[Gllug] Linux on Desktop

damion.yates at gmail.com damion.yates at gmail.com
Mon Feb 12 00:40:34 UTC 2007


On Sat, 3 Feb 2007, Tethys wrote:

> damion.yates at gmail.com writes:
> 
> >> AbiWord and that spreadsheet package whose name escapes me
> >
> >Gnumetric?
> 
> s/Gnumetric/Gnumeric/

Oh yes that's the one I meant.

(to clarify)
On Fri, 2 Feb 2007, Jason Johns wrote:
> >> are a lot faster - shame there's no alternative office suite :-(
> 
> What do you mean?
[snipped - we both pointed at other suites]

> >In general I'm now very disappointed at this group.  So many Windows
> >using quitters.  I'm not about to write a further 1000 word essay on
> >this, but suggesting Cygwin just to pick one example, makes me cry.
> 
> For a start, you're tarring an awful lot of people with the same
> brush.

Well obviously I was only referring to those that are doing so :)  I
also phrased it carefully, "in general" "so many", rather than "You're
all a bunch of...".

> I have personally used a Windows desktop at work for about 2
> months in my whole career,

Excellent then you're the sort of person I was hoping would dominate
this list.

> Besides which, I haven't heard many claims that people are using
> Windows on the desktop.

Well from the replies I read, I'd say that there were and through the
thread I noted a trend to defend Windows beyond what I would
previously have considered normal for a LUG mailing list*.

Look at the following snippits:

"Reinstall Windows. Make up the time you've wasted your company."

"Windows updates can also be configured to download and install
automatically. As for crashes, I can't remember the last time I saw
Windows crash on me (and I use it all the time in my office and in
my lab)."

"It's been a long long time since I saw Windows XP crash by itself              
Windows XP these days is a remarkably stable operating system."

"Personally, I use OSX"

"I ran and run Windows"

"I come in on Weds morning to find a rebooted PC from the overnight
update"

"When I decided to dualboot my work laptop"

"[I use] windows where windows is appropriate"


It's almost like this isn't even a Linux mailing list.

Regarding the point of the whole thread, the person in question, is
not a native speaker and I suspect aged significantly younger than
most, this comes across in his other emails.  Most agree that he was
foolish and fits with the categories I specified as somebody who does
not know _exactly_ what they are doing.

*Of course as I verbosely ranted on about in my last email, times have
changed and sadly for the worse.

> Secondly, criticizing people for being "quitters" for using Windows
> when you yourself are using MS Office via wine, rather than using one
> of the free alternatives? A bit hypocritical, don't you think?
 
I actually don't.  Okay I have done (legally) and MSOffice under wine
is faster than OOo - something that really should be fixed.  But I'm
fortunate that I've never really needed any office tools in any of the
jobs I've had.

In general though I consider a binary app, be it PE(/.exe) under Wine
or an ELF (maybe so old I have to run within a chroot or LD_PRELOAD
old libs, e.g. ViaVoice for Linux) acceptable as a last resort.  The
alternative would probably be to run Windows.  I DO consider doze
under VMWare cheating, but I guess slightly preferable to rebooting.
I don't actually have or run Windows (the OS).

Remember I'm discussing people using Windows Operating systems not
saying people shouldn't use MS software and hardware (I use a MS mouse
and it's very nice thankyou!).  I can't stand the Windows environment
and the fact that it costs loads of money and is unreliable is why I'm
surprised so many are defending or using it on this list.

If for example, StarOffice gets given some code which makes it faster
than MSOffice, perhaps also compiled with a fancy optimised Intel
compiler, but the the OOo developers are taking many weeks
porting/sorting this out in to the free opensource OOo release, I'm
the sort of person who would might buy StarOffice rather than wait.
This is of course I needed an Office suite.

I also use the NVidia binary driver (que tin-foil-hat-wearing loons
flaming me).

What I'm doing is using the fastest nicest environment so I'm ultra
efficient.  I love the "everything is a file" elegance of UNIX, the
speed and power of select->middle_click in X.  I'm a (minor)
contributer to the Free software movement, but I'm not going to cut
off my nose to spite my face.


Damion


-------------- next part --------------
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug


More information about the GLLUG mailing list