Thu 8 Feb 2007
I’ve been using a Linux desktop at work for 8 months, and few people have commented on it at all. Two days ago I installed Beryl, and since then I’ve had a half dozen people mention how they are impressed with the whiz-bang effects. I turned most of them off though, only enabling the cube rotation, expose-wannabe, and alt-tab previews.
Best comment so far… “is that Vista?”
February 9th, 2007 at 11:41am
Here’s how linux makes it to the desktop….
Give me a FUNCTIONAL live cd with the bells and whistles.
FUNCTIONAL means including a working wifi (including WPA)implementation with a gui, it means building in autmatic mounting of NTFS and FAT32 partitions on the computer, and it means having the slick beryl/XGL grpahics stuff working without fucking around with drivers or package downloads.
Give me that, and I’ll drop windows for home use, and I’ll do it immediately.
February 9th, 2007 at 2:47pm
My laptop stopped interfacing with its battery, to either draw power from it or recharge, last month. I replaced the battery; the battery wasn’t the problem.
Since it’s a 3.5yr old out-of-warranty laptop, I replaced it. The new machine came with Vista on it.
So far, i’m impressed. There’s some stuff which doesn’t work quite right — this is the price of the bleeding edge, and I accept that — but it seems more stable than XP, and the UI is impressive.
My general reaction to first release of windows OSes has been:
win95: its not as bad as the critics say, and it’s much better than windows 311, thank god.
win98: what the **** is this ****?
winME: what the **** is this ****?
win2k: finally, a stable, reliable version of windows.
winXP: yuck. they took 2k, made it less stable, and uglified it.
vista: oooh. pretty. much more stable. ****, the user account promotion feature is obnoxious.
February 9th, 2007 at 7:27pm
aphrael: I’m glad you are okay with Vista, I know that on the other hand I want nothing to do with it. For one, I enjoy working in a unix-style environment with a sophisticated and mature toolset for dealing with problems on the command line.
Also, I strongly prefer free software applications which are designed for the sake users, not commercial benefit. Be it shareware, spyware, or the upgrade treadmill — I just don’t like the negatives of relying on proprietary software — even at the cost of sometimes reduced functionality. There are some very prominent counterexamples to this, but sitll on the whole I dislike the “windows experience”.
But more importantly, I have a very strong visceral dislike of the anticompetitive tactics that Microsoft has repeatedly used with great success over the past several decades. I realize that my own actions have no pratical impact on their bottom line, but I still do not want to be part of a cycle I consider wrong.
February 9th, 2007 at 7:34pm
geekpdx: it would probably take me several hours to put all that together for you on a custom LiveCD, but it would certainly be possible. Everything you’ve suggested is available right now, in fact Ubuntu 7.04 due in April will include the whizbang graphics by default, and will hopefully include by default the nifty wireless GUI that I use daily (which supports WPA natively).
I suspect that no reputable Linux distribution will ever automount NTFS or FAT32 paritions automatically though, but it already includes by default a GUI tool for you to mount them. It will however automount any firewire/usb/flash NTFS or FAT32 drives you might have.
February 10th, 2007 at 12:24am
Oh, don’t get me wrong: I love my mks toolkit, and have dragged it along with me over more than a decade. But I’m tied to Windows, for games and for my professional uses; and, as Windows goes, Vista is better than XP.
I think the spyware/virus problem is something MS gets a bad rap for: all software has bugs and vulnerabilities, and any other platform with as large an installed user base would attract the same sort of crap. On the other hand, I have no great liking for Microsoft, and wouldn’t give them my money if I weren’t buying a new PC. :)