Watch Out Win 7 Hackers

[RealBeast]

Gary, next time engage your thinking cap before your search engine.

We all know that Windows is a copyrighted proprietary product of Microsoft. Your long diatribe on that obvious point makes it even more painfully clear that you missed the entire point of his post.

Windows will run on a HUGE range and combination of computers, parts, peripherals. Apply a little combinatorial math and the possibilities are mind boggling.

Macs cannot even come close. They had a chance once upon a time and then they killed Power Computing.

[Gary K]

Gary, next time engage your thinking cap before your search engine.

We all know that Windows is a copyrighted proprietary product of Microsoft. Your long diatribe on that obvious point makes it even more painfully clear that you missed the entire point of his post.

Windows will run on a HUGE range and combination of computers, parts, peripherals. Apply a little combinatorial math and the possibilities are mind boggling.

Macs cannot even come close. They had a chance once upon a time and then they killed Power Computing.

Ummmm..... Who is running a Mac? Not me.

Debian, which I use, runs on many more architectures than Windows does. Windows runs on x86 hardware. It's pretty much all it will run on. Debian runs on 11 different hardware architectures: alpha, arm, armel, hp pa-risc, mips, mipsel, powerpc, and sparc. Plus it runs on all the basic hardware platforms Windows runs on: i386, amd64, and ia64--which only Windows server will run on. I can run a Debian desktop or server on any of the 11 platforms Debian supports. Plus, applications are plentiful in all architectures, which is not true for even the 3 architectures Windows will run on. Windows 64-bit software support is getting better, but Linux has had almost universal 64-bit software support for several years. If it's in the 32-bit repositories the chances of it being in the rest of the hardware architecture repositories is very good. I run pure 64-bit on a couple of machines and I've never run across something in the 32-bit repositories that I couldn't install on pure 64-bit installations, other than proprietary packages such as flash, which is now available.

So, yeah, Windows is proprietary all the way around. When MS first started, and up through NT 4.0, they had better hardware support than they do now. Next time have some clue as to what you're talking about.

[Nater]

Linux doesn't have any software I'd actually want or need to run, that's it's problem. Linux is a great server OS, it's a great embedded OS, it's a crap desktop OS. It's a crap workstation OS. It's inferior to both Windows and OSX because it has no real software. I don't give a rat's *** if it's proprietary or not.

Stuff like Premier, Photoshop, Lightroom, CATIA, SolidWorks, Pro/E, AutoCAD, 3DSMax. Those all run on Windows and don't run on Linux anymore. All I could conceive of using and that actually runs on Linux are Maya, NX, and Bibble Pro.

The fact that Debian runs on so many architectures has in it's past been more of a weakness than a strength. They've dropped 32-bit SPARC support with 5.0 and 6.0 is going to drop Alpha and ARM. I would guess that PowerPC, MIPS, and PA-RISC probably won't be far behind. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they dropped IA-64 support too.

[PDR60]

Linux doesn't have any software I'd actually want or need to run, that's it's problem. Linux is a great server OS, it's a great embedded OS, it's a crap desktop OS. It's a crap workstation OS. It's inferior to both Windows and OSX because it has no real software. I don't give a rat's *** if it's proprietary or not.

Stuff like Premier, Photoshop, Lightroom, CATIA, SolidWorks, Pro/E, AutoCAD, 3DSMax. Those all run on Windows and don't run on Linux anymore. All I could conceive of using and that actually runs on Linux are Maya, NX, and Bibble Pro.

The fact that Debian runs on so many architectures has in it's past been more of a weakness than a strength. They've dropped 32-bit SPARC support with 5.0 and 6.0 is going to drop Alpha and ARM. I would guess that PowerPC, MIPS, and PA-RISC probably won't be far behind. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they dropped IA-64 support too.

32 bit sparc hardware hasn't been produced since 1995. Any chance of getting vista to run on 1995 hardware. The reason I ask is Debian 5.0 came out in 2009 and 4.0 was supported until this year. Alpha is dead too. Hp made sure of that. The programs you mention are very tightly integrated into windows api, why would you try to run them in something like wine under linux? For those apps stick with windows. However it doesn't mean linux is "a crap desktop OS" or "It's a crap workstation OS". That's just not accurate. For those of us that don't need to run specialized apps like you mention, Linux is a great alternative. But I love windows, I've made a career out of supporting their "fine OS". Thats why I run linux on everything I own. My cost is about 20 cents for a cd to burn it on.

[Nater]

Specialized apps? Those are the things people buy computers to run. Why would someone pay $10k for a workstation if they can't run most of the engineering or video applications that are industry standards?

Linux is not a good desktop or workstation operating system. It's strength is the embedded market and servers. x86 and x86-64 killed the RISC workstation market, that caused most of the big engineering software vendors to stop making Unix versions (and consequently Linux versions) of their software.

[PDR60]

Specialized apps? Those are the things people buy computers to run. Why would someone pay $10k for a workstation if they can't run most of the engineering or video applications that are industry standards?

Linux is not a good desktop or workstation operating system. It's strength is the embedded market and servers. x86 and x86-64 killed the RISC workstation market, that caused most of the big engineering software vendors to stop making Unix versions (and consequently Linux versions) of their software.

Your list "Stuff like Premier, Photoshop, Lightroom, CATIA, SolidWorks, Pro/E, AutoCAD, 3DSMax" are products not bought by everyday folks. Haven't seen too many folks run Autocad except engineers and draftsman. I did a job for an engineering firm that got rid of autocad in favor of QCAD 2 running on CentOS, after six months of testing. They still have one autocad machine but all their work is now being completed in QCAD 2. I bet most folks don't even know what lightroom or catia is. By the way, autocad runs great in wine, as well as solidworks.

Linux is fine as a desktop. Your OPINION has been noted, but its incorrect. Not every computer has to run windows....... If you think 7's desktop and features are great, check out some screens of Gnome 3 (in testing). KDE will be coming out with a new desktop this year also. If you like windows that's fine. It doesn't however, mean Linux is bad. It a matter of personal choice.

[Johnmcl7]

The Windows 7 introductory price in the USA was ~$75. That's about £48 at today's exchange rate.

It was even better here as HP was available for £40 and Pro for £80 - these were complete (not upgrade) retail boxed versions.

I don't think the cost of operating systems is unreasonable given that in most cases I'll be using the operating system on a largely daily basis for at least around two years. I've paid 40-50 pounds for a game just to get a month or so's gaming and find it hard to justify the money for Lightroom or Photoshop because it's not software I use that often and they're extremely expensive.

John