french police adopts ubuntu...

Quote: The best quote comes from Lt. Colonel Xavier Guimard: “Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users,” he said. “Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”

The proverbial case of killing two birds with 1 stone... might have improved productivity, if he means that games don't work. Or not, if he's referring to huge collection of simple time-waster games that come with ubuntu [grin] edit: sidenote. I know its taboo to talk about ratings, but those do provide interesting feedback. I just view it as sort of anonymous poll of opinions on something. And results of poll are rather curious: windows users appear to be quite annoyed by anything good at all said about Linux, e.g. by a point being made that it is usable by regular people (cops). Effect appear to be stronger than that from even bashing/flaming something or some company, even popular things like programming languages. What does it mean, I dunno - maybe Linux looks like bigger threat than I thought, or something. BTW. If you like linux, and your rating is around 1000, and you care about rating, beware. [Edited by - Dmytry on March 17, 2009 3:34:12 AM]

The best thing I have notice since my switch to Linux (also Ubuntu) is the much higher half life than Windows. The hardware support is good an one will get free updates and upgrades for ever. For everyone that does not care about games Ubuntu is a great choice.

Quote: Original post by Kambiz
... For everyone that does not care about games Ubuntu is a great choice.

Well, I believe you hit spot on.
Protip: GameDev.net This might be a reason not many people here like Linux

Quote: Original post by JSoftware
Protip: GameDev.net This might be a reason not many people here like Linux

As this is GameDev.net, I'm sure many people are here to improve the linux gaming situation :)

I think that Linux (and why not governemnt funded open source?) is the way to go for the public sector. I hate it how a huge amount of taxpayer dollars/euros/$CURRENCY is going to Microsoft's pockets. France has already switched to Linux based OS'es in some government offices several years ago and now the law enforcement follows.

-Riku

Quote: Original post by riku

Quote: Original post by JSoftware
Protip: GameDev.net This might be a reason not many people here like Linux

As this is GameDev.net, I'm sure many people are here to improve the linux gaming situation :)

good one.

Quote:

I think that Linux (and why not governemnt funded open source?) is the way to go for the public sector. I hate it how a huge amount of taxpayer dollars/euros/$CURRENCY is going to Microsoft's pockets. France has already switched to Linux based OS'es in some government offices several years ago and now the law enforcement follows.

-Riku

Yea. Its annoys me for instance that a: local government spends much money on microsoft's products (i sure hope they dont just pirate windoze) rather than doing proper analysis of alternatives (like it should when it picks the company to buy pencils from), b: all the forms are published as .doc files, which would've been illegal advertising of microsoft if not implicit assumption that everyone pirates microsoft word.

Quote: As this is GameDev.net, I'm sure many people are here to improve the linux gaming situation :)

That is what I'm here for :).

But anyway, good to see that they are saving so much money. Open source software is reaching a stage where it can compare to software that you paid for, which I am very happy about. Even my girlfriend uses Linux Mint on her new laptop after liking it when she tried it on my PC.

I'm going to install the new Ubuntu release on my pc. It's always a safe idea to have a second os on a system.
According to this article Ubuntu is not profitable yet. That will always be a weak point.

Quote: Original post by riku

Quote: Original post by JSoftware
Protip: GameDev.net This might be a reason not many people here like Linux

As this is GameDev.net, I'm sure many people are here to improve the linux gaming situation :)

I think that Linux (and why not governemnt funded open source?) is the way to go for the public sector. I hate it how a huge amount of taxpayer dollars/euros/$CURRENCY is going to Microsoft's pockets. France has already switched to Linux based OS'es in some government offices several years ago and now the law enforcement follows.

-Riku

Okay, give me a stable, well documented API with a matching IDE and I'll get right on that.

edit: ^^^^ is opengl and openal etc "not stable enough" or what?

Profit has two sides... when one side is making profit, another is losing money. Government is certainly on the "losing money" side of the equation.

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
edit: ^^^^ is opengl and openal etc "not stable enough" or what?

Compared to D3D9 and D3D10/11 the OpenGL API is very poor. Longs Peak had a chance to fix that, they fluffed it and lost a few people in the process.

OpenAL on th other hand, while I do like it as an API, suffers from a lack of true support in the Windows space (Creative have done good things with it, but hardware cards are a rarity).

Also I notice a lack of input on your list (DirectInput, Win32 message and XInput being the windows side of things), and unless things have changed in the last few years "Linux" also lacks a nice central point of information about everything in the OS API wise as we have with MSDN. This makes trival things in Windows, such as creating a window which supports OpenGL a nightmare to work out, unless you want to tie yourself to come revision of a perticular toolkit which you then have to assume everyone has; see the Gnome/KDE debate.

This also nicely avoided the tools aspect of things; frankly in my expriance nothing can touch Visual Studio when it comes to C++ development; at work I hate HATE the fact I can't use the VS debugger with the PS3 and instead have to use some useless SN debugger 'thing' which generally makes my life harder. Every other IDE I've used for C++ just feels like a cheap knock-off of VS but didn't get it right. Code-blocks is a good example of this; something about it just feels 'wrong', the icons feel to big, the text isn't quite right, the whole experiance leaves me fighting the IDE rather than working with it (and when you are already fighting C++ another fight is not something you want).

As for Open Source software being 'as good' as commerical software.. well, maybe in some regards it might be.. athough those are probably regards I haven't come across; lets just say there is a reason I brought Office 2007 and didn't use OpenOffice (and there will be a reason I buy Windows 7 and not install Linux and so on).