Do you think Linux is going to be more popular now[read]

[Miku-Marmalade]

As you may and should know, Windows XP is no longer going to be supported by WIndows. It's ancient(I already miss XP... crying )

Anyways, most people have 2 options that I know of.
Upgrade, which for the majority, is the expensive option, which most likely you'll have to purchase a new computer.

Or

Get Linux.

To my general knowledge, last time this happened, Windows 2000, not NEARLY as many people used AND owned a computer. So the effect wasn't that drastic...but I wasn't computer savvy at all then so I could be wrong.

Do you think more people are going to gear towards Linux in the future? I am just curious.
My only concern is that it becomes big and you'll have to pay for some...? Or, at the very least more people will try to make malware for Linux.

I'm running Ubuntu. I'm getting used to it, had it for a couple of months. It's on my laptop. So wifi was confusing at first, but the Ubuntu community and forums are splendid.

I love it to pieces.
My only dislike/disadvantage is that I cannot sync my iPhone to this laptop because I can't get iTunes and iOS7 doesn't seem to agree. I do know the reasons why, but I've rambled too long. It's not even important to me, I have a second laptop that I sync it to.


What do you think?
Please don't bite my head off for lack of knowledge. I just want to see others point of view. Can't talk to people irl about it because they all use Windows...

[Tom Pls]

I'm sure Linux will be as popular as it always has been.

Though, if your computer was manufactured in the Windows XP era, I'm sure it's time for an upgrade.

[Miku-Marmalade]

Tom Pls

I'm sure Linux will be as popular as it always has been.

Though, if your computer was manufactured in the Windows XP era, I'm sure it's time for an upgrade.

♥♡♥{

Yeah. I am not too tech savvy.
I have a Lacie external hard drive quit working on me. So I played with my Dad's laptop and ended up placing the ex. HD in the area of the internal one and installing Linux. Took a few tries, but I did it successfully. It's until I can build my dream computer. I'm saving for that. sweatdrop

}♥♡♥

[psychic stalker]

Miku-Marmalade

To my general knowledge, last time this happened, Windows 2000, not NEARLY as many people used AND owned a computer. So the effect wasn't that drastic...but I wasn't computer savvy at all then so I could be wrong.

At the time, The majority of users on Windows 2000 were businesses that either used the Server Editions (there were at least three of them) on their infrastructure or used Windows 2000 Professional Edition on workstations. Due to its price (which, as I recall, was much higher than Windows 98 and ME), few people used it outside work except so-called "power users."

Generally, power users and businesses kept up with new releases, and when Windows Server 2003 came out, there was a long 3-year migration period where Server users could take their time with the migration and testing. Those that use Windows Servers now are probably in the process of migrating from 2008 to 2012, if they haven't done that already.

Home users on Windows 2000 generally switched to XP shortly after its release and dealt with the brunt of the problems that arose pre-SP1. Most home users, as far as I know, used either Windows 98 or ME, and took their time switching to XP, after SP1 dropped (and so didn't experience the problems XP had then).

The migration to Vista was painful (and abortive) because users were deliberately misinformed about the nature of the few problems it had, and hated every improvement to the OS that Microsoft added. Remember UAC? UAC was a passwordless clone of the "sudo" tool that Unix and Linux users have used for decades. It's something that Microsoft should have done and didn't do until it became obvious that XP systems were being compromised routinely because of users' inept treatment of their computers. UAC existed to protect users from their own stupidity; and, in their stupidity, users complained.

The migration to Windows 8 is more of the same: Users who are unwilling to adjust how they use their computers and who are too stupid to understand how stupid they are are complaining that Windows is suddenly different, and adoption of Windows 8 was sabotaged in exactly the same way adoption of Vista was sabotaged (albeit for a different reason).

Nothing has changed except that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall and the users that complain are too stupid to understand that it means Microsoft needs to change Windows.

Miku-Marmalade

Do you think more people are going to gear towards Linux in the future? I am just curious.

I'm surprised they haven't. Linux market numbers on the desktop are holding around 1.5% and haven't budged much from there at all. Steam for Linux and SteamOS have spurred more interest among gamers, but while Steam is still experiencing lots of growth, even there, only about 1.5% of users run Linux. (For comparison, about 3.5% of Steam gamers have Macs.)

It doesn't seem to be changing much at all, and I don't expect it to.

Ever.

Miku-Marmalade

My only concern is that it becomes big and you'll have to pay for some...? Or, at the very least more people will try to make malware for Linux.

This speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding you have about Linux.

Linux is Free. It's free in the sense that you never have to pay money for it, but it's also Free in the sense that you are legally permitted and, in fact, encouraged to share Linux.

Even among the various Commercial distributions of Linux, they're almost exclusively "Enterprise" distributions (like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise) where you pay for technical support that comes with it, and even then, there are free (gratis) versions you can download (Fedora is what Red Hat develops RHEL from, and CentOS is a free versions of RHEL; OpenSuSE is the free version of SLES and SLED, and SuSE has a build system which you can build your own distro with).

Besides the Enterprise Linux distros, there's not much in the way of commercial distributions, because they simply don't sell well. Companies like Canonical (Ubuntu) and a handful of other companies will sell you a support contract where you can call them up and ask for help. But beyond that, you will never have to pay for a Linux distribution.

Ever.

Miku-Marmalade

My only dislike/disadvantage is that I cannot sync my iPhone to this laptop because I can't get iTunes and iOS7 doesn't seem to agree. I do know the reasons why, but I've rambled too long. It's not even important to me, I have a second laptop that I sync it to.

The reason for this is that the only way to sync with iOS devices is for someone to reverse-engineer the communication protocol that iOS uses. Apple deliberately changes that protocol every time they release a major update to iTunes, so the handful of projects that try to support it are always chasing a moving target.

You should assume that iOS devices will never work with Linux, because Apple makes a concerted effort to make it as difficult and painful as possible.

My advice is to never buy Apple hardware.

Ever.

[Synapt]

One of the major reasons Linux (or Unix based platforms as well) will still not really be a desktop environment for at least some more years to come is primarily gaming.

With that said though, Valve in general (not just with SteamOS) is making a good push at gaming on Linux again that EpicGames has implemented native Linux/SteamOS OpenGL support as of UnrealEngine 4.1, which is a pretty big step (seeing as UnrealEngine based games were pretty commonly ported over to Linux back in the day too).

It kinda helps that half the 'big' things that MS is implementing into DirectX (or well Direct3D) and trying to force people into using Windows 8.1 with (using the age old silly insane excuses of why they can't back-port) have been effectively copied from OpenGL, which has supported it for a while. Most specifically the "Tiled Resources" being pushed into DirectX 11.2 (which of course you -must- be on Windows 8.1 for, minimum) has been in OpenGL roughly since at least 2011.

So we're basically at a point where much like kind of back in the past, a lot of the big "breakthroughs" in DirectX (Direct3D) 'features' have actually been getting adopted from OpenGL implementations/concepts, and people are starting to realize it I think.

Personally I like to think maybe in 5~ years we'll see gaming back into linux a lot more than now.

[psychic stalker]

Synapt

With that said though, Valve in general (not just with SteamOS) is making a good push at gaming on Linux again that EpicGames has implemented native Linux/SteamOS OpenGL support as of UnrealEngine 4.1, which is a pretty big step (seeing as UnrealEngine based games were pretty commonly ported over to Linux back in the day too).

You say this like Unity, CryEngine, Torque3D, Source, and every other engine that matters hasn't already been ported. Unreal was a hold-out in the most recent generations of games.

Synapt

It kinda helps that half the 'big' things that MS is implementing into DirectX (or well Direct3D) and trying to force people into using Windows 8.1 with (using the age old silly insane excuses of why they can't back-port) have been effectively copied from OpenGL, which has supported it for a while. Most specifically the "Tiled Resources" being pushed into DirectX 11.2 (which of course you -must- be on Windows 8.1 for, minimum) has been in OpenGL roughly since at least 2011.

This is misleading.

NVIDIA and AMD work closely with Microsoft in defining the new DirectX versions, and "tiled resources" came out of those talks. Because OpenGL supports extensions (and DirectX doesn't), NVIDIA and AMD can deploy and test those features in OpenGL and bring them to the OpenGL ARB (which is now basically just Khronos), where they get voted into the OpenGL Core spec.

OpenGL probably didn't really "get it first," it's just that NVIDIA and AMD can put it there first, without waiting for someone to mandate it.

[Miku-Marmalade]

psychic stalker

Miku-Marmalade

To my general knowledge, last time this happened, Windows 2000, not NEARLY as many people used AND owned a computer. So the effect wasn't that drastic...but I wasn't computer savvy at all then so I could be wrong.

At the time, The majority of users on Windows 2000 were businesses that either used the Server Editions (there were at least three of them) on their infrastructure or used Windows 2000 Professional Edition on workstations. Due to its price (which, as I recall, was much higher than Windows 98 and ME), few people used it outside work except so-called "power users."

Generally, power users and businesses kept up with new releases, and when Windows Server 2003 came out, there was a long 3-year migration period where Server users could take their time with the migration and testing. Those that use Windows Servers now are probably in the process of migrating from 2008 to 2012, if they haven't done that already.

Home users on Windows 2000 generally switched to XP shortly after its release and dealt with the brunt of the problems that arose pre-SP1. Most home users, as far as I know, used either Windows 98 or ME, and took their time switching to XP, after SP1 dropped (and so didn't experience the problems XP had then).

The migration to Vista was painful (and abortive) because users were deliberately misinformed about the nature of the few problems it had, and hated every improvement to the OS that Microsoft added. Remember UAC? UAC was a passwordless clone of the "sudo" tool that Unix and Linux users have used for decades. It's something that Microsoft should have done and didn't do until it became obvious that XP systems were being compromised routinely because of users' inept treatment of their computers. UAC existed to protect users from their own stupidity; and, in their stupidity, users complained.

The migration to Windows 8 is more of the same: Users who are unwilling to adjust how they use their computers and who are too stupid to understand how stupid they are are complaining that Windows is suddenly different, and adoption of Windows 8 was sabotaged in exactly the same way adoption of Vista was sabotaged (albeit for a different reason).

Nothing has changed except that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall and the users that complain are too stupid to understand that it means Microsoft needs to change Windows.

Miku-Marmalade

Do you think more people are going to gear towards Linux in the future? I am just curious.

I'm surprised they haven't. Linux market numbers on the desktop are holding around 1.5% and haven't budged much from there at all. Steam for Linux and SteamOS have spurred more interest among gamers, but while Steam is still experiencing lots of growth, even there, only about 1.5% of users run Linux. (For comparison, about 3.5% of Steam gamers have Macs.)

It doesn't seem to be changing much at all, and I don't expect it to.

Ever.

Miku-Marmalade

My only concern is that it becomes big and you'll have to pay for some...? Or, at the very least more people will try to make malware for Linux.

This speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding you have about Linux.

Linux is Free. It's free in the sense that you never have to pay money for it, but it's also Free in the sense that you are legally permitted and, in fact, encouraged to share Linux.

Even among the various Commercial distributions of Linux, they're almost exclusively "Enterprise" distributions (like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise) where you pay for technical support that comes with it, and even then, there are free (gratis) versions you can download (Fedora is what Red Hat develops RHEL from, and CentOS is a free versions of RHEL; OpenSuSE is the free version of SLES and SLED, and SuSE has a build system which you can build your own distro with).

Besides the Enterprise Linux distros, there's not much in the way of commercial distributions, because they simply don't sell well. Companies like Canonical (Ubuntu) and a handful of other companies will sell you a support contract where you can call them up and ask for help. But beyond that, you will never have to pay for a Linux distribution.

Ever.

Miku-Marmalade

My only dislike/disadvantage is that I cannot sync my iPhone to this laptop because I can't get iTunes and iOS7 doesn't seem to agree. I do know the reasons why, but I've rambled too long. It's not even important to me, I have a second laptop that I sync it to.

The reason for this is that the only way to sync with iOS devices is for someone to reverse-engineer the communication protocol that iOS uses. Apple deliberately changes that protocol every time they release a major update to iTunes, so the handful of projects that try to support it are always chasing a moving target.

You should assume that iOS devices will never work with Linux, because Apple makes a concerted effort to make it as difficult and painful as possible.

My advice is to never buy Apple hardware.

Ever.

♥♡♥{

OMG thanks so much for clearing like every question I had up. Very much appreciated.


As far as the Apple thing, for me, it was a phase. I am over it, but I still have a contract[my dumb butt just upgraded in January.]
I'd do so much to switch phones, I have an iPhone 5C. I am never going to do the Apple route again. It's just not for me. I have too many needs that Apple cannot provide. And Apple has too many limitations. Bad enough I have to "hack"[I can't think of a word to describe my free media getting and putting into iTunes] instead of buying directly from the iTunes store.


Last month, I bought a cheaper tablet, a Nextbook. Not the greatest thing in the planet, but other than the crappy camera, I found I loved it equally(if not more) than my previously owned iPads, which were stolen from me.
I like Apple's simplicity, but I'm too complicated... if that makes any sense. I like personally my stuff. iPhones, iPods, iEverything looks almost the same, no matter what. Just different wallpapers, apps, and possible organization of apps. End.

}♥♡♥

[Synapt]

psychic stalker

You say this like Unity, CryEngine, Torque3D, Source, and every other engine that matters hasn't already been ported. Unreal was a hold-out in the most recent generations of games.

CryEngine does not have full native Linux support yet (let alone SteamOS explicit support), and they've only mentioned it being previewed as of march this year, let alone what version exactly will support it.

Unity has had portable functionality in the form of their "Linux Publishing Tool/Preview", which is last I saw an Add-on, and non-native, and still has only been available since Unity 4 which admittedly at least is roughly 2 years old.

Again there's a reason I used the word native, because by all intents UnrealEngine was still cross-platform through addons and modifications as well razz

I will give you points on Torque3D and Source though sure, Source being way old and definitely cross-platform though, Torque3D I'm not entirely familiar with their cross-platform history though.

psychic stalker

This is misleading.

NVIDIA and AMD work closely with Microsoft in defining the new DirectX versions, and "tiled resources" came out of those talks. Because OpenGL supports extensions (and DirectX doesn't), NVIDIA and AMD can deploy and test those features in OpenGL and bring them to the OpenGL ARB (which is now basically just Khronos), where they get voted into the OpenGL Core spec.

OpenGL probably didn't really "get it first," it's just that NVIDIA and AMD can put it there first, without waiting for someone to mandate it.

Except what I linked was their effective spec included into OpenGL 4.2, not just a draft that's been sitting around a couple years waiting for mandate, with the original support in 4.2 (which has been out since late 2011 if memory serves correctly), it does seem as far as I can see that OpenGL has had it first for a while, otherwise if it was some how came up with at the same time via AMD and Microsoft it seems weird that it would take this long to get imported in a Windows 8.1 exclusive DirectX update.

[psychic stalker]

Synapt

psychic stalker

This is misleading.

NVIDIA and AMD work closely with Microsoft in defining the new DirectX versions, and "tiled resources" came out of those talks. Because OpenGL supports extensions (and DirectX doesn't), NVIDIA and AMD can deploy and test those features in OpenGL and bring them to the OpenGL ARB (which is now basically just Khronos), where they get voted into the OpenGL Core spec.

OpenGL probably didn't really "get it first," it's just that NVIDIA and AMD can put it there first, without waiting for someone to mandate it.

Except what I linked was their effective spec included into OpenGL 4.2, not just a draft that's been sitting around a couple years waiting for mandate, with the original support in 4.2 (which has been out since late 2011 if memory serves correctly),

Actually, it was just an extension against 4.2 Core. It's not actually considered "part of OpenGL (Core)" until it's an ARB extension, which it is for 4.4. (See Christophe Riccio's review.)

Synapt

it does seem as far as I can see that OpenGL has had it first for a while, otherwise if it was some how came up with at the same time via AMD and Microsoft it seems weird that it would take this long to get imported in a Windows 8.1 exclusive DirectX update.

The update (software) hasn't been finished. What (features) they specified for that update was set in stone long ago, and AMD obviously had the advantage of having an implementation ready early on (for testing).

This is normal. NVIDIA is usually the first one out, but they've both been releasing extensions like this for years.

[Synapt]

psychic stalker

Actually, it was just an extension against 4.2 Core. It's not actually considered "part of OpenGL (Core)" until it's an ARB extension, which it is for 4.4. (See Christophe Riccio's review.)

Ah, thought I saw somewhere that it was actually in the 4.2 spec by release, though still doesn't really make much explanation for MS's implementing it in an 'exclusive' DirectX, as if some how it can only possibly work on Windows 8.1 where OpenGL supports it cross-platform, let alone cross-windows razz

[Maya-Sterling]

it should be!

[psychic stalker]

Synapt

psychic stalker

Actually, it was just an extension against 4.2 Core. It's not actually considered "part of OpenGL (Core)" until it's an ARB extension, which it is for 4.4. (See Christophe Riccio's review.)

Ah, thought I saw somewhere that it was actually in the 4.2 spec by release, though still doesn't really make much explanation for MS's implementing it in an 'exclusive' DirectX, as if some how it can only possibly work on Windows 8.1 where OpenGL supports it cross-platform, let alone cross-windows razz

It "working" has nothing to do with it. DirectX 11.2 is exclusive to 8.1 (which I didn't know until you mentioned it) specifically because Microsoft is trying to get retarded ******** to stop ******** using XP like they were told four ******** years ago when support was originally supposed to expire.

</rage>

OpenGL, like DirectX, is only dependent on hardware support. Nothing more. OS version exclusivity is purely artificial. (But unlike DirectX, the majority of OpenGL Core features are not required to be implemented in hardware, and some of them are not required at all for compliance, which, as you can imagine, makes using OpenGL a little painful sometimes.)

[Synapt]

psychic stalker

It "working" has nothing to do with it. DirectX 11.2 is exclusive to 8.1 (which I didn't know until you mentioned it) specifically because Microsoft is trying to get retarded ******** to stop ******** using XP like they were told four ******** years ago when support was originally supposed to expire.

</rage>

OpenGL, like DirectX, is only dependent on hardware support. Nothing more. OS version exclusivity is purely artificial. (But unlike DirectX, the majority of OpenGL Core features are not required to be implemented in hardware, and some of them are not required at all for compliance, which, as you can imagine, makes using OpenGL a little painful sometimes.)

I thought I put emphasis on that earlier by pointing out the whole silly excuses of MS trying to say it's impossible to backport (much like they did with XP and DX10 even though one of the ol' C&Ters even technically showed to an extent it was) razz

Though while I agree it's fine for them to try and start forcing people to migrate to something other than XP, it's hardly a reason to restrict it to 8.1 only. Windows 7 is still (and until 2020) supported, and I can't even begin to figure why they would treat it like Windows 8 is really so different from 8.1 that it couldn't at least be 8.x friendly in general.

Edit: I think we've digressed a bit from the original subject, lol.

[The20]

psychic stalker

Miku-Marmalade

Do you think more people are going to gear towards Linux in the future? I am just curious.

I'm surprised they haven't. Linux market numbers on the desktop are holding around 1.5% and haven't budged much from there at all.

Didn't you just give the answer for that question above? It's different. It would require effort and people to actually think about their computers. The "dim witted masses", to quote my favorite sociopath, are hardly going to go for that and power uses may have other reasons for sticking to Windows.
Consoles aren't selling like cupcakes for nothing.

[Miku-Marmalade]

Synapt

psychic stalker

It "working" has nothing to do with it. DirectX 11.2 is exclusive to 8.1 (which I didn't know until you mentioned it) specifically because Microsoft is trying to get retarded ******** to stop ******** using XP like they were told four ******** years ago when support was originally supposed to expire.

</rage>

OpenGL, like DirectX, is only dependent on hardware support. Nothing more. OS version exclusivity is purely artificial. (But unlike DirectX, the majority of OpenGL Core features are not required to be implemented in hardware, and some of them are not required at all for compliance, which, as you can imagine, makes using OpenGL a little painful sometimes.)

I thought I put emphasis on that earlier by pointing out the whole silly excuses of MS trying to say it's impossible to backport (much like they did with XP and DX10 even though one of the ol' C&Ters even technically showed to an extent it was) razz

Though while I agree it's fine for them to try and start forcing people to migrate to something other than XP, it's hardly a reason to restrict it to 8.1 only. Windows 7 is still (and until 2020) supported, and I can't even begin to figure why they would treat it like Windows 8 is really so different from 8.1 that it couldn't at least be 8.x friendly in general.

Edit: I think we've digressed a bit from the original subject, lol.

It's fine that you strayed away from the topic. I learned a lot from the various posts, which was my goal ultimately.
Yeah but windows 7 is still my favorite windows os. In fact, I refuse to get 8 because if I have to spend money I might as well get something I favor. I hate windows 8. It's only convenient for touchscreen computers.

And coming from a person who had a touchscreen laptop, it isn't worth the money. Majority of the time, you won't even use the touchscreen. neutral