Windows vs Linux [was: p2exe using wine/cxoffice]

[Tim Golden]

[Sybren Stuvel]

Tim Golden enlightened us with:

Well, I'm with you. I'm sure a lot of people will chime in to point
out just how flexible and useful and productive Linux is as a
workstation, but every time I try to use it -- and I make an honest
effort -- I end up back in Windows

I'm curious, what do you mean with "it" in the part "every time I try
to use it"?
Fair question. I have, over the years, installed and used Gentoo,
Vector, RH, Ubuntu Breezy (my current choice) and various other
flavours and distros. When I "use it" I mean typically that I use
whatever desktop-type thing presents itself to me -- Gnome or XFCE
or Fluxbox, say -- one or more editors (I tend to try things out to
see if they suit), and one or more command shells.

Aside from using Firefox & Thunderbird I'm usually only doing
small-scale development things under Linux: perhaps reworking
Python code for my web sites which are hosted on Cornerhost's
Linux servers, or playing around with up-and-coming tools for
Python, a (very) few of which only work easily -- or at all --
under Linux.
There are different distributions of Linux, and putting them all on
one big pile is like saying "I've tried Windows, and I really don't
like it's user interface" and referring to the interface of Windows
3.1.

Not quite fair. Not only would I avoid saying something with a
redundant apostrophe ;) but the Windows user interface, at least
for my purposes, didn't change such a huge amount between Win9x and
Win2K,
and if you turn off the bells and whistles in XP (which I do!) isn't
so terribly different there. Which, I imagine, is by design. People
like familiarity. Linux distros (and the appearance they choose) seem
to vary far more widely than versions of Windows.

As it happens, (and I suspect I'll have to don my flameproof suit here),
I prefer the Windows command line to bash/readline for day-to-day use,
including in Python. Why? Because it does what I can't for the life of
me get readline to do: you can type the first few letters of a
previously-entered command and press F8. This brings up (going backwards

with further presses) the last command which starts like that. And
*then*
you can just down-arrow to retrieve the commands which followed it.
If someone can tell me how to do this with bash/readline I will be
indebted to them and it will increase my chances of switching to Linux
a bit! (Although not at work where I have no choice!)

It's obvious that everyone has a different way of working, and that I'm
more comfortable in Windows because all sorts of small familiarities I
can hardly articulate: the way the focus works; the shortcuts I've
developed;
the ability to drag files over things and have them respond. I'm very
happy with many things in Linux, and I do use it from time to time,
but it's never quite been enough to pull me away from Windows. Of
course,
I'm lucky enough to have a legal version of Windows to use; if someone
wants to avoid shelling out then of course Linux is even more
attractive.

TJG

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[bonono]

Tim Golden wrote:

As it happens, (and I suspect I'll have to don my flameproof suit here),
I prefer the Windows command line to bash/readline for day-to-day use,
including in Python. Why? Because it does what I can't for the life of
me get readline to do: you can type the first few letters of a
previously-entered command and press F8. This brings up (going backwards

with further presses) the last command which starts like that. And
*then*
you can just down-arrow to retrieve the commands which followed it.
If someone can tell me how to do this with bash/readline I will be
indebted to them and it will increase my chances of switching to Linux
a bit! (Although not at work where I have no choice!)

I use XP as my main desktop(because of many fine details) then VNC/X
into my linux box. But command line in Windows is in no way in the same
league as *nix shell. Use <tab> for command completion and up/down
arrow or <ctrl-R> to search for history.
_______________ _______________ _______________ _______________ _________

[Sybren Stuvel]

Tim Golden enlightened us with:

Not quite fair. Not only would I avoid saying something with a
redundant apostrophe ;) but the Windows user interface, at least for
my purposes, didn't change such a huge amount between Win9x and
Win2K,
Hence my reference to windows 3.1.
It's obvious that everyone has a different way of working, and that
I'm more comfortable in Windows because all sorts of small
familiarities

So what I read in your post is that you simply don't want to leave
your familiar environment. Fair enough.

Sybren
--
The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a
capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the
safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
Frank Zappa

[Giovanni Dall'Olio]

Tim Golden ha scritto:

As it happens, (and I suspect I'll have to don my flameproof suit here),
I prefer the Windows command line to bash/readline for day-to-day use,
including in Python. Why? Because it does what I can't for the life of
me get readline to do: you can type the first few letters of a
previously-entered command and press F8. This brings up (going backwards

with further presses) the last command which starts like that. And
*then*

Argh!! ;)
How about reading a simple tutorial on bash?
You can use even '!' to recall other commands in history.
For example, you can type '!p<Enter>' and it will call the last command
starting with 'p', without having to search for it (and if you want,
you can use CTRL+r)
You can use '!!' to recall the last command, or '!-#' for the other
ones. You can define single arguments, like !-#:2, to call only parts
of a old command.
With bash, you can repeat instructions (using 'for', 'while', and so
on) and use some basic logic to determine if launching them. You can
call easily any program installed in the computer, or in other ones,
too.
Really, are you joking? ;) Do you know that you can use the '<Tab>' key
to auto-fill a command? isn't this useful? I tried to use the windows
command line sometimes, but I found it so slow and uncorfortable, that
I thought that noone can use it. I really don't understand what you
want to say with this topic!

p.s. if you want a tip, leave using desktop manager and begin using the
command line. You will like it.

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On 2005-10-26, Tim Golden wrote:

[Sybren Stuvel]

Tim Golden enlightened us with:

> Well, I'm with you. I'm sure a lot of people will chime in to point
> out just how flexible and useful and productive Linux is as a
> workstation, but every time I try to use it -- and I make an honest
> effort -- I end up back in Windows

I'm curious, what do you mean with "it" in the part "every time I try
to use it"?

Fair question. I have, over the years, installed and used Gentoo,
Vector, RH, Ubuntu Breezy (my current choice) and various other
flavours and distros. When I "use it" I mean typically that I use
whatever desktop-type thing presents itself to me -- Gnome or XFCE
or Fluxbox, say -- one or more editors (I tend to try things out to
see if they suit), and one or more command shells.

All distros look the same to me, because I have an environment that
I like, and I keep my home directory acros distros.
As it happens, (and I suspect I'll have to don my flameproof suit here),
I prefer the Windows command line to bash/readline for day-to-day use,
including in Python. Why? Because it does what I can't for the life of
me get readline to do: you can type the first few letters of a
previously-entered command and press F8. This brings up (going backwards
with further presses) the last command which starts like that. And
*then* you can just down-arrow to retrieve the commands which
followed it. If someone can tell me how to do this with
bash/readline I will be indebted to them and it will increase my
chances of switching to Linux a bit! (Although not at work where I
have no choice!)

In my ~/.inputrc:

"\e[a": history-search-backward ## shift+up-arrow
"\e[b": history-search-forward ## shift+down-arrow
--
Chris F.A. Johnson <http://cfaj.freeshell. org>
=============== =============== =============== =============== ======
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, 2005, Apress
<http://www.torfree.net/~chris/books/cfaj/ssr.html>