On 07/18/2015 09:25 PM, James E Lang wrote:
> The big discussion of Linux over the past 24+ hours has me wondering: What
> operating environment(s) do other members of this list use at home and at
> work? What factors influence the choice?
>
My first home computer was a BBC micro (anyone remember those?) That was back
in the days when programming had to be really tight, only had 32Kb (yes, Kb) of
RAM; long term storage was all external on cassette tapes, eventually upgraded
to floppy disk drive (and the disks really were floppy). I've still got that
computer and AFAIK it still works!
My next machine was Acorn Archimedes, followed by RISC PC. It's a great shame
that the marketing for those machines was so poor, leading to collapse of the
company. The ARM chips had a great architecture and instruction set.
After that, I got my first laptop, a Sony Vaio running windows XP. When I
upgraded, which I was forced to do due to a machine failure, I got a laptop
running Windows 7 - which is still my current machine. A better Windows, once
I'd got used to it, but it had a real downer - couldn't get driver for my
flatbed scanner - Canon didn't produce one.
At work, in my first job I used a computer called a PDP 11 (ghastly thing);
can't remember what the OS was called.
In my second job I think we started off with some sort of mainframe, the
details of which are hazy now. Later we migrated to Sun Spark workstations.
In my last real job, used PCs running windows, I think it was XP at that time.
Now in my office based voluntary work I use PCs with Windows 7. Did have a play
with Win 8 on a laptop, but hated it. It might be OK for tablets, I don't know,
but it was horrible to use with normal PC input devices.
I have thought about upgrading to Linux but have never got around to it. This
is mainly because of familiarity with certain software packages, especially
Photoshop. I know there is GIMP for Linux, but it's not a patch - for one
thing, it doesn't have the concept of adjustment layers; and that means that
all my working files, which tend to be saved as TIFF with layer compression,
can't be properly loaded and edited in GIMP.I also make use of a video editor
(not free but fairly inexpensive) which can edit MPEG2 files without reencoding
unchanged parts of the video, which makes it quite fast and doesn't lose
quality. Something like that probably does exist for Linux but I haven't got
around to looking, and familiarity is a big part of the story.Another thing is
the convenience of plug and play when it comes to hardware - I don't think I've
ever had to manually load a driver, everything seems to work "out of the box"
and that's a very good thing, saves a lot of time and effort. I'm not sure what
Linux is like in that respect, as I've had no experience.
On my phone I have android and I tend to get on reasonably well with that.
I'm not sure what I will do if I ever need to change computer again.
/Gary
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