The One Major Linux Application Downfall -- My Opinion

Why not just use tables in a sql dbase? seriously .. 250 pages.. lol.

Well technically that's not a criticism of Linux per se.

Unix SysAdmin here. 18 years experience in IT and 17 with Linux. In my experience, Linux is an excellent OS.......

.......for servers. Terrible on desktops. I tried for ten years or so to make it work for my primary desktop. Tried Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Slack, CentOS, Mandrake, and I forget what else. I got tired of putting out "little fires" such as the one you mentioned in the OP. I found I was remoting into Windows systems or running a VM just to get work done. That's when it hit me -- why am I doing this? I erased Linux, put back on XP (at the time), and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Everything I needed to do, just worked. It just worked. No need to dink with the kernel; no need to Vi some config file; no need to adjust apt-get sources. It. Just. Worked. I was able to add my software and the necessary drivers and have 100% of everything functional within 12 hours or so; compared to months of trying to get Linux working right, and in many cases never at all.

So for servers, yes. Rock on. I prefer CentOS/RHEL/Oracle Linux. Great support, excellent workhorse OS, scales nicely, makes troubleshooting straightforward. And with Oracle support it's pretty brainless. For desktops... you may want to wait ten years or so. I'm impressed in the progress though; I use a Linux Mint live CD occasionally and while it's not entirely perfect, it certainly works a lot better than the toys I was playing with years ago. I figure about another 10 years and Linux will be there.

But not yet.

Oh and by the way -- I use Libre Office on my home Windows 7 PC. Too frugal to pay for Excel, too much fear of God to pirate it. It's good enough for what I use it for at home; shopping lists, cost spreadsheets, and whatnot. Nothing heavy. About the heaviest function I use on it is Goal Seek. And my Windows licenses come with the old used office hardware that I buy; I never buy a PC or laptop unless it has a COA sticker, thus I don't need to buy really any software. Just... like... Linux :-)

Disclaimer: This is my experience only; your mileage may vary; if you yourself do have a great experience with Linux then by all means enjoy it; Yadda yadda yadda. THIS IS ONLY MY EXPERIENCE.

Sources are available; could build and change the page limit. There are worse ways to spend time.

Because spreadsheet Apps like Excel and Calc offer a level of accessibility and flexibility that a regular database does not.

Let's say you want to generate a large catalogue with formulas determining costs, page numbers, artistically arranged images, etc. A spreadsheet app let's you (or a non-expert/professional user) do that in a one place, through one straight-forward GUI.

If you have a giant catalogue/inventory, you're going to need more than 256 pages to keep everything in order in one central location. Segmenting into separate files based on a page-limit becomes cumbersome and is non-intuitive to an end-user -- typically a salesperson/sales-team. And they have the added benefit of playing with the values (costs) in an intuitive way that doesn't require "opening the hood" or knowing any database scripting language.

Agreed.

As an OS, on balance, I really prefer Linux. But for professional business desktop-use applications, as you said, its just not quite there yet.

I understand what you mean, but everytime I get on a windows system, it's so freaking slow (compared to linux) that it makes me want to cut my wrist. The freaking "virus" software looks at every letter and period, so tht nothing gets through. How do you get around that?

Linux is awesome desktop. OpenOffice is free. Use virtualbix to run Windows and excel if you love it so much.

This is a retarded argument.

Nobody is going to use 256 pages in a single workbook. If you get to 20 you need to seriously get into databases.

That's the hot setup. You can also boot Linux Mint and others from a USB memory stick. You can carry your favorite machine around with you in your pocket. You can have it reset every boot if you like.

How do I get around that? I ensure my system is clean of unnecessary software, I disable unnecessary services, I ensure I have enough RAM, and I keep updates current. Just as I do in Linux, by the way.

It's crazy how fast an old computer can run if you just do these basic things; why earlier this month I was using a nine year old laptop with 4GB of RAM on XP. It screamed. And that was before I killed unnecessary services. Thanks to the XP POS registry hack for updates (Google it), that laptop will still get security patches from Microsoft until around 2020. So as long as the laptop doesn't get physically damaged, it should have a 14 year run.

I only have one computer in my house that's relatively new, and it's three years old. The rest of mine are five-seven years old, and all of them run well. I use TweakHound's guide. Takes about an hour to run through his recommendations. Not very complicated. Newbies can use it because it's well-illustrated.

In my experience, both Linux on the desktop and Windows are about the same speed. My work laptop runs Win7 on an SSD drive, so it's snappy. If I want to do personal things on it, visit websites that are blocked by the office firewall (you can only VPN on the laptop; bypassing that is blocked), I have to boot my Mint CD. Now Mint takes a lonnnnnnnnnnnng time to boot, about 20 minutes, but once it's up and loaded into RAM it's about as fast as the Windows side. I see no advantage for either.

"But Linux runs better on old hardware." That depends. About ten years ago I tried to setup an old P120 with 128MB on Debian for my cousin's kid. I setup a browser, OpenOffice, and I think some parental control package? It crawled. At the time, it was common for computers to have 256 or 512MB RAM in either Windows or Linux. While the OS was just fine for speed, once I started loading a browser (Firefox probably) it started swapping like crazy and there it went. So, the whole "Linux works great on older hardware" bit only applies to the OS itself. A browser is a browser is a browser; the code is very similar across all platforms, and a browser is what you'll be using most of the time anyway. If that PC had more RAM, probably it'd have been just fine. And I'm confident if the PC were running the software it was designed for (probably Win98?) it would have been just fine.

As mentioned, older PCs can be made very serviceable for Windows by following some of the same rules you follow for Linux: No extraneous software, sufficient RAM, disable unnecessary services, keep current on updates. Different than Linux though, you need a good malware scanner like BitDefender and Malwarebytes. (Both free.) BD hardly taxes the system; it's lightweight.

So I don't see a problem with Windows speed. Probably the Windows systems you're using are infected with malware. I don't visit pr0n sites, I run BitDefender, and I occasionally scan with Malwarebytes. That's all I have to do. I forget the last time I had a serious malware infection. It's just not a big deal...

...for me. Again, this is my experience. Your mileage certainly may vary.

What does trouble me a little are the rumors of back doors into Windows. Yet I had to ask myself, am I really ready to audit billions of lines of Linux code? Nope, not even kinda. So in either case I must trust the developers. I do trust Linux developers more than Microsoft's though. You have to decide if that's important enough to you.

Anyway that becomes a moot point if you use the same browser on both OSes. Google Chrome is beautiful on Linux -- and would have precisely the same rumored back doors as in Windows.

If you're going to run a virtual machine and hang out in Windows all day, just reformat your drive and install Windows. Seriously. Why complicate things?

I don't see the advantage of Linux+Virt Windows. If you're trying to remain honest you have to pay for the software. (I'm betting you pirated your Windows.) Whereas if like me you only buy used business-class hardware, it has a COA sticker on it so Windows is free, just like Linux. And business-class hardware has the advantage that it's generally more stable than home-class hardware.

Why complicate things? To be more L33t?

i use my computer for music production and there is no linux alternative as good as the software i use and payed for

if the companies made a linux version of their softwares i would try it out for sure because usually a linux distro is very slim on your processor in usage compared to windows and that would help me out with realtime tracking instruments

but until then i cant afford to go on a different os because compatability

i doubt the companies would do that though

This is pretty much how I feel about it as well. The virtual OS just doesn't seem efficient or snappy enough.

Additionally, I'm always thinking about how to implement an open-source upgrade for non-techie users -- mostly for cost effectiveness and stability (by restricting services/applications to essentials only) and virtual machines/disks (or even multi-boots) simply aren't simple enough for the users I have in mind.

To the AC that said anything workbook above 20 pages merits a database, I completely understand. Most of the material I'm dealing with was inherited and developed over years of no controls and just enough tech-savvy to get by, and at this point, formatting is so varied that porting to a regular database isn't a realistic option; even if it were, the basic user interactivity still wouldn't be there.

I imagine there are a lot of people / organizations out there in this same boat.

I hear ya, but I have to go back to the catalogue example.

While a regular database would be great to store all the variable information -- which is of course what is technically occurring even in excel/calc behind the scenes (so to speak) -- if you view your workbook like a an actual book -- with varying formatting, pictures, designs, etc, in every chapter -- but an artistic book that makes heavy use of interrelated calculations and formulas, I really can't think of a good substitute for a really scalable spreadsheet app like excel and to a lesser degree calc.

What do you need to do that LMMS can't cover?

I use debian on a machine which is not particularly new or impressive specs-wise, and it's very fast.

I know for a fact that if I ran Win7+ on it that it would run like a dog.

For what I use it for, it's the optimal solution.

What version are you running? Have you tried updating to latest version?

The last time I tried was within the last 6 months, and verified last week -- via online documentation -- that this was still the case.

I'll test it in the morning on 1:4.2.8.0ubuntu2 -- no access right now -- to see if the documentation is lagging.

*libreOffice

:youreafag:

I'm using 4.2.8.2

but also...have you found the hidden cow?

I've just tried with LibreOffice 4.4.4.3 - I can add thousands of sheets. I believe the limit is 10,000 for old 32 bit systems.

I tried on 4.2.8.2...can also add thousands of pages...columns go into the thousands for each page, also.

....can't really see a problem with limits here.

open a terminal (Ctrl Alt T)

then type

apt-get moo

...and a cow will appear.

The problem I found with Linux vs. Windows is that hardware is generally customized for the OS platform. If you buy a 'Windows' laptop for example, good luck getting it to work the same (convenient) way with Linux. I tried, failed, and gave up - and I am patient and an IT professional so not adverse to digging into technical issues.

Also, when I tried to use Open Office I discovered to my dismay that unlike MS Word, the saving of documents did not happen in the background i.e. you had to WAIT while the document is saved to disk. This may be a problem that has since been solved (my last Linux experience was a few years ago) but it is a major pain in the ass not to have this functionality by default.

No it's great. Gets all my jobs done. Windows is just easy to use, and has many of the things already set up. Linux requires messing with the command line and doing things ... But some other great things are already set up in linux..

Now I am not a linux pro and have been only using it for an year now , but all is cool .. except for a couple of things which I plan to learn in some time , or I will dual boot with windows ...

*PROS of linux --

1. Multiple desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, LXDE, XFCE more)
2. Multiple desktop screens so that your desktops don't become unorganized .. (I am using 8 currently) and run 10 applications at a time if not more.
3. Very fast interface if you use a light desktop environment.
4. It has wine
5. It has cool package managers

*CONS of linux ..
1. Getting drivers may require you to search around a lot, but hey if you can learn it will only help you..
2.

hrrmmh.

check line 4:

[link to wiki.documentfoundation.org (secure)]

I'll have to check with an actual giant file tomorrow/this-morning/few-hours-from-now -- rather than just adding empty pages; I'm wondering if there isn't some ability to generate a large number of pages but with reduced or nill operability. -- I'll let you know.

Until Linux has fully functioning native versions of MSOffice, the whole Adobe creative suite, pro tools (to name a few) it will never be ready for the big time. hence why I don't use it much. I actually like the feel of it better than OSX & Win

Just my own personal nitpick but a spreadsheet is really the wrong tool to be doing page layout.

Yeah, yeah, everyone does it but most examples that I see would be better off using a word processor. At work I get these forms created in Excel to fill out and they're just horrible to fill out. You can't tab to the next field, cells are easily confused with fields, the screen is littered with extraneous information.

Massage your data in a spreadsheet but present it using something else.