Just today I read a review of the Elecraft Maestro. It pointed to the problems with Windows drivers leading to terrible latencies. Many posts on eham.net speak to problems of Windows updates disrupting operation of hamshacks until the operator has hours to spend sorting things out. I think it is time that the ham community advocate for software to be written to run on Linux natively. I've played with Wine to run Windows software on Linux with sometimes unacceptable results and Wine is just one more unnecessary "moving part" in the setup. Keeping it simple doesn't involve Wine. To the end of finding out how hard it might be to port software to Linux, I posted the question on Quora. The answer was that if software is, at the outset, designed to run on both Windows and Linux it is doable while porting existing Windows apps is very difficult.
I'm thinking that the ARRL could improve this situation by advocating that app developers write their software to be run on both operating systems? |
