Colonel Sun wrote:Colonel Sun wrote:
However, the reason that I do this is that most of the academic scientific community chooses to write their code first on Linux with Windows a possible afterthought.
The rationale seems more historical and ideological than practical.
not at all, i would consider it insane to trap an algorithm or important bit of code against a windows API for very good reasons - microsoft does everything it can to own your logic and your data and keep you paying for access to it and their libraries are propriety and can be deprecated with no warning.
the posix/unix api has all sorts of historical problems but quite literally lets me run programs from the 1970's dawn of computing with minimum fuss on a modern linux box even tho that program might have been written on IRIX or SOLARIS etc
a goodly part of my income over the years has been re-implenting microsoft based applications because the API went away - they have changed core libraries such as the database layer half a dozen times in the previous decade.
which isnt to say I dont scream with frustration at some very tedious parts of the modern linux system - the init system and controlling various components like networking and whatnot is a nightmare of incoherant Not-Invented-Here variations.
the audio subsystem is a fragile mess too.
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I mostly think the linux on the desktop thing has got to the point that the remaining differences are due to close sourced drivers - most of the rant above is due to these and nothing will ever change on that front - which is why android and apple (which are *nix on the desktop) exist, they pay the license fee, they get the secret sauce - this is how capitalism works.
he also spends alot of time raving that the problem is a bunch of hackers doing their own thing without a disciplined integration, which is sort of missing the point of what it actually is, what he wants is android or apple if he wants authoritarian conformance with minimum learning curve.
he is out of date on gaming and flash and video.
linux mint works out of the box better than windows for me but im not doing anything that needs the dark corners of the GPU driver, so meh