That's a good thread.

I only take exception to Robertie's comments about Gnu BG. Robertie is a far superior bg player to what I am, and I think anything he writes on bg is terrific. I learned mostly from his 'advanced' books on my way from 1600 up to 1800.

But to call Gnu BG buggy and say that Snowie is far superior is just way, way, off the mark.

I've seen so many threads about bugs in Snowie that the programmers seem to take forever to fix. I have both programs. Snowie crashes a lot more on my old Windows 98 system then Gnu Bg does.

In fairness, Gnu USED to be quite buggy. But like many open source programs with solid developers behind it, that has changed. Since I upgraded about a year ago I can't recall a single crash or bug on my system. It uses GTK so you need to get that installed properly and working correctly for Gnu to work without bugs. Once I got the kinks in GTK worked out for my system then Gnu BG has been virtually flawless.

I also don't own the latest Snowie, so it may also be far less buggy then it used to be. But I didn't buy the upgrades since I heard of horror stories of speed with the newer versions.

If you can't stand unix style multiple window interfaces then you won't be as comfortable with Gnu, and Snowie would be better. If you can't stand learning things from communities on the internet, then Snowie is also better as it has decent documentation.

However, if you can think for yourself and learn new things then Gnu is worth a try. I think it is superior to Snowie, but each has their fans.

I heard that Snowie's latest version was re-implementing checker play according to match score. Not sure why it was ever removed as that ability seems important to me and Gnu has always had it.

I think Snowie appears more polished then Gnu, but in reality they are just different, not better or worse.