Brontoforumus Archive
Discussion Boards => Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death => Topic started by: Thad on March 05, 2008, 10:39:31 PM
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The most disorienting thing about moving on up to 64 bits is that I now find myself in a Bizarro World where hardware installation is quick and painless on Linux and absolutely agonizing under Windows.
My latest attempt at trying to get a decent Windows boot going has gone fairly decently, but every time I log in I am greeted by a rather annoying message saying my printer driver failed to install. Near as I can tell, HP's beta 64-bit driver installer crashes the spool service, which the driver requires to install correctly. Incidentally, Catch-22 is one of my favorite books.
Oddly, the LAST time I set Windows up (just a few days ago), the HP driver installation went just fine, but nothing much ELSE worked.
Screw printing anyway, I guess; there's only one reason I installed Windows, and you can probably guess what it is.
Oh, but this may be my favorite part:
(http://www.corporate-sellout.com/img/notusb.png)
Well, at least it has the "it's a beta" excuse. I remember, some years back, installing an IE update or somesuch and noticing that the throbber on the progress window was an animation of the Earth rotating WEST.
Course, on the other hand, that's less potentially harmful to the user than showing them a picture of the wrong kind of slot to plug a device into.
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With the help of a hardcore Linux nerd friend, I have Kubuntu up and running on a computer built half from parts of previous computers that are now out of date, and half spare parts from my father.
It's weird, to say the least. It looks completely overwhelming. The friend gave me the advice that I need to stop thinking like I've been trained to do on Windows, and just not be afraid to crack open the help file. Eventually it'll click.
Ironically, the Kubuntu box, for now, will be on a hard drive that has a tiny partition on it for Win95. The short version of why I'm doing THAT is I found an old CD backup I made with Norton Ghost, and the newer versions of it don't support what that old version did. So I have an old version of ghost, just need to find an old working copy of 95, install it, install ghost, restore the "Hard drive" (5gb partition), scavenge anything useful, then I'm going to wipe the whole thing and dedicate all 250gb to Linux (Thanks Donut)
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My Cpu is capable of running the 64 bit edition.
It doesn't for a number of reasons
A: Kinda hard to actually FIND the goddamn thing legally due to Vista being the new cool kid on the block (sure, vista looks cool and all, but is honestly just a massively expensive windows XP reskin that eats RAM like it was candy)
B: MASSIVE DRIVER ISSUES
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B: MASSIVE DRIVER ISSUES
That's my biggest barrier. Drivers are a pain in my ass when they're readily available, let alone trying to make a 64 bit OS function. Actually, same goes for Vista in general. I'll be staying with XP/Ubuntu for awhile I think.
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I have a 64-bit machine but I am running 32-bit lunix on it (some Ubuntu variant or other) for the time being, because the last time I tried to use the 64-bit version, certain binary-only applications (Flash, mainly) worked poorly or not at all, and I did not have the time to muck about with making them better. Someday, though!
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Lyrai: I came to Kubuntu after using Slackware and Gentoo for a few years, so approaching it from that angle is entirely different -- it's SO quick and painless; it works SO well right out of the box. It's got a little ways to go before it becomes viable for the average user, but I think it's getting close. And if Vista is any indication, it's got a lot better momentum than MS does at this point.
GNOME is a lot simpler and prettier than KDE, but doesn't have nearly the functionality. And if you want to talk about a paradigm shift, it does things WAY differently than everybody else. I'm not a fan.
(KDE4 is horrible at this point, but hopefully by the time Kubuntu ships with it its issues will be fixed. It seems to me that KDE versioning is one step ahead of where it should be -- the beta was actually an alpha, and 4.0 is actually a beta.)
Bongo: Flash is definitely the single biggest pain in my ass about using 64-bit Kubuntu. It frequently locks up my browser, and occasionally X itself. I've found that Flashblock (http://flashblock.mozdev.org/) eliminates most of the trouble; it rarely locks up when I'm only viewing one instance of Flash at a time.
On another topic, the EC's smackdown of MS seems to be leading to some positive developments in the Windows world: more openness to API's, and a standards-compliant IE8.
Of course, the more cynical interpretation of these things is that MS is just going to switch gears to patent enforcement to keep its monopoly.
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After accidentally fucking up an attempt at dual-boot partitioning that wiped out both my C: drive AND my other hard drive, I kinda got shoved right onto the open source path, and I've been running Ubuntu gutsy.
I love it. 9 times out of ten, stuff just WORKS. Sound, monitor, word processing, converting to pdf, text, movie files, whatever. It took a week of noodling around to get flash to work on my computer, and the GIMP is an okay-but-no-where near substitute for Photoshop, but I love everything else. I swear, if desktop linux was this easy to use 5 years ago, I wouldn't have sworn off it it for so long.
I have an old motherboard, and relatively small space (boot drive is 20 gigs, same for my other HD), and for the most part, stuff is really fast. With th exception of "Passage", pretty much anything not specifically made for linux runs pretty well in a windows emulator.
I had no choice but to use Vista at my rmost-recent job, and the only good thing about it (for me) were the ability to treat thumb drives as extra gigs of RAM, and the fact that the windows explorer shell could theorhetically refresh itself instead of crashing and taking the whole system down with it-- which one day made the difference between "15 minutes of gummed-up performance" and "oh, great, I lost an hour's worth of work".
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9 times out of ten, stuff just WORKS.
This is the same story for me and why Ubuntu is quickly becoming my OS of choice. At work and at home I run dual monitors, and I was originally using CentOS on my work PC which turned out to be a terrible decision for a lot of reasons. The reason that made me switch is because of an almost total lack of dual head support, and Ubuntu more or less had it right out of the box without any need to tinker with my X configuration which always ends in tears.
I have considered moving up to Vista from XP since I do a lot of 3D design stuff in my spare time, but I've heard really mixed feelings on just about ever aspect of it that I think it might need a little longer in the oven before I make the leap.
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Ubuntu is all kinds of amazing, but my latest installation wasn't as easy as usual, since apparently GRUB didn't like my harddrive configuration and I was left with no choice but to use a boot disk all the time. I will eventually fiddle with that when I have the time to spare to break it and install it again (with happened the last time I messed up with grub configuration).
As for 64-bit windows, I decided to try out XP x64 on my new machine, and yeah, I guess it's 64 bit or something and that's cute, but once the novelty worn out I was just fine using 32 bits and now I'm left with some programs that won't even run for some reason (32 bit programs at that).
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that eats RAM like it was candy
Haven't had my quarterly Linux try-out yet this year, but popping in to say that this comment is really, really dumb.
It doesn't matter how much RAM is being used for caching and the like, or even completely superfluous OS graphics, as long as whatever's using it is good and quick about giving it back when you actually need it for something. Your unfull RAM's just sitting there taking up electricity anyway, it may as well be holding parts of programs to speed up launch times or something.
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It doesn't matter how much RAM is being used for caching and the like, or even completely superfluous OS graphics, as long as whatever's using it is good and quick about giving it back when you actually need it for something.
But is it?
I mean, I really don't know; I've only been within 10 feet of Vista a few times and haven't had the opportunity or desire to play with it. But consensus among the various reviews I've read is that it's way more resource-hungry than it needs to be.
But you make a fair point -- OSX uses all kinds of fancy OpenGL GUI shit (some of it useful, like Expose, some of it stupid, like that "genie" minimize animation and those annoying damn bouncing launch icons) and doesn't seem to suffer a performance hit for it.
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Just for basic reference, I've got about a gig taken up now with every single bell and whistle turned on and a dozen or so programs open, including a heavily-calendared Outlook '07 with two 1000+ piece inboxes open that's taking up about 150 MB and 100 MB worth of tabs in Opera, which doesn't sound all that unreasonable to me for total memory usage.
The only thing I've run that's needed the OS to free up memory is Hellgate: London, which has its own share of loading and unloading performance problems, so I really have no way of judging Vista's handling. If I could take out a gig of RAM to check, I'd be tempted to, but running on one stick of dual-channel is... bad.
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As for 64-bit windows, I decided to try out XP x64 on my new machine, and yeah, I guess it's 64 bit or something and that's cute, but once the novelty worn out I was just fine using 32 bits and now I'm left with some programs that won't even run for some reason (32 bit programs at that).
So are there any advantages to using a 64 bit OS?
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Yes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem)
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Maybe. (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000994.html)
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I suppose the only real advantage I can gather from Bongo's last link is the memory thing. So if you need more than 2GB of RAM for some reason you can go for that. I have only 2GB so that's not a plus for me, and I'm using 64 bit XP, which means none of that stupid aero bullshit of vista. So basically, none that I've seen so far. I guess TF2 runs on 64 bits, but I have no idea how that improves the thing. And you cannot run 16bit programs if you need to do that for some crazy reason. I have no 32bit OS installed on this machine so I can't really do any side by side comparisons, but as it stands I guess drivers were a bit of a pain but they are working just fine now and I'd only get vista if I need DX10 sometime in the future, but then again there's always 32 bit vista.
Oh hey, I guess I got 64 bit 7zip which seems to unzip just as fast as the 32 bit one, maybe I should zip like 1 Gig of stuff with each one and see how they compare?
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I have 64 bit Vista, and it runs peachy. I had a problem with Lightroom at first, but that's more because Abode doesn't feel like supporting Vista yet than an actual problem with Vista. I do have 4gigs of ram, which is nice. Although, to be fair, I'm niche. I use it both for high end gaming and for editing high resolution photos and art.
A lot of people told me I didn't really need the 4gigs, but when building previous computers I was told I wouldn't need 512mb or 1gig or 2gigs so they can stuff it.
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I don't think I've ever used more than half of my 4 gigs, but I still feel better for having it.
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Updated to the new beta version of Kubuntu, because I heard they'd made some strides toward making KDE4 usable.
They have, but it still isn't.
I hate it, for a lot of reasons, most of which boil down to basic UI failures that I can't easily fix. (The active window's titlebar should not be gray; I should not have to change to a completely different, equally ugly theme to change this; I would like to be able to sort my programs by their names instead of their descriptions as I expect Firefox to be under "F", not "W".) In a nutshell, I use KDE not only because I really like the interface, but because the things that I DON'T like are easy to fix; KDE4 has an unpleasantly police-state simplicity where the only things I can do to customize my panel are change its position and its size. Not to put too fine a point on it, if I wanted a UI that I couldn't customize, I WOULD BE USING GNOME, NOT KDE, YOU DUMB BASTARDS.
Fortunately, Kubuntu's still shipping with KDE3 as its default. That should do just fine until KDE4 gets up to speed.
There are a lot of things to like about the KDE4 design, like the less-cluttered Launch menu, but it's just not worth all the annoyances.
Oh, and the instability, too. Firefox kept crashing. Though that may be because it's a beta; I'll have to work with it for awhile in KDE3 before I'm sure.
EDIT: Most annoying thing about KDE3 at this point is that the update screwed up the volume keys on my keyboard. It took me over an hour to realize that there's nothing wrong with the keyboard settings, so it must be something wrong with KMix. (xev correctly returns XF86AudioRaiseVolume and XF86AudioLowerVolume, so X is receiving them correctly, and, weirder still, KMix sees the OTHER media keys, like XF86WWW and even XF86AudioMute, it just doesn't see the two buttons that it should be seeing as the fucking audio controller for some reason.) I remember having a bit of trouble with this when I first set Kubuntu up, but I don't have any bookmarks suggesting how I fixed it.
Pity; other than that Kubuntu's been great about recognizing hardware out of the box. (Oh, also I'm still trying to get the two extra buttons on my new mouse working. But I'm not trying very hard, as I don't need the damn things anyway. I have them set to each sword in The Witcher under Windows, and that's handy, but 3 are plenty for most of my day-to-day stuff.)
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Computerworld (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9076698): Gartner analysts warn of Windows "collapsing".
A little farfetched. Yes, Vista adoption is FAR below any previous MS OS (let's ignore ME; everyone else did), but it's still got a bigger share than OSX.
Many of Gartner's suggestions -- cut out the bloat, give the users a significant enough set of improvements to actually justify the upgrade -- are good, albeit BLISTERINGLY OBVIOUS. The suggestion that Windows be made more modular is good in theory, but in practice that's what gave MS the bright idea to release 78 different versions of Vista.
The overall message is more that the focus of the industry is shifting from monolithic OS's on high-end hardware to Web-based apps and portable devices. But I'd say that's more of a problem for Dell and HP than it is for MS. Then again, you can still buy a low-end Dell or HP machine running XP.
The landscape's changing, but it's changing slowly. I don't think MS will be on top forever, but I think they'll be on top for a long time to come -- I'm as harsh a critic of Windows as you'll find, but let's be realistic here.
Also, can anyone tell me how the next version of Windows counts as Windows 7? Because by my count, either numbering by the DOS series (95=4, 98=5, politely ignore ME again, XP=6) or NT series (2000=5, XP/2003=6), Vista is ALREADY the seventh version.
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You can probably politely ignore Vista too, I suppose.
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I guess that Vista would be 6.1.
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Which I guess is exactly the problem.
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CNet: Mac OS X seller (not Apple) disappears after reports (http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9918069-37.html).
This brings up the longstanding debate about whether Apple should make its OS available on generic hardware. There are a lot of variables to consider; ten years ago, before Jobs brought it back from the brink, it seemed like a great idea, but now I'm thinking Apple's better off sticking to its own hardware.
Now, on the one hand, IBM floundered after opening its hardware, but on the other, Microsoft flourished. Since Apple is both the hardware AND OS vendor, it's hard to say for sure where this would go.
HOWEVER. Anyone who's ever used Motorola's short-lived line of Mac clones from the mid-1990's can testify that they were utter shit. Trying to run OSX on crappy hardware is bound to degrade its reputation, and that dilemma gets worse if you start to think about driver support for generic hardware. One of the biggest strengths of OSX is that it just works; it just works because it's designed to run on very few possible hardware configurations. Contrast with, say, any Windows version prior to 98 or after 32-bit XP, or 1990's-era Linux; hardware support can be a real bastard, and it's not a fight Apple should get into unprepared.
So okay. On the "Should Apple support foreign hardware?" issue, I'm in the "no" court. But on the "Should savvy hackers be allowed to put OSX on foreign hardware" issue, well, you may notice a trend in which side I typically fall on in corporation-versus-consumer rights debates. The way I see it, once you buy something, it's yours and you can do whatever you want with it; if it voids the warranty, that's your choice.
BUT. What we're looking at here isn't just an individual installing a purchased-but-modded copy of OSX on purchased hardware, it's a company buying OSX, modding it, installing it on foreign hardware, and then reselling it. So we're well into gray-area territory here; it's a pretty clear breach of the license, and the law's clearly on Apple's side, but of course it's still possible to debate the ethics of the issue and whether the law is just.
My guess is that the way this goes down is Psystar stops selling machines with OSX preinstalled, but continues to sell hardware advertising that it is capable of running a modded OSX. This is liable to rile Apple, and actually including instructions on how to install OSX on the hardware is probably illegal under the DMCA, but simply acknowleding such a possibility exists should be nice and legal. Linking to instructions on an external site might even be all right, and failing that, suggesting a Google search that will turn up useful results has to be allowable.
Of course, simply creating the barrier for entry that a user has to patch and then install the OS may be enough to keep Apple from caring. That takes the market for the product from a niche of a niche (people who want generic Macs) to a niche of that niche of a niche (sufficiently skilled hackers who want generic Macs and are capable of patching the OS installer themselves). I don't recall hearing about Apple going after the OSx86 project (though it could be that they have and have simply been unsuccessful); I think the key issue here is simply the license breach by a company reselling the product rather than an individual.
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Another note on Vista vs. XP (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080413.wgtMSFTXP0414/BNStory/Technology/home)
Yeah... Good luck with that.
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The pragmatist in me thinks MS should definitely continue to support XP at least through the release of Windows 7.
The asshole in me thinks that anyone who's shocked that Microsoft wants more money from them after 7 years deserves what they get.
I AM interested in seeing how this plays out. My guess is it will play out the same way it has for the last decade -- people will hold onto their existing OS until their computers die, and then buy new ones that ship with the new OS.
The difference is that computers are taking longer to die. But hard drives are still as fragile as ever.
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More on the Psystar Mac clone story from AppleInsider (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/04/15/mac_clone_maker_vows_to_test_apple_on_os_x_licensing_terms.html):
Psystar Corporation, which this week began selling a series of Mac clone systems without Apple's blessing, is determined to challenge the Mac maker in court over the licensing terms for its Mac OS X operating system.
Speaking to InformationWeek, a Psystar employee identified only as Robert said his company sees Apple's end-user license agreement, which prohibits third-party installations of Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, as a violation of antitrust laws.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out, but it's hard to use the "monopoly" argument on somebody with 5% of the market. And thus far nobody's had any luck going after Apple in the portable music player market, where it really DOES have a monopoly.
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CNet covers some of the legal issues in the misleadingly-named article Forget the Courts — Apple May Fight Mac Clones With Tech (http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2008/04/apple_psystar) (which doesn't really mention the very obvious possibility of Apple patching its kernel to prevent its running on foreign hardware until the closing paragraphs).
And while Psystar may be violating Apple's end user license agreement, or EULA, by doing this, legally there's not much Apple can do about it, says Raj Abhyanker, a patent lawyer who used to write patents for Apple.
[...]
In terms of a deterrent, Abhyanker says suing another company for violating a contract doesn't even come close to a tort or patent infringement case.
"Those types of litigation ultimately have a lot more remedies for a plaintiff," he says. "But if you look at breach of contract, it's usually limited (depending on the state) to the amount of services or the amount of goods as subject to the contract. The maximum damage Apple would be able to claim is the price of Leopard -- actually, the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) price of Leopard, which might be a few dollars."
[...]
The problem, say lawyers contacted by Wired.com, is that breaking a EULA technically isn't illegal (it's not a signed or executable contract) and penalties tend to vary from state to state, making it very hard to stop.
"Generally speaking, these user agreements are much weaker than other forms of litigation," says Ted Man, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property and patents. "They're way more problematic, too. It's like going into an ER -- those incredibly broad license agreements they make you sign where you're basically signing away your life. Companies make them as broad as possible but there's no way to basically enforce them. It's a scare tactic, a way to say, hey, we're reserving all these rights," says Man.
Interesting stuff. I've seen talk lately about how EULA's probably wouldn't hold up in court, and I'd like to see them challenged more often.
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XP SP3 out Tuesday the 29th (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2285971,00.asp); appears to be mostly incremental upgrades for security and compatibility. I'm hoping for better 64-bit driver support; watch me hold my breath.
Also: this thread doesn't belong under Media; I am moving it to Real World.
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well, I certainly hope it doesn't break anything
(YES I KNOW THAT IS AN UNREALISTIC EXPECTATION)
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You don't say. (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2302371,00.asp)
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Hey, lookitthat (http://www.physorg.com/news134024177.html)
We all knew it would happen, I'm just surprised it took Microsoft this long.
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It's maddening how much shit doesn't work because I have too much RAM. ::(:
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How much is too much?
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4 gigamuches.
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(This might work better in the copyright thread, but seeing as this is where I brought up the story before...)
NYT: Apple Sues Mac Clone Maker Psystar (http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570F3005978D8002574870067E25A.html?ref=technology)
Looks like the patent lawyer in the article I quoted above was wrong: Apple IS suing for EULA violation, not just copyright.
I am nervous about this. I would love to see the EULA restriction overturned and Apple told that they can't tell people what machines they're allowed to install software on, but I've seen our judicial system make terrible decisions in much less ambiguous cases (http://brontoforum.us/index.php?topic=708.msg16188#msg16188).
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PC Magazine (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2325860,00.asp): Apple's now in third place in US PC sales. It's a distant third -- HP and Dell are selling about three and four times as many machines, respectively -- but it's still pretty significant.
I think this says a lot about the iPod and iPhone's crossover appeal, as well as general dissatisfaction with Vista. In the scheme of things, this is barely a crack in MS's armor, but it'll be interesting to see if the trend continues.
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Apple recently gained some more viability as a development platform.
I'm not into having to buy their fucking hardware at huge cost. Being able to dual boot Windows or something else on one of their machines is a plus, but I think I'd sooner just use Windows and dual-boot to Linux.
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Being able to dual boot Windows or something else on one of their machines is a plus, but I think I'd sooner just use Windows and dual-boot to Linux.
This has always been my view of OSX. Theres a lot of good things to say about it and about 3/4ths of them come from being pretty much BSD at heart.
Personally I've never liked rounded corners and safety features designed to protect me from my self. I mean, sure, it's pretty and has great features for making a website about your dog and stuff, but who cares, besides the dog website crowd? I want all that nice, free, nerd software and I wanna be able to download and install it easily from the command line. :3
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So if Vista Business is $199, and Vista Ultimate is $219, how the fuck does an upgrade from Business to Ultimate come out to be $139?
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Brad just got an OEM copy of Ultimate for $150. Not sure where, but NewEgg (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Description=Vista+Ultimate+OEM&x=0&y=0)'s got it for $180 at the moment.
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Did battle with KDE 4.1 again today. And lost.
There have been some concessions to the people who want it to look and feel more like KDE 3 -- the title bar of the active window is still gray, f'rinstance, but now it has colored stripes -- but the goddamn launcher still sorts programs by their description instead of their name, and doesn't seem to have any way to change that (other than wiping the "description" field for every single program). There IS a simple way to swap it out for an oldschool-style launch menu, but while that can let you view programs by name, it still SORTS them by description. (Also, switching launchers hilariously removes the Alt-F1 keyboard shortcut. Which is now no longer located in KDE settings, and requires hacking a config file to set. Also, hacking the config file doesn't actually seem to work very well.)
There's also no "show desktop" shortcut anymore. You can get a widget to do this, and (hypothetically) set it to a keystroke by hacking a config file, but the widget is a hack: all it does is minimize all programs. So it's a one-way deal; you can't, say, hit Start-D to show the desktop, do whatever the hell it was you wanted to do on the desktop, and then hit Start-D again to go back to what you were doing.
Also, I couldn't find a way to alt-tab to programs on other desktops. But it might be there; it's just that I said "fuck this" and quit looking after wrestling with the goddamn launcher for about three hours.
All in all, I think I now understand how my grandparents feel when using their computers. I spent the afternoon incredibly frustrated with a desktop that wouldn't do what I wanted it to do even though there should be an obvious, simple, straightforward way of getting it to do it.
In a nutshell: KDE 4.1's getting there, and there are FEWER deal-breakers to its basic interface than there were in the beta, let alone 4.0, but by definition one deal-breaker is too many. Maybe they'll get it right in 4.2. And if they don't, people should start seriously considering a fork.
EDIT: Come to think of it, I'm almost certain that the review (http://www.linux.com/feature/142661?) I read that convinced me 4.1 might be ready for prime time is from the same site that convinced me back in '04 that ATI's Linux drivers were in good working order. So at least this time I only wasted my afternoon, not $230.
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I have had an Eee for two weeks and was just able to make it dual boot xandros advanced mode and xubuntu. I don't see much point of going back to windows from here.
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...I just discovered that the KDE 4.1 slogan is -- no shit -- Don't Look Back (http://kde.org).
Here's an idea: quit making a window manager that's inferior to the previous version and I WON'T.
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Vista's marketing guys must be feeling like they dropped the ball on that one.
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...The second Google match for kde-4 launcher sort is now me bitching about it (http://www.linux.com/?module=comments&func=display&cid=1196039). ::(:
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I could probably use some kind of hard drive analysis tool right about now. I'm not at the stage where everything's fucked up and I need a recovery tool, but I have a feeling my external HD might be on the way out. (No, I don't feel like dropping ninety bucks on SpinRite.)
Mumble, mumble...heh.
chkdsk x:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is [snip].
WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.
CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File record segment 26912 is unreadable.
File record segment 26913 is unreadable.
File record segment 26914 is unreadable.
File record segment 26915 is unreadable.
File verification completed.
Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode.
...
chkdsk /f x:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is [snip].
CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File record segment 26912 is unreadable.
File record segment 26913 is unreadable.
File record segment 26914 is unreadable.
File record segment 26915 is unreadable.
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Index verification completed.
...
chkdsk x:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is [snip].
WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.
CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File record segment 26912 is unreadable.
File record segment 26913 is unreadable.
File record segment 26914 is unreadable.
File record segment 26915 is unreadable.
File record segment 26916 is unreadable. :ohshi~:
File record segment 26917 is unreadable.
File record segment 26918 is unreadable.
File record segment 26919 is unreadable.
File verification completed.
Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode.
Looks like that just made any existing problem worse.
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EDIT: WARNING another FOE has been made while you were typing your reply
One part of making Vista work properly with anything is downloading every single patch they have available. XP users generally sneer at how Vista needs these patches to work, completely oblivious to how many patches XP needed to become usable.
And so we move from brand loyalty battles to product (or maybe version) loyalty battles.
(There's probably an intermediate step (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gldt.svg) I'm conveniently ignoring.)
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XP and Vista users have been bickering since Feb. 2007.
For what it's worth, Vista is CONSTANT BLINDING PAIN for me, but I endure it basically out of necessity (if vidjagames were OS-blind then MS probably would have gone under decades ago).
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I guess so.
It seems kind of silly for them to bicker when it is and has been (ignoring travesties like WinME) a matter of waiting for the OS to mature (mostly by service packs coming out), for software packages to begin to support the latest version, and for appropriate hardware costs to fall before the most recent Windows flavor becomesapproaches becoming worth adopting. I've been seeing this shit since ~98 and I'm sure some of you grandpas out there ran into it with different versions of DOS or BBS software or abacuses.
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(if vidjagames were OS-blind then MS probably would have gone under decades ago).
...are you seriously suggesting that games are the motivating factor for most people's PC purchases?
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"A," if not "the."
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I don't like mac oses anyway, but I know that videogames are why I've never even considered getting a mac
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I love Macs and I'd prefer to work on one in the future. That's work. I'd still require a PC for entertainment.
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We are all nerds here. Of course we are getting Windows for the games, not because every single retailer preloads Windows onto their PCs. But we are not most people.
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Well, one can always run Windows and mac os at the same time if one has the RAM for it. Which no one does.
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We are all nerds here. Of course we are getting Windows for the games, not because every single retailer preloads Windows onto their PCs. But we are not most people.
Right, exactly. Unless you're talking about Minesweeper and Solitaire, most people aren't concerned about PC gaming.
Most current PC gamers are into casual games or WoW. WoW isn't a Windows exclusive, and most casual games are Flash-based and therefore platform-independent.
Guys like us are a minority.
Well, one can always run Windows and mac os at the same time if one has the RAM for it. Which no one does.
I'm not actually sure what the fuck you're talking about.
If you're referring to dual-booting, I'm running Windows on a Mac right the fuck now. For gaming. It works pretty goddamn well.
If you're referring to running Windows inside a virtual machine on the Mac OS (or vice-versa), then no, you won't be able to game that way, but that has fuck-all to do with RAM.
If you're talking about somehow simultaneously booting two different operating systems...well, it's theoretically possible, but would require a pretty fundamental change in how those OS's are designed.
It also has fuck-all to do with RAM.
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your face has fuck-all to do with RAM
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So today my keyboard decided to randomly add extra letters while i was typing.
first it was Es, then Rs then Js.
What the fuck.
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My laptop has been randomly dropping Es for about a year now. Except sometimes one keypress will type a bunch of Es. I ... I don't even know where to start.
Also it can't tell whether or not it's plugged in, and burns full AC power off the battery when it's unplugged and runs out of juice in like 5-10 seconds.
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Most current PC gamers are into casual games or WoW. WoW isn't a Windows exclusive, and most casual games are Flash-based and therefore platform-independent.
Guys like us are a minority.
That's strange. Whenever I go into a computer store or electronics store, they have gaming PCs on display. And if I'm buying computer parts, the clerks ask me if I'm going to use them for gaming. Then there's Alienware.
If we are a minority, I'd say we've got a pretty big money-wrapped dick to wave around.
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Most current PC gamers are into casual games or WoW. WoW isn't a Windows exclusive, and most casual games are Flash-based and therefore platform-independent.
Guys like us are a minority.
That's strange. Whenever I go into a computer store or electronics store, they have gaming PCs on display. And if I'm buying computer parts, the clerks ask me if I'm going to use them for gaming. Then there's Alienware.
If we are a minority, I'd say we've got a pretty big money-wrapped dick to wave around.
Retail PCs are extremely low profit unless they're high-end gaming PCs.
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That's strange. Whenever I go into a computer store or electronics store, they have gaming PCs on display.
They are the most expensive and impressive, of course they want to show them off. That's like noting how prominently car dealerships display sports cars, and assuming that a majority of people must drive them.
And if I'm buying computer parts, the clerks ask me if I'm going to use them for gaming.
Well, obviously. Because the majority of people don't manually upgrade their computer. And you're a twenty-something male.
Then there's Alienware.
See first point.
If we are a minority, I'd say we've got a pretty big money-wrapped dick to wave around
Yes, but that also entirely misses the point of the argument. Gamers can spend thousands of dollars on new PCs, but they're not spending any more on Windows (which is what this discussion was about).
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Here's one of the things I love about Windows:
Why the fuck does Windows Explorer still not allow you to view two directories at that same time? I mean, we are taking about a basic UI necessity for any file moving program of any flavor that has been included in any file browsing and moving program since Norton Commander. Have you ever seen even something like an FTP client that didn't have this most basic and obvious set up, cause I sure as hell haven't.
When is Microsoft gonna get off the retard bus on this?
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When I need to do that I just open a second instance of Explorer. It takes about a second. Unacceptable? :shrug:
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Then you have to reposition it so both are visible, and if you ever alt-tab to something else chances are when you tab back one of your Explorer windows is going to be behind something. Complaint is v. reasonable.
And, oddly enough, something that I've found Mac OS X to be even worse at because of the tendency for every single Finder keyboard shortcut to just change your current window instead of opening a new one.
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When I need to do that I just open a second instance of Explorer. It takes about a second. Unacceptable?
I could probably type in this post in one window and then push the submit button in an other window. That wouldn't make the designing a message board UI like that a good idea though.
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If you're talking about actual Windows Explorer (the program that MS hides in the ass-end of the Accessories group so that you never try to use it) then it's pretty easy to just drag files and such into the directory view on the left.
If you're talking about the "let's make it like navigating the Internet that's not confusing at all" Explorer, then yes, it's a badly designed piece of wang that they experimented with in 98 and never bothered to remove or even stop using as a default.
(Although a quick peek shows that it's got a folder view too now. That's what I get for not even bothering to look in ten years. So, er, what are you complaining about now?)
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Geo is bitching that there's no retard-friendly, split view that uses only one UI window. I think it's a lame complaint, in light of the folder view (View->Explorer->Folders) and being able to just open two damned explorer windows. Pro-tip: Tap win+e to spawn a new one, in case anyone doesn't yet know this. Also, if you're in C:\, for example, and want a separate window for Program Files (a sub-directory) you can right click the icon and choose "Open", which will spawn a new explorer window (though it won't keep the settings of the window from which you opened it) for that folder. Just drag it to the side and you can see both at once.
There is some kind of conditional stupidity (at least on the version of XP I'm using). If I select a folder and use shift+enter, if I'm using the folder view, it just navigates to that folder instead. If I'm the folder view sidebar is toggled OFF, shift enter will open a new explorer window up in folder view, showing that directory's contents. The same goes for ctrl+double-click. That's something else entirely, though. Right-click->open is what most people are going to be using, anyway.
My laptop has been randomly dropping Es for about a year now. Except sometimes one keypress will type a bunch of Es. I ... I don't even know where to start.
Wlcom to my world.
Yes, but that also entirely misses the point of the argument. Gamers can spend thousands of dollars on new PCs, but they're not spending any more on Windows (which is what this discussion was about).
Aaactually, Dell (and maybe some other companies) are charging EXTRA to have computers ship with XP (pro?) instead of Vista (home?). A lot of games don't require DX10. Vista tends to impose a resource drain in situations where DX10 isn't needed (and for certain quantities of RAM). I tend to, perhaps mistakenly, correlate gamers with above-average computer proficiency. I don't have concrete evidence supporting that gamers specifically are requesting it, but it seems safe to assume that the everyday user isn't opting to pay an extra hundred bucks to have a computer ship with yesterday's OS.
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That's strange. Whenever I go into a computer store or electronics store, they have gaming PCs on display.
And the Apple Store puts Mac Pros with 32-inch Apple monitors on display, but if you think more people are buying those than iPods, you're an idiot.
If we are a minority, I'd say we've got a pretty big money-wrapped dick to wave around.
Well yes, we're the ones buying the high-dollar computers. There are a lot of people buying cheap things and a few people buying expensive things. This isn't some kind of huge revelation, it's basic economics.
If you're talking about actual Windows Explorer (the program that MS hides in the ass-end of the Accessories group so that you never try to use it) then it's pretty easy to just drag files and such into the directory view on the left.
If you're talking about the "let's make it like navigating the Internet that's not confusing at all" Explorer, then yes, it's a badly designed piece of wang that they experimented with in 98 and never bothered to remove or even stop using as a default.
(Although a quick peek shows that it's got a folder view too now. That's what I get for not even bothering to look in ten years. So, er, what are you complaining about now?)
He's talking about viewing two folders side-by-side. Not just the folder icons, but the contents of the folders.
Tree view doesn't let you see the contents of the folder you're moving files to, is inadequate if you're copying both ways, and gets totally unwieldy as you go deeper into the hierarchy.
The funniest thing is that this is something I didn't even realize annoyed me that, in hindsight, totally does -- I shouldn't have to open a new window to copy files straight across.
Moreover, it inspired me to make a (very cursory) examination of my file browser, and it turns out I DON'T! Under Dolphin, you just go to View -> Split View, and it does EXACTLY what Geo describes. Thank you, Geo, for getting me to think about, and then immediately fix, this problem.
Anyway. For those of you using KDE, Dolphin totally does this. For those of you using Windows, I know there are third-party file managers; if anyone finds one that matches Geo's description, please share with the class.
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Oh oh, I found one. It's called any file viewer not made by microsoft.
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For those of you using Windows, I know there are third-party file managers; if anyone finds one that matches Geo's description, please share with the class.
Okay. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:GNU_Midnight_Commander_4.1.36_Windows_Vista.png)
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Oh sweet, I love me some MC and should have figured there was a Windows port.
...For those less keen on keyboard navigation than I am, how does it do for drag-and-drop?
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lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/replace-windows-explorer-with-xplorer2-258730.php) lists a couple (http://lifehacker.com/399362/power-up-windows-explorer-with-free-add+ons) other alternatives (http://lifehacker.com/399155/five-best-alternative-file-managers). I'm now looking into something to give me tabbed explorer windows.
Speaking of stuff with tabs, I'm still enjoying console (http://brontoforum.us/index.php?topic=754.msg14655#msg14655).
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So I've been on Puppy Linux for a few weeks, and after learning the ins and outs I have come to see why everyone enjoys Linux so much. The distro I have is a very Lightweight and fast type, so I get instant feedback when I click an icon or something. That might sound normal for a lot of you, but before I was on a bloated XP that hadn't been reformatted in 4 years, so it took a few minutes for my clicks to register. Also, since I had no OS disk, and didn't want to pay $200 for one I was SoL for reformatting.
Anyway, while I hate windows I have to keep it around for a few things, like Phantasy
Star Online Blue Burst, and so I can finally someday import all my old bookmarks back, but still Puppy Linux has given me a new love for my PC, and I think everyone should check out the live disk of it at least once.
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I used to keep Puppy on a thumb drive. It was a very useful tool to have around, but the bias toward people coming over from Windows was grating. I've already expressed my irritation with programs being labeled by description instead of name -- I understand that it's useful for people who don't know what the fuck a Pidgin or a Gimp is, but I'm a power user and I want the option. (Plus, if you know what Linux is, you fucking know what Firefox is, though that's a tangent -- and last I checked Puppy still used Seamonkey as its default anyway.)
And while the ass-ugly Windows 95 icon scheme it was using wasn't a deal-breaker, it WAS ass-ugly. I understand the point is to make a tiny distro, so SVG's and full-color PNG's are out, but seriously, ripping off icons from Win95? Ugh.
I also remember package management being a bit of a hassle.
Anyway. I don't actually know if any of my complaints are still operative; I haven't tried Puppy in over a year. (A quick glance at the website at least suggests the icons have been fixed.)
Sora, are you running any of the more advanced, optional stuff on Puppy, like KDE, say? It's a lot more fully featured than the basic window managers that Puppy defaults with, but of course it's slower, too. I assume from what you've said about XP (and the fact that you picked Puppy in the first place) that you're running and older hardware here.
Kubuntu's my Linux of choice. I'm quite happy with it. I like Puppy as something to stick on a thumb drive and carry around with me, but I wouldn't use it as my desktop OS.
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Yeah, it's still got Sea Monkey as a default. I installed FireFox 3 on mine though. Still haven't uninstalled Sea Monkey though.
The theme for Puppy 4's desktop looks really nice off the bat, but I decided to go with IceWM instead of JWM so that I could use Java programs, as JWM doesn't listen for keys being pressed and released in Java.
Don't even get me started on the packages though. Every single one of them I tried to install fucked my shit up so bad I had to reinstall. They really need to work on that.
I tried Koploxx (Probably spelled wrong) which ran KDE and it was really slow on live disk, so I didn't bother installing it. I don't remember exactly, but I think I'm on a Pentium 4 processor, and 512 ram. I got my PC back in 2005, a Sony Vaio desktop, if that helps.
I was going to try Kubuntu, but after trying the Ubuntu live disk and seeing how it was - slower than my 3 to 4 year old bloated XP install - I don't think I'll go anywhere near Slowbuntu distros. Well, it's probally not slow on a system with 2gig ram, but my PC is old, so I have no interest in distros that aren't trying to max on speed.
I have looked into Arch though I really want to try that, but I'm not good enough on Linux to really try for that yet.
On a side note: I tried installing puppy to a USB drive, but it wouldn't boot, which sucks. Also, I heard that the constant reading and writing an OS does to a USB drive wares it out really fast.
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The theme for Puppy 4's desktop looks really nice off the bat, but I decided to go with IceWM instead of JWM so that I could use Java programs, as JWM doesn't listen for keys being pressed and released in Java.
Yeah, I always went IceWM too.
Don't even get me started on the packages though. Every single one of them I tried to install fucked my shit up so bad I had to reinstall. They really need to work on that.
Yeah, that was probably the most irritating thing to deal with. Too bad they haven't fixed it.
Seems like there's gotta be a way to get apt running on it, though.
I tried Koploxx (Probably spelled wrong) which ran KDE and it was really slow on live disk, so I didn't bother installing it. I don't remember exactly, but I think I'm on a Pentium 4 processor, and 512 ram. I got my PC back in 2005, a Sony Vaio desktop, if that helps.
I was going to try Kubuntu, but after trying the Ubuntu live disk and seeing how it was - slower than my 3 to 4 year old bloated XP install - I don't think I'll go anywhere near Slowbuntu distros. Well, it's probally not slow on a system with 2gig ram, but my PC is old, so I have no interest in distros that aren't trying to max on speed.
I ran Kubuntu just fine on the baseline Dell P4 I had at my job a couple years back. Inspiron? Whatever their lowest-end, cheapest tower is.
Shit, I used to run Gentoo on an Athlon XP 1900+. That sure got old after awhile.
On a side note: I tried installing puppy to a USB drive, but it wouldn't boot, which sucks.
I remember it took awhile for me to get that to work; don't remember what I finally did.
Also, I heard that the constant reading and writing an OS does to a USB drive wares it out really fast.
True, but IIRC Puppy's designed to mitigate that and only write to the drive at certain intervals.
The downside is that if, say, you lose power instead of doing a proper shutdown, you can lose data.
Er, I mean, moreso than would happen on a standard OS.
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The downside is that if, say, you lose power instead of doing a proper shutdown, you can lose data.
Er, I mean, moreso than would happen on a standard OS.
Yeah, though I haven't ran into any problems with java loss when I have to hard-turn off my PC after firefox crashes -making it so iceWM stops responding, and making "poweroff" or "shutdown" unresponsive as well.
Know anything about Arch Linux? I hear it's good, but I don't wanna go through all the steps to making a live CD for it.
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Yeah, though I haven't ran into any problems with java loss when I have to hard-turn off my PC after firefox crashes -making it so iceWM stops responding, and making "poweroff" or "shutdown" unresponsive as well.
Can you ctrl-alt-F1 to console and kill it?
Failing that, if there's another computer in the house you should be able to SSH in.
Linux is stable as a rock. X, not so much.
Know anything about Arch Linux?
No, sorry.
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Linux is stable as a rock. X, not so much.
that sounds like maverick talk.
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Linux is stable as a rock. X, not so much.
that sounds like maverick talk.
(http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/2439/300pxmmxchillpenguinno2.jpg)
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I'm looking up unique OS's (What's the correct plural for that?).
Here's an interesting one: http://www.skyos.org/
Another good one: http://www.menuetos.net/
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I think I've heard of SkyOS before, but MenuetOS is news to me.
I'm pretty much of the opinion that X is a lumbering dinosaur and it's nice to see people working on alternatives.
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I would be extremely interested in SkyOS if the dick didn't charge 30 euros to become a member who is able to download it.
The cross bar thing sounds cool though, but with features like that I can't help but wonder how bloated OS will become.
Edit: On a unrelated note, is there a voice activated OS yet? One where I could just say "Open Firefox" and it would pop-up? Because that would be awesome.
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Edit: On a unrelated note, is there a voice activated OS yet? One where I could just say "Open Firefox" and it would pop-up? Because that would be awesome.
Windows Vista.
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Edit: On a unrelated note, is there a voice activated OS yet? One where I could just say "Open Firefox" and it would pop-up? Because that would be awesome.
Windows Vista.
I don't believe it! :ohshi~:
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I've seen old black-and-white-screen Macintoshes that had software that did that.
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:tears: But I want it on Linux.
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Edit: On a unrelated note, is there a voice activated OS yet? One where I could just say "Open Firefox" and it would pop-up? Because that would be awesome.
Windows Vista.
I don't believe it! :ohshi~:
Habeeb it.
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How well does it work? My voice dial doesn't know the difference between Dad and Ben.
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Surprisingly well, but I don't use it that often.
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How well does it work? My voice dial doesn't know the difference between Dad and Ben.
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=KyLqUf4cdwc
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWYigh839gI
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Niku: :glee:
but does it not recognize "Undo"? Because "Undo" would have been one of the first things I tried if it were me, instead of "delete long string of text eat long street of Texas".
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Grr... God damn, why does Damn Small Linux have to be so stupid? I can't get my WG111v3 Netgear usb receiver work at all on this damn thing... :sadpanda:
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Does anyone know how I can install ROX-Filler without an internet connection? The downloads at their site are all download the downloader kinda shit. Anyway, I'm trying to fix up my DSL CD so it's a bit more workable, and I can't get it to see my wireless, so I can't get online to download the files when on DSL.
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Another good one: http://www.menudos.net/
:ohshi~:
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Currently trying Kubuntu since I'm sick of not having a good web browser and having to reboot every 3 hours from memory leaks in Puppy.
I was impressed that it was able to use my wireless usb without dnis (or whatever that's called). Also, so far I am really liking Konqueror. :wuv: spellcheck.
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Fuck Kubuntu! My hand is bleeding!
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Wrong place, wrong time? From what I can tell A lot of people don't like KDE 4 (http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=367443&cid=21438369), and with good reason (http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/96509133/m/237003898831?r=354005898831#354005898831).
It's very slow, and even in my day of using it three different things crashed. I'm not sure if I want to find something with KDE3, or just try normal Ubuntu. Most likely the latter since Anything with KDE3 in it is most likely old, and I'd have to update to KDE4 sooner or later.
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Wrong place, wrong time? From what I can tell A lot of people don't like KDE 4 (http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=367443&cid=21438369), and with good reason (http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/96509133/m/237003898831?r=354005898831#354005898831).
:slow:
You know, sometimes people accuse me -- usually with good reason -- of using certain threads on this board as a blog, something where I'm the only one posting and there's no interaction. However, those are usually cases where I start the thread and nobody replies, not where I just start writing in a thread without bothering to read the first few pages where other people talked about the same subject.
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:MENDOZAAAAA: READING THREADS IS SO FUCKING HARD
I JUST WANNA POST, MOTHERFUCKER
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*sigh*
KDE4 was kind of shitty. KDE4.1 is pretty solid. I use it on my main PC (as Kubuntu) when I'm not playing a game (which isn't actually very often) and I'm quite happy with it... so long as I keep my widgets locked. Nothing like clicking and dragging erroneously, then having to nuke your config file.
Not a fan of most K* applications, though... but that might just be 'cause I'm so used to Gnome. I'll take Firefox over Konqueror any day.
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So, I picked up a remarkably cheap second desktop off of eBay on a whim today and was thinking about popping MythTV on the thing and playing around with it.
I was going to install Ubuntu because it's apparently the NEXT BIG THING. 2.8GHz single-core P4 with a gig of RAM and my Hauppage card does hardware mpg2 encoding, so I'm not that worried about performance issues especially for a lark project, but does anyone have any different suggestions before I get this thing in the mail?
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KDE4.1 is pretty solid. [...] Nothing like clicking and dragging erroneously, then having to nuke your config file.
You and I have different definitions of "pretty solid".
And sorting the programs by description instead of name is still a deal-breaker for me. And does the "view desktop" widget finally toggle properly? It didn't last time I tried.
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You and I have different definitions of "pretty solid".
:wakka:
Well, come on, it's Linux. It's just no fun if shit doesn't go awry, leaving you configuring for hours. But yeah, we've got a long way to go before KDE finds that marriage between good looks and usability. It's still for the power user at this point.
And sorting the programs by description instead of name is still a deal-breaker for me. And does the "view desktop" widget finally toggle properly? It didn't last time I tried.
The program grouping is annoying as fuck, no denying that.
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But yeah, we've got a long way to go before KDE finds that marriage between good looks and usability. It's still for the power user at this point.
See, 4's not, and that's kinda the problem.
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Moderately depressed that my relatively mainstream D-Link wireless card did not work out of the box in Ubuntu (I looked it up prior to install and it looked like it did but apparently only 1 of the 3 revisions does whoops?). I got it working, but should I really have to install ndiswrapper utilities through apt in the terminal and manually set my SSID and WEP key through terminal commands as well?
I'm just glad I wasn't trying to use WPA (Thanks, DS Fat!)
I can already tell it's going to be a joy to install a TV Tuner and muck around with MythTV.
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Yeah, wireless support under Linux is still pretty poor. I've mentioned before that I had to disable the wireless card in my Mac Pro because it brings down the router -- in fairness, that's the Windows driver's fault (XP-64 driver support is probably the very worst at this point), but yeah, having to wrap a Windows driver to run under Linux is an ugly hack to begin with.
It was still way, way easier to set up under Kubuntu than Gentoo. (BTW, I heard the other day that Gentoo was going to cease development, but neither Wikipedia nor the Gentoo main site seem to say anything about it, so I'm going to assume the info was wrong.)
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So, has anyone tried KDE 4.2 yet?
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That's a great question, Sora! Has anyone tried software that WILL NOT BE IN ALPHA FOR ANOTHER WEEK AND A HALF yet?
But I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave you to puzzle that one out for yourself.
PS: I hear there's a Thundercats movie coming out in 2010. Have you seen it yet?
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...Since I'm sooner or later probably going to have to switch to KDE 4, and since most of my complaints with it to date have been regarding its launcher, I decided, for S&G, to try using Kicker on KDE 4 (http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Documentation/HOW-TO-Kicker-on-KDE4-35973.shtml).
It somewhat mitigates my complaints (the show desktop button works, even with the custom keyboard shortcuts I'd set for it), but for some reason Alt-F1 doesn't pull up the K menu.
Also, it still doesn't let me alt-tab into programs on other desktops, or start-tab to other desktops. (I'm sure there's a keyboard shortcut that WILL switch between desktops, but I can't find the setting for it and recall something being off with it the last time I tried, though I can't exactly remember what.)
...So how's GNOME these days, anyway?
Most likely I'll just stick with Hardy and KDE 3.5 at least until 4.2 comes out. (I'll need the 3.5 version of Kicker if I'm going to keep this kludge up anyway.)
EDIT: I AM sorta tempted to start running more of the KDE 4 apps under 3.5. I switched to ktorrent 4 months ago; it's far superior to 3 in that it doesn't bring down my fucking network after a few hours of use. Kate 4 and Konqueror 4 look pretty keen too, from my experience. (Though, oddly, I prefer the backport of Dolphin to the 4 version, even though the 4 version is the original.)
EDIT 2: Tried about 2 minutes with the new version of Akregator. Some of the things about the new interface I hated (entire column devoted to number of new posts, eating up totally unnecessary real estate if the number happens to be 0), some I liked ("author" field on message list -- though it STILL doesn't show the author on gamespite). I didn't have time to draw any more conclusions than that, as that's when the fucking thing crashed.
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ATTN: Mac and Linux users: Free, full copies of CrossOver and CrossOver Games are available today (http://down.codeweavers.com/). I've never used it, but uh, people like it. I guess.
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Shorter Windows 7 feature list (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/29/BUA913Q2KI.DTL): A bunch of shit OSX already does.
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I'll be happy with just "shuts down properly".
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So would I. :enraged: (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=774237)
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Also, it still doesn't let me alt-tab into programs on other desktops
Found it; it's actually in the same place as in KDE 3, so I can't blame KDE 4 for my inability to find it.
It's in System Settings -> Window Behavior; there's a checkbox that says "Traverse windows on all desktops".
So maybe I'll screw around with the thing a little more. I'll probably have to make the switch sooner or later -- 4.2's due out in January; maybe that'll be the magic number. In the meantime, I am officially behind the times on Kubuntu releases.
EDIT: Yeah, actually it's working more or less satisfactorily now. Still can't upgrade to Intrepid because I'm using the KDE 3 Kicker/tray/whatever you call it. (EDIT 2: Panel.)
Some of the OpenGL effects are obnoxious, while some, like transparency and drop shadows, are pretty much essential from a basic usability standpoint, and reveals that KDE 4's UI design isn't nearly as stupid as it seems without OpenGL. Others fall somewhere in-between; the Alt-Tab effects are neat in theory but don't play well with transparency (picture a bunch of transparent windows all stacked one on top of the other -- like exposing the same film more than once). The Expose-style shit is keen, but I think you can get that set up in KDE 3, too.
From what I understand, the fancy OpenGL shit also doesn't turn off when you're using a fullscreen program, which is stupid; obviously I won't be using KDE 4 for gaming.
EDIT 2: Akregator 4 still crashing. I suspect it's because I copied over my settings from 3; it might work better if I nuked them and started from scratch. But I'm not sure I'm ready to expend that kind of effort.
I also can't seem to get my volume keys to work; I think it's something to do with KMix 4 not wanting to play with the KDE 3 panel, but I'm not 100%. But that's not a deal breaker; I think I've got all the deal-breaker shit resolved at this point.
EDIT 3: MPlayer, when using the OpenGL output, has some serious picture problems; frequent white flashes. Assume this is a conflict with all the other OpenGL shit KDE 4 does (see EDIT 1, "which is stupid"). The other graphical outputs don't want to play nice with my video card, so I'm going to have to find a workaround...
...later, because it's 1 in the morning.
(And no, I don't really expect most people care about my exhaustive list of things wrong with KDE 4. But these make for excellent notes for the NEXT time I come back and see if all my gripes are fixed!)
EDIT 4: Okay, yeah, the video flicker is due to a well-documented conflict between the ATI proprietary driver and Compiz. I figured as much. Will see if there's a fix; otherwise I guess I can remove Compiz and lose all those OpenGL desktop effects, which are less important than a functioning movie player.
EDIT 5: ktorrent 4 has been eating cycles and memory like candy. This may have nothing to do with KDE4 as a whole, as I've been using ktorrent 4 even under KDE3 for the past several months (ktorrent 3 has a nasty tendency to flood the router with bad packets until it brings our entire network down) and it behaves similarly there sometimes. I'll need to play with it longer to figure out whether this was a fluke.
EDIT 6: figured out the volume problem; turns out I needed to set it up in KDE 4's system settings even though I'm using KDE 3's version of kmix. So that just leaves the video flicker. Which may not have a fix except for turning compiz off.
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...so yeah, have pretty much been running KDE 3 apps under KDE 4 since that last post. It worked pretty well at first, but I'm increasingly having issues with performance and stability. (My Akregator configuration managed to get hosed the other day; I figured that was a good reason to try the new version again, but the shortcut keys still don't work and it still crashes if you look at it sideways.)
Decided to try the 4.2 beta. It seemed to run faster but Kickoff STILL wouldn't fucking sort programs by name so I didn't bother fucking with it any more. Am convinced at this point everyone at TheKompany is a moron. I MAY rig it up like I had 4.1, with the KDE 3 panel, but I don't want to bother right now.
Am back to running KDE3 for the moment. Will see if it performs better than 4 has been. So far so good.
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Getting pretty exasperated with my current setup. The KDE4 version of KTorrent that I'm running under Hardy has a leak, and frequently crashes. There's a newer version that's at least supposed to fix the crash problem, but it's not available for Hardy.
Can't use the KDE 3 version of KTorrent because it floods the network with bad packets and kills the router.
I used to use a BT client called Deluge. I don't remember why I stopped but I remember it had some really stupid fucking interface things going on -- IIRC you had to deselect files individually, so if you wanted 1 file out of a torrent with 100 of them, you had to right-click the other 99 and click "don't download".
But maybe it's fixed by now -- could give it another shot, I guess.
I still don't want to upgrade to Intrepid, because that would force me to use KDE 4. I'd like to use the more recent, more stable KDE 4 apps, but not KDE 4 ITSELF. The KDE 4 version of Akregator doesn't respond correctly to keyboard shortcuts, and crashes like Launchpad McQuack.
Speaking of crashes, Firefox has become an unstable bastard since the latest update too.
And MPlayer routinely crashes or won't play videos properly. That one I think is ATI's fault.
...which reminds me, I should reboot. I updated my ATI driver days ago and then forgot about it.
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...it has come to my attention that somebody's compiled KDE 3.5 packages for Intrepid (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=963695).
The bad news is that 3.5 can't be installed alongside 4.x, which harshes my mellow as far as wanting to run 4's ktorrent on 3 (or 3's Kicker on 4). Could install 4 as a nightly build, I guess -- might even be more stable than the "stable" version, the way Akregator and KTorrent have been behaving for me.
In summary: oh great, ANOTHER inadvisable upgrade which is probably going to hose an entire OS.
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4th edition sux
prove me wrong
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KDE 4.2 released; Linus Torvalds reveals he's switched to GNOME (http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/12068_3798396_1/Torvalds-KDE-4-and-the-Media-Circus.htm).
I'm considering giving GNOME a shot myself at this point. Or Enlightenment, or Xfce.
OTOH, my KDE 3 experience has been vastly improved since I stopped seeding like 8 million files out of KTorrent.
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Trying Enlightenment. It's fast and it's pretty, but it's pissing me off.
- No built-in taskbar. (The dock or whatever-you-call-it DOES have an Applications button that lists every open window, but it's damned inconvenient.)
- Related to above: OS9-style dock that takes up fraction of the bottom of the screen and is not easily resizable.
- Keyboard shortcuts bound to combinations commonly used by apps (eg Ctrl-G, which a hell of a lot of apps, including Firefox, use as their default for "find again", is bound to "gadgets"; common Windows keybindings like Ctrl-Shift-Left for "highlight previous word" are set to other things too).
- Alt-Tab brings up a tiny, eight-line window instead of taking up more screen real estate if I have more than eight windows open. Also, there's no obvious way to get it to tab to windows on other desktops (though I struggled to find this feature even in KDE, so it could very well be in here somewhere).
- "Run" dialog box won't let you use the arrow keys, Home, or End in the text field; if you want to move the cursor left you have to backspace. (And I tried emacs keybindings, and they don't work either.)
So, yeah. This feels like something that I COULD spend a few hours configuring to work some way resembling how I want it to, but mostly it would just make me angry.
So, the search continues. Or will, probably, at some point; guess I'll check out the current version of GNOME to see if it's acceptable. But for now, back to KDE 3.5.
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I liked GNOME when I used Ubuntu Hoary a while back. KDE seemed to rip off Windows wherever possible, whereas GNOME was closer to Mac or Amiga, hence my preference. It's nice and simple.
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"Simple" is the opposite of what I want. I want customizability (although I want to be able to do it WITHOUT hacking a config file). A friend of mine recently described the Apple/GNOME approach to software as "BDSM".
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Kernel update to 2.6.24-23 hosed my sound mod. Found a fix (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/218845), but now it's barely audible with all my shit cranked.
(EDIT: Actually, I don't think the "fix" did anything; I've just noticed that gmplayer gives me the same "no sound" error it did before. Regular command-line mplayer gives a series of ALSA errors and then says it's playing with OSS. Of course, AFAIK OSS is actually emulated through ALSA at this point. Sure wish I knew what the hell was going on and automatic updates didn't break basic shit that worked this morning!)
I'd complain that they're railroading me into downloading Intrepid, but judging by the outcome of that thread, that won't fix shit, so I'm sticking with Hardy. Maybe I'll give another shot at going back to my previous kernel -- though of course that's the first thing I tried, and sound didn't work there either.
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...so apparently the new (release client) version of Kubuntu actually optionally includes KDE 3.
So they have fixed one of the two things that was preventing me from upgrading.
The other is that I need to find a day I can spend fixing my computer after upgrading breaks something.
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After dancing around the issue for years now, Google to finally go head-to-head with MS in the OS market. (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/google-takes-aim-at-microsoft-with-new-pc-platform/article1210277/)
Android notwithstanding, the gloves are now officially off.
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Will Google make a better operating system than Windows? Well, yes. Windows is spectacularly awful for everyone who's not an end-user, and Google's proven to be perfectly capable of providing a comparable end-user experience.
Can they possibly get the third-party support they need to do what Apple will never be able to do? There's the actual decider.
They're doing the smart thing by starting with netbooks, where third-party software is completely removed as a factor. I might need to grab one.
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Yeah, I might throw Chrome on mine.
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They're doing the smart thing by starting with netbooks, where third-party software is pretty much all google stuff anyway
The biggest issue is how much different will it be to not justify just using the multiple versions of Linux for Netbooks as it is. It seems a weird choice to consider them "taking on Microsoft" this way, as Netbooks didn't originally have XP until people started wanting it.
But if it integrates will all the things I use Google for now anyway (web, docs, pictures) then a Netbook will be an even more pressing purchase than it already is for me.
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Anyone here tried Mint Linux? It is near-perfect. So much better than Ubuntu, or any other *buntu. Seriously, if you've ever tried Linux, or are running it right now go try out Mint! :perfect: :perfect: :perfect:
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Hi Cyan!
When you say "X is better than Y", it sounds like you are simply trying to provoke an argument. It is not a factual statement, and it is not actually helpful in any way.
Please feel free to tell the class precisely what the fuck Mint Linux is and why you feel it is better than the Ubuntu family -- which, going by the about page (http://www.linuxmint.com/about.php), it is based on.
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Well, it's the small things. Like that I have both Java and flash pre-installed. When I click a Link in Pidgin it opens in Firefox. When I press the plus and minus volume buttons on my keyboard they work. It's like Ubuntu is just a bunch of stuff thrown together, but Mint makes it all work together in perfect harmony to make the whole experience blissful right out of the box.
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wow. sounds like it can do almost as many things as windows.
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wow. sounds like it can do almost as many things as windows.
Without any of the viruses, too.
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Well, it's the small things. Like that I have both Java and flash pre-installed. When I click a Link in Pidgin it opens in Firefox. When I press the plus and minus volume buttons on my keyboard they work. It's like Ubuntu is just a bunch of stuff thrown together, but Mint makes it all work together in perfect harmony to make the whole experience blissful right out of the box.
...media keys and Pidgin links worked fine for me out of the box on Kubuntu. And it's not like Flash or Java were hard to install.
wow. sounds like it can do almost as many things as windows.
Get that stupid shit the fuck out of my thread right now, please. If you want to have a constructive argument about the relative merits of different operating systems, then by all means, but save the smug one-liners for the "I'm a Mac" commercials.
Wait, is there some other way I could have put that? Possibly within the past hour?
When you say "X is better than Y", it sounds like you are simply trying to provoke an argument. It is not a factual statement, and it is not actually helpful in any way.
Oh right! That was a good point I made, right there, just now, four posts ago.
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Get that stupid shit the fuck out of my thread right now, please. If you want to have a constructive argument about the relative merits of different operating systems, then by all means, but save the smug one-liners for the "I'm a Mac" commercials.
Jeez. I'm mocking Cyan, not Linux. I've used Linux. I understand and agree that Linux is capable of a lot of things that Windows isn't, and there are a lot of legitimate purposes to which it can be put, in both desktop and server environments, that Windows can't keep up with. I just think those purposes are a bit beyond Cyan. He's operating his Mint Linux on a web-toys and shiny things level, and creaming himself because holy crap it comes with Flash already installed! Those are what he considers the draws, and I was mocking his choice for the reasons behind it.
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But there's nothing wrong with the idea of using Linux as a desktop OS; I've been doing it for years and it is in fact the stated goal of the Ubuntu distribution, among others. Linux is still deficient as a general-purpose OS for end users in some ways, and Cyan has raised a useful topic for discussion, even if I don't think he's really explained what Mint does that standard Ubuntu doesn't.
As for me, I just upgraded to Karmic. I THINK KDE 4 has finally risen to my standards, but I'm sure I'll have a lengthy, bulleted list of everything wrong with it if it still hasn't. (EG: I seem to have broken the rather neat Expose-style alt-tab configuration I was using. That's not really make-or-break, as I can always just go back to the old-style list version. Which is what I'd be doing in KDE3 anyway. Also, the program that's supposed to report crashes keeps crashing.)
fglrx (the proprietary ATI video driver) still appears to suck. I'm getting a lot of tearing with any kind of OpenGL stuff.
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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.
:whoops:
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Linux is still deficient as a general-purpose OS for end users in some ways
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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.
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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.
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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. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/15digi.html?_r=3&ref=business) 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.”
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http://kazz.rooms.cwal.net/honpodscast.mp3
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http://kazz.rooms.cwal.net/honpodscast.mp3
We need to do something about these spambots.
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heh
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Whatever they're making you take these days Cyan, please keep taking it.
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yeah, his pokemon snap thing was fucking funny, too
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spambots want money
this is a cry for help
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Oh, is it just a thing of Kazz asking for money? I didn't click it
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Maybe Kazz's WFE account has been hacked by the same forces behind steampoweredweekend.tk :gasp:
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And then they impersonated Kazz and Geo, made podcast, hosted it on his web space and posted it here.
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The fiends!
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Sweet, Linux Mint 8 “Helena” released! (http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=1155)
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...I think you're still not quite grasping the purpose of this thread.
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Is this for complaining about Windows and Windows alternatives, not shilling for our pet distro?
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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?
:MENDOZAAAAA:
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 (http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=5532) 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 (http://forums.creative.com/t5/Sound-Blaster/SB-X-Fi-Series-Support-Pack-2-0-05-15-2009/td-p/527485) 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 (http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr).
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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.)
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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. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/15digi.html?_r=3&ref=business) 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.”
Hey, remember this? Guess what's one of the cornerstones of the next iPhone OS. (http://www.macworld.com/article/150449/2010/04/liveupdate.html?lsrc=top_1) Go on. Guess.
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Since TA neglected to tell us where, the iAD (that's what it's called) segment starts at about 10:47 am. Choice quote:
The average iPhone user spends a little over 30 minutes every day using apps. Now, if we said we wanted to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that would be 10 ads per device per day. We're going to soon have 100 million devices. That's a billion ad opportunities per day in the iPhone and iPod touch community.
Emphasis mine.
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So is this where Apple finally shoots themselves in the foot? Again?
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If anything is going to finally shatter the illusion that Apple was never the company they claimed they were and are a corporate behemoth in the truest sense of the word, it had damn well better be the fact that they branded their own advertising spam widget and built it right into the OS.
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Apple has made a brilliant move with the iAd system, convincing its users to sit around and act excited and wax poetic about being sold things and having their use of the phone interrupted.
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Kind of shoots all that "use the iPad for presentations and work and shit" rhetoric in the dick, doesn't it? You're doing your architectural demo with iPad visuals and suddenly you get lengthy ads for sneakers, you're fucked.
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I don't really see Apple putting ads in its OWN software -- they've already gotten their money from you, after all, and of course it would seriously devalue their slick image. I think it's more of a way to make more money off the people publishing free apps.
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I've met enough Apple enthusiasts at this point to feel assured that it's not going to affect their decision to continue purchasing Apple products. Hell, they might just fucking love it.
The entire dev team I work with has iPads. My immediate supervisor has two. I have never seen the iPad in use.
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I guess my only solace about the new iPhone update is that I won't actually be getting it, because my phone is too shitty.
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I finally got sick of living on 140Gb, so I splurged on a new much-needed hard drive. I would never have guessed how wonderful it is to have a terabyte of free space; this is what it must feel like to reach absolute cosmic contentment. (I know, I know, please don't pop my bubble.)
Anyway. I decided to set aside a partition for a backup OS for when my old drive craps out. I'm still on the same Windows install that my computer had when I bought it, so it's bound to fail sooner or later. And I thought, hey, maybe it's time to give that new-fangled Linux thing a try, see what all the kids are babbling about.
Now I know exactly two things about Linux: that it comes in several flavors, and that everyone I've ever heard talk about it sounded like an insufferable zealot. I suppose there's not much I can do about the latter, but I did some basic research on the former and I... still don't know what I should get. This Linux Distribution Chooser (http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php) matches me with openSUSE (http://www.opensuse.org/fr). Is that any good? Is there a better place to start? I hear a Live CD is a good option for trying things out, but their download page asks me to choose between GNOME and KDE. I've hit wikipedia but my eyes glaze over about two paragraphs in. Which one is the one that doesn't suck?
(I am being deliberately obtuse here but that's just because I refuse to see my ignorance as anything but a comical boogyman that needs to be squashed with great vengeance and furious anger.)
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My Linux experience is old and not too relevant anymore, I imagine. But I've heard really good things about Ubuntu. Supposed to be fairly straightforward and smooth, abstraction without obfuscation.
Gnome and KDE are both GUI environments, and I'd imagine that look and feel is something you just need to try out. I'd get the Gnome live CD first and see how that works for you, because I recall liking Gnome more than KDE, but screw around for a while on both and see which layout makes more sense.
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My Linux experience is old and not too relevant anymore, I imagine. But I've heard really good things about Ubuntu. Supposed to be fairly straightforward and smooth, abstraction without obfuscation.
Gnome and KDE are both GUI environments, and I'd imagine that look and feel is something you just need to try out. I'd get the Gnome live CD first and see how that works for you, because I recall liking Gnome more than KDE, but screw around for a while on both and see which layout makes more sense.
This is pretty much the exact same knowledge as I have, only I hear that Ubuntu has now gone into many many permutations, and that some find the newer version better and some find them worse, so do some extra research prior to choosing one.
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Hey I just got the thread title :whoops:
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Currently dab into ubuntu here and there, although I'm also going to look into debian totally softcore.
Currently on another streak made much more liveable thanks to Chrome being available in linux now!
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If for no other reason, having an ubuntu disc around is great for diagnostic purposes, since it will boot off the CD.
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Start with Ubuntu. New version's out this week. If you like it, use that; if not, try Kubuntu. If you don't like either one, you're left with a few options, which basically boil down to:
1. do some serious research and tinkering to get stuff working exactly the way you want (whether it be another distro, another WM, or just a million little customizations);
2. wait 6 months for the next Ubuntu release and repeat.
I'm a Kubuntu guy (but have been meaning to give the default GNOME version another shot), so I'm around if you have any questions.
I've also been through Slackware and Gentoo, which are good places to start if you want to be FUCKING HARDCORE and learn everything from the ground up. Those are for somebody who wants to invest literally hundreds of hours but learn a lot doing it. Me, I'm glad I did it that way (because now I know my way around enough to fix shit if it breaks), but see no reason ever to do it again (knowing how to do something doesn't mean you want to do it if you can avoid it -- as I've said elsewhere, I never want to edit Xorg.conf again as long as I fucking live).
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Upgraded to Kubuntu 10.04. No serious problems. The upgrade DID break keyboard and mouse input partway through, with a prompt onscreen, so I had to restart my computer (soft shutdown from the power button still worked) and resume the install from the command line.
KDE 4's still suffering from the same issues -- mainly launch/quicklaunch menus that don't have basic drag-and-drop functionality or context menus. (It somehow borked the icon on my Firefox shortcut, among others, and there's no way I can figure out to go in and set the fucking icon on the shortcut. There is on the desktop, but not on the K menu or quicklaunch.)
ATI drivers still suck. KDE's plenty zippy if I don't turn on compositing (in fact I think it's faster than the previous version), but slows to a crawl when I do.
And they've taken the blue lines off the titlebars of active windows, so now active windows have gray titlebars again, which is stupid.
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I agree entirely with Thad and the others: if you're just starting out and wanna see what's what, start with Ubuntu. It's the closest any linux flavor has come to "just working".
Never leave home without a Live CD.
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So yeah I tried ubuntu and it is pretty keen. Doesn't seem like I need to know as much as I thought I would, so yeah, okay times all around. It's nice to look at as well, though that's coming from a guy used to an OS that was released nine years ago. :D
Thanks for the recommendation!
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Lifehacker today provided a link to Getting Started With Ubuntu (http://ubuntu-manual.org/). Might check this out when I get home. Also, the Live CD stuff, is it possible to just set it up to work Ubuntu or whatever off of a flash drive?
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For what it's worth, I'm not really that linux-savvy, yet all of my problems really do get sorted out by google such as "how do I get that webcam working".
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Lifehacker today provided a link to Getting Started With Ubuntu (http://ubuntu-manual.org/). Might check this out when I get home. Also, the Live CD stuff, is it possible to just set it up to work Ubuntu or whatever off of a flash drive?
Don't know if I'd run full-on Ubuntu from a flash drive, but there are distros designed for them.
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Yeah, there's a tool in the download to make a bootable thumb drive. In this case it isn't so much booting Live CD style as it is booting from a removable hard drive.
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Updates:
ATI drivers still suck. KDE's plenty zippy if I don't turn on compositing (in fact I think it's faster than the previous version)
KDE is no longer zippy. I think I'm going to have to disable the fucking indexing service because it is eating my entire fucking dual-dual-core Xeon.
And they've taken the blue lines off the titlebars of active windows, so now active windows have gray titlebars again, which is stupid.
Turns out there's an easy fix in the system settings, which looks much less half-assed than the blue bars. So that's cool.
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KDE4 has not ceased to piss me off, so I'm trying GNOME again. So far I like it! I hate the color scheme out of the box, and there are a couple weird little interface things I don't like about it, but up to this point it's actually a lot faster than KDE and -- and THIS is where it gets weird -- much easier to customize.
Not 100% I'll stick with it, but at this point I think it's fair for me to recommend regular Ubuntu to newbies over Kubuntu.
EDIT: The first truly, unbelievably asinine thing I have run across in GNOME is that you can't map Ctrl-Tab in gnome-terminal.
Fortunately, there's no shortage of terminal programs in X, but it's still really frigging stupid.
EDIT 2: You can't even SET keybindings in gedit. The default text editor.
Also, GNOME's "Are you you sure you want to overwrite this file?" is FAR less useful than KDE's. KDE's gives you the datestamps of both files, and the option to rename the new file, not just replace/skip.
I'm starting to think that GNOME is a better desktop but KDE has a better suite of programs.
EDIT 3: GNOME's default not-quite-like-a-Mac top panel is a waste of space, especially on a widescreen monitor. You've got three menus on the left, then quicklaunch, then a shit-ton of empty space, and then the system tray on the right. (Suppose it's nitpicking a bit, but if you minimize a program to the system tray, you shouldn't show a DOWNWARD animation if the system tray is at the TOP of the screen.)
It's similar to how Apple puts the menu and tray at the top and the dock at the bottom, but the key difference is that, while the various MacOS's put the program's menu bar on the same line as the Apple menu and the tray, GNOME doesn't by default. So you get a top panel with a bunch of negative space AND each program gets a menubar with a bunch of negative space. (You can set the panel to autohide, but, while this is fine with the bottom panel, it's a pain in the ass with the top one as you'll unhide it every time you try to click the minimize/maximize/close buttons.)
There are themes you can get to make it behave more like OSX (or Windows), but I don't much want to look through that crap right now, and anyway I'm just talking about something that I think is poorly-designed in the default config.
(I'm also not sure how well the themes work across different toolkits -- a theme that puts a GTK+ program's menubar across the top of the screen might not work for a Qt program or an XUL one.)
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Pretty confident at this point that my slowness issues are a result of shitty ATI drivers.
So, general reminder: do not use Linux with an ATI card.
And a specific warning: do not use Ubuntu Lucid with an ATI card. At least in the previous versions you can get good performance with all the OpenGL shit turned off; in Lucid you can't even get that.
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This week in the news:
Massive security flaws found in Windows.
Massive security flaws found in Flash.
Massive security flaws found in Safari.
Massive security flaws found in iPad.
Google changes its homepage.
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Since I have limited knowledge running linux, all I can add here is that I run windows 7 64 bit simply because it works really well with 3D art programs like MAYA and Mudbox. Other than that I frankly have no real opinion when it comes to windows in general. It works so long as you install decent security..and update every other day when someone finds a security flaw. Thankfully Mozilla updates Firefox enough to cover internet usage.
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WGA is saying Microsoft has blocked my Windows key after it's worked fine for six months. How do I tell if I've been supplied with a dodgy CD key, or WGA is just flipping out?
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...so GNOME started exhibiting a weird bug whereby some of my Firefox windows wouldn't refresh. Like, I'd open the program and get a set of tabs with "(Untitled)" at the top and it would just stay like that. It was working on the backend, because if I hit Ctrl-Tab the title of the window would change, but nothing below the titlebar would update. Closing out the window and then reopening it from the History menu didn't fix it, and quitting out of Firefox and restarting it didn't work consistently. So, back to KDE for now.
Memory leak persists. I've seen some threads suggesting that I switch over from the proprietary ATI drivers to the open-source ones; it doesn't seem to help everybody and I don't fucking have time for that right now because I have a website to finish. (Frankly I'd like to wipe the hard drive and start clean -- I'm sure there's plenty of crap I've accrued in the 4 major OS upgrades since I first installed it -- but I REALLY don't have time for that.) So for now, I guess I'm just gonna party like it's 1999 and restart my window station once a day.
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Haven't come across it myself. It's just with Gnome + Firefox? Well, that's pretty weird, but Firefox does have it's problems. If Vimperator (http://vimperator.org/) had a standalone like Conkeror (http://conkeror.org/), or was properly cloned to something else (http://www.google.com/chrome), I'd be gone.
And that's an fglrx memory leak? I'd heard about one of those. I'm currently using Mesa ~7.8 and 6.13 free radeon driver, with the 2.6.34 kernel. Was getting a bit frustrated with fglrx and its shitty 2D performance, quirks, and inability to play large-frame videos without a whole mess of tearing. Much happier with my current setup, though as soon as the code for the whole 'we don't need AVIVO, we'll just accelerate/decode video with shaders and Gallium!' code actually gets written, I'll be all set (it is better as it is, though). Maybe you don't want to run bleeding edge code, though. When I was running Lucid (got fed up with Sid, went to Ubuntu; got even more fed up with Ubuntu went back to Sid--and everything was fixed, go figure), I had stability problems every now and then--don't know if that's the case now. No such problems under Sid.
You might not have heard this: supposedly, 10.6 has new-ish, faster 2D code enabled by default. Don't know if they've fixed the memory leak.
Am I the only one who finds a bit galling that Nvidia, the only major GPU company that has thrown nothing to the free software community, has the best video experience under Linux right now? Supposedly, Intel's got nice/nice-ish free drivers, but nobody's got anything (complete) like Nvidia's VDPAU (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Vdpau).
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Haven't come across it myself. It's just with Gnome + Firefox?
Hasn't happened since my latest round of GNOME updates; hopefully it's fixed.
And that's an fglrx memory leak? I'd heard about one of those. I'm currently using Mesa ~7.8 and 6.13 free radeon driver, with the 2.6.34 kernel.
Switched to mesa/radeon. Took all day to get my computer to work properly again, am not sure how the fuck I finally got it working and am not sure if it will still work after next reboot. (Note to self: last thing I changed was to add nomodeset to my boot options.) Haven't noticed a memory leak yet but compiz is balls-slow and I get vertical tearing when I play World of Goo. Will reread this post any time I consider buying another ATI card.
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Update: still getting a bit of vertical tearing, but after the latest update compiz is quite zippy. It is no longer painful to alt-tab between programs!
Update to update: until I run it for a few hours. Ugh. Doesn't look like a memory leak this time, but it definitely slowed down after it had been open awhile.
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Pretty confident at this point that my slowness issues are a result of shitty ATI drivers.
So, general reminder: do not use Linux with an ATI card.
And a specific warning: do not use Ubuntu Lucid with an ATI card. At least in the previous versions you can get good performance with all the OpenGL shit turned off; in Lucid you can't even get that.
Oddly enough: I inherited a medium-high end server-workstation from my old lead along with the task of setting it up as department-use SVN/Virtual Machine/Test Automation server. He had only had it for a few weeks before he scrammed and only got as far as fucking the Apache install up beyond repair, so I decided to clean out and start over despite, you know, not being a Linux guy at all.
Damn thing came installed with a Radeon FireGL in it - why he went in for a Radeon card in a server is beyond me, I remember him asking me about it at some point and I joked about playing Crysis on it, which I hope he didn't take seriously - and a distribution of Red Hat. Red Hat of course couldn't so much as load the graphical installer without putting the monitor irrecoverably into sleep mode, and after doing it in text mode the thing didn't get any better no matter how many drivers I threw at it. I need to at least run XOrg to do my job, so after marveling at the fact that Dell had supplied us with an operating system which was completely incompatible with the machine they sold us, I took the old boss's last suggestion and burned up a disc of Lucid Lynx.
Let's be honest here: I am a fucking caveman when it comes to system administration, and ULL's so easy a me could do it. I took the barebones Server version that supplies you with bash, a LAMP stack, and little else, and in two days I'm already mostly done building two of the thing's three major functions (Virtualization is probably going to take me a biiiit longer to puzzle out). Apparently John had the Desktop version on there, which instantly turned it into Free Software For Your Mother. I have to admit the whole experience has been vastly different from the usual sort of intentional unhelpfulness I've come to expect from the Linux crowd. It's almost been... *hgk*... pleasant. Now if only it actually could run Crysis.
Oh yeah and I guess the main point I was trying to make is that 10.04 definitely has no problems with newer FireGL cards at least. Go upgrade. Go upgrade again?
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JE-SUS CHRIST.
So okay. compiz performance got to be unbearable. I did some research and found that in fact it's probably that nomodeset that's causing that. You know, the nomodeset I need to enter in order to get a picture.
This appears to be a known issue with 2.6.32. So, I try rolling back to 2.6.31. That fails to load the radeon driver outright.
So, I try rolling back to 2.6.28. That loads the radeon driver fine, but for some reason when I start X it doesn't take input from my keyboard or mouse. Don't know why, as it ID's them just fine according to the log.
So, fuck it, I'm back to nomodeset, and I've disabled compiz so I can run my computer at a usable speed. And back to KDE for now. What does KDE have to do with it? Well, I don't like GNOME's default alt-tab behavior, because it won't let you tab to windows on other workspaces. You need to have compiz enabled to do that. (Also: I like that KDE's non-compiz alt-tab gives a full list of window names. Window previews may be a great idea IN THEORY, but when I have 14 browser windows open that all pretty much look like fucking black text on a white background when they're thumbnailed, THAT IS NOT HELPFUL.)
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New Ubuntu RC is out!
The open-source radeon driver still doesn't work properly (have to use nomodeset to boot). I've read that fglrx has finally been fixed, but at this point my shit's working well enough that I don't want to fuck with it.
New version of KDE 4.x is like every other new version of KDE 4.x: tweaking the fucking icons and not actually doing anything about usability. My Quicklaunch still doesn't have an icon for Firefox, because it broke the LAST time I upgraded and you can't just fucking right-click on a program in your Quciklaunch (or on your launcher menu) and assign an icon to it.
On the plus side, one of the interface tweaks appears to have gotten rid of that stupid fucking black background that the last version put behind half (and only half) of my taskbar. So, you know, one of their unnecessary graphical tweaks at least fixed one of the unnecessary graphical tweaks from LAST version.
At any rate, KDE's perfectly usable at this point, so I'm not really ready to fuck around with GNOME again, especially if I need to switch drivers again and turn on compositing to get it to work the way I want it to. But I'd still recommend it over KDE for most users.
(Interestingly, I got the same Firefox-won't-refresh-a-new-window bug under Win7 at work the other day. It's only happened once, whereas it happened enough times under GNOME to make me switch back to KDE, but it's interesting to see that the bug is cross-platform and not solely based on the rendering toolkit.)
EDIT: Kubuntu's also got a new default browser, rekonq. It's fast, it's compact, it supports adblocking and text-only zoom, and it crashes every 3 fucking seconds. Oh well, maybe next time!
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Latest batch of updates (which I assume were from RC to final) hosed my system. Somewhere in the middle (I queued them up and then went to work) my FS got set to RO for some damn reason. I rebooted and had no keyboard or mouse support (similar to what happened when I tried to boot 10.04 with a kernel from 9.10). It hung when I tried to boot to a recovery console, too; something about Plymouth. Dunno, don't have time to look into it right now.
The nice thing about running 3 different OS's is it takes something pretty special to hose all 3 of them. So, OSX for the time being.
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Booted to LiveCD. Narrowed the culprit down to openoffice.org-common. Which appears to be seriously broken.
Problem: I attempt to reinstall it, it somehow turns my FS read-only and fails.
I attempt to remove it, it somehow turns my FS read-only and fails.
I attempt to hold it, upgrade ignores my hold and tries to reinstall it.
Good times.
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The plymouth thing was the OS hanging because it couldn't mount network shares. From the CD boot, I edited fstab and commented those lines out. (Now I've added "nobootwait" to them; hopefully that achieves the same effect while still letting them mount during a normal boot.)
Not sure why aptitude behaved itself when I rebooted into recovery mode but it did. Back up and running now, but OpenOffice is still hosed. Push come to shove I think koffice will read all my ODF docs, but I would very much still like to get my shit fixed all the way.
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The Linux Experience™: 2011 Edition
Install VirtualBox.
Install Ubuntu 10.10 as Guest.
Marvel at how clean and usable it looks.
Enjoy this new Synaptics package manager thing, which is pretty awesome compared to what one had to put up with ten years ago.
Discover that Ubuntu-Tweak isn't quite TweakUI or Freshmeat.net.
Discover that users can't use Docky/AWN or even change the fucking Visual Effects level because of regression errors in compiz and/or libdecoration0.
Spend hours going through the top solutions on Google to no avail.
Give Linux a couple more years to mature.
Maybe things haven't changed so much after all.
See you in 2021!
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Did you mean 2011 (or 2010) edition?
Or is this just a comment that things have not advanced from 10 years ago?
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Typo. 2011. Ran into stupid, basic usability obstacles 10 years ago. Gave it another chance last night. Not touching that shit again for another 10 years. (This last bit is a lie, I may still VB Ubuntu to set up test services.)
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Ran into stupid, basic usability obstacles 10 years ago. Gave it another chance last night. Not touching that shit again for another 10 years.
That's okay. It's not for everyone.
I'll just be over here, doing cool stuff in Linux without you.
Like, I set up X to make any SIXAXIS or DualShock 3 controllers connected to the computer generate keys and mouse events for Minecraft:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "PS3MinecraftJoystick"
MatchIsJoystick "on"
MatchVendor "Sony|Sony Corp.|SONY"
# Mapping for the SixAxis/DualShock3
# Uncommented entries are currently unused
Option "MapButton1" "none" ## Select
Option "MapButton3" "none" ## (Probably) R3
Option "MapButton2" "none" ## L3
#Option "MapButton4" "none" ## Start
#Option "MapButton5" "none" ## Dir-Up
#Option "MapButton6" "none" ## Dir-Right
#Option "MapButton7" "none" ## Dir-Down
#Option "MapButton8" "none" ## Dir-Left
#Option "MapButton9" "none" ## L2
#Option "MapButton10" "none" ## R2
#Option "MapButton11" "none" ## L1
#Option "MapButton12" "none" ## R1
#Option "MapButton13" "none" ## Triangle
#Option "MapButton14" "none" ## Circle
#Option "MapButton15" "none" ## X
#Option "MapButton16" "none" ## Square
#Option "MapButton17" "none" ## PS-button
Option "MapButton18" "none" ## UNK
Option "MapButton19" "none" ## UNK
#Option "MapAxis1" "none" ## Left-stick X
#Option "MapAxis2" "none" ## Left-stick Y
#Option "MapAxis3" "none" ## Right-stick X
#Option "MapAxis4" "none" ## Right-stick Y
Option "MapAxis5" "none"
Option "MapAxis6" "none"
Option "MapAxis7" "none"
Option "MapAxis8" "none"
Option "MapAxis9" "none"
Option "MapAxis10" "none"
Option "MapAxis11" "none"
Option "MapAxis12" "none"
Option "MapAxis13" "none"
Option "MapAxis14" "none"
# Option "MapAxis15" "none"
Option "MapAxis16" "none"
Option "MapAxis17" "none"
Option "MapAxis18" "none"
Option "MapAxis19" "none"
Option "MapAxis20" "none"
Option "MapAxis21" "none"
Option "MapAxis22" "none"
Option "MapAxis23" "none"
Option "MapAxis24" "none"
Option "MapAxis25" "none"
Option "MapAxis26" "none"
Option "MapAxis27" "none"
####
####
Option "StartKeysEnabled" "False"
Option "StartMouseEnabled" "False"
Option "DebugLevel" "5"
# Map mouse to right stick axes 3 (l/r) and 4 (u/d) (mouse look)
Option "MapAxis3" "mode=relative axis=1.5x deadzone=5000" #My own sixaxis needs a deadzone this large. Others might not.
Option "MapAxis4" "mode=relative axis=1.5y deadzone=5000"
# Map WASD to left stick axes 1 (l/r) and 2 (u/d) (movement)
Option "MapAxis1" "mode=accelerated axis=key keylow=38 keyhigh=40" # a=38, d=40
Option "MapAxis2" "mode=accelerated axis=key keylow=25 keyhigh=39" # s=39, w=25
# Map Start to Escape menu
Option "MapButton4" "key=9" # ESC=9
# also map Circle to escape, since it is used to quite out of menus
Option "MapButton14" "key=9"
# Make the PS button toggle all of this
Option "MapButton17" "disable-all"
# Map R1 to left click
Option "MapButton12" "button=1"
# Map R2 to right click
Option "MapButton10" "button=3"
# Map L1 to jumping (spacebar)
Option "MapButton11" "key=65" # SPACE=65
# Map L2 to 'sneaking' (left shift)
Option "MapButton9" "key=50" # LSHIFT=50
# Map Square to "b" (minecraft inventory menu key)
Option "MapButton16" "key=56" # b=56
# X cycles through rendering distance ("f")
Option "MapButton15" "key=41" # f=41
# Triangle drops stuff ("q")
Option "MapButton13" "key=24" # q=24
# Not doing anything with L3 and R3 yet...
Option "MapButton2" "none"
Option "MapButton3" "none"
# The D-Pad, on the other hand...
# (Using buttons instead of axes, as I don't know how it'll handle an unsigned axis)
Option "MapButton5" "axis=+zx" # Up
Option "MapButton7" "axis=-zx" # Down
Option "MapButton6" "axis=+zy" # Right
Option "MapButton8" "axis=-zy" # Left
# Hopefully, that'll cover control of the scroll wheel, so you can select stuff
EndSection
Didn't have to download any new programs or translators. X already had a driver, 'xserver-xorg-input-joystick'. First joystick->mouse+keys driver I've used that wasn't twitchy and didn't have appalling latency.
:perfect:
Uh, all the other stuff I do on Linux that I think is cool, you probably wouldn't like though. Like, a fully keyboard driven window manager and shell scripting everywhere.
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That sounds less painful than having to deal with DS3Tool on Windows 7 running in test mode to enable unsigned drivers. Personal experience. Tool was semi-inconsistent and it sends a PS button press and turns the fucking PS3 on when you USB-disconnect the controller.
I'm interested in the keyboard driven WM bit. The shell scripting thing, probably less so, since I tend to bang out ruby scripts to do stuff that might otherwise be done in bash. Going to be using linux for a lamp stack and some other development fuckaround.
If I wanted to make myself a bunch of shortcuts to spit into a term or alt+f2 in linux, where would the "correct" place be to put my symlinks? On Windows, the answer is roughly, "wherever the fuck you want, provided you update your PATH variable." On linux, I assume I should stuff it in a subdir of my home dir, but what's the step that's equivalent to appending that newly made directory to PATH?
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That sounds less painful than having to deal with DS3Tool on Windows 7 running in test mode to enable unsigned drivers.
Actually, it gave me the fits, initially, because I hadn't known about InputClass going in. Once I did, it all went very smoothly.
Personal experience. Tool was semi-inconsistent and it sends a PS button press and turns the fucking PS3 on when you USB-disconnect the controller.
Yeah, that happened to me as well (the controller turning on the PS3). The PS button sends normal button presses, but there's definitely something else going on inside the controller as well. I'm chalking this one up to wholy cross-platform DS3/Sixaxis weirdness. (Didn't happen when I 'paired' it and used it with Bluetooth.)
I'm interested in the keyboard driven WM bit.
There's plenty of them to look at. In addition to dwm, I know of stumpwm, ratpoison, and awesome. That's just off the top of my head. (awesome sucks, though--it's dwm without good sense.)
The shell scripting thing, probably less so, since I tend to bang out ruby scripts to do stuff that might otherwise be done in bash.
I dunno man... What you say here got me thinking, and I went looking for a Ruby shell. If found one (rush (http://rush.heroku.com/))... but the regular bash/bourne compatible examples actually look cleaner and better to me.
To each his own, though. If you don't like shell so much, maybe give rush a shot. Lots of people have not-bourne-y, non-bash login shells--scsh (Scheme shell), clisp shell, emacs, you name it. Well, maybe not 'lots' of people--but there are people that actually do this.
If I wanted to make myself a bunch of shortcuts to spit into a term or alt+f2 in linux, where would the "correct" place be to put my symlinks? On Windows, the answer is roughly, "wherever the fuck you want, provided you update your PATH variable." On linux, I assume I should stuff it in a subdir of my home dir, but what's the step that's equivalent to appending that newly made directory to PATH?
In Debian and Ubuntu, and, I'd expect, most distros one would encounter, the place to put a user's scripts, executables, or the symlinks that love them, is in ~/bin. If ~/bin exists, it should be added to PATH at login, at least. Alternately, if you want something system wide (that you don't need restricted to root user/group), /usr/local/bin is what you want.
Answering the other question: adding whatever you want to PATH usually goes like so (using ~/bin as an example):
PATH=~/bin:$PATH
Though, naturally, this varies. My own .profile has:
PATH=~/bin:"${PATH}"
inside an if that checks for ~/bin existing and being a directory, which is usually the sort of thing you'll find if you go looking in .profile, .bashrc, or wherever that would be kept.
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...so by all accounts Wine runs most of my games pretty well now, but I tried running The Witcher and 3D acceleration, well, didn't work at all. (2D shows up, 3D doesn't, so opening movies work fine and then the menu screen is text against a black background.)
Think I'm going to try switching back to fglrx, but thinking this might mean I hate myself. Will let you know how it goes!
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That's really too bad. The Witcher is pretty great.
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...what the fuck is this?
I installed the proprietary driver, rebooted, and it worked.
I was not expecting that at all.
Even took "nomodeset" off my kernel parameters with no negative results.
Compiz doesn't work for some reason, which means I'm still stuck with KDE, but...things are going much better than expected. Waiting for something terrible to happen. I think I quit using fglrx the last time because of a memory leak making my system unusable; maybe that'll happen again.
(EDIT: Huh, restarted GNOME and now Compiz works. Guess I'll fuck with GNOME for awhile now and see if I can get it to behave itself the way I want it to.)
As for Witcher performance: the menu colors are way brighter than they're supposed to be, but in-game looks all right; a little jerky at first and I haven't had time to play long enough to see if it gets better. (The opening movie has ALWAYS rendered like hell for me, regardless of OS, hardware, or configuration.) As noted on the compatibility page, healthbars don't show up, which could be a deal-breaker, but maybe I'll learn to deal with it.
Oh, and the music cuts out after a little bit for some reason; will see if I can figure out why.
The quest editor just crashes as soon as it loads, though, which is a pity.
EDIT 2: Witcher runs for shit when Compiz is enabled. Figured I'd just work up a launcher script to disable Compiz, then run Witcher, then enable Compiz (plan on writing a script up anyway since I like mapping my 3rd and 4th mouse buttons to draw Geralt's swords), but then I found Compiz wouldn't start again after I'd disabled it.
I don't much like Compiz any-damn-way and only run it because it alt-tabs across workspaces and Metacity doesn't.
So it occurs to me, what the fuck, maybe I'll try GNOME Shell.
EDIT 3: Yow. GNOME Shell hogs all my CPU, has some weird rendering shit, and doesn't handle Alt-Tab correctly either. There's a newer version but the Ubuntu package is for Natty, which is still in alpha. Think I'll have to give it a pass and either figure out a way to get Metacity to alt-tab across workspaces or go back to KDE.
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Spent most of the day figuring out how to get my extra mouse buttons configurable in Ubuntu -- appears they're recognized out of the box but their numbering is reversed from what you'd expect, so that clicking the left thumb button goes forward in Firefox and the bottom right one goes back instead of the other way around.
Fucked around with xorg.conf and xinput a good bit and couldn't get them properly rejiggered; fucked with imwheel and I managed to swap some buttons around but couldn't quite get the syntax straight. And anyway from what I've read imwheel was deprecated for HAL, which was deprecated for udev, which is broken in Maverick. Jesus Christ.
Found a program called btnx that does the job, but it's buggy and unintuitive and has to be run as root. Really imwheel looked like the best match for what I wanted since it could remap buttons based on the foreground program, but again, couldn't get it to work quite right.
Anyway, that sort-of settled, I gave The Witcher another shot but found that the sound still cuts out a ways in for no discernible reason (and no worthwhile debugging information in Wine's output), and at my monitor's native resolution it's unplayably slow even with all the video effects turned off. Still pretty goddamned neat that it runs at all; quite nice that Wine proper appears to have passed Cedega in that regard. Think my video card's most likely the bottleneck, either due to specs or the fact that ATI and Linux still don't really play nice together.
One thing left to try is a less resource-intensive window manager, as restarting my X session is still less hassle than rebooting into another OS. Not optimistic that'll work, though.
So it's probably back to Windows for gaming, but I'm still pretty fascinated by the whole experience here. Wine's come a long way. Pity it's so hard to remap mouse buttons, though.
EDIT: Huge performance increase when run under Openbox instead of KDE. Still slower than Windows (I think -- the date on my last save suggests I've never actually played The Witcher since buying this monitor. Given that Dragon Age and ME2 run fine on it, though, I think it's safe to assume Witcher does too), but might be playable -- can't tell if I keep losing because of performance or because I saved right before a bitch-ass hard fight.
Music still cuts out after about a minute too.
Openbox seems kinda neat, though; think I might give LXDE a shot.
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I've been alpha-testing the next version of Ubuntu, and I'm finding I really like the new desktop, Unity, quite a lot. The main problem with it is its own newness -- there's a lot of shit that can't be configured, or at least can't be configured EASILY. Of course, it took KDE 4 several point-releases to settle in, so maybe Unity will do that. Even if Shuttleworth continues with his Jobsian "No, you're going to use your desktop the way *I* want you to" approach, I expect we'll still see things like the ability to add things to the Applications menu without hacking friggin' text files.
GNOME 3: Ubuntu is not using it. There is a third-party repo providing packages, and I would sure like to test them but gnome-shell crashes every single time I run it.
From what I have seen, there are a lot of neat ideas and reexaminations of conventional design wisdom, but the GNOME devs are once again showing a certain amount of arrogance and resistance to suggestions from their users, a kind of "We read in a paper that you don't need a minimize button, you'll get used to it no matter how you've been using your computer for the past 20 years." For those of us who remember when GNOME 2 first came out, it sounds an awful lot like the Spatial Nautilus debate all over again. Remember Spatial Nautilus? Neither do the GNOME devs.
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So how is youtube fullscreening working out for you people on Ubuntu? Seems to be crashing the flash plugin.
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Works about as well as always. Adjusting the volume from the keyboard still kicks me out of fullscreen, and sometimes it hangs and I have to alt-tab back to the browser and close the tab. Doesn't work very well but I'm not getting any crashes.
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I can only get some (not all) videos working on my sister's computer. Issue is apparent in both Chrome and Firefox (and thus my assumption that it's not the browser's fault).
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Natty in beta, which somehow doesn't work as well as it did in alpha.
The Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/01/ubuntu1004_beta_review/) has a review which pretty much reaches the same conclusion I did (Unity's going to be awesome in about two years when they finish it) but goes into a lot more detail.
I'm back on KDE now, because since the beta upgrade all the other desktops error out immediately at login. This is a step down from two days ago, when only the unsupported GNOME 3 did.
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Oh hey, GNOME 3 finally working.
Initial thoughts:
It's pretty, it's clean, and it's got enough in common with Unity that I think it's a little silly that there was enough of a schism for an Ubuntu/GNOME divorce.
Graphics acceleration is, so far, working flawlessly for me. I haven't used Mutter long enough to form a strong opinion on it, but my initial reaction is that I like it a fuck of a lot better than Compiz.
It's funny, given the attention to reducing the amount of wasted space onscreen (things like launchers, the taskbar, the Applications menu, and the workspace switcher are all on a separate interface that toggles when you hit the Start/Super button), that there's still a big dumb useless goddamn bar at the top of the screen, emptier than ever.
You know what? I could describe the huge amount of shit at the top of my screen, but a picture is worth the proverbial thousand words.
(http://corporate-sellout.com/img/gnome3-wastedspace.png)
What the fuck is that shit? Why in God's name do I need 6 rows for that?
I assume GNOME's probably going to follow Unity's (well, Apple's) lead and combine the two titlebars(!) and menubar into a single bar, but for now it just looks sloppy, especially given the emphasis they've put on not cluttering the rest of the screen. Somebody want to explain what the point is of saving space by removing Minimize and Maximize buttons if you're just going to replace them with Giant Fucking Empty Gray Second Titlebar?
(EDIT 2: Oh, and the Applications Menu is a goddamn mess that just shows all your applications in one window, unsorted, with the potential to narrow them down by search but no way to categorize them. I assume that will also change and you'll be able to browse by category like in Unity.
EDIT 3: And for some damn reason most applications show up twice, once with a nice crisp hi-res icon and once with a shitty blurry low-res one. Oh, and also you still can't set Ctrl-Tab as a shortcut keystroke in GNOME Terminal or Nautilus.)
Also, if you squint to read the tabs in that screenshot, you may notice that alt-tab does not seem to be enabled out of the box.
Fortunately, that second tab (http://www.wiredrevolution.com/gnome/fix-alt-tab-task-switching-in-gnome-shell) offers a solution: hacking fucking gconf, hooray!
(EDIT: That page is either bullshit or outdated; you can enable Alt-Tab in the regular control panel. So, disregard. In fact, it even lets you tab across desktops, my preferred method.)
(EDIT 4: But it's awkward for alt-tabbing between different windows in the same app.)
(EDIT 5: And the window for assigning keyboard shortcuts is so tiny that most lines are cropped, eg "Move between windows of a...", "Move between panels and th...", "Move between windows imm...". There are no scrollbars and it cannot be resized.)
So yeah, it IS another example of the GNOME devs ramming some UI theory they read in a paper somewhere down all their users' throats against protests. Which fortunately means it'll probably be fixed a little later down the line.
But as far as UI paradigm shifts, this actually is a pretty neat one and, most surprisingly, I'm finding it stable and zippy as hell. Some shit may still be missing, but it's a lot more complete than Unity is, and a lot more complete than KDE 4.0 was.
There's a lot to like here about both the frontend and the backend. I'm going to be playing with this one for awhile I think.
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Alt-Tab is one of those things where I can see what they're trying to do and it's a neat idea but the execution is a pain in the ass.
(http://www.corporate-sellout.com/img/gnome3-alttab.png)
See, it's got the programs in one row and the windows within each individual program in a second row, underneath. I can see this as a potentially neat idea -- not having to tab past 9 Firefox windows if I don't want to open up Firefox. (Did they crib this from OSX? I know OSX's Cmd-Tab behavior tabs between programs and not windows; is there a way to tab between windows within a program in OSX? Because if there is I don't know it.)
Implementation is awkward for a couple reasons. Mainly it involves extra keypresses. You can expand the second row using the arrow keys and then continue Alt-Tabbing, but I don't like that because it requires me to move my right hand (which is either on the home row or the mouse, never hovering over the arrow keys). Or, you can set a second key combination for moving between windows -- default is Alt-`, which is convenient for its proximity to Tab, but it's actually a bit of a pain in the ass to move your finger between Tab and `; I'm considering mapping it to Alt-Q since that's an easier reach and a fairly unlikely key combination to conflict with anything else.
But then the theory of separating out programs versus windows is really irritating in practice. A bit ago I was trying to tab back and forth between Firefox and a non-maximized LibreOffice window; I wanted to be able to see what was in the browser while I worked on a document. Trouble is, when I Alt-Tab from Firefox to LibreOffice, it doesn't just bring up the last LibreOffice window I was using, it brings up ALL my LibreOffice windows. Now, if I Alt-Tab from Firefox to LibreOffice and THEN Alt-` to the specific window I want, then that doesn't happen, but that's extra keystrokes for no good damn reason.
And while it's nice that you can Alt-Tab across workspaces, the implementation is irritating. Let's say I'm working in a Firefox window on Desktop 3 and want to type something into my terminal on Desktop 1. Okay, fine. I hit Alt-Tab, enter my command, and hit Alt-Tab again -- and instead of bringing me back to the window I was just in, it brings up whatever the fuck is in the first Firefox window on Desktop 1.
Some good theory here but the implementation needs spit and polish.
EDIT: I'm also not sold on how it handles multiple desktops. While being able to add another any time with a simple click or drag is an interesting idea, I've worked out my desktop habits pretty well over the past few years -- I browse the Web on desktop 1, files on desktop 2, edit documents on 3 and read E-Mail on 4. If I've only got a browser and a mail client open, I can't have two empty desktops between them.
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is there a way to tab between windows within a program in OSX? Because if there is I don't know it.
⌘`
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Ah, so I was right; they cribbed it from OSX and I just didn't know the keystroke before. Thanks.
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You know what I fucking hate? Going to click on the File menu and accidentally hitting the upper left-hand corner that activates Expose/Activities/whatever. I turn that corner shit off in OSX. I would turn it off in GNOME 3, too, except according to my Google research you fucking can't, which is of course awesome.
This is something that Unity does right. Hovering in the upper left-hand corner shows the panel, but the close/min/max buttons and menus are far enough to the right of it that you don't activate it by accident. And since all it does is show the panel, even if you DID activate it by accident you'd be able to go right back to what you were doing.
It's also the best way I've seen of doing autohide on a side-aligned panel. Sticking your list of open programs on the side makes a lot more sense in a world of widescreen monitors than wasting a bunch of space at the bottom, and having it only come out of autohide when you touch a corner, instead of any time you move the pointer to the left-hand side of the screen, means you're not going to accidentally bring it up when you try to click on a bookmark or something like that.
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I'm building a small form-factor PC that's going to be used entirely for recording spoken events and concerts for a hall. I've checked the hardware for Linux compatibility (even the Nady USB-XLR adapter!) and am planning on just going Ubuntu with Audacity. This looks fairly simple—which makes me nervous—but if anyone has any particular tips feel free to share.
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I'm building a small form-factor PC that's going to be used entirely for recording spoken events and concerts for a hall. I've checked the hardware for Linux compatibility (even the Nady USB-XLR adapter!) and am planning on just going Ubuntu with Audacity. This looks fairly simple—which makes me nervous—but if anyone has any particular tips feel free to share.
It'll be as easy as it seems.
Just the basic advice: don't go too long between software updates and always check out the bugs for programs that you really, really need to work (http://packages.ubuntu.com/) before updating--this is mostly for machines you actually need to be doing something; for home machines, you can eschew this and instead periodically have Let's Swearing At Fixing Machine Time. Very nearly no problems are solved by restarting, and just about anything can be fixed with the machine live. Kernels: 2.6.37 is fun, 2.6.38 is that much more so--some nice patches hit. And never, ever install outside a package manager or home directory unless you have no choice but to do so and really, really need that program. It's smooth sailing if you keep an eye on things; occasionally bumpy sailing if you don't. That's about it.
Also: Thad, use a window manager.
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I'm building a small form-factor PC that's going to be used entirely for recording spoken events and concerts for a hall. I've checked the hardware for Linux compatibility (even the Nady USB-XLR adapter!) and am planning on just going Ubuntu with Audacity. This looks fairly simple—which makes me nervous—but if anyone has any particular tips feel free to share.
Biggest problem with Ubuntu right now is that it's in the middle of switching over its entire interface. For full functionality you'll probably want to stick with "Ubuntu Classic" or whatever the hell they're calling the GNOME 2.x version.
Also: Thad, use a window manager.
My basic requirements are as follows:
1. Alt-tabbing across desktops;
2. Not having to hack fucking text files.
A nice Win7-style icons-only panel that I can stick on the side of the screen is preferred. Find me a match and I'll check it out, but at this point I'm not about to say "You know, Unity makes me hack too much shit from gconf, I think I'll go try LXDE instead!"
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Find me a match and I'll check it out, but at this point I'm not about to say "You know, Unity makes me hack too much shit from gconf, I think I'll go try LXDE instead!"
LXDE? As in Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment? I'm not sure where you pulled that from 'window manager', but it's not covered in my suggestion anyway.
My motivation for telling you to use a window manager in the first place: if you don't like where KDE4 has gone, and Gnome 3.0's irritations drive you to bitching about its failings, it's time to consider a proper window manager. If you're willing to try something different, you can find some pretty good stuff. I was also being a bit flippant.
2. Not having to hack fucking text files.
You aren't hacking, and it's a fine way to configure things, as long as it's well done. There's no need to be melodramatic about it.
A nice Win7-style icons-only panel that I can stick on the side of the screen is preferred.
I'm not familiar with that, but Gnome 2.x has panels and icons out the ass. I'm pretty sure you could put one on the side (unless you're talking about something that keeps track of open windows? I'm certain I've heard of something that does similar; don't remember what or where, having no interest in it personally). Failing that, there's a multitude of window managers out there, with many different goals--it's not unlikely that somebody's had a similar thought and replicated the functionality you want.
Although I think a good keyboard driven tiling window manager is a much better deal.
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So vague handwaving and semantic nitpicking, then. It's like one of my posts, only without the information content.
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Torvalds has opinions on GNOME 3 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/05/linus_slams_gnome_three/):
You want a new terminal window. So you go to 'activities' and press the 'terminal' thing that you've made part of your normal desktop thing (but why can't I just have it on the desktop, instead of in that insane 'activities' mode?). What happens? Nothing. It brings your existing terminal to the forefront," he wrote. "That's just crazy crap. Now I need to use Shift-Control-N in an old terminal to bring up a new one. Yeah, that's a real user experience improvement. Sure.
Interestingly, this is the single most common complaint I've gotten from new Win7 users as part of the rollout I've been working on: clicking the IE icon in the taskbar no longer opens a new IE window. (What Win7 has over GNOME3 is that you can still launch shit from the desktop, so there IS another way of doing it.) This is, of course, a case of everyone aping Apple.
I actually prefer this behavior, but Linus makes a perfectly valid point: it should be optional. (It is, in KDE. And I believe you can also enable the old QuickLaunch in Win7 but it's not trivial for end users.)
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From the Linux user interface experience of "fuck it, copy Windows"
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So apparently Windows 8's shell will finally include a filecopy mechanism that ISN'T designed for 1.44MB floppies, and will instead support pause/resume and won't stop a 2000-file copy operation if it hits a problem with one file in the set.
Granted, we've had robocopy since 1997, but (1) it's command-line and (2) it wasn't bundled with the OS until Vista, meaning it's STILL not a standard program on most business machines.
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Win8 will also support mounting ISO's (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392109,00.asp), a feature which Macs have only had for a decade and the various other *nixes since...when did ISO9660 become a standard?
Score one for common sense over completely asinine piracy placebos.
(Has anybody else ever gotten a validation error trying to play a legally-rented DVD under WMP...and then just opened up VLC?)
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Yes, although that hasn't happened in the decade or so since I bothered trying to use WMP.
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Yeah, I keep forgetting to disable Autoplay on my HTPC.
Probably a moot point now that we've canceled the disc portion of Netflix. (A decision made even easier when the last movie I rented started skipping in the very last scene. Not that the time I watched Moon on Netflix Streaming and my Internet connection kept going out was any better.)
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Most savvy users I know have been using Daemon Tools Lite for mounting ISOs on Windows, in case anyone on these boards is too big of a fucking troglodyte to already know how.
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Yeah, I keep forgetting to disable Autoplay on my HTPC.
I have an OCD tin-foil hat friend (yes Buge, I'm talking about Brian again) who always did that without my asking whenever I got a new computer.
I didn't complain or reverse it, but I did laugh a bit.
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It's a really obvious best practice. Like enabling file extensions. Or turning off system sounds.
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Ars previews Win8 (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/09/hands-on-with-windows-8-a-pc-operating-system-for-the-tablet-age.ars).
At a glance, it looks like MS has finally gotten a touch interface right, but is making the same mistake everyone else is right now: assuming that users who AREN'T on a damn touchscreen should have the same interface as ones who are.
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Tablet operating system? It's not a desktop system primarily? Or is it?
I'm a little confused here.
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Depends what you mean by "primarily".
Yes, it's a desktop OS.
But their focus is making it usable on tablets.
My concern is that -- like Lion, GNOME 3, and Unity before it -- the focus on tablets will produce an interface that's not very good on desktops.
But keep in mind this is a very early preview build, and I would love to be wrong.
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That's what I was afraid you were going to say. Yeah, here's to hoping they don't cock it up and make it horrible for M+KB users.
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In fairness, I don't have the pure hate for Unity, GNOME 3, and Lion that some folks do. (You can probably find my comments on them earlier in this thread.) But there's a reason I prefer Win7 and KDE4.
It's also entirely possible that MS has had time to learn from the mistakes those other desktops have made, but I don't know that I'd say it's likely; MS is generally a lot less nimble than GNOME, Canonical, or even Apple.
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Looking at it a little more, it looks like the MetroUI stuff is just another program running on top of what looks like Windows7 with minor tweaks.
Later in the conference you can see them get rid of MetroUI and just use it like Windows7. Which is nice, I guess. I'd like the Metro stuff to have blended in a little deeper but I can see why they didn't do that at first. Oh well, skinners will come out and make it look a little more uniform, I'm hoping.
Oh and if you feel like doing some work tonight, you can install Windows8. Lemme know how that goes.
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Seems like somebody at Ars read the comments section, because they've got a followup article (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/09/hands-on-with-windows-8-a-tablet-operating-system-for-the-pc-age.ars) that spends three paragraphs swearing that no, this is totally a desktop OS and not just for tablets, it's okay -- before admitting that yes the Start menu is totally gone and you're going to have to put up with a GNOME 3-style separate interface to launch your programs. And then giving the typical response to any GNOME/KDE user who has complained about his program launcher in the past 5 years: "If you don't like the way the launcher works, it's because you're doing it wrong. Why are you clicking on icons to launch programs, anyway? You should be typing filenames."
(In later screenshots, we see that the Start Menu is actually still there and still taking up space, you just can't launch programs from it anymore. If this is the way it stays in the final release, I think a hearty "Fuck you too, Microsoft" is in order, but I maintain hope that they'll do what they nearly always do and allow users to fall back to the old interface.)
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Well if it IS supposed to be tablet-like, it only makes sense that they throw a nonsensical default UI at you to encourage you to buy a new one.
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Welp, now that Ubuntu 11.10's out, it's time to reflect on 11.04.
11.04 was bullshit.
I've got my share of gripes about Unity, but I think the biggest problem with the switch is that it seems to have distracted the devs from maintaining everything else. Even in sister release Kubuntu. I don't even USE Unity, I've opted to stick with KDE, and my experience with 11.04 has been probably the worst I've had since I had to run a Windows wireless driver through a wrapper sometime back in 2007.
Every update was an opportunity for something to break. On more than one occasion, all my icons disappeared. And by "all my icons" I don't mean "all the icons on my desktop" or "all the icons in my panel", I mean ALL MY ICONS. It's a good thing I'm used to navigating Firefox with my keyboard, because there were no Back or Forward buttons and no New Tab or Close Tab buttons.
Later, when I was installing something from command-line apt-get, it finished an already-in-progress update and my icons came back. (So the second time it happened, I knew to try that!)
So, the GUI updater fucked up somewhere; it got as far as uninstalling old packages but didn't finish actually installing the upgrades.
At this point I'm about ready to throw that fucking GUI updater out, because not only does it not always work, about once a week it'll peg my CPU.
Not in any obvious way, of course. It shoots dbus-daemon up to 100%. For you Windows users out there, that's like if svchost is at 100%: you know some service somewhere is fucked up, but you can't figure out offhand which one it is, and probably don't remember what you need to run to find out.
I still don't remember the name of the specific process I need to kill to fix the problem; I just leave a Firefox tab open to a page that tells me.
And of course it's one of those things that doesn't immediately manifest itself in an obvious way. The system doesn't visibly bog down, KDE just starts flaking out. Like, I start a filecopy and the dialog never comes up. So I figure maybe I misclicked, and try it again. Still nothing. So then I try restarting the file manager, and it takes a minute of the launcher refusing to actually launch anything for me to realize that dammit, it's happened again.
Or, similarly, I try to watch a video and it doesn't come up; try a couple times before realizing that yes the damn update notifier is the culprit.
I've also had multiple kernel updates where my graphics driver doesn't get properly reinstalled to load with the new kernel. Which is another one of those easy fixes except I can never remember off the top of my head what the hell the nVidia graphics driver package is called and for some damn reason can never find it trivially with a Google search.
All in all, this is pretty trivial stuff. But it's exactly the kind of trivial stuff that I switched to Ubuntu to AVOID. This fucking distro used to be solid and friendly, and 11.04 is just a goddamn mess.
Now, I'm an optimist at heart, and think most of this boils down to 11.04 being a major change in direction for Ubuntu, and things being rough as a result of that. 11.10, then, should be the bugfix release that tamps down all the bullshit that's come up. For that reason, I am looking forward to upgrading to it in the hopes that it will fix the various infuriating things 11.04 introduced.
But I sure am happy I have a laptop to test it out on before I try it on my desktop.
(Oh, one more great thing about KDE's update notifier? It's popped up TWICE in the time it took me to write this post, to tell me a dist upgrade is available. Unlike the now-standard Windows update nag screens, there is no "Don't remind me for another [n] minutes" option; it just fucking pops up every five minutes. I am sure there is a way to disable it, but again, if I wanted to have to Google for solutions to things that should be goddamn obvious, I'd still be using Gentoo or Slackware.)
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Forgot to mention the part where I had to quit automounting samba shares because it would lock up my damn computer every time I clicked the K menu or opened a file dialog.
Anyway, the upgrade on my laptop hasn't hosed it. I like the Unity sidebar rather less than last version (used to be it would only unhide by hovering in the upper-left corner; now it unhides when you put the mouse anywhere on the lefthand side EXCEPT the upper corner; the launcher takes up way more space now, Windows/KDE style, and autohide seems buggy), but there's nothing gamebreaking.
Granted, that's what I said LAST time I did an Ubuntu upgrade, and it turned out it ran fine on my laptop but not on my desktop. But that was an alpha and this is a release.
Here goes. If you don't see me for a couple days it's because the upgrade didn't take.
Or I'm just drunk or something.
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Welp, update did not complete. After one of my several reboots it mounted my root FS as RO, so that was pretty awesome. At least this time it was fixed on reboot. (Oh yeah, that's another thing I forgot to mention about the 11.04 upgrade. THAT stuck my FS in RO too, only that time it took multiple reboots, multiple failsafe boots, and multiple fscks. So at least that didn't happen this time!)
Now the upgrader exits with a vague and worthless error telling me that something somewhere is preventing the upgrade from working for some reason, probably, unless it's a bug.
Googling this completely vague and useless error shows I'm not the only one (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/873883); that particular bug report suggests I can get around it if I disable ia32-libs. Meaning I wouldn't be able to use Flash. Come to think of it, the Flash plugin installer DID error out when I upgraded the laptop.
So, 11.04 it is for now. I still hate Flash in general and Linux Flash in particular, but not enough to try to function without it.
Fortunately the "An upgrade is available!" nag appears to have gone away.
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I thought Linux had 64-bit Flash now.
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It does, but it's not supported in the first-party Ubuntu repos and I'm leery of relying on a third-party repo just to make Oneiric work. Plus, even if it did, I still wouldn't be able to use WINE, and even though it's not something I use on a regular basis I don't really want it broken either.
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Also, on the annoying-but-not-game-breaking side of problems I've experienced with Kubuntu Natty: the system volume is broken. If I hit the volume keys on my keyboard, a slider pops up and moves up or down, but...that's all that happens. It does not actually adjust volume, it just moves the slider on a graphic. Sure, I can still adjust volume on a per-program basis and by reaching up and twiddling with the knobs on my speakers, but it's irritating.
Anyway. Still haven't upgraded to Oneiric on the desktop. The bug page blames it on cups and says it's been fixed in a proposed package, but I've decided not to fuck around with enabling proposed packages. I'll upgrade when it's a smooth process and not before.
Meanwhile, on my laptop (running Unity), I've been irritated to find that it gives me a password prompt coming out of sleep even though it's set not to, and also they've replaced the window-to-window Alt-Tab behavior with a Mac/GNOME 3 style Alt-Tab for programs/Alt-` for windows in same program (although a quick Alt-Tab, without waiting for the window list to come up, apparently moves you to your last window and not to a different program -- I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature). It can apparently be reverted to the old behavior but I haven't had a chance to mess with it just yet; couldn't find the Compiz settings and didn't have time to hunt for them.
Ars has a review (http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2011/10/desktop-dreams-ubuntu-1110-reviewed.ars), focusing on Unity.
At this point I think I'll probably try another flavor of Linux next time I rebuild, though who knows when that'll be; I really don't want to go to the trouble to tear down my entire system right now. I know Sora's a fan of Mint but it just looks butt-ugly from everything I've seen of it. My uncle said he'd had a positive experience switching from Ubuntu to SUSE. I dunno; I'm probably sticking with Ubuntu for the foreseeable future just because I don't have time to switch, but they really need to get their shit together if they want to keep me.
Fortunately, 12.04 is an LTS release, so "getting their shit together" is going to be priority one next time around.
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Mint is cool, but the updates always break it. ::(:
#! (CrunchBang) is cool though, you should check that out.
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Mint is cool, but the updates always break it. ::(:
Well, that's pretty much what I'm trying to get AWAY from.
Not entirely surprising given that it's based on Ubuntu.
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Meanwhile, on my laptop (running Unity), I've been irritated to find that it gives me a password prompt coming out of sleep even though it's set not to, and also they've replaced the window-to-window Alt-Tab behavior with a Mac/GNOME 3 style Alt-Tab for programs/Alt-` for windows in same program (although a quick Alt-Tab, without waiting for the window list to come up, apparently moves you to your last window and not to a different program -- I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature). It can apparently be reverted to the old behavior but I haven't had a chance to mess with it just yet; couldn't find the Compiz settings and didn't have time to hunt for them.
I assume you already tried searching CCSM.
Ars has a review (http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2011/10/desktop-dreams-ubuntu-1110-reviewed.ars), focusing on Unity.
My first impression was that it looked pretty slick. The delay it imposed on alt+f2 launching was a total deal-breaker, for me.
At this point I think I'll probably try another flavor of Linux next time I rebuild, though who knows when that'll be; I really don't want to go to the trouble to tear down my entire system right now. I know Sora's a fan of Mint but it just looks butt-ugly from everything I've seen of it. My uncle said he'd had a positive experience switching from Ubuntu to SUSE. I dunno; I'm probably sticking with Ubuntu for the foreseeable future just because I don't have time to switch, but they really need to get their shit together if they want to keep me.
Fortunately, 12.04 is an LTS release, so "getting their shit together" is going to be priority one next time around.
I'm happy enough dicking around with 11.10, though I went over to Gnome-3 and AWN instead of Unity.
In case anyone's wondering about how to get desktop composition (and thus AWN themes) to work in Ubuntu 11.10, go into gconf->apps->metacity->general(?) and make sure "use compositor" is checked. I'm on a Win7 box and can't conveniently check, at present. Also, for whatever reason, I can't seem to get the Compiz cube going, even when flagging it in CCSM. I probably missed something.
Apparently alt+right click is used to adjust the Gnome panel settings, which is a change from Ubuntu 9.x's default of just right-click. This is probably a Gnome-3 vs Gnome-2.x thing, not an Ubuntu thing, but it had me scratching my head for a while.
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More Oneiric irritation (on my laptop; still can't install it on my desktop): by default it's set to dim the screen after approximately 3 seconds of non-use. Even if I'm watching a movie.
There appears to be absolutely no granular control over this "feature"; it's either on or off. There does not appear to be any way to set it to something sensible like "Dim the screen after 5 minutes if I'm not playing a movie".
Also, the Emulate3Buttons option appears to have been removed, which is fucking irritating as my laptop only has two mouse buttons.
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I take it it dims even in the face of things like VLC's "disable screensaver" option (Prefs → Advanced → Video)?
(Shot in the dark.)
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Also, ever since my router went down the other day the Oneiric machine has developed the irritating habit of prompting for a wireless password every single time I wake it up. (The router is, as you might expect from the fact that I am writing this on the Internet, currently up.)
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Happy 20th birthday, vim! (http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/11/two-decades-of-productivity-vims-20th-anniversary.ars)
I use vim pretty regularly but am very much not proficient with it; the most sophisticated thing I know how to do is yy.
(Stross has had a pretty fascinating series of posts on the value of vi recently; can't find them at the moment. Notably, it's designed to run at-speed at 300 baud, which may not matter to most people anymore but is damn useful for somebody who's doing a transatlantic ssh session. He's not an emacs guy, and suggests that emacs only makes sense if you're using a PDP10-style keyboard with Ctrl to the left of A.)
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emacs only makes sense if you're using a PDP10-style keyboard with Ctrl to the left of A.
Not like Caps Lock functionality is worth a damn to begin with. May as well just remap it.
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Speaking of vim - there was a neat post via Daring Fireball (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/11/02/mark-oconnor) about a fellow who gave up his macbook for an iPad (http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for-an-ipad), by (in part) SSHing to vim.
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Decided to give the latest version of Mint a shot and have been finding Compiz a lot more cooperative in it than Ubuntu 11.10.
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I'm thinking of installing Ubuntu on an old laptop of mine, and I've got 9.04 on a disc. If I successfully install that, will it update itself to the latest stable version?
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I doubt you can do a straight upgrade from 9.04 to 11.10 -- that's 5 versions ago.
I'm not even really sure I can recommend Ubuntu without reservation at this point, but if you want to give it a shot I'd definitely recommend burning the latest version and starting from there. (I'm tempted to suggest just going with 10.04 since that's the long-term support version from before they started shaking everything up, but you'd be stuck with some pretty damn outdated packages.)
Or possibly Mint.
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MS will let you jailbreak Windows Phone 7 for $9 (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/11/why-microsoft-authorized-a-9-windows-phone-jailbreak.ars).
This is fucking brilliant, and I'm not being sarcastic. Create a barrier to entry, but a small one, and you get a piece of the action from people who want to run third-party apps, make exploits a less attractive option, and straddle the line between Apple's walled garden and Google's free-for-all.
Well-played, MS.
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Welp, accidentally bumped the power button on my surge protector and the FS keeps going RO shortly after I log in. Can't do an fsck on a mounted filesystem, and even booting to failsafe mounts the FS. It has an option to reboot to fsck, which doesn't seem to do anything; neither does creating a /forcefsck file. Eventually had to boot to a damn CD; fsck's running now and I hope it works. (EDIT: Oh, haha, I forgot the --fix-fixable flag! Well, guess I'll run ANOTHER 15-minute disk check...) (EDIT 2: Oh good, it coredumped.)
In fairness, this may not be an Ubuntu problem so much as a Hans-Reiser-Murdered-His-Wife-and-Now-Nobody-Uses-His-Filesystem-Anymore problem.
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Saw this coming a mile away.
MATE
MATE is at a really early stage of its development and isn't stable yet. It was included in this release to gather more feedback and help it get the maturity it deserves. In this release it comes with stability issues with all Murine based themes, the file manager and on certain systems the session itself. You cannot run MATE from the live session. Once the system is installed you can try to run it by selecting "MATE" as your session at the login screen.
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Soo...a GNOME 2 fork (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/07/linux_mint_12_gnome_3/)?
Trinity tried that with KDE3. I guess it's still under active development, but I don't actually know anybody who gives a fuck. Mainly because KDE4 eventually got its shit together.
Of course, if we're to be precise, the problem isn't GNOME 3, it's GNOME Shell. If MATE's endgame is actually a GNOME 2-style shell that runs on top of GNOME 3, that's going to be a fuck of a lot of work but will have a much broader appeal and staying power than just forking an obsolescent DE.
I guess that's what MGSE is?
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Guess the iron's pretty hot for it.
As other distributions adopted new desktops such as Unity and Gnome 3, many users felt alienated and consequently migrated to Linux Mint. We recorded a 40% increase in a single month and we’re now quickly catching up with Ubuntu for the number #1 spot within the Linux desktop market.
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It seems like a lot of hardware still eats shit on Gnome 3 RE: Graphics drivers. Pretty much everything fglrx works on it now, right? But I seem to recall a friend of mine having trouble with an Intel chipset and my mother's Linux desktop with an old low-end 9xxx series card and the Free drivers isn't stable under it (I'm not sure she'd like it, though--too unfamiliar). That might just be because there's something wrong with her card--quite possible, it's always acted a bit weird--but it runs Minecraft just fine.
I was going to suggest that problems with Gnome 3 were making people not want to use it, but everything I've got to say about it are anecdotal and, besides, Ubuntu used Unity. Unity which, as far as I know, never really had those issues (or didn't have them as long?).
Nothing to do with me, anyhow; I compile my own dwm with 0 pixel borders, for fuck's sake.
Finally tried Unity, though, when I threw Ubuntu on an old, semi-busted laptop to try this (http://gimx.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5). Felt... basic, but essentially usable.
In fairness, this may not be an Ubuntu problem so much as a Hans-Reiser-Murdered-His-Wife-and-Now-Nobody-Uses-His-Filesystem-Anymore problem.
Reiser4? ...mounted root? (IIRC, it had some serious performance issues with some workloads outside of its focus.) What did you need it for? Hoping nothing got eaten. I've heard nice things about BtrFS, but there *are* bugs... and no proper fsck (its fsck can't fix errors yet). What'll you be moving to?
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No, Reiser3. Eventually got everything straightened out. (fsck from CD kept segfaulting so I'm not sure it actually did anything, but on my next boot the forcefsck finally worked.)
Considering btrfs the next time I do a clean install, but no time or inclination right now.
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Anyway. Still haven't upgraded to Oneiric on the desktop. The bug page blames it on cups and says it's been fixed in a proposed package, but I've decided not to fuck around with enabling proposed packages. I'll upgrade when it's a smooth process and not before.
Finally decided it's been long enough that it's not going to get fixed upstream. Fucked around a good bit with the proposed packages; no change. Ultimately determined that it wasn't cups at all, it was (as another poster in the bug thread suggested) nspluginwrapper. Which, fortunately, unlike CUPS is not a dependency for like every damn package.
Upgrade still not smooth. Hangs on splash screen at boot; KDM never loads and I don't get a login shell (though I can ssh in). Current stab in the dark is that it's an nvidia driver problem, as I saw a reference to "nouveau" when I booted to failsafe.
EDIT: Eeyup, reinstalling nvidia-current got me into X. More tribulations to come, I'm sure...
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Okay, so so far:
Thing blocking upgrade: turned out to be nspluginwrapper.
Removed; upgrade worked.
Problem: Some more arcane Flash programs don't work now. But videos work fine so far, and that is of course the main reason to use Flash.
Problem at boot: nvidia drivers not updated with kernel.
Removed, readded; worked.
Problem: Compiz doesn't seem to work. Not like I use the damn thing anyway. (glxinfo doesn't show anything wrong.)
Additional problem: Had that fucking thing where FS went to RO a few minutes after boot again.
Didn't recur on reboot; looks fine now.
New problem: no audio.
Googled; someone said to wipe out my ~/.pulse directory. Audio works now.
And the volume controls on my keyboard work again too!
On the whole, compared to what I've been dealing with in Natty, this actually WAS a smooth upgrade. But a pretty fucking far cry from something a typical end user would be capable of troubleshooting.
Additional issue: Banshee window is completely blank and unresponsive. Plays music okay, but no controls.
Probably not a big deal; I'm using Banshee mainly because it's the thing that opened when I clicked on an audio track. Can switch back to Amarok and not feel too bad about it.
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Sounds like some nasty business. Do you usually experience that in Ubuntu release upgrades? Better than in Natty, yes, but I'm asking more about an impression of Ubuntu upgrades in general.
Considering btrfs the next time I do a clean install, but no time or inclination right now.
I'd stay away from it for data that isn't replicated elsewhere until they've got a fsck for it that actually fixes errors it finds (I believe they're still working on it).
Can switch back to Amarok and not feel too bad about it.
There was a period in which I used KDE (pre-4) and during this period I used Amarok, where previously I had used XMMS (out of inertia more than anything, having preferred to use Winamp when I'd been on windows). I liked it quite a bit--it felt very polished--but when I went back to Gnome, I started using Rhythmbox (despite its iTunes-clone aspirations and not really being better than Amarok) and have continued to use it to this day. I should probably take another look at Amarok--been a long time since I've looked at it.
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Sounds like some nasty business. Do you usually experience that in Ubuntu release upgrades? Better than in Natty, yes, but I'm asking more about an impression of Ubuntu upgrades in general.
Generally they've gone pretty smoothly; last couple have been a bit spottier. Assume that's mostly due to general Ubuntu problems and partially due to my not having done a clean install since 2007 and piling dist-upgrade on top of dist-upgrade. (In fairness, I've never had a major Windows release upgrade cleanly. Compared to that, Kubuntu's been rock solid.)
Considering btrfs the next time I do a clean install, but no time or inclination right now.
I'd stay away from it for data that isn't replicated elsewhere until they've got a fsck for it that actually fixes errors it finds (I believe they're still working on it).
Yeah, like I say, not in a hurry.
I started using Rhythmbox (despite its iTunes-clone aspirations and not really being better than Amarok) and have continued to use it to this day. I should probably take another look at Amarok--been a long time since I've looked at it.
Haven't tried Rhythmbox since the upgrade. It's not bad, but yeah I bristle a bit at the iTunes-like too. Especially since it doesn't seem to work as smoothly as iTunes.
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Especially since it doesn't seem to work as smoothly as iTunes.
Uninstall it if it runs like iTunes for Windows.
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You know, I've never actually used iTunes for Windows.
(Actually come to think of it I had it installed on my old work computer, but I rarely fired it up.)
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Oh good, clicking one of the extra buttons on my mouse disables it now. Replugging it doesn't fix it, and neither does restarting X.
Also I get a popping sound when I get new mail now. Doesn't appear to be a way to disable it from KDE's settings, and it doesn't look like you can access the GTK settings from KDE.
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POP POP (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmhcpbAYrYk#ws)
i don't see the problem
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Of course, if we're to be precise, the problem isn't GNOME 3, it's GNOME Shell. If MATE's endgame is actually a GNOME 2-style shell that runs on top of GNOME 3, that's going to be a fuck of a lot of work but will have a much broader appeal and staying power than just forking an obsolescent DE.
I guess that's what MGSE is?
Ah, THAT'S (https://www.linux.com//images/stories/com_lfnews/galleries/linux-mint-12-preview-1321885860/linux-mint-12-mgse-2-1321887276.png) more like it.
Still a fuckload of needlessly wasted space in the top bar, but they're moving in the right direction.
I predict MGSE will catch on in a big way and ultimately the GNOME devs will do the same thing they did with the 2.x series: back off their stupid no-guys-I-read-a-paper-about-this crap and acknowledge how people actually interact with their computers in real life.
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Fortunately, 12.04 is an LTS release, so "getting their shit together" is going to be priority one next time around.
Alpha's out (http://ostatic.com/blog/first-alpha-of-ubuntu-12-04-arrives-precise-pangolin); Shuttleworth DOES apparently still know what "LTS" means and is talking about tweaks to make sure everything works and that the whole thing is suitable for business users.
Don't expect I'll jump right on this one, but I've got a laptop that's not mission-critical and which has worked well with alphas in the past. Maybe once I get some free time.
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The good news is that HP isn't taking WebOS out behind the barn and shooting it, it's setting it free (http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/hps-decision-means-webos-could-end-up-more-open-than-android.ars).
The last batch of their tablets is going on sale on Sunday, $99 a pop; I expect them to be gone faster than anyone can reasonably expect to get one. With any luck this will mean extended longevity not just for their (apparently pretty good) tablet, but for WebOS itself.
No word on what license yet but I'm betting something like Apache.
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Mint's GNOME3 implementation becomes a full-on fork (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAzMTQ).
I continue to expect that there will be an overwhelming demand for this, and eventually it'll all get merged back into mainline GNOME.
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Something I've been keeping an eye on for awhile: ZFS for Mac. It was supposed to be included in Leopard (IIRC) but was cancelled; rights issues, if I'm not mistaken.
Well, the guy who was in charge of that project has struck out on his own and just recently released it as Zevo (http://tenscomplement.com/).
Why I'm interested: my grandmother has a MacBook Pro, and uses it to put together family movies. The source files are spread across a half-dozen or so external hard drives. There's some redundancy across drives, but not really any kind of reliable backup. The drives themselves are probably a decade old and mostly full.
A few years back she bought my old roomie's rack of external LaCie drives, but I realized in short order that they weren't going to be a vastly superior solution as-is (3 500GB drives and 1 1TB drive, arranged in a software RAID -- simple concatenation IIRC, not striped or mirrored) -- they didn't have enough space to replace her existing bunch of drives, and there was no redundancy so they weren't reliable.
So I replaced the 4 drives with new 2TB ones. I thought of doing a RAID10 thing, but saw Zevo was under development and decided we could wait.
Well, looks like the sucker's finally been released -- partially. They're releasing it in Silver, Gold, and Platinum Editions (in pizza-franchise-style they-think-we're-stupid inflation -- if you have three sizes, the smallest one is not a MEDIUM, asshole) and so far only the Silver is available. The good news is they're offering to let you upgrade to each successive version as it comes out, for just the price difference; the bad news is that it still doesn't look like Silver (or even Gold) has the full feature set I want (RAID-Z), so I'll have to wait anyway.
Still, neat.
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They're releasing it in Silver, Gold, and Platinum Editions (in pizza-franchise-style they-think-we're-stupid inflation -- if you have three sizes, the smallest one is not a MEDIUM, asshole)
I'm sorry if this is diverging from the main topic, but I think you're being overly nit-picky here. Silver does not exclusively mean "second place" or "middle tier," and in this case is meant to be interpreted as "the least valuable of the three options."
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If only there were some standard, universally-understood system that used precious metals to indicate three different tiers.
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Maybe Standard, Silver and Gold, but "Bronze" is really tough to sell to people due to its perception as sort of a consolation prize in our fucking overcompetitive country.
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That's the general idea. I prefer to think that people buying goddamn ZFS for Mac are less likely to fall for that stupid shit than the average Starbucks customer, but maybe that's wishful thinking.
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If you wanted a logically consistent answer for it, bronze (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze) isn't an element.
But it's probably actually a combination of all of the other reasons.
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I've heard nice things about BtrFS, but there *are* bugs... and no proper fsck (its fsck can't fix errors yet).
Per Phoronix (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA0ODU), we're apparently just about there. And Oracle is, for once, not completely worthless to the open-source community.
...hell, we've just about got enough here for an FS threadsplit, but a lot of it's tied up with my general griping about my last Ubuntu upgrade.
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Kubuntu loses Canonical support, will now be volunteer-only. (http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/canonical-ending-support-for-kubuntu-reassigning-lead-developer-1.ars)
Well, I'm going to stick with the damn thing as long as it's usable.
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Win8 "consumer preview" (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/02/windows-8-consumer-preview-coming-29th-february.ars) due 2/29.
The 250GB drive I keep Windows on is getting a little tight and I've been thinking of sticking a new HD in. If people say the Win8 preview's any good, I might try it, but really I like Win7 and do not care for the thinking behind Win8.
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Win8 "consumer preview" (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/02/windows-8-consumer-preview-coming-29th-february.ars) due 2/29.
...anyone wanna try poking it with a stick?
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Gnome2 and Gnome3 won't update titlebars without window resize when using compiz. This is annoying as fuck when using tabbed programs, like text editors and browsers.
Cinnamon, thankfully, doesn't have that problem. Tragically, as with Gnome3, Gnome-Do runs like utter shit in Cinnamon. Have fun mashing your hotkey, trying to get it to open, and inserting key-presses/characters in the current focus. The new Mint menu isn't responsive enough to compensate, though there's significant functionality overlap.
Frustrating. Best bet might be to try using a Gnome2 setup without VirtualBox.
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More on Win8 (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/02/getting-started-with-the-windows-8-consumer-preview.ars). Boy it sure does look a lot like GNOME3.
Oh and also per page 2 they've remapped most of their Start key shortcuts.
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More on Win8 (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/02/getting-started-with-the-windows-8-consumer-preview.ars). Boy it sure does look a lot like GNOME3.
Oh and also per page 2 they've remapped most of their Start key shortcuts.
What it looks a lot like is Windows Phone 7. Which is an awful interface for a desktop environment. If GNOME3 ripped that interface off, then GNOME3 is controlled by stupid, stupid monkeys.
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Yeah, that's pretty much the trend. (We've been talking about it for awhile, but it's a giant dump thread, so I can understand people not keeping up.) Current desktop GUI designers all seem to have contracted a horrible disease where they think a 24" screen controlled by a mouse should behave the same way as a 4" touchscreen. Apple, MS, GNOME, and Canonical (the company that makes Ubuntu) have all fallen prey to this general stupidity.
My desktop of choice, KDE, has managed to avoid it so far, but given that there's a KDE tablet (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/02/preorders-begin-for-spark-the-open-kde-tablet.ars) now I'm concerned that KDE 5 will follow the trend. (Maybe by then Cinnamon, the project to make GNOME3 behave like GNOME2 that Sei was just mentioning, will be ready for prime time. Or maybe I'll have to switch to Xfce or LXDE or something.)
I don't know where it goes from here. I'd like to think that the designers will get over this stupidity and we'll be back to desktops behaving like desktops in a couple years. But I don't know. It's entirely possible that, in the long term, desktops will fade and tablets and phones will replace them -- not now and probably not in the next five years, but maybe in the next ten. If that's the assumption and the long game, then yeah, I can see why the devs would want to converge on a single codebase rather than maintain one that's going to go away.
But I think there'll always be a place for bigger screens and external input devices. Maybe not a keyboard and mouse as we know them, but something quicker and more convenient than typing with your thumbs.
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I don't even like the touchscreen interface for phones all that much. The Blackberry trackball was so much better for a lot of things; ideally they'd start making things with both, but it's kind of awkward to determine where the ball should go thatswhatshesaid.
I think the "desktop touchscreen" idiom is in anticipation of the tablet replacing the traditional PC, but that wil speculation isn't really panning out; tablets and PCs actually exist pretty comfortably side-by-side. In particular, the tablet is wildly inappropriate for office use, and that's where Microsoft is losing the plot hard; non-technical corporate use is where it still makes most of its money and maintains a pretty comfortable lock, and if they start to take a direction that makes THAT segment lose interest (which they already have with the fucking Ribbon) then they might as well fucking quit the PC market and just become a game company.
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The thing that bugs me the most about Windows 8 is the home screen. I mean, yes, the Start Screen sucks, but more the design mindset that leads to that being your home screen. Any computing device has kind of a "Default" place to be, a context from which other things originate. On Android, that's the home screen. On all prior versions of Windows, that's been the desktop. On Windows 8, it's the Start Screen. That's where everything originates, and where everything returns. "Desktop" is just an app within that.
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I don't even like the touchscreen interface for phones all that much. The Blackberry trackball was so much better for a lot of things; ideally they'd start making things with both, but it's kind of awkward to determine where the ball should go thatswhatshesaid.
Yeah, fiancee just got a BB yesterday and the first thing she said was how much she liked the nub. I used it briefly and it was pretty smooth.
In my experience I like touchscreens, but I still don't have a smartphone. Should get one one of these days, at least to learn how to develop for Android.
I think the "desktop touchscreen" idiom is in anticipation of the tablet replacing the traditional PC, but that wil speculation isn't really panning out; tablets and PCs actually exist pretty comfortably side-by-side.
I think it's entirely too early to say it's not panning out. The trouble is that, judging by the reviews, there have only been two good tablets -- predictably, Apple's and HP/Palm's -- and the latter got smothered with a pillow before it had a chance to catch on.
Brad used to use an MBP as his primary computer; since then he's gotten a full Pro, and replaced the laptop with an iPad. Dude's a statistical outlier, but he's hardly unique; I think there'll be plenty of people in the coming years who have a desktop at home and a tablet in a backpack.
There's an appeal to replacing laptops with tablets, as tablets may be "good enough" for most of what laptops can do, and they're more portable. And keep in mind that laptops have been outselling desktops for the past few years now.
In particular, the tablet is wildly inappropriate for office use, and that's where Microsoft is losing the plot hard; non-technical corporate use is where it still makes most of its money and maintains a pretty comfortable lock, and if they start to take a direction that makes THAT segment lose interest (which they already have with the fucking Ribbon) then they might as well fucking quit the PC market and just become a game company.
Yeah, I can't imagine a single corporate office actually switching to Win8, never mind that most are just getting around to 7.
But I'm not really sure that's what MS is going for with this. Win7 Phone is, by all accounts, pretty great, but selling abysmally. MS is trying to enter into the tablet and phone market; the desktop seems to be an afterthought this generation.
Bears noting, of course, that corporations ARE actually a perfect place to try and make inroads in phone/tablet sales right now, as BB is on the decline and Apple is just beginning to gain a foothold.
The thing that bugs me the most about Windows 8 is the home screen. I mean, yes, the Start Screen sucks, but more the design mindset that leads to that being your home screen. Any computing device has kind of a "Default" place to be, a context from which other things originate. On Android, that's the home screen. On all prior versions of Windows, that's been the desktop. On Windows 8, it's the Start Screen. That's where everything originates, and where everything returns. "Desktop" is just an app within that.
An interesting point. GNOME 3 doesn't have a damn desktop at all -- actually, it does, but you can't put anything on it, which is really even worse than having the program launcher be the "home" screen.
I'm not sure that the paradigm shift is an inherently bad idea from a usability perspective (have you seen the shit lusers slather all over their desktops?), but as a power user I want my damn desktop, and I want my launcher to be a small, quickly-navigable rectangle in one corner of the screen. I sure as hell don't need those icons spread out across an entire 1920x1200x24" screen, covering up whatever the fuck I was doing before I opened the launcher and making me train my eyes (and pointer) from one corner of the screen to the other.
Again, great for a phone, but not so sensible for a desktop.
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An interesting point. GNOME 3 doesn't have a damn desktop at all -- actually, it does, but you can't put anything on it, which is really even worse than having the program launcher be the "home" screen.
Gnome desktop lets you place icons on it via Nautlius. It'd be okay, if you could hide the fucking file menu.
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Tragically, as with Gnome3, Gnome-Do runs like utter shit in Cinnamon. Have fun mashing your hotkey, trying to get it to open, and inserting key-presses/characters in the current focus.
This was half-wrong. Gnome-Do works well enough, with Cinnamon, provided one doesn't include <Super> in the key-combo used to open it.
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I've seen a couple reviews of the Win8 beta that really gushed and said it was great.
But they were by tablet users.
Haven't really seen anything from people trying to work it on a desktop yet.
EDIT: Ah, The Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/03/andrew_does_windows8/).
The problem isn’t so much Metro, which by itself represents some good thinking about touch device design. It’s Microsoft’s insistence on inserting Metro between us and what we want to do – and at times Metro is spectacularly inappropriate.
But over at Redmond, the Metro team appears to be completely out of control, like the Red Guard during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They’ve sent the educated to the countryside to dig trenches, and for good measure broken their spectacles. Nobody seems to be able to say no to the Metro Guard, it seems, for fear of punishment. But welding this immature and inappropriate smallscreen UI into the everyday Windows experience is being carried out in a quite totalitarian fashion.
[...]
The problem with Metro in Windows 8 is one of policy rather than execution. At the end of the day Metro is like one of those funky widget layers like Dashboard or Yahoo! Widgets or like a lockdown launcher, like At Ease. But the Maoists have dictated that this ephemeral layer must become the new shell.
In other words, the exact thing I've been saying since I saw the first preview pics.
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The Reg likes Server 8 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/14/windows_8_server/) a lot better than Regular 8, and touts its focus on standards.
Microsoft's newly found openness means that no one is forced to use Windows 8 for administration. What's more, Windows Server 8 is a versatile and feature-rich backend for non-Microsoft client operating systems. Whether your business chooses Linux, Windows, Apple or BYOD client deployments, the case for Windows Server 8 as the backend is easily made.
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Amazing what happens when you finally realize you're no longer the de facto standard for everything. Can't wait for Apple to fall from grace, since I can't really fault their hardware quality.
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Welp, it's a good thing I keep this laptop around to try betas on before I put them on my desktop. Because the Precise beta doesn't work at all on it.
Well, I mean, it boots, and I've got the command line. But once I log in, I just get a blank desktop; no icons, no GUI, no nothin'. It responds to Ctrl-Alt-F1 to drop me back to the console, but doesn't seem to respond to any other key combos to try and get anything to work.
EDIT: Actually, Unity 2D seems to work. So at least the thing's not useless.
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Beta 2's got Unity working. Apparently the panel doesn't autohide anymore. (Hopefully there's a way to set it to autohide, but right-clicking doesn't do anything.)
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Ars has a fairly in-depth rundown of the Win8 interface (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/04/windows-8-on-the-desktopan-awkward-hybrid.ars) from a desktop perspective.
Iiiiit's pretty much what everyone's been saying it is: a great tablet interface awkwardly shoehorned into a desktop OS.
There's some good stuff in there too. Filecopy has finally entered the twenty-first century:
Each operation can be paused independently. If you disconnect from the network, for example after closing your laptop, rather than aborting any transfers in progress, copy operations will be paused. They can be resumed once reconnected.
And Task Manager now reports network and disk usage rather than just RAM and CPU, meaning no more vexing "my HD light is fucking solid but I don't know what's doing it because everything's using 0% CPU" situations.
And:
The App History and Startup tabs represent something of a change for Task Manager. Instead of giving you a view of the system's current behavior, these both track persistent and historic data. App History shows the aggregate processor time and network bandwidth usage of Metro-style apps. This lets you see if an app has a tendency to eat lots of processor time or network bandwidth, even if the app isn't currently running.
Startup is similarly historic; it shows the disk and processor burden caused by all of a user's startup programs, as well as the ability (with a single click) to disable any item from starting automatically.
[...]
Windows 7's Task Manager can already be used to create dumps of processes and attach debuggers—both useful for developers trying to figure out what's going wrong with a program. To these, Windows 8 adds a new "Analyze Wait Chain" option. When applications hang, for example due to a coding error causing a deadlock, the root cause can be hard to determine. Windows Vista introduced Wait Chain Traversal to allow debuggers to see why threads are stuck. In Windows 8, this analysis can now be performed directly from Task Manager.
This isn't something that you'll be doing every day. You probably won't even do it once a year. If your system is working normally, it has no value at all. But it's really handy when you need it. Another Windows 8 user recently told me about some problems he had been having with the operating system; for some reason, applications were hanging on startup. Analyze Wait Chain showed that the programs were all waiting for the network to do something. He restarted the network driver (which is, of course, a beta) and all the applications that were stuck sprung into life.
All useful information!
Better multimonitor support:
When the multimonitor taskbar is enabled, the system distinguishes between the primary taskbar, shown on the primary monitor, and the secondaries, on other monitors. The primary taskbar includes the clock, notification area, and pinned icons. The secondaries only contain icons for running programs. There are three modes: icons can only show on the taskbar where the window is open, they can show on all taskbars, or they can show on the primary taskbar plus the one where the window is open.
Oh I like that.
But then he gets into hot corners. Now, I hate hot corners in general, but in particular it sounds like the multimonitor implementation is just bad. And that's before even getting into Metro pretty much flat-out not working on multiple monitors.
In fact the "Metro" vs. "traditional" style apps looks like it'll be a real problem and vexation:
And it really must be alt-tab; the taskbar doesn't include Metro-style applications. It doesn't even hint that you have any running. Conversely, the Metro-style task switcher that appears in the top-left corner only shows Metro-style apps. Desktop applications don't get individual buttons; there's just a singular "Desktop" button. Only alt-tab shows individual options for each individual desktop and each individual Metro app, so if you've got a mixed workload, alt-tab is the only consistent way to switch between running programs. (Technically, you could also use Task Manager to switch, but who wants to do that?)
:fail: ...how does that even happen? I mean, I know there used to be all kinds of shit that didn't show up in the taskbar or with an alt-tab, but...they'd mostly fixed that! This is a big step backward.
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MS getting rid of stupid fucking "Windows Live" brand; even the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/business/windows-live-brand-fades-into-the-sunset-digital-domain.html) is having a laugh at their expense:
IF you own a Windows-based PC, you may like the operating system well enough. Or you may merely tolerate it, if you give it much thought at all. But whatever your feeling, “love” probably isn’t the word that immediately comes to mind to describe it.
I bring this up because Microsoft acts as if its customers have a strong affection for all things Windows. For the last seven years, it has tried to make Windows the anchor brand for software that is not an operating system.
An array of products, with no natural connections to one another, have received the “Windows Live” moniker. Windows Live Essentials, for example, was the name for a suite of software products that could be installed on a PC, and included photo management, video editing and instant messaging. Windows Live Mesh provided file synchronization among one’s personal computers, including Macs. And the list went on: Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Search, Windows Live Toolbar, Windows Live Family Safety, Windows Live Writer, and others.
It was folly.
Coincidentally, as part of my trip through all my old blog posts to slap tags on them, I was just the other day reading the post where I first pointed out this shit was stupid (http://www.corporate-sellout.com/index.php/2007/02/09/windowslivehotmail/), back in aught-seven.
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Remember before that, when everything was branded Microsoft .NET? Microsoft .NET Messenger, and so on. It was years before I found out .NET was actually a software framework.
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Yesbut at least it WAS a software framework and not a damn OS.
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Gabe Newell really fucking hates Windows 8 (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/steams-newell-windows-8-catastrophe-driving-valve-to-embrace-linux/), believes it (most notably, its app store) is going to be an absolute catastrophe for PC gaming, and says that's why he's been hedging his bets by moving into the Linux space.
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Well... yeah.
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If Miscrosoft goes full-on walled garden it'll be interesting to see what tries to take it's place.
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Using my crystal ball, I'm going to go with Windows 8 flops, Windows 9 is good again.
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I'm going to go with "I thought the app store and stuff was just a level on top of the regular Windows and you can revert to a traditional desktop environment if you want."
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I'm going to go with "I thought the app store and stuff was just a level on top of the regular Windows and you can revert to a traditional desktop environment if you want."
Nope. Start Menu is entirely gone, "Desktop" is just an app within the Start Screen that is your new homescreen.
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Using my crystal ball, I'm going to go with Windows 8 flops, Windows 9 is good again.
Praying for this. I already didn't like what I'd heard about Win8, now I know that it will flat-out not be an option for me.
The silver lining to Gabe being correct is that if PC game designers abandon Windows in droves, there won't be any tempting games to make me grumble about having to stick to 7 for a long time.
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If Miscrosoft goes full-on walled garden it'll be interesting to see what tries to take it's place.
It'll never happen on the desktop. Phones and tablets are another matter, but nothing's really in a position to take their place unless people start buying them first.
I'm going to go with "I thought the app store and stuff was just a level on top of the regular Windows and you can revert to a traditional desktop environment if you want."
Yes and no.
Nope. Start Menu is entirely gone, "Desktop" is just an app within the Start Screen that is your new homescreen.
This much is true.
That Ars beta review I linked/quoted at the top of the page is instructive; you can't get around the Start screen but they said you can avoid most of the rest of the Metro dickery. On the whole they seemed to think it was actually pretty good but with some rough edges.
But that's a bit of a tangent, really. Yes, the standard version of Win8 is still an open platform; yes, you can install arbitrary apps; no, the App Store doesn't PRECLUDE the use of Steam or any other way of getting games.
But this is goddamn Microsoft we're talking about, remember?
They've already been strongarming publishers into following their checklist to get the GFW logo.
This is going to be more of that, coupled with good old-fashioned 1990's-vintage "it's what's on my desktop so that's what I use" ubiquity.
Now, I don't see Steam taking nearly the kind of hit that Netscape did; Valve's in a much better position now than Netscape was back then. And EA's got enough money to keep throwing at Origin that it'll be around for years even if nobody's that damn interested in actually using it. So we've got a much healthier competetive market now than we did 15 years ago (plus an EU ready to pounce on absolutely anything MS does, but I don't think that's likely to affect their stateside operations much. Or their European operations.). It's not going to be the catastrophe that we saw during Browser War I.
But it IS going to hurt Steam, and I think it's going to hurt indie devs (since they'll now be faced with an App Store that gives them more exposure but eats a greater percentage of their profits).
But honest to God, if it makes Linux a more attractive platform both for gaming AND for general-purpose computing, I'm not gonna lie, I am skeptical at the prospect but it would make me pretty goddamn happy if it happened.
The rub is that Win8 is actually going to make it HARDER to install Linux. See, MS is pushing for all vendors, going forward, to support a firmware-level authentication scheme that verifies binary signing at an OS level -- basically, if your OS doesn't authenticate, it won't boot. It's a security feature, but it has serious ramifications for Linux-based OS's.
Hopefully, most hardware vendors will allow users to disable the feature. And some Linux distros -- including Ubuntu, the biggest one (and the one Valve is officially supporting, so far) -- ARE signing their bootloaders. But I think we are very likely to see certain hardware models that will not support arbitrary OS installation.
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Reg has more (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/26/gabe_newell_windows_8/), and apparently "insightful and evenhanded" won the coin toss over "sneery and condescending" this time, which is nice and more than I expected.
It looks at Newell's comments from both sides -- he's probably overstating the harm that Win8 is going to do, but on the other hand people probably HAVE underestimated the effects that MS's newfound finickiness on hardware support could have on OEM's.
On some level, I think it's a plus that SOMEBODY is dragging vendors kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century by forcing them off BIOS, and nobody else but MS is in a position to do that.
That said: while UEFI is definitely a big technological step forward from BIOS, it's got its share of problems and potential pitfalls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Criticism). In a more perfect world I'd rather see support for something open like coreboot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreboot) or OpenFirmware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFirmware).
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Well, that was fast: someone coded up a Start Menu for Windows 8 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/23/classic_shell_gives_windows_8_a_start_button/).
I mean, I figured it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I thought the OS would actually be released first.
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I threw Fedora 17 on this new laptop of mine, because the only Linux distro I've used for the last... ever has been Ubuntu, and I feel like I should try to get comfortable with something else.
Just fought for two hours to get this thing to print to a Windows-shared printer. Found on network, login OK. CUPS, PPDs, gnashing of teeth.
Turns out I neglected to install samba. Sometimes I don't even know what to say.
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I've been thinking if I ever DO get the spare scratch for an SSD and end up doing a clean install, I'll probably try SuSe. I hear good things.
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Sooo MS appears to be pricing itself right out of the market with Surface -- it's too much more than the Nexus 7 to compete on the low end, and not enough less than the iPad to compete on the high end. Seems like a bad move to me.
And I'd like to see it gain some ground, TBH. More competition is a good thing, Windows 8 seems like it IS a good tablet OS even if I have some qualms about it as a desktop OS, and the keyboard seems like a good idea too.
Google is clearly subsidizing the Nexus 7. I can see why MS doesn't want to do that with the Surface -- partly because that's probably going to be the biggest profit avenue for Win8 given people's nervousness about the desktop version, and partly because charging more creates the PERCEPTION of more value -- but I think ultimately it's a mistake. I think they need to try to compete with Google, Asus, Samsung, and Amazon, not Apple.
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Windows 8 seems like it IS a good tablet OS
(It is not.)
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Hm. You using the release preview or whatever it is they called it? What's wrong with it?
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You know how Android and iOS have no real concept of "close application", just a very long suspend until the next time you open it? Windows 8 has that too.
But it's Windows. Apps still manage memory the same way, so you start hitting performance issues fairly quickly on a device with limited power/memory/cpu.
The whole UI is gesture-based, which is fairly standard on touch interfaces, but the gesture recognition is fiddly as fuck. It's not as forgiving as it should be if you accidentally whack into an icon in its cluttered menu, and it's pretty easy to completely screw up your layout when you were just trying to switch pages. To be fair, I was using a beta on a device optimized for Windows 7, so it might have just been half-baked when I tried it.
Oh, and kind of a minor thing, but it really got me: login passwords are still text-only. No gesture or touchpad passwords like you get on a standard phone. IN ADDITION, the password rules force you to pick something which is cumbersome as fuck to type in on a virtual keyboard, meaning it takes 10+ seconds of fiddling with that every time I use the thing rather than the half a second to input the perfectly secure gesture password on my Android. Little, thoughtless stuff like that adds up.
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You know how Android and iOS have no real concept of "close application", just a very long suspend until the next time you open it? Windows 8 has that too.
But it's Windows. Apps still manage memory the same way, so you start hitting performance issues fairly quickly on a device with limited power/memory/cpu.
The whole UI is gesture-based, which is fairly standard on touch interfaces, but the gesture recognition is fiddly as fuck. It's not as forgiving as it should be if you accidentally whack into an icon in its cluttered menu, and it's pretty easy to completely screw up your layout when you were just trying to switch pages. To be fair, I was using a beta on a device optimized for Windows 7, so it might have just been half-baked when I tried it.
Yeah, all that stuff DOES sound like it could be fixed by the time the service pack rolls around. Which I am given to understand is actually going to happen by launch time.
(Regarding the "no closing the app" thing: Apple's doing it on the desktop, too, and I think that's actually one of the cases where bringing the phone metaphor to the desktop is a good idea -- just so long as there's a way for power users to disable it. Save and Quit may be ideas that are firmly ingrained into our brains, but in truth they're 1970's relics best abstracted out of userspace.)
Oh, and kind of a minor thing, but it really got me: login passwords are still text-only. No gesture or touchpad passwords like you get on a standard phone. IN ADDITION, the password rules force you to pick something which is cumbersome as fuck to type in on a virtual keyboard, meaning it takes 10+ seconds of fiddling with that every time I use the thing rather than the half a second to input the perfectly secure gesture password on my Android. Little, thoughtless stuff like that adds up.
Yeah, I went through and randomized my passwords recently; at first I checked the "Include High ANSI Characters" box, up until the first time I hit a password box that didn't support the Paste command (which is a stupid fucking idea BTW) and realized why I should not have checked that box.
Password rules are stupidly, laughbly bad, not just for the reasons xkcd has already outlined. I hit one site that rejected any password without numbers in at as not secure enough, but utterly refused any character that wasn't alphanumeric or an underscore.
My favorite is the little bars that evaluate how secure your password is, which are of course completely fucking meaningless unless someone actually builds a dictionary into their backend. A randomized 10-character password is "weak" because it has only one capital letter and no numbers? Shut up, you're stupid; I bet you'd tell me "P@ssw0rd123" is Strong. That or error out because of the at sign.
...hem. That's a whole other blog post, though.
As to Win8: again, this is stuff that could be fixed pretty easily; RTM is already one version passed the last preview release, and there are going to be patches for that by the time it's on the shelves.
Sounds like a typical "wait for the service pack" release. Surprise surprise.
(I'm still considering fucking around with the preview release when I rebuild my computer next week. We'll see.)
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Then again: Microsoft fresh out of $499 Surface RTs after one day of pre-orders (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/10/microsoft-fresh-out-of-499-surface-rts-after-one-day-of-pre-orders/)
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Ubuntu 12.10 is out, and includes a new feature where it provides stupid, irrelevant, possibly pornographic Amazon search results when you type in the name of a program. The Reg spends the entire first half of its review (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/18/ubuntu_12_10_review/) on this, and the best thing it has to say about this feature is that it can be disabled.
Aside from that, you can finally right-click on things in the launcher now, so that's an improvement.
Will probably stick it on my laptop, though I'm planning on switching my desktop to OpenSUSE.
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Did you ever get around to giving Mint a whirl?
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Nah. I think Cinnamon is the future of the Linux desktop but it still looks a little half-baked to my eyes -- agree/disagree? Because if you think it's ready to roll I might put it on the laptop.
Decided on SUSE for the desktop because when all's said and done I'm still a KDE guy, and from the research I've done it appears that being a KDE guy and NOT trying out SUSE would be madness.
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Nah. I think Cinnamon is the future of the Linux desktop but it still looks a little half-baked to my eyes -- agree/disagree? Because if you think it's ready to roll I might put it on the laptop.
Damn now I need to buy cinnamon rolls next time I go get groceries.
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Gizmodo (http://gizmodo.com/5953866/microsoft-surface-rt-review-this-is-technological-heartbreak) says the Surface is a great idea but the execution is lacking. Two major reasons: the keyboard sucks and Windows RT sucks.
The good news is that those are fixable problems. Looks like yet another case where MS releases a half-baked product but will probably get it right in a year or so when the service pack rolls around.
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im about to abandon my usual windows + fedora vm.
What is it with this mageia and lxde super hype?
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Ars reviews Win8. (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/windows-reimagined-a-review-of-windows-8/)
What Microsoft has attempted to pull off with Windows 8 is extremely ambitious. There are pieces that work well, and there are pieces that work less well. It has the feel of a transitional operating system, an attempt to bridge from one universe into the next, and yet it is when one attempts to use it transitionally—when using a mix of desktop applications and Metro applications—that it is at its worst. Stick to one universe—whether desktop or Metro—and it feels far more coherent.
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Welp, discovered my laptop's hard drive AND optical drive use proprietary bullshit connectors, so no solid-state goodness for it.
Desktop, on the other hand, is about ready to rock.
(I mean laptop still gets an upgrade to because Quantal, but it won't be a hardware upgrade after all.)
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Nah. I think Cinnamon is the future of the Linux desktop but it still looks a little half-baked to my eyes -- agree/disagree? Because if you think it's ready to roll I might put it on the laptop.
Last I checked, its configurability isn't the whole way there. I can say that VirtualBox handles it much better than Gnome 2 and Mate. (The latter two have a bug that prevents titlebars from updating when one changes tabs in a program; it only updates on some other events, like window move/resize. Gets annoying as fuck when using sublimetext or browsers.)
Decided on SUSE for the desktop because when all's said and done I'm still a KDE guy, and from the research I've done it appears that being a KDE guy and NOT trying out SUSE would be madness.
Funny coincidence: I haven't tried KDE since I tried SuSE (my first distro, back when a lot of the docs/help posts were still in German) ~10 years ago.
I don't like the default Gnome setup that much. I mostly hate menus for common launches; more of a hotkey/command kind of guy. That said, I fucking love Gnome-Do. Which was, last I checked, occasionally a little slow/quirky when I was using VBox+Cinnamon or VBox+Gnome 3. (Was fine and snappy under Gnome 2 / Mate.)
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Yeah, I went through and randomized my passwords recently; at first I checked the "Include High ANSI Characters" box
I stopped using accented characters on passwords when I couldn't login to my university account on two out of every three computers in the lab.
The thing about Windows 8 is: so far I haven't seen a single reason to use it other than "it's new".
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I think the theming is pretty fantastic, actually. I've always really liked the minimalist look of big single-color rectangles. The fonts are pretty solid, too, in programs that look the way they're supposed to, though a lot of legacy stuff looks like a blurry goddamn mess. Course, I'm still using a prerelease version.
Start screen is confusing so far; the arbitrary distinction between Metro and Classic apps is worse.
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It offers fuck-all to the PC space, is the big problem.
On a tablet it probably does have a nice preview-based UI (wasn't really functional when I tried it) but there's no goddam reason that couldn't have been added to Windows 7 without the toxic autologin/app-store/hardware-DRM bullshit.
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The thing that un-sells me about Windows 8, ultimately, is the future it proposes. Yes, Desktop mode is pretty livable, but it's also a legacy system. More and more things are going to be Metro-only. And with Metro, you are very limited in how many Metro apps you can have on-screen. I like to aggressively multitask, and Windows 8 seemed from my use of it to be hostile to that desire.
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Forcing the standard Windows games (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/10/the-new-and-updated-games-of-windows-8/) into full-screen Metro apps is especially odd to me. I don't think I've ever maximized Minesweeper, not even back in the 640x480 CRT days.
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... oh man, what does Metro look like on multiple monitors? Does anything work?
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Apparently one monitor is metro, the other is the legacy desktop.
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Has anybody talked about W8's adoption among businesses yet? Office productivity is pretty much the last area where Microsoft still has a lock, but all the differences between 7 and 8 are pretty hostile to that space (the touchscreen controls, the forced full-screen apps, the worry that Microsoft may become privy to corporate secrets). Shoehorning a tablet OS into their PC OS was pretty bad, but shoehorning their consumer OS into their business OS might be what actually sinks them. At least, if they're stupid enough to actually try to force businesses along that upgrade path.
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As much as PC OS manufacturers hate catering to backwards compatibility, it's a huge driver as far as adoption goes.
Most OSes do what you want for at least another 5-10 years before all support for them ceases (or longer if you push it... I bet there's non-zero number of dorks still plugging away on Win98 for now - I'm still on XP here at work) so most people have the luxury to not upgrade if the end result is no real improvement and a bunch of old shit breaking or becoming way more inconvenient.
Generally the late adopters are only forced to change by the need to buy dramatically new hardware or because they want a shiny (i.e. new software that does not support the old OS). If an OS is well-loved, devs and hardware manufacturers will even push for extended support.
Not telling you guys anything you don't know, I'm sure, but the point is that that if Win8 turns out to be a big clunker, people will naturally cling to Win7 the way they did Win98 and Win XP and support will be extended for Win7 just because the demand will be there.
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It offers fuck-all to the PC space, is the big problem.
On a tablet it probably does have a nice preview-based UI (wasn't really functional when I tried it) but there's no goddam reason that couldn't have been added to Windows 7 without the toxic autologin/app-store/hardware-DRM bullshit.
Well sure, but "minor tweaks plus shit you don't want" has been MS's MO for some time now. Win7's a glorified service pack -- so are XP and Win98, when you come down to it.
Doesn't mean we have to like it, obviously.
The thing that un-sells me about Windows 8, ultimately, is the future it proposes. Yes, Desktop mode is pretty livable, but it's also a legacy system. More and more things are going to be Metro-only.
Yep. And this isn't going to be like Vista where poor sales lead to tweaks and fixes -- it's going to be like Office 2007 where everybody's stuck with it even though nobody likes it, because this is what MS is doing now.
And with Metro, you are very limited in how many Metro apps you can have on-screen. I like to aggressively multitask, and Windows 8 seemed from my use of it to be hostile to that desire.
Which ironically is the OPPOSITE of what tiling WM's are for.
I've said before that the App Store is basically Apple seeing apt-get and deciding to release a version without its single defining feature (dependency resolution). MS seems, similarly, to have seen tiling as a good design except for all the parts where it's useful and flexible.
Has anybody talked about W8's adoption among businesses yet? Office productivity is pretty much the last area where Microsoft still has a lock, but all the differences between 7 and 8 are pretty hostile to that space (the touchscreen controls, the forced full-screen apps, the worry that Microsoft may become privy to corporate secrets). Shoehorning a tablet OS into their PC OS was pretty bad, but shoehorning their consumer OS into their business OS might be what actually sinks them. At least, if they're stupid enough to actually try to force businesses along that upgrade path.
I'm curious to see some numbers, but anecdotally, the businesses I've worked for just switched to Win7 and have no damn interest in 8 whatsoever.
I think it has a shot at making some inroads in the tablet space and mmmmmmaybe even the phone space, but Apple's got a pretty massive head start.
Still, the size of the Surface plus its (sort of) actual keyboard plus Office compatibility might be a big driver, provided MS can fix the problems with RT that review mentioned. Again anecdotally, my experience is that road warriors are damn particular about having the smallest, most lightweight computers they can (we had multiple users at my last job who had a full-sized laptop for work and home AND a second, smaller laptop for travel).
Guess we'll see. I don't see what the draw is (it's got its moments but I wouldn't pay for it) but I wasn't expecting a huge demand for the Surface, either. I've been pretty consistently wrong about what kind of gadgets consumers want since, oh, the original iPod (in fairness, who the fuck wanted the original iPod?), so I'm not exactly qualified to make forecasts.
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Welp, got it working -- 64-bit Lion, Win8, and SUSE, all handily managed from a visible GRUB menu that I do not need an Apple-supported video card to see. Pretty happy about it.
Still some kinks to work out of course. SUSE has a surprisingly hideous set of default fonts -- not sure if that's because I used a LiveCD to install instead of the full DVD (which would not boot for me).
I don't like KDE's OpenGL nonsense any more than the last time I tried it, so I've turned that shit off. Which leaves the whole thing feeling a little too heavy on the dark grays -- will have to tweak that stuff too I guess.
The basic interface (panel and such) DOES seem to be working better than it did in Kubuntu -- taskbar integration in Kubuntu 12.04 was fucked up, for example. (When I set up the panel on the left-hand side of the screen and had it run MacOS/Win7 style, with large icons that work as either quicklaunch OR an indicator of a running program -- that worked fine with any QT-based program, but for any other kind of program it fucked up and showed two icons when the program was running. Worked okay in 11.10, broke in 12.04. Works fine in OpenSUSE 12.2, so far.)
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ME2 playing with no crashes so far. On the one hand, it worked fine for quite awhile before it started crashing like crazy, but I AM cautiously optimistic that the new installation has fixed it.
Maybe tomorrow I'll try it in WINE. If I can get it to run without even having to reboot to Windows, so much the better.
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...can't get my old Kubuntu drive to mount with a USB adapter. Oh, ReiserFS, you have failed me once again.
Still have an empty bay; guess I'll have to open the damn thing back up again tomorrow to get the shit I need off my old drive. Needless to say I am not using Reiser on the new installation.
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ME2 playing with no crashes so far. On the one hand, it worked fine for quite awhile before it started crashing like crazy, but I AM cautiously optimistic that the new installation has fixed it.
Maybe tomorrow I'll try it in WINE. If I can get it to run without even having to reboot to Windows, so much the better.
Speaking of gaming on Linux... (http://www.valvesoftware.com/linuxsurvey.php)
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None of you guys answered my question about mageia and lxde, so i went with my first choice. My main box is now a nice and fast Mint xfce. The lazy man's choice!
I'm just now following this guide.
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=2020528&page=1 (http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=2020528&page=1)
Before that i successfully made League of Legends run on Playonlinux which is a pretty decent community supported wine frontend (think of it as firefox's greasemonkey for wine). It had some minor problems. Game map was flickery and the Rune/Character shop doesn't work. I hope this guide will make it work better or teach me something. But it's running almost perfectly. And check this list out:
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/supported_apps-1-0.html (http://www.playonlinux.com/en/supported_apps-1-0.html)
A friend won and gave me a free copy of CrossOver, and it's pretty darn good. Took me a while to figure out how installing game expansions is done: you have to run the installation file inside the directory of the bottle (that's what CrossOver calls a virtual Windows with stuff in it), as opposed to installing it as a normal application. It took me hours to figure that one out... but now everything is peachy. Windows' gaming and application support support seems close to 100%. =)
Although I never even tried Windows 8, the whole.. "Smartphone friendly look of it", didn't appeal me one bit. Hence my change. Hope this helps anyone.
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None of you guys answered my question about mageia and lxde, so i went with my first choice.
Don't know Mageia. Tried LXDE briefly a couple of years ago (it's buried in this thread somewhere...) and found it lacking in GUI customizability. Pretty much the reason I've stuck with KDE (http://www.corporate-sellout.com/index.php/2012/11/02/why-kde/) is it's got the best balance between customizability and not having to fuck around in config files to DO that customizing.
My main box is now a nice and fast Mint xfce. The lazy man's choice!
Thinking I'll try Mint/Cinnamon my next round. Doing okay with OpenSUSE/KDE right now; I like YAST.
I'm just now following this guide.
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=2020528&page=1 (http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=2020528&page=1)
Before that i successfully made League of Legends run on Playonlinux which is a pretty decent community supported wine frontend (think of it as firefox's greasemonkey for wine). It had some minor problems. Game map was flickery and the Rune/Character shop doesn't work. I hope this guide will make it work better or teach me something. But it's running almost perfectly. And check this list out:
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/supported_apps-1-0.html (http://www.playonlinux.com/en/supported_apps-1-0.html)
A friend won and gave me a free copy of CrossOver, and it's pretty darn good. Took me a while to figure out how installing game expansions is done: you have to run the installation file inside the directory of the bottle (that's what CrossOver calls a virtual Windows with stuff in it), as opposed to installing it as a normal application. It took me hours to figure that one out... but now everything is peachy. Windows' gaming and application support support seems close to 100%. =)
Interesting. I've heard of Playonlinux but haven't fucked around with it yet. Clean install ME2's giving me the same problem it did under Kubuntu: it prompts me to connect to EA's servers and then, whether I click OK or Cancel, hangs forever on "Please wait..." I think the next step is to try copying over my settings folder from Windows -- on Kubuntu that got me past the prompt but then mouse clicks/keyboard navigation wouldn't work past the Press Any Key screen.
I have an old copy of CrossOver (from when they were giving away free licenses) but never really tried it. The bottle settings you're describing sound a lot like what I was doing with WineSkin when I tried to get ME2 to run under OSX; I had a similar problem to what you're talking about -- I could get it to run on a clean install but couldn't get any of the expansions to run. I tried the equivalent of the "run in a bottle" setup but it just timed out.
Oh well -- at least now it's working under Windows without bluescreening. So far.
Although I never even tried Windows 8, the whole.. "Smartphone friendly look of it", didn't appeal me one bit. Hence my change. Hope this helps anyone.
It's useful information. Thanks for sharing!
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I was just now trying to learn how to do a clean reboot (one where xfce forgets everything that was open on previous session), and I unknowingly told it not to restart useful things such as the task bar and other elements in the GUI.
At the same time I was trying out to see if I could install kde, Cinammon, lxde and Mate, to check them all out. Result: it's popping errors all over the place. ;_;
apt-get dist-upgrade fixed some stuff but it uninstalled most packages. Took me an hour to get online again.
So now I'm chilling trying to figure my way through Mate and all these duplicated elements in my Start menu.. ignoring all the error messages, resisting the urge to format and listening to yacht rock.
Mate seems a teensy bit slower than xfce. You know of any benchmarks?
edit: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_desktop_vitals&num=1 (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_desktop_vitals&num=1) <- found one.
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Decided to give Win8 Mail a shot.
First thing: you can't even open the damn thing without setting up a Live account.
Second: No POP support.
Third: No support for editing From/Reply-To headers. So that if I redirect my Cox E-Mail address (which does not support IMAP) to a separate E-Mail address (which DOES support IMAP), I can't put the Cox address in my From or Reply-To field.
Now, I'm pretty okay with MS deliberately breaking POP support. It's the best way to drag ISP's kicking and screaming into the terrifying future world of 2003 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501).
But until such time as those ISP's HAVE stepped forward into 2003, I would very fucking much like for MS to let me continue using the same E-Mail address I have been since 2001.
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http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-12/microsoft-shows-its-windows-chief-the-door (http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-12/microsoft-shows-its-windows-chief-the-door)
Windows 8 is doing fine, guys. Pay no attention to the man behind the Metro.
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Starr's sister works for MS as a tech writer. She broadly agreed with the off-the-cuff assessment that this is either going to be fixed with Service Pack 1, or is going to follow the Star Trek-like pattern of only-every-other-OS-being-good.
Most interesting things I learned:
1) MS EMPLOYEES are unhappy about being forced onto Win8 (they are not allowed to keep Win7 machines for work at all, unless they're doing specific Win7 updates).
2) At the last minute (i.e. AFTER the Beta), the developers changed the latest version of Windows Server to use the Win8 interface... where it is the most useless and infuriating interface anyone could have possible designed. MS's solution is to tell users to use the command line. HAR HAR.
In TOTALLY UNRELATED news, MS employee health benefits are being replaced by health savings accounts and employees are all being forced out of offices and into cubicles. Funnier still, instead of being honest about the space constraints driving the move, the cubicle thing is actually being sold using corporate copy taken from 1981 - including claims that cubicles are the office of the future.
:whoops:
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Ubuntu phones (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/canonical-unveils-ubuntu-phone-os-that-doubles-as-a-full-pc/) within the year.
Good.
I have my problems with Unity as a desktop/laptop interface, but I find myself frequently using Android and thinking "Why can't this do what Unity does?" (For example, something as simple as sorting my apps into categories so I don't get one giant pages-long alphabetical list of every single fucking thing I have ever installed. Had to get a separate launcher to do that on Android -- and a number of the third-party launchers CHARGE for that feature. Plus whenever a program crashes I get dumped back to the default Android launcher instead of ADW.)
It's going to be a tough damn market to get into, and I suspect Ubuntu will continue to be a money sink for Shuttleworth. But I think more options are a good thing.
(I AM a little ambivalent on the attempt to focus on native code over Java. It's a good idea in theory, but imagine having to have binaries compiled for every single architecture. Course, it's not like Java won't run on the thing, either.)
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Course, it's not like Java won't run on the thing, either.
I expect Ubuntu may lean on existing for-Android software, since it won't likely launch with a great app ecosystem*. (Take a moment to laugh at the implication that the Android ecosystem is great. Okay.) If Android devices are optimized for Java, while Ubuntu phones are not, performance will look poor and we may relive something like the WebOS collapse.
*Most X apps won't translate to touch screens without total UI overhaul.
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*Most X apps won't translate to touch screens without total UI overhaul.
That and the devices presumably won't be running X in the first place (though Canonical, like a lot of dev groups, has been talking for years about replacing X with something better but still compatible).
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Office 2013 to be locked to the computer you first install it on. (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/why-microsofts-new-office-2013-license-may-send-users-to-google-docs/)
Seems like sort of a weird and unnecessary move. The majority of Office's sales are either with new computers or as bulk licenses for business users; there doesn't seem to be much to gain here except an opportunity to say "fuck you" to the minority of end users who buy Office as a download or a box.
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That's hilarious. The only reason I even bothered with Office 2010 is because I got it for $10 through work. I still use Google Docs (and occasionally OpenOffice) for most things anyway.
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Office 2013 as a whole has led a number of reviewers to wonder if the Office team isn't actively rebelling against the corporation's apparent new focus on touch-based/consumer devices.
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But hey, you can always get a Mac -- and then discover that they just jacked up the price of Office 2011 by twenty bucks (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/02/office-2011-for-mac-same-product-now-20-more/). Mac users like paying extra money for the same thing, right?
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Objectively, yes.
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:itsatrap:
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I've actually had a couple people tell me that 8 is pretty alright, provided you hack the start menu back in and just generally go to great lengths to circumvent everything that makes it 8. Kinda like Win 98 being pretty boss if all you use is a dos window.
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So... Win 8 is good if you make it into Win 7?
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Mac users like paying extra money for the same thing, right?
Isn't that kind of Apple's entire business model?
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:joke:
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So... Win 8 is good if you make it into Win 7?
:joke: X2 COMBOB
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Pity, because, as noted earlier, Win8 DOES have a couple compelling brass-tacks features. My favorites are (1) a filecopy system that was not designed in the 1980's and (2) a Task Manager that doesn't just tell you how much RAM and CPU each program is using, but also how much bandwidth and HD activity.
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While trying to install Ubuntu on my laptop get a free TF2 hat, it took me 3 hours to get it up and running, and then when I tried to run TF2 the first time, it crashed, deleted TF2, deleted Steam, deleted the installer, and then shut down.
I reinstalled Ubuntu and Steam, got my hat, got someone else's hat, and shut it down.
Now it won't boot up, it just hangs at the Ubuntu screen
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I've actually been having similar problems with WUBI. For some reason this past week, I decided to increase the size of my ubuntu partition by reinstalling it. Of course, this deleted all of my data on that partition that I stupidly forgot to back up. Nothing crucial, so whatever. But for some reason, the new partition has problems installing and will either crash, boot up to GRUB, or if the reinstallation finally works, it runs incredibly slowly. I'll open Firefox or open a directory and the screen will go gray and unusable for a minute. Updating it helped it with the slowness issues slightly; now it only freezes when I open firefox and a directory simultaneously. Of course, for some inexplicable reason, that barely usable partition also stopped working the next time I booted it.
Not to mention when I first time I tried to reinstall(some time this weekend, I think it was Saturday or Sunday), WUBI installed ubuntu 13.04(???) for some reason. This OS didn't have any problems with speed at all as far as I could tell. The only problem I had with it was that I could only log in as guest. The newest version of WUBI forces you to include a username and password when you're installing, so you already have an account set up when you load up Ubuntu for the first time. However, 13.04 didn't have the default profile set up so I had to choose which user to log into. The account that I set up in WUBI didn't work.
What the fuck Ubuntu why is everything breaking. This is literally the only time I can think of in the past 2-3 years of using Ubuntu that I've had a serious problem. It's like all those times I probably should have been suffering computer bullshit but didn't has finally caught up with me.
So yeah, dunno if you're also using WUBI (and I dunno if that's the problem, I might've gotten these same issues if I installed a fresh copy of ubuntu over my entire hard drive), but it seems like they've been having some problems or something.
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Ubuntu for Tablets (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/ubuntu-for-tablets-arriving-on-nexus-7-nexus-10-this-week/) coming this week (in beta); sounds like it's got some interesting features for power users. Multiple user accounts, multitasking (ie you can have two apps running onscreen at once), and can be docked and run as a fully-featured Ubuntu OS. I'm definitely intrigued, though I don't know if I've got the time or inclination to fuck with it this early. Depends on a lot of things like touch-ready apps.
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Ubuntu to dump X. (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/ubuntu-dumps-x-window-system-creates-replacement-for-pc-and-mobile/)
I've been waiting for a viable alternative to X since I first used X in the late 1990's; it was out-of-date then. It would be swell if Canonical COULD actually cook up an alternative that's viable, backward-compatible, and useful for other distros -- but I'm not holding my breath. Canonical is in it for Ubuntu, and indeed the announcement is VERY SPECIFIC about all the ways they need this for cross-platform Unity implementation reasons.
If it's actually useful for DE's that aren't Unity, that would be swell -- but I wouldn't count on it.
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Everything I've heard about Mir makes it sound like a really bad idea. Apparently their technical arguments around why they couldn't just use Wayland are straight-up bunk (snippet (http://pastebin.com/KjRm3be1) of #wayland IRC discussion), to the point where they wound up retracting (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxODY) them a day later. On top of that, Canonical's Mir team apparently doesn't have a lot of experience with such low-level display implementation.
What has me most concerned, though, is the driver situation. Current Linux graphics drivers are all designed around X; presumably Wayland and Mir drivers will be designed around Wayland and Mir respectively, and won't really be interoperable. We're going to find ourselves in a situation where manufacturers are going to be asked to make an X driver and a Wayland driver and a Mir driver, and since Linux isn't exactly the biggest market to start with I sort of find myself thinking that they'll just say "no, screw all of this".
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Well, fragmentation's always the threat in the open-source world. But if we were to see the major distributions adopt Wayland/Mir/whatever with the same rapidity they did GNOME 3, it wouldn't be a concern -- X would be out, New Thing would be in, the proprietary driver devs would drop support for X in favor of New Thing.
The problem of Mir is of course that it really doesn't seem like the type of thing that's going to be useful to the other distros, and it's one more step forward in the world where (desktop) Linux is split between Ubuntu and Everybody Else.
Of course, at this point it doesn't even look like Ubuntu's trying to play the same game as the other desktop distros -- it's got its eye on competing with Android. Meantime, it's already losing ground to Mint on the desktop, because users are already pretty ambivalent about Unity.
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Office 2013 to be locked to the computer you first install it on. (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/why-microsofts-new-office-2013-license-may-send-users-to-google-docs/)
Seems like sort of a weird and unnecessary move. The majority of Office's sales are either with new computers or as bulk licenses for business users; there doesn't seem to be much to gain here except an opportunity to say "fuck you" to the minority of end users who buy Office as a download or a box.
MS is reversing course. (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/microsoft-comes-to-its-senses-allows-office-2013-to-move-pcs/) Now you'll be able to switch computers every 90 days, or immediately if it's due to a hardware failure. (Not sure how they're going to verify that it's actually a hardware failure; my guess is, like all authentication schemes, "poorly".)
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...oh, new OpenSUSE version out. THAT'S why all my updates keep timing out.
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Update itself appears to have gone off without a hitch.
Color scheme and widget style are generally appealing, except in he taskbar where I can't easily tell what desktop I'm on or what programs are open.
(EDIT: Unsurprisingly, it works better if you enable compositing. I've made it this far without enabling it, but after some fiddling I find that it's acceptable as long as I disable translucency and outline. That's probably not an exhaustive list -- I'm sure I disabled a bunch of other effects the last time I tried to make a go of it. Basically I disabled as much as I could to get it to run as close to the non-composited version of KDE as possible.)
OpenSUSE appears to have finally given up on that weird-ass default KDE 4.x desktop style where your desktop folder appears as a widget on top of the desktop. (EDIT 2: Nope, that's back after logging out and back in.)
Aaaand I've gotten some LEGITIMATELY WEIRD fucking behavior involving the system tray. I clicked on ktorrent in the system tray and it took me to a completely different set of workspaces; my open programs were not listed when I hit Alt-Tab, nor were they listed in the taskbar (which itself showed a different set of programs than it had before). It wasn't as if I was just on a different desktop; all four desktops were empty except for ktorrent and anything else I clicked on while trying to figure out what was going on.
I clicked on Kopete in the tray and it took me back to my previous set of open programs. Damnedest thing. Haven't been able to reproduce it so I'm hoping it was a one-time thing.
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Several of my frontends for mplayer weren't displaying video; I eventually realized OpenGL wasn't working. On reboot I couldn't get X at all.
Eventually traced it to some FS-level corruption -- the /etc/ld.so.conf.d/nvidia-gfxG03.conf was completely unreadable. As in, couldn't even delete/rename/chown it.
I've still got my old Ubuntu drive in this box, so I booted to that and ran an fsck on my OpenSUSE boot partition; after that I managed to delete the file, remove and reinstall the nVidia driver, and get OpenGL working.
So my last major outstanding issue since the upgrade is that I can't access my Samba shares. Can't mount them from the command line, can't access them from Dolphin. (ownCloud seems to be able to sync to them okay.) So I still need to figure that out.
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I installed Ubuntu 12.10 w/ Unity to dodge some some GPO shenanigans by an incorrigible group of would-be desktop support with too much access to AD.
Much happier to be in the Linux club, particularly since I commandeered a VMWare View Windows workstation as well. Having a severe annoyance with Pidgin in Unity, though: I'm noticing a bug where the notification icon for Pidgin (up there by the clock) will mysteriously disappear after using the system for short while. If I ctr + alt + arrow key to switch virtual desktops, it shows up again, but only until I let go. It's the strangest thing... and it's driving me mad.
Tried Cinnamon, XFCE, Gnome 3, and probably something else I'm forgetting on a test machine, but none of them get along with my VMWare workstation in full screen mode. Why can't I just have cake and also eat that cake?
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Unity integration's still pretty buggy. You can always take a crack at one of the other DE's and see if they're more to your liking.
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Global PC shipments drop a full 14% on the back of peoples' unwillingness to adopt Windows 8 (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/global-pc-shipments-plunge-14-per-cent/article10982527/)
Haha, oh man. I mean that is 14% of PC sales for the entire world. Even if the direct effect of Win 8 is only half that, that's still massive.
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Ubuntu 13.04 is out today. Here I thought they were going to release their first .05
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My old Kubuntu drive is going south. I mainly use it for storage but I've found it handy as hell to have a spare Linux boot around when OpenSUSE misfires, so I'm going to go ahead and put Mint on the replacement drive and fuck around with it for a bit.
Haven't had much luck so far. My torrent download fucked up; I looked for the correct checksum but didn't find it listed on the Mint site, so instead of thinking to look for an FTP mirror I just decided to roll the dice, burn it, and see what happened.
Which was foolish of me; even though it only took a few boot attempts to convince myself I'd burned a bad ISO (I knew it wasn't a bad burn because I HAD checked that) that was still a pretty hefty chunk of time.
Always look at the checksum. And if you can't find it on the distro website, well yes that IS pretty stupid, but you should still be able to find it if you pull up one of the FTP mirrors.
Trying again now...
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It's installed but I haven't tried it yet because now I'm troubleshooting an unrelated issue in OpenSUSE. X isn't working because of an nVidia driver upgrade.
I swear to Christ if I find a distro where that doesn't happen I'm sticking with it. Think I'll try Arch next.
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...just gonna go ahead and post this here too in case my website's down the next time I need it:
For the next time I get locked out of X after an nVidia upgrade:
The OpenSUSE package for nVidia drivers for a GTX570 is x11-video-nvidiaG03.
The OpenSUSE package for the nVidia kernel module for a GTX570 is nvidia-gfxG03-kmp-default.
Which still hasn't goddamn fixed it and I'm STILL getting an error that the kernel's using an old version number, despite my installing the new one. But it's a start.
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Got similarly fucked when I updated my work computer to 13.04, since it updated xserv and broke my legacy-ass ATI fglrx drivers. Fun, though, because installing 13.04 from scratch, downgrading xserv, and then installing the legacy drivers is still breaking unity.
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What I'm getting from all of this is "don't upgrade from 12.10 just now".
EDIT: No, wait, I misread; it's only one of you actually having Ubuntu problems. Still, though, I've never had an OS upgrade go well, so I'm still going to put this one off.
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And then updating my kernel led it to kp. Tried to run a previous kernel and that worked for a bit but now I'm getting kp's from the old one too.
Mint's working, though still a pretty bare install without much of anything configured (I'll probably have more comments later, but generally speaking it's got a good collection of software, a good and often clean look, but the typical GNOME problem of not nearly enough easily-visible options to configure shit), and...
...well. The good news is I just found out that after a reboot it's no longer failing to mount any of my other drives, so that's good. Should be able to chroot into the OpenSUSE partition and fuck around with zypper from there, hopefully get my kernel working again.
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What I'm getting from all of this is "don't upgrade from 12.10 just now".
EDIT: No, wait, I misread; it's only one of you actually having Ubuntu problems. Still, though, I've never had an OS upgrade go well, so I'm still going to put this one off.
To be honest, I've never had an Ubuntu upgrade work well. Much better luck (current circumstances aside) with fresh installs.
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OpenSUSE's booting again but, while the nvidia kernel modules finally appear to be working, no other modules seem to be. Can't mount any non-Linux FS's (which it turns out is the reason I couldn't boot at all for the past few hours -- have I mentioned how much I fucking HATE OpenSUSE's refusal to boot if it has trouble mounting something?) and networking is not working, which I hope is the reason why Firefox and Evolution just max out the CPU when I try to launch them and never actually come up.
Posting this from Mint, as you might expect.
Miserable damn headache all day; this hasn't helped.
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(http://24.media.tumblr.com/fed25df261c297f2879c40c791951016/tumblr_mlx3y4BFWh1s5pvv9o1_500.gif)
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Back to the kp's.
Can use Mint as my main OS for a few days if I need to but I'm not prepared to make it my primary.
Could do a backup/restore on my home directory etc. and just reinstall OpenSUSE, but I'm not exactly filled with confidence that it wouldn't crap out as soon as I run another kernel update.
And while "try out Arch" is on my to-do list, it's sure as hell not on my to-do list for this week or indeed this month.
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So I guess http://login.passport.net/uilogin.srf?id=2 (http://login.passport.net/uilogin.srf?id=2) is gone for good?
Too bad, I always liked having a clean, no-frills page to access Hotmail from.
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So I guess http://login.passport.net/uilogin.srf?id=2 (http://login.passport.net/uilogin.srf?id=2) is gone for good?
Too bad, I always liked having a clean, no-frills page to access Hotmail from.
Well how about that! They brought it back! Huh.
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Finally got my Samba working again using a script called SACT (http://forums.opensuse.org/content/155-sact-samba-automated-configuration-tool-version-1-20.html). I was impressed by its thoroughness and ease-of-use; I think it'd work great as part of the standard distro.
Course, I'd rather have Samba Just Work. It worked fine in 12.2 and broke when I upgraded to 12.3; dunno what happened but I'm not the only guy who's had that problem. Regressions suck. My printer's stopped working too.
On the whole I'm still happy with 12.3 and everything it's fixed; they seem to have stomped the bug I kept getting with Evolution and LibreOffice where after a reboot they'd segfault and I'd have to reinstall them. But I wish they could have fixed those without breaking things that were working fine before.
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About two hours to get to the point where I can make posts using Raspberry Pi, including the hour it took just to get NOOBS onto an SD card. Not bad.
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Ars (http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/07/disgruntled-google-users-try-to-live-a-low-google-lifestyle/) has an article that's basically just a summation of two other articles listing alternatives to various Google products and services.
I was hoping that the 207 comments meant that there would be people contributing more suggestions, but nope, today we got the Petty Snipey Nerd Ars Comments Section instead of the Helpful Knowledgeable Nerd Ars Comments Section.
I only ever used gmail as a forwarding destination for the E-Mail address that some of my disposable accounts are tied to, because at that time that address was stuck with a hosting provider that didn't support IMAP. Now that I've taken ownership of that domain myself, I use my own IMAP server and don't need gmail anymore.
I've been using owncloud for backups on my local network. Interface is fiddly but backend is solid and gives me something to do with my early-model Mac Mini.
Finding an alternative to Reader has been frustrating. I've gone with Tiny Tiny RSS. The official Android client (which costs money in the Play store but is free on F-Droid) is feature-complete enough that I don't miss NewsRob until it starts running balls-slow and then crashes, which only happens, you know, constantly.
And it seems that the only desktop Linux client for TTRSS is Liferea, which has at least tried to live up to its terrible name by being runny shit. Its level of sophistication has not quite reached the complexity of "display an apostrophe instead of ' in the subject line", "display post author", or "show categories associated with Tiny Tiny RSS feeds". (Though at least it still displays your feeds in the same order they appear in when they're categorized, so they ARE still sorted by category -- you just can't actually see any of the category names or divisions.)
I go back and forth on whether it's actually superior to just using TTRSS's Web interface or not. It's certainly faster, and it's got better hotkey support.
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I've found Feedly + GReader (Android app) to be adequate for RSS consumption. The default magazine style layout of Feedly is crap, but they have 3 other views, some of which are satisfactory.
OwnCloud's freedom from other people's servers is appealing, in a way, but it's a Dropbox competitor more than a Drive one. If you discover something else that makes it that convenient to collaborate on documents in real-time, great. If you find something like that that's easy enough for non-geeks to use, all the better. If it's free to them, only then does it become practical for business use.
(Well, unless it became free to them through some other, pre-existing software purchase they've made. Wonder how Office 365 is panning out.)
Re Dropbox-like services: I would still want to back my shit up off-site. Unless you co-locate a server, OwnCloud isn't doing that for you. I don't really know what the other viable, secure options for that shit are. Dropbox can decrypt your shit whenever they feel like it, which isn't really okay for anyone heavily invested in their privacy. IIRC, SpiderOak and Tarsnap can not, but I imagine they're both far more hassle to use.
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I'm not in love with Mint but it may become my regular distro just by default.
Much as I love YAST, OpenSUSE has once again gotten all fucked up and I've been using Mint exclusively for about a week now.
And I just had to print something, and let me tell you something: I set up a wireless printer and it FUCKING WORKED. No bullshit, no package fuckery, no infuriating third-party binary installers. Mint supports my printer better than Windows 8 does.
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Adding: we'll see just how cheerful I still am about Mint after I finish my first distribution upgrade.
On the one hand, I am nonplussed by Mint's naked fucking hostility (http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2) toward the very IDEA of a simple distribution upgrade.
On the other hand, so far it doesn't seem like it's actually significantly HARDER to do one in Mint than Ubuntu. You have to do a find/replace on some files in sources.list instead of a prompt popping up and offering to do it for you, but that appears to be the only real difference.
Sometimes I think maybe I'll try Arch next.
And then I think, yeah, THAT'LL remind me why I quit using Slackware and Gentoo.
Meantime, starting to consider switching my laptop to Xubuntu or something. Ubuntu proper has gotten balls-ass slow. Though it's possible that's just the result of umpteen upgrades since I got the already-pretty-long-in-the-tooth sucker back in '010.
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I'm not in love with Mint but it may become my regular distro just by default
Somewhere, CyanPrime just popped a boner.
(I wish I could figure out what my brain remembered and processed and why)
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Hell, if he'd just told me 5 years ago "It will recognize your printer without any fucking around on your part"...
Anyway. For all the handwringing about how rolling releases are the devil and will void your warranty and destroy your data and rape a bear, that may have been the smoothest dist-upgrade I've ever done. The only speedbumps I hit were a result of my own overcautiousness. And the fact that my bootloader is still on the OpenSUSE drive.
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Yeah, the whole "back up your home folder + software selection before wiping the drive" affair is pretty shitty. It's one thing on a single-user system, but if you've got a server set up with shared folders across different users for managing shared resources and all that, it seems like it would be obnoxious to start backing up each users' individual assets and hoping you didn't park something in /var/www where you'll forget to cover it.
Then again, if you're running a server, why the fuck use Mint?
Also, I don't think I'm touching Arch or any of the DIY bullshit distros. My time is not worthless. I tried LFS a long time ago. Never again.
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I feel like I learned a hell of a lot running Slackware and Gentoo for all those years. But as I've often said before, every day I don't manually edit Xorg.conf is an improvement over a day where I do.
OpenSUSE has proven a maddening combination of the best damn frontend I've ever seen and constant fucking breakages that won't let me use it.
It's not that I'm crazy about Mint. It's just that it seems like the least-worst option just at the moment.
(Rather similar to Revolver or Reloaded or whatever Android mod I'm currently running on my phone because Cyanogenmod got in the nasty habit of not booting back up when I powered it down and I got sick of taking off the case and popping the battery. The one I'm using has periodic issues where it slows down and I have to reboot it, and other annoyances CM didn't, but it's rarely forced me to take the battery out.)
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This seems like the thread to ask for this kind of question, so. I'm in need of a 64-bit Linux VM image for development purposes. I don't really want to make my own because I'm lazy. Where's the best place to grab one? No real preference on distro besides being fairly easy to install things on and maintain.
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My preference for dev is Debian, not because it's very good on its own, but because Mint and practically every other distro that isn't proprietary or barebones seems to have forked off from it, so you'll probably cover the greatest percentage of their unique idiosyncrasies that way. Also, you can boot it off a USB drive if you don't feel like fucking around with your disk partitions. 'sall here. (http://www.debian.org/distrib/)
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Debian for both server and workstation, Brentai?
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I assume you're not going to do your development on a server. Unless you're talking about development for a server, in which case uhhh I guess you get Fedora since you clearly hate yourself already anyway.
(Unless you have direct control over both your development environment and the runtime environment, in which case you install Ubuntu on everything and tell the rest of the world to go fuck itself.)
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I successfully created a Debian image. Latest version from their webpage, plain 64-bit installation. The only things I have added to the system are git and make.
However, proxies are being a bitch. I'm behind a corporate proxy and some programs seem to not like that. I got the system to recognize one proxy enough to download various things during installation and apt-get works, but not Iceweasel or ping. I've tried giving Iceweasel a proxy under Preferences - Advanced - Network, but no dice. I got git working by feeding it a proxy manually, and it seems happy enough. make, on the other hand, throws "Resolving http (http)... failed. Name or service not known." when I try to use it to build Mozilla's gaia project. I've tried setting the network proxy under System Preferences - Network - Network proxy, but it doesn't seem to do anything.
The proxy I entered during installation and the proxy git is using are different, and I'd like to use the git proxy for everything. How can I change this? (would it even change anything after installation?)
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The system-wide proxy should normally be set in the "http_proxy" environment variable, but:
- way too many programs implement it their own Special Way
- if you're using GNOME for your desktop, who the hell knows what madness it's up to for menu-launched programs
- everything is terrible
The apt proxy is probably set in /etc/apt/apt.conf, and nothing else will use that setting. http_proxy might catch whatever in Gaia's makefile is trying to talk to the network, though.
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Just seeing this headline made me literally laugh out loud and check to make sure I wasn't reading the Onion or something "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months, Microsoft share price surges"
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Oh right, the package that makes GTK programs not look like balls in KDE is called kde-config-gtk-style.
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This may be a subjective impression--and it's been a long time, so I'm a bit fuzzy on it all--but it seems like a lot more people here are using Linux (GNU/Linux, the proper Linux you put on a proper computer) than I remember. That's interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that'd end up happening.
Thad's apparently still using KDE. That seems like the natural order of things.
Since the last time I was here, I've been using Debian as my only OS on my personal machines. It's been treating me well, as it had been, but I've adapted further and further to WM lifestyle; the DEs still aren't doing it for me, though I've been meaning to take another look at KDE for a while now--I've already got it installed, just haven't gotten around to it yet. I'm certainly considering writing with Qt, which is looking pretty nice these days. KDE's involvement with Qt development and its open governance (and how they're using the new features they were involved with) also seems to have borne fruit (http://dot.kde.org/2013/09/04/kde-release-structure-evolves) from what I've heard.
I've also been considering taking a running leap at Awesome (http://awesome.naquadah.org/), but I'm hampered by how much I utterly, utterly hated it the last time I used it and how I'd probably have to write a ton of Lua code (a task I have, so far, not found enjoyable) to make it liveable to me. Still, if I did it, I might be able to solve every nagging issue I have with dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org) and also have a way of updating my window tag filters that doesn't involve recompilation of C code, which is always a plus. I remain tempted.
Apologies if bumping this thread after more than a month of inactivity or unceremoniously reappearing after however long it's been is weird or irritating, but I'm more curious as to whether I can reconnect with this place than concerned about not being able to.
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Nah, it's a good topic.
Having played more with both Cinnamon and XFCE, I am both (1) tremendously impressed by how far XFCE has come and (2) utterly baffled at what the fuck the point of Cinnamon is when we already have XFCE.
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Just got around to trying out a recent XFCE. Yeah, it's nice. A good, inoffensive desktop environment with all the usual metaphors. It's become rather less spartan than I remember XFCE being, as well. I can see the comparison to Cinnamon, given Cinnamon's stated goals. My only gripe is that I don't see any way to configure the positioning of monitors in the monitor configuration--a minor one,since I'm used to handling that myself with xrandr in my .xsession.
Tried out Awesome again. If you took dwm, completely ruined it, added on that 6-point font, right-click application menu from E16, then added extensibility in the form of a Lua API, you'd have Awesome. I have a completely unnatural hatred for it that does not belong on this Earth.
I had plans to use it's Lua scripting and API to essentially bring it back to dwm as a starting point, but it seems that this will be non-trivial and full of rough edges--I got bored and quit before my study of the documentation really bore fruit. I may come back to this later (the way it handles window rules still remains enticingly not-compiled-in).
After ranting to a friend about about it (who unsuccesfully tried to sell me on E17 again--he took my 'well, it seems okay, but I'm not sure it's for me' as 'I can be convinced that this is good' instead of the 'I hate this, but I don't understand why' I should have said), he recommended CLFSWM (http://common-lisp.net/project/clfswm/) to me, touting it's Lisp-programmability. I've been meaning to get (more) into Lisp, but it's that Emacs in the way. I just haven't been able to get past its 'finger feel'. And if I did? I'd probably be writing a ton of code to essentially transform CLFSWM into a WM I actually wanted to use.
Writing code to turn an extensible WM into exactly what I want is beginning to look like more work than it's really worth.
Also: heard that Linux 3.12 has significant gains in FPS/performance for games on the free AMD driver (and possibly all games on all drivers, due to a change in the performance governor code). Not for me, apparently! Though that was on this RC 3.12 kernel that showed up in Experimental--I'll be trying it again when 3.12-proper makes its way into Debian.
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Rumor: (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/09/microsoft_threshold_start_menu/) Next version of Windows (8.2? 9? 2015?) to be split into three versions: one with the Metro/"Modern" UI, one for desktops with a more "Windows Classic" interface, and an enterprise version that's the latter with a longer, more regular patch cycle.
Just a rumor, but "reverse course on a stupid idea that everyone told you was a stupid idea in the first damn place" is a pretty good description of every MS decision in recent memory, so I'd say it's plausible.
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Probably still tied to a Microsoft account and a bunch of other terrible things they learned from Apple/Google.
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A lighthearted link: Is this guy the funniest tech analyst ever? (http://in.news.yahoo.com/apple-microsoft-may-39-merge-39-next-5-091213266--finance.html)
Like maybe just watch the guy and assume whatever he says, the opposite is what will actually happen.
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Rumor: (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/09/microsoft_threshold_start_menu/) Next version of Windows (8.2? 9? 2015?) to be split into three versions: one with the Metro/"Modern" UI, one for desktops with a more "Windows Classic" interface, and an enterprise version that's the latter with a longer, more regular patch cycle.
Just a rumor, but "reverse course on a stupid idea that everyone told you was a stupid idea in the first damn place" is a pretty good description of every MS decision in recent memory, so I'd say it's plausible.
Well, they'd be in for a real heartbreak. Of their own making, which it seems like it'd be pretty stupid and pointless to set themselves up for. I mean, if you had the versions broken down like this, you'd have to know what the end result would be--else, why would you break it down this way? I mean, it's backpedaling, but it's exceptionally stupid and wrong backpedaling. Then again, that's also pretty Microsoft.
I remember hearing a rumor that Microsoft was considering moving Windows to a more frequent release cycle--like, say, yearly or every couple years--and charging must less for each release--like, say, $20.
That's about the sweet spot for me: I'd pay $20 for Windows. Pay $20 and half-heartedly toss it on whatever I've got lying around, just to look at it? Sure, why not.
Updates don't really have to be that meaty to justify $20; just make the upgrade process relatively painless, don't fuck up Windows too badly, and maybe they've got a persistent solution to their persistent problem of people not upgrading and handing them money. Seems like it might be a good idea, so watch it never happen.
Also, offered without comment because no can brain today: Will Canonical force Linux Mint to license Ubuntu binary packages? (http://www.itworld.com/open-source/387035/will-canonical-force-linux-mint-license-ubuntu-binary-packages).
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Honestly all MS ever needed to do was make the Metro UI more optional than it currently is. All this "Pick one desktop and live with it" nonsense is silly as hell, and is the most visible symptom of MS following the smartphone philosophy of "Do it our way or not at all". It's kind of inevitable considering that they're currently watching Apple make billions of dollars by doing the exact same shit that MS got sued for, only to a much greater degree. The lesson learned is apparently "If you're going to engage in antitrust behavior then do it all the fucking way."
Problem is that's just going to keep blowing up in their faces. Windows currently differentiates itself by being one of the last proprietary platforms that isn't constantly trying to handcuff the user, and while that could be a powerful sell to MS's Enterprise lifeblood they seem determined to just punt it away and sell themselves as the third-string alternative to foole. If Red Hat or SuSE are paying attention right now they ought to be scrambling like mad to put something together that non-technical people could be comfortable with, because Enterprise Linux could very easily take over as the de facto productivity platform.
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As far as making the Metro UI more optional than it currently is, that sorta sounds like what they're doing? I mean, Enterprise version aside, that sounds like one version for tablets and touchscreen laptops - where the Metro UI is really effective, and far better than the traditional desktop - and another version for desktops, that eschews it. It's not a switch back and forth at the flip of a setting situation, but it still seems geared around delivering the preferable version of the OS to the specific platform.
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Well yeah, but my point is that there's no reason not to have a single, not confusing OS choice that does have such a switch. Maybe I want my thousand dollar PC/tab to act like a tablet when I'm carrying it and act like a PC when it's docked, and not one or the other or some weird Frankenstein amalgamation of the two all the time.
The foole platforms succeed in part because they're wonderful at adapting seamlessly to different usage modes. Microsoft simply cannot get with that program and it is killing them.
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Probably still tied to a Microsoft account and a bunch of other terrible things they learned from Apple/Google.
Yeah, but I doubt they can make it mandatory.
Note I didn't say that I doubt they'll try. I just don't think it's feasible from an implementation standpoint, between the legacy codebase and established user expectations.
It would, of course, be utterly suicidal to try and do this in a corporate environment. But then, that didn't stop them from releasing 2 out of 3 of their last major OS revisions.
I remember hearing a rumor that Microsoft was considering moving Windows to a more frequent release cycle--like, say, yearly or every couple years--and charging must less for each release--like, say, $20.
That's what Apple's been doing for years, culminating in finally releasing Mavericks as a free upgrade.
Difference is, Apple's a hardware company.
That's about the sweet spot for me: I'd pay $20 for Windows. Pay $20 and half-heartedly toss it on whatever I've got lying around, just to look at it? Sure, why not.
Meh. $50 upgrade is how they got me to buy Windows ME. Not falling for THAT again.
Well yeah, but my point is that there's no reason not to have a single, not confusing OS choice that does have such a switch. Maybe I want my thousand dollar PC/tab to act like a tablet when I'm carrying it and act like a PC when it's docked, and not one or the other or some weird Frankenstein amalgamation of the two all the time.
This is what Ubuntu's trying to do. So far, it's resulted in a shitty desktop UI and a not-even-functional phone UI.
Not to say it's a bad IDEA. And MS, unlike Canonical, already has all the pieces; they just have to figure out how to put them together the right way.
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Yeah, but I doubt they can make it mandatory.
Note I didn't say that I doubt they'll try. I just don't think it's feasible from an implementation standpoint, between the legacy codebase and established user expectations.
I know you're a programmer. I haven't written much (well, anything) for Windows/Win32/etc., but I wouldn't be surprised if you have. And, if so, could you answer this: how does their legacy codebase hold them back from, say, making it difficult or unpleasant to install things from outside of their own 'app store'? Honestly asking. Does Windows legacy code really prevent them from, say, making it so that unsigned executables (barring the use of an exploit) couldn't be loaded and run? Why?
If you mean to say that they'll try and end up having to backpedal--well, that'd be the reasonable outcome. I'm not sure reasonable outcomes are the only ones on the table now.
It would, of course, be utterly suicidal to try and do this in a corporate environment. But then, that didn't stop them from releasing 2 out of 3 of their last major OS revisions.
It's hard to see what their logic would be, trying to push that on a corporate environment. What would they gain? How could they possibly not understand what they'd stand to lose?
However, were they to lose the personal desktop, I think they'd probably, eventually, start losing the corporate environment--but maybe not for a long, long time. I'm thinking about how the home OS and work OS being the same probably cuts down on training costs--even if they lost the desktop tomorrow, it'd be a while before the familiarity with Windows in the workforce really began to drop off.
That's what Apple's been doing for years, culminating in finally releasing Mavericks as a free upgrade.
Difference is, Apple's a hardware company.
If Microsoft did it, it'd be more of an intermediate step to a subscription model than what Apple is doing--like where Adobe has gone with their creative suite. Though it remains to be seen whether doing that with the creative suite was really such a good idea, it's clear to see why Adobe thought it was one: frogmarch people into upgrades, continually extract money from your customers, cut down on piracy.
Microsoft has a persistent problem of having trouble moving people to newer versions of their OS. It's not a completely unreasonable thought that a subscription model might solve the problem.
I'm not sure it would work, mind you--and I have the faint hope that taking a stab at that transition would further loosen Microsoft's hold on the desktop--but I could certainly see intermediate steps towards it.
If I recall correctly, the rumor was something like 'compelling improvements + yearly releases + low price = profit'. It's conceivable, if you consider that Microsoft can make compelling improvements to Windows--maybe 'compelling improvements' is code for 'we'll only patch it for a year'. I don't know. It would probably help if I could actually remember or find where I heard about it.
Meh. $50 upgrade is how they got me to buy Windows ME. Not falling for THAT again.
Funny you should mention Windows ME. My first machine was a ME box, just as ME was coming out. I was on that for a good 4 or 5 years, I think. Overpriced Gateway PIII 733MHz with integrated graphics and nothing else to really soften that blow; it did not dazzle, it did not amaze. I'd tell stories if I had any: that was my calibration for 'normal' at the time, and after XP I sorta forgot all about it.
Getting back to the subject: $50 would be too much. $20, on the other hand, would be fine, no matter what stinker was produced. If nothing else, I could have the pleasure of tearing it apart with the benefit of my experiences with it to lend authority to my arguments--that's probably worth the $20 itself.
Aside from that, I don't actually have a copy of Windows right now. I don't want to pirate it, don't want to spend ~$100 on an OEM copy I can't move from machine to machine (see: "I don't have a copy of Windows right now") and even if I could afford to drop $200 or more on a retail copy, I wouldn't do it because I don't actually want to use Windows--not for day-to-day stuff--I'd just want it to run that copy of Saints Row 3 that I've got moldering on my Steam account. I'm not really willing to pay $200, $100, $70, or even $50 for that--but I'd shell out $20.
Maybe I want my thousand dollar PC/tab to act like a tablet when I'm carrying it and act like a PC when it's docked, and not one or the other or some weird Frankenstein amalgamation of the two all the time.
Absolutely. I want different things out of a mobile UI than I want out of a desktop UI. I'm just not sure you can reconcile the needs of the mobile use case and the desktop use case in a decent way with a single design. So, obviously, two designs.
However, unless we want to take a significant amount of freedom from client applications in terms of how they may do their UI, a lot of the burden must necessarily fall onto the common programmer. That, I think, is where the dream of convergence breaks down.
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Windows is that thing that comes for free with a new laptop, right?
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Yeah, but I doubt they can make it mandatory.
Note I didn't say that I doubt they'll try. I just don't think it's feasible from an implementation standpoint, between the legacy codebase and established user expectations.
I know you're a programmer. I haven't written much (well, anything) for Windows/Win32/etc., but I wouldn't be surprised if you have. And, if so, could you answer this: how does their legacy codebase hold them back from, say, making it difficult or unpleasant to install things from outside of their own 'app store'? Honestly asking. Does Windows legacy code really prevent them from, say, making it so that unsigned executables (barring the use of an exploit) couldn't be loaded and run? Why?
I wasn't suggesting anything that extreme; I was thinking more along the lines of simply forcing you to import a profile at install time, which would be easily circumvented (especially in a corporate environment where it would already be stripped out of the OS image before putting it on any client machines).
As far as actually releasing a version of Windows that tells customers they can't use any of their existing programs and are going to have to buy everything through the Microsoft Store? Well, they have that; it's called Windows RT and it's an abject failure.
If you mean to say that they'll try and end up having to backpedal--well, that'd be the reasonable outcome. I'm not sure reasonable outcomes are the only ones on the table now.
Backpedaling is exactly what they're already doing on RT. Have you seen any Surface commercials lately? They're hammering the "and you can run all your programs" part pretty hard to make sure potential customers know they're not buying RT.
Speaking technically, RT can force users (inasmuch as it has any) to use only App Store apps because it runs on ARM and there's no existing infrastructure of ARM-based Windows apps. If it were to appear on the desktop, well, the first thing that would happen is that nobody would buy it, and the second is that someone would find a trivial method of jailbreaking it.
Speaking in terms of user reaction, I can't believe MS would be that utterly suicidal. I could only see it happening after the scenario you posit where MS loses the desktop completely and nobody's using their products at all anymore -- if they're starting over from scratch, they might try this; short of that, I don't see it happening.
(I don't see even Apple going that far on the desktop. Adobe CS represents a line in the sand -- Apple makes more money from Mac users who want to run Photoshop than Adobe does; if Apple tries to force Adobe to sell CS exclusively through the App Store, the likely outcome is that Adobe takes its ball and goes home and Apple loses the entire graphics professional market. At that point Apple may as well give up the Mac entirely and just sell phones and tablets -- which I think is a likelier prospect than a fully-locked-down Mac OS, but still not likely to happen soon.)
However, unless we want to take a significant amount of freedom from client applications in terms of how they may do their UI, a lot of the burden must necessarily fall onto the common programmer. That, I think, is where the dream of convergence breaks down.
Fair point. Developers can't even converge on something as similar as an "Open File" dialog (and I JUST FUCKING LOVE how you can't just copy your current directory from Photoshop's to paste into Explorer); a program that can easily switch its entire UI is another level entirely.
Then again, there's probably a certain "If you build it, he will come (http://www.filmsite.org/moments03.html)" aspect to setting up the infrastructure -- if your OS, as one of its major selling points, actually allows this sort of varying app interface, that's incentive for developers to get on it and support it in their software.
And on the "take a significant amount of freedom from client applications" front -- while I'm not a big fan of Unity, I have been impressed at how they managed to make apps from a bunch of different toolkits all work correctly with its menubar. (Originally only GTK apps were supported, but last I checked they'd managed to make it pretty seamless across programs.) Course, Canonical's working almost exclusively with open-source software, so it's a lot easier to figure out compatibility.
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You make a fair point with RT. It failed, and it failed because it didn't do what users wanted to do--which is run existing programs. With such a clear example, it's an argument that writes itself against a total lockdown of Windows--everyone can see that it'd fail.
What about a more Android-y model, though? Unless something has changed recently, Android still lets you install and use .APKs that you find any-old-where, but to be able to do this you must go into the settings (can't remember how many levels deep, but I don't think it's top-level) and check a box and (I've heard, recently--can't verify, as my Android phone runs a 'historic' version of Android) you get a big scary warning.
If Microsoft ends up going that route, they don't actually prevent anything from running on their OS, but they get nearly the desired result. Most users won't go in and check the figurative box--the tyranny of the default--so most new program sales go through Microsoft. And the end result might not be open revolt or mass-exodus, either--technical, knowledgeable users wouldn't have any trouble with going into the settings to enable non 'app store' program sources--a trivial, one-time fix. Maybe a week of furor in tech news and then it's all forgotten. Non-technical users who find a need for something outside of Microsoft's store will probably get along just fine as well--getting instructions on what they need to do from a friend or the Internet or something. For the balance, they just start getting their programs from Microsoft's store and don't give it much more thought.
So it's not really a matter of locking things out as just making them more difficult. Actually, maybe 'difficult' isn't the right term. It's really more reducing relative convenience. Nonetheless, possibly quite effective--especially in the long term.
I honestly don't know if Microsoft really intends to go there, but I think that might be what Valve's worried about (prompting all that SteamOS stuff). For the users heavily invested in Steam, they probably won't be torn away any time soon by such an effort. Prospective Steam users or Steam users with a low level of investment in the service might be pried/turned away if Microsoft put a barrier to Steam installation in the form of not being able to install it without toggling a setting somewhere--or just not letting Valve distribute it on Microsoft's store! If they do a good enough job with their store that people start using it for discovery of new programs, programs not on there may be significantly disadvantaged. At the very least, they might be able to slow Steam adoption while working on making their own equivalent services more competitive. Potentially a threat to Steam, and I'd think Microsoft would want to threaten Steam--all without preventing it's installation in Windows or truly making it difficult to install.
(I don't see even Apple going that far on the desktop. Adobe CS represents a line in the sand -- Apple makes more money from Mac users who want to run Photoshop than Adobe does; if Apple tries to force Adobe to sell CS exclusively through the App Store, the likely outcome is that Adobe takes its ball and goes home and Apple loses the entire graphics professional market. At that point Apple may as well give up the Mac entirely and just sell phones and tablets -- which I think is a likelier prospect than a fully-locked-down Mac OS, but still not likely to happen soon.)
What about Gatekeeper? (https://support.apple.com/kb/ht5290) It isn't a full lockdown by any stretch of the imagination, but they might not need to go so far. I find it especially interesting that it's got an App Store-only setting, though the default is apparently App Store + 'identified developers'. In any case, it represents a certain increase in Apple's control over their desktop platform.
Skimming through, I wasn't clear on whether or not this thing is actually enabled at all, or if it's in the latest OSX, so I searched on the subject and found something with a bit more detail on how it works (http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/gatekeeper-on-mac-os-x-10-9-mavericks/). Even when it's on, it's not completely effective at preventing unsigned applications from loading, it seems. Actually it doesn't seem that difficult to get around at all. Still, it and Apple's stern warnings are probably more than enough to keep most users from straying from the App Store. That combined with it not being that difficult to circumvent makes me wonder if the song and dance Apple gives about increasing the security of users isn't just blowing smoke and 100% of their rationale behind it is just increasing the barriers to users installing programs from outside of Apple's control and/or purview.
Maybe I'm reaching a little, but I really don't think it's all that implausible.
Well, maybe DEVELOPERS will end up revolting (SteamOS), and that might end the party, but I could see why Microsoft might think it was a good idea.
Oh, hey tinfoil hat idea:
What if Microsoft threw out Windows 8 the way they did so that they could 'make good' with the next version while quietly introducing soft walled-garden features, so as to deemphasize the misfeature and encourage the users it'd annoy to migrate anyway? Possibly timed with a EOL to Win 7 or along with some genuinely compelling features?
Just to be clear, I don't think this is what actually happened; I'm still attributing the mistakes of Windows 8 to stupidity, not malice.
Tying it all back into Linux discussion: I hope it all happens and it all blows up in Microsoft's big, dumb, entirely-figurative face. Their fucking up a little has ended up improving my gaming experience enormously--I can only imagine what them really screwing the pooch will do!
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What about a more Android-y model, though? Unless something has changed recently, Android still lets you install and use .APKs that you find any-old-where, but to be able to do this you must go into the settings (can't remember how many levels deep, but I don't think it's top-level) and check a box and (I've heard, recently--can't verify, as my Android phone runs a 'historic' version of Android) you get a big scary warning.
If Microsoft ends up going that route, they don't actually prevent anything from running on their OS, but they get nearly the desired result. Most users won't go in and check the figurative box--the tyranny of the default--so most new program sales go through Microsoft. And the end result might not be open revolt or mass-exodus, either--technical, knowledgeable users wouldn't have any trouble with going into the settings to enable non 'app store' program sources--a trivial, one-time fix. Maybe a week of furor in tech news and then it's all forgotten. Non-technical users who find a need for something outside of Microsoft's store will probably get along just fine as well--getting instructions on what they need to do from a friend or the Internet or something. For the balance, they just start getting their programs from Microsoft's store and don't give it much more thought.
This is pretty close to the current state of OSX with Gatekeeper, as you mentioned -- you're right that Apple currently requires that apps be signed using their toolkit, but doesn't actually require that they be purchased from the App Store. You're also right that it would be simple for Apple to flip the toggle and require that all apps come from the App Store by default, but I don't think they'll go so far as to refuse to run outside binaries at all, for the aforementioned Adobe reasons.
It would be trivial for MS to implement something similar, but there are a couple nontechnical MS-is-not-Apple hurdles.
The first is MS's dominant market position. Requiring purchases through its app store would be a surefire way to put itself right back in antitrust regulators' sights. And while the US courts never did more than slap MS on the wrists, it was still a lengthy and costly legal fight that MS would prefer to avoid -- and the EU courts have been a lot stricter than the US ones have.
The second is psychological. I think MS has seen that it needs to tread carefully as far as trying to use the kind of "one login for everything" setup that's worked for Apple, Google, and Facebook. Consider another two of MS's recent failures: the Windows Live suite that attempted to integrate Hotmail with a bunch of other, less desirable online apps, and Games for Windows Live, where MS learned one of its recent harsh lessons that console gamers and PC gamers have different expectations.
At some point, customers get angry that there's just one more login, one more thing they have to sign up for, and they don't like that.
Keeping it optional is probably in MS's best interests -- but again, I wouldn't be surprised if they acted against those best interests.
(I haven't really tooled around with MS's App Store at all, but my experience with app stores in general is that someone saw apt-get, thought it was awesome, and then removed all the good shit from it. There's a convenience advantage to being able to install all your programs from one place, but without versioning and dependency resolution it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why does Steam pop up that "Installing DirectX..." box on the first run of every single game instead of just doing it once? And I've got a whole rant (http://brontoforum.us/index.php?topic=1064.msg267000#msg267000) about how the OSX App Store has made it impossible to do something as simple as increase your resolution if you're still running the OS version it released TWO YEARS AGO.)
Skimming through, I wasn't clear on whether or not this thing is actually enabled at all, or if it's in the latest OSX, so I searched on the subject and found something with a bit more detail on how it works (http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/gatekeeper-on-mac-os-x-10-9-mavericks/). Even when it's on, it's not completely effective at preventing unsigned applications from loading, it seems. Actually it doesn't seem that difficult to get around at all. Still, it and Apple's stern warnings are probably more than enough to keep most users from straying from the App Store. That combined with it not being that difficult to circumvent makes me wonder if the song and dance Apple gives about increasing the security of users isn't just blowing smoke and 100% of their rationale behind it is just increasing the barriers to users installing programs from outside of Apple's control and/or purview.
Maybe I'm reaching a little, but I really don't think it's all that implausible.
I don't either. I definitely think there's a trend toward using security as an excuse to tighten control -- obviously there are plenty of political comparisons to be made here, but I'm limiting my point to computer design at present.
There really ARE arguments to be made in favor of code signing for typical users. But it sure can make life tough for tinkerers.
Apple, MS, and Google are all doing this stuff right now. It's been interesting contrasting my new Chromebook (which has a legacy BIOS that will boot any old x86/64 OS you attach it to) with my old one (which only has the Chrome BIOS and which, while comparatively easy to get to run non-Chrome Linuxes, still requires a signed kernel).
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This is pretty close to the current state of OSX with Gatekeeper, as you mentioned -- you're right that Apple currently requires that apps be signed using their toolkit, but doesn't actually require that they be purchased from the App Store. You're also right that it would be simple for Apple to flip the toggle and require that all apps come from the App Store by default, but I don't think they'll go so far as to refuse to run outside binaries at all, for the aforementioned Adobe reasons.
It would be trivial for MS to implement something similar, but there are a couple nontechnical MS-is-not-Apple hurdles.
The first is MS's dominant market position. Requiring purchases through its app store would be a surefire way to put itself right back in antitrust regulators' sights. And while the US courts never did more than slap MS on the wrists, it was still a lengthy and costly legal fight that MS would prefer to avoid -- and the EU courts have been a lot stricter than the US ones have.
The second is psychological. I think MS has seen that it needs to tread carefully as far as trying to use the kind of "one login for everything" setup that's worked for Apple, Google, and Facebook. Consider another two of MS's recent failures: the Windows Live suite that attempted to integrate Hotmail with a bunch of other, less desirable online apps, and Games for Windows Live, where MS learned one of its recent harsh lessons that console gamers and PC gamers have different expectations.
Yeah, you're probably right.
At some point, customers get angry that there's just one more login, one more thing they have to sign up for, and they don't like that.
Tangent: are you familiar with SQRL (https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm)? It sounds pretty interesting.
Keeping it optional is probably in MS's best interests -- but again, I wouldn't be surprised if they acted against those best interests.
I get the feeling even Microsoft doesn't really know what it's going to do these days.
(I haven't really tooled around with MS's App Store at all, but my experience with app stores in general is that someone saw apt-get, thought it was awesome, and then removed all the good shit from it. There's a convenience advantage to being able to install all your programs from one place, but without versioning and dependency resolution it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why does Steam pop up that "Installing DirectX..." box on the first run of every single game instead of just doing it once? And I've got a whole rant (http://brontoforum.us/index.php?topic=1064.msg267000#msg267000) about how the OSX App Store has made it impossible to do something as simple as increase your resolution if you're still running the OS version it released TWO YEARS AGO.)
You put a lot in the parenthetical aside. This is what Valve has to say for themselves on the DirectX subject. (https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9974-PAXN-6252) To summarize: this is for games which use the D3DX helper library--apparently the D3DX ABI is highly unstable or something and you need to have the precise version/build of D3DX/DirectX the game was linked against when a game uses it. Unfortunately, Microsoft's licensing terms prohibit distributing this in any way but as an installer and manually determining what versions of D3DX are already install is 'extremely complicated', so running the DirectX installer the first time for each game that uses D3DX is the only practical way to ensure it all works. It's a stupid situation that's all Microsoft's fault, so I'm leaning towards believing Valve's excuse.
The OSX bit is hilarious. The most broken bit, to my mind, is that you need XCode to set a particular resolution, though. Not providing the proper version of XCode is a close second, though, because I could think of many reasons to want a particular version of an IDE/compiler.
I can't help but think that the reason for 'app store' packaging formats/systems not providing state-of-the-90's features probably comes down to sheer laziness. After all, dependency resolution and versioning is actual work.
In mobile, I've heard the excuse that things like dependency resolution are too CPU intensive to have in a mobile package manager; that it uses up too much battery, and that's why they don't do it. I don't really buy that installation is happening frequently enough to warrant that kind of worry and, also, OPKG (http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/techref/opkg) exists. And I have seen instances of proprietary Android packages needing other packages to be installed in the past, so I'd say there's still a use for the feature in proprietary systems. (I'm sure you've heard that old saw about 'proprietary systems don't need/can't use dependency resolution because etc. etc.') So: laziness.
EDIT: Maybe, in Microsoft's case, it's because their programmers are honestly incompetent at package management. (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/exponential-algorithm-making-windows-xp-miserable-could-be-fixed/)
Quoting my friend, who brought this article to my attention: "Exponential algorithm? Everybody knows if your algorithm is exponential, you look really, really hard for an algorithm that isn't exponential. Just imagine if Debian used an exponential algorithm for updates. I sometimes have 200 or more updates waiting for me, and I stay up to date (ish). Upgrading from one stable release to another can involve over a thousand updates easily. You'd never finish..."
There really ARE arguments to be made in favor of code signing for typical users. But it sure can make life tough for tinkerers.
In a limited sense, I think it's a very good thing. It's basically how software installation already works for the Linux distributions I'm familiar with--there's a curated repository of packages and they're all signed. Granted, the executables aren't signed. Granted, running of things outside of repository isn't prevented... But, the user has reasonable assurance that the software they get is 'legit' and they can casually install whatever they want from the repository without too much worry.
On the other hand, going much futher than that is throwing the baby out with the bath water. We need tinkerers--that's how we got here; that's how we'll get where we go next, if we go anywhere.
I think it's much better to just discourage casual installation or running of code from sources the user doesn't know. And let's not forget the browser, either: even if we end up signing all the native code that's run on a machine, there's still all that javascript. The browser continues to be a major attack vector, and I don't think that's going away--and good luck getting that stuff signed. My feeling is that browser installation isn't finished until you've got NoScript or ScriptSafe installed. If the end goal is safety, I think it's much better if there's user education on the subject--don't run code you don't know, don't grab from places you don't have reason to trust. It's not enough to absolutely protect the user, but that's not really achievable anyway; this is good enough, and I think it's better tradeoff too. Requiring the signing of executabables on its own, depending on the impelmentation of the system and what you then allow those exectuables to do, might end up being little more than security theatre.
Apple, MS, and Google are all doing this stuff right now. It's been interesting contrasting my new Chromebook (which has a legacy BIOS that will boot any old x86/64 OS you attach it to) with my old one (which only has the Chrome BIOS and which, while comparatively easy to get to run non-Chrome Linuxes, still requires a signed kernel).
Interesting. Would you say that's a general trend--letting you more easily run your own OS/kernel--or is it only isolated models? Haven't kept up with Chromebooks much.
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I get the feeling even Microsoft doesn't really know what it's going to do these days.
I don't think they've known what they were doing since Windows XP.
Longhorn was a wonderful hypothetical OS that never got anywhere near working out in real life. Win7 is good damage control for Vista. Everything else...well, it's a series of halfbaked UI ideas that nobody wanted (Office 2007, Win8), johnny-come-lately imitations of other people's more successful software (Office 360, Windows Phone), and attempts to focus on the products that ARE selling well and trying to shove them sideways into markets where they don't really work. I've linked articles already on why Windows Live was such a failure, and it comes from some misguided idea that Windows is a dominant product because of brand loyalty and people's strong positive feelings toward it -- a notion so bizarre that only a Microsoft publicist could possibly believe it.
And in the past few years, MS has learned something anyone could have told it (and did): PC gamers accept that they can't resell their games but don't like having to sign up for a Microsoft account to play them (and sure as fuck aren't going to pay a subscription fee to play them online, unless the game happens to be called World of Warcraft), while console gamers will happily sign up for an account and pay a monthly fee but will openly revolt if you tell them they can't buy or sell used games.
Interesting. Would you say that's a general trend--letting you more easily run your own OS/kernel--or is it only isolated models? Haven't kept up with Chromebooks much.
I think it's too early to tell, but it seems to be a general trend in the higher-powered/Intel-based models. I expect if you're already putting an Intel-based board on the thing, the cost of adding SeaBIOS is trivial.
I also think that, while Google management is certainly geared toward Big Brother data indexing and profit maximizing, a large part of Google's actual developers is still made up of good old-fashioned hackers who want the same kinds of stuff you and I do. That's why there's stuff like Crouton (Google-developed software which lets you run Ubuntu inside ChromeOS) and other, similar support for running third-party Linux stuff, and also why Google-branded devices (Chromebooks, the Nexus line, etc.) tend to be pretty easy to jailbreak/set to Developer Mode. Google's smart enough to keep guys like me happy, and keep us as customers (even if sometimes reluctant ones) despite our grave misgivings about the general thrust of its business.
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PC gamers accept that they can't resell their games but don't like having to sign up for a Microsoft account to play them (and sure as fuck aren't going to pay a subscription fee to play them online, unless the game happens to be called World of Warcraft), while console gamers will happily sign up for an account and pay a monthly fee but will openly revolt if you tell them they can't buy or sell used games.
It's funny how odd this dynamic is, I wonder what the breakdown of why (not how - I think most of us know the history) we reached that point looks like.
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People will accept restrictions if they seem to have a valid technical purpose (even if said purpose is anachronistic) but not ones that feel arbitrary or fully intended to make a profit.
Best Example: Diablo 3 always-online vs. SimCity always-online. Nobody was happy with either, but the first one didn't cause a shitstorm because there was a pretty solid reasoning behind it (even if everyone knew that the actual reasoning ended at a point of Blizzard making money.) The second example serves no useful purpose to the end user, same as most Windows Live services.
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No. There were many tears about the lack of Diablo III offline play.
Stuff from soldiers, people with flaky connections, etc. was showing up on forums.
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I've linked articles already on why Windows Live was such a failure, and it comes from some misguided idea that Windows is a dominant product because of brand loyalty and people's strong positive feelings toward it -- a notion so bizarre that only a Microsoft publicist could possibly believe it.
That really is astonishing; I'll have to go back and look at those links a bit (more, if I have already). You'd think they wouldn't forget that their business model's strength traditionally stemmed from chaining their users to the proverbial radiator (http://youtu.be/KkQlgdn1MuU). Just goes to show: never believe your own hype.
I also think that, while Google management is certainly geared toward Big Brother data indexing and profit maximizing, a large part of Google's actual developers is still made up of good old-fashioned hackers who want the same kinds of stuff you and I do. That's why there's stuff like Crouton (Google-developed software which lets you run Ubuntu inside ChromeOS) and other, similar support for running third-party Linux stuff, and also why Google-branded devices (Chromebooks, the Nexus line, etc.) tend to be pretty easy to jailbreak/set to Developer Mode. Google's smart enough to keep guys like me happy, and keep us as customers (even if sometimes reluctant ones) despite our grave misgivings about the general thrust of its business.
Play somebody well, and they'll do what you want. But when someone realizes they're being played, resentment follows.
On the subject of being a sometimes reluctant user of Google services, here's something actually-Linux-related: I found a FUSE filesystem doodad for Google Drive (https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse). These (https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse/wiki/How-to-install-from-source-on-Debian-Jessie) are the instructions I used, but if you're using Ubuntu or whatever, they've got special stuff for you (typical). I've used it, and it works. Be warned, though--it's ass-slow.
PC gamers accept that they can't resell their games but don't like having to sign up for a Microsoft account to play them (and sure as fuck aren't going to pay a subscription fee to play them online, unless the game happens to be called World of Warcraft), while console gamers will happily sign up for an account and pay a monthly fee but will openly revolt if you tell them they can't buy or sell used games.
It's funny how odd this dynamic is, I wonder what the breakdown of why (not how - I think most of us know the history) we reached that point looks like.
I honestly don't know. I'd say that part of the reason for part of this probably comes down to money though. Console gamers probably care more about the ability to resell their games because of the cost of buying them in the first place, compared to the PC (even used console games vs. PC new games sales is sort of a wash in the PC's favor). But, then, there's the paid accounts. PSN+ supposedly has a decent value with that game-a-month thing, but I don't know anything about Xbox Live and it's more abstract value, not having been an Xbox (360) owner. I could point out that PC gamers are accustomed to (and, apparently, happy with) running their own servers for multiplayer, but those same people go on the consoles and accept the other way around. Maybe it's a matter of putting on a culture like you put on a hat, and that's down to a difference of culture?
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PCs make it easier for players to host decentralized game servers. Players would rather host their own shit than pay monthly. I can run Starbound, Terraria, etc. servers, so I wouldn't want to shell out.
Until the last gen or two, that would've been computationally expensive for consoles.
On the console side, PSN+'s freebies supposedly offer good values. XBL was just "pay us or go fuck yourselves."
The deal with PSN+ becoming mandatory on the PS4 is that Sony is claiming they'll use fees from it to keep servers for games up. This hopefully means less evaporating multi-player support (see: Demon's Souls).
So, while it sounded bad, at first, it may be a boon to players who use online multi-player consistently enough to justify it. This assumes that Sony will be controlling the servers.
My understanding is that some companies (EA) are not playing ball with this, wanting to keep tight control for themselves. Maybe their plan is to eventually force people to buy season passes or pay monthly to EA to keep their servers up. EA is nothing if not innovative in the field of villainy.
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PC gamers accept that they can't resell their games but don't like having to sign up for a Microsoft account to play them (and sure as fuck aren't going to pay a subscription fee to play them online, unless the game happens to be called World of Warcraft), while console gamers will happily sign up for an account and pay a monthly fee but will openly revolt if you tell them they can't buy or sell used games.
It's funny how odd this dynamic is, I wonder what the breakdown of why (not how - I think most of us know the history) we reached that point looks like.
Brent's halfway there; technology and availability are the other half of the coin. PC gamers have been installing software on their hard drives for decades now; the disc, if any, is merely a thing they use once to install the game (obnoxious games that require a disc in the drive as DRM notwithstanding). Likewise, they've had free online play at least as far back as battle.net; for a long time subscription fees were considered an accepted part of MMO's, but as WoW has become completely dominant in the genre other games have had to resort to the free-to-play model instead.
The technological limitations of consoles have led in much the opposite direction. The game IS the medium it's played on, the cartridge then the disc. And by the same token, a used game market sprung up for consoles in a way it never really did for PC's -- installing a game on your PC and then reselling it tended to made retailers nervous due to the possibility for piracy (and the possibility that they'd be sued by vendors), so you never saw used PC game sales take off.
And consoles didn't have a viable online platform until Xbox Live. Sony is still playing catchup, and Nintendo straight-up does not give a fuck. When you spring up as the de facto distributor of a service, people are more inclined to think your price is fair.
It's pretty simple psychology when you look at it like that. MS was dumb not to understand it, especially given how incredibly savvy it's been, on the whole, in parlaying its dominant status as a PC software company into a dominant position in the console market.
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So my desktop finally crapped out; Vista (I know, I know) finally corrupted itself with what I believe is an astonishing 2500~ registry errors. Now the problem is how the fuck I find the discount I'm entitled to with the 'upgrade' version of Windows 7, sure it's easy to find it for 8. But like hell I'm putting that on my machine if I can help it.
Now I could just go to a computer repair shop, but that would cost me $70+ that I shouldn't need to spend--and would be quite useful given the current steam sale--if I could just get through the confusing mess that is trying to find an upgrade to 7 online, and I'm damn sure I won't find what I'm looking for in real life retail.
Seriously, fuck you, Microsoft, I will not buy a second defective OS from you in a row!