clevin said:
miles behind? you need seriously retry linux before you make these statements. other than big commercial software such as MS Office, there ain't such thing called "miles behind". "freeware likes to be terrible and unusable?" these blindly over confident statement will not be helpful. don't forget OSX is derived from a bunch of freewares. Just can't believe Mac users are so over confident.
Sorry, but for the past maybe 2 years I've been a Linux user, with some periods of Linux usage before. It has improved greatly, but I still find Linux pretty bad, and eventhough I learned to hate Windows (which I've used for like 9 to 10 years before my switch to Linux), during the time I used Linux I've started to think Windows isn't as bad as everyone said it is. My Linux broke quite often too, although that might have been because I'm a Gentoo user, and Gentoo just loves to break. I really like OSX (most parts of it at least), even though I started using it maybe a week ago or so. I'm using Expose and the Dashboard all the time
One thing I hated about Linux, besides the lack of any good graphics software (Gimp is slow, the layout makes little sense (it took me several minutes to resize a picture, or to add a border, and each time I use it I'm searching again because the position didn't make any sense), quite a few good features are missing, and it was impossible for me to get Photoshop running on Wine), was or is the lack of a good audio player. There was a WinAMP clone... I don't like WinAMP, then there are a few usable players, like amaroK (quite good user interface, liked it alot, but slow, has (or at least had) a tendency to crash, and several very important features are missing, the sound quality wasn't very good to, IMHO. I think the only thing they cared about was the UI), but nothing even coming close to foobar2000 (Windows, freeware developed by a single person (if you don't count the plugins), and yet all those Linux programmers can't get it right. Strange...). I must say though that it did run pretty good with Wine, and OSX has the same problem, though iTunes looks promising (still missing convolution and gapless playback).
OpenOffice is decent, Firefox of course too (though it tends to love RAM... e.g. never gives it back).
A lot of software for Linux is configured through configuration files... tvtime (Linux) is a great application, but so is DScaler (Windows). DScaler is (most of the time) easier to use and to set up though, and it offers slightly superior quality. And the configuration has to be done via a configuration file. Anoying. Then there is a convolution software, which offers things I could only dream of under Windows. The programmer has put quite an efford in stressing how great his little program is, how fast etc. There is a tiny problem though... it took me many days of work, day and night, trying to figure out how to get the program working, reading the manual over and over again (which, in parts, said "read the source code to figure out how you use this feature"). At the end I just gave up. Very frustrating, if you compare it with one download and a hand full of clicks to get the same thing (in a smaller dimension) working under Windows.
I like Linux, I like the concept behind it, and respect the work (all the drivers for example... hardware companies tend to ignore Linux developers). But I think they still have a very long way to go, to be truly usable for an average user who wants to do more than surfing in the internet.
