[DeepSpace9er]

Mac has its purpose. Believe it or not, there are a great many stupid people who have no clue how to use a computer properly. Mac is great for them with its hold-your-hand design, one company to call to fix service, and limited confusion with just 1 button to worry about on the mouse. Installing software doesnt require any brains at all.. just drag the program where its supposed to be, just dont drag it into the trash unintentionally.

PC Manufacturers today throw too much of their own crap pre-packaged onto the computers, and since nobody who buys them and doesnt know how to use it even thinks of getting a manual for it, they are hopelessly lost. Then they start clicking all those shiny banners to install software, which runs on Windows, they open those emails about winning $1,000,000, and before they know it they themselves have completely screwed up their computer by their own doing.

Most computer problems today are not caused by crappy OSes... to each his own in that department, but most problems are caused by user error. Personally I am a Windows user. I built my own PC and it runs Vista. I am happy with it. I also own an OSX Tiger computer and hate it.

[colecampbell666]

My dad moved out of his office job, and into installation again (change of scenery), and he says that in most of the houses he goes to, the PCs are so screwed up that he can't install DSL on them. He has to put in the router etc, and leave the people tot heir own devices.

[Mars]

Macs don't help this problem though. If someone never maintains they're machine it will fall apart.

Granted some filesystems (ext3, reiserfs, JFS) will continue to work quickly even if they're ignored. HFS+ lacks some features, but it seems to hold together better than NTFS, which fragments in a week if you use it enough.

Computers will collect dust weather they're a Mac or a PC

[BloodEagle]

Computers will collect dust weather they're a Mac or a PC

Well, you could always use a liquid coolant instead of a fan system.

[S-99]

So if a program refuses to work with wine, even appears to have problems according to their website, somehow it relates to my inability to work with dlls? Your powers of logic astound me.

I guess i do confuse you. My statement was about the fact that you haven't been able to get any windows program running in wine at all and you didn't elaborate on that like which other programs besides chessbase you have tried to install and run in wine. Since you didn't elaborate, i have no idea which programs you're saying that are in the wine application database that say they wont run. If a program is in the wine application database and it says it won't run, then yeah it's not going to run until wine improves.

With the other stuff you wrote about wine, it seems to point out that you have a general disability with using wine since you didn't write anything further. My logic will still continue to astound you i guess.

The bigger picture with wine that i was painting was that if peoples plans for using linux with windows programs don't pan out, because the specific windows programs they want to use in linux happen to still not work with wine, then keep using windows.

There is an alternative to wine which is windows in a virtual machine. But, this is really unnecessary if that virtual machine is not for temporary use. If it becomes unnecessary you might as well just install windows and not have linux at all. Dual booting while it's possible why do it? If you have to switch from one os to another because the other one can't do what the other can, then you might as well just use only the one that does everything for you.

[Ghostavo]

So if a program refuses to work with wine, even appears to have problems according to their website, somehow it relates to my inability to work with dlls? Your powers of logic astound me.

I guess i do confuse you. My statement was about the fact that you haven't been able to get any windows program running in wine at all and you didn't elaborate on that like which other programs besides chessbase you have tried to install and run in wine. Since you didn't elaborate, i have no idea which programs you're saying that are in the wine application database that say they wont run. If a program is in the wine application database and it says it won't run, then yeah it's not going to run until wine improves.

With the other stuff you wrote about wine, it seems to point out that you have a general disability with using wine since you didn't write anything further. My logic will still continue to astound you i guess.

The bigger picture with wine that i was painting was that if peoples plans for using linux with windows programs don't pan out, because the specific windows programs they want to use in linux happen to still not work with wine, then keep using windows.

There is an alternative to wine which is windows in a virtual machine. But, this is really unnecessary if that virtual machine is not for temporary use. If it becomes unnecessary you might as well just install windows and not have linux at all. Dual booting while it's possible why do it? If you have to switch from one os to another because the other one can't do what the other can, then you might as well just use only the one that does everything for you.

I apologise then, but the fact remains that wine still has a long way to go before being the alternative to windows most people make it up to be. And if I understood this time, you seem to agree with this.

[Nuke]

wine was pretty cool. my real problem with linux is that many of the apps aren't even done yet, of stuff is in beta or less. i know how to do things like compile stuff and solve a few problems. so i might give it a go again in the future, i haven't totally written it off yet. i just think it still needs some work.

i think apple should look to making osx a retail operating system. assuming they tune it to work with a wider variety of hardware and don't do anything stupid to it in the name of marketability, they would have a good product, one that would thump windows in a heartbeat. it would also be a push fore more multiplatform development among the retail software market. people don't want to buy a $2000 computer thats on par with an $800 pc just so that they can have a more user friendly operating system.

[Kosh]

people don't want to buy a $2000 computer thats on par with an $800 pc just so that they can have a more user friendly operating system.

That was really Apple's problem with the G3 and G4 (maybe even the G5 too, IIRC), they depended on relatively exotic processors from a company who not only didn't focus on their processor lines but seriously underinvested in them as well.

[Mars]

wine was pretty cool. my real problem with linux is that many of the apps aren't even done yet, of stuff is in beta or less. i know how to do things like compile stuff and solve a few problems. so i might give it a go again in the future, i haven't totally written it off yet. i just think it still needs some work.

Try a KDE distro like Kubuntu, I find their usually pretty stable and work pretty well

[S-99]

Kde's the shizzle. It's application suite is very good too. However a good example of software that's not finished is kde's koffice suite. It's making some good strides, but not complete enough for me to want to use on a forever basis. Many version of k3b before they got to 1.0 were actually very usable and dependable. Wine is still in beta and has been in beta for years, but it's nearing 1.0 which is when it should no longer be in beta. I'm really curious how awesome wine will be when it's no longer beta status, or if it'll be just like using wine normally like today except with a lot better compatibility. Some other programs in linux which are still works in progress are brasero, koffice, kopete 0.12.7 (not as mature as pidgin, but it's really come along way to replace pidgin in my setup especially the webcam support), the kde nic cc applet (it really sucks ass compared to the gnome nic applet, i just don't use the kde nic applet since it's an optional download, i wonder if this applet in kde4 has improved), wicd (this program while a work in progress is very good, where network-manager doesn't work, wicd can replace network-manager completely and work and also be a nic control applet). Some programs while still being in beta or still works in progress can be very great program to depend on everyday, and other works in progress just suck until they mature to a good point. Wine also hits the list of being a work in progress, but it's sort of a middle ground on being great to depend on everyday...depending on what programs you are able to run with it

[Nuke]

wine was pretty cool. my real problem with linux is that many of the apps aren't even done yet, of stuff is in beta or less. i know how to do things like compile stuff and solve a few problems. so i might give it a go again in the future, i haven't totally written it off yet. i just think it still needs some work.

Try a KDE distro like Kubuntu, I find their usually pretty stable and work pretty well

i tried kubuntu and it seemed a little slower and more glitchy than fawn. ubuntu and fedora have been my favorite distros thus far. i just lack a computer powerful enough to run linux since my #3 computer's memory controllers gave out. i should get me one of those 500 gig drives so i can run a dual boot again.

[S-99]

I like kubuntu. Ubuntu really does put out a well balanced kde distro. Other kde based distro's seem to overdue the kde experience a little too much. I have 480gb capacity on my computer. I really don't know what to do with all of the space, but when your dad gives you a free 320gb drive to add with your 160gb what are you going to say? I'll probably take out the 160gb and toss it into a computer i'm going to sell in the summer. 320gb is already twice the capacity of my older drive. Idk, if you want to run linux on a slow computer go with a liter distro. Antix is a good one which is based off of mepis and the debian testing repository (debian testing seems to work great with ubuntu binaries too). All in all for speed increase get a different desktop environment.  Some good recommendations are xfce and equinox. If you really want to go crazy with a fast running desktop environment, then you can go with fluxbox, openbox, or enlightenment. But, they can be hard to configure (enlightenment can be hard to configure especially). Xfce is a good one to go for. Check out equinox at least, it's really cool. It's very windows classic desktop oriented and has the smallest memory and processor footprint out of xfce, kde, and gnome. Maybe even possibly smaller than openbox and fluxbox. Equinox is like 10mb for the whole entire download. It looks like xp in classic mode, supports theming so you can make it look like xp if you want, and the general over all equinox utilities look like windows utilities. It's actually a much better desktop environment to fool people into not knowing they're using linux as opposed to getting people on kde. I know this isn't the case, just an easy foolery job you could pull on people who use your computer. You could pull some test data to see how much more comfortable people are using linux if the gui looks like windows.

[achtung]

Looks like ISO can't take the heat.