65024U wrote:
All I hear is good stuff about Ubuntu....Hmm...
Well then! Let me give you some contrast!
I've been on Ubuntu for about a year now. Let me tell you some of my tales:
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Installing new programs sucks unless the programs come from the repositories.Finding binaries for Linux online that you can just download and run is a rare conveinience. Most expect you to download the source and compile it.
Often, this means downloading and installing all of the program's dependencies. Which is easy if the dependencies are available in the repositories (and the repositories have the right version of the dependencies). Otherwise you have to find them yourself and hope that installing other packages won't destroy packages you already have installed (read: it will destroy them).
I had the pleasure of trying to install some WinAmp clone that someone recommended (which turned out to be incredibly lame). Afterwards, dozens of my installed packages were broken, and every time I wanted to install a new package I got error messages saying my package versions were incompatible. But of course it didn't tell me WHICH packages were causing the problem.
After about 15 minutes of trial and error... trying to downgrade different package versions in order to fix the problem, I got everything straightened out (until a week later when I tried to install something else -- then a whole new set of broken packages surfaced and I had to repeat the process).
Oh, also, I tried installing BSNES. But I didn't have QT on my system. So I tried installing QT, but the repositories had an outdated version because I don't update my OS every week like I guess you're supposed to.
Long story short, after about 2 hours of dicking around trying to compile BSNES, I gave up and just got the Windows binary and ran it in Wine.
I still don't have a Linux binary.
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Linux likes to waste your time and make you jump through hoops to do simple tasks.
My sister has a external hard drive with a USB plug that she keeps a bunch of music and stuff on. I wanted to copy some stuff onto it for her.
So I plug the drive in my computer and try to copy files to it. I mean it should be that simple, right?
Of course not! Linux doesn't want to mount the drive because it's NTFS. Note that NTFS
IS supported, and there really shouldn't be any problem. But instead of just mounting the drive so I can use it,
it tells me to open a command prompt and type some bullshit to mount the drive.
Note this is the mounter that's telling me to do this. Not only that, but it tells me
verbatim exactly what I need to type to mount the drive. This means the mounter
knows how to mount my drive, and is perfectly capable of doing it... it's just refusing to do it itself.
I just about threw my box out the window at that point. How retarded is that? Seriously.
So I do what it says and manually mount the drive via the commandline. It appears to work. Until I try to copy files to the drive, at which point it informs me that I don't have permission to write to the drive.
So I check permissions to make sure I can write to the drive. All signs say I can, except I can't.
I try logging in as root to copy files to the drive. No luck.
Finally I give up and ask my Linux-savvy friends on IRC. After a few minutes of back and forth, doing various diagnostics, we discover that the drive is mounted as read only (so I guess the mounter told me how to mount it incorrectly).
They walk me through the process of mounting it as read+write (which of course I have to do manually via the commandline). Note that this process wasn't striaghtforward, as they had to find where the drive was being loaded, and we had to set up a folder to mount it to, figure out what filesystem to mount it as, etc.
Finally we got it all working. I checked the timestamps of my IRC logs to see how long it took from the time I asked for help, to the time where I got the drive working....
2 hours.
I'm not exaggerating. And that's not even counting the time I spent on my own before I asked for help, which was at least another hour. So 3 hours to plug in a USB drive and get it to work.
Here's the kicker....
THIS IS TYPICAL. This isn't a rare one-time occurance.
Every time I need to do something new on this machine, it takes
at least an hour to figure out how to do it.
Nothing is intuitive.
Nothing is user friendly.
Nothing is easy.
This OS is the biggest joke I've ever seen.
Oh, also, I still have to manually mount (and unmount) the drive whenever I need to use it on this computer. I have a system set up where it's easier to do now.. and it only takes a few seconds... but it still isn't as simple as "plug in the drive and use it"
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Linux is not nearly as stable as everyone claimsThe OS is pretty solid, yes, but the again so is Windows. Windows isn't the cause of crashes on Windows, it's the
programs that you run that cause the machine to screw up.
Linux has all the same problems. Linux itself is pretty solid. But the programs you run have just as many bugs and problems as any Windows program.
I tried out KDE for a bit. Tons of visual glitches, and crashes every half hour.
If a game or emu or something has a problem when in fullscreen, your resolution gets hosed. I've had this happen to me a few times and the only way I can fix it is to log out and log back in.
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So yeah. Those are my tales.
I heard nothing but good things about Ubuntu, as well. And I was optimistic and really wanted to like it when I tried it out.
But now I'm just fed up with it. I'll leave it on this box for cross-platform compilation pursposes, but the next box I get I'll be switching to Windows and will never look back.
Know what you're getting into. I can tell you this (and this has even been confirmed by some people I know that like Linux.. so this isn't one-sided):
- You
will need to spend a lot of time figuring things out. Even on "user friendly" distros like Ubuntu
- You
will need to read pages and pages of documentation and man pages to learn how to do things.
- You
will need to use the commandline regularly (I try my best to avoid it wherever possible, but I still have to use it sometimes)
As far as I can tell... the people that like Linux are people that like to solve computer puzzles and tinker around with their machine.
So if you like to do that, then you might have fun on Linux.
But if you want your computer to "just work"... then
STAY AWAY.
Quote:
I really want to do something like a emulator like this but there aren't any good examples on how opcodes are figured out by the values of the numbers, atleast in my research :(
http://www.obelisk.demon.co.uk/6502/reference.html