Linux-on-the-desktop pioneer Munich now considering a switch back to Windows - Polidicks

[QUOTE=antianan;45734305][/QUOTE] They should use Windows 8 then because I haven't had any issues with compatibility and it's noticeably more stable.

I can't imagine why IT would push the entire organization to transition for Linux in the first place, unless their helpdesk is outsourced :v:. The transitional period would be such a headache as well if it was all at once. What might have made more sense was to roll out Linux workstations by department, and slowly expand over a few years while providing training.

everyone who doesn't work in an office thinks using linux is a great idea in offices

[quote]Microsoft is planning to move its German HQ from nearby Unterschleissheim to Munich as of 2016.[/quote] hmmmmmm

[QUOTE=.Lain;45733855]after using linux as my primary operating system as a photographer for two years i am fairly displeased with it. i don't think it's ready for anyone who plans on doing serious creative work just yet. hardly any support from that industry [editline]19th August 2014[/editline] and no, gimp is not a viable alternative to photoshop for anyone planning on doing serious work[/QUOTE] Anyone who says gimp is a viable replacement for photoshop would probably not suffer if they exclusively used paint.net. Disregarding gimps history with genuinely horrendous interfaces, it is a seriously gimped product in comparison to the simple ease of use of photoshop. Yes, you can do most things in gimp that you can do in photoshop. It just takes 5-30 button clicks instead of 2-10. It's a classic case of non enterprise level software that hasn't had hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at analyzing usage data to enhance its functionality and ease of use.

[QUOTE=shauntp;45731428]While I don't think you're totally wrong, part of the reason it's not able to be used by the general public is that the general public has grown up using either Windows or Mac. Yes, there are the occasional hardware incompatibilities and the terminal does take a bit of getting used to (although on almost any mainstream distribution you can still get things done assuming you don't need CLI-only software or don't want to do anything really complicated or use niche software) - but it's through projects like this that we can help make it useable by the general public. Generate a need and spend the time/effort training and over time not just the people will learn, but you'll find there's a greater demand and market forcing developers to start producing software and drivers for Linux. I know it has it still has its shortfalls - but we have to start somewhere.[/QUOTE] The moment anyone even mentions terminal and that people might sometimes rarely be forced to use it, the argument is lost essentially. Remember that we're talking about the average user here. While it has in general improved over the years, you still have have people who equate the internet with the browser, who equate a file or program with a desktop shortcut. People who aren't completely ready to drill into a folder structure. And while these bad cases aren't as common just think back at the amount of people who actually read various windows or just click OK or next to make them go away. Just look at any game community where people build modding tools that use CLIs. You have constant questions on why doesn't the app work, that it closes as soon as it's run and other typical questions. And these are modding forums - aka places where people are at least semi passable at IT, where the majority re probably tiny bit ahead of the average user.. These are people who are afraid of the commandline, the terminal or powershell. It's also why both on windows or OSx the amount of times you actually need to use these is close to nill. Considering I regularly have to go trough a CLI to get a GUI whenever booting into a nix distro says more than enough. Hell the pain I had on getting my laptop screen to run on it's native resolution was insane. ----------- Now if you have limited use machines. Where everything is heavily preconfigured and lockeddown - like office computers, you shouldn't have too many issues. But you're still going to be dealing with different software, different keyboard shortcuts, you need to retrain staff on where they can actually save stuff, the new applications, what formats to use for saving... [QUOTE=Maladroit;45733915]Yeah, same. If adobe would just bring over their apps so much of anyone doing serious work could just switch right over Fuck, it can't be that high of a jump from OS X to Linux[/QUOTE] It's probably quite significant. Remember that the OSx version uses Cocoa as far as I know (older versions used carbon).

The only reason I don't use Linux is because the support for all the games I play is very spotty to say the least. To me it seems this Mayor is being bribed by Microsoft. Moving their HQ to Munich? Tsk..Tsk..

i think linux is great for embedded and simple-use computers like HTPCs, but honestly for the average desktop user it isn't really all there yet. bad graphics drivers, underwhelming office suites and spotty support in almost every other area it might install and run properly, but that's not to say something will go wrong and require you to open a bash terminal at some point. something i've never had to do to fix a basic problem in os x

[QUOTE=wraithcat;45737355] Now if you have limited use machines. Where everything is heavily preconfigured and lockeddown - like office computers, you shouldn't have too many issues. But you're still going to be dealing with different software, different keyboard shortcuts, you need to retrain staff on where they can actually save stuff, the new applications, what formats to use for saving... [/QUOTE] File formats they should be using anyway, because public institutions shouldn't be saving documents as ".docx".

[QUOTE=danharibo;45737516]File formats they should be using anyway, because public institutions shouldn't be saving documents as ".docx".[/QUOTE] Why not? It's an open xml format. Sure it's going to work best on office. But you're looking at this from the wrong angle. doc or docx have become the standard and everyone pretty much knows what those formats are and everyone has something that can read them. These formats should remain to be in use for clarity. In the same way you're going to be using a PDF as opposed to using a postscript file.

[QUOTE=wraithcat;45737550]Why not? It's an open xml format. Sure it's going to work best on office. But you're looking at this from the wrong angle. doc or docx have become the standard and everyone pretty much knows what those formats are and everyone has something that can read them. These formats should remain to be in use for clarity. In the same way you're going to be using a PDF as opposed to using a postscript file.[/QUOTE] Except that PDF files can be opened and read easily by almost anything you'd reasonably try to open a PDF with. While there are some other office suites can open DocX files, it's not something I would rely on when publishing a document. And of course, the OpenDocument format existed prior to DocX, a more cynical individual would accuse Microsoft of trying to force their foot into that door. We could argue all day about the use of file formats in public organizations but it won't get anybody anywhere. The underlying problem is that Microsoft has got their hands in too many places, they might not have an actual monopoly on the market, but having one company making up such a large segment of the market is undoubtedly a bad thing (and this one company being [i]Microsoft[/i], doubly so).

[QUOTE=aydin690;45731380]No matter how you linux fanboys sugar coat it, linux is still years away from being usable by the general public, specially those that use public computers.[/QUOTE] Finally a person who can describe linux, and make linux users scream to be touched.

Which is why they're getting hammered by anti monopoly suits in the EU. The thing is, in terms of software, a dominant position tends to be a landslide position as well. The more people are using your system, the more people you are likely to get and the more software, support or content will come for your system. It's rare for a second or third party to break in without offering something significantly different. The truth is, enterprise license costs that MS has, aren't a significant enough drawback for enterprises to not go MS. OSx broke trough by creating attractive marketing, poising itself as the high end alternative and claiming it was better in most areas compared to windows. (plus it never left the audio and 2d art industry) Nix systems tend to (purposefully avoiding android here) tend to live among fans who use them day to day and people who use them as a secondary boot environment when they need to fix something. Sure nix also powers a lot of embedded devices, but the user doesn't really come into contact with the OS there. And in terms of android, the usage scenario is different and it was the first direct alternatively to the highly expensive offerings from apple.

[QUOTE=wraithcat;45737694]Which is why they're getting hammered by anti monopoly suits in the EU. The thing is, in terms of software, a dominant position tends to be a landslide position as well. The more people are using your system, the more people you are likely to get and the more software, support or content will come for your system. It's rare for a second or third party to break in without offering something significantly different. The truth is, enterprise license costs that MS has, aren't a significant enough drawback for enterprises to not go MS. OSx broke trough by creating attractive marketing, poising itself as the high end alternative and claiming it was better in most areas compared to windows. (plus it never left the audio and 2d art industry) Nix systems tend to (purposefully avoiding android here) tend to live among fans who use them day to day and people who use them as a secondary boot environment when they need to fix something. Sure nix also powers a lot of embedded devices, but the user doesn't really come into contact with the OS there. And in terms of android, the usage scenario is different and it was the first direct alternatively to the highly expensive offerings from apple.[/QUOTE] Splitting "nix" and "Android" is a bit arbitrary there. There are different use cases here: The "desktop", phones & tablets, embedded appliances and servers. Linux as a kernel is suited to all of these things, as a result of a variety of events and decisions over the years (apache web server, Google using Linux as the kernel for android). There's more to an operating system then a kernel though which is where it diverges for each use case. When it comes to servers, the "unix" parts of Linux are the most important parts for the user (where "User" here means the person working with the server, not the person viewing the web-pages on it). This is different to almost all the other use cases where the user is 99% of the time not going to be overly concerned about POSIX compliance. I'd say that your description of "nix" systems is inaccurate, lots of people rely on Linux and *BSD every day - they just don't realize it. I assume this is why a lot of people tend to shitpost in threads like this about Linux being some marginalized system when in fact it runs on more devices than NT or mach could even hope to ship on. Of course at this point the topic of the discussion swings rapidly into "open source" versus proprietary software and the thread is already a bit of a train wreck already so I'll leave it there.

Oh I'm not arguing about the fact that nix powered systems are plentiful, albeit I should have seperated it out even more. Overall, I think we can argue that there's 5 main segments that one can see it. "average user" home system enterprise office system Embedded device server phones The thing is, when talking about the suitability of linux, people will usually talk about merely the first two segments. A professional who works with a server is going to have vastly different needs, compared to a standard user. Android is also a bit different due to the fact, that you are usually only going to be seeing vetted configurations and overall a lot of things are vetted together. For instance I know my router runs on a nix kernel, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter too much to me. I won't be loading any third party apps on it, I won't be interacting too much with it in truth. Now if I were a professional, it might be far more important. The amount of fiddling required amounts to - turn it on and maybe go into the UI once to set up a wifi password. That's sadly not the same as getting a linux distro running flawlessly on my laptop. (it's doable, but why bother to an extent) Now we'd have a different ballgame if my laptop came preconfigured with a distro. But then you're running into the application issue again. It does take some effort to configure wine, effort a lot of people might not be willing to undertake. Overall in my opinion, this isn't a discussion about open source vs closed source. Both approaches have their benefits drawbacks. This is more of a discussion about the maturity of the system in regards to the target audience. Both windows and OSx are highly mature systems in regards how the average user will and shall interact with them. Most things are in a nice GUI, most errors have automatic troubleshooters that try do it for you and the user is just not expected to ever go into the registry, to load or unload a reg hive, or to go trough config files. This isn't completely true on Linux systems yet. Going into xorg.conf is still something you might have to do on a lot of hardware, jumping into the terminal still happens as does having to get into a GUI. From a purely technical standpoint I will not deny that linux distros are often superior to windows or OSx. There's a reason that linux is popular among IT professionals, why it's used in places where you need robustness. I also won't deny that a lot of distro made a big headway in the ease of use. It just isn't there on the same level yet.

I would say that your point about needing to edit xorg.conf and use the terminal are false. A list of things I needed to do to Kubuntu 14.04 after installing it on my desktop: * Click "nVidia drivers" to choose the official nVidia drivers. That was it. I didn't have to edit anything, I didn't have to install a bunch of obscure packages nor did I have to download some dodgy tar-ball from anywhere. It just worked. My laptop is even easier, it doesn't have a discrete GPU so I don't need to select the official drivers. That is an anecdote of course, many other people have some cheap no-name hardware that only just works properly in windows, let alone have a driver in the Linux kernel. Individual experience aside, when it comes to a managed environment like an office you're going to be dealing with systems that aren't configured by the users themselves. This makes the fact that sometimes there is something that needs to be configured a bit moot, ideally the systems are just imaged en mass so anything like that is just done once by someone in the IT support staff. I'm not aware of anything in my work-flow that doesn't have a GUI. I only use a shell when it's quicker than clicking on a bunch of buttons to do something. No doubt there is something missing somewhere or this perception wouldn't exist (I'd hope) but I haven't come across that gap.

Windows for life.

I would be interested in knowing how many people acually experience these "problems" that some people in this thread keep mentioning. Google is not a good source for knowing how many people experience x problem/s so dont think you know because Google told you so. I myself have never experienced any of the problems people in this thread keep talking about. For me its as a simple as installing (in about 7 or less steps) Debian or Ubuntu through their CLI or GUI installer and it just works. I know what i've experienced with Linux might not be what x has experienced with it however just because [B]you[/B] have had a bad experience with it does not mean the majority of others have and does not delegitimize it as a stable platform for general users.