>When people buy a laoptop they expect the OS will take up a good chunk of the storage space.[sic]
Why? My linux install has a full dev environment and office suite and doesn't take a ton of room.
Why? My linux install has a full dev environment and office suite and doesn't take a ton of room.
Users expect their office suites to crash, but that doesn't mean that we as developers shouldn't be constantly trying to improve our code.
Are people honestly getting regular office suite crashes?
I don't use MS Office on windows much, so I can't comment on its stability.
A Windows install, for example, will have lots of pre-cached drivers, a crap-ton of little utility programs, several pre-installed libraries and frameworks (.net, vb6, etc.), and a VM for running 32-bit apps. All of these things provide valuable features for the OS.
Now, on top of that there is certainly plenty of bloat, and in many instances linux has simply approached these same problems differently. For example by installing shared libraries on demand via the internet through a package management system, or by simply having poorer hardware and cross-architecture support (zing!), or by having a vast ecosystem of open source tools available so that it's always possible to install something via a native compilation. Those are good choices for the linux way of doing things but they certainly come with tradeoffs.
P.S. Linux should be installable on the Surface Pro, so if the hardware intrigues anyone it might be worthwhile to see how it fares with a different OS.