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[sei]

But there's nothing wrong with the idea of using Linux as a desktop OS...
fglrx (the proprietary ATI video driver) still appears to suck.  I'm getting a lot of tearing with any kind of OpenGL stuff.

[Thad]

Linux is still deficient as a general-purpose OS for end users in some ways

[Bal]

I've found an interesting use for Ubuntu lately that I wouldn't have guessed at a couple of years ago. It is very good for your parents. The interface is simple, Firefox is the default browser, you've got access to Open Office, and other similar programs and packages. Best of all, no malware or viruses to worry about. A couple hours of setup and they have a good end user interface with far fewer traps for your mom to get stuck in while traversing the internet.

[Joxam]

I used the KDE Ubuntu as my main operating system a few years back, for about a year. Even went so far as to actually get WoW running in it. I just didn't like the grind, man. I hated always needing to find out how to make my x compatible with my y and having to check and double check every hardware purchase I made on the off chance that it wouldn't work or that I'd be stuck figuring out why it didn't work for like five hours.

That being said, I really like the look and feel of it. I loved what you COULD do in it. I also really loved how foreign it was to anyone who was a casual Windows user. In the entire year I used it, I never password protected my computer and my brother was the only person I even so much as thought could figure it out in my immediate family.

[TA]

Apple has decided to patent "Being evil fucks", with a method to lock up your computer at the hardware level until you watch an ad.  Using an Apple laptop for car navigation?  Hope you can pull over and watch an ad for Transformers 4 so you don't miss your turn!  Presentation at work?  Haha, we can put that on hold, can't we?

What the application calls the “enforcement routine” entails administering periodic tests, like displaying on top of an ad a pop-up box with a response button that must be pressed within five seconds before disappearing to confirm that the user is paying attention.

These tests “can be made progressively more aggressive if the user has failed a previous test,” the application says. One option makes the response box smaller and smaller, requiring more concentration to find and banish. Or the system can require that the user press varying keyboard combinations, the current date, or the name of the advertiser upon command, again demonstrating “the presence of an attentive user.”

[Kazz]

http://kazz.rooms.cwal.net/honpodscast.mp3

[Cyan Prime]

http://kazz.rooms.cwal.net/honpodscast.mp3

We need to do something about these spambots.

[Frocto]

heh

[Brentai]

Whatever they're making you take these days Cyan, please keep taking it.

[Frocto]

yeah, his pokemon snap thing was fucking funny, too

[Büge]

spambots want money

this is a cry for help

[Frocto]

Oh, is it just a thing of Kazz asking for money? I didn't click it

[Mongrel]

Maybe Kazz's WFE account has been hacked by the same forces behind steampoweredweekend.tk

[Joxam]

And then they impersonated Kazz and Geo, made podcast, hosted it on his web space and posted it here.

[Büge]

The fiends!

[Cyan Prime]

Sweet, Linux Mint 8 “Helena” released!

[Thad]

...I think you're still not quite grasping the purpose of this thread.

[sei]

Is this for complaining about Windows and Windows alternatives, not shilling for our pet distro?

[MadMAxJr]

I'm running Vista Business, 32-bit. (Was free in college, XP install was dying. Wanted to try something new at the time.)

So I got this great idea that I'd try Windows 7, since we're shifting to it at work early next year, I figured I'd get familiar with it now.  Well, I just dropped in a new 1.5TB hard drive, I figure I'll make a 100gb partition and stick Win7 Professional 64-bit on that.  Numerous articles said it'll modify the boot so I can dual boot Win7/Vista.  Everything says this is dirt simple.  I stick in the Win7 DVD I got cheap for having a .edu email address and watch the amazingly painless install process.

Reboot.

Wait.  Wait a minute.  Where is my dual boot?  Lifehacker said there would be a dual boot.  WHERE IS MY VISTA?

 

2 hours later, digging through boxes I haven't unpacked in 2 years, I find my Vista disc.  Pop it in, boot from it, run the repair procedure.....  Now I have dual boot.

Now I had backed up my important stuff first.  Financial files, key software installers, photo album.  I was just hoping this would be easier than doing a total rebuild.

Now I apparently need a new soundcard.  The Creative X-Fi I bought off woot is not an actual Creative product, but a HP surplus soundcard with a minimial Vista Business 32/64 bit audio driver.  Win 7 will /use/ that driver, but it fills every sound with static, pops, and worse.  I've discovered there's a fellow who has been writing drivers to cover up the holes in Creative card support and I'm hoping to try one of his releases to see if it'll work for me.  Otherwise I'm going to need to hunt down a new card.

If I didn't want to play games so much, I'd just give up and live off my EeePc with Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

[Thad]

Assume you hacked the boot.ini and all that other stuff first, right?  I attempted an XP dual-boot when I got on the 7 beta, but it didn't work; XP boot got hosed.  Never went to the trouble of fixing it.  I spend very little time in Windows on this machine (though that may change if I get a couple games for Christmas).

I've got 7/64 running on my media center PC.  I've damned and praised it elsewhere.  On the whole Ubuntu handles privilege escalation much more painlessly, and also was much easier to set my Wii remotes up in.  (Windows's built-in Bluetooth stack blows, BlueSoleil costs $30 and still didn't consistently listen for my remotes at boot, and GlovePIE, while a very neat program, is buggy, won't close properly when I try to shut down, and isn't exactly sophisticated programming; I'm considering whipping up my own Java code for WiiUseJ.)  However, running a Wii remote in XBMC under Ubuntu/64 doesn't work that damn well; you push a direction and it's like roulette guessing at where the cursor will land.  I'm sure it's something about the polling delay being based in a 32-bit number which I could probably fix trivially in source, but I can't get it to compile from source because it's a bitch to compile anything 32-bit on 64-bit Ubuntu.

I've got Windows 7/32 on the spare computer in my back room, and it's quite zippy on a P4 with 1GB RAM and an old Matrox video card, even with Aero shit turned on.  That said, it runs about the same speed as Xubuntu did on the same computer with 256MB RAM.  (The only reason I switched was that, while Comic Collector Pro runs under WINE, it throws up a whole lot of very annoying error messages.  That's mainly what I use that computer for, is comic inventory, as it's in the room with my comics.)

On my main desktop...KDE 4 is finally fully-featured enough to work as my main window environment (though the taskbar is completely fucking atrocious and violates every usability guideline in the book; it doesn't even have simple drag-and-drop functionality -- I guess it's fine if you like it exactly the way it comes by default, but if you want to change it in any way it's going to be a huge, time-consuming pain in the ass.  But at least it's actually doable now.), but it never seemed quite as fast as 3 did to me.  After some mysterious lockups I switched back to 3, but I can't confirm that 4 was what caused the lockups.  (I thought for sure it was causing the shit a few weeks ago where my mouse click would register in a completely different window than the one I was in, which pretty much made me throw up my hands and quit using my main computer for about a week, but it turns out that was X itself.  It's fixed now.)