Porkepix: Have you seriously tried them?
shaddim: I did, and while I had the feeling it was functional OK, I was neither impressed nor did I had the feeling it was so similar to MS office that it could be called a "drop-in" alternative. I was especially annoyed how slow & crashy Impress was.
Didn't crashed for me since years. Either on Windows, Mac OS nor Linux. My sister use it : at secondary school that's what they teach them, and she never had issues too. From every peoples I know using it, no one complain. But as usual, you have the universal knowledge, don't you?
Porkepix: Never heard about dependency AND
conflict checking with repositories? I did. And it does it very well by giving you warning if something is going to break if you force the update of this or this component.
shaddim: You have heard of: Arch linux is notorious for broken systems because of dependencies. Also debian unstable - (which you will need if you want actual app versions)
Sure I have. But are you aware that asking to any lambda user to use Archlinux or
UNSTABLE Debian is just crazy? If there is "unstable" in the name, that's not for nothing. Do you put Windows lambda users on alpha version when a new Windows is coming? That's the same (unstable pretty much same as alpha and testing as beta version…)
Archlinux is a particular distro where user build the system itself. It's done for it. I did not mentioned this one for lambda users because I will never advice to a beginner to use it.
shaddim: Also, what should a casual user do with such a strange warning?
"I know you want this software, but potentially it will break your system. Install: YES or NO?" This is a stupid situation a user should never be confronted with. Windows prevents that by a clear separation of system and apps. (And even if a lib is missing it will not break the system)
In spite of what you're thinking, you can easily cause troubles to Windows. For sure there are less BSODs than before…but it have not disappear (and yes, you can do some kernel panics on Linux, even if it's not that easy ;) ), and I don't talk about all the craps you can install on the system (yeah, every malware/virus/trojans/ and os on you can find on each basic users computer). These craps exists on Linux too, you're right (because I know you'll tell it ;) ), but…how many?
Porkepix: You want multi-desk? Install a (paid) 3rd party software.
You want a real terminal? Install cygwin, but it still an ugly patch/fix.
A better FS? Ops, you can not, It's only NTFS or FAT32 (even worse) on older Windows., only HFS+ for MacOS. extX, ZFS, ReiserFS, BTRFS and so on? Meh, useless.
Unicode and UTF-8? Meh, useless, deal with your old ISO-8859-1
shaddim: Normal users don't care for these developer gadgets the linux distros have included in abundance. They want
Photoshop and Battlefield 4,
not support for 1024 cores, the selection from a bazillion arcane editors, file systems or window managers.
You get my point for FS and terminal : a basic user don't care about this. However, multi-desk is just very powerful for a lots of peoples. Even my sister in High School use them. And Unicode should not be something about peoples should have to care. Why? Because it just should be here. And I don't even understand you can't agree with this : if you were from USA, Great Britain or any other country speaking natively english I would understand it's not a problem : 7-bits ASCII is enough for them. But you are from germany. You use letters like ü, ß (I know it's now replaces by
ss most of the time, but you had to use it before) and every umlaut letters. So you can get the same problem we have with our accent on letters which cause sometimes problems.
And think to peoples from Asian countries, Arabic countries, Russia and so on…
Unicode should not be something to worry about…it must be everywhere.
And again and again…would make me laugh if it was not so much sad to be that much blind.
But that's enough…I already gave you lots of reasons for this low market share, you reject all of them with always the same things…
And you know what? Even if you was right (which obviously is not the case), I don't care at all that to be only 2% of market share. And even if we were less than 0.1% I would still happy to have a functional, secure, light, performant,
free(as much as in freedom or free beer ;) ) system. And most important : which don't try to give me the obligation to use it, because you're always free to choose to use it or not.
And 2% of the very huge quantity of computers in the world still a lot of users which are potential clients. and these potential clients pay often more, as you can see on every Humble Bundle sale.
But you will again tell that it's false, it's biased of I do not know what else?
