Linux is useless

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You didn't answer my question. I asked why, if computers are getting faster, do we need it.

This is my problem with Windows - each rendition of Windows has been bigger than the last. Windows 95 fit in about 80mb when it first came out, 98 went out to 300mb, 2000 was 500mb, XP was 1.5gb, and Vista is close to 6gb.

Don't give me crap about driver support because XP and Vista dropped support for older hardware. And new features is a complete load too - Ubuntu is smaller - MUCH smaller - than Vista and it includes a full office suite! Where is that space in Vista going? BLOAT. Junk designed to make the footprint bigger so you have to buy bigger hardware to do the same thing you were doing in the previous generation. It's insane.

That's my two cents.

I have three machines with Windows Vista on them. One with 1GB of Ram, one with 2GB, and one with 4GB. On each machine, RAM usage sits at about 50% with no programs open. That's just how Vista manages RAM, as others have said.



Do you mean they are available for Linux as the latest version, do you mean your distro has all the latest versions, or do you mean you upgraded the software that came with the distro?



I've used a few too. Some crash, some fail to start. Occasionally, they work properly. It might depend on how popular your distro is.



I find this odd because I have had such drastically different results, without explanation. Perhaps Linux just hates me.



And this is guaranteed to get you the latest version of the app? What distro are you using?



This morning, I installed Kubuntu KDE4 again, this time on a virtual machine with the idea that I'd use it sparingly. I needed it because I wanted to use Kontact and that isn't available on Windows yet. After Kontact claimed it did not have permission to write to a samba share to save the calendar, even though the permissions were set fine, I gave up on that and tried other apps. Both Amarok and Dragon Player refused to play MP3s without giving an error message explaining why, even though I had installed the ubuntu-restricted-extras package, which from my understanding is suppose to remove purist problems like this. Given that my entire music collection is in MP3/WMA, except for one OGG folder (which plays just fine on Windows with a codec pack), and given that Chronix uses MP3s in their playlist, I had no use for music on KDE. I should note the OGG playback was badly inferior to that on WMP, though this could have been due to the VM. Finally, I tried Konqueror, which wouldn't sync bookmarks. I tried using it without this feature, but then it kept lagging for about 30 seconds once every 2 minutes. I got sick of this and had no clue what the problem was or how to fix it, so went back to Firefox on Windows, which ran great.

Having no further use for the VM, I deleted it. I suppose when I run into problems this fast it's hard to keep track of many things. I was ages away from running Skype, for example.



The included media was small, but you say you can get any package with a command line utility, so it sounds like most of it is just available in online repositories instead of on a CD. I myself prefer network installs of distros, which also do it this way.



Yes, it's gotten a lot better. I liked how when I installed Linux on the laptop, I was able to use my wireless card without needing to install or configure anything, and how even the volume buttons on my keyboard worked. That's impressive, and deserves an applause. But as for my web cam, it still does not work with Linux, and mine isn't the only one, from what I've read online. Nice to know Skype now has web cam support though. I'll have to look into it next time I need a new web cam and I'd definitely want to keep my options open by buying a web cam that works with Linux.

To be fair, web cams are not the most solid, not the most engineered and not the most functional in any operating system. I suppose with a 60 dollar one it might be better, but most of the web cams i've installed had trouble, windows or not. Often windows complains about the possibility of unstability if i install.

Driver support from fly-by-night web cam companies sucks in general. I dont use them enough to justify an expensive one. Are they better?

I bought a cheap $10 webcam off eBay once and it works fine in Linux. Not sure about application compatability, though, I haven't tried yet.

What brand/model? I want to set my laptop up as a motion detector. Is the color good? The one I have has terrible color.

I'm not really sure, its an 8 megapixel camera, they're pretty common on eBay.

You'd think companies would brand their cameras. Most of the ones I have seen dont do it either.

XP 4 life.

Planning on trying it out soon to see what I am supposedly missing.

And you complain about zealots?

There's no perfect OS out there, all have their good and bad sides. I like exploring them, it's a fun challenge.

The repo generally has the latest of everything. Well, ghc 6.8.1 is older than 6.8.3, but that hardly means anything. I didn't notice the distinction. My distro gets vital security updates of course, but I never bother to keep track of 'em anyway since I'm pretty sure I'm behind a NAT and don't have any services running.



Mine is not very popular.

Generic binaries work pretty consistently.



No, it's guaranteed to get me a recent version of the app with negligible and probably not user-visible distinctions from the absolute newest one, if not the newest one itself.

I use Vector.



mp3's work fine on my distro. I have about eight gigs of metal on my hard drive and about all of it is mp3 format. I would not be too happy if it didn't play.

MP3 = Yucky

At this point in time, everyone should switch to lossless formats such as FLAC, APE, WAVPACK, etc.

I'm not picky.

I can rarely tell these formats apart in terms of quality anyway.

I agree, Lunix is useless.

Can you elaborate please?

Unless you're running a server, Windows can do anything Linux can but better, especially DirectX, the best graphics API there is (designed specifically for games, therefore faster).