Who uses linux?
what's missing in Linux at this point is a killer application, a tangible reason for users to switch.
At the moment, there is none, unless you want to believe your geeky nerdy friend that keeps telling you "Windoz crashez all the timez dude". Some will surrender to the hype, get the thing installed and then, even if things go smoothly, what you do? What did you gain? You'll have to relearn the OS for what? Until the desktop experience is on par with Windows (which, imo, is not) and there is no real advantage to move over, people will rightly stay where they are.
Release Half Life 3 as a Linux-only killer app, and you'll start seeing a movement... until then, it's all useless geeky nerdy hype.
Release Half Life 3 as a Linux-only killer app, and you'll start seeing a movement... until then, it's all useless geeky nerdy hype.
Then what you'll get isn't a killer app, it's a flop =/ You don't need just a killer app, you need to convince users that the platform will bring many things like said killer app or they won't bother switching (why will they switch if they will be stuck with just one thing?). They need something that will look to be it will be better than what they already have.
I wouldn't be surprised if HL3 was a Steambox exclusive, though...
[quote name='Sik_the_hedgehog' timestamp='1357535154' post='5018449']
As a general rule, you want to avoid writes to the SSD as much as possible, both due to wear off and because they're horribly slow (even slower than on a hard disk - SSDs are faster at reading
[/quote]
I think you should check out SSDs again, because I think your facts are slightly outdated.
Not only are they quite cheap, but most of them has pretty much the same write speed as read speed nowadays.
SSD is without question the most cost efficient upgrade you can give your computer today, if you don't have it already.
Makes it scary quick :)
As far as I know they start fast since all the blocks are blank but once it starts running out of blank blocks and it needs to start erasing making them slower. Again, initially it's fast since blocks are pretty much new, but over time it will start slowing down. Some drives can erase blocks while it isn't writing to reduce slow down when it actually needs to write (and may rearrange blocks as needed), but if you're hammering it with writes constantly it isn't going to work very well. Not really a problem for normal file accesses, more of a problem when using the drive as an extension of RAM...
The wearing issue still exists. Remember, the problem with swap pages is that they're bound to write very often to the drive, and overwriting the old data, not appending. So if you go with a SSD either make sure you can run without a swap page or get a hard disk to run the swap page there (old small hard disks seem like they could be useful for this purpose).
[quote name='Sik_the_hedgehog' timestamp='1357556720' post='5018547']
The wearing issue still exists. Remember, the problem with swap pages is that they're bound to write very often to the drive, and overwriting the old data, not appending. So if you go with a SSD either make sure you can run without a swap page or get a hard disk to run the swap page there (old small hard disks seem like they could be useful for this purpose).
[/quote]
Or, you know, get some more RAM so you don't need to hit the disk so much.
The wearing issue still exists. Remember, the problem with swap pages is that they're bound to write very often to the drive, and overwriting the old data, not appending. So if you go with a SSD either make sure you can run without a swap page or get a hard disk to run the swap page there (old small hard disks seem like they could be useful for this purpose).
For the record I've been running an SSD as my primary drive since mid-2009 (256Gig OCZ Vertex series), with the swap drive pointed at it and having installed windows a couple of times over this period (due to system upgrades) and the drive still functions just perfectly.
Nor does it suffer from slow down issues or other related problems which plagued earlier drives - starting from about 2009 onwards SSD drive controller tech really did improve quite significantly to the point where on some drivers you would have to be writing gigs for data EVERY day before the drive would fail after about 5 years.
But saying "Then who cares to switch to Linux?" seems unrelated - if someone is considering switching, why should it matter what it comes on? You can buy machines without an OS, and anyone on a forum for game development I would hope is capable of installing their own OS.
The last bit is just plain wrong (OpenOffice), and seems a flawed argument anyway, since not everyone needs to run Office.
Personally I have Ubuntu installed dual-boot on my Clevo, though Windows is still my main preferred OS I use most the time - I think Ubuntu is fine, just I still prefer Windows overall. I only have Windows on my Samsung ultra-portable. I find it odd the way that arguments end up so polarised between "Windows is always crashing" and "Linux is unusable" when in practice neither are even remotely true imo (I've never had Windows 7 crash, even graphics driver crashes fail to take it out, Ubuntu failed to boot after an update however; even if overall Linux is more stable than Windows, the difference must be so tiny to be unnoticeable for users, as both are extremely stable; Ubuntu I would say is easy enough for an average user). Whilst I prefer Windows, the differences are slight and a matter of preference, and both are really good OSs.
@Bregma I've installed the retail version of Windows 7 (which wasn't customised to any particular version), and found it easy and straightforward, just as much as Ubuntu. The Windows 8 RTM seemed fine too. Hours to format the drives? Something seems seriously wrong there. As for rebooting, Ubuntu has to reboot after updates too, which it seems to do more often than Windows.
@MichaBen "I have to agree that installing Windows is not something for beginners though."
Is Linux? Or any OS?
@Karsten_: "As Google Android has proven, users are quite happy to run Linux. It just needs to be marketed upon them (sigh...)."
I agree that more people could run GNU/Linux if there was better marketing support. Though I disagree that Android is proof of this for Linux - although Android uses the Linux kernel, it is not the same OS as GNU/Linux - it's just that people tend to refer "GNU/Linux" as "Linux" (much to RMS's dislike).
@Sik_the_hedgehog "Also makes the swap page unusable (try to use it on a SSD and watch how quickly it dies due to wear off), so you better add more RAM to make up for it if you were using swap beforehand [snip]"
Do you have a reference for these claims that isn't years old? My reading on the subject suggests that this is a thing of the past. Also see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx , "Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?" Plus RAM is cheap these days...
I agree that more people could run GNU/Linux if there was better marketing support. Though I disagree that Android is proof of this for Linux - although Android uses the Linux kernel, it is not the same OS as GNU/Linux - it's just that people tend to refer "GNU/Linux" as "Linux" (much to RMS's dislike).
Allthough GNU/Linux isn't really an OS either, the LSB compliant distros could possibly be grouped together as an OS family(since they are binary compatible) but saying that a non LSB GNU/Linux distro is the same OS as for example Redhat or Ubuntu is quite misleading (Ubuntu for example is closer to being 100% binary compatible with Windows95(through wine) than it is to being 100% binary compatible with a some non-LSB distributions or Android)
