Personally, I use it all. Simultaneously. I have a windows box, a mac and 2 linux boxen on my desktop and I move back and forth between them with ease. You cannot get all software on any single platform. I look for free/open source first, and barring that, move to the commercial platforms to get what I need. The ethos is âget it doneâ rather than hewing to an ideological line. Nothing beats my 5k retina display. And nothing beats the speed of my 12-core custom built Debian distro box. So, I advise⌠become facile with it all, have it all, use it all. Get stuff done. And donât forget Amazon AWS & other hosting to fill the gaps for things you donât need to have the hardware for.
85% of the people who use computers would be lost with Linux unless it was an off shoot like android or Chrome OS where their hand is held for them. I mean look at the Mac adverts by all the people too stupid even to use windows.
Yeah, I use it all, too. Including mainframes and superdomes and HP-UX and VMS boxen⌠but when nobodyâs paying me to use what they want, I use linux running on hardware I build out of junk. And if theyâll take paypal, I send money to the authors of open source software that I like.
Oh so much this⌠also all the âparanoiaâ about win10 is if you use the microsoft cloud services and tie the local machine account to the cloud account. and a lot of it is stuff they have been collecting since XP and is the same stuff apple and google collect if you use their services.
This. As a designer locked into the Adobe ecosystem by the requirements of my job, Linux as a desktop tool is completely useless for me on an everyday basis, and Windows isnât much better. So Mac it is. It runs smoothly, has few-to-no operational issues on a daily basis, has never had a worm or virus in the 20+ years Iâve been on it, and I have no complaints. But thereâs other things that Linux and Windows are extremely useful for.
[quote]Among other things, in the iOS ecosystem users are obliged to get all their software from Appleâs store, and developers are obliged to sell it in the company store. This may be Appleâs definition of personal computing, but itâs not mine.[/quote]Wait a minute. Is one not generally doing the same thing with the distroâs repositories when one runs Linux?
Of course, one is hardly expected to pay money for software in the repositories, but it seems to me that as soon as you dare to try something that isnât already expressly configured in the repositories, trouble starts a-brewing.
Totally disagree. The bulk of people who âuse computersâ typically require a browser, an office suite, and photo editing software. Get them on just about any standard Linux distro and all you have to give them is a cheat sheet on how to do updates. Boom, done.
Have you tried Ubuntu? I mean, I know for a fact that a 85 year-old man suffering from Parkinsonâs dementia, myesthenia gravis and peripheral neuropathy can use Ubuntu. Itâs slow due to sporadic anomic aphasia and occasional inability to see or comprehend numbers, but he struggles through.
I use Linux on my work machine, and have had OS X boxes at work before that. I use Windows at home, mostly because I always have and I know how to work around itâs annoyances.
No OS is perfect. Linux wins on out of box price, but I imagine supporting 1000 desktops for people of varying technical sophistication would be nightmarish. If I was in that position, OS X would probably win, but I think in most environments Windows wins just because itâs the default, and even the technically unsophisticated users have made their peace with its quirks and foibles.
One thing though â if you use a PC to produce music, Windows or OS X are your only choices. Those two environments support âit just worksâ for audio and MIDI devices. Iâm not a noob by any means and I get frustrated with Linux every time I try to use it with music apps. It just isnât ready for prime time.
For example, I have a machine with Centos 7 on it. Both Ardour and Audacity canât find any audio devices to make sound. Luckily, web browsers and VLC work fine, and thatâs good enough for me. Until I can boot Linux, plug in some MIDI and Audio devices, and applications âjust work,â itâs not ready for prime time, full stop.
Actually linux is pretty nifty these days but it frustrates my wife who wants to use it day to day especially for printing things and recently undoing an install of software manually.
For a 85 year old guy Cory looks fantasticâŚ
I totally buy your argument as to why Linux isnât right for you, in an audio production environment. I do have to question the choice of Centos though. It seems like it would be a little too server centric, and in that I would expect it to not have a lot of audio support.
You are a rare breed. No wonder I like ya.
Just to give it an extra special âlikeâ
Switching to linux is no big deal when most people actually do run unix on their phones and tablets, and operating systems mainly provide services to a web browser for access to cloud services.
This is off topic, but - I think that weâre going to see more and more companies going towards virtual desktops. Of course, they will be Windows, but the days of procuring, supporting and managing traditional desktop machines for office staff will dwindle. Itâs a tough up front cost, but when most people in an office (other than code crunchers, engineers, etcâŚ) donât need an actual PC other than Office and a browser and when all apps can be delivered via Citrix or the like, the use case for either BYO or thin clients is a better long term choice. And for your remote users, they can be given a stipend (or give them a laptop) and they can access everything they need over their existing internet connection.
I worked infrastructure for a company two companies ago and we rolled out a Citrix farm that was awesome. We were the first test case and when I worked from home, I just used my Mac with two big monitors and pulled up my Windows desktop over the internet. All my apps were available as well as network shares, etc⌠For field users, they had all their apps available through the Citrix client on all platforms - iOS, Android, etc⌠and could get their work done from anywhere.
Server virtualization came first and is still the most prevalent in enterprise environments (why would you even build a physical server OS box in 2012??) but publishing apps and desktops to users will start climbing fast.
Which is where they are collecting the information.
And honestly if you are getting it for free then duh you gotta provide something of value to the provider and it wonât matter what OS you personally are using.
If there is one I could use for a reasonable fee that promised to not own my data/info I would happily sign up cause I have enough sysadmin fun at work and no desire to do it for âfunâ at home anymore.
If only Adobe ported to LinuxâŚ
InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator are too essential to my work to rely on Scribus, Inkscape, and GIMP. GIMP is really good but not quite there.
Iâve ran Debian-based distros like Ubuntu (and multiple flavors therein like Mint, Xubuntu, ElementaryOS, etc.) as well as Fedora and Arch.
In the end, my go to OS is now Mac OS X, after years of being an Ubuntu and Windows fanboy. Only got it a couple years ago and the pain points (photos not opening to Photoshop or other 3rd party) are minimal.
This is generally true for unsophisticated users. I occasionally build packages for RHEL and derivatives and itâs pretty painful if you donât do it every day.
But honestly itâs not a big deal, since there are thousands of packages readily available, and the least sophisticated users only need a web browser anyway (Google and others can supply online document processing, media storage & playback, email, &etc. through the browser).
Itâs pretty nightmarish regardless of OS, but until Microsoft introduced SCCM and Win7 I would say linux was actually the easiest option for truly huge rollouts. Now, Microsoft wins mostly because (as you noted) most people already know how to use it, and with SCCM you can control everything from one console pretty easily.
[quote=âchaircrusher, post:10, topic:71542â]if you use a PC to produce music, Windows or OS X are your only choices. Those two environments support âit just worksâ for audio and MIDI devices.
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I feel your pain! Itâs always been much easier to throw money at the problem than to deal with the intricacy of linuxâs various audio subsystem iterations, and if youâre generating income with your music it can even be cheaper, in the long run, to spend some money wisely up front. But in any case, I recommend you stop trying to do audio on Centos - that is probably the worst possible choice of linux distros, bar none, for audio work. Seriously! Use an actual linux audio distribution. Itâll still be worse than a Mac fitted out with hundreds of dollars of specialized aftermarket software, but itâll be astronomically better than a Red Hat clone datacenter server like Centos.
My wife actually has the exact same problems with Windows. Totally not kidding! I cannot understand how she continually manages to screw up the printer, sheâs smarter than I am but she canât seem to keep the print spooler in Windows properly configured for more than a week. I donât think the problem is in the operating system, but donât tell her I said that⌠Linux tends to work perfectly with some printers, and poorly with others, but in my opinion itâs harder to predict which ones it will not work properly with than it is with Windows or Mac. Youâre best off asking other linux users what they recommend if you want everything to âjust workâ.
