Comments on: Microsoft is Doomed, Linux is the Future

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 02:04:57 +0000

Mr. Fergus, every single person who uses a Kindle, a non-iPhone smart phone running android, or who visits the WWW is using Linux!

By: Mr. Fergus

Mr. Fergus — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:59:47 +0000

If every one were geeks linux would rule, however this is not the case, although an excellent OS linux is currently, and probable will always remain the OS of geeks.

By: Mr. Fergus

Mr. Fergus — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:49:21 +0000

Big piles of dung take longer to rot away, in Microsofts case the process is well under way.

By: Ron Krumpos

Ron Krumpos — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 20:17:45 +0000

Let me think back to the days when using a PC. Trouble, trouble and more trouble.

For me, my wife, most of our associates and friends, Leopard roars.

What is a virus?

By: punz

punz — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:35:37 +0000

I have been using Ubuntu 6 months with no Dual Booting. I love every moment of it. I work for a non-profit organization as the IT Admin and I would love to setup Linux on the desktop. Linux is the future OS:
1. Its free, you know how many people are stealing Windows OS and software, why steal it when you can get Linux for free.

2. Its more stable, my system has never crashed point blank.

3. Its more safer. I have not once had a virus, popup, etc on my system and I have put it through some nasty testing.

4. Besides the free software, my machine tunrs on and off within 30 seconds max. Let’s try and see a Windows OS do that after a couple of days.Linux gets faster over time , Windows…. Can you say Defrag 🙂

Working for a non-profit has taught me one very important thing about Windows, its expensive!!!

By: DrMcCoy

DrMcCoy — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:38:18 +0000

@Jeff, #65:

Except if you have an Itanium CPU, amd64 /is/ the correct architecture even for your Intel system. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Industry_naming_conventions

By: Jeff Knapp

Jeff Knapp — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 06:27:55 +0000

OK. Downloaded and installed the 32 bit Ubuntu running as a virtual machine in Parallels Desktop for Mac. Got Flash installed and running in Firefox quite nicely. Turns out, the 64 bit Ubuntu I installed was for AMD processors, not Intel. So, when I tried to install Flash, it refused insisting it was not an i386 architecture. Sigh… Early in the learning curve for me.

btw., my system is an intel based system – two quad-core processors for 8 cores total. I assigned four of the cores and 4 Gigs RAM to Ubuntu.

I have to say, it is fast! I mean really fast. Firefox loads faster and is more responsive running on a virtual machine than it is running natively in OS X. Very nice.

Downloaded and installed Blender 3D – an open source 3D animation program. To say I installed it is a misnomer since all I did was download it and unpack it, double-clicked the icon and in some small fraction of a second, it was loaded and running. Nice.

I am very encouraged.

By: DrMcCoy

DrMcCoy — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:31:04 +0000

@Gruesome Rob and Alex, #61 and #62:

$ apt-cache policy flashplugin-nonfree
[…]
990 http://ftp2.de.debian.org unstable-amd64/contrib Packages
[…]

Note the amd64. 😛
Newer Flash releases actually do have 64bit versions. And before that, nspluginwrapper existed (though it is a hack).

@Jeff, #63:
On GNU/Linux, 64bit and 32bit stuff can co-exist peacefully too. You just have to go the route your distribution implements. But: You still can’t use a 32bit plugin directly in a 64bit browser. nspluginwrapper was written for that reason.

Again, I don’t know about Ubuntu, but in Debian Sid, the new way of doing that (since they’re currently changing their system there) is by install ia32-apt-get, which hooks into the installation system and lets you then install ia32* packages (you can choose beforehand if you want to only install 32bit libraries or applications too).

By: JM

JM — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:02:47 +0000

The real reason why Microsoft is doomed: money.

They have just two cash cows: the operating system and Office. They either lose money hand over fist on everything else (eg. mobiles) or struggle to break even (Xbox)

They’ve just announced a free version of Office and they’re letting people use W7 for free after stuffing up Vista so badly that almost no-one uses it (so no money there).

Over the last few years their cash reserves have fallen from about $60B to around $20B now. A few more years of bad revenues like this and they won’t have any money left. Oh they’ll still operate, but they’ll be effectively dead.

By: Jeff Knapp

Jeff Knapp — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:14:59 +0000

@Gruesome Rob – You are absolutely right. I did indeed install the 64 bit Ubuntu. I am interested in using it for some visual effects software where having 64 bit address space is important. I guess it is similar to Windows in that it matters if an app is 32 or 64 bit. I forget this. In OS X, it doesn’t matter, 32 bit and 64 bit apps can coexist peacefully within the OS which is, itself, kinda-sorta 32 and 64 bit. (10.6 will be a true, 64 bit clean environment that will happily run either 32 or 64 bit apps without complaint.)

What I can do is make another virtual machine with the 32 bit Ubuntu.