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Author Topic: I Don't Do Windows  (Read 50781 times)

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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #320 on: October 17, 2012, 06:56:41 AM »

Hm.  You using the release preview or whatever it is they called it?  What's wrong with it?
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Brentai

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #321 on: October 17, 2012, 07:33:58 AM »

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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #322 on: October 17, 2012, 07:49:03 AM »

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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #323 on: October 17, 2012, 02:06:02 PM »

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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #324 on: October 18, 2012, 01:02:17 PM »

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 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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sei

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #325 on: October 22, 2012, 02:14:29 PM »

Did you ever get around to giving Mint a whirl?
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #326 on: October 22, 2012, 04:23:25 PM »

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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Metal Slime

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #327 on: October 23, 2012, 12:23:33 AM »

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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #328 on: October 23, 2012, 10:39:59 PM »

Gizmodo 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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fullmooninu

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #329 on: October 24, 2012, 06:37:48 PM »

im about to abandon my usual windows + fedora vm.

What is it with this mageia and lxde super hype?
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #330 on: October 25, 2012, 03:14:04 PM »

Ars reviews Win8.

Quote
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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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #331 on: October 26, 2012, 11:59:28 AM »

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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sei

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #332 on: October 26, 2012, 11:01:49 PM »

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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Zaratustra

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #333 on: October 27, 2012, 06:01:32 PM »

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".

Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #334 on: October 27, 2012, 08:01:00 PM »

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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Brentai

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #335 on: October 27, 2012, 08:32:55 PM »

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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TA

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #336 on: October 27, 2012, 08:34:18 PM »

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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Mazian

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #337 on: October 27, 2012, 09:49:56 PM »

Forcing the standard Windows games 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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TA

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #338 on: October 27, 2012, 09:58:54 PM »

... oh man, what does Metro look like on multiple monitors?  Does anything work?
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Smiler

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #339 on: October 28, 2012, 05:39:43 AM »

Apparently one monitor is metro, the other is the legacy desktop.
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