Gods dammit. I bought into the Vista Ultimate non-event - twice, then choked back the RAGE when they didn't offer a 7 Ultimate upgrade on the cheap and bought a couple copies of frakking Pro. NOW, they tell us there's a family pack a.k.a multi-user pack, which is what I wanted in the first place. C'mon Linux weenies, get that open source community going and add decent game support. I'll jump ship in a heartbeat. Frak! Frak! Frak! Frakkin' toasters.

Linux already has decent game support. Game devs simply choose not to develop for it. When they do games work just as well. See Doom 3, Quake 4 which both had native Linux versions and ran fine. Unfortunately, most devs aren't interested so the choice is not huge </understatement>

So, in the meantime I am forced to rely on Wine with mixed results. The good news is that Steam and a lot of other games works OK. The bad news is that most of the new games don't.

Even that can be turned into a positive though. Now I simply wait a year or three until a game hits its "Platinum edition" release, then check the Wine compatibility for it. Usually if it is a good game it will have a reasonably high rating by that time. The advantage of doing it this way is;

1) Platinum releases are *far* cheaper than new release games.

2) Your PC hardware is always up to the task.

3) You can easily avoid the dud games because a) Wine devs don't bother supporting them so they have a dud rating and b) you should know the duds by then anyway.

4) All the bugs (should) have been fixed in platinum releases.

Disadvantages are;

1) (Usually) can't play the latest and greatest games

2) Sometimes there are glitches in the in-game menus and sound.

3) You won't be able to run every game you want to run.

4) Not counting Steam, most of them require a NoCD crack because the stupid copy protection crap doesn't work in Wine. (This may count as an advantage to some, including me)

Currently I'm playing Half-Life 2 under Wine. Prior to that I played a lot of Elders Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Over the last 4 years I've played;

Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 with both expansions.

Quake 4 (native)

Doom 3 (native)

Call Of Duty

Civilization IV

C&C Generals with both expansions

GTAIII - San Andreas

I don't have time to play all the time but when I do I get by.

Make the game devs hear your voice, John. It'll happen eventually, but you can definitely speed things up.

Would love to move to Linux. Think Beryl looks way cool. Like the idea of an O/S that actually runs on the hardware I can afford. Hate M$.

But.

With all due respect to the great folks who donate their time to opensource projects. Impress is dreadful. I've tried Open Office several times, and while the word processor and spreadsheet are OK, Impress is totally unusable. I suppose the difference is that I only use 10% of Word functions, 5% of Excel functions, so I don't notice the lack of function or compatibility in those Open Office apps. But with Powerpoint I use 110% of the application - I push the boundaries of animations and such, and also use a bunch of add-ons for even more functionality.

When I look at the pitiful support for these features in Impress I realise that Microsoft is guaranteed a place on most enterprise laptops for the forseeable future. And if it's stuck on the laptops you can bet that enterprise desktops will use it for compatibility.

By the way - you could justifiably say that very few people need these advanced functions in any company. You would be correct. But the presentations that I develop are used by our whole sales force. They not only need to be able to display the presentation, they also need to be able to do simple editing of the file to suit their needs on a given day. There is virtually no chance that I can take one of my spiffed up Powerpoint files and import it to Impress.

The need for presentation editing is also the reason I can't move to Flash. the other reason is that I can develop a presentation in Powerpoint in a quarter of the time I need for Flash.

What really brought it home to me was when I posted my question about poor animation support on the Impress development forum. One of the lead developers responded with something like...

"You shouldn't be using transitions and animations in a presentation package anyway."

At that point I knew I was in the wrong place :-) Nice guy. Wrong planet.

Cheers,

SPuD

in the UK

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/3-/379971/2-/Promo.html?source=0700311095&cm_mmc=Silverpop-_-R2_wk28%20July%2009%20Vol%203-_-N-_-PC_PROMO_1&utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=R2%202009-07-10%20July%20Vol%203%20(1)&utm_content=

You're preaching to the choir, so I'll play Devils' Advocate and play Luser for a moment:

WHERE'S THE START BUTTON WHY CAN'T I FIND WORD WHERE'S THE INTERNET GONE WHY CAN'T I USE MY PRINTER WHY CAN'T I FIND MY WIRELESS NETWORK WHY DOESN'T 4ONDEMAND WORK WHY CAN'T I PLAY ANY GAMES WAAAA WAAAAA WAAAA I WANT WINDOWS.

Ubuntu is ready for users. Ubuntu is ready for nerds. Ubuntu is not ready for geeks; Geeks being the 14 year old who will unjam your printer, set up your router (using the web interface), and upgrade your ram. He doesn't know what grep is, and he's the one who will get the flack when stuff doesn't work. He's the one who will be put off Linux, and he's the one you REALLY want to get to like it. He's the one who will sell it to his family and friends.

Well like most family's during this little recession thingy, I am more worried about making sure my lot all have a roof over their heads and food on the table, MS can get stuffed if they think they are getting anything like 200 sovs for their pretend, toy O/S!

Orders continue to be placed at D L SERVICES INC Microsoft affiliate marketing Windows 7 pre-order special. Within hours after posting the pre-order offer clients where taking advantage of the discount pre-order. The marketing manager at D L SERVICES INC has a positive vision for the Windows 7 products moving forward http://dlservicesincservices.com

It took almost an hour for a Linux pratboi to make a comment????

Amusingly, at the bottom of that Play page is the note "Does not come with Internet Explorer. A web browser is required to access the internet".

Cue the "but how do I get a browser without accessing the internet" storm.

$149.00 clams is still a ripoff when you can get superior quality software in most of the major GNU/Linux Distros, use Ubuntu 8.06 at home CentOS5 at work. As far as OpenOffice goes I am writing a doctoral dissertation in Writer, MS Office 2007 from 2003 was too much of a change so if I am forced to relearn a suite I might as well get open to ODF (OASIS). The dissertation is heavily technical, lots of equations, figures, charts and its handling it well. Cross Referencing is great, auto-numbering, outlining, bibliography import from the database....I am sold, OO is getting better in leaps and bounds. BTW using v2.4 (haven't even seen v3.0 yet). In fact given the stability and "it just works" bliss of GNU/Linux, I'd REQUIRE M$ to PAY ME that amount to just run their crap with all of the Patch Tuesdays, malware, BSOD, incompatibilities and other headaches.

You know what, I'm gonna bite, I've checked the ubuntu website out and it looks fairly useable and I don't really play games on my laptop, but - how easy will it be for me to import all my files and documents? Like, I've got an Outlook which contains all my calenders, contacts and emails in .pst format, most of my docs are still in doc format, not docx (good ole MS, trying to lead the way again), and I have Excel documents in 12 month tabs, are they easily importable?.

Also, what are the video codecs like, divx and mkv?

How good, really, is Open Office compared to MS Office?

I am really sick of MS, Win7 should've been a free upgrade (or at least a nominal fee) for every Vista user (and in fact @£25 for an update to Win7 they'd have probably made millions on launch date), and to be honest, since I now play few games, Windows is fast becoming obsolete for me (tho I kind'a like Fallout3, but if Oblivion plays thru Wine, then so should it. How about Sims3 (... cough, for my niece), any chance of that playing?

Cheers for any info.

and sorry, no way is it ready for prime time. Due to user stupidity I had to install three times whilst searching the net because the grub<?> loader wouldn't show - finally sussed that the partition had to be made bootable - duh! When working it hadn't imported my docs over (but that maybe because I was importing from Win7RC), and while it could see my Audigy2 soundcard, no sounds were working. Much trawling thru' the web and looking thru' options screens later, before a tick in a random box caused it to work. DLing VLC was a trauma, no executables, writing things in a terminal? finally found a web page with one command that did the job.

Gotta admit, I loved it, could feel my brain creaking into action - thinking about growing a beard and scoring some corduroys. Not so sure about Open Office tho', but I'll give it a chance, it even opens .docx. Gonna play with wine over the next couple of weeks, if I can get Fallout3 and Sims3 working, import my Outlook data over (which according to one post on the 'net I can), then I may finally say byebye to MS's irrelevant creaking software.

But, for the primetime sheeple, those folk who can't even read the instructions on the screen in front of them, having to trawl the 'net for even the simplest operation, not gonna happen.

Also, if this thing is so open source, why hasn't anyone written a more windowy looking interface for it? I know it's windows - like, but it just looks so primitive.

Seriously, I would love to think OO is great and up to standard, but it just isn't. Every MS equivalent is miles ahead in just about every area...I recently wrote an undergrad dissertation, never mind a doctoral one, and Word made it so, so much easier than Writer.