Comment by wfunction | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wfunction | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

GUI "variety"? Are you joking? The very reason there exists so much "variety" is that they all suck. Windows has one GUI system and it's worked darn well for quite a long time, and will continue to do so. Linux might be able to let you make your windows do somersaults so you can show off to your friends, but it still hasn't been able to get the basics right, like focus-stealing prevention. Windows is miles ahead of Linux on GUI -- if there's one thing I can tell you for sure, it's that.

And Linux is "miles ahead of Windows for research because of its command-line interfaces"? Really? Since when are 25-year-old command-line shells research products? Not to mention stuff like http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls

As for package management, when it works it works, but sometimes I wish it could burn in hell. I can't tell you how many times I've run into problems getting packages to work because their dependencies were either (1) no longer available ("sorry! our servers changed, your version of Linux is outdated"), (2) only available in source code form (but good luck compiling it!), or (3) not available for my version ("sorry, this version is too new for your OS"), among other things. Distributing your dependencies along with your application might not be sound engineering practice, but it sure as hell can make things actually work out of the box so you can focus on what you actually want to do.

"miles ahead of Windows for research" For example, only 2 of the currently fastest 500 super computers run Windows and 1 of them is owned by Microsoft. All of the others run Linux or Unix.

"Since when are 25-year-old command-line shells research products?" The shell is a researcher's best friend as they have always been (and will be for the foreseeable future) the direct interface between data and the user. I honestly can't think of a faster and easier way to parse a nasty 10GB log file from a simulation than bash. The fact that its old and still in use is a testament to its usefulness.

You have heard of powershell?

REPL are way superior as shown in any Xerox PARC OS.

And shells are indeed REPLs (in the sense that they run a loop in which they read, evaluate, and print things).

Though to be fair, REPLs for languages like MATLAB or Julia are likely far more useful from a scientific standpoint than a typical shell (which is more useful for system administration).

Compared with what I know from Xerox PARC documentation and what I self experienced in Oberon and Visual Works Smalltalk, shells are like REPLs yes, but not quite.

It is a very different experience when the shell (e.g. Transcript in Smalltalk) is capable of interacting with the whole OS.

For example in Cedar, which Oberon copied, any public function/procedure exported by dynamic libraries can be used in the shell via modulename.function.

Depending on their signature they act on REPL text input, the active selected graphical element or some other OS element.

While this can kind of be emulated on an UNIX shell, it breaks down that there isn't an OS wide standard API to bring everything together.

I don't know... Ubuntu's UI is pretty consistant and I think simpler to use than Windows. I wouldn't say it sucks... at all.

After using Ubuntu Desktop recently for the first time in a few years, I completely agree. I'm really surprised it's not more popular yet.

>like focus-stealing prevention

Example? I could show you thousands of issues on windows where a window has stolen focus and it wasn't prevented[0]

[0]: http://www.eightforums.com/

Could you link me to 2-3 of the actual posts instead of linking me to the entire forum?

In the meantime, it seems to me you've already conceded that Linux can't get it right, so I'm glad we agree there.

As a current Ubuntu user, I think you are just spreading old, outdated FUD.

The GUI works and it is in fact just as good as Win8 (which I dualboot). When using virtual desktops, it's far better, and makes me more productive.

The package management is amazing. Chocolatey sucks in comparison.

What I fail to see, is what these basic computer functions have to do with research.

Visual Studio has a lot to do with research, and it is a fantastic tool in its own right. The GDB debugger is a piece of ancient garbage in comparison to VS debugger.

You could have focused on the real issues instead of your uninformed outdated FUD.

What is the latest version of Ubuntu that you consider "outdated"?

Also, Windows has package management in the form of Chocolatey/OneGet: http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2014/04/03/.... It just isn't used by most end-users so awareness is limited.

Ehhh....that's "installer downloading and executing", which is a far cry from "package management". Notably, it doesn't provide dependency resolution (which is 90% of a package manager's job, IMO), and Windows' software packaging conventions don't really work well for an apt-like system, since they are intended to be mostly self-contained outside of shared frameworks.

I use chocolatey, but it's not anywhere near the level of apt-get. That's more Windows and Windows developers' fault than chocolatey's though. They've done a great job given what they have to work with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com