When you buy a PC / Laptop there is no free choice of Operating System....its nearly 100 % with Microsoft- Windows Pre-installed...( which you pay for) LIKE IT or NOT ! Apart the safety and privacy issues...and apart that so many applications/ programs run on it..... they force everyone to keep connected to them.... Its the dominance of One market player that allow no others...while there are many other Operating Systems often based on a Linux platform/ kernel ... Ubuntu, Open SUSE, Arch Linux, Elementary OS, Solus, Chrome OS, Debian and many more..... When we see how things evolve then its time for change and explore alternatives.... Please discuss
Indeed I think it is actually quite difficult to buy a PC without a Microsoft license nowadays. I've used Linux distributions exclusively for years. It's a natural OS for me as a software developer but equally my wife who isn't overly technical uses Linux Mint on her laptop too, and far prefers it to M$. The trouble with Windows these days seems that it's no longer "your" computer but heavily under the control of Microsoft who'll push forced updates and nags on you. I hate the way Windows handles updates, effectively impeding you from using your machine.
It's the nature of the market. Your average PC user has no idea how to do anything on a PC, apart from email, surf, use spreadsheets/documents, etc. Microsoft is used almost exclusively in businesses, so the average user learns how to use Windows at work, and wants the same again at home. It's only developers and tinkerers that want anything different, and we're some microscopic %, so there's no business sense in offering any alternative. Dell did it for a while, using Ubuntu I think, but it only lasted a year or so before they gave up.
Indeed, we are no longer in controll... not over our PC, data, updates , security and privacy .... its going way to far Before you could decide when and what updates got installed, now you turn your computer on and it start updating.... last it took imore than an hour and all i could do was wait....
You can control updates. Just select the option to be told about them but not do anything with them, which is what I do. My PC may be downloading stuff in the background but I have a 60 meg broadband connection and a decent system so it's no issue. The last time I let it update there were 18 updates made. But all that is done whilst the PC is powering down. The next time It turned it on it took about a minute to update the registry, reboot and finish the updates. I have only just moved from Windows XP about 12 months ago to W7 . W8 is a complete waste of time and W10 looks to be a cross between W7 and W8. I will stick with W7 as long as that is supported. I tend to use free third party apps. such as Firefox, Avast Free anti virus, Comodo firewall and these all work well for me. One advantage of Linux systems seems to be that there are very few virus's or exploits due to the small number of users compared to windows. However I understand that you still need anti-virus on Linux. And with the smaller number of users and reduced support I think I would feel a little more vunerable.
There have been many good operyating systems in the past that failed because of the dominance of microsoft. Only apple could fight them, the rest died a slow and sad death. This isnt just operating systems, take pkware, the man who created zip compression. Winzip stole his limelight, the man himself became an alchoholic and died a young death. Whatever anyone else does, ms will move the goal posts to slowly destroy the compatability. There are no standards, laws or anything preventing any goid concept, product or intelkectual property to be thwarted, so we all follow suit in the name if business compatability. Lotus 123, notes Novell netware Ibm 0s/2 Unixware Xwindows Citrix All these names will and have been lost or being lost because if it was a good idea, ms will replicate jt with the power... there is one player who might just change things, Google... lets hope for some real choice soon. Novel file servers were and are better than anything ms ever produced, yet...novell created the nds, then ms made the active directory, its been going on for 30 years, nothing will change. The reality that world poverty can be attributed to this never ending exoense of change, it saddens me as an IT guy and I am ashamed of what has and is happening
I've always been a windows fan, have tinkered with linux before but i've been brought up on windows. that being said, i really don't like the way it's gone since XP. I thought XP was a good OS and if it wasn't so out of date and insecure i would still use it. Vista was a slow overloaded heap, 7 was a little better but still slow, and then 8 and 8.1 much faster but they started using Apps and tiled layout which i bloody hate. i have used windows 10 briefly but hate it just because of the way everything is laid out. i much prefer a good old start menu and organization, otherwise i just get lost. My laptop at home has windows 8.1 but with Stardock Start8 installed which gives a windows 7 style start menu and desktop so now i have the speed of windows 8 with the layout of windows 7. On mobile devices i quite like android, the only thing that really bugs me is everything still running in the background all the time. To me, this feels messy. I like a computer to just use its resources when i want it to do something.
Have a look in services ajd there are thrird party apps that will oepn up even more of what is running in the background that is redundant, its all their to dumb it down for the uneductaed. Unix is and alway will be the perfect operating system, you MAKE your own operating system tailored to your needs. Its been a 30 year money grab by Intel and MS to keep pushing forward. Those who can remember the excessive premiums of up to 1000 dollars we had to pay for 16mhz of speed 386 33 and 386 50 years will know what I mean. My first professional job was on a 4mhz 20mb system by sharp that cost 10,000 dollars. Theres are piles of beige pcs we could all run a busniess on, the size of all the egyptians pyramids, the world is paying for the greed We ran a bank of a 2mb memory, 200 mb disk back in the 90s.. it was worth 2 million dollars and took 7 people to run. You got me started.... but im learning I alone cant educated the world. And old IT support joke says... "have you got the box it came in.. pack it up and send it back, you're too stupid to use one..." microsoft had it's way and stole our jobs because of it. Yes I use window too, i do know how it works... bring on arm and android, its time for a change. <end_rant /> Ps.. twolitre.. this wasnt directed at you by the way, just my conscience ranting over the injustice ms has caused moving th goal posts for th sake of business. They even setup their office one the land my old high school educated people on, obviously money was more important than education
Here is the reality... Each desk in all the major corporate offices on it has a 2 to three year cycle at best. This cycle could easily be offset to 5 to 7 years. Each Pc had to be changed because ms bloated the operating system and would not support the old ones, so business was forced. At a rough average (conservative) of 5000 dollars, in my career 10 pcs were used where 7 would have done. So thats 15,000 dollars per pc on every corporate desk, and im being very conservative. If you add that up worldwide, there are a lot of hungry children we could feed. My conscience is true and theae are low estimates, engineering computers, market gfx computers set on desks up to 20,000 including legal software. DOS and early versions of windows was distributed free like a drug, then once everyone was hooked the pimps took over. Employment agencies completely unqualified began taking the cream out of the IT professional wage, this in turn makes it cheaper now to replace a pc than it is to hire an IT professional like RJ or myself to educated the user.. So I guess its our subconscious that brings us here to peserve the old, the beautiful and the trusty Golfs I am waiting for the new dawn, to capture the beauty of nature, its much prettier and honest that the world of business, and I do it at my own expense of time and money. Because its a life mission, just like the golf is.
Computers should make peoples life and work easy... my experience is that they do the opposite ! When you buy a PC/ Laptop you get something where you can do nothing with as its pretty much an empty box....with an O.S system installed ( read Microsoft Windows) then you need a browser that you can choose , get internet acces, wifi sorted Install things as a printer/ scanner, keyboard, screen, etc and yes.... there is something as plug and play, if it works...but often there is more needed... software / updates / settings to get the best functionality... Install of a security program, btw needed because MS make their systems as leak as can be ! And we all accept that ? Install some Office program and all sort other programs Ahh now you can start doing something.... well you think... until you open some PDF files some work and open and some dont and you need a plugin. The same apply with video and music players, Then we havent spoken about extensions , all or not supported byMS, its not nice to get an email and you cant read it...because it was written with a more recent version of office or with other software....again search a solution and find some plugin.... 15 years ago you could surf the internet just as fast as today with less powerfull hardware.... that same hardware nowadays takes ages to open a basic webpage ? Apart all the mess that is needed to keep a system running healty,and all the updates from various sources are not a help...you need to allow them and if it goes wrong... its your problem, Nice ! Apart all the hundreds of settings often well hided in not the most obvious places were you would expect it. Settings you can only guess what they do.... Take a keyboard, i use a qwerty layout, but i live in a country were the standard layout is azerty to get that working correct its always a struggle...with land settings... its just a bad joke... while it could be so simple give every keyboard a code , andyou select that code in the O.S ! But no that is way too simple and certainly no option ! For many people there is way to much functions in many software packages....and it works often more against you as you loose your way in it. After all, Its now 2016 and computers are still sort of lego or mecano system ( apart that their building blocs always fit )
An Android application is very unlike a conventional 'monolithic' PC application, which could run just the same and consume just the same resources whether it's maximised or minimised. On Android, an application is composed of a number of very loosely-coupled building blocks which are independently suspended and resumed as the user interacts with them. For an Android application to "keep running in the background", it's not really the whole application as such that continues running, but rather a task which the app has very explicitly declared it wishes to keep running in the background. These are typically called Services. To give my MSDroid app as an example, you can have it in the foreground showing you the graphical dashboard which is heavy on the CPU and battery. It is also communicating with the ECU and datalogging. If you then background it, the application appears to keep running in the background because it's still connected to the ECU and logging data. The user just thinks the whole app is still running, but minimised. The part that shows you the dashboard is completely suspended. If the Android OS then needs more resources, the part of the app that gives you the dashboard has been completely wiped and is resources freed, such that it no longer exists at all. Only the Service that does the ECU connection and logging remains in the background. A whole Android app has to be designed such that its individual components can be killed and recreated at any time by the OS. Admittedly some Android apps do continue to drain resources in the background if they insist on hitting the network frequently or insist on doing other frequent background tasks. So when you see that apps are 'backgrounded' on Android, it's not really the whole app that's sat there still running, but rather some part of the app in suspended state, with some specific work still happening in the background if the app has declared for it.
I think the type of person who wants the simplicity and familiarity of windows will be the type of person to walk into a tech store and purchase a pre built PC. However a user of Linux for example, may be the type of person more inclined or willing to build their own PC, therefore they don't get tied down to windows. There is of course chrome os now which comes on some laptops, but then the point you make is reinforced, you don't get the same choice of spec between operating systems! Never thought of this myself but it's a great point and interesting to read the discussion so far!
