Macs or PCs

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MyFutureSelfnMe
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05 Mar 2010, 6:11 pm

RaceDrv709 wrote:

I'm a PC user and have always been. I'm running Windows 7 on my desktop along with Ubuntu 9.10. Ubuntu isn't very hard at all. It's surprisingly easy for those who still think Linux doesn't have anything more than a command line. I absolutely hate Apple with a passion. Why? Their iPods are horrible MP3 players. My Cowon D2 that I have Rockbox on beats the iPod any day. Ubuntu serves the same purpose of Mac OS X to me. I.E. a stable UNIX like OS good for productivity.

Ubuntu is *not* *good* *enough*. If it were, everyone would buy their Dell preloaded with it. It's a good effort, but it's not polished by 2010 standards.

I don't like Macs either.

lau
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05 Mar 2010, 6:15 pm

Orwell wrote:

lau wrote:

$ uptime
12:53:33 up 27 days, 22:45, 10 users, load average: 0.86, 0.40, 0.45
$ uname -a
Linux medion 2.6.24-27-generic #1 SMP Wed Jan 27 23:54:28 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

This is Hardy Heron.

The Mac users I know typically get as much as six months or a year of uptime without thinking twice about it. But then, they probably don't install updates, which I presume is why you rebooted last month.

I install all updates, all the time. I've not investigated hot kernel changes, and just after I posted my earlier message, there just happened to be an update to the kernel. So I installed it. I may get around to doing a reboot, to start using it, maybe tomorrow. I don't feel like going offline for the three minutes a reboot takes, today. This may not have been the first kernel update I've installed, this month. I never feel pressured into a reboot, and sometimes just forget, even though any restart reminder is visible, up there, at the top of the screen, all the time.

The only times this machine has been rebooted, for about three years, has been for kernel updates, a few power cuts (which includes moving house), one instance where I accidentally kicked the plug out, and a couple of times when I have been changing hardware.

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Orwell
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05 Mar 2010, 6:20 pm

pat2rome wrote:

PC's. If you pay for a Mac, you pay for the brand. I guarantee you a PC of the same price will be a better computer.

For the typical home user, I'm not sure that's true. Windows is considerably more resource-demanding than OS X, so a Dell with higher specs is necessary to run Windows with comparable performance to what you'll see on a Mac. Besides that, there is the generally good customer support from Apple, and the fact that OS X is better than Windows, making a Mac a better choice for a lot of people who are going to stick with the bundled OS.

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Orwell
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05 Mar 2010, 6:25 pm

MyFutureSelfnMe wrote:

And I don't believe Ubuntu or any Linux is appropriate for an inexperienced computer user. Of the many UIs available, none are as intuitive as Windows 7 for an inexperienced user.

I find either GNOME or KDE much more intuitive than Windows. Whenever I boot into Win7 I find myself wondering where stuff is hidden, where I can change some simple configurations, etc. GNOME does not give me that problem at all, and it never has. Assuming you don't run into hardware incompatibility, I really think Ubuntu (or Mint) is the most user-friendly operating system there is.

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Further, those types of users tend to use their computers to do office work and games, both of which are lacking in the applications dept on Linux.

Oh, baloney. Office 2007 may be prettier and nicer than OpenOffice, but OOo is more than sufficient for almost everyone's needs. Heck, AbiWord is plenty good enough as a word processor for the typical user.

I'll grant games, but aside from that there really is nothing that really sets Windows above the competition.

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MyFutureSelfnMe
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05 Mar 2010, 6:59 pm

Orwell, I think your priorities and tastes differ from that of the general population. I don't have time to go beyond the dogmatic-sounding and start analyzing points and have a proper debate though, so we can just agree to disagree

DentArthurDent
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06 Mar 2010, 2:31 am

MyFutureSelfnMe wrote:

Thing is your comments give me the impression that you have not given the likes of Ubuntu more than a cursory glance. Up to a year and a half ago I was a committed user of MS products. Over the intervening time I have grown to like Ubuntu more and more, to the point where I have XP on my machine really only out of habit. I run a small business and I am doing a course in political science, add this to the various other things I use the computer for and I would say that I give Ubuntu a good all round work out, now that I have settled down with it, and have come to realise just how good the available programs are, I cannot imagine myself ever going back to MS. As I have already explained my 78 year old mother has taken to it luck a duck to water. I sincerely believe Windows is a prime example of how market forces can get it very wrong.

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lau
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06 Mar 2010, 7:23 am

As DentArthurDent mentioned his 78 year old mother, it reminded me of something that cropped up here, some years ago.

Someone was asking if anyone knew of any "cross stitch" software. I'd not heard of "cross stitch" before, but a few minutes later, I was toying with kxstitch.

For no particular reason, I still have it installed. I haven't been pestered to "renew my licence", or any other such attempts to extract money from me.

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EnglishInvader
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06 Mar 2010, 7:53 am

Orwell wrote:

I'll grant games, but aside from that there really is nothing that really sets Windows above the competition.

Most emulators are available on Linux these days. That gives you the whole of Sega, Nintendo, Atari, Commodore et al to play around with. Beyond that, PC games are usually too much hassle for them to be worthwhile.

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06 Mar 2010, 10:04 am

EnglishInvader wrote:

Console games in PC emulation are not nearly as good, since the keyboard is very different from a controller.

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MyFutureSelfnMe
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06 Mar 2010, 10:29 am

DentArthurDent wrote:

MyFutureSelfnMe wrote:

Not only have I given Ubuntu more than a cursory glance, I've written drivers and done huge amounts of other software development on it (various versions from 8.04 to 9.10, both 32- and 64-bit). I've also done development on RHEL 5. In all cases, yes they are getting slowly better over time, but I find working on them to be unintuitive (and the available applications to be unpolished enough) that I share my working directories on a Samba share and do my actual work in Visual Studio 2008 on my Windows laptop. This is despite the far superior system specs of my Ubuntu box (and its 52" display), the fact that it has ext3 as the filesystem (much faster than NTFS) etc. In the end, I just do not want to use the IDEs available on Linux, and I do not want to use any desktop environment I have found for it. When I do 'clerical' work, I do not want to use OpenOffice *at all*. I want to use Office 2007.

I don't even really use some of the finer features of either the Windows 7 desktop or Ubuntu's (or OSX for that matter). It's just that every time I do need to deviate from my usual routine, I still get frustrated on Ubuntu after all these years. Yes it's getting better, but not quickly enough.

Bear in mind that patience is so far outside the realm of my virtues as to be a joke. If it doesn't work for me right away, I get pissed off.

MyFutureSelfnMe
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06 Mar 2010, 10:39 am

Orwell wrote:

EnglishInvader wrote:

Console games in PC emulation are not nearly as good, since the keyboard is very different from a controller.

I have NES and Super Nintendo controllers with USB chips embedded in them. They work great. Yes I had to tweak the emulators to be just right.

If I decide I really want to play the latest Grand Theft Auto though I'm hosed on Linux. This isn't necessarily Linux's fault, but it is what it is. I'd be the first person to re-evaluate my position if WINE were perfected.

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06 Mar 2010, 10:51 am

MyFutureSelfnMe wrote:

It's just that every time I do need to deviate from my usual routine, I still get frustrated on Ubuntu after all these years. Yes it's getting better, but not quickly enough.

Bear in mind that patience is so far outside the realm of my virtues as to be a joke. If it doesn't work for me right away, I get pissed off.

Curiously enough, this is precisely why I can't stand Windows. Perhaps we just have different tastes in interface, but for me it has always been easy and intuitive to find my way around in GNOME, whereas in Windows I am a fish out of water. The way stuff is done in Windows just makes no sense to me whatsoever (same goes for OS X in a lot of ways, but I can bend that to my will more easily than I can with Windows).

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MyFutureSelfnMe
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06 Mar 2010, 11:10 am

I think we agree to disagree then - it's a matter of taste and opinion

I would like to see WINE perfected, it would help take a variable out of the equation.

EnglishInvader
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06 Mar 2010, 11:22 am

Orwell wrote:

EnglishInvader wrote:

Console games in PC emulation are not nearly as good, since the keyboard is very different from a controller.

The standard of emulation has come a long way since the year 2000. In most cases, your standard USB gamepad will work just fine with little or no need for configuration.

Emulators are still no substitute for the real thing, but they're certainly good for a rainy day when you don't feel like getting your old console out. Plus you have a lot more games to choose from.

MyFutureSelfnMe
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06 Mar 2010, 11:54 am

For the older consoles, as far as I can tell, the emulators *are* the real thing, for all intents and purposes. I could plug a Super Nintendo into my Sony XBR through the composite video port, but using the computer through the HDMI port gives me a clearer version of exactly the same picture, exactly the same gameplay, and the same controller.

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06 Mar 2010, 9:44 pm

Still run on an old g5 ppc, if I had money ide build a newer pc and move to windows to play more games on and keep updated cheaper.

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