Tag: linux

From The Register, “Ballmer ’fesses up to Linux/Windows cost FUD”. For quite some time, Microsoft maintainted that Linux costed more than Windows. But, they’ve apparently realized that people just aren’t buying that anymore:

Windows is a lot more expensive to run than Linux, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has finally confessed. Despite Redmond’s heroic efforts to defeat common knowledge with elaborately-rigged total cost of ownership ‘studies’, innuendo, FUD and outright distortions, the rhetorical power of common experience has become too powerful, even for a marketing behemoth like MS.

According to an article by VARBusiness, Ballmer now concedes that MS execs “haven’t figured out how to be lower-priced than Linux. For us as a company, we’re going through a whole new world of thinking.” [...]

Via OSNews is this article “Top 10 Things Wrong With Linux, Today”. I know that Jason can relate to #9, for instance:

No common editor which supports “soft wrapping.” By which I mean displaying things wordwrapped, even when it”s one long line. This means you can go back and edit the line and the rest of the paragraph will reformat itself automatically. Evolution’s message editor does this, but that doesn't help me for composing text files (like this one!). Others I’ve tried — Kate, GEdit, and even vi — only support “hard wrapping”, where it inserts a newline when you get to the end of the line. [...]

Is that really the case, though? No soft-wrappable text editors for Linux?

#5 makes a good point as well — one that I hadn’t given much thought to until now:

Cleaner redraws. This has long been a complaint of mine in almost every OS and desktop environment: slow or flickery window updates. I have only ever seen one OS do it right, and that's Mac OS X. This isn't a speed issue, really; it’s a how-you-update-the-screen issue. Mac OS X pops a window onto the screen all at once. Presumably it does any drawing that it needs to do on a back buffer and then blits it to the screen when it's all done, just like a video game. [...]

To his credit, the author also links to “Top N Things That Have Been Solved”.