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Comment by mkr-hn | Hacker News Reader

My issue is that the Linux applications I use have good Windows ports, and it's hard to find motivation to improve an OS I don't use. There are even some Windows applications I use that don't have a Linux port. The usual response is "run it in WINE," but then I ask "why?" It already works!

Linux is already a fine server OS and ecosystem. I think the "Linux desktop" has become less relevant with the rise of smartphones and tablets. Maybe it's time to start talking about which year will be the year of the Linux workstation. :)

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I think is depends heavily on what you're doing and your mental work flows. Personally whenever I use OS X or Windows I feel a tremendous decrease in UI bandwidth. That said, I only use a very tiny portion of the Linux desktop. If I was primarily doing mainstream activities instead of server side software development, I'd probably switch.

Linux is a fine desktop OS and ecosystem, you just don't use it so you don't care. I'm in exactly the opposite situation. Find me a windows editor like X11 emacs. A windows terminal editor that even comes close to gnome-terminal or konsole? These are my killer apps. And I won't use other platforms because they don't have them.

>gnome-terminal or konsole? These are my killer apps. And I won't use other platforms because they don't have them.

So wait, is it your love of these specific terminal emulators or of the shell?

OSX has terminal.app

> OSX has terminal.app

In fairness it took until Leopard (as I recall) to support tabs and still doesn't support 256 colors. (It will in Lion apparently.[1]).

[1] http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#unix

Terminal.app definitely still has problems in Snow Leopard; especially the lack of 256 color support. I've switched to using iTerm2, a replacement terminal emulator, and it's solved most of my complaints about Terminal.app.

Hopefully Lion rolls a lot of those fixes into Terminal.app.

[1] http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.4010

This is something that keeps coming up, so I made a blog post out of it to avoid writing out the same response repeatedly: http://mkronline.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/why-i-dont-use-lin...

But... you missed the point entirely. All those points apply symmetrically to my platform choice. Sure, I could use windows or a mac, but it's a pain just to get the stuff I have out of the box on my preferred OS.

Use what you like. Just don't use your personal preference for specific software (which is all that blog post is about) as evidence for failure of the "Linux Desktop" or whatever.

I didn't do that at all. Linux is doing fine as a niche desktop, and my post doesn't say otherwise. The point is that it's going to stay niche in its present state. All the hundreds of millions of people currently not using Linux don't have a reason to use Linux, and will continue not having a reason.

Whether or not this matters to you depends on how far you want Linux to go as a desktop operating system.

What exactly is different between X11 emacs and win32 emacs? I haven't noticed anything significant.

There are a number of functions that I have come across that only work on the linux version of emacs. I can't remember any off the top of my head though.

Are you comparing Gnu Emacs on Linux and XEmacs on Windows? I found Gnu Emacs so ugly and alien on Windows and XEmacs so lacking in extension support that I gave up on both. Also, it's annoying to switch back and forth between Gnu Emacs and XEmacs. Therefore, my IDE on Windows is Putty. I log into a Linux box and connect to one of my long-running Screen sessions so I can use a decent Emacs :-)

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