If you define a metric, it's easy to say "Foo is better than bar".

Yes. But you have to be careful that you are actually comparing on the metric, and not on your interpretation of the metric, or on the metric but influenced by some hidden factor (ie Mindcraft or whoever they were benchmarks)

Back to the point of the metric, the page was designed to say "This program, if you use X on Windows, will do it on Linux." And the short answer is that it won't. You will find that it does some things better (might be more stable, might have more functions), but it does some things worse. Or everything differently.

We have no idea what they want to use it for on Windows though. For you to make the statement on the wiki, along the lines of 'All this linux sofware is at a basic equivalence level with its Windows partner' is completely missing the point, that you actually have no idea what people want to do with it or not. Moreover, the statement as it stands is highly likely to put anyone off using the alternatives - they are only a basic equivalent after all.[1] One example here. Gnumeric is a very polished replacement for Excel. It supports all the Excel spreadsheet functions, and a whole lot more. It doesn't have VBA, but I'm to understand that it supports perl/python/tcl scripting instead. It has a graph builder, advanced mathematical support, solver support, etc etc, and can even read / write Excel95/97/2k etc files. This is completely irrelevant if the user wants to build a basic spreadsheet with a few SUM and AVERAGE functions thrown in, and some formatting. Its completely irrelevant if the user is actually, due to its nice column layout structure, using it to generate a template for school reports. I have no idea what the user wants to use it for, and therefore I can only suggest that it might do the job. Likewise: VS is perhaps the de facto IDE under windows. Thats nice. It's entirely possible you'd be able to code just as well, if not better, under vim, or emacs, or joe, with another xterm open and use of make / gdb and cvs. It is perhaps worth noting that joe isn't as feature-full as VS (in fact, its just a text editor), but that is rather different from implying that there is no way to do the things you do in VS, under linux.

If your concern is "Linux Acts Just Like Windows Does" then Windows scores 100% and Linux scores in the lower half of the spectrum. That was the point I was trying to make. Linux's goal isn't to OSS Windows (interestingly,

If you meant this, you said it very badly. As what you had said sounded more like "Nothing under Linux does as good a job as the Windows version", which is a very broad reaching statement, and I might add, highly subjective based on your view of what people actually want to do with a program under Windows or Linux. It *is* fair to say that there are differences in the program, and that while Openoffice.Org Writer or Abiword might, at first blush, be an adequate replacement for MS Word, but lack some features that *some* people *might* want, but that wasn't what you were saying. While we're on the discussion of that wiki page, it was asking for what people use instead of a program under Windows. I dont use Windows. So instead of using MS Word, I use Abiword. It doesn't matter at all if its feature-equivalent to the MS Word. It's WHAT I USE UNDER LINUX. Likewise, I use gvim/gcc/make/cvs/gdb under Linux for development. It's *my* IDE. Highly subjective, of course, but the page was asking for individual responses.

there is a project that aims to do this, and they almost have NT4's cmd.exe down pat). It will keep evolving whichever way it does. Linux doesn't have the commercial app support (and it may never, and it may never matter). You can't do everything you can do in Windows on it. But the price of freedom

I dont see that 'you can't do everything you can do in Windows on it' is true. I *can* do everything that *I* do in Windows under linux. You can propose that 'Joe Windows User' would say otherwise if you like, but until we actually have a good, objective, understanding of what 'Joe Windows User' actually does with his computer, then its all speculation, and as I pointed out before, highly subjective and based on our own view. As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing stopping people using linux as a desktop fulltime. You disagree. Who of us is right? Daniel (From his linux desktop, on which he does all his work, and all the stuff he would want to do in Windows) [1] IF you want to do real comparisons, then do a feature matrix. And do full comparisons, so list things that both equivalents do, or perhaps grade them if you think one is better. Phil's comparison of The Gimp to Photoshop is a good candidate here, as would a comparison bettween MS Office and Abiword, Gnumeric, Oo.O, Kword, etc etc.