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OS X Is No Longer On My Main System, But I Already Have Regrets

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  • Originally posted by Michael_S View Post

    Users dislike change. As I think I said earlier, the people angriest about the changes in Microsoft Windows 8 were the Microsoft fans. So you want to help adoption of Linux? Give yourself the biggest possible target audience and make your default desktop look like a prettier version of Windows 7. That's exactly what Cinnamon and RazorQt do, and I wouldn't be surprised if they become the two most popular Linux desktop environments in the next five years.
    I work at a Microsoft certified company that mostly does repairs for other businesses. Lots of the time when they start having trouble they think, if they just switch to Mac they won't be having these issues. I generally have to remind them that their computer was really old, and be paid like half the price for it too.

    But the point I'm getting at is how common it is to hear this, like there's a public consensus that switching to something other than Windows fixes the problem. They are right in a way, and it shows once again why Ubuntu is so popular. It's very similar to a mac in UI.

    The problem Windows has right now is they need to ditch legacy stuff entirely. But then they'd have almost no programs. Windows programs are it's own poison.

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    • Originally posted by Sonadow View Post
      IYou don't get this kind of special treatment with Linux; everything goes to the bugzilla where you have to wait for the developers to successfully recreate the issue so that it can be pushed with a general update package for all users. Which is not acceptable for an enterprise environment.
      If you are using a properly licensed RHEL you would get the same treatment.

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      • Originally posted by Sonadow View Post
        The dept wrote to OEM for help since it only affected their machines, but the OEM claimed that it was a Windows issue and they were unable to assist. So we had no choice but to ask Microsoft. In 4 days Microsoft sent down a specially written patch that solved the problem.

        You don't get this kind of special treatment with Linux; everything goes to the bugzilla where you have to wait for the developers to successfully recreate the issue so that it can be pushed with a general update package for all users. Which is not acceptable for an enterprise environment.
        If you are paying as much for an Enterprise distro as they were paying Microsoft (Microsoft does not send patches to just about any consumer), I'm pretty sure you'll get this kind of special treatment.

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        • Originally posted by profoundWHALE View Post
          I work at a Microsoft certified company that mostly does repairs for other businesses. Lots of the time when they start having trouble they think, if they just switch to Mac they won't be having these issues. I generally have to remind them that their computer was really old, and be paid like half the price for it too.

          But the point I'm getting at is how common it is to hear this, like there's a public consensus that switching to something other than Windows fixes the problem. They are right in a way, and it shows once again why Ubuntu is so popular. It's very similar to a mac in UI.

          The problem Windows has right now is they need to ditch legacy stuff entirely. But then they'd have almost no programs. Windows programs are it's own poison.
          I know it's an unpopular position to hold, but I think that the latest Microsoft stuff is largely pretty good, technologically speaking. I prefer to use alternatives for political reasons, not technical ones.

          And the legacy support that Microsoft does is their goose that laid the golden egg. Big enterprise customers want to run their apps written in Visual Basic and their ASP intranet websites targeted at IE6 until hell freezes over, and to retrain users as little as possible. Microsoft might take a revolutionary technological step forward by dumping all of their legacy support, but they really believe it would probably alienate more customers than it would gain. I suspect they're right - even as Slashdot and a dozen other open source sites have celebrated each Microsoft press release as a sign that the company is about to implode, their revenue from Office and related services just keeps going up.

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          • Originally posted by liam View Post
            This is why fedora is making reliable and easy rollbacks a priority for the desktop. It's something that all distros should be working on. in addition there is the problem of in place updates (I'm not sure how dist-upgrade works but I'd assume it downloads everything and reboots you to a safe initrd to provide a safe upgrade environment but given your problems with X I suspect it used some shortcuts).
            This is the single reason of why btrfs can't become the default filesystem soon enough. I use it with OpenSUSE, and it's awesome to know that if I fuck up something, the old working system is just a "snapper -v" ahead.

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            • Originally posted by erendorn View Post
              If you are paying as much for an Enterprise distro as they were paying Microsoft (Microsoft does not send patches to just about any consumer), I'm pretty sure you'll get this kind of special treatment.
              He said he worked at a school. Microsoft works extra hard to help schools and keep their products cheap for schools because their marketers are smart - make someone comfortable with Microsoft products from age 14-22, and they're much more likely to use those products from age 23-97.

              In any non-educational endeavor, I think you're point would be valid.

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              • Originally posted by Spittie View Post
                This is the single reason of why btrfs can't become the default filesystem soon enough. I use it with OpenSUSE, and it's awesome to know that if I fuck up something, the old working system is just a "snapper -v" ahead.
                I had to look that up. That's awesome. Ideally, it would be automatically integrated in Yast/yum/dnf/apt, so that every time you made a change it would snapshot for you and you could revert automatically. If you have to manually take snapshots yourself, it's harder.

                The Conary package manager supported rollbacks, but after the company that backed it was bought by SAS I think the project went defunct.

                The Nix package manager supposedly supports it. I've never tried it.

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                • Originally posted by Michael_S View Post
                  I had to look that up. That's awesome. Ideally, it would be automatically integrated in Yast/yum/dnf/apt, so that every time you made a change it would snapshot for you and you could revert automatically. If you have to manually take snapshots yourself, it's harder.
                  Indeed, Zypper create a new snapshot before and after installing any packages, and ootb OpenSUSE takes an hourly snapshot of your root too.

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                  • Originally posted by Michael_S View Post
                    I know it's an unpopular position to hold, but I think that the latest Microsoft stuff is largely pretty good, technologically speaking. I prefer to use alternatives for political reasons, not technical ones.

                    And the legacy support that Microsoft does is their goose that laid the golden egg. Big enterprise customers want to run their apps written in Visual Basic and their ASP intranet websites targeted at IE6 until hell freezes over, and to retrain users as little as possible. Microsoft might take a revolutionary technological step forward by dumping all of their legacy support, but they really believe it would probably alienate more customers than it would gain. I suspect they're right - even as Slashdot and a dozen other open source sites have celebrated each Microsoft press release as a sign that the company is about to implode, their revenue from Office and related services just keeps going up.
                    Sorry I should have clarified what I meant at the end: People are running into so many viruses and other issues because of continuing that legacy support, but they need that legacy support for their corporate clients, but they also have to move ahead with technology. It's this nasty tug of war thing going on.

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                    • Originally posted by Sonadow View Post
                      the department had a problem with a Windows update that, for some reason, affected only staff and students using notebooks from a certain OEM (which shall remain anonymous) that had the school's software installed; other notebook makes and brands were not affected.
                      Why anonymous? What is your vested interest in protecting this OEM?

                      Originally posted by Sonadow View Post
                      The dept wrote to OEM for help since it only affected their machines, but the OEM claimed that it was a Windows issue and they were unable to assist. So we had no choice but to ask Microsoft. In 4 days Microsoft sent down a specially written patch that solved the problem.
                      You don't really think that an average consumer could make such a request, do you? Microsoft will laugh in their face and send them back to the OEM in an infinite loop of misery. The nature of Academia is such that moving to Linux or OSX isn't nearly as foreign or difficult as in the business world, and Microsoft knows this. Of course they're going to give top-tier support to a large volume licensee of their product, especially in the academic world. If you were an organization with 20,000 RHEL licenses, I bet you'd get the same 'special treatment' from Red Hat.

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