bgalakazam wrote:
Being in my twenties, I lament not having lived in the 80s and early 90s to use the SGIs and other related products. I often re-read old threads here and look at photos online with nostalgia. Currently, I have several problems with today's market.
1. I don't like the OS choice. Currently the market is pretty much Windows, OS X (wintel still) and GNU/Linux. I have a particular hate for GNU/Linux and try to avoid it outside of my work. I have never owned an Apple product and after they went to wintel, I pledged never to buy one ever. To this day my wife and I have had or used 0 iCrap products. I personally like to use FreeBSD, but the lack of software support for some major applications leave it out of the market. It took GNU/Linux 20 years to start being recognized in key consumer areas (like the gaming industry and media/design). Currently the market is set: Windows - OS X - GNU/Linux. Anything else is considered hobbyist and is very limited in a professional environment software-wise.
2. The architecture. x86 (with 64bit extension) is just overwhelming. Indeed, ARM is making progress, but it's still not enough to be an alternative. All the other RISC (basically POWER and SPARC) are used in mid to enterprise level and dropped the workstation line somewhere between 2006-2009. This is far worse than the OS problem. There really
isn't
an alternative here and we can only hope AMD doesn't go bankrupt as then wintel will be a full monopolist.
you're perfectly right, right now it totally sucks
i'm 101% with you and it saddens me to see how things developed in recent years. variety is crucial for proper evolution and so are different sections. the desktop landscape today completely lacks both which leads to "one for all". needless to say that this is very bad in many ways.
i'm afraid i have no solution right now. i was thinking about the very same many times but i guess all we can do is just wait and hope it gets better again. in the meantime your idea of getting a terzo and hope for better times is probably as good as it gets under these circumstances. also stocking up the "good stuff" as long as you can still get it doesn't hurt for sure.
and keep in mind that the former top-notch products always lacked some amount of common stuff even in their prime so having an x86 standing by for "the rest" is the classic package.