people pick these things based on whatever suits their fancy at that time.
In regards to getting shit done, I can pretty much get shit done on any distro for the most part once past any learning curve (if there is one).
But what's the point then? If it's just an academic process then that's fine, but for the purposes of determining a useful day-to-day primary system, it seems like 'It's free software' is a terrible metric on its own. All else being equal, of course, I'd rather free than closed, but all else is not equal.
It feels sometimes like this sort of 'free therefore better' ideology blinds the people doing the actual development to the fact that if they made the system more productive and intuitive for people to use, then more people would use it, and that's a net benefit to everyone. Perhaps if they DID focus on 'whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks', then their project would reach more people, and through that more people would be exposed to the (legitimate) benefits of free software.
I think it boils down to the difference between idealists and realists. Realists are always optimizing locally whereas long-term change is always brought by the persisting efforts of the idealists.
I also sense that you speak to FOSS as in "us vs them". You want to wait till their products become better than anything else while they are looking for comrades in their campaign to reach there.
That said, I think Linux and all the other FOSS OSes and software keep costs down. Without Linux, could you imagine what a Windows license would cost? I can't picture that we would have the same price points.
Do you think a similar argument could be applied to Android or any other free/commodity software/platform?
That's because they're free as in beer, not free as in speech.
Proprietary software - i.e., software you can not modify to suit your needs - can actively inhibit your ability to "GSD". That's kind of the point.
And Linux is the top system for ease of acquiring development tools. Compilers, debuggers, IDEs, version-control systems, scripting languages... you get it all on Linux.
On OSX, as well as the FOSS tools you can also choose from a set of nicely tailored Cocoa apps, some free and some worth paying for.
When im doing multimedia stuff , say using progs like xtranormal i have to use my windows because again, no port for mac is available. If im coding on an xterm connected to my amazon instances im using my macbook because its just alot nicer and basically all the tools i need come installed with the mac.
The thing i never understood is, if you are a mac fanboy and would never use windows or visa versa how do you manage to develop properly. How can an apple fanboy who refuses to use windows do blackberry development and how does a windows fanboy do any iPhone development, do they just restrict themselves to programming in objective C and dot net respectively ?
Yeh you could use a VM but i just found it easier to have two separate laptops with whatever OS i needed to run to get the job done
I guess you can have a preference , me i prefer my macbook when im doing general stuff because again all tools are included and if i need to fire up an xterm, run some network tool, quickly whip up a shell script or try some random thing its just easier on a mac but to be a fanboy who refuses to use the other OS makes no sense to me.
It just limits you ... doesn't it ?!
3rd party apps on Windows are a different matter however.
I'm decrepit enough that I remember the bad old days when proprietary OSes had a lock on things. I remember the number of times I ended up fucked because I couldn't look at the source of some crucial component, couldn't change it, and could only plead with a vendor to unbreak their stuff. And the standard response to my pleas was, "How many more units will you buy if we change that?"
I'm way more productive now thanks to the open source movement. My minor problems often turn out to be somebody else's big deal, so they end up fixed as if by magic. And if not, I can dig in myself, or hire someone instead.
No thanks to people like you, of course. But I owe a great deal to people who made the "irrational" choice to adopt an open platform and make it the most productive choice.
My experience suggests that a Free OS isn't worth it to me, but it's been about six years since I gave it a go full-time. The last time I gave Linux a good go round (as in using it as my primary OS for everything I did), I still had to invest time in getting my touchpad to work correctly with X or getting decent sub-pixel anti-aliasing. All of the freedom to tinker in the world is worthless to me if I can't get the basics sorted without a significant investment of my time.
Nothing precludes the OS from being tinkerable but mostly working out of the box.
I remember using Terminal to change every single .string string to "LOL" on one of the school macs. Good times indeed...
A number of years ago, working on a semi-embedded system, I hacked the way Linux boots from USB devices to speed it up, which made the people I was working for quite happy. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about - I would expect to find a lot of people with similar stories on a site like this.
Also, configuring Linux machines is not really that onerous in this day and age. I suspect more time is wasted complaining about it than in actually doing it. There are certainly still some exceptions, and if you want the ultimate in "mom friendly", Mac OS is probably the way to go. But for a 'hacker', the ability to explore and modify might trump that need for ease of use.
What cost? You're stating this as a fact, when it certainly isn't. As I've pointed out in another comment, the claim that usability is an orthogonal concept to Freedom is a false dichotomy.
Yes, there are quite some issues at the moment, I'm not going to deny that. The thing is, a lot of those, like missing hardware support, are not the fault of the Free Software community, it's the fault of the very things we're trying to stop: closed/locked hardware, proprietary drivers, non-open file-formats or Freedom-denying practices like DRM or tivoization, and finally plain and simple FUD (named as the single most critical problem GNU/Linux faces in an infographic released by the Linux Foundation last year[1]).
Before someone points out that shifting the blame doesn't make the problems go away, let me add that I'm perfectly aware of this. I just want to make it clear that it's unfair to blame Free Software for a lot of the problems it faces, when in fact we fought and tried to prevent a lot of them for more than two decades.
[1]: http://content.linuxfoundation.org/20th/images/linuxthennowi...
Relatedly, your most critical problem is not external, it's that the FSF is now associated more closely with non-issues like "GNU/Linux" nomenclature than solving serious problems.
Suck it up, grit your teeth, and press on. That's what it takes to be successful in just about any field of life. Anything else ends with you sitting on the sidelines, impotently complaining about how unfair it all is and how bad all the successful organizations are.
So no, we're not going to "suck it up", but we're going to press on, to make a better world for future generations.
"Suck it up" does not mean "accept defeat," it means to accept the blows that come with contesting the arena of ideas, and get serious about effectively pursuing your mission. You don't get to just pretend the arena of ideas doesn't exist.
Free software is an ideology, and as an ideology it badly needs a prophet, someone who can inspire reverence for the cause the way that Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson can inspire reverence for science.
rms is wasting his influence. Just look at the primary GNU Project About page; it's a disaster of anxious dissembling, fussing over terminology, scolding people who only 95% agree with him, and taking pages and paaaaages to do it. That is not how you lead.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
When the FSF has a message other than "the waves are choppy and all the boats are unsound so you better stay close to shore," maybe they'll find that people start listening.
I'm not willing to sacrifice productivity to make a philosophical point, so I only use Linux when Linux is the best tool for the job.
Not in the least since Snow Leopard, as Terminal.app has been perfectly fine (with Terminal Colors SIMBL plugin, and MouseTerm if you really want) and even better in Lion. For utmost configurability you could lean towards iTerm2, which you can tweak to no end (and arguably more than most X terminals).
Platform-specific tools from pb{copy,paste} to tmutil are truly useful and improved at each new release. Tools like brew give you all the package management love you could want, and xorg support is as first class as it could get without OSX being X-based itself.
I guess that if you want to go further than what OSX currently support, then you're looking for getty VTs, tiling window managers or Compiz customizability. As such one should probably not try to shoehorn Linux into OSX and rather use Linux (or some *BSD) directly.
The last thing I remember was that in OS X 10.5 I had to change some locale option to have UTF-8 working properly. But that's it.
Could you give examples where Terminal.app fails?
grep "$search_string" -n -C 3 --color # color bugs out
Because it operates at the object level rather than the files and strings of nix shells, Windows Powershell is more or less "one ring to rule them all."
Unlimited scrollback, the ability to copy and paste using the keyboard, key bindings to clear scrollback, change font size, etc., separate keybindings to scroll the buffer vs. send scrolling commands to the terminal, double-click on parens/etc. selects a range from there to the corresponding other one, and I could probably go on listing more-or-less unmatched _usability_ features for quite a long time. On the other hand, if it's functionality people are referring to then I guess I just don't know what I'm missing because I've never found it lacking in that department either.
As the cultists say, it "just works".
To say unilaterally that it's better for all people at all times in all use cases is, at the very least, an overstatement. While being free is a top concern for you and many others, for some (perhaps many) usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability, and that's a choice we should all be free to make.
While some argue that this is the current situation, I want to point out that's a false dichotomy. Freedom and usability aren't orthogonal concepts like some make them out to be. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we need to lock everything down to make it "usable".
Also, Freedom of software (and hardware) ultimately has greater implications on society as a whole, which is why I raised the issue. It's not merely a feature, a pro or con, it's something which at least people like here on HN should be greatly concerned about. Computers play an incredibly important role today, and will only become even more important in the future. It's important to retain control over them on a fundamental level, and that requires Open Standards, Free Software and Open Hardware.
Nobody is making this claim, so why are you trying to refute it?
Yes. Just better for hackers who want to alter anything about the code they are working with.
"While being free is a top concern for you and many others, for some (perhaps many) usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability"
False dichotomy.
> False dichotomy.
I disagree, he's not stating that there's a correlation between free-ness and usability. Just that what he (and maybe most "normal" people?) consider usable is not currently available in free form. As a result they end up with a choice between "better usability" and "worse usability" and it just so happens that the entire former category happens to be non-free.
Now I know a lot of linux fans disagree and say that linux is just as usable as OSX/windows, but I personally disagree and the markets appear to be backing me up on this. Unless you are supposing there is some other important reason for people not to switch?
Theoretically linux and the important applications can be made just as usable, but it hasn't happened yet...
The reason people don't switch may very well be that noone except tech-aware people has ever heard of Linux (I'm pretty sure my parents don't). And as this poll suggests, for people that know Linux, it is a very very good alternative to Windows, even better than that ;)
Do you honestly think so many people here would use Linux instead of Windows when it's not "usable"? You know, i'd like to get my work done, so i'm using what makes me most productive. Certainly not Windows.
Since XP the instability issues have Windows have been a thing of the past and the Windows 7 user experience has been pretty solid in my experience. Granted I don't do anything complicated under Windows (like I said, unix wins for programming), but neither do most "normal" people.
Edit: Also, note I'm not saying that Linux isn't usable, it is just that most trivial desktop tasks take me significantly more effort to get done nicely under Linux. Whether the benefit of other tasks (scripting your system/whatever) taking less effort outweighs this extra effort depends on the frequency of the different types of tasks.
Assuming you can then get the game to work , expect graphical glitches a plenty , occasional/not so occasional crashes , slower performance and issue with the audio and visuals being out of sync.
There are a bunch of older games (GTA3 etc) that work fine in wine, and some indie games that have been built for it to begin with but I couldn't recommend it to anyone as a gaming experience that is close to that available in Windows 7.
Steam on OSX brought some hope, but performances are just not there yet, and in any case, as long as developers will stick to Direct X, there won't be any other choice than having a Windows installation. I cannot blame them, Direct X seems to be largely above OpenGL, notably accessibility wise.
Throw debacles like Silverlight, OOXML, IE, and Vista into the mix, and it's not hard to justify a lot of the resentment toward the "Evil Empire" from back then.
Today (though Microsoft had to be dragged here kicking and screaming), Microsoft actively supports open source (CodePlex), open standards (ODF is officially supported by Office), and the open Web (they're clearly genuinely trying with IE9+); on top of that, they're rolling out some pretty solid products (Kinect, Win8, MSE, WP7, Azure/AppFabric, all the random stuff MS Research does, etc.). Mind you, I still wouldn't be caught dead using Windows or any other Microsoft product, but it's nice to such an influential tech company changing for the better.
[1] http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/08/ooxml_vo...
By using mostly Windows I trade the inconvenient and risks of non-free with other advantages. It is a informed choice.
RMS may hate me though :)
I think something like "non-power-users", or "random/average user" would be a better term ?
When I switched from Windows to Linux in the mid 90's it was a transition from a box with an illegal copy of MASM and a not-really-working copy of a C++ compiler to a box with a plethora of PL's, databases, code-examples and whatnot with an enormous educational value for me. On the winbox I learned Assembler, on the linbox I learned to program, that made the big difference for me.
Is it still that way for others or is the current situation on windows better? (not considering OSX as you can install pretty much anything there nowadays)
Lots of other programming systems also enjoy at least decent Windows support.
Superior (i.e. free) will not make me use it (Linux, or anything else that's free).
Every January 1st I refresh all of my personal PCs and laptops. Every January 1st I kick off Windows installs on three of them while I give a Linux distribution a go on the fourth - a stock Sony Vaio P-Series.
Never, ever has the install run smoothly. And I have to admit that a single bump in the road is enough for me to delete the partition and put Windows back on. Because I need stuff to work. I'm productive when I program, not while I debug installations.
Software being free means absolutely zero to me.
It's a factor which, in the real world today, makes them better for some purposes and worse for others.
There are reasonable but unproven conjectures that this kind of freedom could become the most important factor over time, but the existence of conjectures doesn't demonstrate any inherent superiority.
Everytime I've tried to switch from Windows to any usable Linux Distro, never has it happened that i didn't have to get frustrated due to some driver issues, laptop hibernation issues or some other issues which forced me back to Windows and kept Linux to either servers or a guest OS running in a VM in my PC.
I don't intend to be rude, but recommending ReactOS as a legitimate Windows alternative is reality-averse.
Because it's irrelevant. When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel?
On the contrary, it couldn't be more relevant. It's a fundamental issue of technology, and becoming increasingly important as we face the war on general purpose computing, a possible new advent of trusted computing with UEFI, and the list goes on.
I would go as far as to say Free Software is on of the most important things of the 21st century. We're moving towards an information society, and if we don't free the means to create, process and transmit information (as well as information itself), we will lose control to a few big corporations. I'm not planning to let that happen.
>When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel?
I haven't done that yet, but I occasionally poke around in the sources for things like the coreutils, read them, try to understand them and learn from them. I plan to do that with the Linux kernel at some point, too. You simply can't do that on unfree operating systems.
If you are getting $150 an hour, there are better things to do with the money than flaunt it in public.