rec.autos.simulators

// Johan

// Johan

I don't think that's true. As we all know Linux is way better than
windows and even more important, less buggy. So all the time that MS is
investing in bugfixes gives all those enthusiatic Linux developers the
chance to make it more user friendly. The result? Linux will catch up on
windows in user friendlyness (is that a word?) and MS will go bankrupt
when paying the bail for Bill. :-)

Is that 'buch like us' not the largest group of customers for sims like
eg GPL? And could it therefore not be usefull to consider Linux?

// Johan

There is another element you need to consider.  The enthusiastic Linux
developers aren't doing it for the money.  One one hand, as soon as you try
and sell Linux and games written for it to the general public, you are going
to have people SCREAMING at the developers to support every piece of
hardware they own. "Does not support the blahblahblah
soundcard/videocard/mouse/modem/etc. at this time" isn't going to fly.

When developers are required to respond to consumer demands, they are going
to want money.  As soon as money comes into the picture, you will lose the
'everybody pitching in to make it great' concept that makes Linux what it is
and it will become another commercial endeavour, subject to the same rules
as any other.

I am willing to bet that the "buch" of us are a really small fraction of the
game-buying public.  the number of copies of NASCAR Revolution that will be
sold to people who have never even HEARD of Usenet newsgroups probably
exceeds the entire readership of r.a.s.

What if I wanted to run Linux today? (and I have installed and set it up a
few times)  It doesn't support my scanner or my video capture gear and
doesn't implement all the features in my soundcard or video card.  What do I
have to do to get Linux to support these things? (All mainstream hardware,
BTW)  I am a pretty computer-savvy user, and I have no recourse.   I'm not a
programmer, and nobody is going to conjure up device support for me just
because I want it.  Even if it did support these things, what am I supposed
to do with al the WIndows software I already own?

Before you throw in the 'windows emulator' concept, let me tell you about
OS/2.  It was touted as being able to run Windows programs 'better than
Windows'.  Basically, it allowed you to run each 16 bit windows program in
its own virtual machine and allowed you to specify the environment with more
flexibility.  It worked, but getting programs to run in it was a huge hassle
and they often didnt work fully/correctly.  You also needed big hardware to
run more than a couple things smoothly. It also had poor device support.
Eventually, I said to myself: "Why am I trying so hard to make Windows
programs/hardware run in OS/2 when I can just run them in Windows?".

I'm not down on Linux at all, I think it is wonderful, but thinking that it
is ever going to have a place in  *mainstream* public computing as a desktop
OS is blind, MS-hating optimism.

daxe

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Well, maybe you should get your facts straight: Supposedly win98 will
suffer several "followups" before the lines finally merge into the
nt-only domain, but by then (sometime around 2004, I guess) we'll all
be running Linux anyway.

Ouch! You've outed yourself here a a die-hard ***. ;-)  I admin'ed
a mix of Ultrix /VMS vaxen while in Uni, and my colleagues and I took
turns in "forgetting" the VMS admin passwords just not to have to work
with it...;-)

Yep, but this is still some NT only problem. SMP scales much much
better in Unix systems. The only thing that noticeably helps NT
performance is throwing shitloads of RAM at it.

I agree. When the Bebox first came out I was finally hoping for
relatively low-cost consumer SMP to get a firm foothold in the ***
market, but this has not yet happened. Maybe if BeOS takes off (which
is great at supporting SMP, BTW) we'll see this change. We'll
definitely see a change in what you call "low Linux use" if the growth
rate of Linux keeps up (user base doubling each year for five years
running now, not bad!)

Cheers,

Uwe

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By a margin of 10-to-1, perhaps?

Precisely. The economic realities of the marketplace just don't support it.
The mainstream computing user base is not looking for an alternative to
Windows as fervently as you fellows, if they're looking at all.

        Actually, having worked with installing multiple OSs as part of a
networking class a year back, I think I can add to this discussion.

        Linux was easy to install--much easier than Win95, which tends to
randomly not work.  However, Linux wasn't as pretty--it was using text-windowed
menus for most of the process, where Win95 goes to that "pretty" GUI--and as
we all well know, prettier=easier.

        Seriously, Linux was as easy or easier to install than Win95, and much
easier than Novell.  WinNT was, however, much easier than either Win95 or
Linux.

                                -The Enigmatic One

Actually, I've only worked on VMS for about 3 months and even then I was working on
other systems at the same time. I've worked on them all - different flavours of IBM,
all kinds of UNIX, ICL, NT, Windows. I like the purity of design of VMS - in its day
it was good as was MVS which had an excellent multi-threaded capability in the
sub-system. UNIX has its good and bad points - in some ways if it had stayed at Bell
Labs it may have been better than it is now - so many fingers in the pie have rather
destroyed its clarity of design. IMO, the best thing Thompson and Ritchie did was
the C programming language and not UNIX. Who remembers the failure of Open Systems?
Who has tried to port from one UNIX flavour to another?
Programming in C, C++ or Java is much the same under any platform - it's the tools
and APIs that make the difference. The range of compilers available in NT far
exceeds those available in UNIX both in number and in quality. X is not nice to deal
with at all, and, though horribly flawed, the Win32 API is a lot nicer to program
with. I am not a Microsoft lover - much of their offerings are pilfered from others,
much is seriously flawed (eg COM - CORBA is much nicer) and a single software vendor
is not good for the world. Having said that NT does a lot of things very right. Dave
Cutler has produced an exceptional OS there and I have not seen a better
light-weight threading model than can be found in NT. I'm not saying one doesn't
exist, just that I have not seen it. I think we would both probably agree that the
Windows 3 - Windows 95 - Windows 98 family are shite operating systems.

I don't think so! Once you have more than one processor you have to start managing
threads, priorities, locking objects etc etc. This is always going to consume
resources.

True enough.

I would have absolutely no objection to this happening. I know little about Linux
other than it is a flavour of UNIX. Any competition to Microsoft can only be good.
One of the keys to its growing is that it must show a GUI as the primary point of
user contact, be easy to install and have dialog based access to all its
functionlity. As an IT professional, we may not find the interface to UNIX daunting,
but most users will. MacOS got all this right, the only shame was that they
preserved it for their own machines and were far to late to publically licence it.

Cheers,
Paul

But I'd be really surprised if there has been any significant migration of
existing users from Windows to Mac. I'll venture a guess that there is a
substantially larger number of users that have migrated from Mac to Win than
from Win to Mac. And my guess is that that migration trend is driven by
software availability and other economic considerations.

So I don't see how Linux has a prayer. I'm a developer myself and, though we
know they exist, I've not met anyone that's writing for Linux.

I have installed and configured Win9x on about 50-60 computers.  It has been
problematic on exactly one of them.  Linux asked questions that no-one but a
computer-savvy person could answer.  How many mainstream computer users do
you know who can name their graphics chip?

Unless you have plug 'n' play hardware.

daxe

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:o)

daxe

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If I am not mistaken, Apple tried to license the technology to some
clone-makers a short while ago, but stopped the process because they were
losing their own sales!  Mac users love to tout the crash-freeness of the
OS, etc, but if the Wintel platform didn't have to try and encompass 9
hundred zillion different manufacturers' products and the attendant
variations on the theme, it could easily make everything work just as
smoothly.

daxe

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When I got my first computer in the summer of 1993, I didn't have a clue
about what the differences were between MACs and PCs.  If anyone had told me
that MAC was the platform to go with if your interests are graphics and
music, I would have bought one.  INstead, I went to a software store.  I saw
row after row of shelves of software for DOS/Windows, and one or two for
MAC.  I bought a PC.  You have a catch 22 here...Nobody is going to port or
write software for Linux unless there is money in it (read: large installed
user base)  There is not going to be a large installed user base until there
is software.  Take your figures about how the user base is growing and make
sure you divide it up into the gamers, the office users, the graphics pros,
the DTP people, the casual internet surfer, etc.  It is just common sense
that someone writing software for a living is going to try and sel it to as
many people as possible.  Those people aren't using Linux.

If there was money in it, they'd be lining up at the door.  No-one pays me
to do my hobby, either.

daxe

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