Can't resist.
I've been using Linux as my main desktop OS for many years now, nowadays
even my wife and daughter use it (and no: I did not force that, all
their machines are dual-boot). At work I often have to use Windows and
apart from performance issues I see lots of usability problems. Where
are the windows that align to each other? The vertical maximize? A
decent quick-start dialog with fast full-text search? A coherent update
mechanism for OS and applications? A well-structured start menu (i.e.
not sorted by vendor names)? A decent shell and terminal out-of-the-box?
And I seriously thought I could use my netbook with the XP it came with
-- after all it's mostly for mail, web and PDF reading, how hard can
that be? I gave up after a week, ever since I put Ubuntu on it it became
my main computer. The reasons for that change were not about shell
access, command line tools or anything similar. It was all about usability.
Seriously: give a recent Ubuntu/Kubuntu a run before you make claims
about how bad it is. IMO both KDE and Gnome beat XP and Vista hands down
in terms of being user friendly, both for noobs and power users. The
only people with issues will be the ones that expect everything to be
100% like Windows.
I don't have an opinion on Windows 7 yet, I had only brief encounters so
far.
End rant. Sorry.
Peter
On 28/04/10 09:09, opinali wrote:
On 27 abr, 09:45, Christian Edward Gruber
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahah. That's awesome. What a wonderfully
naive assertion.
If linux was a platform with merit, it would have met some degree of
success on the desktop...
If you mean Linux Desktop Platform (GNOME, KDE and all that including
its totally crappy video and sound stacks...), yes it is garbage and
even major Linux enthusiasts complain about this all the time. A good
kernel makes not a good desktop platform; and Linux is not even one of
the best kernels in many respects - let's not digress into an OS-war,
but the desktop market leaders are superior to Linux in important
aspects even in the core tech (e.g. see Linux's pathetic advanced-
filesystem story, it's not yet in the place that Windows was>10 years
ago with NTFS.) On the other hand, Linux _does_ have some degree of
desktop-type success in new niches like mobile devices, where Linux
_is_ clearly superior to the competition (surely beats the pants off
WinMob and Symbian). So, thanks for validating my argument. ;-)
These kinds of statements are ridiculous, because they assert
underlying causes of success that are simply not provably so. The guy
could be right, but the assertion of causation is without merit.
The simple fact is that great programming languages - at least when
combined with good implementation, tooling, libraries and other basics
- will always gain SOME respectable market share and have a long-term
story with a thriving ecosystem (even if a relatively small one, e.g.
Python). Objective-C never managed to have that kind of success, on
any platform where it did not benefit from _massive_ protectionism.
Ada is another interesting case: it was promoted and imposed for years
by the US govt, but failed to gain any traction outside the government
contracts that mandated its use or its satellite industries. Yet, Ada
was arguably a superior language if compared to Obj-C; you could use
that as evidence that quality=>success does not necessarily hold...
but life is more complicated that this, when I wrote "merit" I didn't
mean only a good formal design or powerful/innovative features, there
are other important factors, like some good alignment with the
technology and the problems of the developer community at each time,
the fitting in a larger ecosystem (e.g. LAMP prompting the 'P'
languages), etc.
A+
Osvaldo
cheers,
Christian.
On Apr 27, 2010, at 8:42 AM, opinali wrote:
If Obj-C was a language with
merits, it would have met some degree of success in other platforms.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java
Posse" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group
athttp://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java
Posse" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
