Topic: Linux. Gotta love it!

[Peripatetic Phil]

Thank you for your input, Bob.  I do not for one second dispute that (a) there is some first-class open-source software (TeX being the supreme example), or (b) that contributors to open-source projects are, in the main, well motivated.  But I do have problems with the political aspects.  Why, for example, would you "love to break Microsoft's monopoly" ?  Microsoft, along with IBM, are the people who made personal computers possible (before their entry, the best we had was the BBC Micro and the TRS-80).  Do they not deserve not only credit for this but also our loyalty ?  Some of the early stuff was an abomination (I hated Windows 3.1 like the plague, and was determined to stick with MS/DOS forever) but things got better over time, and with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows NT 4 and Windows 7, Microsoft brought us ever better operating systems.  Of course, they also had their fallow years (Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10, ...), and even Windows 7 has some bad points (the time required to delete a large directory, the lack of an API to Windows Explorer, the failure to find files that one knows d@mn well exist) but in the main, Windows 7 "just works".  I don't need to re-compile the kernel just because I have added a new graphics card; I don't need to chain a million little noddy programs together through pipes in order to accomplish some hardly-esoteric task, and above all I don't need to remember that "man" means "help", "ls" means "dir", "grep" means "search" and so on.  And because the platform is well-documented, free programs such as XeTeX, Algol 68 Genie, MultiAVCHD, Seamonkey and so on are all possible.  But for exactly the same reason, superb professional suites such as Adobe CC are also available, albeit at a cost, whilst Adobe have lost all interest in making even some of their products available in the *ix world.  And it is, I very much suspect, not a co-incidence that the finest operating system ever to have been created (Digital's VMS) lost both its way and its market share once DEC felt forced to re-brand it as "OpenVMS" and retrofit a Posix API.

So let us agree to differ in friendship :  you see strengths in open-source software, I see strengths in proprietary.  Long may they both continue to exist and evolve.

** Phil.

[Edwin Catflap]

I dual boot between Linux Mint Cinnamon which is my default and Windows 7 for the rather crap ITunes which I still use for my old iPod etc. As mentioned Libre Office is damn close to MS office and you can save files in the MS format in most cases. Linux is just slicker and virus safe etc. There are times when you need to use the Terminal and a bit of coding but there

[bhamcurry]

Phil, "re-compiling the kernel" is a tired piece of anti-Linux fearmongering from Microsoft. For most people "re-compiling the kernel" comes down to clicking "install upgrades" and typing in their admin password. Most of the time nowadays I don't even have to reboot unless it's a substantial upgrade.