Linux users

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Originally Posted by gugi

he's a niche market - a gamer.

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Me too.
Oh, and I use AutoCAD at work. Is there still not yet a decent CAD that runs well on Linux?

Hey!! I'm a gamer too. If it's text-based adventure games you're after (and who isn't?), linux has your back!

James.

For those of you Linux users interested in playing with CAD software, here's a listing.. LUnIx . . . CAD & Linux: Linux CAD Links So far I haven't touched it professionally, but I just might, depending on where work takes me. Now I've got my hands full with learning the GIS basics.

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Originally Posted by gugi

yeah, let's have again the 'linux is best' war!!!!

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:medvl:

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Originally Posted by gugi

i've said it again, but for few years i was on the microsoft's supercomuter project, which is the thing that microsoft spent tens of millions trying to convince the scientific community that windows is good for that. eventually they realized it's not going to happen so they gave up. i did not have a very good experience - it was nice to get access to top of the line hardware, but getting the software to work was nightmare, just wen you get it they do an upgrade and it breaks again. and that's software that we've written ourselves - pretty straightforward stuff, very basic c++, so it's essentially good old c, with pthreads, mpi, blas and lapack. of course may be we're just used to u**x but among all unix types of OS I've used linux is the easiest to develop on and windows was order of magnitude worse than any u**x.

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My experiences are the other way around. (this is 4 years ago)

I've done 50KLOC projects on both platforms, and find Windows much easier to use. Primarily because
a) APIs and the platform are well documented, whereas most apis in linux only have man pages, which usually lag 2 releases behind.
b) Visual Studio is just sooooooo nice.
c) gdb cannot debug multithreaded C++ apps. after a couple of steps it loses context and goes oops.
d) IPC between multiple apps sucks. There is no way to work with named objects that I could find (i.e. identify a semaphore by name from different processes). You had to use magic 32 bit number, which could clash with other unknown apps.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: BSD is the unix that linux should have been: at every release cycle, it is fully tested, documented, and stable.
Linux may be fully tested, and may be stable (depending on which hardware you use) but it is nowhere near documented.

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Originally Posted by gugi

yes, hardware has poor support on linux, but it's a whole lot better than it used to be. that's why games suck - hw manufacturers won't make decent linux drivers so games can't take advantage of the hardware.
as linux gains market share this may change, or may not, after all the best hardware for games gets packaged as game consoles and sold at big discount.

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Aren't the nvidia drivers providign full 3D functionality? honest question.

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Originally Posted by gugi

i'm sure that photoshop is better than gimp, but i believe this is largely because the professional photographers know how to use photoshop and not gimp..

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[/QUOTE]

Actually, GIMP is missing a lot of things that are critical to pros, like the ability to work with CMY instead of RGB. This is the only one I remembered, but it is huge, and there are several other major issues.
For average users like me it is good enough, although the GUI is hard to get used to.

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Originally Posted by gugi

So I would argue that Alex finds Windows more suitable than Linux, only because he's a niche market - a gamer. And if his sister didn't already know and own photoshop, Aperture/OSX may be much better choice for her.

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Windows is suitable in many other places.
.NET has taken off in enterprises because it is so easy to create custom software, and integrate it with SQL, Exchange, COM components and legacy libraries, ...

I am a developer, and I work currently in a pharmaceutical company.
Cost of tools is not important here. Or rather, the price we pay for my dev tools is truly insignificant in the larger scheme of things. VS allows me to be very productive when I write the code to integrate different systems which use different technology. :shrug: my 2 ct.

Bruno, this is the last piece of code I wrote on VisualStudio, that was few years ago

Code:

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#ifdef _WIN32
  const size_t nbytes=size*nmemb;
  const size_t write_size=33554432;
  size_t nwritten=0;
  const char *my_data= (const char *) data;
  for (int i=0; i<nbytes/write_size; i++)
    nwritten += fwrite(&my_data[i*write_size], 1, write_size, stream);
  nwritten += fwrite(&my_data[(nbytes/write_size)*write_size], 1,
                    nbytes%write_size, stream);
  return (nwritten==nbytes)?nwritten:0;
#else
  return fwrite(data, size, nmemb, stream);
#endif

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The reason I had to split the write in few pieces was that I kept getting an empty datafile with the result after I ran the calculation for few days. And that only showed when I ran on 4 machines (i.e. only when the problem is big enough that I need 15GB of memory and had access to only 4GB machines), so tracking it down to a buggy fwrite was quite a challenge. There's another level of MPI communication above this. I've never had to track anything like this on linux.

I agree that the cost of tools is insignificant in most cases, I just never cared much for VisualStudio, but that's probably because it's a bit too visual - I prefer to keep my hands away from the mouse.

The only BSD I've used is the apple's horrible and buggy implementation and that really sucks.

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Originally Posted by Bruno

Aren't the nvidia drivers providign full 3D functionality? honest question.

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Haven't been able to find any that didn't require a lot of tweaking to my system yet.

Under windoooze it was easy. Download exe file, install exe file...done.

Ubuntu started screaming that they didn't have any drivers....didn't have the drivers in the list that I could select from.....and as a result I haven't even rebooted ubuntu since then.

Like I said...it's excellent for many people....just not for some and I'm one of those.

I had no problems with nvidia drivers under Hardy so I'm assuming I'll get the same level of implementation with Intrepid. It asked me whether I wanted to use open source drivers only or if I also want to use propriatory drivers. I chose propriatory and my nvidia was fully functional right out of the box.

I've had problems with the nvidia drivers for my card in more than one ubuntu distribution

It depends on which distros you ran. As I said, Hardy had that problem fixed and I haven't heard of any issues with Intrepid, as long as you enable Proprietery drivers. If you're on Gnome, just click on System, Administration, Hardware Drivers. Then you can check the box to enable the NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (latest cards) and it will work. Actually, I think I took care of mine during the install process.

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Originally Posted by FiReSTaRT

It depends on which distros you ran. As I said, Hardy had that problem fixed and I haven't heard of any issues with Intrepid, as long as you enable Proprietery drivers. If you're on Gnome, just click on System, Administration, Hardware Drivers. Then you can check the box to enable the NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (latest cards) and it will work. Actually, I think I took care of mine during the install process.

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Yes, I enabled the proprietary driver but even after taking care of a serious issue, I still have minor issues. I have used Gutsy and whatever it was that started with an F - flaunting flamingo? furry fox?