Are you forced to buy windows in order to solve certain tasks on the internet e.g. like certain banktasks and to update garmin gps maps and other

[Robert Heller]

At Thu, 31 Jul 2014 18:19:02 +0100 dave at thefletchers.net,         "Ubuntu user technical support,  not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> On Thu, 2014-07-31 at 16:16 +0000, user1 wrote:
> > What you really say here is that you ARE forced to buy windows? whatever 
> > way you obtain -or use windows
> 
> Nobody is forcing me to use windows. When I eventually figured out how
> to get the Brother updater to work, there was no update available
> anyway.
> 
> It is bloody annoying though when companies do this - publish printer
> drivers for Linux then have some other function only work with windows.
> It is completely unnecessary too. For instance the firmware update for
> my Cisco/Linksys router works through the administration web interface,
> so it doesn't give a damn what OS I'm using. There's probably no reason
> Brother could not do this.
> 
> The other bad example that comes to mind is the Toshiba net book I
> bought a couple of years back. It's a lovely little computer but AFAICT
> the damn thing can't be BIOS updated without having a copy of bloody
> windows installed. There's absolutely no excuse for this crap - this
> desktop computer I'm using now is years older then the net book yet all
> I needed to do was plug in a memory stick with the BIOS update file
> copied onto it, boot into the BIOS settings, press a button and it did
> everything for itself. That's the way it should work on all computers.
> 
> What I tried a few years ago, was ask one of the mailing lists if maybe
> anybody interested could contact Meade, saying they would really like to
> buy a telescope but were prevented from doing so by dependence on
> windows. I got no response.
> 
> Even if manufacturers do want to have their own software to do updates,
> there's no reason they can't use a cross platform GUI tool kit to write
> it, and just supply it at very little cost to themselves for windows,
> Mac, Linux, and anything else that happens to be around. Is wxWidgets
> still around? I heard that's what Audacity for example is written in,
> and that's got to be way more complex than a firmware update program.

I write cross-platform GUIs in Tcl/Tk.  And cross-build the mess-windows 
shared libraries (.DLLs) on my Linux machine.  (The shared libraries contain 
the C/C++ code needed.)

> 
> Dave
> 
> 

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