12 ms·

I would just like to add that there is a valid reason why Linux or the *BSDs are superior to Windows or OS X - they are Free. As in Speech. And I'm sad this doe

I would just like to add that there is a valid reason why Linux or the *BSDs are superior to Windows or OS X - they are Free. As in Speech. And I'm sad this doesn't even warrant a mention.

csomar 15y ago
How much does the price tag matters when you are a developer or professional that gets paid $150/hour?
- pavanky 15y ago
  Free as in freedom. Not free pizza. If you are getting $150 an hour, there are better things to do with the money than flaunt it in public.
- orta 15y ago
  You're thinking free as in beer. Free as in speech means open source. As a developer you gain more from that as you can tweak/maintain your own software if needs be.
- mahmud 15y ago
  In the last 5 years I have spent more on Free Software donations than I have in licensing crippleware.
- csomar 15y ago
  Wow. I'm getting quite of a down votes. I'm not opposed to Open Source software, actually I'm contributing to one of them. What I meant is that when the price tag is so small comparing to your earnings (since you are going to use the software for work), why would you make it a decision factor when picking an OS?
  - dchest 15y ago
    You are again confusing free software, open source software, and gratis software. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...
Osiris 15y ago
I agree with you. That's certainly a 'pro' on the side of Linux. I stated that every OS has it's pros and cons, but my goal wasn't to list what those are. To say unilaterally that it's better for all people at all times in all use cases is, at the very least, an overstatement. While being free is a top concern for you and many others, for some (perhaps many) usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability, and that's a choice we should all be free to make.
- slowpoke 15y ago
  >usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability While some argue that this is the current situation, I want to point out that's a false dichotomy. Freedom and usability aren't orthogonal concepts like some make them out to be. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we need to lock everything down to make it "usable". Also, Freedom of software (and hardware) ultimately has greater implications on society as a whole, which is why I raised the issue. It's not merely a feature, a pro or con, it's something which at least people like here on HN should be greatly concerned about. Computers play an incredibly important role today, and will only become even more important in the future. It's important to retain control over them on a fundamental level, and that requires Open Standards, Free Software and Open Hardware.
  - SamReidHughes 15y ago
    > While some argue that this is the current situation, I want to point out that's a false dichotomy. Freedom and usability aren't orthogonal concepts like some make them out to be. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we need to lock everything down to make it "usable". Nobody is making this claim, so why are you trying to refute it?
  - celer 15y ago
    For the virtues of locking everything down, I would switch from free v not to mac v windows. These are the two dominant operating systems, dislike it as I think we do. Apple locks down everything. Apple hardware, on the iphone Apple Software, Apple plugins and addons, everything, to the greatest extent possible, is controlled by Apple. This yields benefits. Driver installs giving you problems? Not with Apple. Screen display no working properly? Not with Apple. They control everything, and they make it all perfect. Windows makes a "something for everyone and everything" strategy. It gives you more options, but it also gives you more headaches. I don't think it is possible to increase options endlessly without costs.
conradfr 15y ago
My way of thinking is that being free does not really to me, a lambda user, make it superior but otherwise just add pros and cons. By using mostly Windows I trade the inconvenient and risks of non-free with other advantages. It is a informed choice. RMS may hate me though :)
- timClicks 15y ago
  Are you able to explain the term "lambda user"?
  - conradfr 15y ago
    Sorry it's a very bad translation from French, it's Monday morning ... I think something like "non-power-users", or "random/average user" would be a better term ?
    - DanBC 15y ago
      That's an excellent term, and I am going to start using it.
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    Someone who does a lot of lisp?
    - marshray 15y ago
      A user who introduces a new variable binding environment?
  - grandalf 15y ago
    an anonymous utility function.
jsolson 15y ago
Freedom also carries a cost. At the end of the day, the best OS for any given individual is the one that gives them the largest net increase in utility, for their personal utility function. My experience suggests that a Free OS isn't worth it to me, but it's been about six years since I gave it a go full-time. The last time I gave Linux a good go round (as in using it as my primary OS for everything I did), I still had to invest time in getting my touchpad to work correctly with X or getting decent sub-pixel anti-aliasing. All of the freedom to tinker in the world is worthless to me if I can't get the basics sorted without a significant investment of my time.
- davidw 15y ago
  You would hope that on a site like Hacker News, there would be a good percentage of users who would get a lot of utility out of being able to tinker with their operating system in ways not sanctioned by the creator of said OS.
  - arthur_debert 15y ago
    The issue is not that one would like to tinker, but that without a significant time investment tinkering, you can't get the basics working. Nothing precludes the OS from being tinkerable but mostly working out of the box.
    - thatjoshguy 15y ago
      Why I love OS X. I remember using Terminal to change every single .string string to "LOL" on one of the school macs. Good times indeed...
    - icarus127 15y ago
      In my experience this hasn't been true of (some distributions of) Linux in several years. I've talked to a lot of people who hold this opinion and they generally haven't tried Linux in 5+ years.
      - 15y ago
rbarooah 15y ago
The kind of freedom you mention is not a reason why they are superior in some absolute way. It's a factor which, in the real world today, makes them better for some purposes and worse for others. There are reasonable but unproven conjectures that this kind of freedom could become the most important factor over time, but the existence of conjectures doesn't demonstrate any inherent superiority.
mseebach 15y ago
One more thing: A terminal as a first class citizen. Definitely not on Windows, and while the OSX one is orders of magnitude better, I seem to recall it's still a bit lacking. What ruins OSX for me isn't the terminal, though, it's that X apps aren't first class.
- terhechte 15y ago
  That's more of a toolkit problem. For most X apps, there's no way to figure out (for OSX) what part of the app is the Main Menu. And what functions to call when a drag/drop happens, there's no interface for it. Under X, every toolkit has it's own solutions. The only solution is to embed support for compiling to native Mac apps into the toolkit. There were projects to pull that off for KDE and Gnome, but somehow nobody continued working on them. I had the KOffice running first class on my Mac in 2004, and also Inkscape and GIMP a couple of years ago, but these native interfaces were buggy, and somehow there wasn't enough leverage to really finish them. Sad.
- lloeki 15y ago
  > I seem to recall it's still a bit lacking Not in the least since Snow Leopard, as Terminal.app has been perfectly fine (with Terminal Colors SIMBL plugin, and MouseTerm if you really want) and even better in Lion. For utmost configurability you could lean towards iTerm2, which you can tweak to no end (and arguably more than most X terminals). Platform-specific tools from pb{copy,paste} to tmutil are truly useful and improved at each new release. Tools like brew give you all the package management love you could want, and xorg support is as first class as it could get without OSX being X-based itself. I guess that if you want to go further than what OSX currently support, then you're looking for getty VTs, tiling window managers or Compiz customizability. As such one should probably not try to shoehorn Linux into OSX and rather use Linux (or some *BSD) directly.
  - celerity 15y ago
    Unfortunately, the terminal on OSX is incredibly buggy. Keeps incorrextly coloring commands, randomly failing... Perhaps it's because of the outdated bash they use?
route66 15y ago
Besides that, while I'm not sure it's still a valid concern: When I switched from Windows to Linux in the mid 90's it was a transition from a box with an illegal copy of MASM and a not-really-working copy of a C++ compiler to a box with a plethora of PL's, databases, code-examples and whatnot with an enormous educational value for me. On the winbox I learned Assembler, on the linbox I learned to program, that made the big difference for me. Is it still that way for others or is the current situation on windows better? (not considering OSX as you can install pretty much anything there nowadays)
- maxerickson 15y ago
  There are various ports of the GNU tool system and Microsoft has been making recent compilers available for download (and use, the free editions include redistribution rights). Lots of other programming systems also enjoy at least decent Windows support.
RexRollman 15y ago
I don't think being free necessarily makes an OS better piece of software.
tseabrooks 15y ago
Maybe I'm the only one... But as a professional developer working on everything from device drivers, embedded systems, up to your average LAMP stack and other web frameworks the "Freedom" of the operating system is worth exactly bupkis to me, ziltch, zero, nada. There are a whole host of reasons to use one OS over the other but this "Free as in Speech" is simply not a very good one. I'm far, FAR, more concerned about "Getting Shit Done" than I am about the free-ness of my OS. For some tasks the right tool for GSD is windows, for others it's osX, and for still others it's some Linux / *BSD (I'm a NetBSD fan myself). It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another. I guess it's a matter of what sort of things you grade on, For my personal OS grading metric there is only one item, "Helps me Get Shit Done". Nothing else matters, I just want to be productive.
- randallsquared 15y ago
  It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another. It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks. I'm assuming that that's what you mean by "short sighted"? Well, that's a bit snarky. I chose OS X above (though I'm moving more and more in the direction of Linux on the desktop again). I guess it just struck me as odd to use "short sighted" to describe the people who, for idealistic reasons, are willing to take a short-term hit to productivity to ensure long-term capability.
  - thatjoshguy 15y ago
    Just out of curiosity, what is making you move towards Linux? The huge appeal of OS X to me is, as someone said on here recently, it's basically *BSD with a fancy window manager and 1-to-1 hardware/software integration.
    - randallsquared 15y ago
      The way OS X is being locked down. In 10.8, signing is optional and even if you tell your system not to allow unsigned, you can bypass it on a case by case basis. In the next OS X, we'll probably move a bit farther in that direction, and at one per year, the OS X of 2016 will probably refuse to run unsigned applications at all, for excellent reasons involving security and malware, etc. I'm sure there will be a way to turn it off, but when it's basically impossible to get more than a few users unless you submit to signing, applications like Bittorrent will either submit or find themselves reduced to developers-only status. If they submit, Apple will be able to remove them at any time (for the vast majority of users, who won't know how or want to "root" their Macs). Even if Apple never chooses to use this maliciously -- and I don't think they would for a long time, if ever -- it's going to be only a matter of time before some group sues them to use it to stop infringement or something. I don't want to run a system where, by design, the manufacturer can remove my ability to run applications I've installed after the fact. So, even though I'm happier in general with the polish and fit of OS X than current desktop linuxes, that's where I'm headed.
sharjeel 15y ago
Free, but at the cost of your time. Everytime I've tried to switch from Windows to any usable Linux Distro, never has it happened that i didn't have to get frustrated due to some driver issues, laptop hibernation issues or some other issues which forced me back to Windows and kept Linux to either servers or a guest OS running in a VM in my PC.
- userulluipeste 15y ago
  I think ReactOS is what are you waiting for. It suppose to offer you the freedom of any other free and open source OS while holding the benefits of Windows. But it also awaits contributions. Spread the word.
  - eropple 15y ago
    ReactOS is poorly supported, incomplete, and user-hostile. Very little actually works on it--the software support is mostly limited to fairly old software, the only development happening for it is OS development (which is fine, but that's not a lot of use for normal people, or even software developers who don't have a burning desire to reinvent the wheel), and its UX decisions are a noted step backwards from Windows itself. I don't intend to be rude, but recommending ReactOS as a legitimate Windows alternative is reality-averse.
    - userulluipeste 15y ago
      "ReactOS is incomplete" = still needs development attention, which is what I've said - "it also awaits contributions". "user-hostile" as much as Windows has ever been. "Very little actually works on it" is actually more than what works on Linux + Wine, which at it's turn (like many would claim) do cover enough needs already, and that's only the "alpha stage" we're talking about here. ReactOS is getting better and better at the fastest pace relative to the rest of the OSS. You see, even if the ReactOS project had to start right now, it would still have a guaranteed chance of succeeding thanks to it's principles: it is free and open source like any other "free-as-in-speech" option out there, plus the one thing that makes the difference - it avoids alienating the users by breaking the backward binary compatibility for the sake of whatever reason. It offers the Windows simplicity.
Spearchucker 15y ago
Before I start, what follows is my personal opinion, based on my own experience. I'm not saying my way is right. I'm saying it's right for me. Superior (i.e. free) will not make me use it (Linux, or anything else that's free). Every January 1st I refresh all of my personal PCs and laptops. Every January 1st I kick off Windows installs on three of them while I give a Linux distribution a go on the fourth - a stock Sony Vaio P-Series. Never, ever has the install run smoothly. And I have to admit that a single bump in the road is enough for me to delete the partition and put Windows back on. Because I need stuff to work. I'm productive when I program, not while I debug installations. Software being free means absolutely zero to me.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
Agreed, though I think it's one of those things many people don't miss until they really need it, hence the lack of mentions.
BrainInAJar 15y ago
"And I'm sad this doesn't even warrant a mention." Because it's irrelevant. When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel?
- slowpoke 15y ago
  >Because it's irrelevant. On the contrary, it couldn't be more relevant. It's a fundamental issue of technology, and becoming increasingly important as we face the war on general purpose computing, a possible new advent of trusted computing with UEFI, and the list goes on. I would go as far as to say Free Software is on of the most important things of the 21st century. We're moving towards an information society, and if we don't free the means to create, process and transmit information (as well as information itself), we will lose control to a few big corporations. I'm not planning to let that happen. >When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel? I haven't done that yet, but I occasionally poke around in the sources for things like the coreutils, read them, try to understand them and learn from them. I plan to do that with the Linux kernel at some point, too. You simply can't do that on unfree operating systems.
goodcanadian 15y ago
"Free - as in Beer" has always been the more important point to me. This is followed closely by the ability to screw around with anything I want which, I suppose, is close to the "Free - as in Speech" argument, but for me it has always been about pragmatism rather than ideology.
- nileshtrivedi 15y ago
  Ideologies are pragmatic in the long term.

I would just like to add that there is a valid reason why Linux or the *BSDs are superior to Windows or OS X - they are Free. As in Speech. And I'm sad this doesn't even warrant a mention.

csomar 15y ago

How much does the price tag matters when you are a developer or professional that gets paid $150/hour?

pavanky 15y ago
Free as in freedom. Not free pizza. If you are getting $150 an hour, there are better things to do with the money than flaunt it in public.
orta 15y ago
You're thinking free as in beer. Free as in speech means open source. As a developer you gain more from that as you can tweak/maintain your own software if needs be.
mahmud 15y ago
In the last 5 years I have spent more on Free Software donations than I have in licensing crippleware.
csomar 15y ago
Wow. I'm getting quite of a down votes. I'm not opposed to Open Source software, actually I'm contributing to one of them. What I meant is that when the price tag is so small comparing to your earnings (since you are going to use the software for work), why would you make it a decision factor when picking an OS?
- dchest 15y ago
  You are again confusing free software, open source software, and gratis software. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...

Osiris 15y ago

I agree with you. That's certainly a 'pro' on the side of Linux. I stated that every OS has it's pros and cons, but my goal wasn't to list what those are. To say unilaterally that it's better for all people at all times in all use cases is, at the very least, an overstatement. While being free is a top concern for you and many others, for some (perhaps many) usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability, and that's a choice we should all be free to make.

slowpoke 15y ago
>usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability While some argue that this is the current situation, I want to point out that's a false dichotomy. Freedom and usability aren't orthogonal concepts like some make them out to be. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we need to lock everything down to make it "usable". Also, Freedom of software (and hardware) ultimately has greater implications on society as a whole, which is why I raised the issue. It's not merely a feature, a pro or con, it's something which at least people like here on HN should be greatly concerned about. Computers play an incredibly important role today, and will only become even more important in the future. It's important to retain control over them on a fundamental level, and that requires Open Standards, Free Software and Open Hardware.
- SamReidHughes 15y ago
  > While some argue that this is the current situation, I want to point out that's a false dichotomy. Freedom and usability aren't orthogonal concepts like some make them out to be. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we need to lock everything down to make it "usable". Nobody is making this claim, so why are you trying to refute it?
- celer 15y ago
  For the virtues of locking everything down, I would switch from free v not to mac v windows. These are the two dominant operating systems, dislike it as I think we do. Apple locks down everything. Apple hardware, on the iphone Apple Software, Apple plugins and addons, everything, to the greatest extent possible, is controlled by Apple. This yields benefits. Driver installs giving you problems? Not with Apple. Screen display no working properly? Not with Apple. They control everything, and they make it all perfect. Windows makes a "something for everyone and everything" strategy. It gives you more options, but it also gives you more headaches. I don't think it is possible to increase options endlessly without costs.

conradfr 15y ago

My way of thinking is that being free does not really to me, a lambda user, make it superior but otherwise just add pros and cons. By using mostly Windows I trade the inconvenient and risks of non-free with other advantages. It is a informed choice. RMS may hate me though :)

timClicks 15y ago
Are you able to explain the term "lambda user"?
- conradfr 15y ago
  Sorry it's a very bad translation from French, it's Monday morning ... I think something like "non-power-users", or "random/average user" would be a better term ?
  - DanBC 15y ago
    That's an excellent term, and I am going to start using it.
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  Someone who does a lot of lisp?
  - marshray 15y ago
    A user who introduces a new variable binding environment?
- grandalf 15y ago
  an anonymous utility function.

jsolson 15y ago

Freedom also carries a cost. At the end of the day, the best OS for any given individual is the one that gives them the largest net increase in utility, for their personal utility function. My experience suggests that a Free OS isn't worth it to me, but it's been about six years since I gave it a go full-time. The last time I gave Linux a good go round (as in using it as my primary OS for everything I did), I still had to invest time in getting my touchpad to work correctly with X or getting decent sub-pixel anti-aliasing. All of the freedom to tinker in the world is worthless to me if I can't get the basics sorted without a significant investment of my time.

davidw 15y ago
You would hope that on a site like Hacker News, there would be a good percentage of users who would get a lot of utility out of being able to tinker with their operating system in ways not sanctioned by the creator of said OS.
- arthur_debert 15y ago
  The issue is not that one would like to tinker, but that without a significant time investment tinkering, you can't get the basics working. Nothing precludes the OS from being tinkerable but mostly working out of the box.
  - thatjoshguy 15y ago
    Why I love OS X. I remember using Terminal to change every single .string string to "LOL" on one of the school macs. Good times indeed...
  - icarus127 15y ago
    In my experience this hasn't been true of (some distributions of) Linux in several years. I've talked to a lot of people who hold this opinion and they generally haven't tried Linux in 5+ years.
    - 15y ago

rbarooah 15y ago

The kind of freedom you mention is not a reason why they are superior in some absolute way. It's a factor which, in the real world today, makes them better for some purposes and worse for others. There are reasonable but unproven conjectures that this kind of freedom could become the most important factor over time, but the existence of conjectures doesn't demonstrate any inherent superiority.

mseebach 15y ago

One more thing: A terminal as a first class citizen. Definitely not on Windows, and while the OSX one is orders of magnitude better, I seem to recall it's still a bit lacking. What ruins OSX for me isn't the terminal, though, it's that X apps aren't first class.

terhechte 15y ago
That's more of a toolkit problem. For most X apps, there's no way to figure out (for OSX) what part of the app is the Main Menu. And what functions to call when a drag/drop happens, there's no interface for it. Under X, every toolkit has it's own solutions. The only solution is to embed support for compiling to native Mac apps into the toolkit. There were projects to pull that off for KDE and Gnome, but somehow nobody continued working on them. I had the KOffice running first class on my Mac in 2004, and also Inkscape and GIMP a couple of years ago, but these native interfaces were buggy, and somehow there wasn't enough leverage to really finish them. Sad.
lloeki 15y ago
> I seem to recall it's still a bit lacking Not in the least since Snow Leopard, as Terminal.app has been perfectly fine (with Terminal Colors SIMBL plugin, and MouseTerm if you really want) and even better in Lion. For utmost configurability you could lean towards iTerm2, which you can tweak to no end (and arguably more than most X terminals). Platform-specific tools from pb{copy,paste} to tmutil are truly useful and improved at each new release. Tools like brew give you all the package management love you could want, and xorg support is as first class as it could get without OSX being X-based itself. I guess that if you want to go further than what OSX currently support, then you're looking for getty VTs, tiling window managers or Compiz customizability. As such one should probably not try to shoehorn Linux into OSX and rather use Linux (or some *BSD) directly.
- celerity 15y ago
  Unfortunately, the terminal on OSX is incredibly buggy. Keeps incorrextly coloring commands, randomly failing... Perhaps it's because of the outdated bash they use?

route66 15y ago

Besides that, while I'm not sure it's still a valid concern: When I switched from Windows to Linux in the mid 90's it was a transition from a box with an illegal copy of MASM and a not-really-working copy of a C++ compiler to a box with a plethora of PL's, databases, code-examples and whatnot with an enormous educational value for me. On the winbox I learned Assembler, on the linbox I learned to program, that made the big difference for me. Is it still that way for others or is the current situation on windows better? (not considering OSX as you can install pretty much anything there nowadays)

maxerickson 15y ago
There are various ports of the GNU tool system and Microsoft has been making recent compilers available for download (and use, the free editions include redistribution rights). Lots of other programming systems also enjoy at least decent Windows support.

RexRollman 15y ago

I don't think being free necessarily makes an OS better piece of software.

tseabrooks 15y ago

Maybe I'm the only one... But as a professional developer working on everything from device drivers, embedded systems, up to your average LAMP stack and other web frameworks the "Freedom" of the operating system is worth exactly bupkis to me, ziltch, zero, nada. There are a whole host of reasons to use one OS over the other but this "Free as in Speech" is simply not a very good one. I'm far, FAR, more concerned about "Getting Shit Done" than I am about the free-ness of my OS. For some tasks the right tool for GSD is windows, for others it's osX, and for still others it's some Linux / *BSD (I'm a NetBSD fan myself). It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another. I guess it's a matter of what sort of things you grade on, For my personal OS grading metric there is only one item, "Helps me Get Shit Done". Nothing else matters, I just want to be productive.

randallsquared 15y ago
It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another. It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks. I'm assuming that that's what you mean by "short sighted"? Well, that's a bit snarky. I chose OS X above (though I'm moving more and more in the direction of Linux on the desktop again). I guess it just struck me as odd to use "short sighted" to describe the people who, for idealistic reasons, are willing to take a short-term hit to productivity to ensure long-term capability.
- thatjoshguy 15y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what is making you move towards Linux? The huge appeal of OS X to me is, as someone said on here recently, it's basically *BSD with a fancy window manager and 1-to-1 hardware/software integration.
  - randallsquared 15y ago
    The way OS X is being locked down. In 10.8, signing is optional and even if you tell your system not to allow unsigned, you can bypass it on a case by case basis. In the next OS X, we'll probably move a bit farther in that direction, and at one per year, the OS X of 2016 will probably refuse to run unsigned applications at all, for excellent reasons involving security and malware, etc. I'm sure there will be a way to turn it off, but when it's basically impossible to get more than a few users unless you submit to signing, applications like Bittorrent will either submit or find themselves reduced to developers-only status. If they submit, Apple will be able to remove them at any time (for the vast majority of users, who won't know how or want to "root" their Macs). Even if Apple never chooses to use this maliciously -- and I don't think they would for a long time, if ever -- it's going to be only a matter of time before some group sues them to use it to stop infringement or something. I don't want to run a system where, by design, the manufacturer can remove my ability to run applications I've installed after the fact. So, even though I'm happier in general with the polish and fit of OS X than current desktop linuxes, that's where I'm headed.

sharjeel 15y ago

Free, but at the cost of your time. Everytime I've tried to switch from Windows to any usable Linux Distro, never has it happened that i didn't have to get frustrated due to some driver issues, laptop hibernation issues or some other issues which forced me back to Windows and kept Linux to either servers or a guest OS running in a VM in my PC.

userulluipeste 15y ago
I think ReactOS is what are you waiting for. It suppose to offer you the freedom of any other free and open source OS while holding the benefits of Windows. But it also awaits contributions. Spread the word.
- eropple 15y ago
  ReactOS is poorly supported, incomplete, and user-hostile. Very little actually works on it--the software support is mostly limited to fairly old software, the only development happening for it is OS development (which is fine, but that's not a lot of use for normal people, or even software developers who don't have a burning desire to reinvent the wheel), and its UX decisions are a noted step backwards from Windows itself. I don't intend to be rude, but recommending ReactOS as a legitimate Windows alternative is reality-averse.
  - userulluipeste 15y ago
    "ReactOS is incomplete" = still needs development attention, which is what I've said - "it also awaits contributions". "user-hostile" as much as Windows has ever been. "Very little actually works on it" is actually more than what works on Linux + Wine, which at it's turn (like many would claim) do cover enough needs already, and that's only the "alpha stage" we're talking about here. ReactOS is getting better and better at the fastest pace relative to the rest of the OSS. You see, even if the ReactOS project had to start right now, it would still have a guaranteed chance of succeeding thanks to it's principles: it is free and open source like any other "free-as-in-speech" option out there, plus the one thing that makes the difference - it avoids alienating the users by breaking the backward binary compatibility for the sake of whatever reason. It offers the Windows simplicity.

Spearchucker 15y ago

Before I start, what follows is my personal opinion, based on my own experience. I'm not saying my way is right. I'm saying it's right for me. Superior (i.e. free) will not make me use it (Linux, or anything else that's free). Every January 1st I refresh all of my personal PCs and laptops. Every January 1st I kick off Windows installs on three of them while I give a Linux distribution a go on the fourth - a stock Sony Vaio P-Series. Never, ever has the install run smoothly. And I have to admit that a single bump in the road is enough for me to delete the partition and put Windows back on. Because I need stuff to work. I'm productive when I program, not while I debug installations. Software being free means absolutely zero to me.

SkyMarshal 15y ago

Agreed, though I think it's one of those things many people don't miss until they really need it, hence the lack of mentions.

BrainInAJar 15y ago

"And I'm sad this doesn't even warrant a mention." Because it's irrelevant. When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel?

slowpoke 15y ago
>Because it's irrelevant. On the contrary, it couldn't be more relevant. It's a fundamental issue of technology, and becoming increasingly important as we face the war on general purpose computing, a possible new advent of trusted computing with UEFI, and the list goes on. I would go as far as to say Free Software is on of the most important things of the 21st century. We're moving towards an information society, and if we don't free the means to create, process and transmit information (as well as information itself), we will lose control to a few big corporations. I'm not planning to let that happen. >When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel? I haven't done that yet, but I occasionally poke around in the sources for things like the coreutils, read them, try to understand them and learn from them. I plan to do that with the Linux kernel at some point, too. You simply can't do that on unfree operating systems.

goodcanadian 15y ago

"Free - as in Beer" has always been the more important point to me. This is followed closely by the ability to screw around with anything I want which, I suppose, is close to the "Free - as in Speech" argument, but for me it has always been about pragmatism rather than ideology.

nileshtrivedi 15y ago
Ideologies are pragmatic in the long term.