[plug] Re: Nick Miller challenge (was Lexmark Printers)

[Jason Nicholls]

Hiya,

On Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 10:35:51AM +0800, Simon Scott wrote:
> 	After you guys easily fill the blanks (see my attempt below), issue
> our own challenge....Can Windows provide software , with no loss of
> configurability or functionality, that is the equivalent of .....?
> 	here are my attempts at his list
> 
> 	f) Geez, this guy's trying hard! What's the name of that
> professional (free) video editing suite? 

He's stretching the list of stuff that average windows users do here...

> 	g) errr, 'Quicktime' is a program under windows? ugh, this makes me
> more ill than his articles. Does xanim or similar handle quicktime? Does
> anyone care?

Yes and no. The most used codec in quicktime, the one all movie trailers
are encoded with, is proprietary and nothing under linux supports it.
All we can hope for is that a Quicktime for OS X comes out and a Liunx
version comes out after that.

> 	h) Dunno much about games, however I have Quake III Arena and Unreal
> Tournament running on my box at home. Im sure the others have been LOKI-fied
> at some point.

Not to mention the rich set of up-and-coming linux games like tux-racer ;)
We should actually provide some URLs to loki games and linux games.

> Caveat - 3D is very young under linux

Are you talking about ease of installation because driver-wise things are
looking pretty good. The G400 support in XFree86 3.3.x (Utah-glx) gives me
_better_ performance than windows and as far as I know, the XFree86 4.x Nvidia
drivers offer performance on par with windows. Apparently the ATI Raedon
performance is also very good since they have been willing to provide the
programming specs.

> opengl with performance (on most recent cards) close to windows.  This
> should probably be seen as Linux's biggest weak point.

I see the ease of installation of 3D support as a big drawback.


> 	A couple of people have written to challenge me on the issue of
> Linux
> 	software, along the general lines of 'Anything Windows can do, Linux
> can do'.

This is difficult to attack head-on because there _are_ apps for windows to
which linux either has no answer, or an under-developed answer. Things 
are getting better all the time though!

> 	Obviously I use plenty more programs

He's obviously a mega-l33t windows user.

> switch to Linux unless A) Linux offers me everything that Windows
> does , or B) Linux does something useful that Windows can't.

Linux offers a rich OS environment for real power users to excel. Having
source gives flexibility, and it's rock solid + it doesn't cost anything ;)

It's my opinion that it shouldn't be force fed to regular joes at this point
in time unless they have someone to admin the thing. If someone is there to
admin the box they can make sure required functionality is there and nothing
else.



Later,

Jason Nicholls
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