Quote Originally Posted by gugi View Post
yeah, let's have again the 'linux is best' war!!!!


Quote Originally Posted by gugi View Post
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.
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.

Quote Originally Posted by gugi View Post
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.
Aren't the nvidia drivers providign full 3D functionality? honest question.

Quote Originally Posted by gugi View Post
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..
[/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.

Quote Originally Posted by gugi View Post
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.
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. my 2 ct.