Heater. can parse his message all he wants, I am correct in saying "Linux OS", and he is incorrect in saying that it is not an OS. Hmm, now that I think about it, as far as it concerns me, there is nothing to bash.
You cannot possibly be correct. Just look at the post which stated that "Linux had [spyware] before Windows, even though it was limited at the time to Amazon."
A completely meaningless statement as written, because "Linux" certainly didn't have any such issues. I should know, having used nearly every version of Linux since version 0.95 (1992) until the present.
No, the issue was with Ubuntu. Canonical had at one point integrated such spyware into the search function of their desktop software of their operating system Ubuntu. Nothing to do with Linux. Linux is a kernel implementing the Unix kernel API, the various distros (RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, Mint, Slackware etc. etc.) implement the Unix user level experience by various means, mostly by combining components from GNU and BSD and other projects with a Linux kernel or another kernel (e.g. a *BSD kernel).
As I said, I'm happy for the various OS based on Linux to be called "Linux" in casual speech.
However when making operating systems comparisons one should be careful to be specific otherwise ones comparison is meaningless. For example I could be making comparisons based on some old version of Windows 3 or 95. That's "Windows" right?
Saying: "...he is incorrect in saying that it is not an OS" clearly shows you have not done the experiment I suggested. Just try to operate a computer with Linux alone.
@ctwardell
You are right, certainly pedantic, with good reason in this particular case for reasons given above. The comparisons being made in these Windows debates are often very specific: Win 7 vs Win 8 vs Win 10 for example. Why not be equally specific when extending those comparisons to other operating systems?
Anyway, anyone like to explain what on Earth that thing above about Amazon was and how it made "Linux" first in privacy invading operating systems?
Getting error messages like GWGXUX stopped working and then finding out it's part of the Win10 upgrade nag should be enough to discourage anyone from upgrading and encourage them to look at alternatives.
As far as I can tell it's short for "Get Win 10 sucks"
Out of boredom I did a quick Google for that. Very enlightening.
I'm often told Windows is easy and "Linux" is impossible for the normal person. What I found on that little search is a whole other world of forums and other venues jammed with hapless souls lost as to what to do with their machines and desperately seeking help. So much for what I have been told.
Here were the first few for those of you having trouble with Windows:
I was certainly not recommending any of those sites. Be sure not to download and run random junk from the net. Beware of websites distributing malicious trojans. Especially the second one on the list I gave
As far as I can tell it's short for "Get Win 10 sucks"
Out of boredom I did a quick Google for that. Very enlightening.
I'm often told Windows is easy and "Linux" is impossible for the normal person. What I found on that little search is a whole other world of forums and other venues jammed with hapless souls lost as to what to do with their machines and desperately seeking help. So much for what I have been told.
Here were the first few for those of you having trouble with Windows:
Yes, I meant "GWXUX". Don't know where the extra "G" came from. Also didn't think it got posted in this thread, so I posted it in the other Win10 thread. Must have had a "seniors" moment.
Your posts, here and in the anti-thread, are so mangled, I can't be sure what is quote and what is post.
What is this thing that Linux had before Windows and has something or other to do with Amazon and spying? I
However not all of them are designed to be a means of extorting money out of you and exploiting your personal information.
Heater, just posted in the Pro thread, and i am actually holding off, and will most likely keep W7 unless MS changes its datamining, or perhaps try moving to Free/Open-BSD/Mint so that I can go back to 'owning' 'my' 'personal' 'computer'.
However, I'll agree with Rsadeika. Linux is.. Linux. No one gives a flip about the kernel, and I have to give props to ctwardell for beating me to the punch.
For the record, Heater is correct.
Linux is a Kernel.
With only a kernel, you are not going to be running anything, and correctly, it is not an operating system.
However, this is namby-pamby word gaming.
Get 100... no, 1,000,000 people in a room, so we can get some useful data.
Ask everyone what OS they use, and everyone using MS/OS X can sit down.
For the remaining 5-10 people, ask again, what OS do you use.
I guarantee almost all of them will say 'Linux', no Debian, Suse, Ubuntu, etc.
Go onto the most pro-Linux website there is, /. , and pick ANY MS/OS X story, thread.
Almost any thread that mentions either of the 2 will have dozens of replies starting of with
"But Linux lets you....".
Therefore, Linux IS an OS. QED.
Now if I wanted to be really devious, I could opine on how Linux is becoming more MS-like, starting with SystemD
Personally, I think MS is now really running scared, as much as a behemoth with billions in the bank can...
I might throw a W10 on a spare SSD for some gaming if I ever get the time, however otherwise I am staying with what I believe is a mostly private W7 install for general use.
Hey, I already agreed that using "Linux" as a generic name for all those Debian, RedHad..ad nauseam operating systems was just fine in casual speech. We do it all the time. My objection was that we are here comparing minor versions of the same OS, Win8, 8, 10, so if you are then going to compare those to "Linux" you had better be more specific.
...if I wanted to be really devious, I could opine on how Linux is becoming more MS-like, starting with SystemD
I'm afraid I'm with you there, and it's a very disturbing trend. A couple of recent examples:
1) A while back I found inserting an SD card into a reader on my Debian box automatically mounted it and opened the thing in a file browser. Just like Windows. Great, thanks for writing to my SD card and changing the file system image checksum that I was counting on for verification (mounting an fs updates it's mount count at least). I did not ask for that, why do it?
2) With a recent upgrade to Debian Jessie I find that plugging in a USB serial dongle the new serial port device is automatically assumed to be a mouse. Just like Windows. WTF? I did not ask for that, why do it?
Not only that, the auto mouse detection is buggy. Just like Windows. Somehow plugging in that seria poet buggers up the USB mouse driver and the mouse becomes very slow and stuttery until I reboot or reload the mouse driver.
3) I love my KDE desktop, but for a long while it was impossible to use out of the box because by default it comes with a file system indexing system that is supposed to help with finding files and things in files. Just like Windows. That indexing process would eat all your CPU and disk access time for hours as it did it's work.
So, increasingly one finds that after installing "Linux" one has to go around and make sure all kinds of options, mostly useless, are turned off or some how disabled by brute force before getting down to work. Just like Windows.
I have no idea if any of this is to do with systemd. Much of is is to do with some misguided ideas about "usability" seeping into the Linux world. The stupid idea of "Linux on the Desktop" as if it should ever be a Win or Mac clone. No thanks.
I can't speak for those issues per se, however you may want to look at FreeBSD if you want more Unixy feel, or less 'helpfulness'. The fact that it has Linux-compatability should be comforting.
Just saw where Samsung phones are storing your fingerprint in some non-secure way. Won't be long before someone has everyone's fingerprint on file now, isn't this great?
I usually laugh at the tin-foil hat brigades, however lately I am not laughing nearly as much.
I've always been curious about FreeBSD, ever since I saw one group at work using it many years ago.
Problem is that every few years I have tried installing it and never got the installation CD to boot on whatever machine I had available at the time. Like a sad Windows user half heartedly tying Linux I have always given up at that point.
These past couple of days I have been contemplating going back to an old favourite, Linux From Scratch (LFS) http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ Build your own Linux based OS how you like. LFS was a serious challenge back in 1999, downloading everything through a 14.4 modem and building on a 100MHz AMD 486 but today it should be a breeze.
I never did get the whole fingerprint id thing. Great idea, use something as an identity that cannot be changed (like a password), can be easily copied, and indeed we leave thousands of copies of it on everything we touch every day. Brilliant!
Have a google for "fingerprint hack". Not everyone wearing a tinfoil hat is looney tunes. The sensible ones are wearing gloves as well
Yes, the BSD I found were even worse installer-wise than Linux. However, while I haven't tried in years I believe they are now pretty rigorous and battle proven. Never bothered figuring out the whole disk slice, etc stuff.
I've heard of LFS and contemplated it, however if I am going to learn a new OS, and its supposed to be Unix-y, why not just get an actual Unix? I'm more partial to OpenBSD at heart, though I haven't done much beyond reading a manual. Its even more picky about h/w, however I'm pretty sure they'll be the very last one to exfiltrate my data.
And yes, we do leave our printers all over. However its only relatively recently that someone can come along with a piece of malware and harvest a couple, tens, hundreds of millions in one fell swoop.
Now I remember. Sort of. It was about a year ago that a new BSD release was announced (I forget which one now) So I snagged the install image. That did actually boot from CD and install BSD on a not so new PC. That in turn did boot. But it was unusable, no mouse. Or was it keyboard? I forget. I wimped out and gave up.
The thing about LFS is that it not a case of having to learn a new OS. Well there might be a lot to learn to build it but that's mostly just normal program build steps. You end up with a system that works the way you want it to.
Do I even want a unix-y system? I'm not sure. My experience of "real Unix" is limited. Mostly Sun back in the day.
In fact a few of us here have been discussing a plan to build a system that throws away most of what one thinks of as Unix! Here is the idea:
Get rid of init. No more sysVinit or systemd. Throw out BASH and X Windows and all that old junk.
Instead boot straight out of the Linux kernel into node.js. The node.js Javascript REPL becomes your command line. Node and Javascript can take care of mounting file systems, starting networking and all that stuff. All configuration will of course be in JSON.
For a UI we want a Chrome like browser running full screen directly into the frame buffer. No X Windows. Of course whatever shows up in that browser can also be served up by node.js to external connections.
I guess we are describing ChromeOS or Firefox OS, but we can make our own right?
LFS would be a good place to start for building such a system.
What do you do for apps? Seems like you either start from nothing like all the others, or get dragged back into some sort of Linux dependency hell.
About going Unix, yes, that may be not exactly what I want on a desktop.
I may give this a shot in the near future. http://www.desktopbsd.net/
FreeBSD with KDE.
A little heavy, I prefer something lighter, however since its all integrated...
Doing a little more reading and on Reddit it appears lots of people are happier with OpenBSD on laptops than Free. Hmm, will be an interesting Fall experimenting.
Good question. What apps? There are none. Well, apart from the browser I mentioned and "web apps". We can edit in the browser, compile Spin in the browser, and so on.
OK, we are going to need to fire up things like GCC occasionally so we can get a terminal window up. In the browser.
What is this "Linux dependency hell" of which you speak?
Good question. What apps? There are none. Well, apart from the browser I mentioned and "web apps". We can edit in the browser, compile Spin in the browser, and so on.
OK, we are going to need to fire up things like GCC occasionally so we can get a terminal window up. In the browser.
What is this "Linux dependency hell" of which you speak?
OK, it may no longer be quite hell.... maybe purgatory.
I've done a couple of Suse/Ubuntu/etc install to play with the past couple of years and almost without fail have had some sort of dependency error pop up after installing a handful or dozen programs from different repositories. Its one of the things that kept me from away from simply dumping windows.
I will grant that its far less a problem than it was years ago.
Of course if you take an app from Mac OSX and try to run it on Win XXX it won't work.
Similarly if you take an app built for RedHat and try to run it on Debian it won't work. Or from Debian to Ubuntu.
What you are trying to do is move apps across different operating systems, it does not work. Did I say " 'Linux' was not an OS" here somewhere already?
This is no more a "Linux" problem than is the Mac/Win problem. If the vendor of the app you want does not support your OS you have a problem. We cannot expect all vendors to support all apps on all operating systems.
Luckily most things we need are available in Linux OS repos for the OS we happen to be running. Or Apps are provided that by their vendors for most popular OS's or delivered in such a way that they can be run on RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu etc (e.g. goggle-chrome). Or, best of all, we have the source code and can build the app for whatever system we have.
...without fail have had some sort of dependency error pop up after installing a handful or dozen programs from different repositories.
Yeah, don't do that. Installing a program from an Ubuntu repo into Debian or whatever way round, may well happen to work. It may well pull in a bunch of it's own dependencies and hose your OS installation.
In truth, I have no reason to hate Windows 10 and no way of doing so.
But doing business with Microsoft has left me disgusted.
Why? After Windows Vista, I migrated to Linux (first Ubuntu, then Mint, now Debian for various reasons). I gave up on Microsoft after I was provided with Windows Vista 32bit only in Chinese on a 64-bit Intel Quad machine, and MS wanted over $1000USD for me to migrate to English Vista 64-bit and a fresh copy of MS Office.
The machine only cost me $700USD in the first place. Suddenly I needed to put out more than the cost of hardware for new software. Plus, I had previously tried to buy my way to happiness in MS WindowsXP with a copy of XP Professional English and 2003 Office, only to find that because I was located in Taiwan --- Microsoft only offered me on-line support in Chinese.
Yes, I specifically purchased XP Profession and Office2003 in English and wasdenied any support in English regardless of this obvious choice of language in spite of MS earning a 30% profit margin on that product at that time. I began to sign all postings for help as "Roadkill on Microsoft's Internet Super-highway". Then Vista in Taiwan was ONLY available in Chinese without a special order from the USA. And only with Windows7 did MS finally wise up and provide a language choice at start-up.
By that time, I had pretty much decided that I would never pay another dollar for a Microsoft product under any conditions. So Windows 10 is a complete unknown to me and too late to the game. I am even extremely wary of what unpleasantness a free upgrade of my Windows 7 Starter to Windows 10 might bring. And the Windows Vista 32bit won't allow a free change over to English or to 64 bit -- so it sits there as a reminder of how messed up Microsoft can be when we presume they might do something rational (like provide 64-bit software with 64-bit hardware, or English support for their English versions of software)
Yes that is me ---- ROADKILL ON THE MICROSOFT INTERNET SUPERHIGHWAY.
I simply prefer to give my money to people that know what they are doing.
Of course if you take an app from Mac OSX and try to run it on Win XXX it won't work.
Sorry, my bad. I shouldn't have used the term repositories. I think I noticed this when I had issues with one, and changed to a different mirror, on either Ubuntu or Mint.
However what I actually meant was discussed in that thread, I think it was about different library versions not playing nice with one another.
I don't think it is as much of a problem nowadays, however from the linked thread others apparently are running into the same thing still.
Libraries in Linux are known in Windows at dll files. They do evolve over time and are up-graded to improve service and to resolve security problems.
Time marches on and something new is learned everyday -- regardless of what OS you use. There are some very good reasons that old libraries are abandoned. But when they are, old favorite software may no longer work unless you can find a way to reinstall the old libraries that worked so well with it.
That is what virtual machines are for. It's easy now. So that means just packaging something up, OS and all, and just running it when you want to run it.
Container mania is great. Famously Docker containers. Package your program and all it's library dependencies into a container. Share that container around any OS that has support for the process partitioning required and it will run. Your developers will all have the exact same environment, in the container, as the deployed system. Containers are relatively small very efficient at run time as there is no virtualization involved.
Containers have their limits. They are not virtualization or emulation so a container built for Linux will not run on Windows or Mac (as far as I know) like you can do with vmware or virtual box. They are not architecture neutral so a container made on x86 wont run on ARM.
Great idea for developing and deploying server side, or even embedded system components. I'm not sure they make a great general purpose application delivery system.
Cuba is in the news right now, and apparently the general population is into "Container Mania". Almost no one owns a computer and has to go to an internet cafe to use one.
So, the 'true net' in Cuba is the 'USB storage network'. People just keep and share data on USB storage devices, pass them along, reboot the computers at the network cafes with them to retain privacy and open up privileges.
Certainly based on the LiveCD OSes that originated in Linux, and not a Microsoft product.
Comments
Ray
C.W.
A completely meaningless statement as written, because "Linux" certainly didn't have any such issues. I should know, having used nearly every version of Linux since version 0.95 (1992) until the present.
No, the issue was with Ubuntu. Canonical had at one point integrated such spyware into the search function of their desktop software of their operating system Ubuntu. Nothing to do with Linux. Linux is a kernel implementing the Unix kernel API, the various distros (RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, Mint, Slackware etc. etc.) implement the Unix user level experience by various means, mostly by combining components from GNU and BSD and other projects with a Linux kernel or another kernel (e.g. a *BSD kernel).
Ray
As I said, I'm happy for the various OS based on Linux to be called "Linux" in casual speech.
However when making operating systems comparisons one should be careful to be specific otherwise ones comparison is meaningless. For example I could be making comparisons based on some old version of Windows 3 or 95. That's "Windows" right?
Saying: "...he is incorrect in saying that it is not an OS" clearly shows you have not done the experiment I suggested. Just try to operate a computer with Linux alone.
@ctwardell
You are right, certainly pedantic, with good reason in this particular case for reasons given above. The comparisons being made in these Windows debates are often very specific: Win 7 vs Win 8 vs Win 10 for example. Why not be equally specific when extending those comparisons to other operating systems?
Anyway, anyone like to explain what on Earth that thing above about Amazon was and how it made "Linux" first in privacy invading operating systems?
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/richard-stallman-calls-ubuntu-spyware-because-it-tracks-searches/
and
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2840401/ubuntus-unity-8-desktop-removes-the-amazon-search-spyware.html
and no it doesn't make "Linux" a first in privacy invading operating systems!
-Tor
Not a "Linux" problem at all. A Canonical problem. Who would trust that Shutleworth character?
You may have noticed I always advise against Ubuntu. They just leech of the work of Debian and all and break it in interesting ways.
You mean "GWXUX"?
As far as I can tell it's short for "Get Win 10 sucks"
Out of boredom I did a quick Google for that. Very enlightening.
I'm often told Windows is easy and "Linux" is impossible for the normal person. What I found on that little search is a whole other world of forums and other venues jammed with hapless souls lost as to what to do with their machines and desperately seeking help. So much for what I have been told.
Here were the first few for those of you having trouble with Windows:
windowssecrets.com
answers.microsoft.com
www.freefixer.com
www.pchelpforum.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport
www.removepcrisk.com
https://answers.yahoo.com
systemexplorer.net
removirus.com
malwareprotectioncenter.com
I was certainly not recommending any of those sites. Be sure not to download and run random junk from the net. Beware of websites distributing malicious trojans. Especially the second one on the list I gave
Yes, I meant "GWXUX". Don't know where the extra "G" came from. Also didn't think it got posted in this thread, so I posted it in the other Win10 thread. Must have had a "seniors" moment.
Heater, just posted in the Pro thread, and i am actually holding off, and will most likely keep W7 unless MS changes its datamining, or perhaps try moving to Free/Open-BSD/Mint so that I can go back to 'owning' 'my' 'personal' 'computer'.
However, I'll agree with Rsadeika. Linux is.. Linux. No one gives a flip about the kernel, and I have to give props to ctwardell for beating me to the punch.
For the record, Heater is correct.
Linux is a Kernel.
With only a kernel, you are not going to be running anything, and correctly, it is not an operating system.
However, this is namby-pamby word gaming.
Get 100... no, 1,000,000 people in a room, so we can get some useful data.
Ask everyone what OS they use, and everyone using MS/OS X can sit down.
For the remaining 5-10 people, ask again, what OS do you use.
I guarantee almost all of them will say 'Linux', no Debian, Suse, Ubuntu, etc.
Go onto the most pro-Linux website there is, /. , and pick ANY MS/OS X story, thread.
Almost any thread that mentions either of the 2 will have dozens of replies starting of with
"But Linux lets you....".
Therefore, Linux IS an OS. QED.
Now if I wanted to be really devious, I could opine on how Linux is becoming more MS-like, starting with SystemD
Personally, I think MS is now really running scared, as much as a behemoth with billions in the bank can...
I might throw a W10 on a spare SSD for some gaming if I ever get the time, however otherwise I am staying with what I believe is a mostly private W7 install for general use.
Hey, I already agreed that using "Linux" as a generic name for all those Debian, RedHad..ad nauseam operating systems was just fine in casual speech. We do it all the time. My objection was that we are here comparing minor versions of the same OS, Win8, 8, 10, so if you are then going to compare those to "Linux" you had better be more specific. I'm afraid I'm with you there, and it's a very disturbing trend. A couple of recent examples:
1) A while back I found inserting an SD card into a reader on my Debian box automatically mounted it and opened the thing in a file browser. Just like Windows. Great, thanks for writing to my SD card and changing the file system image checksum that I was counting on for verification (mounting an fs updates it's mount count at least). I did not ask for that, why do it?
2) With a recent upgrade to Debian Jessie I find that plugging in a USB serial dongle the new serial port device is automatically assumed to be a mouse. Just like Windows. WTF? I did not ask for that, why do it?
Not only that, the auto mouse detection is buggy. Just like Windows. Somehow plugging in that seria poet buggers up the USB mouse driver and the mouse becomes very slow and stuttery until I reboot or reload the mouse driver.
3) I love my KDE desktop, but for a long while it was impossible to use out of the box because by default it comes with a file system indexing system that is supposed to help with finding files and things in files. Just like Windows. That indexing process would eat all your CPU and disk access time for hours as it did it's work.
So, increasingly one finds that after installing "Linux" one has to go around and make sure all kinds of options, mostly useless, are turned off or some how disabled by brute force before getting down to work. Just like Windows.
I have no idea if any of this is to do with systemd. Much of is is to do with some misguided ideas about "usability" seeping into the Linux world. The stupid idea of "Linux on the Desktop" as if it should ever be a Win or Mac clone. No thanks.
I can't speak for those issues per se, however you may want to look at FreeBSD if you want more Unixy feel, or less 'helpfulness'. The fact that it has Linux-compatability should be comforting.
Just saw where Samsung phones are storing your fingerprint in some non-secure way. Won't be long before someone has everyone's fingerprint on file now, isn't this great?
I usually laugh at the tin-foil hat brigades, however lately I am not laughing nearly as much.
I've always been curious about FreeBSD, ever since I saw one group at work using it many years ago.
Problem is that every few years I have tried installing it and never got the installation CD to boot on whatever machine I had available at the time. Like a sad Windows user half heartedly tying Linux I have always given up at that point.
These past couple of days I have been contemplating going back to an old favourite, Linux From Scratch (LFS) http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ Build your own Linux based OS how you like. LFS was a serious challenge back in 1999, downloading everything through a 14.4 modem and building on a 100MHz AMD 486 but today it should be a breeze.
I never did get the whole fingerprint id thing. Great idea, use something as an identity that cannot be changed (like a password), can be easily copied, and indeed we leave thousands of copies of it on everything we touch every day. Brilliant!
Have a google for "fingerprint hack". Not everyone wearing a tinfoil hat is looney tunes. The sensible ones are wearing gloves as well
Yes, the BSD I found were even worse installer-wise than Linux. However, while I haven't tried in years I believe they are now pretty rigorous and battle proven. Never bothered figuring out the whole disk slice, etc stuff.
I've heard of LFS and contemplated it, however if I am going to learn a new OS, and its supposed to be Unix-y, why not just get an actual Unix? I'm more partial to OpenBSD at heart, though I haven't done much beyond reading a manual. Its even more picky about h/w, however I'm pretty sure they'll be the very last one to exfiltrate my data.
And yes, we do leave our printers all over. However its only relatively recently that someone can come along with a piece of malware and harvest a couple, tens, hundreds of millions in one fell swoop.
The thing about LFS is that it not a case of having to learn a new OS. Well there might be a lot to learn to build it but that's mostly just normal program build steps. You end up with a system that works the way you want it to.
Do I even want a unix-y system? I'm not sure. My experience of "real Unix" is limited. Mostly Sun back in the day.
In fact a few of us here have been discussing a plan to build a system that throws away most of what one thinks of as Unix! Here is the idea:
Get rid of init. No more sysVinit or systemd. Throw out BASH and X Windows and all that old junk.
Instead boot straight out of the Linux kernel into node.js. The node.js Javascript REPL becomes your command line. Node and Javascript can take care of mounting file systems, starting networking and all that stuff. All configuration will of course be in JSON.
For a UI we want a Chrome like browser running full screen directly into the frame buffer. No X Windows. Of course whatever shows up in that browser can also be served up by node.js to external connections.
I guess we are describing ChromeOS or Firefox OS, but we can make our own right?
LFS would be a good place to start for building such a system.
What do you do for apps? Seems like you either start from nothing like all the others, or get dragged back into some sort of Linux dependency hell.
About going Unix, yes, that may be not exactly what I want on a desktop.
I may give this a shot in the near future. http://www.desktopbsd.net/
FreeBSD with KDE.
A little heavy, I prefer something lighter, however since its all integrated...
Doing a little more reading and on Reddit it appears lots of people are happier with OpenBSD on laptops than Free. Hmm, will be an interesting Fall experimenting.
Ray
OK, we are going to need to fire up things like GCC occasionally so we can get a terminal window up. In the browser.
What is this "Linux dependency hell" of which you speak?
OK, it may no longer be quite hell.... maybe purgatory.
Good discussion/rant here: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/219538/dependency-hell-why-not-create-portable-applications
I've done a couple of Suse/Ubuntu/etc install to play with the past couple of years and almost without fail have had some sort of dependency error pop up after installing a handful or dozen programs from different repositories. Its one of the things that kept me from away from simply dumping windows.
I will grant that its far less a problem than it was years ago.
I see what you mean.
Of course if you take an app from Mac OSX and try to run it on Win XXX it won't work.
Similarly if you take an app built for RedHat and try to run it on Debian it won't work. Or from Debian to Ubuntu.
What you are trying to do is move apps across different operating systems, it does not work. Did I say " 'Linux' was not an OS" here somewhere already?
This is no more a "Linux" problem than is the Mac/Win problem. If the vendor of the app you want does not support your OS you have a problem. We cannot expect all vendors to support all apps on all operating systems.
Luckily most things we need are available in Linux OS repos for the OS we happen to be running. Or Apps are provided that by their vendors for most popular OS's or delivered in such a way that they can be run on RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu etc (e.g. goggle-chrome). Or, best of all, we have the source code and can build the app for whatever system we have.
Yeah, don't do that. Installing a program from an Ubuntu repo into Debian or whatever way round, may well happen to work. It may well pull in a bunch of it's own dependencies and hose your OS installation.
But doing business with Microsoft has left me disgusted.
Why? After Windows Vista, I migrated to Linux (first Ubuntu, then Mint, now Debian for various reasons). I gave up on Microsoft after I was provided with Windows Vista 32bit only in Chinese on a 64-bit Intel Quad machine, and MS wanted over $1000USD for me to migrate to English Vista 64-bit and a fresh copy of MS Office.
The machine only cost me $700USD in the first place. Suddenly I needed to put out more than the cost of hardware for new software. Plus, I had previously tried to buy my way to happiness in MS WindowsXP with a copy of XP Professional English and 2003 Office, only to find that because I was located in Taiwan --- Microsoft only offered me on-line support in Chinese.
Yes, I specifically purchased XP Profession and Office2003 in English and wasdenied any support in English regardless of this obvious choice of language in spite of MS earning a 30% profit margin on that product at that time. I began to sign all postings for help as "Roadkill on Microsoft's Internet Super-highway". Then Vista in Taiwan was ONLY available in Chinese without a special order from the USA. And only with Windows7 did MS finally wise up and provide a language choice at start-up.
By that time, I had pretty much decided that I would never pay another dollar for a Microsoft product under any conditions. So Windows 10 is a complete unknown to me and too late to the game. I am even extremely wary of what unpleasantness a free upgrade of my Windows 7 Starter to Windows 10 might bring. And the Windows Vista 32bit won't allow a free change over to English or to 64 bit -- so it sits there as a reminder of how messed up Microsoft can be when we presume they might do something rational (like provide 64-bit software with 64-bit hardware, or English support for their English versions of software)
Yes that is me ---- ROADKILL ON THE MICROSOFT INTERNET SUPERHIGHWAY.
I simply prefer to give my money to people that know what they are doing.
Sorry, my bad. I shouldn't have used the term repositories. I think I noticed this when I had issues with one, and changed to a different mirror, on either Ubuntu or Mint.
However what I actually meant was discussed in that thread, I think it was about different library versions not playing nice with one another.
I don't think it is as much of a problem nowadays, however from the linked thread others apparently are running into the same thing still.
Time marches on and something new is learned everyday -- regardless of what OS you use. There are some very good reasons that old libraries are abandoned. But when they are, old favorite software may no longer work unless you can find a way to reinstall the old libraries that worked so well with it.
Containers have their limits. They are not virtualization or emulation so a container built for Linux will not run on Windows or Mac (as far as I know) like you can do with vmware or virtual box. They are not architecture neutral so a container made on x86 wont run on ARM.
Great idea for developing and deploying server side, or even embedded system components. I'm not sure they make a great general purpose application delivery system.
So, the 'true net' in Cuba is the 'USB storage network'. People just keep and share data on USB storage devices, pass them along, reboot the computers at the network cafes with them to retain privacy and open up privileges.
Certainly based on the LiveCD OSes that originated in Linux, and not a Microsoft product.