please, break it down for me. it wasn't at you btw.

What are you doing with your computer that makes you worry about the time wasted over clicking buttons in GUI installers/end task dialogue boxes? Windows automates defragmentation and it's in the background, most antivirus software just sits in the system tray, windows performance scores are tucked away in the computer properties dialogue box and it's not like it's advertised at you; I haven't even looked at mine. I don't know what you mean by asking official permission to fix your own computer, I'm pretty sure nobody is stoping you from messing with your own stuff, unless you're referring to poking around the source code of the OS.

basically you're harping on a bunch of banal aspects and inconsequential differences between the platforms. UGH, NTFS? NO THANKS!

Internet cafes aren't even a viable option for a large part of America (can't speak for other places but uh I sure can't find internet cafes with the latest games here!!!).  Jesus I love arcades but I'd never tell someone WHY BUY AN XBOX WHEN YOU CAN JUST GO PLAY STREET FIGHTER IN AN ARCADE???

msi files? you gotta be kidding me, I don't got all day to be scaling mountains of "accept" or "install" buttons here. *posting this via EMACS/W3 cuz I can't be bothered with dragging a mouse across the screen* You want graphical browsing? go to a kinkos chump

ain't from america, don't think playing the latest games matters, play street fighter at home on my emulator, arcades are a treat. so are internet cafes. games are a treat. if you're short on time, might as well play interesting games: braid, penumbra, dungeon crawl. what is "part of the operating system" on windows is often just some program you installed or your distribution installed on linux. you don't need to hack kernel source code to change between window managers or filesystems.

whether or not my preference in computer software or the fact i even have preferences is aesthetically repulsive to you, it's nice to be able to choose, and it's nice to be able to examine bits and pieces to find out what they do if you want to. on a proprietary platform, the vendor controls the software and to a certain extent the means of setting user's beliefs about it. they hold power over the platform, which they may confer to developers. users accept the conditions of using the platform. this means using the platform's distribution channels, environment, etc. blah blah blah. i would continue but i get the feeling that everyone present is either already familiar with the arguments around free software or doesn't care and that this will inevitably result in the word "conspiracy theory" being thrown around (empirically this happens 100% of the time when i argue with people about computer software wrt discourse.)

overall summary is that Windows has opposing security goals to me and so from my perspective is a virus.

ain't from america, don't think playing the latest games matters, play street fighter at home on my emulator

see the problem here is that you're suggesting this to EVERYONE not saying that this is your particular reasoning for why YOU choose linux.  you're saying people in general should play games this way.  i don't live ANYWHERE NEAR an internet cafe.  it's not a treat for me, it's a complete lack of a possibility.  aaaa it doesn't even compare to an arcade you'd have to take your save game with you on a flashdrive every time and you'd be restricted to whatever games they had installed if they even have them and this is just a big mess of impracticality that can be solved by just having a dang computer at home to play games on.  having a computer to play games on doesn't mean you're playing generic bullshit games 24/7 if you want someone to play braid what's wrong with them playing it at home?  your arguments would be okay if you were talking about yourself but you were talking about everyone and your posts are really really bad arguments from that perspective.

most of the games i care about run sufficiently well on linux and to be honest if your reason to be running windows is access to derivative space marine bullshit you should just read a book.

honestly can't get over how smug this is

obviously i am only explaining why i personally use linux and believe that it is overall better to put up with halfassed (but increasingly bearable) game support than to put up with windows. the reason i mentioned braid, machinarium etc is because those games do run on linux. natively. internet cafe is for starcraft and shit.

i'm intentionally trying to avoid arguing about software politics and stick to criticising windows aesthetically.  it's an i think it's a virus and you should too kind of deal. makes computers work non-properly. of course, nobody gives a shit about computer software aesthetics except, well, people who are already linux users. so i guess the argument doesn't work. next time this topic comes up i'm just going to do copywriting and play pretend adbot. viruses on my computer? it's more likely than you think. click this free link for a free scan of your user agent string for microsoft windows.

Biggles, what is it that you primarily use your computer for that requires Linux? I mean you can simply prefer to use Free/Open Source Software out of support for the cause and whatnot but seriously everything you've mentioned so far are totally bogus concerns for desktop computing on a modern PC: the filesystem and background defragging, running an up to date virus scanner, needing to "hack kernel source code to change between window managers or filesystems"(lol what),  etc.

I mean I get it, you like free software and not a fan of corporate encroachment on the use of your computer and you boycott that shit on principle. but for daily home and office computer use linux is no better than windows, they both basically do the exact same thing.

when i just got to university for computer science in the first year that i was there i remember a TA making fun of my laptop because I had installed the windows 7 beta

he then went on to explaining to me how he installed arch on his and deleted all traces of windows, and how it took him 6 hours to get even the simplest things to work, he was explaining this in the tone that "heh im so good at this"
i threw back something insulting about how he was just being some pretentious comp sci guy who wants to seem cool to the first years (i regret this as I'm pretty sure he was marking my assignments and I kept losing marks for stupid things)

regardless im thinking that ta was biggles

oh yeah windows rules linux drools

I'm pretty opposed to the existence of the user/developer boundary in general because I think that if most people with high school math don't also have some computer programming then bad things will result.

As for my own use of the computer, I'm doing my honours year in computer science, but it's mostly theory and reading papers at the moment. I'm not studying anything overly systems related. I also program various things e.g. game stuff in my spare time. Aside from that, it's all web browsing, music, etc. In running a minimalist system, I know that I have enough spare memory to work on songs or make a big drawing/animation without closing everything else or swapping to disk a lot. I dunno? There's a million things that bug me whenever I have to go back to Windows. I want to order outside of the menu but it's all burger, coke, fries, optional side salad.

Since Windows essentially defines what people expect from using their computers, i.e. what home and office use IS, of course other operating systems are pretty much the same as Windows for home and office use. But there are other ways of using a computer in the home or in the office, and I think that the current way of looking at things could be improved on a lot, especially in changing the way computers enforce (or don't) organisational structure, culture and policy. To a certain extent, Windows (and clones of Windows software for Linux) embodies typical use - reports, spreadsheets, desktop icons, the official story of Human-Computer Interaction.

I know that I have enough spare memory to work on songs or make a big drawing/animation without closing everything else or swapping to disk a lot. I dunno? There's a million things that bug me whenever I have to go back to Windows. I want to order outside of the menu but it's all burger, coke, fries, optional side salad.

this made me chuckle :3

does your computer have 64mb of ram running windows 95 when you were having to close everything to do something else

just wondering

To a certain extent, Windows (and clones of Windows software for Linux) embodies typical use - reports, spreadsheets, desktop icons, the official story of Human-Computer Interaction.

wowwwww you are more or less a I'M A MAC/I'M A PC ad only instead of mac it's linux.  this is the most narrow minded view of an operating system ever.  ugh...windows and its spreadsheets and desktop icons...*ignores that windows does all of the things you described you do on linux, and you must have one heck of a bad computer to not be able to multitask those things*

i mean if your computer is having a hard time running programs at the same time in windows but not in linux then fine that's cool but that's hardly a problem with windows it's a problem with your computer.  you can't really use that as a criticism for windows.

it's not that i'm low on memory, it's that i like to do things that need a lot of memory and would prefer to avoid using my hard disk to make up virtual memory on account of it being slow. not all the time but once a week ish. I have two computers, one box with 2GB main memory and one netbook with 1GB main memory.

that said, the netbook i bought recently seemed to have trouble running IE and changing control panel settings and notifying me about critical security threats to my family at the same time for some reason. i'm told i have the worst experiences with windows?


either way, being less efficient at more cost sounds like a reasonable criticism to me. it becomes more apparent for things like web servers but it's still a limiting factor on what you can do with a general purpose machine. hence music / design types always get memory upgrades. either way, it indicates that Windows is more costly to run. this isn't my main concern with it at all though. it's just a consequence of the way the platform works.


neckbeard flares up, begins drooling

biggles you are wrong and possibly a little bit crazy

i was just OCRing some financial documents in microsoft windows xp and the program misread a visa symbol as "GNU". it's a sign. information wants to be free. it's trapped.

The main Linux desktop environments(GNOME and KDE) and firefox are pretty notorious resource hogs as well... I really don't think there's a significant difference between running common desktop variants of linux and windows in terms of resource use.

I'd agree with that. There are some easier low-resource desktop environments (OpenBox I think?) coming out though. I got stuck on linux when I switched to using Awesome as my window manager, after which I switched to xmonad. Apparently there's a really easy to use xmonad variant called BlueTile now. I don't know how it is on resources. The minimalism thing isn't for everyone though. It's the choice thing that's important. After you know about packages, you can kind of do what you want. There are also tradeoffs - some software only works on nonfree platforms and you actively deprive yourself of it if you only use linux or bsd but I think the best long term strategy is for as many people as possible to use as much free software as possible since at the moment the tradeoffs for doing so are not entirely terrible unless you're in a line of work/hobby that has all its core software on windows with no decent alternatives.

OS doesn't matter to me much since most of what i do is INTERNET and WORD and i'm sure any differences must be slight at best, but i'm pretty offended by the idea that a video game is more mindless than a book. here's a newsflash for you book lovers: BOOKS SUCK. if a book is more exciting than your imagination you may be a computer running linux. this is why video game plots are horrible, everybody wants them to be more like books and they're trying. the reason people say "the book was better" after a movie is because the book was garbage and they only realised how contrived it was when the format is changed from the one that they're so used to the cliches and unnatural behaviour is invisible.

no what i meant is that by buying a book instead of a video game that's basically a book with filler you save money because books are cheaper and there's probably more of them since they cost less money to make. i actually like video games more than books as a medium and it would be nice if space marines left to go chill with the other romance novels.