Respaul said:
Martin,
In this thread you have laid into Vista.. even though you admit you havent tried the beta... Not to mention that what we have seen so far is indeed only a beta... No one knows how good or bad Vista will really be on launch... Yet you continue to bemoan it..
Throughout this thread and others you continually assault windows...
Yet theres one thing you have never given... A viable alternative to windows...
So what is it... What other option is there for A: Me and B: the average everyday, non computer geek man in the street ?
It's all well and good slagging something off, but please tell us what we can use instead to run on our pc's ??
Wow, that's a shockingly open minded post of yours, Paul.
Well, it's no secret that the market dictates the options the consumer gets. If you want to play lots of games, there's only Windows or consoles. If you want an alternative to Windows and you don't mind losing some choice of software, Apple would love your business. (At this point, Majed is going to shoot in with bootcamp, which allows you to dualboot Windows and Mac, but why would you pay for both if you can't do without Windows?)
Finally, if you want more control over your computer, there's linux. Or unix. Or many different kinds of POSIX-y operating systems that look a lot like linux and unix. Linux is by far the most widely adopted, so again it has the widest selection of software, and documentation, and technical support, and hardware support. If you can do without some of that, there's solaris or freebsd etc.
There are solutions for those who want to find them. Linux is used today by lots of people who are "ordinary computer users" and it has been for years. Yes, it's different than Windows and there are different kinds of problems with it. But then again Windows users have to deal with viruses and spyware and such, so it's not entirely careless either. So substitute one set of issues with another. I think most Linux users would say that their choice of OS gives them greater freedom, they feel more empowered.
The problem is people who are used to Windows, take one look at linux and say "that's way too wacky and complicated". Today's linux is not inherently more difficult to use than Windows, studies have shown this. If you take a person who's never used a computer, they will not find linux harder. It's just that with our Windows culture, anything non-Windows feels unnatural. And if you buy Windows knowing that if something breaks you call their support people (which I have personally never done), you can just as well get a support deal with linux as well, and then too you will have someone to call, in fact they would love your business. If you buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux for $299 you get a support deal with it. If you prefer the flavor of the month Ubuntu Linux (actually flavor of the last two years), you can sign up with Canonical for $250 per year for support. I don't know how this compares with Microsoft price wise, I've never paid for support myself.