Hacker News Reader

>It's the same as digging for coupons. Everything has a learning curve if you want to do it cheaply.

Not linux. For most distributions the free version is right there on the homepage - often it's the biggest and most prominent link.

The coupon-digging analogy is a good one. Rather than a case of "linux is free, windows is expensive", it's often "linux is free, windows is cheap/free if you can dig out enough of the right coupons". But it's still a much better experience with linux.

>I've been installing vanilla MSDN Windows 7 (with SP1) images on 15 different types of Dell/Lenovo machines.

How many different wireless chipsets was that? And yeah, some manufacturers get it right or lucky, but many don't. My impression is your odds of it working out the box without having to hunt down a driver are better with linux - but I've had to track down a driver there on occasion too.

>Again part of the learning curve. The same with Linux.

Which is the article's point - not that linux is always easier than windows, but that many of the things you have to learn when starting out with linux were just as difficult to learn when starting out with windows, you've just forgotten them through familiarity.

>Sorry gstreamer stuff via ubuntu-restricted-extras. It's the same turd rolled in different coloured glitter.

I don't know what you're talking about; I installed mplayer in the default way and it plays everything I encounter on the internet. It would probably need some codec installation to play WMV3 or real media, but does anyone use those any more? My impression is the world has pretty much settled on MKV/h264, and linux handles that fine out of the box.

>> That hasn't been necessary for years.

>Sorry gstreamer stuff via ubuntu-restricted-extras. It's the same turd rolled in different coloured glitter.

The important difference is that Ubuntu will offer to install that for you when you try to play something it doesn't have codecs for. I was trying to play a DVD on Windows 8 last week and it took me forever to figure out that the problem was that Microsoft was no longer shipping the decryption key for CSS by default anymore.

> apt-get install ...

Lame excuse. That is not part of the learning curve for most users. Most users use the GUI of their distro.

>Sorry gstreamer stuff via ubuntu-restricted-extras.

Sorry. GUI. For this, most distros prompt you with a button to click on, to install the required plugins when you try to play a particular file. Not many of my Linux using friends are aware of ubuntu-restricted-extras.

Do most people really use the gui?

I find it pretty horrible and try to avoid it.

My point remains: most people who don't write software find it easier to use a GUI.

I use Arch, myself. But Synaptic is very well-made. I prefer the command line to any other GUI.

It is quite useful when you are not aware of the package names or if you want to make changes to configuration.

> apt-get install build-essential vim-nox tmux sudo openssh-server

That is quite a different level of user though to the things people "just know about" for Windows. Most people that consider themselves Windows power users don't have a compiler installed, let alone a SSH server, customised versions of vim (or emacs, or any similar editor) and a terminal multiplexer! I can only imagine that trying to find equivalents to such things on Windows wouldn't be a pleasant or easy experience - the only one that has an obvious answer is Visual Studio, and the last time I dealt with that it took the best part of an hour + multiple reboots to install, let alone the service pack.

Well its actually a better story than that.

Compiler is installed in c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework folder. You get c# and vb.net compilers in there. This is by default.

SSH is not really the windows way of doing things. Windows 7 pro and above have an RDP server built in though and you can remotely connect powershell to other machines using WinRM.

There is a thing called powershell ISE installed which is a terminal multiplexer, scripting IDE and debugger. the version with windows 8 (and a download for windows 7) has syntax highlighting and completion built in.

So actually, the windows equivalents are already there.

And no you don't need to install visual studio (which the pro edition of 2012 takes only 20 mins to install on my 5 year old ThinkPad).