Lots of good points. From the consumer standpoint I have seen many laptops replaced by tablets and less service work as a result since tablets are through away. My daughters have phones, tablets, etc but recently asked for laptops for Christmas because of school work and tablets not getting done what they needed.
I'll admit when Windows first came out (3.11? or earlier) I was highly sceptical considering how well DOS ran. Windows98 seemed OK but maybe flaky sometimes, especially the ME version while 2000 seemed solid which is where XP came from. I think it would be really cool if XP became open source and someone went a different direction than Microsoft has gone. You should see how many updates that I run in my computer shop once I load Windows7 (that is true of XP as well). It can take a whole day just to run updates and updates to the updates. I'm guessing many of them are security patches with a few being driver updates. >From my perspective I have noticed Window8 as the operating system to make >Windows uniform on the tablets, phones, desktops, and laptops (esp. >touchscreens). However the phone market and tablets are dominated by Android >(google) and Microsoft's late entry and failed earlier attempts at the phone >market seems to have a very small market in this area. With this becoming >their standard it seems many disliked the 8 interface on computers vs >traditional interface especially those who were proficient. So they brought >back some features in 10 on the 8 platform. I really don't talk to many >people both professional and consumers who like Windows8 or 10. Maybe 1 in 10 >seems OK with the new OS? I will also add that while I have little to do >with Apple stuff, but the ones who have it won't go back to Windows and often >talk about how they sinc up their devices etc. Many of the school systems are >replacing Windows with Chromebooks. Man, google seems to be taking over! I >actually prefer Windows but have some issue with the direction Microsoft has >taken. >From a future outlook from a software company's angle, such as R:Base, it may >be necessary to cover a range of OS to stay competitive in the market >including apple, android and also Linux. Being in the wireless internet >business I am seeing most of the companies using Ubiquiti equipment (even >though I really like Tranzeo) which is based in the Unix/Linux OS for their >firmware. Ubiquiti is offering many solutions on the network side of things >as well all of which are powered by Linux. I don't know exactly what the >future holds but my guess is we will continue to see more Android/Google, >Apple and Linux (because of open source). ----- Original Message ----- From: Javier Valencia To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2015 5:36 PM Subject: [RBASE-L] - RE: Linux & R:Base I agree that Vista was not a good release but it did pave the way for Windows 7 which was a marked improvement over Windows XP, a system that I like a lot. However, saying that Windows XP runs faster than Windows 7 as the criteria to call it a better OS is a very simplistic view; MS-DOS would run considerably faster than both of them but is that really the direction we want to move towards? In my humble opinion it is not. The computers we use are undergoing big changes. A few years ago if you wanted power you needed a desktop and now, even power users rely on laptop and the trend is moving towards the more touch/visual tablets which now are catching up with laptops and in many cases replacing them; unfortunately, Win XP is just not designed for this type of environment. Say what you will about Microsoft but the more recent releases have been rock solid and whether we like it or not the end user business market still runs on MS Windows and Linux has just a tiny fraction of about 1.5% compare to close to 90% for the various flavors of Windows and close to 10% for Apple OS. One of the computers I am testing is very low powered Liva Mini PC kit with miniature Intel BayTrail board with 2 GB or Memory and 32 GB of storage and runs a full resolution 1080P monitor surprisingly fast; It seems to run the Internet Browser on Wi-Fi faster than my loaded Dell XPS Win 7 Pro, Core I7 based laptop with a hard connection to the router. As I indicated, it does have a fresh install of Win 10. By the way, Linux was announced in late 1991 and released late in 1992 and it really did not become widely available or popular until the mid-90s, at that time R:Base was well into the 4.X versions, the 3.0 version was released in 1990, before Linux was even a concept in Linus Torvalds mind. I remember several R:Base version were released specifically for the OS/2 system and I remember talk about a release for Unix/Linux, I had a couple of workstations running Linux in the late 90s and I would have liked to run a version of R:Base but I am not sure if one was ever officially released…although my memory is not what it used to be; maybe R:azzak can shed some light. Javier,
