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Author Topic: I Don't Do Windows  (Read 47783 times)

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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #300 on: March 25, 2012, 12:15:07 PM »

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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #301 on: April 03, 2012, 08:02:01 AM »

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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #302 on: April 25, 2012, 10:20:40 AM »

Ars has a fairly in-depth rundown of the Win8 interface 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:

Quote
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:

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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:

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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:

Quote
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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #303 on: May 30, 2012, 01:32:53 PM »

MS getting rid of stupid fucking "Windows Live" brand; even the NYT is having a laugh at their expense:

Quote
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, back in aught-seven.
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JDigital

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #304 on: May 30, 2012, 03:01:22 PM »

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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #305 on: May 30, 2012, 03:57:23 PM »

Yesbut at least it WAS a software framework and not a damn OS.
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #306 on: July 25, 2012, 01:33:47 PM »

Gabe Newell really fucking hates Windows 8, 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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Brentai

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #307 on: July 25, 2012, 02:18:36 PM »

Well... yeah.
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Mongrel

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #308 on: July 25, 2012, 02:52:22 PM »

If Miscrosoft goes full-on walled garden it'll be interesting to see what tries to take it's place.
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Bal

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #309 on: July 25, 2012, 02:55:32 PM »

Using my crystal ball, I'm going to go with Windows 8 flops, Windows 9 is good again.
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Royal☭

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #310 on: July 25, 2012, 03:46:42 PM »

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."

TA

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #311 on: July 25, 2012, 04:15:57 PM »

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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Mongrel

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #312 on: July 25, 2012, 04:35:56 PM »

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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #313 on: July 25, 2012, 05:01:08 PM »

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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #314 on: July 26, 2012, 07:04:58 AM »

Reg has more, 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.  In a more perfect world I'd rather see support for something open like coreboot or OpenFirmware.
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #315 on: August 23, 2012, 11:23:19 AM »

Well, that was fast: someone coded up a Start Menu for Windows 8.

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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Kayma

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #316 on: September 10, 2012, 10:31:51 PM »

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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #317 on: September 11, 2012, 07:08:59 AM »

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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #318 on: October 16, 2012, 04:33:06 PM »

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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Brentai

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #319 on: October 16, 2012, 07:15:00 PM »

Windows 8 seems like it IS a good tablet OS

(It is not.)
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