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So you thought you bought some software
At the heart of the computer industry are some very big lies, and some of them are especially iniquitous. One is about commercial software.
[...] Anyone who chooses to use free and open source software on their desktop regularly gets asked why. Why bother? Isn't it more work? Isn't the pro-grade gear commercial? Isn't it worth buying the good stuff? Windows is the industry standard, isn't it simply less work to go with the flow?
[...] The practical upshot of which is that most of the time, the commercial stuff isn't significantly better. No, it isn't less hassle. Mostly, it's more hassle, but if you're used to the nuisances you don't notice them. If the free software experience was really worse, most of us wouldn't do it.
[...] Anyone who chooses to use free and open source software on their desktop regularly gets asked why. Why bother? Isn't it more work? Isn't the pro-grade gear commercial? Isn't it worth buying the good stuff? Windows is the industry standard, isn't it simply less work to go with the flow?
[...] The reason that it's not better to buy software is simple, but it's a lie. A lie at the heart of the entire computer industry, but nonetheless a lie that's very hard to see – "for the same reason that people in Trafalgar Square can't see England," to quote a good book.
It isn't better to buy commercial software because you can't buy software.
It is not possible for you to own paid-for, commercial software. You can't buy it. You probably think that you have bought lots, but you haven't. All you really bought is a lie.
[...] All you can buy is licenses. Serial numbers or activation keys or maybe even hardware dongles. Strange abstract entities that only really exist in lawyers' minds, which claim to permit you to use someone else's software.
As someone who started installing gcc in the 80's, I use more open source packages than closed source. The only "bugs" they have tend to be compatibility issues. As in, $GiantCorp releases a new version of $PopularProgram and suddenly the Open Source version can't open the new save files.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Thursday October 06 2022, @08:01AM (14 children)
I find windows GUI is more stable than linux.
* Every few days I have some issues with cinnamon (some linux mint thing which I don't understand very well) going bonkers and not rendering the desktop properly.
* Firefox wants to reinstall every week, which in itself is painful; and when it does reinstall it often goes into some weird mode where it uses loads of system resources (and takes thunderbird down with it).
* Libreoffice crashes every now and then, especially when it tries to render powerpoint. Sometimes even rendering libreoffice generated docs. It also struggles with slides that have lots of objects on.
I can usually fix these sorts of things by power cycling and/or mysterious incantations in the terminal to kill/restart processes etc.
I don't see any of these issues with windows - on the other hand I tend to use windows for non-work stuff i.e. video games which are possibly not so demanding, and I don't tend to leave my windows boxes running.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2022, @08:19AM (1 child)
I use Windows at work for a living. I have lots of issues. Windows is great if you don't do much, or don't strain it. It's really not a suitable operating system for heavy duty use. Windows crashes on me at least once a week, mostly due to how crappy the window system is.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 06 2022, @07:24PM
Windows is okay if YOU are not responsible for maintaining it. If your organization spends obscene amounts of money keeping Windows running smoothly, safely and securely. And throwing plenty of hardware at it to have satisfactory performance.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2022, @08:59AM (1 child)
The UI is relatively stable(*cough Win 11 cough*), but whoever's been writing their security patches has gotten very sloppy. I'm currently battling yet another Windows Update corruption that isn't getting repaired with the usual tools. If it isn't that, the updates are flat out broken, pushed too quickly, then retracted so they can do it right. On Linux you can blame the fragmentation, but Microsoft doesn't have that excuse.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday October 06 2022, @10:00AM
Exactly this. As someone else said, the Linux desktop has stability problems. Windows has other problems, often related to the registry or the updates.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Thursday October 06 2022, @01:38PM (5 children)
I cannot confirm your first two points. I am on openSUSE/KDE and the GUI is absolutely stable for years (no crashes/lockups). If firefox wants to re-install, use a better distro which has turned off the online-checks of firefox and relies on own repos. WRT Libreffice I have to concur. In my perception, word processing is an unsolvable problem. In all processors (LO/MS word/google docs) I have seen horribly garbled text formatting on single character changes (like removing a new-line) in recent versions. LO seems to be the worst, however. Just the other week, I had it edit two characters away from the actual text cursor and undo eating away my text (using track-changes). I wonder how it is even possible to produce code to this effect.
For presentations, I recommend using pdf (latex) or HTML (much better effects).
(Score: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Thursday October 06 2022, @03:09PM
Firefox often wants to update, but that's because there's a new version every month (even with the ESRs) - partly because of security vulnerabilities like https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2022-41/ [mozilla.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by EEMac on Thursday October 06 2022, @03:29PM (1 child)
> word processing is an unsolvable problem
Only because Word compatibility is required. That requires Word's multiple-level overlapping character/paragraph/page style model, which overlaps "somehow" with the visible style (heading 1, heading 2, . . .), which overlaps "somehow" with the text-styling controls (bold, underline, . . . ). It's learnable but complicated. I can only imagine what LibreOffice programmers go through trying to match Word's behavior - and bugs, since that's part of compatibility.
WordPerfect, for example, is famous for getting documents right repeatedly. And with Reveal Codes you can actually see/fix the underlying structure. Or, as shrewdsheep mentions, HTML lets you (mostly) separate content from presentation. That solves a whole host of problems.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday October 06 2022, @05:35PM
Agreed. I cant say I've ever had an problem using OpenOffice to open OpenDocument files, or any other supported file formats for that matter. Nor even with Word files created by Open Office or other open source word processing programs.
Word files are just a disaster - even Microsoft was either unable or unwilling to fully document the format when creating their current "open" formats. Instead, despite (as I dimly recall) the format specification being ~10x the size of the ODF specs, they still only define large stretches of the format as literally just "the way Word does it", while resorting to bribery and coercion to get it accepted as an "open" format by those governments that decided to require open formats for government files.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday October 07 2022, @02:33AM
Oh, LO does even more interesting things with RTF documents...
-- When Track Changes encounters one of the RTF tag nesting bugs (as can happen if italics comes to the very end of a line and includes the punctuation), it proceeds to mis-nest the whole rest of the document so you get 500 pages of italics, or strikeout, or both, and you can't fix it from inside LO; if you try you just wind up with all subsequent text hidden. You have to fix it in a text editor, assuming you know how to find the overlapped tags and delete them. (I have become proficient at this.)
-- When Track Changes encounters an image used as a scene spacer, sometimes it proceeds to insert ~550MB (yes, megabytes) of invisible UUEncoded garbage. (It's not even document data, it's just junk, possibly grabbed from RAM.) Same fix, if you can find an editor to handle it. If you copypasta around the point of error, it'll lose the tracked changes, having somewhere in the mess dropped the close tag for something upstream.
These problems don't occur in DOCX or ODT files... but if you trust either as your save format, you have a death wish. I have a client who lost a whole finished novel to header corruption in the ZIP file those formats are on disk (unfortunately by the time it was discovered, it had propagated across her backups too... Nope, the ZIP wouldn't rebuild either.)
" I have seen horribly garbled text formatting on single character changes (like removing a new-line) "
That's probably a tag nesting bug -- it's not properly preserving formatting tags when you delete visible text, so they wind up miswhacked, and formatting gets mangled.
BTW this is exactly why Internet Explorer ignored missing tags, back in the early days -- because until the XP release, when this was fixed, Frontpage had a tag deleting bug that had the same effect. (Backspace over the WYSIWYG text, and it took out any tags in its way too, as if it was editing raw text.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday October 08 2022, @02:17AM
BTW I also greatly prefer KDE, and... it depends.
PCLinuxOS/KDE runs perfectly stable for months even in heavy use, and about the only way to clog it up is when Chrome dies of tab overload, and takes memory management with it. Even that happens very rarely (probably because 24GB RAM).
Fedora/KDE needs to be restarted about once a week even if it was just sleeping. (It also tends to get sluggish toward the end of the stable period, which PCLOS never does.) If I forget, I will soon be reminded because first sign is Chrome's bookmarks are misaligned and don't work. (This'un has 64GB RAM, so it's not starving.)
When they fail, they both do it the same way. GUI becomes unresponsive, but terminal still works. It looks very much like Windows being run out of resource heaps.
I've had Mageia lock up, but might have been a Wayland problem. And I had Neon forget its password on the 2nd boot after a clean install. Conversely Manjaro/KDE on my Pinephone has never misbehaved.
But outside of distro-specific quirks... KDE itself misbehaves so rarely that the bugfix list is funny, because I never saw any of them.
Chrome will sometimes whine that it needs to be reinstalled. This is just boilerplate for "I want an update!!" and has nothing to do with the OS. I imagine Firefox is doing the same thing.
Disclaimer: I am typing this on an everyday WinXP system that was last restarted 09 October 2021. Yeah, I like stability.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2022, @04:38PM
Oh we're doing anecdotes? Ok here's mine. I've been using linux on the desktop exclusively for two decades. The only GUI crashes I've ever had were related to AMD drivers, which has been a challenge on Windows as well. LibreOffice is literally rock solid it has never crashed once for me. Not ONE time. Firefox has never tried to "reinstall itself." Sounds like you either have a hardware issue or have managed to screw up your installation somehow. Those are extremely odd problems that 99% of us do not experience.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday October 07 2022, @03:25AM (1 child)
Sounds like more of a Cinnamon problem; this is why I use XFCE, which is just functional and stays out of my way.
I don't need some UX twerp completely replacing the general user experience every 5 years with some new, sexy-looking piece of vomit that destroys my productivity and forces me to relearn how to use my OS.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday October 07 2022, @07:32AM
I am not really interested in Desktop UI, so I just wanted something that wasn't a mobile phone OS (i.e. not ubuntu). Maybe I chose the wrong car keys from the jar.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday October 08 2022, @02:52AM
I can't be sure, but I suspect some of these are graphics driver issues. One way to be sure would be to run something like a frame-buffer-only X server and view it on another system, as it then wouldn't be graphics-hardware specific, or to be able to preserve window structure and application data when fully restarting the X server.