NEC offers official Vista downgrade product
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That's quite true. It does seem odd to me, however, that those who despise Vista and rail against Microsoft to its core revert to XP instead of jumping on the Linux band wagon.
There are good reasons NOT to jump on the Linux bandwagon. It's a great idea in theory. I tried to do a project based on Linux to learn it. When using Linux, I felt like I was in a foreign country where no one spoke English. Things that were trivial to do in Windows required major research projects in Linux. I posted questions on Linux blogs that were unanswered. Bottom line: Jumping into Linux from windows involves some culture shock, and you will run into problems with no apparent solution. At the very least, it will cost you time to figure out the Linux way of doing things. For some things it will cost a lot of time.
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There are good reasons NOT to jump on the Linux bandwagon. It's a great idea in theory. I tried to do a project based on Linux to learn it. When using Linux, I felt like I was in a foreign country where no one spoke English. Things that were trivial to do in Windows required major research projects in Linux. I posted questions on Linux blogs that were unanswered. Bottom line: Jumping into Linux from windows involves some culture shock, and you will run into problems with no apparent solution. At the very least, it will cost you time to figure out the Linux way of doing things. For some things it will cost a lot of time.
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martin_hughes wrote:
instead of jumping on the Linux band wagon.
Because jumping on the Linux band wagon quickly leads you down a Vail of Tears to such a degree that you begin to pine for Windows 3.1 and Visual C++ 1.5. Any group that still has near religious discussions about whether or not to *distribute* proprietary vendor drivers*, or even plug-ins for proprietary formats, has it's collective head deeply and permanently buried up it's collective rectum. Yes, those little chunks of code that make you uber cool NVidia graphics actually usuable for X-Winblows, as opposed to resorting to all sorts of software emulation.
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Jim Crafton wrote:
you begin to pine for Windows 3.1 and Visual C++ 1.5
Ah, yes. I was using VC++ 1.5 for commercial development as late as 2004. :(( In the same contract I was also using a bit of VC++ 6 and 7 and .NET 1.0, so it was a real mixture.
Kevin
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There are good reasons NOT to jump on the Linux bandwagon. It's a great idea in theory. I tried to do a project based on Linux to learn it. When using Linux, I felt like I was in a foreign country where no one spoke English. Things that were trivial to do in Windows required major research projects in Linux. I posted questions on Linux blogs that were unanswered. Bottom line: Jumping into Linux from windows involves some culture shock, and you will run into problems with no apparent solution. At the very least, it will cost you time to figure out the Linux way of doing things. For some things it will cost a lot of time.
Of course. If you have grown up in a Windows world, that's to be expected. You will see identical comments from those who have grown up in a Linux world jumping on the windows bandwagon. I grew up in a bastard world (Commodore, Apple, Atari) and moving into the windows world was very painful indeed (Windows for Workgroups anyone?). However, there is a reason why so many web servers and so many supercomputers and more recently, so many mobile devices are using Linux, and it's not just because it's free. Perhaps if you got comfortable with Linux before trying to do develop a project you would have had more success? Microsoft has done a great job of making complex systems easier to work with. Linux is playing catchup, but with distros like Ubuntu it is definitely catching up! There also seem to be a lot more cross platform apps being developed. Yesterday I was surprised how well NTFS-3g worked with my USB thumbdrive (backtrack distro), which was on a Truecrypt encrypted partition. Another example is the XMBC (Xbox Media Center) Linux port. I wonder what Microsoft will do when you can use the XMBC (which is an awesome app) on the PS3? :) Unless Microsoft maintains its stranglehold on document formats and its non-open standards (OOXML is a great example of the lengths they will go to), and can get some decent traction on the internet (Yahoo! a big bold move), I would expect them to lose market share in the long run, especially if (and I hope it doesn't happen) computers no longer become general computing devices, and instead become more specialised, e.g. Just a game console or just a web browser (with word processing, spreadsheet, etc). You might think this impossible, but most of what I used to do on the o/s 5 years ago is now handled on the web. If all you apps run on the web, then you don't need to pay for the operating system or MS office. Makes a lot of sense to tight-arse corporations too :) Finally, note how Microsoft is now starting to develop in a more Linux (or Unix) orientated approach. For example IIS 7 and Windows 7 are based on a modular rather than monolithic architecture. wow, that was a lot more than I had intended to say :-D