Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Constructivne Comment request

[MJ Ray]

Stephen Mount <address@hidden> wrote: [...]
> I'm a web designer and I use Mac because Linux doesn't have the  
> correct software and Windows is not stable enough to do what I want to  
> do, as well as Mac seems to have the best text anti-aliasing, doesn't  
> surprise me all the magazine companies designers use Mac, and the  
> results are excellent usually.

I'm a web developer and I use GNU/Linux because neither Mac nor
Windows can do all the tasks I need it to do, which has included
hacking drivers to make strange hardware work from web applications,
as well as more usual graphics editing, programming, publishing and
what have you.

So, I disagree with the above statement almost completely, with
the exception that I agree that Windows is not stable enough.  Also,
free software tends to give enough information to enable bugfixing
without help/permission from the software barons, which Mac usually
doesn't and Windows almost always doesn't.  Our one Mac-based client
has been painful, with months-old serious bugs which haven't been
fixed (for example, we can't log in to their terminals when we're
on-site - the users are created, but don't allow us to log in), even
with Mac-specific local tech support available.

Text anti-aliasing is a "fun" problem, which involves software patents
if I remember correctly, so it's not really the GNU/Linux software
developers' fault.

Two other things: instead of virtualising Windows, ies4linux is a step
nearer freedom;  GNUstep is a bit more MacOSX-like than Ubuntu's
default user interface but I'm not sure whether it's all in Ubuntu and
of course some apps (IceCat, GIMP...) will still have their own user
interface styles.

I probably won't comment on the original blog post because it uses
reCAPTCHA, which would mean changing browser security settings,
passing either an eyetest (my eyesight is imperfect) or a hearing test
(my hearing is imperfect) and so on, which is just a pain.  So, that
site is not really inviting comments.

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237