On 14 May 2004 at 19:22, João Miguel Neves wrote:
Which is precisely the same logic why people continue to use Windows. Unless there's an obvious and compelling reason to change, the incumbant has a major advantage.
Fortunately those reasons are appearing and growing (viruses and license restrictions).
On a technical level, Windows should be more secure than Linux as it uses a fine-grained ACL security system. Unfortunately "should" isn't "is" :(
Both systems are equally broken with respect to good security. See http://www.eros-os.org/
There are some developments like the ndis wrapper driver (which I think is a bad idea, but we obviously have very different views on how quick users can drop a platform).
Techie types can drop platforms pretty quickly but non-techies will put up with surprisingly large amounts of pain before they'll change. If you feel out of your depth about something, you'll tend to overvalue the familiar - it's why many MacOS fans are so diehard about the issue.
- Few Windows games will run under WINE. And this is unlikely to
change as DirectX demands a certain driver architecture Linux isn't moving towards.
You do now that there is a DirectX implementation of Wine and that the latest work in X.org is improving in taking advantage of the hardware.
Absolutely. However unless they implement binary compatibility with Windows graphics card drivers they are dowsing a fire with petrol. Graphics cards evolve so fast even Microsoft has trouble keeping DirectX up with them.
As I mentioned before, the Linux driver model isn't the Windows one by any measure. Therefore to use Windows drivers they'd have to do quite a lot of emulation which attracts a heavy speed penalty. Not what gamers want!
- No matter how wonderful WINE becomes, running Windows
applications under it will always be a bit of a black art. Most people just want to shove in the CD and make it go. This is why Linux is unsuited to replace Windows in non-server arenas
I don't get why this is impossible? Binfmt and things like nautilus together with wine can do that behaviour without any problems. I don't understand why you say it isn't possible.
Are you seriously claiming that Joe Soap who doesn't even know what a command line is will ever be able to run Windows binaries transparently on any Linux ever?
Of course it can be done - like Apple did for legacy MacOS app support. But it's very tough - like pushing square pegs into round holes. And far more effort than simply cloning Windows. If you want a comparator, look at cygwin on Win32 - nearly a Unix environment, but no Joe Soap will ever be able to run an unmodified Linux binary on Windows via cygwin.
And why do you think reactos will go further than wine on implementing win32?
Actually ReactOS incorporates WINE, they simply provide a "native" implementation layer - instead of calling Linux functions, they call reimplementations of the NT kernel API.
So they'll also have to help develop DirectX for Wine to that. Nice to know...
It certainly is most interesting. I see no point in upgrading from Win2k ever except I have the horrible feeling MS will make the newest MSVC require a newer version. If I could break from MS operating systems I would.
Cheers, Niall