Re: 64 or 32 bit Win 7

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from J R FOX  on Wed, 12
May 2010 10:54:44 -0700 (PDT)


> in what little I've seen there seems to be a lot more work
> involved in setting them up, and the UI for them tends to be
> rather lacking in Win or Mac terms. While it would be great if
> free 'Nix apps could give their Win counterparts a serious run
> for the money, it hasn't really happened yet and I'm doubtful
> it ever will.

Relatively little energy has gone into development of big
consumer apps, and it doesn't help (it's outrageous, IMO) that
major players like Apple won't share their work. So there's
truth in what you say, but I think you're comparing bumble bees
to locomotives: misunderstanding what *nix does and why it is
used. For the most part, Unix/Linux is harnessed to a huge
range of very narrowly defined purposes. Most installations
devote all resources to a very few jobs. But they do those jobs
with unmatched efficiency and a degree of manual control that no
other operating system offers. I haven't bothered to look at
recent numbers, but there's a reason why virtually all the
serious servers in the world run on Solaris or FreeBSD or
RHEL/CentOS.

But does *nix necessarily involve "a lot more work in setup"?
If you simply want the defaults, Linux RPMs and packages install
hands-off, resolve dependencies automatically, and "just work".

Power implies complexity. Whether the XWindows UI is good or
bad is pretty much irrelevant; I don't know any sysadmin who
actually uses X -- they operate exclusively at a terminal prompt
(command line). So yeah, many programs have hundreds of manual
switches and options, to control minute aspects of the program.
Fantastic! Isn't that one reason that we use XyWrite -- to get
precise, controlled results? If I have a problem with Adobe
programs, for example, it's that some of them have a lot of
power but relatively little control -- e.g. Acrobat has
impoverished control compared to Ghostscript, even though the
Distiller engine
makes higher-quality PDFs.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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