Hacker News Reader

Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I don't know why he things it is rare. It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut.

The opposite is very common, as your list demonstrates. Also another big category is CAD, and CAM. There are no decent open source programs in that space at all!

View on HN

> It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut.

I think the canonical example has been web browsers, for instance.

Or Linux which as an OS far surpasses e.g. windows. It runs on any hardware you can imagine from satellites to hand-held devices and the majority of the super-computers in the world.

> Or Linux which as an OS far surpasses e.g. windows.

Linux is a lot cheaper than Windows. More importantly, it's a lot LOT cheaper than most proprietary Unices. And it's freely modifiable. If that makes it "better" for you, have at, I am not going to quibble.

If you are talking about Linux as a desktop, rather than server, operating system... there are reasons that Windows users outnumber Linux users on the desktop on the order of about 90 to 1. It's not all because Microsoft is evil. If you use Linux as your primary desktop operating system, I'm happy for you. If you think it's better for you, great. May you go forth and prosper. If you think Linux far surpasses Windows as a desktop operating system in the general case, then you are incredibly delusional and should seek some help.

Well, Linux is used every day as operating system by millions of end users – on mobile devices.

And Linux and the BSDs are getting a lot more love on consoles, too – look at the SteamBox.

With 16% of all current generation games being able to run on linux, often (like in the case of the new Batman game) even running better than on Windows (or expected to do so), it is getting more and more towards equality.

> With 16% of all current generation games being able to run on linux, often (like in the case of the new Batman game) even better than on Windows

You are literally making stuff up. The OSX/Linux port of Arkham Knight doesn't even have a release date yet.

And the studio porting it has NEVER made a single game that was bad – while the windows port, made by a different studio... well, you’ve seen it.

And about the 16%: Look at the Steam games catalogue.

>I am not going to quibble >I'm happy for you >You are incredibly delusional and should seek some help

Yeah you seem unbiased...

What is the example web browser?

Firefox and Chromium vs Internet Explorer.

Today, no open source browser is clearly more featureful and functional than the closed source alternatives, so seems like a transient aberration rather than a canonical example.

I mean, the people who maintain far and away the most used closed-source browser, IE[1], are deprecating it and have tried to distance themselves from IE as much as possible in Microsoft Edge. And this is entirely because IE lacks features that Chrome and Firefox have, largely but far from entirely related to standards support for HTML5. I have been using Microsoft Edge since it was available in the Technical Preview, and it is not on par with Chrome or Firefox yet as a daily driver. I hope it gets there someday, but it's not there now.

[1] Safari is kind of a border case -- all the chrome is closed source, but the rendering engine and I think the Javascript engine are open source. I am lumping it in as an open source project here, I can understand why someone might argue the point though.

Ok, I think it's reasonable to accept this. However one could equally well describe these open source browsers, as browsers funded by Google and Apple. Perhaps that's why they are outliers.

Doesn't BRL-CAD [1] count ?

[1] http://www.brlcad.org/

I tried BRL-CAD while trying to finish my transition away from Windows to Linux. Although BRL-CAD has features that arguably make it more 'powerful' than Solidworks (the package I had learned previously), it was incredibly less intuitive to use.

To me, it seemed like a software package. Of course, it /is/ a software package, but making models in CAD doesn't feel like writing software to me. Making models in CAD reminds me of playing with LEGOs, a very visual activity. Typing in coordinates just seems wrong.

Now, I failed to effectively learn the software. It is totally possible that if I were a faster learner, or had more perseverance, I would be born again as a BRL-whisperer. I was just hung up on how wrong and difficult it felt compared to SolidWorks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com