The thing for me is general usability. I am a gamer and not all game titles are supported in Linux. Another issue is stability and compatibility, and while that point might be less of an issue these days than lets say 10 years ago i’m still not sold on Linux being a platform that is easy to jump into. I wouldn’t know where to being on problem solving if i had any issues with the OS or its software (while i’m more comfortable and familiar within Windows).
I’d be interested in taking on Linux at some point but i’m not sure about it since it’s such a foreign OS to me as i’ve never used it, only seen it used by friends ages ago.
This is one amazingly good thing Steam has been doing, getting things away from MSFT and Apple for gaming.
One of my oh that’s a nice windfall of money project ideas is a getting a nice big screen and building a steam box for it.
You always have the option of building from source, which is nowhere near as tricksy and hellish as it sounds.
My favoured window manager has no configuration options other than a C header file, so every time I want to change, say, the colour scheme, it’s recompilation time. Takes a second or so.
After volunteering for FreeGeek here in PDX I earned a refurbished PC box complete with a Linux Mint installation. For basic work it’s great, but video streaming companies are gradually moving away from supporting the OS. CW and ABC are fine, but AMC, USA, SyFy aren’t. HBO Go has been a no-go from the get-go. Amazon and Netflix too.
The philosophical difference for me (which, if one searches or asks online, regularly becomes a practical difference) is that with proprietary systems, very intelligent people are being paid a great deal of money to stop you doing what you’d like to do, and with open systems very intelligent people are volunteering to help you do what you’d like to do.
A Linux DAW is still a dream, I subscribe to Ardour because I believe it has the best chance of making that dream a reality and I try it out from time to time but in the meantime you should be able to make your hardware work on Linux. Try a distro like Ubuntu Studio, make sure your interfaces are hooked up during the initial setup and I’m pretty sure you’ll get them to work out of the box. I’ve never had trouble with any hardware I’ve thrown at it.
But yes, this is the main reason I still have Windows on my main PC.
Slightly off topic, but have you tried Affinity Photo or Designer? I’ve heard a few good things but don’t know anyone using them as Adobe alternatives yet.
I switched to Ubuntu for professional and personal use years ago and haven’t looked back except when proprietary vendor software locks out linux. In those cases, I’ve dual booted for the outlier software. Over time, the odd workarounds and fixes have boosted my tech literacy too.
same here - design, architecture, 3d, large format document publishing - linux is useless. But I wish them success. Market leverage by a third party is the only way the big two will ever bend to work for their customers.
Similarly. Mac for general everyday use/audio/getting stuff done. Dual boot with windows (only for video games) and linux at home.
At work, windows for email and powerpoints, and linux for anything serious. Linux would be far better than windows for the email and presentations, because using windows for anything is a nightmare.
Audio: Mac over linux, hands down and without question. If I ever have money to blow on an nvidia tesla card, I might well set up a dedicated linux box to use with that as a single dedicated instrument, but it would still be going into a mac to get recorded much more often than not.
Any serious computing with large clusters or GPUs: Linux or one of the cloud platforms.
Both osx and linux are perfectly good for getting stuff done in general. For anything except video games, (and possibly some esoteric field-specific software that you need to use and is windows only), both are enormously better than windows, though the trend mentioned in the article of moving osx in the direction of ios could definitely change that.
I got so tired of reading books by large publishing houses that I take each book from the library and hand copy it into my own language for my own use. That’ll show 'em!
Use what you need when you need to get the job done. Why throw out your hammer and screwdriver because you like your tape measure the best?
Three years into Linux here. Pathway: 8080 -> C64 -> Mac IIsi -> Mac Clone -> iMac G5 -> Vista -> various Linux boxen.
Hardware scorecard:
IIsi ‘superdrive’ * failed, $400 floppy replacement cost foregone.
Clone: outlawed by Apple. Dozens of Hypercard stacks obsoleted by abandonware.
iMac: bad drive ‘forgot’ partitions; display developed vertical color bands (for thousands of users), unacknowledged by Apple for years. Crippled $300 audio crippleware; full function sold for $1000.
Gateway lappie with Vista: Great box, OK software, half of drive used by 20GB of mysterious Win files.
Linux Mint 13 on 3-4 boxen: friendly, simple, -FAST- OS uses 5-6GB for system and -all- apps I need. Install 2 to 5 different distros to toy around within 50GB. Little pain, NO proprietary formats. Stop suffering, move on.
P.S.: concur on not using Linux for -pro- audio projects. (MIDI is fine.)
Agree with Tropo on this one … Linux is just fine for the majority of casual users these days. The days of command-line dominance is long-gone, stability is remarkable, and the number of alternatives for many software types is staggering. If you don’t like something about one distro, try from among several hundred … each uses 5-6GB at most. I like a half-dozen at once.
