I think almost everyone has seen those types of major regressions with Windows. One key in keeping that beast running is being conservative when it comes to major system upgrades. (At this point OpenOffice supports more of the early MS Office formats than the current version of the product.)
Mac OS usually doesn't have major hardware regressions... the last one they had was when they stopped supporting the PPC-based systems.
Debian is not a conservative OS. In the past they always rolled the security updates in to the stable branch, but with their 6 month release cycle things move pretty fast. (IMO this makes Ubuntu significantly better than Debian for the server, as with Ubuntu's LTS releases you get desktop support for 3 years and server support for 5 years.)
Really, Redhat and SUSE are distros that are not suitable for the desktop, as their user population *has* to use third-party package repositories or compile from source. The only reason to use either as a desktop is if you are forced to administer servers using them.
When it comes down to it, all of the modern OSes require modern hardware or things just don't work right all of the time. Sometimes the most suitable OS really is FreeDOS. Now, the light-weight Linux distros may provide some leeway, but in general you need to periodically update your hardware to stay in the peak support region for any OS.
That's just my two cents.
Cheers,
Steven Black
On May 5, 2010 4:44 PM, "Joe Auty" <joe@netmusician.org> wrote:
Sure OS X has its share of bugs, but can you in anyway suggest that the overall QA or likelihood of there being show stopping problems is less than a Linux OS such as Ubuntu? I sure can't. How many years have we heard from Linux users struggling with *basic* problems such as getting sound to work, getting video to work properly, wifi, etc.? Saying that the problems are just "different" I don't think is fair. Your video or sound not working at all is probably a problem of a much higher magnitude to most people than, say, a dropped network share causing the OS X Finder to spinning beachball.
Of course, in a way it's unfair to compare a Linux OS to the Mac since the Mac uses very predictable hardware, but at the end of the day things are what they are. I can count on not having these sorts of basic problems on a Mac. On a Linux (or at least Ubuntu) box, not-so-much. There is a reason why Ubuntu doesn't just happily support the proprietary Nvidia drivers - they are buggy, they cannot be accounted for, and the team cannot offer assurances of them "just working", hence the creation Nouveau, and this doesn't even get into the weaknesses of Xorg (which has always been a weak spot as many users acknowledge, although I *love* *love* *love* the whole X11 forwarding thing, that's slick!) I suppose Apple and Microsoft have more influence over NVidia and ATI in getting them to come up with better drivers or something?
Like I said, I can forgive some problems on account of the circumstances, these drivers being proprietary, more hardware to support, etc. I get it. However, what is more depressing is the constant regression of the hardware and various other features they do support such as some of the things I listed in my original post. If they support something, they ought to test it in new releases, or else don't support it. The NVidia driver (aside from crashing X in the last Ubuntu release) has actually been okay, but there has been regression of the other basic things I have listed. This is what bugs me most!
If I go for an OS like Debian, will they backport fixes to older versions of the software that is available through the OS like Redhat does? I'm sure this will help a lot, but at the time I wasn't sure if a more conservative OS like Debian would work at all with some of the things I'm doing, specifically the LIRC/Myth type stuff? I always figured that these more conservative OSes just focused on servers and less so on being a good Desktop OS?
Simón Ruiz wrote:
>
> Hmmm. I think I'm going to agree with David more on this.
>
> We will neve...--
joe@netmusician.org
Joe Auty, NetMusician
NetMusician helps musicians, bands and artists create beautiful, professio...
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