Actually in business you would find more cases were Linux is clearly the superior choice. Especially in electronics, but also in administration and databases. The software stack for business is clearly there. Webservers, Mailservers and mainframes would run some kind of linux or unix*-like system already. Containers a very practical thing for webservers for example. Even a decent version of office is available. Microsoft even runs linux servers themselves.
But a lot of companies still have their horrible little exchange server in the corner for their outlook calendar. What may surprise a lot of people is the true reason some companies don't go full board linux is price. Price for support can be high and often higher than support from Microsoft. That was true for a big shipping company in Denmark. Even though their specialized boxes (data crunching) already ran linux, administration could not shift, since Red Hat prices were very high.
In my honest opinion as to why linux is not as popular/big as it needs to be is because no dev's are developing ways to improve the LINUX OS for a normal user thats not as tech sabby.. so far the only development i see in linux is server-based shit in big corporations. ALL in ALL Linux is server based and is only good for server structures and its up to us to change that really ;/
That's completely untrue though. There are tons of distributions that have become push button, receive OS. Just a few days ago I did a fresh install of Peppermint Six. Literally the only information I provided was the physical location of the computer, I assume for converting the unix time to human time. It was so easy that I assumed I did something wrong when the desktop popped up.
I tried peppermint when it first came out. The installer didn't even work! Cool to see it on the move with the rest but is it really that easy? That's pretty great if you think about it.
but with those distributions ... how can they make it main stream for the normal user too find? for me i have to google my ass off to find these linux distros. i agree with you tho :)
Unfortunately, advertising really works. And things like the Mint and Ubuntu projects just don't have the money to show off their work. The most basic thing that you absolutely must know before you can install them is to search "alternative to Windows" in google. If you don't do that, there is no hope. :(
Linux does need a multi billion dollar company, but not just for advertising, but also for making the API's and ABI's backwards compatible from one version to another, so you can run older programs.
Why would anyone run older programs ? What it you want to run a program that has been discontinued, like a video game. When video game developers release a new game, they usually discontinue the previous ones.
Now I know what you're going to say, that the Steam Runtime has fixed this problem. Not really, because the Steam runtime is just a collection of libraries from Ubuntu 12 that are constantly being modified to make them work on newer versions of Ubuntu and other distros, and some people are already complaining that those libraries are getting out of date. Do you really thing that the Steam Runtime will still be used 10 years from now, forcing developers to only use features from Ubuntu 12 ? I don't think so. The Steam Runtime is not a long term solution, it's a short term hack.
But why not have multiple runtimes, one for every version of Ubuntu ? Won't that fix the problem ? Well, yes, but it will also generate a huge amount of bloat as time passes by and newer versions of Ubuntu are released, possibly making your distro even more bloated than Windows. And with that many runtimes to maintain, the older ones will inevitably be discontinued, solving nothing.
The video game thing doesn't really make sense because there's not so much of a problem in API/ABI's because there are just packages that the community in total keeps under raps.
Also on the steam runtime: Valve has literally JUST started to play with this kind of stuff. As I said packages will be made to replace more API stuff. Easy stuff, not as broken as windows can get (for example, you can play MechWarrior in linux STILL in comparison to playing Mechwarrior in windows 7/8/10). Gaming is not a problem in linux.
Yeah, backwards compatibility is a stupid argument that doesn't hold any ground. No one is going to want to use a C compiler from 1992, for example, compared to using clux or gcc.
Compatibility is NOTHING compared to windows. I have no clue about the OSX side.
Are you talking about repositories ? That only works with open source programs and requires people to continuously modify the programs to maintain compatibility. With Windows, Microsoft maintains compatibility so that developers don't have to. If you're a small developer it's really difficult to keep up with distro updates and your program only ends up on a repo if it's popular, because the repo maintainers can't maintain all the programs in the world. Now, I'm not saying that compatibility is perfect on Windows, but it's a lot better than on linux.
If you want to run MechWarrior on newer versions of Windows, you can find tutorials on how to make it work. I just googled and couldn't find any evidence of MechWarrior having a linux version. If your talking about the first versions running in DosBox or later versions using wine, that doesn't count because, while Wine works with old games, with the latest games, Wine is just not good enough. That's because Wine is not a complete Windows environment, it's programmed to work best only on specific programs, you can't just run any Windows program, it doesn't work that way.
I'm not talking about programmers today using a C compiler from 1992, I'm talking about people who are not programmers using programs that were compiled in 1992. Big difference.
OS X has very poor backwards compatibility, but that doesn't matter because most Apple users are willing to spend huge amount of money (otherwise they wouldn't have bought the overpriced hardware in the first place), so they don't care that they have to always buy the newest version of their programs because the older versions don't work anymore. And if they want to play video games that will get discontinued, they prefer to buy a console instead.
No, I am talking about individual packages. They aren't always in repositories. If it was anything near repos I would have said so. I was thinking more in the direction of the AUR for arch.
Mechwarrior would run really easily in wine. You put in d3d8 and maybe like 2 d3dx9_2x packages and it runs. No problems. I have tried multiple tutorials for mechwarrior in windows XP even and it didn't work. As the Windows 10 updates roll back to 7 and 8 games like saints row 3 will not work in windows anymore, as it does not work in windows 10. I am expecting this to happen in the update fallout. Speaking of, it is also a lot easier to run fallout 3 in WINE. You can argue that wine isn't easy but that's basically a lie. I figured it out when I was 14, so can anyone else in their 20's, 30's, whatever. All you have to do is explore.
Seeing as how something like xorg has code from when it started (vector 3D graphics acceleration to allow video cards like the ATI MACH64 VT2 to have 3d capabilities) as well as numerous other packages still having the old code, on top of being able to install any age of C, Python, or whatever else (even cobol, don't get me started), that's still a stupid argument and non-negotiable.
Hello wine.
Also I think it's the crossover team (?) that's working on a "wine/crossover tool" for OSX. You can also get an apple Ii / Ii/e emulator or OSX9 VBox. Not too difficult. And if you want to argue about the PPC age of macs, no one cares anymore. I tried making a powerPC group on G+ and very few people joined. Yes, they still used the PPC macs that they had bought in 2005, sure, but most of them were running debian and making their own apps or they had a newer mac and the PPC machine was a project, like my 2 were.
Linux is exactly as big as it should be, e.g. mostly on servers and embedded devices.
There are many reasons why it's not king of the desktop in spite of the advantage of being free. It's really not a good desktop OS: hardware support is lacking, software offerings are lacking in many areas, GUI isn't standardized and neither are packaging. From a design perspective, I find it unappealing.
Windows and OS X may not be perfect but they do a pretty damn good job for every day use in many scenarios, as well as in most specialized scenarios: development, content authoring, cad and whatnot.
On the phone, one can't really say Linux is pervasive.
What is, is Android, which brings lots of standards that Linux lacks, such as standardized UI, standardized APIs, for better and mostly for worse a java standardized development and so forth. If needed, I'm sure Google could swap whatever unix derivative in Android for another in a very short time.
Isn't it because the same reason as why OSX and apple user base has gotten so big over the past recent years, Smooth UI and an OS that just works for the common end user without having to piss about with a console to get shit done.
Their is a reason I'll never be able to get my mother or girlfriend on Linux, Because they don't give a shit plus I think they think it's some sort of status thing.
Why is Linux not as big as it should be? Because the average consumer doesn't know what an OS is. I have mentioned OSX to mac users and they seriously had no clue what I was talking about. They thought it was a themed version of Windows.
OS just doesn't matter to people. I love Linux but I know it isn't going to catch on. People use whatever you give them. Getting them to install another OS is not going to happen because it requires effort. If people actually cared about their computers, services like Geek Squad wouldn't exsist. It is not a high priority.
That is why mobile has taken off so fast, it does everything for the user, i. e.updates.
I managed to get Need for Speed II SE working using the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit. It's not exactly easy to use, but at least you don't have to be a programmer. And I got Red Alert 2 working by using right click -> properties -> compatibility. I'm sure there's a way to get Saints Row running.
Like I said, compatibility isn't perfect in Windows.
As far as video games are concerned, compatibility isn't just the responsibility of Microsoft, it's also the responsibility of the video driver developer, because every feature in Direct3D and OpenGL needs to be implemented in the driver in order to work (this is also a problem for Linux, not just Windows). A lot of people can't play certain games just because they updated the driver, not Windows.
That's why you can run some very old programs that are not games, but you have problems trying to run old games.
Also, another problem is when developers use API behaviour that's not officially documented (they depend on bugs in the API), for which Microsoft doesn't maintain compatibility (because they're bugs).
Linux also has API bugs, but since compatibility is broken from one version of a distro to the next, it doesn't matter.
Of course, sometimes Microsoft even breaks compatibility for API behaviour that is officially documented, but that happends very rarely, like when Microsoft switched to the NT kernel when Windows 2000 was released.
DOS compatibility wasn't broken by Microsoft, it was broken by modern CPU's which don't allow real mode DOS programs when a 64 bit operating system is running.
Wine is not a complete Windows environment, it only includes portions of the API that are needed for specific programs, including those API bugs that I mentioned earlier. Because of that, when a new program is released, you have to wait a long time until it's compatible with Wine, so can't play the latest games, you can only play them on Windows.
But the biggest problem with a program like Wine is the same problem that I mentioned on repositories, which is that the developers of Wine can't make all the programs in the world compatible, so they only work on the most popular programs.
The Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit and the compatibility right click menu have shims that emulate older versions of Windows (including API bugs, the bugs that Microsoft knows about).
Xorg uses very old code, but the parts that interact with the operating system's API are constantly modified and recompiled, that's why it still works.
Sounds like 2 hours wasted when you just open up a dialog for wine, put ni like 6 packages in a drop down and play the game.
And yeah there probably is a way to get SR3 working, the same can be said for fallout and if you screw around long enough my first example of mechwarrior will work, but thats a lot of screwing around.
Compatibility isn't perfect anywhere. In fact the fact that you can still get the old C packages or python, ruby, cobol.... Any code platform and still run those packages and scripts from the ages of old is rather cool. You can't even argue about "kernel incompatibility" because unless you specifically change the linux kernel (example: the hardened kernel structure for more security), all the code that was added 12 years ago is still there. If you wanted to run something from 12 years ago there isn't as much jumping around. Windows went from DOS, to NT (which killed a lot of compatibility), to whatever they have now which has killed a lot mor compatibility. Yeah, theres toolkits out to run CGN Diamond Browser from 1995 in windows, but at the same time no one really cares.
That's why opensource is such a great thing that allows for these API's to roll around. If a programmer on GIT hub has 50 bug reports to sort through, git hub makes them open for anyone to read. If you want to fix it, you can! I know you want to keep away from programming because the average user isn't going to learn LUA when they use ubuntu but at the same time no one who just started using that ubuntu install needs to have any knowledge of code. In windows most of the time you can't fix whatever is broken. You have to wait a month or even 3 for that API to be fixed. In linux almost everything has a following. If a group of linux users is having problems, that API, ABI, or compatibility layer is open source for more than being able to have a freedom sticker slapped on the front. You can change what's broken and either label it as a fork or make it known to the dev's. "Hey, I fixed these 80 some bugs". I don't know if you could resubmit the code on github but it would still need to be looked over.
Yes, and at the same time you can still use DosBOX for all that dos-y goodness. I know some people on this site used RISC, Cyrix, or the intel Pent's, but now we only have AMD and intel, and they trade microcode all the time. There is nothing with CPU incompatibility anymore. And DosBOX is OLD. Theres also current DOS distros like freedos.
Again, Open Source. Also WINE compatibility is growing way faster than we really thought it would. Direct X 11 and 10 are coming ratther soon. You may not be able to play the brand new AAA game, but at the same time work is being done to have that one game run efficiently or better.
That may be true but the open source listing still stands.
Have you looked at the WineDB? https://www.winehq.org/ There are hundreds of users on there every day submitting and fixing bugs, not only with games, but with things like the Adobe suite, photoshop lightroom 3 (something I have been submitting work for recently), turbotax of all things, and so many more things that range from all areas that it makes my head hurt when I look at the list. Because of it being open source and easy to modify and work with, Wine is easier to use than that compatibility toolkit that you have. Hell if you want to argue that Wine is complicated for new users look at crossover and PlayOnLinux. "Sigh, now he's reaching", no. POL allows for all of the goodness of wine in an easier to understand format. At that it's the POL users making and submitting scripts for other users to use that gets shipped in the almost weekly POL updates.
If you don't want to work on bugs from the website to get something working on your machine (hardware difference make a difference, even in windows), then POL works just as well. A lot of the install scripts are worked on by basic users all the way to the developers. It's not just for games but for almost everything. Need IE6? It's in there. MS word? In there. Adobe Tools? In there, but it has a list of stuff that it needs in order to work (sys req's, other packages that it will install, etc) but it is still there. Crossover does the same thing aiming at different angles and for some apps it works BETTER than wine. I haven't used it much but I have seen other users use it and while I couldn't get something working that I had in windows XP, CrossoverGuy1 could do it on youtube and making the few changes to wine that crossover has wouldn't be hard, even for a basic user.
As does wine. In wine you can choose any of the OS's MS has released. XP, 7, vista, server 2003, Win 9x, Dos, windows 1/2/3, any windows distro you need to use. You can also create multiple prefixes and use whatever you need. If you have a 16 bit program you used on windows 3.1, the fact of the matter is that it will work. When windows 95 came around on Pentium I the 32 bit computers were around for a long time, but all the OS's were 16 bit. 95 was the first 32 bit OS. But, you could still use those 16 bit programs in windows 95, and, you can set Wine to windows 95 in one prefix and install those apps, or set it back to 3.1 or 2.
Yeah, because Xorg is that deeply integrated. I agree with that.
And on the powerPC stuff, I had a feeling you might jump to that so I stuck that in there.
Fact of the matter is while, yeah, windows has a compatibility toolkit and you can change compatibility settings in the right click menu, Wine is a dedicated user group and compatibility system. It has better support for old apps and new apps. League of Legends works just fine in linux if not better. CGN Diamond Browser will still work, albeit with some issues, but you can run it. Word Perfect, available and will run. Mavis Beacon for windows 95, will work and does work. The list goes on but the fact of the matter is that compatibility isn't given much attention.
Look at game consoles even. The Wii had Gamecube compatibility and so did the PS3 with PS2 and PS1 compatibility. Later on they removed it because it was too much work to manage all of that.
Yeah you have that toolkit but at the same time theres, what, 15 people working on it? Yeah thats a good strong working area, but compare that to the thousands if not millions of wine users PER DAY. There is so much pushing Wine along that if something is broken and someone talks about it then it gets attention and is fixed. You can't get that level of dependability from windows because they are more worried about the main issue and the top of the bell curve, not windows 98 PLUS compatibility. Thats in the past and the company has to move on or they will lose money and precious time.
Linux has less stable drivers for high end hardware
Linux is not a 'pick it up and go' OS, it requires some pre-knowledge and experimentation
Linux may simply not work with some lesser known hardware
Linux PC's don't integrate as well with other hardware in comparison to more mainstream OS's (a big deal in mainstream tech atm). Linux PC's tend to be much more contained environments.