Blogging Ottinger (tim)Not use Linux?
There are lots of reasons not to use Linux, I guess. Depending on which way you turn your bias magnifier.
A guy told me that all versions of linux are incompatible. I was amazed. I had no idea. All this time I thought we were all running the same kernels and the same applications on all of them. Amazing what you can learn from a guy who’s never used it.
A fun experiment - in a lab I set all the machines running different window managers. I had kde, xfce, fluxbox, and gnome running. A good friend of mine asked me “which linux” I liked best. So I showed him that it’s all the same and you could switch between look-n-feel. He asked me if you could still run the same programs. He was amazed that you could. I guess it’s weird to have choices, when you’re used to being under a more dictatorial system. Especially when the choices aren’t slight variations of the same thing.
Much to my regret, none of the software tools that I need for my profession are available for Linux. Needless to say, this severly limits my interest in the O.S.
Comment by Walter Moore — 2005-September-6 @ 05:31
Yeah, I know your industry, and the degree to which they design their tools for a microsoft-only world. There are some good signs of things moving (ever so slowly) in that direction, though.
http://www.ni.com/linux/
http://xtronics.com/toshiba/comp_link.htm
http://www.control.com/1011195315/index_html
http://rongage.org/
But I appreciate what you say about AB and the like not supporting Linux, and I completely understand how you’re stuck there. Bummer. Well, given enough time, it will be everwhere (who expected IBM to do what they did?), so maybe there is hope.
And I suppose it might even be better if control applications went to something like BSD rather than linux (still free, but famously stable), though the differences don’t seem to be all that great.
Comment by Administrator — 2005-September-6 @ 02:13