Paul Stenquist wrote:
Paul via phone
On Aug 18, 2016, at 4:11 PM, John<[email protected]> wrote:
On 8/18/2016 3:01 PM, Larry Colen wrote:
It has also been my personal experience that if I want to "just get
things done", most of the time Linux boxes work that way from
installation, whereas it takes quite a bit of work installing usable
editors, compilers, cygwin and other tools on Windows machines.
Different level of "just get things done" there.
Same here. I have to "get things done. " Frequently more than 1000 words a day
of well researched copy, lots of photo processing and countless communications. In a
previous life I had to write command lines in ASCII Express just to communicate or send
files to NY. That's crippling, My Retina 5K iMac hauls ass through any work load. The 4
Ghz i7 processor makes Photoshop as fast as a text based program. SSD helps with that,
and 32 gigs of RAM is more then enough for anything I do. With a Linux box I would sit
there and stare at the wall. And starve. We're not all computer scientists. In fact I bet
the number is less than a hundredth of one percent.
Specialized commercial software "for the desktop" is the biggest
weakness for Linux. It no longer takes knowing much about computers to
install and run Linux. Slap in an installation disk, accept the
defaults, select the packages you want and better than 90% of the time
you will pretty soon have a working system.
There are tradeoffs in the usability of the various GUIs with the
flexibility. They are no harder to learn, or to use, than any of the
commercial ones.
Most of the basic "office" functionality is supplied by the LibreOffice
suite, as well as other suites. I haven't found any significant
advantage to the Microsoft suites in my limited experience with them.
There are, of course, valid reasons on the lines of "I don't want to
spend the time learning something new".
The one place where Linux seriously lacks (on the desktop) is commercial
software. Adobe isn't available. Games aren't available, and so forth.
One of the really nice things about Linux is that you can find
software to do almost anything you want for free beer values of free.
This has developed a culture of people using it who just are not willing
to pay money for commercial software. Therefore the people who sell
commercial software don't port to it, and the folks who are willing to
pay for commercial software can't get the apps they need, and don't run
Linux.
On top of that, a lot of commercial organization are actively opposed to
Linux because it is so difficult to limit people's access to their own
data. Hardware vendors that want to charge extra for features
implemented in software do their best to prevent people from porting the
hardware to Linux.
This is why I have a mac on my desk. When I started with digital
photography, I couldn't even calibrate my monitor on my Linux system.
Linux may excel in technology, cost, ease of use and stability, but it
lags in appeal to the people who make commercial products for the desktop.
If you start looking in datacenters, on your cellphone, many, many
embedded systems such as routers, you will find the Linux kernel is
tremendously popular. But that doesn't mean shit if you just need a
system to run Lightroom or Photoshop.
--
Larry Colen [email protected] (postbox on min4est) http://red4est.com/lrc
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