Microsoft Windows: The only viable operating system.

Thanks for the best laugh of the day. A couple weeks ago I made a video of my current desktop, with a panorama from one of the Mars Rovers as the "skydome" when I rotate the desktop cube between the workspaces.

Of course, if I really wanted a professional system, I guess I'd have to switch to Windows Vista. And install Microsoft Office... and ditch mySQL for Microsoft SQL Server... and ditch Apache for Microsoft IIS... Wait, for IIS I'd need one of the Windows Server versions, not Vista... Let's see.. Where's my credit card and Microsoft's phone number?

Oops.. Embed doesn't work on comments...

Compiz desktop cube with Martian background on Ubuntu

Yeah, any operating system with a command interpreter and clear text system files can't be all that useful.

I have ubuntu on my laptop - its great. But I use XP most of the time. I think that many of the ubuntu advocates don't really live in the real world. In my world everyone uses windows and microsoft products. I can't help that. Openoffice, while great isn't 100% compatible with word. We can debate whose fault that is, but I don't care. 99% compatible is not good enough.

Ubuntu is sort of like the electric car that gets 400 miles on a charge. Its great invention. An engineering marvel - as long as you always come home to charge it up. But if you want to visit somewhere else you are going to be looking for somewhere to plug it in - and thats where you get stuck.

I agree Ubuntu is awesome. But its not that useful when you are the only one using it. I think this post misses that point.

I use Linux all the time, work in the real world, use OpenOffice as my word processor and have yet to have a compatibility problem except briefly when DOCX files were not yet readable. Honestly.

I am currently engaged in an intense research project exchanging data and text with a coleague using a Mac. No problems. None. I am constantly reviewing and editing documents sent to me by my 30 or so active students. Half the time I do that on an XP at school, the other half the time on my laptop (ubuntu) or my home computer (ubuntu). Not one problem with compatibility ever except the small one mentioned. I have a paper coming out in a journal in a few weeks/days co-authored by an XP a Windows Vista and me (Linux) without a single problem.

Honestly, this is how it is all the time for me. Richard, I think as is the case with a lot of Linux-Likers you are basing your conclusions on someone out of date experiences. What you are describing is the world of 2006, not 2008.

Only reasons to use Windows:
1) You are a game player.
2) The company you work for has it's most of the user infrastructure build on Microsoft.
3) To infect your own system with what ever nastie from the internet that friend/family member/colleague has so you know how to remove it.

I was amused to read on that site "Why would you want to use Scribus" in the context that it would be ridiculous not to.

I have had the misfortune of using Scribus for about a year when I was an editor of a magazine, and let me tell you that I would happily fork out the money to use Microsoft Publisher before using it again. Scribus is pretty horrible, and its free status does not come close to offsetting that.

OpenOffice on the other hand is mostly fine for my purposes.

Crap tech support has nothing to do with the OS itself. And what's with the implied racism? Are people with Indian-sounding names not good enough?

Dunc: I don't know if the author's intent with that part had a racial bias or not. I guess it could go either way. The way I took it is that it seems to be another aspect of the situation where they aren't being honest with you. This goes for tech support across the board, I think, regardless of the product or service.

Maybe I'm just being over-sensitive. I used to work with a very swarthy chap called Rajeev. From looking at him, or hearing his name, you'd assume he was Indian. However, from speaking to him you immediately realised that he was actually Glaswegian (although of Indian descent).

It's not just tech support that sucks - it's customer service of any kind, in any industry. Having been on the wrong end of that phone before though, I can kinda understand why... ;)

@Greg - thanks for your comments - I am in academia also and frequently share documents like you describe. My main problem is actually equations! It drives me nuts, but if only I could edit equations across platforms then most of my trouble would be gone. I really do want to use Linux - I love it.

Oh, and your blog is one of my faves - I'm a regular reader - keep up the good work!!

Richar

I like to refer to the process that most Microsoft-product support people use, no matter what the problem is, as "The Five R's":

1. Retry
2. Restart
3. Reboot
4. Reinstall
5. Reformat

And I thought it was pretty obvious the Indian name commentary was directed not at people from India but at "what happens when you outsource technical support to the cheapest source possible", which right now seems to be gigantic call centers in India.

Not compatible with MS Office? Hell, MS Office is not compatible with MS Office. I received an Excel file from the latest version of Office, which I do not have on my Mac. I had to take it into a secure computing environment, load it onto the systems that do have the latest version, convert it to csv text (the only way I could take it back out), load it onto my computer, convert it back to an Excel file, make my changes, and then send it back to the originator. That's MS compatibility.

Anon: One word: MS Works.

(as in the software, "Microsoft Works", not "Microsoft works" because no it does not. Especially Works does not work.

Richard:
Regarding the math equation editors, are you having difficulties sharing documents between word processing programs such as OpenOffice.org, KOffice, and MS Office 2007, or between scientific document editors such as Publicon or SciWriter? I think the only commonality between most of them is MathML, though some of these use their own structures by default.

For display on the web, MathML equations show up fine in Firefox or Opera, but I think IE has some difficulties.

Greg: We still have MS Works documents where I work. One of these days I'm going to slip in and secretly replace their Windows machine with an Ubuntu machine... Let's see if they can taste the difference.

Google Docs is quickly becoming my replacement for MS Office. Any docs I write tend to be html or latex, and emacs or vi works fine for that. However, I get a lot of crap from other Biologists and admin-critters in MS formats... unfortunately I can't just ignore all of it.

A big up side to google docs is that I've actually had fair success getting other people to use it in the first place instead of Word/Excel.

Dan, yes often equations made in MS word don't import well into OO running on ubuntu and vice versa.

Of course if they are done in mathtype then it gets even more fiddly.

I guess I tried to figure work arounds, but found that they always took longer than doing it natively in word running on XP.

I think Word attempts to represent the equations graphically once you save it as a .DOC file. This renders it pretty much useless to anyone down the line who wants to edit it.

I did find that "Word 2007 does have support to convert equations to/from MathML via the clipboard, although this feature is not turned on by default, and a recent Google search shows that the control to turn it on/off is virtually undocumented by Microsoft."

There are details at Inera, Inc. - Word 2007 Math if it might help. The guys at Design Science (makers of MathType) have a little page up about Creating a Quick Access Toolbar button in Word 2007 to open Equation Editor. It's really interesting that Microsoft seems to have discounted the existence of any users of MS Word who want to go beyond a resume or a newsletter.

LaTex anybody? If it is not LaTex it is not real math.

Greg - you had to play the LaTex card! Yeah LaTex is way cool of course, except my coauthors would really think that I have gone off the deep end. I don't really do enough equations to merit LaTex, and quite a few journals are actually moving away from LaTex as one of their acceptable formats.

I am downloading OO release candidate 1, and I am typing this in linux, so I'll give it all another shot.

Dan, thanks for those links, although I have tried to avoid Office 2007. I tried it for a week and found you had to do twice as many (at least) clicks to do basic formatting. Like you said, MSFT assumes everyone just wants to make newsletters that look pretty.

My only problem with Linux is (most likely me...) that I have trouble finding which programs work on which distribution.

My only problem with Linux is (most likely me...) that I have trouble finding which programs work on which distribution.

This isn't an unusual problem, so don't feel alone. The only real barrier when it comes to running certain programs is which desktop environment you use. Gnome, KDE, and XFCE are three of the most poular. You might have seen reference to Ubuntu's variations Kubuntu and Xubuntu. The differences between them are the desktop environment that is installed by default.

The package manager used in an installation will most often be able to tell you the prerequisites (dependencies) for a particular program. If I were to try to install a program based on the KDE desktop from my Gnome system, it would tell me that the KDE-desktop package, and all its other requirements, would have to be installed as well. It's possible to have several such desktop environments installed on one system, and to choose which one you want to use when you log in.

Dan, yes, it would tell you all that, but even more importantly, it would also just do it all for you when you hit "OK"... (as you know).

And that is pretty remarkable because from the point of view of the average desktop user, the difference between, say, KDE and Gnome is up there in magnitude with the difference between Windows 95/2000 and XP, for instance. So you can have any one of a half dozen well tested proven desktop environments ... picking the one you like best ... and pretty much have any software from any of those 'systems' run on any of the others.

So you can have any one of a half dozen well tested proven desktop environments ... picking the one you like best ... and pretty much have any software from any of those 'systems' run on any of the others.

Which is why those of us "in the know" consider it the best of all possible worlds (almost). There are still some issues with some Windows-specific software and difficult hardware. But we're working on it!

I have to say, I no longer think an operating system in the 1960s sense is a good idea. Give me Smalltalk, Lisp, or Forth, running straight on the hardware. I don't want a separate command language, I don't want artificial barriers between my programs, I don't want to be disconnected from my compiler and debugger as soon as the operating system can possibly do so. In this sense, Linux is better than Windows in the sense that living in the peaceful Kalahari is better than living in the war-torn Kalahari. But I'd still rather live in Switzerland.

Thankfully Alan Kay has begun a project to reimplement most of desktop computing in a few thousand lines of code (http://www.vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm), and Charles Moore has finally brought a really well designed parallel processor to the market (http://www.intellasys.net/), so there is a chance we may be able to escape this absurdity in the next decade.

I've lived in the Kalahari. I prefer it to Switzerland, hands down.

Fair 'nuff. Perhaps my choice of regions wasn't useful. Let's say, Alabama swamp instead of the Kalahari.

I get better cell phone reception in the Kalahari than in the swamps of the southern Appalachians. But to be onest, I don't think I've ever been to Alabama proper.