** Reply to message from J R FOX <jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxxx> on Wed, 12 May 2010 10:54:44 -0700 (PDT) > in what little I've seen there seems to be a lot more work > involved in setting them up, and the UI for them tends to be > rather lacking in Win or Mac terms. While it would be great if > free 'Nix apps could give their Win counterparts a serious run > for the money, it hasn't really happened yet and I'm doubtful > it ever will. Relatively little energy has gone into development of big consumer apps, and it doesn't help (it's outrageous, IMO) that major players like Apple won't share their work. So there's truth in what you say, but I think you're comparing bumble bees to locomotives: misunderstanding what *nix does and why it is used. For the most part, Unix/Linux is harnessed to a huge range of very narrowly defined purposes. Most installations devote all resources to a very few jobs. But they do those jobs with unmatched efficiency and a degree of manual control that no other operating system offers. I haven't bothered to look at recent numbers, but there's a reason why virtually all the serious servers in the world run on Solaris or FreeBSD or RHEL/CentOS. But does *nix necessarily involve "a lot more work in setup"? If you simply want the defaults, Linux RPMs and packages install hands-off, resolve dependencies automatically, and "just work". Power implies complexity. Whether the XWindows UI is good or bad is pretty much irrelevant; I don't know any sysadmin who actually uses X -- they operate exclusively at a terminal prompt (command line). So yeah, many programs have hundreds of manual switches and options, to control minute aspects of the program. Fantastic! Isn't that one reason that we use XyWrite -- to get precise, controlled results? If I have a problem with Adobe programs, for example, it's that some of them have a lot of power but relatively little control -- e.g. Acrobat has impoverished control compared to Ghostscript, even though the Distiller engine makes higher-quality PDFs. ----------------------------- Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxxxx -----------------------------