Support Board
Date/Time: Sat, 23 Nov 2024 20:59:49 +0000
Post From: Future planned OS platforms for SC
| [2016-04-04 20:30:36] |
| bjohnson777 (Brett Johnson) - Posts: 284 |
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Ganz is not the end all authority on linux. I, too, have quite a bit of time under my belt. I've been using linux since 1997. I started learning unix in late elementary school back in the mid 1980's. If someone wants to wait until a graphical programming package and related OS is 100% stable and bug free, that person will NEVER, EVER start a project ... on ANY platform. Mac is a NetBSD bastardization. The hardware is closed source and absurdly expensive (Apple typically makes a ~40% profit). While Mac is far more stable than any windoze (because of the BSD core), many people do not like to be at the mercy of Apple marketing executives making hardware and other decisions for them. For the power traders, good luck on building a high performance custom workstation... Oh wait, you can't unless it is 100% Apple because that's a license violation. Good luck on finding the hardware you really want. Where M$ is going with win10 and beyond has flat out pissed off a lot of professionals. Install win10 and M$ pretty much violates all your privacy and owns you. (...not forgetting the excess bloat that's way out of hand with each new version) A lot of that isn't too hard to turn off, but how many people have enough admin experience to do that? And what else is "hiding" that can't be disabled? When I install an operating system, I do it to run applications, not to see how pretty it is eating up all my resources with uselessness to the point where it interferes with those desired applications. Red Hat Enterprise Edition may be an answer for commercial support, but it is not geared towards end users. When choosing a linux, pick the biggest and most popular to start with. That's currently Ubuntu. Canonical has commercial support packages. There are plenty of things I don't like about Ubuntu, but fixing them isn't impossible. (There're also KDE, Xfce, and LXDE flavors available for those who hate the Unity desktop.) Since linux is open source, releasing your own flavor variation isn't very hard. I've been remastering the live CD for years now. That doubles as an installer. That would also get a non-admin level trader running relatively quick on linux. Backups (disaster planning). Years ago I used to recommend Ghost to my win based clients... but M$ has broken it and others due to their licensing paranoia. Reading reviews, sometimes those programs work, sometimes not. I gave up for my end user clients. I'm not sure about mac backups, but linux and BSD are trivial with Clonezilla (free and open source). Thankfully SC is pretty much self contained for everything, so that may not be a huge issue... just zip it out to a network share or thumb drive. As far as getting bugs fixed, if it isn't a major security threat, ALL maintainers of ALL platforms will push it off to "whenever we feel like it". It doesn't matter if you have a paid support contract or not. They have things they're working on just like the SC dev's have things they're working on. It's nothing personal, it's just scheduling and the time available. If the SC dev's choose their programming language GUI platform carefully, they can knock off win, mac, linux, and BSD at the same time with one language. Will it be sunshine and lollipops? No, of course not. Will it be more work that just the win platform? Yes. Will it expand the potential user base and offer something that NO OTHER charting package currently offers? Definitely. Will it bring in heavy power traders looking for performance (and privacy) that cannot be offered by win and mac? Very likely. Will it make the other charting packages nervous? Very likely. >:-] As far as graphics drivers, that's a bit of a red herring. SC isn't a video game and won't even come close to using all the features of an over priced graphics card. (That's also true for M$ and Mac.) Commercial Nvidia and AMD/Radeon drivers will work just fine for most people. Default open source drivers will probably work just fine for most people. If someone wants to use a different card (or multiple cards in a non-standard configuration), SO WHAT? If they can get it working, good for them. The SC dev's will have their usual preferred hardware listing on the web site. Nothing will change in that matter. If someone has a really convoluted setup, the SC devs will push that person to a support package with the proper entity. Once again, nothing will change in that matter. I personally have been using the commerical Nvidia GeForce drivers on my main workstation for several years without problems. I've also been using the open source Radeon drivers on my laptop for around 5 years without problems. As far as calling something a “multilayer buggy environment”, start with M$. ALL of my linux installs have easily outperformed ANYTHING M$ has thrown out to the public in terms of long term stability. I started calling Microsoft “M$” because they charged a lot for a platform they claimed worked just fine... but reality was something quite different. If M$ put half as much time and money into their engineering departments as they do with sales&marketing, maybe win wouldn't be so bad... But blame M$ for pushing me to a linux server and desktop environment early on just because I got way to frustrated having to fix the same damn thing over and over and over and over and over... |