'Office 2007: OpenOffice'

No way.

No camera support? I personally only had to fight Linux on this once. And it turned out to be a hardware problem (USB hub wasn't enough for it.) rather than a software one.

Most MP3 players. My opinion, the best are NOT the ones that use proprietary protocols to talk to their software. No. The best ones are the ones that not only support a wide array of formats (Which Zune and iPod do not.) but also mount as mass storage devices so you can use them from anything that uses the USB Mass Storage System (Which the Zune and iPod do not.) This not only allows you to simply use your file manager to put music on your media player, bu also to write some pretty clevel shell scripts. Most those that force you to use proprietary protocols through their software are products of either low-qualit companies, or monopolies/wannabe monopolies like Apple and Microsoft. A good Linux user would probably decide against getting an iPod.

Printers. I can only really think of one brand that doesn't seem to have any printer support at all on Linux, and that's Lexmark. Since those printers are garbage anyway, we're not losing sleep over their lack of support.

Limited software compatibility? This is the result of Microsoft believing people blur the line between their operating systems and their computers. Unfortunately for Microsoft, there's little to no software on Linux that is not at least an equivalent, and most cross into superior territory rather quickly. Never mind Linux has superb virtualization support, and WINE covers the vast majority of Windows software well.

No support for Windows Live services. MSN messenger? We have so many multi-protocol clients on Linux and not one doesn't support MSN. Hotmail? We have web browsers and POP3/IMAP clients that can just as well support it as Outlook or Internet Explorer. The real question is what Live service would any Linux user really care about aside from maybe hotmail or MSN?

Who would even buy a netbook for gaming? Point well made. Still. Linux is a lot more lightweight and has BETTER game technologies than Windows. It's not for a lack of game support at all. Still, netbooks are not even remotely suitable for gaming. Their hardware is far too limited (Too slow a CPU, lacking a high end GPU, not nearly enough RAM/hard disk space. This is hardly the fault of Linux, nor should it even be acknowledged as an issue on netbooks as that's not what they are meant for at all. You wanna game on the PC, get a PC.

Authorized support? This was a huge festering pile of bullshit. LOADS of big name companies provide support for Linux. Not the least of which is IBM.

Video chat. This must be a throwback to Microsoft's lie about video support not being in Linux. Skype, Pidgin, Kopete, need I say more?

iTunes and Zune. As I said above. A company forcing you to use their proprietary protocols, is likely a scumtastic company that wants vendor lock in and to cut down on interoperability. Apple is actually worse than Microsoft here, as Apple is severely restrictive on their users.

Quicken. I don't really use money apps, but there's plenty of money programs out for Linux. Lots. LOTS. And all of them beat their commercial counterparts.

Photoshop. I'll pick it. The only features PS has that GIMP does not are features only PROS give a flying fuck about. Trust me. I have three professional graphics designers amongst all my friends. They've weighed in HEAVILY on this debate.

Office 2007. Do I also really have to point out OpenOffice? And it supports a real open standard, not the fake one Microsoft got passed by the ISO through bribes and committee stacking.

Regular Updates? Linux's updates sometimes reach the HOURLY. Linux definitely updates much more frequently than Windows, and it updates ALL its software, not just the software the distributors deem important like Microsoft does.

Meets expectations. What a loaded term. Everyone's expectations are different. If Microsoft means the expectation that Linux is like Windows, they are correct. If they are inferring Linux falls well short of being a desktop OS, they're even more deluded then I thought.

Free downloads. I'll approach this one different. NO OS IS PERFECTLY SECURE. NOT EVEN LINUX. And one of the #1 tips for a safe system: UPDATE YOUR PACKAGES AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE. For discrete release distributions like Ubuntu,. most, if not all, updates ARE about security, with actual new versions of the software coming with the next distribution release. If it's rolling release like Arch, it'll be both security AND full new versions of the software. Also, we have free security and free software out the wazoo. Does Microsoft not even know what Linux is like?

“Funny how they were boasting that they update regularly, then use that same argument against Ubuntu”

Microsoft has a really sleazy metric about how to measure the security of software: The LESS security releases made, the more secure the system must actually be. Probably to try to spin their utter lack of security implementation around.

“It doesn’t have to be clear, unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t have to reboot after every freakin minor update.”

Microsoft doesn't even bother to try to make the system modular or online upgradeable. You practically have to restart the system every time you save a basic text file. Linux, unless you have a kernel update you're not rebooting. And that's fine with me.

I don't like demotivators, but good point. Microsoft deliberately ignores the fact that distributors and upstream DO send security fixes out, GUARANTEED, despite that disclaimer in the GPL about warranties.

Defamation, or something…?

When they say MP3 players, they might mean ones that us MTP to transfer files. I found libmtp and that fixed it. The rest of them are like a flash drive. Some programs do crash, so I delete and reinstall, or reinstall from the application's website.

A couple of years ago I could not get a Lexmark printer to work on Mandriva. No drivers for it. The people in the forums had this same problem.

I tried Sabayon 5.0 and PCLinuxOS Gnome. The font size was too big, like 72pt and could not find a way to change that at the CD boot up. I did get Sabayon to install by guessing but some apps had that same problem with fonts being 72pt. I changed the fonts and the sizes on everything and still the same.

I have been happy with Ubuntu Ultimate and Mandriva.

If I had the cash I would go out and buy it this weekend, sadly I have other
obligations. So I will stick to working with OO PHP, Linux and MySQL this
weekend as I had planned to do. I probably will be able to get that new
system by Thanksgiving and can give it a go over the holidays. At least
that will be good timing as I will probably have some time off at that
time.

Thanks for the information and the feedback. The last time I did any
programming with a bus the MicroChannel Architecture was all the rage. That
dates me, ouch. Seems like most of my jobs have not been straight
programming positions except for the last few years and those were with
higher level languages, specifically web development (LAMP more than .NET)

I have irrational dreams of a building a production server farm from the
ground up based on Coreboot, Linux and Cinelerra; with whatever languages
and tools I need to throw in to get it all to work together. All open
source, all fast, all free, except the hardware and my time of course.
Nothing vendor-locked in, no worries about future dead ends. And if things
go the way I hope they will, that same basic system should provide an
excellent gaming platform, movie watching / Tivo type platform, etc… I
really do not care if it runs any Microsoft games or not. They (Microsoft)
are never going to develop games that will run in Linux without Wine, so why
should I give another thought to them. Besides their gaming platforms seem
to fail a week or month after the warranty expires. At least with my
platform it should run for 10 years if I want. Replace a power supply or
fan, no biggee. Its not like I even care to try to compete or anything,
that is not the point of the effort for this, though there are some obvious
applications where such a platform could not just compete, but surpass what
they can offer, thanks to the open source and FOSS community. In fact I am
more interested in the development tools/stack that would let a kid or
teenager create their own games, backgrounds, scenarios and play with others
via the Internet than I am with anything else.

Back in those MicroChannel days, when everyone said you had to use a
Macintosh to do anything with Video and sound; I was using OS/2 1.2 (thank
goodness I did not get involved with OS/2 1.0) and the Audio Visual
Communication software to edit and replay video and sound just fine. A
friend of mine was using a midi connection/adapter and keyboard to mimic
multiple instruments and build his own Orchestra all without a Macintosh.
It was fun doing things others said could not be done.

Today, there have already been movie productions designed, developed,
created, coded and produced on 100% Linux platforms, so that has already
been done. While I still use Windows for work and did last year. I have
been 100% Linux at home for almost two years now. I just figured it might
be fun to give a kid a very robust, very capable graphic platform with zero
limitations for under $500. And see what they come up with. I know I can
do that with Linux today, could have done this with Linux 3 – 5 years ago,
with the right hardware of course. But if I have to purchase the GPUs, and
based on what you have posted, my own efforts will bare out the truth of
that; the cost will definitely go higher. Heck I probably can not get a
quad core for less than $500. I know I can get a dual core for less than
$400 running Linux and a Nvidia 2 or 3 year out of date GPU adapter as
ZaReason sells that in a bundled package from their website now. (I do not
blame ZaReason and System76 when they can not offer the latest GPUs as I
understand that its the hardware industries current practices to release new
products for Windows first, and only 2 – 3 years later offer anything to the
Linux, Open Source community device driver wise…makes me recent that
industry and not give them any of my money however) When the hardware
device driver industry consistently releases their Linux, Unix and Macintosh
device driver in the same calendar month that they release the Windows
device drivers I will start supporting them again, but not before. The
ZaReason PC w/ the Nvidia (6xxx or 8xxx) adapter was $399 if memory serves.
So we can get a Linux box + GPU adapter for that price today. Not too
shabby. How long have the 9xxx Nvidia cards been out and on the market.

I am pretty sure that neither company builds their PCs with the coreboot
bios yet, but have honestly not checked this to be sure. Coreboot is one of
my must have requirements anymore. (If I have to write C code to turn
on/off the fan at a different time I want to be able to do that. True
story, the guys PC overheated because the BIOS ~ designed for Windows ~ did
not turn the fans off/on at the correct times, thus the PC would
overheat.) I only had to read about one incident to know that I did NOT
want those kinds of vendor lock-in issues/hassles in my future. Which for
me is a future deal breaker, though I admit the ZaReason box is very nice
and the price would be hard to beat. Best of all since the ZaReason box was
built with Linux from the ground up, you know with 100% certainty that you
can run future versions of Linux on it without fear of Vendor lock-in
preventing you. The opposite can never be guaranteed with any big box store
Windows PC, especially when they do not offer Linux. Just say no and save
yourself future headaches.

If I can get a Coreboot enabled quad core processor w/ an Nvidia 6xxx
adapter (not sure they have released the Linux device drivers for anything
higher …8xxx or 8xxx yet) for less than $500, than watch out. Add in
either Xen or VMS running underneath two or three different Linux distros,
with solid development tools, on top. CMake, GCC, Qt and some others not
only would I have a solid machine that could be used in a production
farm(movie production), gaming platform(no need to Wine), but it would be
like a DVD/Tivo on steroids. What processor does the cable company put in
their DVD Recorders today, 200 – 300 mhz? I know they do not store the
movies you record on the local hard drive anyway, but only on the servers at
the office that serves your area. (Found that out the hard way when a
hurricane knocked out power. When the power came back on and Internet had
not recovered yet (It took them an additional 4 hours to get the Internet
back up. Well I figured no big deal as I was catching up on a series and
had recorded a couple of TV shows with the Cable company's DVR. Imagine my
surprise when I could not watch the shows or any movies only because the
Internet (via Cable) was not available. Up and till that point in time I
thought the movies and TV shows were on the DVR's hard drive, not.) Get
really crazy with this Linux box and add in a fiber connection (overkill I
know) in addition to multiple 1000 Ethernet NIC cards and what might I be
able to do from a home movie/video network perspective.

Oh that's right, nothing because the Cable Internet company's deep packet
inspection, bandwidth shaping software would throttle back my connection to
something insanely low. I wonder what will happen in the future with
Bandwidth caps?

Well all this rambling has been fun, time for me to get back to the OO PHP.
I am building a Model View Controller (MVC) framework over the weekend
starting tonight with only PHP. No C++, no Java, no .net, no C (not that
you would use that for this), no Python, no Ruby, no Perl, hopefully little
or no JavaScript, and as little CSS as I can get by with, primarily just
PHP. I am wondering how efficient I can make it, especially if I do not
have to load in the normal large OO libraries that many of us use today.
Why, for the fun of it (and a future project ). Fortunately some others
have gone this route so I will not be the first or in completely uncharted
waters. Probably add in some Xajax the jury is still out on that as I type
this, depends on what I have time for. I plan to give it a MySQL back end.
(Would add in MariaDB and PostgreSQL if I had time; after all if you are
careful how you code it, PHP does not care what RDBMS is running under it.)
If time permits, probably will not, I want to add in some Google Maps in the
web interface for the fun of it. Down the road tie in FFMpeg, Tagging,
Imagick, a little Regex, perhaps some OAuth (for interfacing with other
social media websites) and proxy front end. Make sure my blogging
environment is 100% PHP so when some weasel cracker finds a weakness (think
lately with Wordpress) I can patch it myself. It is nice to NOT be limited
by your framework / CMS / libraries / platform / whatever-you-want-to-call
it / someone-else-will-call-something-else.

Later and thanks for the info.

Yes, things have changed a lot in the real-time 3d pipeline since the days of software rendering (which is what you describe by saying 2 CPUs doing dedicated rendering). Video cards these days are powerhouses designed from the ground up to process SIMD-style moving MASSIVE amounts of data around. The CPU does send quite a bit of data to the video card, so much that they've upgraded the connection bus from the old AGP 8x standard to –> PCI Express 16x, but it still sucks compared to onboard memory, but that's another discussion.

/// If that is the case, then a GPU on an adapter hooked to the display would be faster. ///

That's exactly what a dedicated graphics adapter is. It receives triangle data and base textures over the PCIE bus and then does magic with them. The triangle setup is not the hard part. It's the multiple passes of shading that will kill a CPU trying to do this (unless your meshes are very dense, then that will also kill your CPU).

/// However if very much communication needs to take place between the GPU and the CPU (which is still my understanding), than the bottle necks (either 8 bit, 16 bit or if you are lucky 32bit) somewhere in between (even on 64 bit systems) is going to be your limiting factor. ///

PCI Express 2.0 has dual 32 bit channels for each slot (I have no idea what that means, since it makes no difference to me what the data granulation is, as long as it moves quick enough) So in terms *I* can understand: Old school PCI moves data at 133 MB/s, AGP8x at 2GB/s and PCI express x16 at 4GB/s.

/// I understand that the GPU by design is intended to offload processing from the CPU to the GPU's processor on the adapter card; but I have been led to believe that there is still significant communication over a smaller data pipe, between the CPU and the GPU on the Adapter card. ///

You have been misled, the data pipe is now adequate for pretty respectably high end real time rendering as I described above.

/// I have also been told that even if the GPU is on the motherboard, the data path between it and the processor is smaller and thus becomes a bottle neck. Heck every datapath (even between northbridges and southbridges) is a bottle neck when it comes to doing anything internal to the processors. ///

This is also incorrect, I don't even know where you got this =) what a strange statement … you haven't been taking to programmers about this sort of thing have you? They get all sorts of weird ideas about how their computers work.

If you solder the GPU into the motherboard, you would still be using the northbridge's PCI-e interface to connect it to the video card, the only thing you're changing is the physical interface between them. The GPU can be anything and thus can be quite powerful, of course not even the craziest OEMs have yet attempted to weld 4 ATI4890's in SLI mode into a motherboard. I suspect it is because the need for 1.5 kilowatts of peak power would cramp their style just a bit. Just look at a block diagram one day, no video card talks directly to a CPU (you can pick at that statement by bringing up system-on-a-chip and integrated graphics chipsets, but the fact is that even those are internally communicating with the rest of the machine via the internal PCIe bus built into that chipset).

/// I have always believed that this bottleneck was significant. I have not written this type of code yet, but plan to in the near future on a Linux + Coreboot BIOS + Quad CPU (or more) box. I will be purchasing that this year. So once I start doing the C code, what you are saying, I might have more than one eye-opener. Sounds like fun. ///

So you ARE a software guy! This explains why you have weird views about everything

/// If what you are stating is fact, at least there are a number of GPU adapters that are compatible with Linux that I can make use of…. ///

ATI actually has a pretty good track record with drivers these days (release – day linux support through fglrx (shudder) … allegedly, YMMV).