Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

ConnorBehan · 2009-06-22 00:47:55

ngoonee wrote:

ffmpeg is actually one of the reasons I switched from Ubuntu to Arch, cos Ubuntu decided to ship a stripped version of it due to licensing concerns.

Shhhh, you're giving them ideas

Ranguvar · 2009-06-22 04:58:53

I too miss some of the video capabilities of Windows apps... ffmpeg and mencoder IMHO are a mess, usage-wise, and I will likely never get used to them. That's not to say I don't prefer them over Windoze GUI apps (I do), but I prefer to use x264, xvidencraw, mp4box, mkvtoolnix, etc. from the command line -- it's what I'm used to, even on Windows.

Anyways, that's not the problem. The problem is that we have nothing like AviSynth for GNU/Linux, as it is tied to DirectShow/VfW, AviSynth 3.0 which was supposed to be instead based on the cross-platform GStreamer is basically dead, and the hacks that get it working under Linux are just that -- hacks. AviSynth is powerful beyond measure, and an absolute necessity for every encoding buff It's the one single thing I miss the most. Point me to another video processing scripting language where you can produce degrained video via 5-frame motion compensation and the FFT running on your GPU, and then take out the annoying watermark

Ah well.

cyclotomic · 2009-06-22 16:24:56

I think MS Paint is pretty neat, I miss it and its ridiculous jpeg compression. Also utorrent is pretty much the best torrent client in existence and I don't really like Wine all that much.

Meyithi · 2009-06-22 16:39:49

Games - gaming was in a better state in 1999 on Linux than it is today due to the popularity of Open GL. The support from developers such as ID and Epic was welcome as well.

Also, if Linux could land a properly supported "AAA" MMO natively, that would help out immensely.

generic_ · 2009-06-22 23:06:09

Well I actually told my teacher to read this whole thread.(And she did.) The funny thing is adobe dreamweaver is the essential software that is used in my "web design".(All they do is teach us how to use expensive software.) In the end we came to an agreement. Linux is a perfectly viable alternative for average users with no specif needs. Development is very strong, but it is lacking support from bigger companies like adobe.(I don't completely agree with that, adobe yes but it seems the more "high-end production" up you go the more likely there is to BE support for linux such as when someone was mentioning 3d printers, and other very specific stuff Though I guess those rent "bigger companies" anyway...) She also uses open office but me and her agree that really nothing replaces power-point.(Is there a good replacement I've never found one, ooo-presentation is just sad in my opinion.). Games? Linux just completely fails in this area so we did not even discuss it. It's not linux's fault is would probably be better in performance than windows if direct X was open source and fully usable with Linux. And yeah media development is not really mature on Linux yet, Though after all this she said she was the most impressed with the knowledge and willingness along with the quick and strong support from OUR community. : ) She said she will be try Archlinux on her home desktop computer. Well very interesting topic this was. Really it was really cool. And a there is a new Linux user (if she continues to use it). Either way +1 for arch. Thank you guys for all your help.

Last edited by generic_ (2009-06-22 23:09:02)

iBertus · 2009-06-23 03:50:03

First, a few words on using Excel for serious work. Just don't! You'll simply be locked into the MS way of working. R, SAS, etc. are may more flexible.

Second, I've observed that most of the issues people claim to have with linux are just due to lack of creativity or skill on the part of either the user or their technical support team.

@OP: If you're teacher cannot tell you what makes Windows a better "wide" development platform, whatever that means, you should call bullshit. Sorry, but I don't listen to arguments like "it has the most market share."

anadyr · 2009-10-28 21:42:40

The only advantage I can think of is that Windows doesn't need so much time before things start working. Every month or so I stumble upon a linux problem that needs solving... so I start reading wikis and search forums and spending a lot of time. For instance, now I am trying to figure out some strange ALSA problem. I am usually not too much bothered about that, but sometimes I spent hours trying things, configs, and solutions. That is quite frustrating.

However, I was forced to work with Windows Vista for about three months, and then it is very clear again that my configurations-take-time-nuissance is only very minor compared to the overall frustration with Windows (for the well known reasons cited earlier).

fukawi2 · 2009-10-28 21:58:35

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/For … Bumping.27

skottish · 2009-10-28 22:00:34

anadyr wrote:

The only advantage I can think of is that Windows doesn't need so much time before things start working. Every month or so I stumble upon a linux problem that needs solving... so I start reading wikis and search forums and spending a lot of time. For instance, now I am trying to figure out some strange ALSA problem. I am usually not too much bothered about that, but sometimes I spent hours trying things, configs, and solutions. That is quite frustrating.

Windows isn't a rolling release. The fact that it has as many problems as it does with a base system that's over 13 years old tells a story of how catastrophic it could be.

JohannesSM64 · 2009-11-01 12:25:41

Windows has standards. If you write a program for Windows XP, it will work on any machine with Windows XP. Because of the standards, it's easy to write programs that integrate tightly with the platform. Since the kernel isn't in constant development, it's much easier to write drivers. I can install Windows on practically any machine, go find a few drivers, install, and everything works perfectly - full resolution, acceleration, perfect audio, perfect wlan. I've had a plethora of problems with wlan in Linux systems, and zero in Windows. Again, because the standards, I can go find any EXE, double click it, and have it work. I can even put some full-featured, configured GUI apps on a thumb drive, carry them everywhere, and run them straight off the thumb drive anywhere and have it work. While the APIs and UIs MS enforce on their users are certainly not ideal, they are standardized. In the GNU/Linux world, everything keeps changing. In Windows, you don't have to worry about kernel upgrades breaking things, dependency hells or "Windows only" games and tools not working in Wine. There are certainly reasons to run Windows.

mrunion · 2009-11-01 15:02:58

@JohannesSM64 -- this is only true if you use THEIR development tools and libraries. When you want to delve into more "custom" stuff, you;ll pay the price. I was an MS dev for years -- certified and everything. I'd rather write code on Linux!

(It's probably safe to say "If you're using VB, you can run it everywhere", but VB sucks and should be beaten, killed and buried!)

fsckd · 2009-11-01 17:27:01

JohannesSM64 wrote:

In the GNU/Linux world, everything keeps changing. In Windows, you don't have to worry about kernel upgrades breaking things, dependency hells or "Windows only" games and tools not working in Wine.

DLL hell!

Oh, and the registry, one update monitor for every program/package, no automatic update for some programs and drivers, most solutions to problems are reinstall (partially or full), etc.

There are certainly reasons to run Windows.

YMMV.

Last edited by fsckd (2009-11-01 17:34:06)

Renan Birck · 2009-11-01 19:10:28

My $0.02, from a personal POV:

- Windows is (or at least tries to be) consistent... Things will (at least theoretically; I've seen it happen in practice) not break after a Windows Update.
- Even though I don't do audio/video/graphics design, I understand that the Linux alternatives sometimes aren't the best. I once tried Cinelerra and never again... I got SO frustrated with it, that I rebooted into Windows and used Movie Maker to do sth I needed to do with a video file.
- Technical apps which aren't available for Linux (this includes CAD/3D/pro audio/video/graphics etc...).
- Sometimes, hardware support. I have a hard time getting Bluetooth to work correctly on Linux, but on Windows it's completely smooth.

Again, it depends on what you're doing.

JohannesSM64 · 2009-11-01 20:09:07

fsckd wrote:

DLL hell!
Oh, and the registry, one update monitor for every program/package, no automatic update for some programs and drivers, most solutions to problems are reinstall (partially or full), etc.

Calm down please. I never said Windows is perfect. GNU/Linux is certainly superior in many ways.

Last edited by JohannesSM64 (2009-11-01 20:10:05)

Misfit138 · 2009-11-01 20:49:24

JohannesSM64 wrote:

Windows has standards. If you write a program for Windows XP, it will work on any machine with Windows XP. Because of the standards, it's easy to write programs that integrate tightly with the platform. Since the kernel isn't in constant development, it's much easier to write drivers. I can install Windows on practically any machine, go find a few drivers, install, and everything works perfectly - full resolution, acceleration, perfect audio, perfect wlan. I've had a plethora of problems with wlan in Linux systems, and zero in Windows. Again, because the standards, I can go find any EXE, double click it, and have it work. I can even put some full-featured, configured GUI apps on a thumb drive, carry them everywhere, and run them straight off the thumb drive anywhere and have it work. While the APIs and UIs MS enforce on their users are certainly not ideal, they are standardized. In the GNU/Linux world, everything keeps changing. In Windows, you don't have to worry about kernel upgrades breaking things, dependency hells or "Windows only" games and tools not working in Wine. There are certainly reasons to run Windows.

QFT. GNU has many advantages, but you have certainly highlighted some of Windows' strong points.

fsckd · 2009-11-01 21:13:19

JohannesSM64 wrote:

fsckd wrote:
DLL hell!
Oh, and the registry, one update monitor for every program/package, no automatic update for some programs and drivers, most solutions to problems are reinstall (partially or full), etc.
Calm down please. I never said Windows is perfect. GNU/Linux is certainly superior in many ways.

Those were counterpoints.

May be it's been a while since I've used Windows, but here's what happens (or used to happen or at least how it happened in my strange little world). Programs can step on each other's feet with ease. What's worse is this can create a hellish breakage of the system if you install the wrong stuff. For example, anything that can edit the registry can edit it globally.

Windows does not come with all the drivers. Just this year, I experienced the wonders of not having usable hardware on Windows because of this. Whereas Linux worked fine on the same machine. Go figure.

What's even nicer is so many components of the system having their own update monitor running in the background. This is nice except when the update breaks something.

Probably something I should have added in my other post is, Windows does not have a constant kernel interface. If it did, we wouldn't have seen complaints about the lack of drivers for Vista.

As for program compatibility, I could very well claim Windows does not have full POSIX compliance out of the box without special add-ons.

As with everything, YMMV.

loafer · 2009-11-01 21:49:10

JohannesSM64 is correct to a certain extent. Windows has standards but they are not always compatible with other "standards" and they are not always compatible with *other* Windows standards. For example, an application written in a certain version.net may need to be re-written to work in IE8.

sand_man · 2009-11-01 22:44:22

The same can be said with kernel versions.

JohannesSM64 · 2009-11-02 12:32:09

fsckd wrote:

May be it's been a while since I've used Windows, but here's what happens (or used to happen or at least how it happened in my strange little world). Programs can step on each other's feet with ease. What's worse is this can create a hellish breakage of the system if you install the wrong stuff. For example, anything that can edit the registry can edit it globally.

Yes, Windows can easily break if you install a load of fishy apps. Only install reliable apps.

fsckd wrote:

Windows does not come with all the drivers. Just this year, I experienced the wonders of not having usable hardware on Windows because of this. Whereas Linux worked fine on the same machine. Go figure.

Every single time I've installed Windows in my life, I've googled for a few drivers, installed them, and everything works smoothly.

fsckd wrote:

What's even nicer is so many components of the system having their own update monitor running in the background. This is nice except when the update breaks something.

What? I've never had an update break something in Windows. in GNU/Linux, though, certainly.

fsckd wrote:

As for program compatibility, I could very well claim Windows does not have full POSIX compliance out of the box without special add-ons.

POSIX is not the mother of all standards that every OS needs to adhere to.

I prefer GNU/Linux overall, but many many killer apps and games are only made for Windows.

Last edited by JohannesSM64 (2009-11-02 12:40:17)

Themaister · 2009-11-02 16:00:19

The greatest flaw of Windows is that apps have the possibility of getting full access to the system without the user explicitly stating so. This is a bit better in Win7 though, but the system is kinda shaky still. Also, the centralized registry is a pain when something goes wrong, or you want to configure something.

Also, setting up an XP installation on friends computers where they have lost the driver disc is a pain :3 On several occasions, I needed to inspect the hardware myself :\ And when you find out what hardware you have, you need to crawl google to find drivers for chipset, network, graphics, audio, etc. I don't expect the average PC-user to be able to do that. Again, the situation is a bit better with Win7 on more modern hardware, as you often only need to install GPU drivers.

fsckd · 2009-11-02 17:19:44

JohannesSM64 wrote:

[snip lot's of stuff here]
I prefer GNU/Linux overall[snip more stuff here]

That's why I added YMMV to each of my posts. You have not experienced all the problems I have had with Windows, and I may have not experienced the problems you have had with GNU/Linux. This doesn't imply our problems do not exist, right?

Anyways, I didn't mean to force you to defend an OS you don't prefer. I was simply pointing out some what you stated isn't true for everyone.

pseudonomous · 2009-11-02 22:43:20

JohannesSM64 wrote:

Windows has standards.

It's not so much that "Windows" has standards, it's that windows has a stable and largely backward compatible API / ABI, and this is something that Linux really lacks; nobody is at all interested in maintaining a stable ABI (becuase Linux is open source so you can just recomplie, right?) and it seems like a lot of our APIs are less stable than in the Windows world. On the other hand, both Solaris and FreeBSD have a lot more stable API/ABIs and keep backwards compatibility longer than linux; on the other hand, there's less software/hardware that works with FreeBSD and Solaris in the first place.

A big problem with Windows is that in fact does not have "standards", instead Microsoft implements some proprietary, patenet encumbered way of doing something, and then interoperating with it is a RPITA. Linux tends to focus on open source / open standards, so interoperating with Linux is, in principle, easy, but in practice no one cares because Microsoft has such a greater market share.

I believe that Windows has "user interface standards" as well, but it seems like they are largely ignored; linux has no appreciable user interface standards beyond what XDG standards (which people ignore) and the GNOME/KDE standards, which also seem to be commonly ignored, so in that respect we're not really any better off. OS X applications, on the other hand, tend to have consistent user interfaces which is nice, but there are other problems with OS X, like a lack of customizability and the fact that you are beholden to the whims of Apple.

Speaking of non-standardization; packaging software is also easier for windows becuase you only have to package your applications for at most 4-5 versions of windows, which are largely binary compatable anyway; linux has somewhere around 6-7 "major" distrubutions, and hundred of distrubutions in total, each of which lays out there FHS in a different way, may have different versions of libraries running, have different kernels, patched kernels, kernels compiled with different configs ... and beyond this even the package format is distro dependant; rpm, deb, tar.gz ...

In the end, I'm kind of using Linux in general, and Arch in particular, becuase it's kind of "the best of bad alternatives"; I certainly miss the easy availability of software for Windows, and the fact that webpages / tutorials / official tech support are setup to work with windows and maybe OS X, and generally linux support is left to the community to hack together. On the other hand, LInux is so easy to customize. script for, and compile software for, and it has better hardware/software support then FreeBSD.

But I think what I like the best about Linux is that, for all intents and purposes, you always get all the features. You don't have to shell out extra money to be able to join a domain; the same distro that you run your desktop/laptop with can be run as a server. You can simultanously use a machine as desktop AND server. You don't have to pay to upgrade to the latest version. You don't break the law when you install one copy on multiple computers. You don't break the law installing it in a VM. You don't have to license your server per CPU-core. And I trust open source developers to be trying to produce good programs and not just find some way to siphon one more dollar out of a users pocketbook.

Ranguvar · 2009-11-03 01:24:16

@pseudonomous: Wow, I think that's the first time in a long time that someone has written a semi-large block of text, and I agreed with every word, and I mean _every_ word xD

I think that the reason GNU/Linux has few stable API/ABIs is because of the distro model. Everything is based around getting software into the distros, which then handle the compiling and management for the software developers. So, there's absolutely no focus on providing a nice methodology for 3rd-party devs to make and distribute binary packages. The good news is that this hurts proprietary developers a bit (:P), but more often said proprietary software is very wanted and distros just have to bang on it until it works, which sucks for all.

*BSD and (Open)Solaris do better here because they do more of an integration into one defined OS, which has its own shortcomings as a model, and they are less targeted by 3rd-party developers anyways. That's where the Porters do a bang-up job forcing stuff to work (have you ever seen the mountain of patches they often use!? Anyways...).

I think that the distro model _is_ overall good, and we shouldn't drop it, but while I am prone to get annoyed by those who demand MSI-like installers for GNU/Linux, we DO need stable API/ABIs and easy ways to make 3rd-party binary packages, independent of the distros. The fact is that while package management systems kick some serious ass, there's always going to be that bit of rarely-used software the distros didn't package (or even just one distro didn't), and the user will be stuck, assuming they don't know how to make packages -- here's where the system as it is today fails. There's a huge drop-off when you hit an edge case of having no distro package (making your own or asking for help making one, or source-compiling yourself which is hackish and often complex). We need those edge cases covered spot-on -- we need to make sure it's dead-simple for 3rd parties to provide binaries that work well on nearly all common distros. Package management is preferred, but it can't cover everything.

Lay down the standard and say that if a distro has THESE characteristics, a binary package built THIS way will work brilliant, and distros will either conform or else build systems to work with those binaries anyways via emulation or whatever. The Linux Standard Base, Single Unix Specification, and POSIX are nice, but they don't go far enough.

dunc · 2009-11-03 10:59:43

pseudonomous wrote:

In the end, I'm kind of using Linux in general, and Arch in particular, becuase it's kind of "the best of bad alternatives"... But I think what I like the best about Linux is that, for all intents and purposes, you always get all the features.

Absolutely agree, 100%. There's a quote attributed to Winston Churchill, "Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented... apart from all the other ones". That's how I feel about Linux. It has a lot of problems - which have been well discussed in this thread, so I don't need to list them - but its flexibility and freedom still beat the alternatives hands down.

And when you've spent over a decade using an OS that most people these days have never heard of, the "lack" of software and websites set up for Linux seems like a joke. Try using a browser that doesn't support CSS.

Arch Linux

#51 2009-06-22 00:47:55

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#52 2009-06-22 04:58:53

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#53 2009-06-22 16:24:56

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#54 2009-06-22 16:39:49

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#55 2009-06-22 23:06:09

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#56 2009-06-23 03:50:03

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#57 2009-10-28 21:42:40

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#58 2009-10-28 21:58:35

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#59 2009-10-28 22:00:34

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#60 2009-11-01 12:25:41

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#61 2009-11-01 15:02:58

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#62 2009-11-01 17:27:01

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#63 2009-11-01 19:10:28

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#64 2009-11-01 20:09:07

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#65 2009-11-01 20:49:24

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#66 2009-11-01 21:13:19

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#67 2009-11-01 21:49:10

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#68 2009-11-01 22:44:22

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#69 2009-11-02 12:32:09

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#70 2009-11-02 16:00:19

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#71 2009-11-02 17:19:44

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#72 2009-11-02 22:43:20

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#73 2009-11-03 01:24:16

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

#74 2009-11-03 10:59:43

Re: Can you guys help me list of what windows has over linux.

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