Well NOW it’s awkward! Who puts the awe in awkward? @OtherMichael! Guess what? I like you too. Now it’s a three-way joust. I hope you sharpened your lance, good sir.
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Bah, there haven’t been nearly enough posts about grits and Natalie Portman.
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Totally spot on. Truth be told, if I must prefer one… I prefer Linux. I know where everything is, how it operates and how to get help if I don’t know something. I may not have everything, and definitely don’t always have that shiny look-and-feel with Linux, but I have function. Total, practical functionality, especially for coding.
I also second what you and other people have said about the various platforms… they each have their uses.
What would be really cool is if someone came up with a completely new operating system. Just for the hell of it. Maybe they could write it in Haskell.
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Funny how often people forget that computers are just tools. Get whatever does what you need/want, in the way that you need/want it.
Stallman isn’t a prophet. The average user can still ditch to Linux fairly easily if that’s what they want to do.
Personally, I started down the BSD path back around the time of windows NT. I currently have systems running OSX, FreeBSD, Debian, Windows 7, Ubuntu, OpenWRT, etc…
I also have a segmented network in my home environment, with IDS monitoring traffic between segments as well as inbound and outbound, and a radius server for the wifi. I’m a bit weird. There are a lot of people though who want to get away from Apple and Microsoft, and Linux is a legit way to do it.
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This all sounds very nice, and I’d like to do it myself, but it sounds mighty expensive.
If you have one main system with decent processing power, virtual machines are an option for running multiple OS. It doesn’t even have to be that powerful, depending on what you’re trying to do.
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I’ve been around UNIX since SunOS was BSD based. Oddly enough the thing that got me into OSX was when I looking to ditch Windows but had a laptop with some Japan only hardware so I went to the Tokyo Linux User Group to see about drivers. The TLUG people all had Apple laptops for the BSD layer. I figured I’d see what that was about. Turned out to be the he desktop UNIX I’d wanted for years.
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I’m good with it for my primary laptop so far. With each new release of OSX, I have to poke around and find a few files to modify and switches to flick for the things I find important over what Apple does. So far they haven’t given me a reason to completely wipe it and install something else.
I am a little grouchy about the way it does DNS though, in that it starts querying root servers on its own, which means the results don’t get cached in the server that supports the whole network. Haven’t been able to fix that one yet.
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I live in public housing where they’ve begun classes teaching people how to use a computer. At the end of the course, you get a nice basic desktop to have. Interestingly, the classes are taught using Windows 7, but the computers that you end up getting are running Ubuntu. Guess what? No one is having problems using Ubuntu. NO ONE. As I am the go to person for computer problems here, I should know.
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i’ve been using linux since 2012, and it’s great. when it pisses me off, i wipe the drives and reinstall. it takes like 30min on a weekend. everything that’s anything on my box is backed up on my external drive.
linux mint is very friendly to apple/windoze expats, and the online community is absurdly helpful.
the only reason not to switch is if you’re playing lots of AAA games. linux runs minecraft, ksp, dorf fortress and most games on steam pretty well. on the other hand, blender, gimp, inkspace and openoffice are either equals to their big-name competition or much better. (ffffuuuuckkk adobe.)
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What started out as a child of NeXT has grown up in its own way.
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I’m glad they pulled that code back in, as well as the idea to make it *nix based. The old apple os was crippled by comparison. The crazy resolver crap came later, and can go take a flying leap as far as I’m concerned.
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MacOS was good in its time but didn’t age gracefully
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Have you tried using the PPA system in Ubuntu? It’s as simple as seeing a new repo, cutting and pasting two lines into the “additional repositories” window in your package manager (APT, I guess?). You could go the “I’m a sooper werld-kless hakkar” way and use the terminal and do:
sudo add-apt-repository “ppa://nameofppa/yourversion”
Super easy. Works almost every time as long as you know which version of Ubuntu you’re running, and know what software you want. It’s not like it’s setup to work for just browsing to see what’s cool.
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But that’s not a thing. Windows, as most proprietary software for a mass market, is designed to make people feel stupid. As you get more involved with these products, you will run into problems, but everything is shrouded in company secrets, and your only hope for a solution is to buy one. Linux is a little rough around the edges, but as everything is open, chances are somebody has found a solution already, and a web search will find it. There is a learning curve, but the benefit is immeasurable, as you will learn more and can solve your problems by yourself. I was comparatively late to embrace Linux, banging my head against the big wall of corporate bullshit that is Windows well into my undergrad CS studies. I never regretted switching, and will never go back. Every odd year I am forced to use Windows for some proprietary stuff, and it’s a true nadir every time. I tried to install Windows 10 on an old Laptop to update my GPS device that wouldn’t play with my old XP inside Virtualbox. It was horrible. Even when figuring in that they are spying on you and send your every keystroke back to their servers, I still don’t understand how it can be so sluggish. Paying a hundred bucks for a piece of shit like that? I’d rather have someone hit me in the head. And Apple is only gradually better, the basic problem is exactly the same.
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There’s workarounds for Netflix. It’s got a clunky interface and basically is just using WINE and a 32bit Firefox binary for Windows and Mono to effectively simulate a weensy little windows environment the very old phone clients for Netflix used to do.
It’s actually pretty easy to get running. It’s just ugly, and I shudder to think what it’s doing to that instance of WINE. WINE gets so nasty and tangled up so fast.
If you are willing to use chrome, Netflix’s HTML5 player works fine without using WINE. (Similarly for Amazon)
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How about chromium? Does it work in chromium? I would test it out myself, but I’m at work.
No, I just double checked and it wants the DRM:
We cannot find all the required components to play Netflix on this device. Please visit chrome://plugins, ensure that the “Widevine Content Decryption Module” plug-in is enabled and that the “Always allowed” setting is checked.
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