[H-GEN] Windows to *nix

[Anthony Irwin]

David Jericho wrote:

>Quite frankly, most (unix) software developers should be taken out the back and
>beat with a large lump of wood. Until they are not breathing. Then beaten a bit
>more for good measure.
>  
>
Just wondering why you feel that way.

>>The joining of all these programs may result in a really cool user
>>friendly gui program or a bash script that is run in a cron job it
>>doesn't matter because you have the power.
>>    
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>
>Windows does have this ability. Most modern operating systems do.
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*nix has tons of cli programs that can be used in scripting or simply 
pipe output to different commands to do different things. Windows may 
have the ability but really how many programs do you have that can take 
advantage of it.

>>This is they type of power and flexibility that windows users will never
>>experience because of the mind set of the user base. 
>>    
>>
>
>I will say exactly the same of the average Linux user, or the average OS X user.
>
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There are a number of programs that mainly windows converts are asking 
for things like dreamweaver or a development environment like visual 
studio. Although these things can be nice I still prefer vim myself and 
know many developers that use vim or emacs in fact I am yet to meet a 
*nix developer that uses ide's but they are bound to be out there 
because their are a number of different ide's in *nix.

>>Now these days there are more and more user friendly programs linking all these tools
>>together to make it easy for people to do things and thats a great thing.
>>    
>>
>
>And yet these programs continue to suck the proverbial, and the end result is
>the user switches back to Windows.
>  
>
I don't really agree with that. There are lots of great *nix software 
that has been ported to window and people use all the time. Firefox, 
Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Gimp and more.

Sure it maybe lacking in some areas like say copying dvd movies or maybe 
music creation or video capture from tv but all those areas are 
improving fast.

>>Sure being able to diagnose problems, read through logs and manually
>>changing configuration files can be a steep learning curve but once done
>>you control the computer not the other way around.
>>    
>>
>
>It is a flaw of design that you have to control it to care for it. You don't
>need to control your other tools. You need to maintain them to some basic level,
>but as a whole, they're very simple to care for.
>
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Yes I would agree that once things are running you just maintain them 
what I mean by control is doing things the way you want. Like in the 
*nix world if you want to have just a mail server then you can install a 
minimal system with just a mail server and don't need a graphical 
environment and all that other bulk that you won't be using. You don't 
have that control in Windows you have to have the graphical environment 
you can't choose to strip it down to the level that you can on a *nix 
system.

>Free software is generally rubbish. The sooner the OSS world realises that most
>of their software is total and utter crap, the sooner we'll actually start to
>see progress. It would also be nice if closed source developers also realised
>this before  launching and subjecting me to it.
>
>There is such a thing as giving someone too much freedom.
>  
>
Again I am wondering why you feel that way. I can think of many freat 
free software programs that windows users use on their computer over 
comercial equivilants.

How can one have too much freedom? if its your computer you should be 
able to do what you want how you want.

Kind Regards,
Anthony Irwin