Are other operating systems ever going to catch up with Linux?

DWPTA said:
Been running it for a while now with no issues. No spyware or malware detected.

Not everything from China is a Fong Kong special....
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You will not easily detect it if it is there. I have reason to mention this but won't go public with the info. All I am saying, be careful.
 
I don't think many people realise that Windows XP sill has a greater or comparable market share to Windows Vista/7/8.

How can advanced Ubuntu 14.04 or other distros be a second choice to discontinued/unsupported Windows XP?

This is like the Playstation 2 vs PS3&4 argument. It's all well and good for game makers because they still get to make money selling latest games to PS2 owners, but th eonly way Sony can make money is to make new consoles 3-4-5 etc. Are they really needed? No!

So in the OS scenario apps/software are they key, which means developers are the key. Too lazy to develop for Linux guys? I still stand by my initial argument - greed. People will follow whatever OS their primary apps are designed to run on. Port them to Linux.

At this rate Apple&Google (and Samsung) are killing Microsoft. Huge retrenchments and lay offs taking place. Zero uptake for Win 8, and Windows 9 might not cut it. Satya might wean off Xbox, and if the struggle continues so might Windows Mobile(Nokia+Mobile OS). To make matters worse, Surface not doing too greatly either. Who knows how much they'll be making from Azure, Office 365, MSSQL & Win9 going forward. Not easy when having to deal with consumers&businesses going who are increasingly going mobile while you're centred around the desktop/laptop.

Banking so much of your future on a company that's losing value fast (Gates won't have much share left, if any, in another couple of years at the rate he's selling his MS stock) makes little sense from my perspective.

Markets in the west have reached their cap IT wise. Just ask Google. The only market share or growth path left is 2nd&3rd world. Densely populated countires like Bangladesh, India, China, Brazil, Nigeria etc. The only way to really break through them (politics aside) is Open Source, otherwise no one ther will afford the poducts/services. Linux is at the centre of that.
 
noxibox said:
That's not really a valid reason not to use software like Linux in schools and universities. They're not training grounds to suit the requirements of the business world nor should they be corrupted to become so.
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MacLindroid said:
Linux has become super easy, it can be great fun and my suggestion would be to let schools and universities use it. It is an excellent way of teaching the young relevant ICT knowledge, hone their skills. This will eventually lead to some of them developing better or new apps, even choose a career as Linux professionals are not easy to come by. Create a career path now by thinking far ahead.

Most people/businesses will find [LibreOffice] sufficient and the benefit is that the interface remains virtually unchanged. Traning staff is easier than having to deal with re-training as fast as MS changes things.

Over a generation, this can bring down the cost of computing and silently bury the proprietary systems.
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The EFF should move a motion in parliament for these two quotes to framed and displayed parliament, Union buildings and every government department!!!!
 
MacLindroid said:
You will not easily detect it if it is there. I have reason to mention this but won't go public with the info. All I am saying, be careful.
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Tinfoil aside the biggest problem with Kingsoft on linux is that, as with MS Office, it doesn't support the open document format.
 
MickZA said:
Tinfoil aside the biggest problem with Kingsoft on linux is that, as with MS Office, it doesn't support the open document format.
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It's still freeware/proprietary and not Open Source. If enough people put faith in OSS then:
Gimp=Photoshop
Inkscape=Illustrator
Blender=SolidWorks
LibreOffice=MS Office
PostgreSQL>Oracle
Odoo>SAP

Afterall, Linux(Ubuntu) is already better than Windows!
 
MacLindroid said:
Yes, I know how that works, but what the security scribe said was that the part given to NSA held the "DNA" of the entire thing, allowing the encryption to be reversed. It can be done because the underlying technology has a number of fields (whatever) that are all the same for both public & private keys. It somehow makes it easier to be 'reversed'. Yes, it already has been done as the hack was reported at the time.
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If you knew how it works you'd know that there is no "magical DNA" that would allow the keys to be decrypted easily, unless you had a quantum computer, of course.
In theory, those number of fields* your friend referred to "cannot all be the same"; different values of n produce different fields based on the factorisation of n.

However, your friend was probably referring to the usage of EC_DRBG in RSA. That has a backdoor, and was promptly dropped by the security community once this was found to be the case. Otherwise, the mathematical basis for RSA still is sound. But with larger keys needed and the increasing usage of low powered devices, other systems like elliptic curve crypto are gaining traction.

*I think he may have said number fields, but that would be weird since Z_p is not a number field.
MacLindroid said:
Microsoft is suspected of snooping upon its users, something that won't surprise me. Do they silently feed data from user machine to their servers? It is also happening with some Chinese phones and computers.

Linux, being open source, has the benefit of thousands of enthusiasts checking ever line of source code. Also, nothing can be executed unless marked as executable, on my system at least. Even to get there requires root access depending upon a password.
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This.... i can kinda agree on. But credible citations would be nice to minimise the extent of the tinfoil hattery :p
 
MacLindroid said:
The encryption keys and techniques have been handed to NSA. Now all encrypted data could be accessed. Not until an entire new generation of encryption tools are invented, will data ever be safe again. Even so, encrypting is better than leaving it open, of course.

Encryption for email: Thunderbird Mail runs on Linux, Mac and Windows and can be adapted for encrypting mail between parties, using GNUPGP, with keys created by the user and not bought from Thawte or Verisign.
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Ok, so then you're ignoring the fact that Azure now has encryption servers that are NOT housed in the US, and that MS has no sight of... they're operated and maintained by Kaspersky (I think)
 
MacLindroid said:
What broke on my Apple was local sync, both iTunes and iOS. Also, wireless networking on iOS on SOME devices, following in the wake of the removed USB sync. It forced users through the iCloud. Sorry, there is much more to say but it really is uncomfortable just reliving it. Just on the issue of local sync, 242 pages of irate Apple users bashed Apple for their sheer stupidity.....go do a search on their forums.

Then the iPhone's power button broke and it took six weeks to get it fixed/replaced. Since iStore staff wear jeans exposing their arses, I see no reason why we should be paying up to 55% more than elsewhere for things that stop working after updates.

Paying that premium for stuff that does NOT work even remotely as well as Linux does, is plain stupid. My yeaar with Apple is the only one that I came to hate anything with such a fierce passion. Expexting it to be perfect would be daft, but an expectation of performance according to price is fair. Apple fell far short.
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Oh wait a moment are you THAT guy from a few months ago who actually wanted a Nokia and then went and bought everything Apple and couldn't deal with the change?

In that case...I eject myself from this conversation.
 
Eventually.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/16/windows_9_leak_suggests_microsoft_has_caught_up_with_linux/
New videos of a Windows variant thought to be Windows 9 have emerged, and to this hack's eyes they look to have brought Windows up to speed with tricks Linux on the desktop has been doing for at least half a decade.

The feature in question is being described as “multiple desktops” and looks an awful lot like the “workspaces” that have been around in Ubunutu and Gnome for years, are on offer in the Raspbian distro for the Raspberry Pi and. If correspondent's memory is not entirely crocked, the ability to create and switch between multiple desktops was also on offer in that version of Red Hat I bought with a n00bs guide in about 2004.
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ginggs said:
Eventually.
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ZDnet reported on this some time back, officially supported workspaces are long overdue on Windows.

I've been using dexpot to provide this functionality on my Win x systems for some years now.
 
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Eventually (part 2).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
Linux was the first operating system kernel to run the x86-64 architecture in long mode, starting with the 2.4 version in 2001 (prior to the physical hardware's availability).
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x64 editions of Microsoft Windows client and server—Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition—were released in March 2005.
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However driver support was so poor, I'd probably only start counting at Windows Vista (2007) or Windows 7 (2009).

Mac OS X v10.6 (2009) is the first version of OS X that supports a 64-bit kernel.
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ginggs said:
Eventually.
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Virtual desktops we be having since before me. I recently started using PekWM and the ability to group any application windows together is pure awesomeness, so in one window I can have my web browser, terminal, file manager etc etc etc I like this more than virtual desktops :D
 
I stopped using Linux 2 years ago when I bought a MacBook. OS X kills Linux as a desktop/laptop OS.

I stopped using my Linux machine. Everything just became a chore to run or to setup, which is not what an OS is supposed to deliver. So I replaced it with Solaris Unix as a server OS.

No reason for me to use Linux now.
 
zippy said:
I stopped using Linux 2 years ago when I bought a MacBook. OS X kills Linux as a desktop/laptop OS.

I stopped using my Linux machine. Everything just became a chore to run or to setup, which is not what an OS is supposed to deliver. So I replaced it with Solaris Unix as a server OS.

No reason for me to use Linux now.
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Cool and next year they'll release a bigger iPhone too
 
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