Linux is for die-hards. It is plain and simple.
Linux is still not simple enough for the average user who needs shit to just work. Don’t need to be in the middle of recording something and the sound crap out or playing music and it not work on their $30 to $150 device they just brought. There are some of us who will take the time, the hours to get it working, but even we are going to have our limits.
In the coming years, Linux will hopefully become easier as it always has and I believe the distributions are becoming smaller enough to focus on one or the other. I mean, when I last tried Linux RedHat distribution 5 or 6 years ago, I knew enough to get around, but not enough to really do anything useful (setup Wine? Nope. Was it worth setting up Wine? Probably not.)
I discovered the problem with forking projects and have several versions. The fact that Microsoft is one company and Apple is one company doesn’t seem to appear to make any amount of sense. For example, if you took everyone that was doing the ALSA drivers, the Pulse Drivers, the OSS drivers, etc and like, I don’t know, developed a single driver based off of one of those, then you might just have something that works and works consistency with majority of devices and in VM.
Another fact is that you have really two big Windowing Shells: KDE and Gnome. You will notice that Windows and Mac OS X only has one for their distributions. Which is the best one? You also have various smaller compact ones that will most likely force you to do more work, but will be compact, lightweight, and crash less frequently (not that the others crash frequently, just that it will be more stable).
Just think about if the developers put their heads together on just one and made one awesome! It would be one that developers building applications for would have to support. They wouldn’t have to choose between the QT or the Gnome API. I wouldn’t be using KDE or Gnome and wishing that I could use an application that works on the other.
I want stuff that just works and for the most part, Linux just work fine for what I’m doing right now. That is, if I don’t want to really do anything with sound or like test my graphics card. I’m not sure if I could go back to Windows, except for the 64-bit versions with 8GB of RAM. I think the problem is that with Windows, I’m constantly using more swap file than I need to use and on Linux, I’m barely using any. On Linux, I’ll need to use upwards to all my RAM before the swap is used. If I tried to do that on Windows, my system will run at a crawl as it tried to push the majority of my RAM usage to the page file.
I don’t know about you, but I get real irritated when I have 3.2GB and I’m using 2GB swap file and 1GB of actual RAM. So, I think I might go for the MacOS and run Windows in a VM. I believe Linux will eventually do what I want it in another 3 or 4 years, but by then, I might learn about a setting for Windows to not use the page file as much and it would be decent to use.
Well, that said, I won’t be buying a Mac, I’ll be building one. Also, it won’t be for another few months, I might need to buy specific parts for it. Actually, I could probably get away with having a PC for development and building a PC using Windows for Games and other Windows applications.
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