Software in the cloud

[Richard Hed]

I have put several people on KDE for everyday computing with no major complaints and I also prefer it for everyday computing. But I prefer Redhat for more business like environments. I agree, try several out until you get one that your happy with. My main computer is a Win10 machine and am very happy with it. I prefer Eagle 7.6 which is the last version before they were bought out by Element and they made it a subscription program, sucks. When I was doing the IT stuff I use to complain that the programmers always screwed up the programs. So I decide to get my Computer Programmer/Analyst papers, that's when I found out that programmers used faulty programs to write programs and there wasn't always time to test the software on every machine ever made. I have 5 computers here to test my software and that's still not enough. Back in the day one of my best customers had problems every month with 1 Win95 machine and the rest Win98's. Because I like a good soldier I kept very good records of all work that was done on each machine. I found that if we kept the machines always on which, we did so the automated maintenance could work over each night, would crash ever 28 days. If we rebooted the computers on the 28 day, they were fine. I notified Microsoft, they in turn duplicated my tests and 3 months later put out a bulletin. But no thank you. I still stand by what I said, "business or our work place dictates what we use at home". I found that @95% of the people that use computers don't want to know anything more than to get them through their day. They use to tell me stop, do I really need to know this - well no - then stop telling me.

Hardware and software, it's nothing personal, it's just business.

Ray

Is Redhat still around? I thot they died. I prefer SUSE anyway

 

[Richard Hed]

Actually there are 2 spots you need to look at, 1 - Task Manager and 2- the Services. You can Google the names of each and decide which ones to turn off/disable but, PLEASE set a new restore point before turning stuff off. You can also use a program called CCleaner to look at what's starting up on boot up. I have noticed over the years that Microsoft is hiding more and more of the settings.

Ray

Yes, GRRR! and thanx for that info. It takes a lot of time, however to do all this. and thanx for telling me about the "restore" point, that helps a great deal.

 

[74Sprint]

Yup RedHat.com

 

[Richard Hed]

Yup RedHat.com

I'll be darned. I notice they sold to IBM last year. Wonder what that will mean. I boought version 6.2 probably more than 20 years ago but I see they are only up to 8. at this time. Or it looks lilke it now. Also, the blurb claimed they are the biggest maker of open software, but it had that feel of someone writing something pretending to be someone else and giving themselves a pat on the back. If you see in my avatar, I can barely lift my arms to give myself a pat but I really dislike it when I detect that stuff where someone writes about themselves and pretends to be a disinterested party. I saw that in the Philippines all the time, particularly in the restaurant/tourist business. What a crock.

 

[awake]

As far as speed is concerned running from a CD can seem slower. What happens here is the bulk of the OS is loaded into memory and parts are swapped in and out as required. For low memory machines this can be a bit of a drag, but the parts that are in memory will run just as fast as they would as if the whole lot was being read from the HDD.

Yeah, that's probably the key to my experience - mostly I've used a LiveCD on low-end systems.

Baron, I was not familiar with Trinity until you mentioned it. I've read some things on-line about it now, but of course, it is hard to evaluate just from a list of features or such. If you were to pick just one or two key features that make you go with Trinity over another desktop - the one or two things that you just couldn't live without - what would they be? And if you didn't use Trinity, what would you settle for instead? (I ask out of curiosity and desire to learn, nothing more!)

 

[Rodney Brown]

Redhat is alive and well, but is currently a subsidiary of IBM. Reminds me of a moment in my past. In the 90's I worked for a mapping software startup in upstate NY. Matt Szulik was the head of marketing and invited me to leave coding behind to join his marketing team. Should have taken the offer, but instead moved back west to Wyoming. A year later Matt was the chairman of RedHat... and pretty much defined the model that FOSS software today follows when it needs to have a profitable corporate structure behind it.

For as long as I can remember, there have been religious arguments over operating systems -- Unix/DOS/AIX/Posix/OS2/Next/Mac/Windows/Linux/ and a bunch of others that were arguably better but never made a scratch in the marketshare chart. Historically they were closer related than their marketing hype pushers wanted anyone to know. AT&T(Bell Labs) developed Unix and initially shared the source for the asking (mostly with universities - saw my first version at U of Wyo). They changed the deal and suddenly commercial users had a risk of owing AT&T royalties. University off shoots like the BSD (Berkley software distribution) formed the basis of other proprietary versions from Sun, DEC, and others leading to the giant mess of "standardizing Unix". I was part of several "OpenUX" conferences back in the day when all the vendors were arguing for their pet features and hoping to capture a little of that royalty revenue. Ultimately Linus Torvalds did an end-run around the whole deal and Linux became the defacto standard.

But there were others... Carnegie Mellon University had a flavor called Mach Unix that become NeXT (incidentally lead by Steve Jobs). Side note: the world-wide-web as we know it was originally built on a NeXT machine. NeXT was the golden egg that Jobs used to get back a job he had lost at Apple. On a different trunk of the OS family tree a developer/manager from Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) was enticed to Microsoft and Windows NT (MS's first "real" multi-tasking system) grew out of the DEC VMS legacy. Windows 10 is just the latest modern, consumer-grade edition of NT. Microsoft's early market domination has left them with the unenviable task of supporting Edsel-era applications on Model-T platforms.

As I see it, any OS is tolerable. Even so, I tend to avoid Apple-anything like the plague, not because their OS's are better or worse, but because their self-centric view of system management runs afoul of my daily job to tweak systems to my clients needs. Similarly, being dependent on cloud-based applications is abdicating authority over your own data and business intelligence -- selling your tech-soul for the promise of thoughtless updates and backups.

The song goes "No need to remember when 'Cause everything old is new again". A few decades ago, we all sent in paper copies of our 1040's to the IRS. Now the questions they ask get more invasive, and we enter that data for them electronically with our eSubmit buttons. Our horizon has your cloud-based Quickbooks and online bank directly reporting your activities so that "filing is easy (er..... automatic/mandatory/compulsory)". I may write cloud-software for my clients, but I'll keep using old, unfriendly apps and mailing in my paper 1040 as long as I can.

 

[BaronJ]

Hi Andy, Guys,

Trinity, is derived from KDE3 and was a fork started because SuSe moved to KDE4 and completely ruined the KDE experience. Then they did it again with KDE5. Microsux got blamed for their interference with the programming at SuSe.

Trinity is what KDE4 onwards should have been. Simple straight forward and fast. It just works, doesn't crash and burn ! Actually everything Microsux isn't.

Really you get lazy using a desktop that you like which makes moving to another desktop a of a chore. But it like anything else, it take time to learn.

 

[Richard Hed]

Hi Andy, Guys,

Trinity, is derived from KDE3 and was a fork started because SuSe moved to KDE4 and completely ruined the KDE experience. Then they did it again with KDE5. Microsux got blamed for their interference with the programming at SuSe.

Trinity is what KDE4 onwards should have been. Simple straight forward and fast. It just works, doesn't crash and burn ! Actually everything Microsux isn't.

Really you get lazy using a desktop that you like which makes moving to another desktop a of a chore. But it like anything else, it take time to learn.

I don't care, anything that goes wrong with computers is microsux's fault. Even when the sun shoots out sun spot x-rays and it fries a computer, it is their fault. I tried a SUSE after 9.2 and preferred the 9.2, however, I didn't really give the newer version much of a chance. I down loaded a new version yesterday and am going to put it on a disk and use it for start up. I'll see how that goes. I'll probably like it just because it's not microsux. Do you remember when IBM had their operating system? It was $1000 so it didn't take much from microsux to undermine them. IBM deserved what they got but now sux is the big gorilla on the block

 

[Richard Hed]

Hi Andy, Guys,

Trinity, is derived from KDE3 and was a fork started because SuSe moved to KDE4 and completely ruined the KDE experience. Then they did it again with KDE5. Microsux got blamed for their interference with the programming at SuSe.

Trinity is what KDE4 onwards should have been. Simple straight forward and fast. It just works, doesn't crash and burn ! Actually everything Microsux isn't.

Really you get lazy using a desktop that you like which makes moving to another desktop a of a chore. But it like anything else, it take time to learn.

Hey, Baron,
I have been trying to use FreeCAD, but it's a bear to learn. I lookt at the tutorials on line but they miss so much, I thimk they have the bad habit like I do myself, that is, if I am trying to explain something, I assume the other person knows what I am talking about when they don't have a clue. The program looks very powerful but trying to follow the tuts is difficult. I thimk maybe the UI has changed because the tut says one thing but it's not there when I go to find it. Do you know of any good tutorials for that?

 

[stanstocker]

Greetings folks. I've used linux to varying degrees since the distribution was on 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. Windows machines are around here too, Mach4, VCarve, GWizard, Fusion 360, and Arturia (music synthesizer stuff) are Windows based. Software development was a component of my professional life on many platforms all the way back to punched cards. Did my time on everything from embedded to mainframes, assembler and C to COBOL

I really like linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. KDE is also a good environment, I just like the older 2.x based Gnome desktops. Thunderbird is the email client in use, nothing against webmail, it's used on vacations and travel, but I like having everything local and backed up. Gnome 3 desktop and the current Windows 10 interface feel focused on touchscreens at some expense to the keyboard/mouse user. That's OK, they aren't "wrong", it's nice that linux supports a variety of desktop environments. It's not that I refuse to use Gnome 3 / Windows 10 style interfaces, it's that I'm not FORCED to do so that I appreciate! Many things said of linux (and other things in life) are based on prior experience that may be very far out of date. People still say you can't do anything in linux without using the command line, or that networking is difficult to get working, all sorts of things that were true 20 years ago without doubt, 10 years ago sometimes, and recently in very few instances. Windows 10 is harder to get playing nicely in a mixed OS network than Linux by far. I still have one Windows 10 machine that can't see drives on linux boxes, while all the other machines (Windows and linux) see the drives just fine and dandy. I lived in a command line world for many years, and seldom feel any need to use the command line. If you DO need the command line, odds are you are following directions to install an application manually, and will copy from the website instructions and paste into the terminal window anyway, it isn't as if you need system programmer level knowledge!

More recently applications for linux have been available in "appimages", which contain the entire support infrastructure and application in a single file. While these are larger files and do take a bit longer to load than the standard binary installation, they do ensure all libraries and such match the original build of the application. CURA has benefited from the appimage world quite a bit, it has had far fewer odd things happening as an appimage than as an installed application here. The overall linux application availability and quality has improved quite a bit over the last few years. While you can find Adobe or Microsoft folks who will find some detail that isn't in the same place or called the same thing, for the vast majority of folks they work very nicely. If you are a die hard Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop user who uses the most advanced features everyday you may not be satisfied with GIMP and DarkTable, most folks find the same features are there, just with a different name or on a different tab. But it will take some effort to move for some folks.

Wine allows SOME windows applications to run without installing a virtual machine instance of Windows, but check before you commit if a specific application is a must for your world. I've never had great success using wine, tried again with several apps and installed Windows 10 in a VirtualBox. Getting Fusion360 to run took some tweaks, and virtualbox has some infuriating limitations (like not being able to use the physical DVD drive as a general i/o device). If you can extract the disk to an ISO file you can mount that file, but not being able to just plop in a disk and shove the drawer closed is irksome in some cases. Then again, many machines don't even come with DVD drives any more.

It's funny, we had a "PC revolution" in the late 70's to free us of the tyranny of the mainframe world where we had no control over our applications or data, not to mention the operators from hell. We then went to a world of fragmentation, where who knows what was installed on or in the machines you were dealing with (not in most classified environments but elsewhere no matter how hard "they" tried to lock it down, some user always found the cute screen saver that would eat files or worse). Now we're back to the world of applications running on remote systems, with most to all of the data residing somewhere besides the end user machine. What was once a terminal is now a web browser. Often on a phone. With more MIPS, memory, and colors than the mainframes we were getting away from. Funny world.

Best to all,
Stan

 

[awake]

Hey, Baron,
I have been trying to use FreeCAD, but it's a bear to learn. I lookt at the tutorials on line but they miss so much, I thimk they have the bad habit like I do myself, that is, if I am trying to explain something, I assume the other person knows what I am talking about when they don't have a clue. The program looks very powerful but trying to follow the tuts is difficult. I thimk maybe the UI has changed because the tut says one thing but it's not there when I go to find it. Do you know of any good tutorials for that?

Richard, no doubt you have looked at this page: Tutorials - FreeCAD Documentation

It has a wealth of tutorials - and that is part of the challenge! As you note, the version used in the tutorial is quite important, because FreeCAD continues to develop rapidly. Fortunately, most of the tutorials on the page above indicate the version they used in the title. Be especially careful of tutorials based on pre-.17 versions - I would probably not bother with anything based on .16 or below, because there were some significant changes to the organization / workflow with .17.

A parallel issue is that many tutorials are already based on .19, which is not yet in final release - but which has added a number of very nice features. So you may have to choose between running a stable version that lacks some cool features that are already being discussed, or getting the features but having to run a not-completely-stable version against

Another challenge is that FreeCAD is very much an international project, so tutorials can be in a variety of languages. Conversely, it seems like many FreeCAD tutorials use no speech, just showing a series of steps - I find these to be the hardest to follow.

And yet, despite all of these challenges, there are good tutorials out there, and once you get hold of the basic approach, experimenting, supplemented by Google searches, becomes the best teacher. If you haven't already done so, start with the two basic ways of modelling parts, and branch out from there: Creating a simple part with PartDesign - FreeCAD Documentation, Basic Part Design Tutorial 017 - FreeCAD Documentation, Manual:Traditional modeling, the CSG way - FreeCAD Documentation.

 

[Richard Hed]

Greetings folks. I've used linux to varying degrees since the distribution was on 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. Windows machines are around here too, Mach4, VCarve, GWizard, Fusion 360, and Arturia (music synthesizer stuff) are Windows based. Software development was a component of my professional life on many platforms all the way back to punched cards. Did my time on everything from embedded to mainframes, assembler and C to COBOL

I really like linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. KDE is also a good environment, I just like the older 2.x based Gnome desktops. Thunderbird is the email client in use, nothing against webmail, it's used on vacations and travel, but I like having everything local and backed up. Gnome 3 desktop and the current Windows 10 interface feel focused on touchscreens at some expense to the keyboard/mouse user. That's OK, they aren't "wrong", it's nice that linux supports a variety of desktop environments. It's not that I refuse to use Gnome 3 / Windows 10 style interfaces, it's that I'm not FORCED to do so that I appreciate! Many things said of linux (and other things in life) are based on prior experience that may be very far out of date. People still say you can't do anything in linux without using the command line, or that networking is difficult to get working, all sorts of things that were true 20 years ago without doubt, 10 years ago sometimes, and recently in very few instances. Windows 10 is harder to get playing nicely in a mixed OS network than Linux by far. I still have one Windows 10 machine that can't see drives on linux boxes, while all the other machines (Windows and linux) see the drives just fine and dandy. I lived in a command line world for many years, and seldom feel any need to use the command line. If you DO need the command line, odds are you are following directions to install an application manually, and will copy from the website instructions and paste into the terminal window anyway, it isn't as if you need system programmer level knowledge!

More recently applications for linux have been available in "appimages", which contain the entire support infrastructure and application in a single file. While these are larger files and do take a bit longer to load than the standard binary installation, they do ensure all libraries and such match the original build of the application. CURA has benefited from the appimage world quite a bit, it has had far fewer odd things happening as an appimage than as an installed application here. The overall linux application availability and quality has improved quite a bit over the last few years. While you can find Adobe or Microsoft folks who will find some detail that isn't in the same place or called the same thing, for the vast majority of folks they work very nicely. If you are a die hard Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop user who uses the most advanced features everyday you may not be satisfied with GIMP and DarkTable, most folks find the same features are there, just with a different name or on a different tab. But it will take some effort to move for some folks.

Wine allows SOME windows applications to run without installing a virtual machine instance of Windows, but check before you commit if a specific application is a must for your world. I've never had great success using wine, tried again with several apps and installed Windows 10 in a VirtualBox. Getting Fusion360 to run took some tweaks, and virtualbox has some infuriating limitations (like not being able to use the physical DVD drive as a general i/o device). If you can extract the disk to an ISO file you can mount that file, but not being able to just plop in a disk and shove the drawer closed is irksome in some cases. Then again, many machines don't even come with DVD drives any more.

It's funny, we had a "PC revolution" in the late 70's to free us of the tyranny of the mainframe world where we had no control over our applications or data, not to mention the operators from hell. We then went to a world of fragmentation, where who knows what was installed on or in the machines you were dealing with (not in most classified environments but elsewhere no matter how hard "they" tried to lock it down, some user always found the cute screen saver that would eat files or worse). Now we're back to the world of applications running on remote systems, with most to all of the data residing somewhere besides the end user machine. What was once a terminal is now a web browser. Often on a phone. With more MIPS, memory, and colors than the mainframes we were getting away from. Funny world.

Best to all,
Stan

Ha, I learned on punch cards too. I use GIMP in windows 10 environment and it works just fine for most everything I need. However, I did have one need to darken up some drafting lines on some .jpegs that I could not get to darken to a readable point. Don't know what CURA is and would like to know what DarkTable is. And, yes, all those apps that put your into into the "cloud", I don't use. My kidz do, but then they don't do anything useful either, or important--just play games and chat with their buddies. As for MY stuff--it's going into my hard drives. Every year until two years ago, I was able to buy thumb drives that doubled in size, I got to 256 GB, and they stopped in this country. I asked why this was at Staples, they said essentially there wouldn't be any--then in the Philippines I found out that the rest of the world has indeed kept doubling. so the USA is being restricted on purpose I believe. It's always about $$, power, control. Anyway, each year the terabytes get larger and larger too. Last year is the first year I didn't buy a new upgrade for many years--the reason? I couldn't fill an 8TB hard drive and had no need of a new one. I'll try to buy one this year, particularly if the prices drop significantly. (Often greedy business's will RAISE prices when they need to LOWER them which ultimately causes them to go under.) And I fill my machines with Lang Lang, Beethoven, Bach and so on along with youtube vids of machining processes and foundry processes.

Technology is a wonderful thing if you don't let IT control you or let the corporations tell you how to give them your $$

 

[stanstocker]

Hi Folks, Turns out that Oracle renamed and moved the option to enable CD/DVD drive access in VirtualBox, it wasn't removed. It's buried and multistep in the settings menus, but I just got it working. If anyone cares, the DVD option is no longer called passthrough, it's now "live cd/dvd" and the device has to be added then set up. No doubt there was some good reason, just not at all apparent to me at least... When originally installed nothing turned up on searches referring to the changed names and locations, several folks simply said it was removed. So I said something untrue based on outdated info, just 6 months or so outdated rather than 20 years

Cheers,
Stan

 

[awake]

Thanks for the update. I knew I had used CD/DVD drive access in the past, but wondered if that had been lost. Good to hear it is still available!

 

[74Sprint]

In high school I started with punch cards but, we also had a brand new Commodore PET computer (Commodore BASIC) that no one was allowed to use without direct supervision with the teacher. Anyway AFAIK I'm the only one I have ever met that had to do 16 bit binary UNIX programming using switch settings for my TQ4 RADAR tech training. Took me 1/2 hour entering commands to just get it to print "Hello World, hello Ray". You set the 16 switches on the front and then pushed down on the momentary enter switch. Assembly was advanced programming to me at the time.

Ray

 

[Richard Hed]

In high school I started with punch cards but, we also had a brand new Commodore PET computer (Commodore BASIC) that no one was allowed to use without direct supervision with the teacher. Anyway AFAIK I'm the only one I have ever met that had to do 16 bit binary UNIX programming using switch settings for my TQ4 RADAR tech training. Took me 1/2 hour entering commands to just get it to print "Hello World, hello Ray". You set the 16 switches on the front and then pushed down on the momentary enter switch. Assembly was advanced programming to me at the time.

Ray

I missed that part, but my instructor said he had to do it. I started with punch cards.

 

[Richard Hed]

Trust me Microsoft and other big companies are no better - my 2 year old printer won't work with my pc on Windows 10 but works on my wifes pc with the same operating system - no obvious reason. There is always an example of somebody who got screwed by Linux or Windows. I could list dozens of examples of Windows updates that affected the company I work for, as a small business its hard to keep up when the software is only a supporting piece of your product.

Many times peripheral devices are left unsupported when the big guys decide to move on.

Gordon
As far as in the cloud software and Fusion 360 - I've accepted that I may be held somewhat ransom by them at a point in the future, and I'll protect myself as much as possible by exporting portable formats, as well as saving locally the native format and hoping that some savvy person will in the future figure out a conversion to the next great cheap CAD software when that day comes.

I tend to support the Linux crowd for home use and there are open source software that operate on Windows that can replace many of the current subscriptions (i.e. OpenOffice instead of Microsoft office for word processing and spreadsheets, etc. )

Mike

My advice: Never never NEVER use the cloud. I am also a screenwriter, and there are seveeral programs that insist on saving the script in the cloud. -- forget it. won't happen. It is not only some of the probs that peeps have mentioned above, but also the prob of it being INEVITABLE that someone will crack the passwords to all that stuff. (In fact, I believe, there is room to suspect that this is PLANNED to happen). There goes all your stuff and it's Oh, we're SO sorry. Don't believe it? Look at the banks, goggle, yahoo have all been hackt, military, governments. You Better believe it. It is not safe. Even you home stuff is not safe if you are hookt to the internet in any way. the only way it is safe is when it is UNPLUGGED.

 

[Richard Hed]

I must respectfully disagree. I have been using Linux nearly exclusively for many years now. The Windows machine supplied by my employer mostly just serves as a backup device - only very rarely do I turn to it to use Microsoft Word, and that only when a quirk in converting Word's formatting comes into play in a document that is shared with others.

Otherwise, I do all my work on Linux, and all of it using free and open-source (FOSS) software. Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations - LibreOffice does them all quite well; in fact, there are a number of things that LibreOffice Writer in particular does MUCH better than MS-Word. I do most of the editing of the MS-Office documents used by my organization in LibreOffice; it generally handles the MS-Office documents seamlessly, which is definitely NOT true of the reverse. (As noted above, though, there are some specialized formatting issues that are not handled well in conversion, either by MS-Office or by LibreOffice.)

What else? Desktop publishing - Scribus. Audio and video editing and production - any number of programs, from the command-line ffmpeg to LMMS, Ardour, MuseScore to Handbrake, OpenShot, Kdenlive, and more. Graphics design - Inkscape. Photo-editing - GIMP. C++ programming - Code::Blocks and the gcc suite. Electronics and PCB design - KiCAD. 2d CAD - LibreCAD (the FOSS version of QCad). 3d CAD - FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, Blender. And the list goes on, and on, and on.

It can be argued, and often is, that many (most?) of these FOSS programs are not as capable as the Windows equivalents - and that is often true. Fusion360 has more features than FreeCAD; Illustrator and Photoshop have more features than Inkscape and GIMP; and so on. But here's the thing: I rarely if ever miss those features. So much software available today can do so much more than I will ever make use of - I don't care if my program can only do 90% of what the other program can do, as long as it does the 10% that I actually need and want. And here's the other thing: FreeCAD, Inkscape, GIMP, etc. are completely and absolutely free. Meanwhile, Fusion360 is free only so long as Autodesk chooses to allow it to be free, and Illustrator and Photoshop and the rest are ... let's just say, a long, long way from being free. And some of the FOSS programs remain under continual development, and are rapidly gaining ground - FreeCAD being a particularly good example.

Interestingly, it is not unusual for me to wind up taking care of something for someone else in the office because I can do it on Linux, and they can't do it on Windows. Admittedly, some of that has to do with me being a geek, and some of it has to do with the fact that Windows users tend not to know about the highly capable FOSS software that is available. (Note that most if not all of the FOSS software listed above, though it may have originated on Linux, has for years been programmed using multi-platform toolkits, so it can run on Windows and Mac as well as Linux.) Still, it is interesting that it is so often quicker and easier for me to reformat the video or fix the graphics or tweak the photo using my FOSS software on Linux than it is to 1) figure out some way to get Windows to do it, or 2) afford the commercial program that could do the job on Windows.

Ray's point above is well taken, that "nothing happens or gets created unless there is money to be made." Definitely true ... often. But the many FOSS programs mentioned above point to an alternative, one that "shouldn't exist" - and yet it does. To be sure, many of these FOSS efforts have led to monetization opportunities for some - RedHat and Canonical/Ubuntu, for example. The 3d printing phenomenon is a particularly interesting example - so much of it developed as open-source software AND hardware designs, and even now some of the most successful 3d printer manufacturers (e.g., Prusa) remain fully open-source, and the vast majority of commercial 3d printers run on Marlin - which is still FOSS to its core.

Obviously, I have revealed myself to be a Linux and FOSS advocate, and thus everything I say is automatically suspect. So let me end with a very different example, one that shows both the pluses and minuses of Linux for "ordinary users":

Several years ago, my aging parents were having a very difficult time using / adjusting to their new Windows 8 machine. I was having to do a LOT of troubleshooting, both over-the-phone and in person (which required a 3-hour round trip - very doable, but not necessarily something I wanted or had time to do on a daily basis!).

As an experiment, I set up a dual-boot option with Ubuntu on their machine. Immediately they found it easier to use Ubuntu, and wound up never booting up in Windows again. Things were blissfully trouble free for many, many years ... until, last year, after moving to a different state, the hard disk on their machine began to get flaky. The problem was not particularly amenable to troubleshooting over the phone ... and now they lived far enough away that a day trip to fix the issues was no longer an option ... and the local computer gurus were of no help, because they only handled Windows, not Linux. Sigh ... we had to set them up a new Windows 10 machine, so that they would have local support if needed.

Another point is that when you 100$-2000$ for some program, you very well might have DONATED a few bucks, say 10% of that 100 or 2000$ to the Linux developers. The more they get a donation, the more interesting it is for them. Generally, only about 1/20 people donate to them. If you could even dontate 1% that would help them out immensely. You see, they have to have day jobs to support their naughty habit of programming for free programs. If you want a better CAD in Linux, help support the linux programmers. If you support them and at the same time register your concerns, you are likely to get a goo response. Not with any of the big $$$ greed heads. In Economics, it is well known that if you lower your price a few percent, you will sell more product and actually make more $$. But this doesn't seem to faze the market that is selling product for 2-3000$ when it could sell the same product for 2-300 and STILL be making much much much. There have been Many quality products (Thimk Amiga computers) that went out of business because of overpricing. (Amiga had bad marketing strategy, was cheaper than Apple and a FINE product.) Iomega had a great product but would not support their market with problems--they didn't exactly go out of business, but they had the unfortunate case of technology superceding their stuff.

FOSS generally keeps up with technology, let's YOU decide how much to pay and sits back in their grow room laughing at the greed heads.

 

[Richard Hed]

Or - just to be a FOSS pain in the rear (please note that I said FOSS, free and open source software, not FOS!!) - I can get a free hammer (FOSS), that is mine to keep, AND I can get the free updates that are available on a regular basis - or not, as I choose. When I can do that, why pay $2 / month for a hammer I don't actually own??

Actually, Cogsy, I agree that sometimes the subscription model makes sense - particularly in a larger organization, where it is actually cheaper to pay $2 / month than it is to try to update several hundred / thousand computers when the $20 hammer falls apart. But as Gordon notes, the math works out differently for an individual user, and even more so for a hobby user.

A large organization can easily use the clod but it is wise to daily back up their stuff on their OWN hard drives. The way that works is to have the workers files save to the clod but at the end of the day, an administrator copies the files to their own hard drives. That's what I would do if I were to use the clod.

 

[Chriske]

Long thread, didn't read it all.
I'm a Linux user too. Mint 18.3, stopped using Wintendo after W7.
About Linux , but BaronJ and a few others said all, it's all free. But most important Linux has all software on board, also for free.
The only thing, not running in Linux, I need is Autodesk Inventor. That I do run in a VirtualMachine + W7.