EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: BrianHG on January 10, 2026, 01:05:49 am
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Is this for real? Will windows will be a minority operating system in a few years? :popcorn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrtJAw57Wkw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrtJAw57Wkw)
(I don't know as I still use Windows 7)
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Is this for real? Will windows will be a minority operating system in a few years? :popcorn:
(I don't know as I still use Windows 7)
I loved Windows 7. Loved XP, liked 10.
Windows, in some very important ways, is already a minority OS. By the numbers, Linux is king!
No if you narrow that to Desktop OSs, Windows is king but has been losing for years. Mostly to macOS. Any particular version of Windows loses more share to its siblings than other OSs, I believe.
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I hope so, that will teach a lesson to others.
You can't ignore reality and just be money driven in your choices.
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Winux Zorin all other flavours ......... win 11 and up are dead
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Dying is strong but increasingly inrellevant.
Android already outnumbers windows worldwide and iOS does in the US. Linux is the overwhelmingly dominant server OS. Mac OS and ChromeOS are very strong in the laptop segment. Windows is still the leader in laptops and the king of desktop operating systems but those are an ever diminishing share of the market.
Plus windows "sales" are basically new device sales. Replacement cycles especially for desktop computers have increased dramatically. Even big companies aren't replacing computers every 3 years.
That's why MS is adding mandatory MS account sign-in, user tracking, and ads to windows. That's also why they are tricking people into using cloud storage. They can't count on selling someone a new computer with a new version of windows any more so they want ongoing revenue.
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the business cycle repeats - Gates should know this.
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It's happening, but I can't celebrate. There were real benefits to an almost universal and open operating system. I know there will be pushback on open, but Windows allowed others to operate in their ecosystem, unlike Apple. Linux lets anyone play, but because of the fragmentation of Linux the true cross device compatibility is even lower than indicated by the market share. Same things apply to iOS and Android.
And the reason it is happening is that Windows is avidly adopting all of the problems I complain about in the other OS.
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I think the today's AI, datacenter and network tycoons dream about a "thin minimalist terminals" completely wired to their clouds/accounts. So the "heavy" PCs as we know it today should become the history (OSes regardless). No need for powerful CPUs, GPUs, beefy fast memories/SSDs and heavy thick OSes at home or in any offices then..
:(
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Probably the biggest force against windows is that nobody (except enthusiasts) actually wants to own a computer of any description. They want the internet so they can buy crap off amazon and make their brains dumber with political propaganda on facebook, and that's already something their phones can do.
For enthusiasts I see no reason why you would want to use Microsoft's tailored-advertising-with-vestigial-operating-system-functions product. You can just install linux mint or something, install steam, your games work. In the rare instance they don't immediately, then it's 99% faster to fix the problem than it would be to decrapify a windows 10 or 11 install.
The remaining market for windows is just office computers and the terminally apathetic.
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I'm wondering, how much of that video is fakenews?
If so many desktops have been migrated to Linux, why don't we see that on statcounter?
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I think the today's AI, datacenter and network tycoons dream about a "thin minimalist terminals" completely wired to their clouds/accounts. So the "heavy" PCs as we know it today should become the history (OSes regardless). No need for powerful CPUs, GPUs, beefy fast memories/SSDs and heavy thick OSes at home or in any offices then..
:(
Its funny how the circle of computing goes around. You had computers and terminals, then we had physical computers, now we have the 'cloud' and back to computers being terminals. I wonder if we are going to return to PCs at home.
I see more and more often people dont have a PC or even a laptop at home. The phone does most of what they want to do.
People who work in an office I guess are a big part of the PC users and other than being secure the OS makes little difference for those that are cloud users. Its only the ones that need specific apps that still use them.
I have not watched the video, then to avoid click bait vids if I can. Can somone who has watched it give some context to what its rambling on about.
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i've watched a few and as usual they repeat the same thing ad nauseum. I'm going to visit "the register" to see if they are any better.
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I have not watched the video, then to avoid click bait vids if I can. Can somone who has watched it give some context to what its rambling on about.
I think it is an AI generated video. Spelling errors and usage of random video fragments based on context. And it seems it is just a rant against Windows 11. Some Googling tells me South Korea decided to ditch Windows in 2020 and finalise the migration to Linux in 2026.
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The color in these videos makes me really uncomfortable, it feels just like a Netflix show. Maybe I'm just getting old and out of touch, maybe it's because I'm Chinese, or maybe I'm just weird. Either way, I'm really not used to this kind of look ...
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The color in these videos makes me really uncomfortable, it feels just like a Netflix show. Maybe I'm just getting old and out of touch, maybe it's because I'm Chinese, or maybe I'm just weird. Either way, I'm really not used to this kind of look ...
Ah looks like a clickbait video collection. I know if I clicked on one I would be shown videos like it for a the next few months. The algorithm is an arse and cant cope with a person who is interested in lots of random things.
Thanks @nctnico that sounds like the standard jump on a partial truth and expand on it crap. I find it interesting that we have statistics and data but it still doesn't stop people using them to spread misinformation.
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The color in these videos makes me really uncomfortable, it feels just like a Netflix show. Maybe I'm just getting old and out of touch, maybe it's because I'm Chinese, or maybe I'm just weird. Either way, I'm really not used to this kind of look ...
You are allergic to click-bait . And that's a good thing! :-+
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are you sure the thin client thing is just not the school of MBA that only knows how to outsource stuff telling you that things need to be outsourced and that is that? They usually push propaganda pretty hard with a strait face
the only thing I see is that its the least work and least responsibility and basically the whole concept is shift risk elsewhere make my position safe and easy, I noticed it has little to do with business continuity or efficiency... its kind of self serving to tell people to rely on services
if you shift all the risk and work it becomes closer to the ideal money making machine (but only for the person in charge of that thing within a organization, not for the organization, i.e. self serving). At some point its like watching your significant other get wow'ed by a infomercial advertisement, because that is the only info they basically have about whats going on, advertisements..
So when there is someone managing an outsourced service that is kind of amusing because what are you paying them for, the possibility of releasing their primal frustration on a telephone to protect your business with a mean and loud conversation when the outsourced risk fucks up? It's not like trump is gonna send delta force for them. Oh or maybe they will get to cut ties and go on a big expensive shopping trip, or get you tied up with lawyers with a company that is bigger then yours because it does generic shit, possibly in another country. bring in that bread hero
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Back in the day, that's '80s when computer hardware was different, the repair operation was on-site.
That included the user end, that was a terminal.
That was also expensive.
Next step was when user end repair changed to off-site, then a PC was broken.
Earlier a repairman had a hardware kit, a single trip approach.
Next the broken machine was moved and repair facility was stationary, a bit cheaper system.
And now a system where the whole machine is sort of disposable, cheapest for the machine support.
Next rational step is that software support follows, back to its beginning.
First software was centered, obviously when hardware was the same.
Then its bug style period started, actual harmful part started also quite early.
Spreading things around is not cheap, especially when quality and harmony is low.
I've seen a retail chain grow, now it's cashed out at least once and grown more.
When the chain was growing first it bought other sort of small ones, so many kind of retailer electronics and their systems were also collecting.
Obviously combining that collection wasn't very smooth, so outsourcing all hardware stuff became eminent, and no sense to do any different with the software.
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Probably the biggest force against windows is that nobody (except enthusiasts) actually wants to own a computer of any description. They want the internet so they can buy crap off amazon and make their brains dumber with political propaganda on facebook, and that's already something their phones can do.
For enthusiasts I see no reason why you would want to use Microsoft's tailored-advertising-with-vestigial-operating-system-functions product. You can just install linux mint or something, install steam, your games work. In the rare instance they don't immediately, then it's 99% faster to fix the problem than it would be to decrapify a windows 10 or 11 install.
The remaining market for windows is just office computers and the terminally apathetic.
There are many comments along these lines, and I think they slightly miss the boat on my attitude and situation, and I would guess a significant majority of those on this forum.
I would say it this way.
In the beginning there were computers. Served by punch cards and bunches of attendants. And the purpose of those computers was to do science, and military things and big finance things. Most people didn't care much about it. But there was a small percentage of the population, the geeks and scientists and engineers who lusted after access to these new toys.
Then the big users of those computers saw a way to fill their needs with timesharing and smaller machines (called mini-computers at the time and called things like PDP). And that small group still didn't have their lusts fulfilled because both time share time and mini-computers still were way out of almost everyone's financial reach. Only the relatively few who could access after hours access on one of the big machines or sweet talk a couple hours of time share from somewhere got to explore this new universe. Any even smaller subset could actually do hardware interfaces to such machines.
And then came the altairs and the apples and the ohio scientifics and many more. Finally the geeks had their toys. And they did things that interested the big boys. Spreadsheets. Low cost control of ATE. And particularly, word processing and graphic presentation tools. Which talked to the money people. They could fire secretaries and do local analysis. So desktop computing became a thing both in big business and small business. These mass produced things drove costs down even more, and because of their geek roots they still had the features that let those of us in that crowd do our thing.
Now the business needs of small and big business have been largely satisfied, and the public has lost their fascination with printing fancy placemats and whatever so the market is moving back to thin clients which do fine for social media and light word processing. And the geek crowd has lost the big market driving hardware and software suitable for our needs. Linux is the best available solution for geeks from my point of view, but I doubt it will ever have big money driving it as Microsoft once did. So we won't have the benefit of what was a relatively brief overlap of our interests with the mainstream market. Maybe the gamers will be fine, but that isn't what I consider a peer group.
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I think thats a very bold statement about what the public lost interest in or how much satisfaction there is with thin clients. I worked managing thin clients before and everyone hated them pretty much universally. The only people that liked it were the bosses because they said it saved money (but there was serious friction because of constant complaints)
Worst job I ever had because I had zero power to help people because of how locked down the systems were. If it was a for-profit business, they would have gotten axed, but it was taxpayer dollars at work so complaints fall on deaf ears, mostly. The only thing I kept thinking is that someone must have really thought they can make one of my skill sets useless, and that they have failed.
That is what I think, there is adoption by organizations that basically have no performance metrics (horrible accountability) and change incredibly slowly, that makes it seem like they are popular. I also saw a med doctor go haywire when his thin client bullshit system was acting up. Of course its a 'jump' type organization, where everyone wants to GTFO, there are zero 'lifers' and its only tolerated because the attrition is so damn high for multiple reasons. By jump I mean like a resume filler/looking for another job thing, where its just like a crappy springboard. Those places are like 'damned'. They also like to have zero-tolerance rules, it just seems to go with the territory, so they can prevent experience based pay increase from occurring.
Oh yeah its also not doing its job of being secure (main selling point, that it was supposed to be so secure that there would never be a problem), given how I get regular mail about 'data-break-ins' that invite me for class action fun. :palm: It has the obvious marketing of being a 'golden bullet' solution that will eliminate computer problems, get rid of IT and allow you to be 'cutting edge' with no work. Yeah, golden bullets don't work. I suggest keeping "too go to be true" in mind when you listen to the spiel, your skepticism will save your butt. Does the rhetoric advocating for these changes not sound exactly like "there has been a paradigm shift in the computing industry"? (wow, no one has been making fun of paradigm shift related corpospeak marketing recently... maybe that is why so many companies are getting owned after blindly rushing into a AI focus, what is it, too 2000's to ever happen again, they can't bear to miss out on the profitable paradigm shift?)
If I had to make a list of how to scuttle an organization while making your own career, I would say adopting thin clients is a real good bullet point.
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Good.
Bloated, horrible, uncustomizable task bar where I can't even add quick launch folders, cpu slowing animated skeleton placeholder.
No OS should require an online account just to use it, forced app store that does things in the background and install things behind the users back and pesters them
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Good.
Bloated, horrible, uncustomizable task bar where I can't even add quick launch folders, cpu slowing animated skeleton placeholder.
No OS should require an online account just to use it, forced app store that does things in the background and install things behind the users back and pesters them
As a long time Linux user I have no idea about modern day Windows at all. But from what I remember from the distant past, Microsoft seems to have Windows editions or at least offers way of tailoring Windows to suit business users. AFAIK what drives updates is to add security for the home users. What drives needing an account is to milk extra money from home users. As larger business users typically have IT departments and service contracts, there should be less need for pestering Windows users and milking more money.
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Plus windows "sales" are basically new device sales.
That's a slight over-representation because a good number of people buy a PC or laptop with Windows and immediately wipe it and install Linux. That's what I did with my current machine. I also bought my nephews a Mac Air, to both avoid Windows and because I'm generally happy with Apple's build quality, even though it has downsides of poor upgradability and it being a closed system.
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People have been banging on about thin clients for years, probably a couple of decades, maybe three.
Do you remember Web 2.0 back in 2002? As soon as we had interactive Web pages people were predicting that the Web browser would become the universal client to server-side processing. Do you remember ChromeOS and the appearance of Chromebooks back in 2010? Again, we were told that soon all we will need is a Web browser running on a minimalist hardware (and software) platform, and it would be the end of the traditional PC. Chromebooks would supplant most traditional consumer computers.
Honestly, I don't see very much progress towards the widespread use of thin clients, despite the technology being largely in place for a good quarter century. I don't actually know why. Google Docs and the online versions of the MS Office suite have been around for several years now, and are mature technologies, and yet there is still an enormous market for client-side versions of MS Office, et al.
For reasons I don't fully understand, the online versions of MS Office (for example) have slightly different - and lesser - features from the client-side applications.
I suspect - but don't know - that it's all about the UI and the available bandwidth. Take a 3D CAD program, for instance, running on the user's own PC. The bandwidth between the modelling engine and the screen - via a sophisticated and powerful graphics card - must be orders of magnitude faster than even a fast Internet link.
Perhaps the cost of providing all that server-side processing power, and the bandwidth necessary to serve tens or hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users, is just too high for the service providers, and it makes more financial sense to run the software on the end users' own hardware.
And I'm sorry to repeat myself, but I don't think there will be a significant move to Linux on the desktop until the big commercial players port their applications to Linux. The existing Linux desktop applications are just not good enough.
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Honestly, I don't see very much progress towards the widespread use of thin clients
Are you serious? I would bet that vast majority of end users' computers (smartphones included) are actually used as thin clients that do nothing else than access online content. People rarely use anything but the web browser and maybe a couple messenger apps, which are essentially thin clients too. Yes there are cases when people need to run specialized software that don't exist in "the cloud" or can't operate like that because of bandwidth or other limitations, but I'm sure these are comparatively rare.
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Linux desktops are still just in the noise, but it's interesting that it's pretty much doubled in the last year.
I realized, and have even told customers, that Windows is starting to become my malware, and it's getting harder and harder to lock it down and stay in any sort of compliance. We're actively looking for ways to ditch it entirely, not because we hate it, but because we can't control it.
The killer apps for systems have ALWAYS been games. Yes, there are a couple of niche apps. Altium...Solidworks. But these are really niche. When Linux gaming becomes for real world class, and it's close, Windows will be irrelevant to home systems. And will thus become irrelevant to business systems. Everything is in the web anyway, just like you wanted.
Won't be the next 5 years, probably, but the desktop is effectively dead as a concept at the moment. When the tide shifts again to a local desktop being a thing, I don't think Windows will have any relevance. These things take many years to sort out. We went from remote computing, to local computing, and back to remote over 60 or so years. These are big, long cycles.
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Honestly, I don't see very much progress towards the widespread use of thin clients, despite the technology being largely in place for a good quarter century. I don't actually know why. Google Docs and the online versions of the MS Office suite have been around for several years now, and are mature technologies, and yet there is still an enormous market for client-side versions of MS Office, et al.
What? Are you serious? Google docs and MS office 365 are incredibly popular. If client side office isn't the minority yet it will be soon. Of course there are still tons of users of the client side office either because they need them for something or just that's what they have always done, but the online versions are hugely popular.
I suspect - but don't know - that it's all about the UI and the available bandwidth. Take a 3D CAD program, for instance, running on the user's own PC. The bandwidth between the modelling engine and the screen - via a sophisticated and powerful graphics card - must be orders of magnitude faster than even a fast Internet link.
Onshape is an online only 3D cad tool founded by former solidworks executives and it works well enough for a large number of use cases. There are still performance advantages to local tools but it's not orders of magnitude.
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Plus windows "sales" are basically new device sales.
That's a slight over-representation because a good number of people buy a PC or laptop with Windows and immediately wipe it and install Linux. That's what I did with my current machine. I also bought my nephews a Mac Air, to both avoid Windows and because I'm generally happy with Apple's build quality, even though it has downsides of poor upgradability and it being a closed system.
Linux desktop users are still a basically irrelevent fraction.
My point was that if new computer sales are down 40% because people are keeping computers for 5 years instead of 3, that's 40% fewer windows sales even if the number of users remains the same.
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As a long time Linux user I have no idea about modern day Windows at all. But from what I remember from the distant past, Microsoft seems to have Windows editions or at least offers way of tailoring Windows to suit business users. AFAIK what drives updates is to add security for the home users. What drives needing an account is to milk extra money from home users. As larger business users typically have IT departments and service contracts, there should be less need for pestering Windows users and milking more money.
After what happened in 2019:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/windows-10-update-aggro/ (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/windows-10-update-aggro/)
If someone gave me a free Windows 10 (standard branch)/11 license key I'd bin it.
I discovered Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019 in early 2020 which doesn't have a stupid app store and I read security updates only but Flash Player which I used for something was stilled uninstalled under the guise of security so not pleased about that at first.
It took me 2 years from early 2020 to make alterations get it the way I want before I started using it. One thing it won't do anymore is shut down all of a sudden which is a big nono. A notification would be nice but none as above. I have removed services; Rempl, waasmedic and set permissions to stop 'update orchestrator' from rewriting the keys in it's task scheduler folder (system) and registry bit (trustedinstaller) that shuts it down where it'd recreate the keys and deny users write permissions to alter the tasks. Disabled and removed quite a few telemetry things to discover over time there are others and even with Office Click to run service which I now set to manual.
I think this might be my last version of Windows I'd use.
I gave up on LTSC 2021 in 2022 (see screenshot) as soon as I saw it plastered with stupid animated skeleton placeholders that slow everything down for a few seconds by hogging a cpu core, flash and annoy me that they copied of webpages, the built in appstore and bloating of the window appearance where I find I could no longer set the size in the registry like i could before. It just looked bloated and horrible to me. I have seen Windows 11 since when given things to look at or buying newer laptops. It looks to me like they copied what was called Chrome driver, called it Webview and are now trying to use it to mimic explorer. In regedit, deleting keys and it dims the screen or the area? like on a web page which I find a very STUPID idea and that hurts my eyes, especially if I am searching, altering and deleting stuff where it dims and undims excessively goes to show they have absolutely no consideration for the eyes of their users.
I wonder how they'd like it if I turned up and down their contrast and brightness control excessively to the extremes depending on what they're doing.
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Honestly, I don't see very much progress towards the widespread use of thin clients, despite the technology being largely in place for a good quarter century. I don't actually know why. Google Docs and the online versions of the MS Office suite have been around for several years now, and are mature technologies, and yet there is still an enormous market for client-side versions of MS Office, et al.
What? Are you serious? Google docs and MS office 365 are incredibly popular. If client side office isn't the minority yet it will be soon. Of course there are still tons of users of the client side office either because they need them for something or just that's what they have always done, but the online versions are hugely popular.
I suspect - but don't know - that it's all about the UI and the available bandwidth. Take a 3D CAD program, for instance, running on the user's own PC. The bandwidth between the modelling engine and the screen - via a sophisticated and powerful graphics card - must be orders of magnitude faster than even a fast Internet link.
Onshape is an online only 3D cad tool founded by former solidworks executives and it works well enough for a large number of use cases. There are still performance advantages to local tools but it's not orders of magnitude.
Actually, when visiting various companies, I see a lot of thin clients being used. So to me is seems the thin client is back. And indeed a lot of office tasks can be done online. The last 5 years I have gravitated to using web based office alternatives (like Google docs). These work surprisingly well and get rid of the complexity which comes with MS-Office. I basically stopped using MS-Office.
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when market saturation occurs sometimes a business will try to extract more from what they have.
killing off more demand for the product. greed gets in the way of good judgment. as in trying to please everyone.
maybe by 2027 see Windows phone 2.0 on a wearable device with a hand crank to save energy.
one size fits all Windows is not the answer? in 2026 Windows OS has become obese & too smart for its own good.
but then what would I know.
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Is this for real? Will windows will be a minority operating system in a few years? :popcorn:
(I don't know as I still use Windows 7)
I loved Windows 7. Loved XP, liked 10.
Windows, in some very important ways, is already a minority OS. By the numbers, Linux is king!
No if you narrow that to Desktop OSs, Windows is king but has been losing for years. Mostly to macOS. Any particular version of Windows loses more share to its siblings than other OSs, I believe.
Don't know why, but, WinNT4 sp4 with a 2 cpu motherboard was the fastest most efficient OS I ever used.
Win2000pro SP3 was small and a little slower than NT4 with dual cpus. I think is was something to do with the scheduling as NT4 had a few multi-threading related bugs solved in 2000pro at the expense of speed. I rarely rebooted 2000pro if ever.
I got 2000pro to work really good on a P-Pro with I believe 512mb of ram. Boy, have times changed...
I ran a Quake 3 arena server from that system. It was up for a year without a hiccup.
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maybe by 2027 see Windows phone 2.0 on a wearable device with a hand crank to save energy.
We already had those for over a century. They are called watches.
They are so efficient, they only need a windup one a day.
There even exist watches which gather surplus energy from the motion of you arm as you do things throughout the day such as walking. Never need winding, they just appear to operate perpetually.
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People have been banging on about thin clients for years, probably a couple of decades, maybe three.
Do you remember Web 2.0 back in 2002? As soon as we had interactive Web pages people were predicting that the Web browser would become the universal client to server-side processing. Do you remember ChromeOS and the appearance of Chromebooks back in 2010? Again, we were told that soon all we will need is a Web browser running on a minimalist hardware (and software) platform, and it would be the end of the traditional PC. Chromebooks would supplant most traditional consumer computers.
Honestly, I don't see very much progress towards the widespread use of thin clients, despite the technology being largely in place for a good quarter century. I don't actually know why. Google Docs and the online versions of the MS Office suite have been around for several years now, and are mature technologies, and yet there is still an enormous market for client-side versions of MS Office, et al.
For reasons I don't fully understand, the online versions of MS Office (for example) have slightly different - and lesser - features from the client-side applications.
I suspect - but don't know - that it's all about the UI and the available bandwidth. Take a 3D CAD program, for instance, running on the user's own PC. The bandwidth between the modelling engine and the screen - via a sophisticated and powerful graphics card - must be orders of magnitude faster than even a fast Internet link.
Perhaps the cost of providing all that server-side processing power, and the bandwidth necessary to serve tens or hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users, is just too high for the service providers, and it makes more financial sense to run the software on the end users' own hardware.
And I'm sorry to repeat myself, but I don't think there will be a significant move to Linux on the desktop until the big commercial players port their applications to Linux. The existing Linux desktop applications are just not good enough.
have you ever tried using that shit? I had a co-worker that wanted to make this the project norm, the google or maybe microsoft virtual office system. Thank god I fucking don't trust it and saved the documents copy paste locally, because I don't trust it with my career. IIRC it even locked access during a important review meeting with people who are hard to get a hold of
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Linux desktops are still just in the noise, but it's interesting that it's pretty much doubled in the last year.
5% marketshare in the US is not noise.
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I think the today's AI, datacenter and network tycoons dream about a "thin minimalist terminals" completely wired to their clouds/accounts. So the "heavy" PCs as we know it today should become the history (OSes regardless). No need for powerful CPUs, GPUs, beefy fast memories/SSDs and heavy thick OSes at home or in any offices then..
:(
Have you ever tried controlling 3D CAD on a PC over an internet link from another PC? in 4k ? The average but well setup PC can do 3D CAD so no need for a remote machine. Really the daily use of the vast majority of people is already met by what would be used as a terminal anyway. Where I work the general office PC's are not that powerful compact PC's. I even used one for a bit and with it's integrated graphics and DDR4 RAM it ran 2 4k monitors with no problem and may have managed 3D CAD on a 2k monitor.
My rapsery pi 5+ with an SSD is frankly fast and good enough to run a 4k monitor and do general office work. The new terminal idea won't be to save hardware but to control users and lock them in.
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Linux desktops are still just in the noise, but it's interesting that it's pretty much doubled in the last year.
5% marketshare in the US is not noise.
Funny how different readers get triggered by different things. For me it was the second part of the sentence -- where the heck does the "pretty much doubled last year" claim come from?
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People are not switching to Linux in their droves. The open source world has a problem: no standardization. You can't run 3D CAD on linux, the vendors just won't risk such a fractured and fractious bunch of people to provide the thing that if it goes slightly wrong screws them and all of their customers.
Open source is great but not great for business. The big problem Linux has is that the mantra is: It's not perfect but the good news is that you can fix it yourself because you are a programmer yourself and you can do as you please. This is the definition of a business nightmare for anyone wanting to provide software to users on any distribution.
Until there is a big wide ranging reason for people and more importantly businesses adopt one distribution of linux that is seriously supported it won't become mainstream on desktops. If UNIX is still around that would be a better place to start from a business point of view.
this is what the man himself has to say and he is right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc)
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^^^ This, among other things, is why I will never switch to *nix.
And the average person won't either. So enough with the fond fantasies of Linux taking over the world.
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^^^ This, among other things, is why I will never switch to *nix.
And the average person won't either. So enough with the fond fantasies of Linux taking over the world.
This an age old argument. These days we are in echo chambers than we like to admit.
At work we use(d) Google workspace and I dislike it hence we are heading towards MS Office as I do like editing spreadsheets in a grown up program. At home I have 5 MS machines, 1 Chromebook, and 5 Pi with Linux on them but all are headless. Depending on your job and industry things maybe different. I will say again more and more of the general population dont have a computer, just a phone or a tablet.
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The other thing that has changed in "computers" is the number of women amongst our ranks.
I thought about this for a while, trying to track where and why they left.
Consider in the 30/40s it was 99% women as the men where fighting in WWII. In the 50/60s The "computer room" was often fronted and operated by women.
There is a very human aspect here, which starts to depart the industry. In those early days "people" brought "people" decks of paper work. Women who once where in the computing departments, typing pools became "Data entry cleks" through to "system adminstrators". The point is.... real people met real people face to face to hand over input, action the machines, hand over outputs. There was a people->people social mechanism.
We progressively "optimized" all that person->person contact out the system with automation. Eventually even the data entry, typist role disappeared. Typing became less critical a skill once you could edit before print.
Now "Hardcopy" is hardly ever seen. We try and encourage women back with incentives and "We'll change the workplace to suit you". However, women still seem to flock towards "Health Care", "Retail", "Hospitality" and the sciences of the same. They "enjoy" working with people directly.
Human types something up.... machines move it... another human reads it. This is 1% the bandwidth of "Human goes to other human and has a conversation"... even if they hand them the document and it's just "small talk", it's still dozens of times more "human bandwidth" that sending an email.
I think this bores women. I think they prefer a far more human rich environment with "social" turned up to 11. The IT world has been going the other way in the past 60 years.
For me it's the same as saying, "Women like people. Men like things".. that old trope. I am aware it's a "bell curve thing" though I think it has merit to ask?
Or am I being a sexist pig?
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Honestly, I don't see very much progress towards the widespread use of thin clients
Are you serious? I would bet that vast majority of end users' computers (smartphones included) are actually used as thin clients that do nothing else than access online content. People rarely use anything but the web browser and maybe a couple messenger apps, which are essentially thin clients too. Yes there are cases when people need to run specialized software that don't exist in "the cloud" or can't operate like that because of bandwidth or other limitations, but I'm sure these are comparatively rare.
Yes, I'm serious, but I admit that I was thinking mostly about desktop computing rather than mobile computing. What you are describing (Web browsing, messaging) are content consumption activities and mostly take place on Android and iOS devices.
As for desktops, I think I am a fairly typical user, and I don't think I have a single app that - overtly or covertly - runs "in the cloud". Let's see:
MS Visual Studio and Delphi for Windows software development
Arduino and VisualMicro for microcontroller programming
MS Office 2019 for word processing, spreadsheets, etc
Affinity and Corel Paint Shop Pro for graphics creation and editing
Soundforge Audio Studio, Audacity and Pocket MIDI for audio creation and editing
Cyberlink Power Director for video creation and editing
Siemens Solid Edge and KICAD for CAD work
All of those run on my PC, not in the cloud.
So yes, I'm serious. Are you seriously telling me that most desktop users do all that "in the cloud"?
EDIT: I've just remembered: my email software - em Client - also runs locally. I've also just remembered that I have Messenger and WhatsApp clients on my desktop, and those will definitely be "thin", so that's two cloud apps I run.
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Honestly, I don't see very much progress towards the widespread use of thin clients, despite the technology being largely in place for a good quarter century. I don't actually know why. Google Docs and the online versions of the MS Office suite have been around for several years now, and are mature technologies, and yet there is still an enormous market for client-side versions of MS Office, et al.
What? Are you serious? Google docs and MS office 365 are incredibly popular. If client side office isn't the minority yet it will be soon. Of course there are still tons of users of the client side office either because they need them for something or just that's what they have always done, but the online versions are hugely popular.
Yep, serious. See the list of non-server-side software I use in my post just above this one.
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Onshape is an online only 3D cad tool founded by former solidworks executives and it works well enough for a large number of use cases. There are still performance advantages to local tools but it's not orders of magnitude.
Yes, I'm aware. I didn’t say that cloud apps don't exist, I said that the local versions are much more popular.
I totally admit that I didn't research the statistics, although I don't believe those of you who disagreed with me did either. All I'm saying is that I'm a pretty boring, conventional Windows desktop PC user, and none of my main applications (listed above) run in the cloud. As far as I know, only MS Office out of my list gives me a choice. That's why I think local applications are more popular than cloud apps.
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Yes, I'm serious, but I admit that I was thinking mostly about desktop computing rather than mobile computing. What you are describing (Web browsing, messaging) are content consumption activities and mostly take place on Android and iOS devices.
As for desktops, I think I am a fairly typical user, and I don't think I have a single app that - overtly or covertly - runs "in the cloud". Let's see:
MS Visual Studio and Delphi for Windows software development
Arduino and VisualMicro for microcontroller programming
MS Office 2019 for word processing, spreadsheets, etc
Affinity and Corel Paint Shop Pro for graphics creation and editing
Soundforge Audio Studio, Audacity and Pocket MIDI for audio creation and editing
Cyberlink Power Director for video creation and editing
Siemens Solid Edge and KICAD for CAD work
All of those run on my PC, not in the cloud.
So yes, I'm serious. Are you seriously telling me that most desktop users do all that "in the cloud"?
I'm telling that most desktop users don't do all that at all, except maybe the office suite, which they don't need either, because it's available in the cloud.
You (and me, and many other folks here) are in the minority, that's what I'm pretty sure about.
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People are not switching to Linux in their droves. The open source world has a problem: no standardization.
It depends. Some things are very well standardised: file formats, much more so than proprietary platforms, others not so much.
The two things I hate most about Windows are the desktop and they way updates are handled. It would be good if someone were to develop their own desktop environment for Windows, which is fully customisable and doesn't change random things when updated.
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People are not switching to Linux in their droves. The open source world has a problem: no standardization. You can't run 3D CAD on linux, the vendors just won't risk such a fractured and fractious bunch of people to provide the thing that if it goes slightly wrong screws them and all of their customers.
Utter nonsense. Lots of software companies prove it is perfectly possible to distribute software to run on Linux. Every FPGA vendor has their tools working on Linux. And take browsers like Firefox and Chrome. That is just the tip of the iceberg. No need to compile anything. Don't confuse not knowing how to use Linux with Linux being useless in general.
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Someone asked why the increase in linux desktops does not appear on statcounter.
Look at where they get the data.
About Statcounter GlobalStats
Statcounter Global Stats are brought to you by Statcounter - the free, online visitor stats tool.
It appears to primarily work off of "X-UserAgent" headers from browsers.
You realise that most large company InfoSec teams will have those obfuscated within the proxy right?
Additionally and far more damning. Virtually no servers have internet access or EVER use a browser.
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Yes, I'm serious, but I admit that I was thinking mostly about desktop computing rather than mobile computing. What you are describing (Web browsing, messaging) are content consumption activities and mostly take place on Android and iOS devices.
As for desktops, I think I am a fairly typical user, and I don't think I have a single app that - overtly or covertly - runs "in the cloud". Let's see:
MS Visual Studio and Delphi for Windows software development
Arduino and VisualMicro for microcontroller programming
MS Office 2019 for word processing, spreadsheets, etc
Affinity and Corel Paint Shop Pro for graphics creation and editing
Soundforge Audio Studio, Audacity and Pocket MIDI for audio creation and editing
Cyberlink Power Director for video creation and editing
Siemens Solid Edge and KICAD for CAD work
All of those run on my PC, not in the cloud.
So yes, I'm serious. Are you seriously telling me that most desktop users do all that "in the cloud"?
I'm telling that most desktop users don't do all that at all, except maybe the office suite, which they don't need either, because it's available in the cloud.
You (and me, and many other folks here) are in the minority, that's what I'm pretty sure about.
OK, I think that's a fair point.
As I mentioned above, I think that most content consumption is done with iOS or Android, and I think that is where the thin client is king. I doubt that's true for most machines running Windows. I suspect that - in general - most Windows machines exist because the user needs to do more than just consume content. Trouble is, I don't have the stats to support my suspicion.
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People are not switching to Linux in their droves. The open source world has a problem: no standardization. You can't run 3D CAD on linux, the vendors just won't risk such a fractured and fractious bunch of people to provide the thing that if it goes slightly wrong screws them and all of their customers.
Utter nonsense. Lots of software companies prove it is perfectly possible to distribute software to run on Linux. Every FPGA vendor has their tools working on Linux. And take browsers like Firefox and Chrome. That is just the tip of the iceberg. No need to compile anything. Don't confuse not knowing how to use Linux with Linux being useless in general.
OK, find me a professional 3D CAD program that runs on linux. Right so that is my employer out. How many electronics CAD packages are there for linux? Apart from KiCad I don't know of any and KiCad is not a professional package or at least it is not a package that a business is likely to use unless as in my case the electronics engineer (me) gets to choose. Right so that is engineering out.
Programming, of course as the software user is a programmer, yes sure Linux is a doddle.
The general public? People like to all use the same system so that they can compare notes and tell each other about how to do things and how great it is. If everyone is on a different desktop then they won't have access to the same programs.
If you just want to browse the internet and do emails then sure, by definition every phone is linux and a basic desktop machine is fine.
I don't I know anyone that uses Linux for any reason other than they actively don't like windows or are anti capitalism bla bla bla and hate microsoft. None of the general public looks at their options and goes "I think I like the Linux option better", they just want to use whatever is the easiest and supported. For Linux to take over you need a huge commercial drive, some new product that makes you use it and that is nice to use.
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People are not switching to Linux in their droves. The open source world has a problem: no standardization. You can't run 3D CAD on linux, the vendors just won't risk such a fractured and fractious bunch of people to provide the thing that if it goes slightly wrong screws them and all of their customers.
Utter nonsense. Lots of software companies prove it is perfectly possible to distribute software to run on Linux. Every FPGA vendor has their tools working on Linux. And take browsers like Firefox and Chrome. That is just the tip of the iceberg. No need to compile anything. Don't confuse not knowing how to use Linux with Linux being useless in general.
OK, find me a professional 3D CAD program that runs on linux. Right so that is my employer out. How many electronics CAD packages are there for linux? Apart from KiCad I don't know of any and KiCad is not a professional package or at least it is not a package that a business is likely to use unless as in my case the electronics engineer (me) gets to choose. Right so that is engineering out.
Programming, of course as the software user is a programmer, yes sure Linux is a doddle.
The general public? People like to all use the same system so that they can compare notes and tell each other about how to do things and how great it is. If everyone is on a different desktop then they won't have access to the same programs.
If you just want to browse the internet and do emails then sure, by definition every phone is linux and a basic desktop machine is fine.
I don't I know anyone that uses Linux for any reason other than they actively don't like windows or are anti capitalism bla bla bla and hate microsoft. None of the general public looks at their options and goes "I think I like the Linux option better", they just want to use whatever is the easiest and supported. For Linux to take over you need a huge commercial drive, some new product that makes you use it and that is nice to use.
I completely agree until the last sentence. If Linux standardized enough so that everyone from grandma to the gum chewing high schooler could use the same programs and share help on how to print their photos and listen to their music and so on Linux could grow greatly. That is what Mandrake attempted, and the what Ubuntu set out to do. But the Linux ethos is orthogonal to standardization. So it seems unlikely to happen.
The result is that someone like me, who wants to leave Windows hasn't. Because despite an engineering and programming background I can't make a program like Lightburn work under Linux. Lightburn has a dedicated Linux version, but there is some nuance to installation, and some requirements on distro and version number that keeps it from happening. I'm sure it is possible, and if I spent enough time on the FAQs and forums I would eventually get it working. But if the barrier is too high for me, think how unscaleable it is for those with less technical background.
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What about Mac then? Many arguments also apply for that with the exact same reasons. Plenty of people get a Mac because it is not Windows. That is all the reasons you need.
I think (relatively speaking) only few video/image editing folks are around that want to use with Apple ProRes using hardware encoders from their cameras.
Linux is a much larger niche though. And my personal gripes with it is that some people become all rosemary and can't criticize its obvious flaws. I've used Linux daily for over 10 years, and although I never had something dramatic happen, I've had to daily workaround annoying quirks and bugs which over time have ground me down..
And one of the annoying one is exactly Simon's argument. Its still has a home garage tinkering vibe to it. It may be a fairly high-spec home garage.. but the tool selection is more limited than Linux, and there is a lot of reliance on emulation or virtualization software to get 'foreign' software to work. If you tell Altium, Autodesk, Inventor you have problem running their software through Wine or Virtualbox, I guess they will shrug and tell you to just get a Windows machine. IME the ecosystem for Mac is slightly bigger, and if my tax records software crashes on Mac, I can at least call them up and don't have to jump through 100 hoops to explain why.
I know likes such as SteamOS may change the future of Linux in the coming years. I hear from plenty of gamer folks that they grow absolutely tired of spyware, nagware and AI riddled shitcan that Windows is these days. But 95% program support is not enough for people. It needs to near darn 100% for people to jump over. I think if an OS can deliver that, while also providing a consistent, stable and non-quirky experience, that it will be a no-brainer for many people.
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The point is that no linux developer gives a toss weather or not you use their OS, they do it because it's what they do for fun.
The first thing that gets something adopted is that someone has something to gain from them doing so and spends a huge amount of money up front getting it out there. At this point success is more down to luck than how much money you throw at it, you would just be trying to sell people something they never asked for.
People are generally highly tolerant of garbage, that is why windows is garbage.
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Plenty of people get a Mac because it is not Windows.
Every single Mac fan I know prefers the Mac because of the better usability compared to Windows, including a fully-integrated ecosystem (desktop & mobile devices, backup infrastructure, content stores). I have never heard that as an argument in favor of Linux. ;)
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Yes, I'm serious, but I admit that I was thinking mostly about desktop computing rather than mobile computing. What you are describing (Web browsing, messaging) are content consumption activities and mostly take place on Android and iOS devices.
As for desktops, I think I am a fairly typical user, and I don't think I have a single app that - overtly or covertly - runs "in the cloud". Let's see:
You may not, which is fine. But plenty of people do.
MS Visual Studio and Delphi for Windows software development
A ton of software development is not for windows, and that has been common to use "thin clients" all along, even if that's just SSH + emacs. Windows software development itself is a decreasing niche vs web development. But VSCode has a web version. It's usually self hosted, not public cloud but still thin client, and plenty of businesses have thin client development workflows.
Arduino and VisualMicro for microcontroller programming
Arduino IDE has a cloud version. And there are arduino plugins for VSCode as well.
MS Office 2019 for word processing, spreadsheets, etc
From what statistics you can find online, Google Workspace (cloud only) has a 50% market share worldwide, vs 45% for MS. In the US google workspace is dominant in education and small business but MS Office is still more popular for the fortune 500. But that's not counting the MS Office users who primarily use the thin client versions -- the workplaces I know that use MS Office are tending to default to the web version for new users, but still have a large fraction of desktop application users. On the other hand, I would be _shocked_ if more than 5% of small businesses founded in the last 10 years primarily use the desktop versions MS office.
Affinity and Corel Paint Shop Pro for graphics creation and editing
Soundforge Audio Studio, Audacity and Pocket MIDI for audio creation and editing
Cyberlink Power Director for video creation and editing
Siemens Solid Edge and KICAD for CAD work
I don't know of any pro grade could options for these, although there are plenty of cloud based photo/graphics editors for casual use.
For mechanical CAD, again, OnShape has a very small market share -- CAD customers are mostly big established companies that have been doing this for decades and they are continuing to use the tools they have. But it's proof that a lot of things that even 10 years ago you might have said are "impossible" to do as a thin client are now possible. And OnShape is growing, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a major player in another 10 years.
So yes, I'm serious. Are you seriously telling me that most desktop users do all that "in the cloud"?
I'm saying there has been a dramatic move to thin client tools in the past 10 years and if you 'haven't seen evidence" of that, then you just aren't looking. I think many, perhaps most people still have a handful of more special purpose tools that aren't readily available as a cloud service. Plenty of people use local apps because they prefer them, or that's just the tool they were used to. But the list of "must do locally" is constantly diminishing.
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I see more and more often people dont have a PC or even a laptop at home. The phone does most of what they want to do.
I expected this for many years to eventually happen. However I expected the manufacturers to push more into the "breakout box" thing - connect your phone to a monitor, keyboard, mouse - and have your "more than powerful enough" desktop replacement. Though technically, you could use BT and wireless mirroring nowadays, so no extra box needed.
I think Samsung had that a couple of years ago, but it flopped.
Really, only gamers and a few poweruser really do need a desktop system now.
And (other than AI and search engines) the "mainframe aspect" is not the same, as the local machines are plenty powerful by themselves and cheap, so there is no need to dumb them down.
Replacing the desktop systems for gamers and poweruser is a thing as well - with the internet being fast enough, real time hires graphics can be streamed now...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VZJO-hOT4c (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VZJO-hOT4c)
Same hardware platform. Cow 11 "wins."
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I see more and more often people dont have a PC or even a laptop at home. The phone does most of what they want to do.
I expected this for many years to eventually happen. However I expected the manufacturers to push more into the "breakout box" thing - connect your phone to a monitor, keyboard, mouse - and have your "more than powerful enough" desktop replacement. Though technically, you could use BT and wireless mirroring nowadays, so no extra box needed.
I think Samsung had that a couple of years ago, but it flopped.
Really, only gamers and a few poweruser really do need a desktop system now.
And (other than AI and search engines) the "mainframe aspect" is not the same, as the local machines are plenty powerful by themselves and cheap, so there is no need to dumb them down.
Replacing the desktop systems for gamers and poweruser is a thing as well - with the internet being fast enough, real time hires graphics can be streamed now...
I don't like using phones because they're touch screen, I find I become frustrated very quickly because it doesn't always register my fingers properly, so I can definitely see a market for that, but I suppose it's cheaper just to buy a desktop PC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VZJO-hOT4c (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VZJO-hOT4c)
Same hardware platform. Cow 11 "wins."
Did you watch the same video as I did? Windows 8.1 is the fastest and Windows 11 the slowest.
It's obviously for old hardware. There might be less of a difference on a system with more memory.
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I see more and more often people dont have a PC or even a laptop at home. The phone does most of what they want to do.
I expected this for many years to eventually happen. However I expected the manufacturers to push more into the "breakout box" thing - connect your phone to a monitor, keyboard, mouse - and have your "more than powerful enough" desktop replacement. Though technically, you could use BT and wireless mirroring nowadays, so no extra box needed.
I think Samsung had that a couple of years ago, but it flopped.
Really, only gamers and a few poweruser really do need a desktop system now.
And (other than AI and search engines) the "mainframe aspect" is not the same, as the local machines are plenty powerful by themselves and cheap, so there is no need to dumb them down.
Replacing the desktop systems for gamers and poweruser is a thing as well - with the internet being fast enough, real time hires graphics can be streamed now...
So you can stream 2x 4k monitors ? that will be expensive. Miracast uses 25+ Mbps, so that is 50-70 Mbps for 2 monitors over the internet. It must be real time, so my mouse movements need to reach the shared server, be interpreted and then come back in 20ms over the internet to my screen having been compressed and decompressed. Don't be utterly ridiculous! This is so expensive and resource demanding. A total waste of electricity never mind the power demands of AI datacentres, the average desktop will go from a low power device to a power hungry abomination.
The hardware required to run such a remote system is basically the hardware that is used for a basic computer these days but you can use that hardware for something rather than just handling the IO that right now is done at a fraction of that overhead.
The point is that to replicate a basic to decent desktop setup will take at least what is already used in computers. Workstations are no longer a thing although they are coming back the opposite way around as the average PC is now being built to be cheaper and less capable as so much is now possible for so little that it is a novelty now to make a low power PC.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VZJO-hOT4c (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VZJO-hOT4c)
Same hardware platform. Cow 11 "wins."
Did you watch the same video as I did? Windows 8.1 is the fastest and Windows 11 the slowest.
It's obviously for old hardware. There might be less of a difference on a system with more memory.
Did you notice the quotation marks in "wins"?
I have the same opinion as you.
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I see more and more often people dont have a PC or even a laptop at home. The phone does most of what they want to do.
I expected this for many years to eventually happen. However I expected the manufacturers to push more into the "breakout box" thing - connect your phone to a monitor, keyboard, mouse - and have your "more than powerful enough" desktop replacement. Though technically, you could use BT and wireless mirroring nowadays, so no extra box needed.
I think Samsung had that a couple of years ago, but it flopped.
Really, only gamers and a few poweruser really do need a desktop system now.
And (other than AI and search engines) the "mainframe aspect" is not the same, as the local machines are plenty powerful by themselves and cheap, so there is no need to dumb them down.
Replacing the desktop systems for gamers and poweruser is a thing as well - with the internet being fast enough, real time hires graphics can be streamed now...
So you can stream 2x 4k monitors ? that will be expensive. Miracast uses 25+ Mbps, so that is 50-70 Mbps for 2 monitors over the internet. It must be real time, so my mouse movements need to reach the shared server, be interpreted and then come back in 20ms over the internet to my screen having been compressed and decompressed. Don't be utterly ridiculous! This is so expensive and resource demanding. A total waste of electricity never mind the power demands of AI datacentres, the average desktop will go from a low power device to a power hungry abomination.
70Mbps isn't a lot nowadays, but it's very doubtful that they would do that - they would merely stream the changes between frames (just like every existing video streamer does now). Mouse movement would be handled locally, and a click is probably fast enough to get upstream and cause something to happen quicker than your reactions would notice (unless you play games).
Only significant difference between the average phone and previous thin clients is the phone is smaller and faster.
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I'm telling that most desktop users don't do all that at all, except maybe the office suite, which they don't need either, because it's available in the cloud.
You (and me, and many other folks here) are in the minority, that's what I'm pretty sure about.
I second that emotion, although I have no hard data to back that up.
But surely the mass migration--among the general population, not the narrow sliver that comprises techies and geeks like us--to non-desktop devices (phones/tablets) surely indicates the way forward. Which of course is much more cloud-based.
People like us (like me) who actually use non-cloud applications on a general-purpose computer are very much in the minority. Even among businesses, with the exception, perhaps, of the ranks of code monkeys churning out code in the back room.
Everyone else can happily (they think) subsist on thin clients and everything-in-the-cloud.
Or on a local area network. Typical example, I think, is when you go to see the doctor; all their computers in the exam rooms are the thinnest of clients, with all the applications lodged on their server--maybe--or perhaps that too is in the cloud.
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70Mbps isn't a lot nowadays, but it's very doubtful that they would do that - they would merely stream the changes between frames (just like every existing video streamer does now). Mouse movement would be handled locally, and a click is probably fast enough to get upstream and cause something to happen quicker than your reactions would notice (unless you play games).
Only significant difference between the average phone and previous thin clients is the phone is smaller and faster.
During the pandemic I had to work from home remote controlling my work pc. It was insane, 4k was out of the question, even HD was a shit show. Long story short I ended up installing a local hooky copy of the 3D CAD software. 70 Mbps is a lot when it has to be low latency. The internet is not low latency, it may appear so when your demands are small and you are not competing with many people. Move everything out of the PC to a server and it will get very expensive to match current system performance of cheap machines. Why do it? we are talking about a complete change in how infrastructure is used and it will be heavily used to get us back to where we are.
You can buy a computer for £200 that has plenty of performance for the average user, your "terminal" will cost as much.
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You can buy a computer for £200 that has plenty of performance for the average user, your "terminal" will cost as much.
Cost of computer isn't really relevant. It's whether we are allowed to run stuff on it that counts. With the trend towards subscription it's only a short hop to 'cloud too', so they have maximum control over your funds.
During the pandemic I had to work from home remote controlling my work pc. It was insane, 4k was out of the question, even HD was a shit show
That's because it's dealing with video. Think about X11 and, instead, sending window information. The info necessary to put up a window of some colour at a specific size and position is many, many times less than this paragraph. And once it's up it doesn't need to be constantly refreshed.
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surely indicates the way forward. Which of course is much more cloud-based.
ok, ok...here is the thing....over the decades, present for a few of them, there is always some way "forward".
"everyone" was moving to the suburbs, everyone was buying station wagons, then minivans, then SUVs, then twin cab trucks, Porsche, Ferrari Maserati even Rols Royce have an SUV (Ugly as f**k, but it exists)...it's he way forward.
Pehaps fom most the way "forward" is not determined by some sort of compass, but which way everyone else is going.
That's where we get into trouble.
Neither on premise servers, nor remote hosted a'la rackspace, nor "cloud hosted" ie amazon/google/azure is alway a universal solution.
The big money is trying to get "everyone" to switch from something, to something else , and then to whatever the new something else wiil be.
After getting inendated with "cloud" propaganda", maybe 2-4 years ago the "new" "new-thing" was "Hybrid Cloud".
AKA, now that we got your cloud money, we'll also sell you a bunch of on-premise servers too! A Win-Win!!
For sure the only way forward is not to stick to what works, but whatever direction causes the "industry" to sell more stuff.
progress!
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OK, find me a professional 3D CAD program that runs on linux. Right so that is my employer out.
Onshape is web based but runs fine on Linux. But you are correct that there is no "professional" 3D cad tool that runs natively on Linux.
How many electronics CAD packages are there for linux? Apart from KiCad I don't know of any and KiCad is not a professional package or at least it is not a package that a business is likely to use unless as in my case the electronics engineer (me) gets to choose. Right so that is engineering out.
So this part is completely wrong.
Cadence Allegro runs on Linux. Keysight ADS runs on Linux. HFSS and comsol both run on Linux. Sonnet EM runs on Linux. Cadence virtuoso _only_ runs on Linux.
The only pro EDA tools I know of that lack a Linux version are altium and microwave office.
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surely indicates the way forward. Which of course is much more cloud-based.
Pehaps fom most the way "forward" is not determined by some sort of compass, but which way everyone else is going.
[snip]
For sure the only way forward is not to stick to what works, but whatever direction causes the "industry" to sell more stuff.
progress!
Look: I'm not saying that this is the "way forward" I would prefer, but you know what? Nobody asked me.
I'm saying this is (probably) the way forward for all of us schmos, like it or not.
And yes, it is due as much to herd instinct and corporate greed as anything else.
I'm just reading the handwriting on the wall.
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The XP interface was the best.
I'm running windows 10 and a free program called "Classic shell" so my interface looks just like XP. I tried learning the new windows interface but it sucks, there is no other way to put it, it just sucks.
Windows isn't going anywhere and the majority of programs are designed to operate on windows. I thought about switching but I'm too invested in it with CAD, CFD, CNC and countless other windows based programs.
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Windows isn't going anywhere and the majority of programs are designed to operate on windows. I thought about switching but I'm too invested in it with CAD, CFD, CNC and countless other windows based programs.
designed :-DD
No, they are tech-debt locked on Windows.
Most of them probably use .NET Framework or DirectX which is only available on Windows.
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The way it works is that joe public determines what happens. Joe public want the cool stuff, so corporates dress up whatever will make the most money as the next best thing. Joe public not wanting to be left behind falls for the pitch. And so critical mass is achieved, whether it's any good or not. Unfortunately everything about our existence is measure by money or value or what seems to be best, the actual facts are secondary.
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I drive a cupra born, anyone who see's it tells me how great it looks, it I tell them it's not worth the £40k it costs they will say "but it looks nice". Fact, it is inferior to a renault zoe that comes in at £30k......
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Most of them probably use .NET Framework or DirectX which is only available on Windows.
.NET is available for Linux and Mac.
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Most of them probably use .NET Framework or DirectX which is only available on Windows.
.NET is available for Linux and Mac.
.NET Framework is not.
There are three version, they are all called .NET.
Microsoft :-//
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I'm wondering, how much of that video is fakenews?
If so many desktops have been migrated to Linux, why don't we see that on statcounter?
Several reasons come to mind why statcounter statistics in particular might be skewed.
It can only look at the Browsers user-agent identifier that is sent when visiting a website running the statcounter codesnippet.
There is an incentive for Linux browsers to outright *lie* in their user-agents. There are some websites that do not want to work if they recognize a linux header, but work fine with a fake header saying it's windows.
Secondly, for now i suspect that the average linux user is somewhat more intent on data privacy. Blocking third party scripts is common then. If the statcounter script is blocked, it won't see a thing.
Supposedly a similar thing happened within Windows itself. As a reason why you can't move the taskbar horizontally anymore, it was said by Microsoft, that their telemetry shows that barely anyone uses the taskbar that way. Well... *I* was using it that war and still sorely miss it, but all my Windows telemetry is blocked, and I suspect that to be the case for a large part of "power users".
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I'm wondering, how much of that video is fakenews?
When I looked at the click-baity title and still photo and the AI-laden production with its urgent voice-over, I was wondering how much of that video is true. And after I looked at the 16 most recent videos from that Youtube channel, my guess is "not much at all".
EDIT: Proudly brought to you by Nouman Malik, "CEO - KNSAAE DIGITAL, Self-Made Millionaire at 20". KNSAAE DIGITAL, Pakistan's top YouTube Automation company. When I try to bring up their website, it redirects to a fake version of the major German public news service, with made-up scandalized content.
So, while the discussion in this thread may bring some interesting perspective -- I think it is safe to fully discount that video in the original post.
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AI slop/fiction on the rise. In this case it should be for catching your attention to make money from ad revenue. YouTube and Co are becoming more messy. A test for your media literacy. ;)
And regarding Windows 11. Yes, it will die some day after upgrading to Windows 13. >:D
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The XP interface was the best.
Actually I think the W7 UI was the best. 😄 To me, it feels like the pinnacle of the WIMP paradigm.
Windows isn't going anywhere and the majority of programs are designed to operate on windows. I thought about switching but I'm too invested in it with CAD, CFD, CNC and countless other windows based programs.
That's exactly where I'm at. The applications ecosystem for Linux is dire, for Windows it is great.
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Continuing with a retail chain.
But first a small and special one.
Here locally MS is not offering hardware of any kind, but for regular stuff only net access is missing and getting one is trivial.
It changes fast if you have special needs, like static address, VPN tunnel etc, maybe also some special inhouse hardware.
Somebody must maintain all that, despite how little time is needed.
When retail chain is big enough, and its hardware needs regular enough, at some point it starts pulling hardware maintenance back in.
Its retail software is most likely tailored so far from generic product that it needs its own support folks.
But own datacenter, I'd say it's still one step ahead.
The lag or not then.
Very few environment needs a minimum lag, real time is obvious, but what is real time, what kind of thing needs a reaction time like fraction of seconds.
I'd say that any design interface that needs an instant response, or can't do it by exact numbers, is incomplete.
Internet is also not a real time environment.
Now we have a cache memory, why not drag and drop cache.
Original stationary and moving new part are local, current change has coordinates that are calculated at the server side and only drop and its new original is updated locally.
Back in the day Mac used a remote cache/swapfile.
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OK, find me a professional 3D CAD program that runs on linux. Right so that is my employer out.
But you are correct that there is no "professional" 3D cad tool that runs natively on Linux.
I Disagree. Freecad is pretty powerfull these days and very useable as an alternative to Solidworks. I've seen people use Freecad for commercial 3D work. And then there is Blender for more artistic 3D modelling. I've also seen some impessive things from OnShape.
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Don't know why, but, WinNT4 sp4 with a 2 cpu motherboard was the fastest most efficient OS I ever used.
Win2000pro SP3 was small and a little slower than NT4 with dual cpus. I think is was something to do with the scheduling as NT4 had a few multi-threading related bugs solved in 2000pro at the expense of speed. I rarely rebooted 2000pro if ever.
I'm pretty sure it was something to do with you being much younger and a grass green'er at that time, and very little to do with actual reality. Objectively Win 2000 was crap when it comes to security even after all those service packs, even early releases of XP were a bit of a mess until SP2 arrived, which made a lot of security improvements. Vista introduced a new driver model as well as mandatory driver signing, which defeated a whole host of security problems, Win10 overhauled a WDDM (display driver model) which allowed to recover from some driver crashes, which again improved stability.
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One aspect there is also the second CPU.
My upgrade from single core to dual core was significantly later, running Windows XP, when AMD dual-core processors became available for socket 939.
That was the second most impactful upgrade i ever made from one pc to the next. The most impactful upgrade was switching to an SSD.
Considering how lightweight Windows NT was, i can imagine how well it must have ran on two CPUs.
I am currently looking at how to emulate NT4 Server, just to feel around in it a bit, since my professional IT carreer barely missed it and i never actually used it. But i'm curious how much NT there still is in Windows 11. There is *a lot* of Windows 2000 in Windows 11 if you look a bit deeper.
Cinsidering that i'm baffled with how little hardware the servers ran back then and how much of a hardware hog windows has become over the years.
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I Disagree. Freecad is pretty powerfull these days and very useable as an alternative to Solidworks
But it dont follow the corporate ideal. Spend loads, own nothing.
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OK, find me a professional 3D CAD program that runs on linux. Right so that is my employer out.
But you are correct that there is no "professional" 3D cad tool that runs natively on Linux.
I Disagree. Freecad is pretty powerfull these days and very useable as an alternative to Solidworks. I've seen people use Freecad for commercial 3D work. And then there is Blender for more artistic 3D modelling. I've also seen some impessive things from OnShape.
Well FreeCAD is powerful, but I still find it awful to use. The learning curve is atrocious. Also, importing any moderately complex .STEP model makes it ultra-slow, that's nearly unusable. I'd like to say it's on par with Solidworks, but it clearly isn't. My main use case is to work on integration of PCBs and so I use a lot of .STEP models, so clean and fast handling of these is key to me.
Blender OTOH has become pretty good. There's a learning curve as well, but it's not that bad, there are tons of clear tutorials, and the overall experience I have with it is way better than with FreeCAD.
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nctnico
I Disagree. Freecad is pretty powerfull these days and very useable as an alternative to Solidworks.
I love freecad and have been using it for years.
Freecad and Blender are free and can do literally anything I want. I don't buy into all this online/cloud software bs. If I can't run the software on my machine offline I won't use it.
Blender is my goto software for 3D printing and CNC. Blender 3D CAM is by far the best CNC software I have seen to date and it's free.
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I love freecad and have been using it for years.
Cool, I have a real use case question for you. So, say, I'm making a fishing lure. My current flow is: use Inkscape to draw the side profile shape, mark the drilling points etc., also manually draw the top/bottom profile shapes, then print them, cut and proceed to the woodworking fun.
Inkscape isn't too great for all this, because it requires a lot of manual operations and approximations, especially when I try to estimate the volume of the model. Its measuring capabilities are all super basic, "because Inkscape is not CAD software".
I kinda want to make my models 3-dimensional to make things easier and more predictable: calculate surface area (3d and a given cross-section), volume, measure linear sizes etc., not to mention having a proper 3d visualization.
So if I move my workflow to freecad and obviously decide to keep it simple in the beginning, i.e., create the 3d shape by "extruding" a side profile shape and then adding some chamfering on the corners, how steep and long of a learning curve may it require to arrive at that, what do you, as a long-time user, think?
I've been thinking of freecad, but never really even tried to run it (nor any other 3d modelling software actually), and now that I'm reading all these horrors about it, I'm somewhat scared.
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And regarding Windows 11. Yes, it will die some day after upgrading to Windows 13. >:D
And in longstanding Microsoft tradition, the next major version will hopefully be a decent one again. ;)
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8
Windows 10
Windows 11
Windows whatever is next
Edit: Or maybe this is just the users' psychology. People never like to move away from something they have gotten used to. So MS gives them a new version which everybody agrees to hate -- only to create that shared feeling of relief when we can finally move on to the next iteration. 8)
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Edit: Or maybe this is just the users' psychology. People never like to move away from something they have gotten used to. So MS gives them a new version which everybody agrees to hate -- only to create that shared feeling of relief when we can finally move on to the next iteration. 8)
Yup, that's exactly it. I've been hearing this for any new major version of Windows.
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Edit: Or maybe this is just the users' psychology. People never like to move away from something they have gotten used to. So MS gives them a new version which everybody agrees to hate -- only to create that shared feeling of relief when we can finally move on to the next iteration. 8)
It's not just that. In many cases the "bad" revisions introduced major changes, and the subsequent versions fixed a lot of the complaints. Windows 2000 was the first NT based OS for consumer / desktop use, but it had a lot of compatibility problems with windows 95 code. XP improved this a ton, plus by then there was a lot more native code. Windows 8 tried to push the "metro" UI overall, and windows 10 backtracked that a lot. I think there is a legitimate point that windows vista was primarily disliked because people had gotten used to windows XP.
The only problem I really have with windows 11 over 10 is the mandatory TPM and MS sign in. Partly because it "obsoletes" perfectly good hardware but mostly because it's one more step away from actually owning your computer.
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The only problem I really have with windows 11 over 10 is the mandatory TPM and MS sign in. Partly because it "obsoletes" perfectly good hardware but mostly because it's one more step away from actually owning your computer.
How does requirement of having TPM makes your PC less yours? That doesn't make any sense.
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The only problem I really have with windows 11 over 10 is the mandatory TPM and MS sign in. Partly because it "obsoletes" perfectly good hardware but mostly because it's one more step away from actually owning your computer.
I agree on the forced MS account. Why would an operating system need that?! Well, to lock you into the vendor's offering and cloud service, of course...
The other thing that really annoys me is how they force Copilot down our throats. My new Thinkpad has a blessed Copilot key on the keyboard! >:D And MS have even made it impossible to assign anything but either Copilot or the Search dialog to it. So whenever I accidentally touch it instead of the neighboring AltGr, my typing gets interrupted by a popup Window. Alt Grrr...
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Objectively Win 2000 was crap when it comes to security even after all those service packs....
I can certainly accept the truth of that, but in my experience it was pretty quick and very stable.
Well FreeCAD is powerful, but I still find it awful to use. The learning curve is atrocious.
That's exactly what I think. It is typical of open source software: it is developed by geeks, as a hobby, for fellow geeks. They have made no effort to make it beginner friendly because they don't care whether people use it or not. In general, new users are a net negative because they keep distracting the geeks with their "stupid" questions. "If only they'd RTFM!"
Edit: Or maybe this is just the users' psychology. People never like to move away from something they have gotten used to. So MS gives them a new version which everybody agrees to hate -- only to create that shared feeling of relief when we can finally move on to the next iteration. 8)
Yup, that's exactly it. I've been hearing this for any new major version of Windows.
Oh, god, I hope that's a joke.
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Systems are now getting further away from win32 with each version (replaced by WinRT/COM). Unless they do a 180 on a decade of going in the wrong direction it can only get worse now.
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Systems are now getting further away from win32 with each version (replaced by WinRT/COM). Unless they do a 180 on a decade of going in the wrong direction it can only get worse now.
What are the main problems you see with that shift? Provided that they don't repeat the Windows 8 attempt of a "unified, touch-centric UI for the desktop" in parallel, of course.
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The only problem I really have with windows 11 over 10 is the mandatory TPM and MS sign in. Partly because it "obsoletes" perfectly good hardware but mostly because it's one more step away from actually owning your computer.
How does requirement of having TPM makes your PC less yours? That doesn't make any sense.
For individual end users it absolutely does.
The point of TPM is to establish a trusted boot sequence from the processor to the firmware to the OS loader to the OS to the drivers to (potentially) the applications so that each of them can refuse to run if the layer above it isn't trusted, and untrusted code can be limited in its access to the computer and the hardware. This is all fine in principle. What it does is meant that the control of the computer belongs to whoever holds the keys rather than whoever holds the computer. And for the most part, microsoft holds the keys. It's possible to create your own root of trust and build a secure boot system that you control, and large organizations can do that to make their fleet management more secure. But as an end user, it's not practical to do so.
And it doesn't really provide a lot of added security for the end user. Currently microsoft allows untrusted applications to run outside of the most privileged parts of the OS. But those "unpriviledged" parts of the OS are where literally everything I care about lives. Trusted boot can't protect my actual data against spyware or ransomware because that's all part of the untrusted application layer. It can protect against malicious firmware rootkits that persist after a OS reinstall, but you know what else can do that? Simple signed firmware update process from a USB stick that can only be done from within the EFI interface with the hardware physically in your possession, like we have had for ages. This is impractical for large companies that want to remotely administer firmware updates, but it's ideal for individual users.
The only way TPMs and trusted boot really help protect end user security is (somewhat ironically...) if it's coupled with a microsoft account. In this case, microsoft can maintain the key management infrastructure that is impractical for an individual, taking the place of your corporate IT staff. In that case you can have TPM protected full disk encryption, backups, and password/person secret stores, and you can do that because you can use your MS account for key recovery if needed. This is why it drives me crazy when people say "I don't mind the windows 11 requiring a TPM because it's good for security, but I hate the mandatory signing because it's bad for privacy" -- they work together.
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I can certainly accept the truth of that, but in my experience it was pretty quick and very stable.
How about you install it, connect to the Internet and count seconds until some kind of worm or virus infects it?
Oh, god, I hope that's a joke.
It's not a joke. Most people are resistant to change. So much so that they will believe any BS which supports their resistance due to confirmation bias even if there is no objective basis for it.
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I drive a cupra born, anyone who see's it tells me how great it looks, it I tell them it's not worth the £40k it costs they will say "but it looks nice". Fact, it is inferior to a renault zoe that comes in at £30k......
I was tempted by a Born or an MG EV4.
Then I got a valuation my car "2017 GT86 Pro" and discovered it still hold 50% of it's value at 7 years old. Don't make them anymore. So it's likely to hold it' valve far, far better than any 2025 electric will.
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For individual end users it absolutely does.
No it does not because at the end of the day, you can control what's in there and even wipe it if you so please. So all control remains with the user. As for the OS, the mere fact that you run OS presumes that you trust it's vendor since it by definition has access to all your hardware and can control it. So not trusting OS vendor but still running their OS doesn't make a whole lot of sense to begin with. But even despite of that, there are various methods to control what OS can and can not do with some hardware components - like hardware encryption via password/fingerprint protection.
Another big thing is that keys stored in TPM can never leave it, so if you encrypt anything using that key, it can only be ever decrypted on the same machine, which makes stealing drives for the purposes of extracting data pointless (provided it's secured properly). I do agree that a lot of TPM features are more geared towards corporate environments, but I've long held that Windows is designed for those environments first and foremost (those who think it's designed for casuals and housewives are delusional), but all of those features are still available for home users, so dedicated enough user can take advantage of them too.
Simple signed firmware update process from a USB stick that can only be done from within the EFI interface with the hardware physically in your possession, like we have had for ages. This is impractical for large companies that want to remotely administer firmware updates, but it's ideal for individual users.
Many UEFI firmwares allow you to lock out firmware upgrades so you can do exactly that if you so please. Again, it's your hardware, so you get to decide what it's running.
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What are the main problems you see with that shift?
It encourages maldesign. Using WinRT for high frequency calls is a giant waste of CPU cycles. It's not the only reason modern Windows UI is slow (UWP was faster than WinUI3) but it doesn't help.
https://community.devexpress.com/blogs/wpf/archive/2022/01/24/winui-3-performance-boost.aspx
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It encourages maldesign. Using WinRT for high frequency calls is a giant waste of CPU cycles.
But isn't it such that you are not supposed to perform high-frequency calls, but rather wait for whatever event to come back? More a case of "it punishes bad design" than "it encourages"? Which, of course, is still a problem for the user of a badly designed piece of software.
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But isn't it such that you are not supposed to perform high-frequency calls, but rather wait for whatever event to come back?
It's not I/O which is the problem, the dozens of levels of indirection take a toll no matter how many awaits get thrown in.
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No it does not because at the end of the day, you can control what's in there and even wipe it if you so please. So all control remains with the user. As for the OS, the mere fact that you run OS presumes that you trust it's vendor since it by definition has access to all your hardware and can control it. So not trusting OS vendor but still running their OS doesn't make a whole lot of sense to begin with.
Well, part of my trust in an OS is being able to see and control what it does. And Windows 11 is reducing that further. For instance, you can't (without unsupported and undocumented hacks that will eventually be blocked) run windows 11 in a hypervisor with a soft TPM provided by the hypervisor.
It's not yet at the android/ios/ChromeOS level where only signed apps approved by the OS vendor can run, and can run and only with restricted permissions, or if an alternative is allowed it's only in a super restricted sandbox. But that's definitely the goal, and honestly that's the only thing that can actually provide the security that MS _claims_ that TPMs do.
MS also attempted but ultimately backed off of making trusted boot mandatory (not able to be disabled) for windows supporting systems -- AFAIU it's already this way on ARM but not yet x86. This makes booting any OS dependent on Microsoft signing the bootloader shim. And this bootloader shim is a major source of "security vulnerabilities" (really: secure boot bypass bugs), so it's now going to be continually in the crosshairs for increased restrictions.
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Well, part of my trust in an OS is being able to see and control what it does. And Windows 11 is reducing that further. For instance, you can't (without unsupported and undocumented hacks that will eventually be blocked) run windows 11 in a hypervisor with a soft TPM provided by the hypervisor.
I haven't tried it myself, but I'm pretty sure you can run Win11 in a VM. That is a major testing workflow used for many different purposes - from debugging device drivers to testing upcoming updates in corporate environments before rolling them out across the company, to testing in-development software in different software and hardware environments.
It's not yet at the android/ios/ChromeOS level where only signed apps approved by the OS vendor can run, and can run and only with restricted permissions, or if an alternative is allowed it's only in a super restricted sandbox. But that's definitely the goal, and honestly that's the only thing that can actually provide the security that MS _claims_ that TPMs do.
Actually they can not do that because their primary market relies on a crap ton of custom software developed specifically for those companies, and they are not going to share with anybody because it might disclose some corporate secrets. So that can't possibly be their goal. Maybe for home edition they can get away with it, but not for their main cash cow for sure.
MS also attempted but ultimately backed off of making trusted boot mandatory (not able to be disabled) for windows supporting systems -- AFAIU it's already this way on ARM but not yet x86. This makes booting any OS dependent on Microsoft signing the bootloader shim. And this bootloader shim is a major source of "security vulnerabilities" (really: secure boot bypass bugs), so it's now going to be continually in the crosshairs for increased restrictions.
You can always add your own key and sign bootloader with it instead of using somebody else's key.
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Well, part of my trust in an OS is being able to see and control what it does. And Windows 11 is reducing that further. For instance, you can't (without unsupported and undocumented hacks that will eventually be blocked) run windows 11 in a hypervisor with a soft TPM provided by the hypervisor.
I doubt Microsoft will ever require attestation, millions of VM's would break. Soft TPM's with UEFI firmware with pre-enrolled keys will keep working.
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FWIW I had to modify my win11 installation image, or something along the lines (maybe some special magic during boot?), to disable the secure boot check, in order to install it in virtualbox. It works.
There have been news since that it was no longer possible to disable secure boot, I haven't checked that.
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I can certainly accept the truth of that, but in my experience it was pretty quick and very stable.
How about you install it, connect to the Internet and count seconds until some kind of worm or virus infects it?
You're applying 2026 knowledge and experience to a 1999 product, and then picking the worst possible case to justify your fearmongering.
Back when W2K was around things were very, very different to what they are now. You wouldn't point to Y2K Internet Explorer and then postulate that it's really very crap to browse random websites now. Or maybe you would, because you don't see how silly that comparison is. At least it wasn't an Apple machine, which got infected just by being powered on, seemingly :)
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You're applying 2026 knowledge and experience to a 1999 product, and then picking the worst possible case to justify your fearmongering.
Back when W2K was around things were very, very different to what they are now. You wouldn't point to Y2K Internet Explorer and then postulate that it's really very crap to browse random websites now. Or maybe you would, because you don't see how silly that comparison is. At least it wasn't an Apple machine, which got infected just by being powered on, seemingly :)
Well people are saying that this 1999 year product is better than a modern one, so I offered a way to check if that's the case. Since there were no Win11 in 1999, the only way to check that is in today's environment.
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I can certainly accept the truth of that, but in my experience it was pretty quick and very stable.
How about you install it, connect to the Internet and count seconds until some kind of worm or virus infects it?
I guess I'd be waiting a long time behind my router with NAT?
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I can certainly accept the truth of that, but in my experience it was pretty quick and very stable.
How about you install it, connect to the Internet and count seconds until some kind of worm or virus infects it?
I guess I'd be waiting a long time behind my router with NAT?
Indefinitely... Unless you have an internet provider which is foolish enough to encourage their customers to have their PCs connected to internet directly. There should be a law against such practises.
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You're applying 2026 knowledge and experience to a 1999 product, and then picking the worst possible case to justify your fearmongering.
Back when W2K was around things were very, very different to what they are now. You wouldn't point to Y2K Internet Explorer and then postulate that it's really very crap to browse random websites now. Or maybe you would, because you don't see how silly that comparison is. At least it wasn't an Apple machine, which got infected just by being powered on, seemingly :)
Well people are saying that this 1999 year product is better than a modern one, so I offered a way to check if that's the case. Since there were no Win11 in 1999, the only way to check that is in today's environment.
If nothing else, it took up a hell of a lot less disk space! The one I have running is <800MB. Until last year, when the PC running it died, I had W2K controlling my mill primarily because the timer interrupt was super-smooth compared to later Windows.
So, for the time, yes, it was pretty damn good and in some respects it is indeed 'better' than W11. Depends on how you want to measure stuff.
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Oh, god, I hope that's a joke.
It's not a joke. Most people are resistant to change. So much so that they will believe any BS which supports their resistance due to confirmation bias even if there is no objective basis for it.
I was referring to the suggestion that Microsoft deliberately releases crap versions of Windows alternately, in order to drum up demand for the next version. It's obviously ridiculous, therefore a joke. Right?
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Well people are saying that this 1999 year product is better than a modern one, so I offered a way to check if that's the case. Since there were no Win11 in 1999, the only way to check that is in today's environment.
What? Who said that? And anyway, how do you define "better"?
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I can certainly accept the truth of that, but in my experience it was pretty quick and very stable.
How about you install it, connect to the Internet and count seconds until some kind of worm or virus infects it?
I guess I'd be waiting a long time behind my router with NAT?
Indefinitely... Unless you have an internet provider which is foolish enough to encourage their customers to have their PCs connected to internet directly. There should be a law against such practises.
You're not wrong.
I think that it's an interesting subject. Prior to NAT, all computers were connected to the Internet. With IPv6, all computers can again be directly addressable on the Internet without NAT.
My ISP provides me with a /56 block of IPv6 addresses for my home use. I still use a firewall, of course, but no NAT is required.
An IPv6 /56 is 2^72 addresses vs all of IPv4 space being 2^32 addresses. The IPv6 /56 offers me 256 /64 blocks, which are the smallest you can properly mask per the standards. That's still more than enough to directly map all of the IPv4 space into a single block, with plenty of room left over.
What may surprise folks is that most computers today are connected directly to the internet via IPv6 and IPv6-to-IPv4 NAT GWs, and we carry them in our pockets and on our wrists. Carriers manage their mobile networks "differently" from typical ISP networks.
Windows NT and 98 both supported IPv6. Though not at the level of support it is today on hosts. The auto-addressing scheme came later, and there's more than one.
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I love freecad and have been using it for years.
Cool, I have a real use case question for you. So, say, I'm making a fishing lure. My current flow is: use Inkscape to draw the side profile shape, mark the drilling points etc., also manually draw the top/bottom profile shapes, then print them, cut and proceed to the woodworking fun.
Inkscape isn't too great for all this, because it requires a lot of manual operations and approximations, especially when I try to estimate the volume of the model. Its measuring capabilities are all super basic, "because Inkscape is not CAD software".
I kinda want to make my models 3-dimensional to make things easier and more predictable: calculate surface area (3d and a given cross-section), volume, measure linear sizes etc., not to mention having a proper 3d visualization.
So if I move my workflow to freecad and obviously decide to keep it simple in the beginning, i.e., create the 3d shape by "extruding" a side profile shape and then adding some chamfering on the corners, how steep and long of a learning curve may it require to arrive at that, what do you, as a long-time user, think?
I've been thinking of freecad, but never really even tried to run it (nor any other 3d modelling software actually), and now that I'm reading all these horrors about it, I'm somewhat scared.
Whenever I want to design something in Freecad I usually look for video's on the subject. Google freecad fishing lures like this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taTp4EIr2lA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taTp4EIr2lA)
Make your first fishing lure in FreeCAD
I follow along and go through the steps then make a few notes on the tools used and process. Once we understand the basic process then it's much easier to start playing around and modifying things. I think it's much easier and faster to learn by example.
I use Freecad for most basic 3D parts but use Blender whenever there are more complex curves.
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I was referring to the suggestion that Microsoft deliberately releases crap versions of Windows alternately, in order to drum up demand for the next version. It's obviously ridiculous, therefore a joke. Right?
It's a similar joke/meme to "this year is the year of desktop linux". It is a joke but a carefully crafted joke enough that some people take it seriously.
Once one gets into the mode of confirmation biases, they can easily find some proof. Obviously with each new version of any software, new bugs get introduced. And, with each new version, some old bugs get fixed. Similarly, new features usually do not work perfectly when they are first introduced, but get better on the next release.
Select suitable set of bugs/features and you can easily see how "good" and "bad" versions alternate, on any software.
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I was referring to the suggestion that Microsoft deliberately releases crap versions of Windows alternately, in order to drum up demand for the next version. It's obviously ridiculous, therefore a joke. Right?
I have a feeling you have not been around very long. If you delve into the history of Windows, you can easely spot an alternating pattern where Windows versions where bad / good. I doubt it is on purpose though. Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
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I was referring to the suggestion that Microsoft deliberately releases crap versions of Windows alternately, in order to drum up demand for the next version. It's obviously ridiculous, therefore a joke. Right?
I have a feeling you have not been around very long. If you delve into the history of Windows, you can easely spot an alternating pattern where Windows versions where bad / good. I doubt it is on purpose though. Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
I listed those Windows versions a few posts above (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/windows-11-is-dying/msg6158781/#msg6158781), and made the (tongue-in-cheek) suggestion that the alternating pattern might be somewhat deliberate. That's what prompted Steve's comment.
To clarify: I do not think it is deliberate. But I do think there is a mix of bad Microsoft design decisions and user psychology at play:
When Microsoft has made major changes to Windows (often in the area of new UI "paradigms"), their first attempts have tended to be objectively poor, and they fixed this in the next revision -- with tweaks and sometimes significant back-pedaling. At the same time, users were alienated by the changes in the original release, then to some extent got used to them and accepted them in the next release.
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I was referring to the suggestion that Microsoft deliberately releases crap versions of Windows alternately, in order to drum up demand for the next version. It's obviously ridiculous, therefore a joke. Right?
I have a feeling you have not been around very long.
Goodness me, how I wish that were true! 😅
However, as someone who didn't get into Windows until Version 3.1, I accept I am a baby compared with you. I do claim one good decision, though: I switched to NT as soon as NT4 was released, and never went back to the original code base after that. I have used every NT version of Windows since. In fact I am one of the few people on the planet who actually liked W8, but only on a touch-based device.
Having lived with Windows since 3.1, I am intimately familiar with it, and of course I recognise the claim that every alternate version is crap. I think there is something in it, although a lot depends on what your usage criteria are - crap for one person might be just fine for another.
But where I dig my heels in is the claim that this is all part of a big conspiracy by Microsoft. To deliberately release crap software in order to encourage the adoption of the next release. It's beyond ridiculous, and anyone who really believes that probably wears a tin foil hat.
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I know it's anecdotal but I started a new job this week.
I have, so far, got two MacBook Pro's a 14" and a 16". No Windows 11 in sight. (Two because "Company + Customer" laptops)
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When Microsoft has made major changes to Windows (often in the area of new UI "paradigms"), their first attempts have tended to be objectively poor, and they fixed this in the next revision -- with tweaks and sometimes significant back-pedaling. At the same time, users were alienated by the changes in the original release, then to some extent got used to them and accepted them in the next release.
I think this is the most credible explanation by far. In general, it takes a couple of versions - maybe more - for Microsoft to polish their latest marvellous idea.
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8
Windows 10
Windows 11
Windows whatever is next
In terms of this list, there are a couple of things I disagree with. I don't think W2000 should have a line through it. It was very good in its own right and a solid step forward from NT4. XP was a further solid step. So I think there's a run of three non-crap versions in the list: NT4, W2K, XP.
Also - and this is controversial - I think the line through V8 should be dotted. It was very awkward for mouse/keyboard users, but excellent for touch UI users. I loved using it on my Sony Vaio 2-in-1 - it was innovative and modern and suddenly made its competitors look distinctly "ordinary".
Finally, I think V8.1 warrants a place on the list, it being a very significant change from V8. Should there be a line through it? Well, only a dotted one. Again it was very good for touch UI users.
Right now everybody is singing the praises of W10. But not me. I think it might warrant a strikethrough for its awful, bodged together, half-touch half-mouse/keyboard UI. Making every dialog twice (or more) as big as it was in W7 is no use for mouse users, and leaving a load of old UI elements in there, carried forward from the XP days, is no use for touch users.
So no, W10 isn't one of the great releases. In my opinion, the best ever mouse/keyboard UI was in Windows 7, and the best ever touch UI was in Windows 8.
Windows 8.1 was a half-baked merging of W7 and W8, and Windows 10 was a two-thirds-baked merging of W7 and W8.
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EDIT: To be fair, I acknowledge that each release improved on security. My comments are aimed at usability.
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I have, so far, got two MacBook Pro's a 14" and a 16". No Windows 11 in sight.
I have several times been tempted to go Apple to deal with W10+, but it's the cost and walled garden that's the sticking point. And global menu. Thankfully they've moved on from the single-button mouse.
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Windows 3.1 and before: small gradual improvements
Windows 95: Large fundamental changes, some hated it, some loved it
Windows 98: Small gradual fixes over Windows 95.
So now is 95 a "bad" and 98 a "good" Windows? Some could say so, but I don't think so (especially if by 95 we mean the fixed version, not the initial release)
(Windows NT, a separate parallel product line. Considered that of better design by pretty much everyone, but not considered a general-purpose option, and does not fit into the linear history timescale as such.)
Then after the many versions of 98, Windows 2000. Large fundamental changes, but because those were already tested on NT, was fairly stable and usable, so generally a real improvement. This is definitely a "good" Windows, most would agree I guess?
Then Windows XP. Small gradual improvements over Windows 2000. Saw some hate for reasons unclear in retrospect, really. Then again wasn't really game-changing either. But this coincides with the proliferation of home computers - I mean the period in history where "all those normies who still didn't have a computer" finally got one, and for them Windows XP is their first OS. So around 2001-2008, just before smartphones, was era in history where home computers were more relevant than ever. And Windows XP also was one of the longest-in-use operating system. People really ended up liking it.
So what, do we have TWO good Windows (2000 and XP) after each other? Wasn't they supposed to alternate?
Then Vista, nearly everyone agrees it was crap, everyone hated it. Brought in some breaking new changes and new fundamental ideas which people did not like. This is clearly a bad Windows, and most would agree.
Then Windows 7, which is undoubtedly an improvement over Vista, but IMHO only because Vista clearly sucked. It's the case of introducing new ideas and failing to make people like them on the first try (Vista), but then being able to polish them on the second try (7). Maybe 7 was a sweet spot to some as it still resembled a classic operating system and not a thin client for MS cloud services, I don't know. I was not able to like it and saw too many problems to use it as a daily driver and migrated completely my desktop use to linux in 2014-2015 or so, when Windows XP had been end-of-support for many years already.
But clearly, consensus is that Windows 7 is a "good" Windows.
And then, finally, for all the rest, it seems no one likes any OS Microsoft manages to produce anymore; people are getting more honest about the motivation, they use Windows to run Windows software because it works well enough. There are occasional strong feelings of dislike to Microsoft's practices even among Windows users but it seems this is now regardless of version, same complaints with 10 and 11.
So really, to summary, I can only see the alternating pattern of "good and bad" XP (good) -> Vista (bad) -> 7 (good) -> 8 (bad), and even that is pretty questionable and depends who you ask. The more you look into either history, or more recent versions, the more the theory of altering good and bad versions falls apart, IMHO.
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I have, so far, got two MacBook Pro's a 14" and a 16". No Windows 11 in sight.
I have several times been tempted to go Apple to deal with W10+, but it's the cost and walled garden that's the sticking point. And global menu. Thankfully they've moved on from the single-button mouse.
Absolutely. Apple got it wrong with the single-button mouse, but stuck to it for years because, as far as Apple is concerned, they never make mistakes and their competitors never do something better.
One area where Windows has wiped the floor with MacOS for years is in windows management. Attaching windows to the sides of the monitor, arranging them in tiles or other layouts.... Apple have only recently started to catch up.
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But clearly, consensus is that Windows 7 is a "good" Windows.
For me, yes, absolutely.
I consider W7 to be the very pinnacle of the old WIMP UI paradigm (windows, icons, menus, pointer), after years of fine tuning and polishing. If you like that type of UI (I do), then I don't think W7 has ever been surpassed.
Unfortunately for me, later versions of Windows have varying amounts of touch-based UI folded in, which I very much dislike when using my mouse/keyboard workstation. And much to my dismay, even Linux has started along that path! At least, Mint has.
Now, instead of checkboxes and radio buttons, my favourite Linux has adopted those large blue slider switches. Now look, they were designed for poking with a finger, not clicking with a mouse! I wish Mint would stick to the pure WIMP UI and release a separate version for touch-based devices. That is exactly what Apple did.
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Windows 3.1 and before: small gradual improvements
Windows 95: Large fundamental changes, some hated it, some loved it
Windows 98: Small gradual fixes over Windows 95.
So now is 95 a "bad" and 98 a "good" Windows? Some could say so, but I don't think so (especially if by 95 we mean the fixed version, not the initial release)
Agree; the "every other version is good" (for most users) did not apply to the original, DOS-based Windows versions.
Windows 1 and 2 were clearly work in progress; some might say the same for 3.0. I think there's a consensus that 3.1 was the first solid version that gained massive traction, and 3.11 brought some improvements in networking ("for workgroups"). The successor, Windows 95, was pretty good in my view, and as far as I remember was well-received in the market -- despite the comprehensive technical changes (16/32 bits!) and UI changes. I don't have any recollection of Windows 98: All home users I recall staid on 95, and professional use I was involved with switched from 3.11 straight to NT.
So you might argue that Windows 95 was the one and only instance where Microsoft got major changes to the OS right first time. ;)
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Windows 3.1 and before: small gradual improvements
Windows 95: Large fundamental changes, some hated it, some loved it
Windows 98: Small gradual fixes over Windows 95.
Windows Me ;D
Then after the many versions of 98, Windows 2000. Large fundamental changes, but because those were already tested on NT, was fairly stable and usable, so generally a real improvement. This is definitely a "good" Windows, most would agree I guess?
Yep, Windows 2000 was great for business applications, i.e. swift and stable.
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So you might argue that Windows 95 was the one and only instance where Microsoft got major changes to the OS right first time. ;)
Maybe some rose-tinting in your glasses here... Remember how Windows 95 was quite late from the promised release date and when finally released, people were pretty angry with all sort of issues and missing features (like a web browser people were expecting to see), until later service releases fixed that. When we talk about Windows 95, we really remember Windows 95 OSR2 from late 1996, 1.5 years later than the original planned release date of Windows 95. So maybe not right the first time.
I consider W7 to be the very pinnacle of the old WIMP UI paradigm (windows, icons, menus, pointer), after years of fine tuning and polishing. If you like that type of UI (I do), then I don't think W7 has ever been surpassed.
I never saw how it was any better than Windows XP, really. It did the job. Then again, now I'm more than happy with xfce, which is also quite primitive.
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Windows Me ;D
Just one of too many in the 98 series. As I said, there was nothing special in 98 to begin with; just small gradual, irrelevantly small changes to 95. And not only that, they branded it as three "different" "major" releases, 98, 98SE and 98ME within very short timeframe.
But that was also the time where normies were buying a lot of home computers, so with a massive sales volume you can have a "newly" branded product every year. Soon after the release of XP that development tapered off.
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So you might argue that Windows 95 was the one and only instance where Microsoft got major changes to the OS right first time. ;)
Maybe some rose-tinting in your glasses here...
It was great, since it came with Edie Brickell! ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okt9GcWiWmE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okt9GcWiWmE)
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I never saw how <Windows 7> was any better than Windows XP, really. It did the job.
W7 was a big step on from XP (two steps, via Vista, of course). There was a tremendous amount of polishing in the kernel, behind the scenes. Improved handling of large amounts of RAM, faster thread scheduling. Probably the biggest change for users was UAC (introduced in Vista, I think?) - the equivalent of which Linux had had for years. Users didn't like it, so sadly it was dialled down in later versions. Also, dont forget Aero (introduced with Vista), which many people (including me) think has never been improved upon. Oh, and the ability to pin programs to the task bar. Also, better memory protection and driver isolation.
Proper SSD support: W7 was a serious step forward over XP for SSDs, including TRIM support.
XP didn't have Windows Defender (the "better than nothing but only just" anti-virus), and compared with XP, W7 was significantly hardened against malware in most forms.
I also liked the "Libraries" concept in the W7 filing system, plus the clever ability to have Library entries for search results, which automatically update their contents. This was, apparently, a step too far for most users because it has largely been ignored since.
Windows 7 introduced Aero Snap - the first step towards the excellent windows management that left MacOS years behind.
In fact, it's a lot easier just to read the this Wikipedia article: 😅
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7)
So yes, Windows 7 was BIG, and in my view very much better than XP.
EDIT:
Two more things, which probably seem trivial: the default sound theme in XP was ATROCIOUS! Do you remember the giggling children and the other patronising sounds? Secondly, the default colour scheme which always reminded me of a bag of sweets. And do you remember how XP put "My" in front of everything? "My Computer", "My Documents". FFS! W7 felt much more "grown up" than XP.
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And I'm sorry to repeat myself, but I don't think there will be a significant move to Linux on the desktop until the big commercial players port their applications to Linux. The existing Linux desktop applications are just not good enough.
Well I think that's a very personal matter that depends on a)what you need to do; b)laziness
I personally use almost exclusively Linux since about 2002. Found that i can do all I want to do. Things like FreeCAD made me pulling my hairs more than once, but, hey, with use comes learning, At the end of the day, it's enough to do what I need it to do, including things like FEM that are not available on windows offers, at least for free. By using Debian, I get easy, hassle free access to rare and quite fine apps like a virtual wind tunnel from a MIT professor, a fine, free GIS which isn't emasculated, or a mapping app for caving that is able to redraw the contours of a cave when a polygonal is corrected (which saves A LOT of work). Installs are really easy, apt does install any dependencies for me, and I never had any antivirus making my system slow. So, if you are happy with what windows gives to you, fine. It just isn't enough for me.
I have friends that used to have windows for just email, Internet and spreadsheets. Problem was, they were guys and, so, they liked to look at some boobs every now and then; after that, they usually called asking for help because their PC got syphilis, gonorrhea and AIDS. They were scared to have linux because of substituting libreoffice calc for excel. Most of them rapidly saw it was the same since hey didn't use any macros. An easy migration and now they don't need windows, which a) allows them to watch boobs recklessly, and b) allows them to use old hardware. One of these friends still uses one of the first dual core AMD athlons, which I got for him, for free because it was already "too old" in about 2015 IIRC. So, if you like to be bothered by all sorts of viruses, have your PC slow because of the antivirus, and have pockets deep enough to upgrade your hardware each time microsoft thinks it's time to milk the cow again, fine. I just don't like that, so took another road.
On the other hand I have seen a low-ranking local female officer ranting at tech staff because what was Ctrl-P on Excel became Ctrl-V in Calc, and that was obviously unacceptable. Well, laziness is still a personal matter.
I think privative business model has more to do with slow Linux adoption on the desktop. You can't do any serious paid, professional printing work without Pantone codes, and they will probably never get into Linux, because Pantone is privative, unless Pantone gets interested in having it working under linux. No one is going to do it for free. Pantone privative business model was already a thing in the 90s. So far this has not changed. Better get a Mac for that.
Of course, you don't want to waste all the work you did to learn to use the apps you "need". I can understand that. But I'm glad I took the work to learn how to do useful work with apps that are really worse, but allow me to use an OS that is free, runs faster, safer and easier, can use much older hardware, doesn't compel me to signing into any vendor account, and doesn't spy on me.
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And I'm sorry to repeat myself, but I don't think there will be a significant move to Linux on the desktop until the big commercial players port their applications to Linux. The existing Linux desktop applications are just not good enough.
Well I think that's a very personal matter that depends on a)what you need to do; b)laziness
I personally use almost exclusively Linux since about 2002. Found that i can do all I want to do. Things like FreeCAD made me pulling my hairs more than once, but, hey, with use comes learning, At the end of the day, it's enough to do what I need it to do, including things like FEM that are not available on windows offers, at least for free. By using Debian, I get easy, hassle free access to rare and quite fine apps like a virtual wind tunnel from a MIT professor, a fine, free GIS which isn't emasculated, or a mapping app for caving that is able to redraw the contours of a cave when a polygonal is corrected (which saves A LOT of work). Installs are really easy, apt does install any dependencies for me, and I never had any antivirus making my system slow. So, if you are happy with what windows gives to you, fine. It just isn't enough for me.
I've said up there ^^^ somewhere that I like Linux Mint as an OS, but I don't like the applications because they look and feel like they were developed and are maintained by geeks for geeks. Which they were, and are. I haven't tried looking in the Windows ecosystem for the specialised applications you describe, although my experience is that if you can imagine it there will be a Windows application that does it. I accept there may be some rare exceptions. 😊
I also totally accept that my assessment of the Linux app ecosystem is totally subjective. What's important to me might not be for anyone else. Having said that, I think there is a fair degree of consensus about Linux apps being a bit old-fashioned, a bit geeky, with some pretty steep learning curves.
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I've said up there ^^^ somewhere that I like Linux Mint as an OS, but I don't like the applications because they look and feel like they were developed and are maintained by geeks for geeks. Which they were, and are. I haven't tried looking in the Windows ecosystem for the specialised applications you describe, although my experience is that if you can imagine it there will be a Windows application that does it. I accept there may be some rare exceptions. 😊
I also totally accept that my assessment of the Linux app ecosystem is totally subjective. What's important to me might not be for anyone else. Having said that, I think there is a fair degree of consensus about Linux apps being a bit old-fashioned, a bit geeky, with some pretty steep learning curves.
Well, I don't think apps like Firefox or libreoffice look like made by geeks for geeks. For that matter, almost all the apps that get into the PC on a default Linux install look very much the same than windows counterparts. It's only on the specialized apps where that difference is visible. I wonder how much people has a CAD app versus how many have an office suite and a browser.
I do care for a well developed app with an intuitive use a good GUI; but to me what really matters is: can it do the work I need? I'm willing to trade many things for the ability to escape from windows, as you can see. I think it's well worth the hassle. YMMV.
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I do care for a well developed app with an intuitive use a good GUI;
But then you contradict yourself:
but to me what really matters is: can it do the work I need? I'm willing to trade many things for the ability to escape from windows, as you can see. I think it's well worth the hassle. YMMV.
So you admitted that you're so heavily biased against Windows that you are ready to accept objectively poor user experience if it means not having to use Windows. There is a name for that behavior, and we all know it.
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I have, so far, got two MacBook Pro's a 14" and a 16". No Windows 11 in sight.
I have several times been tempted to go Apple to deal with W10+, but it's the cost and walled garden that's the sticking point. And global menu. Thankfully they've moved on from the single-button mouse.
Absolutely. Apple got it wrong with the single-button mouse, but stuck to it for years because, as far as Apple is concerned, they never make mistakes and their competitors never do something better.
One area where Windows has wiped the floor with MacOS for years is in windows management. Attaching windows to the sides of the monitor, arranging them in tiles or other layouts.... Apple have only recently started to catch up.
... and Windows took that back from KDE where it appeared first for a few years. (window snapping). You will find a lot of Windows features get back ported from improvements that KDE make in their "Windows like" UI.
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and Windows took that back from KDE where it appeared first for a few years. (window snapping).
has windows got an "always on top " option yet?
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So you admitted that you're so heavily biased against Windows that you are ready to accept objectively poor user experience if it means not having to use Windows. There is a name for that behavior, and we all know it.
Having to use windows is the worst user experience. Moreover, we are talking about specialized apps right now. Ask my boob-watching friends. They want a system that "just works" They can now watch boobs and to do their invoices in Calc, on machines that any windows user would consider "really obsolete". Without needing to call asking for help. For years. Not to mention microsoft accounts, AI, spyware, etc, etc, that they don't need nor want. Without having to buy new hardware when MS feels any itching in their balls.
I'm not biased against windows. I'm biased against privative software. I began in 1990 on MacOS because i was working at a newspaper. Photoshop was a MacOS back then. But, in 1998 I needed GIS software and nothing available, neither on Windows and even less on MacOS, even under student licenses, even still expensive, was nowhere near what we needed. But we could do it, using GRASS GIS for free. Yeah, it was Linux-only back then. Yeah, it was geeky. But it was the only software that allowed us to have areas of about 300 sq kilometers studied in any way, shape or form we needed. I will say it again: for free. No way we could pay the fortune they were asking for a full fledged version of ESRI or something like that. So, the benefit in migrating to Linux was obvious.
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Having to use windows is the worst user experience. Moreover, we are talking about specialized apps right now. Ask my boob-watching friends. They want a system that "just works" They can now watch boobs and to do their invoices in Calc, on machines that any windows user would consider "really obsolete". Without needing to call asking for help. For years. Not to mention microsoft accounts, AI, spyware, etc, etc, that they don't need nor want. Without having to buy new hardware when MS feels any itching in their balls.
Lol here we have a typical staple of fanatics. Literally none of those things are true, yet you continue to parrot them like headless chicken :palm: Oh, and "Linux desktop" and "just works" do not belong in a single sentence. It requires quite a bit of maintenance as updates regularly break something (leading contenders in my experience are WiFi/BT cards - I had to fix their drivers after every update because some kind of firmware which is required for them to run get removed after update for some reason). And don't get me started on version upgrades - they are a disaster, still in this day and age. While my install of Windows dates back to 8.1 days, first being upgraded to Win10 and then recently to Win11. All while having changed a complete system once (from x99 Intel to AM4 AMD) and many less radical upgrades. Show the the Linux install which will survive such transplantation without requiring extensive manual fixing or outright reinstallation.
I run both Windows and Linux on two separate PCs as I need them both for work, so I know first hand what it takes to maintain them both over many years. And Linux has been much more maintenance-intensive than Windows. And that despite it running on "Linux-friendly" all-AMD SoC, so none of that NVidia drivers shenanigans which are known to be a big pain in the butt.
I'm not biased against windows.
Yes you are. And not only that, you are very behind regarding what modern Windows actually is.
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Without needing to call asking for help. For years.
Unless they want newfangled stuff like hibernation (suspend to disk). Or speakers in their laptops which don't sound like a phone landline. Or maybe they want a calendar which can be accessed from multiple devices. Then they will need help.
All of that is possible with Linux, no doubt. But don't expect a plain "user" to figure it out.
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Lol here we have a typical staple of fanatics. Literally none of those things are true, yet you continue to parrot them like headless chicken :palm: Oh, and "Linux desktop" and "just works" do not belong in a single sentence. It requires quite a bit of maintenance as updates regularly break something (leading contenders in my experience are WiFi/BT cards - I had to fix their drivers after every update because some kind of firmware which is required for them to run get removed after update for some reason). And don't get me started on version upgrades - they are a disaster, still in this day and age. While my install of Windows dates back to 8.1 days, first being upgraded to Win10 and then recently to Win11. All while having changed a complete system once (from x99 Intel to AM4 AMD) and many less radical upgrades. Show the the Linux install which will survive such transplantation without requiring extensive manual fixing or outright reinstallation.
I run both Windows and Linux on two separate PCs as I need them both for work, so I know first hand what it takes to maintain them both over many years. And Linux has been much more maintenance-intensive than Windows. And that despite it running on "Linux-friendly" all-AMD SoC, so none of that NVidia drivers shenanigans which are known to be a big pain in the butt.
I'm not biased against windows.
Yes you are. And not only that, you are very behind regarding what modern Windows actually is.
Well I feel you are somewhat offensive. I understand it; your beloved windows is getting trashed, and you feel the need to fight that. But I have nothing to earn by entering into any arguments here. I will just observe that a) you seem to have more problems than my absolutely-non-tech friends have, and b) windows user experience gets worse and worsewith each new version, as demonstrated by this thread existence. No amount of copium will change that.
Have a nice day
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Then after the many versions of 98, Windows 2000. Large fundamental changes, but because those were already tested on NT, was fairly stable and usable, so generally a real improvement. This is definitely a "good" Windows, most would agree I guess?
Then Windows XP. Small gradual improvements over Windows 2000. Saw some hate for reasons unclear in retrospect, really. Then again wasn't really game-changing either. But this coincides with the proliferation of home computers - I mean the period in history where "all those normies who still didn't have a computer" finally got one, and for them Windows XP is their first OS. So around 2001-2008, just before smartphones, was era in history where home computers were more relevant than ever. And Windows XP also was one of the longest-in-use operating system. People really ended up liking it.
So what, do we have TWO good Windows (2000 and XP) after each other? Wasn't they supposed to alternate?
I think Windows 2000 counts as "bad." It's an odd one -- It was originally promised as the OS to unify the home and business operating systems. But while it replaced Win9x on corporate desktops, it ended up not being suitable for home use so that had to wait for XP. It added DirectX, but still had massive compatibility issues with win9x/DOS, and poor gaming compatibility in general when games which were still *the* killer app for home computers as internet access was still uncommon. So MS had to abandon it as a home OS and keep upgrading win98 and release winME. It was super stable as a corporate desktop replacement for Win98, so in that sense it was good, but in the "alternating versions" theory, either Win2000 was a "bad" OS, or it wasn't in the lineup at all, and WinME was the bad one.
It also did have a lot of rough spots for end users who did adopt it. It introduced non-tech users to mandatory sign-ins with permissions checks to people who hadn't ever seen their own computer say "permission denied" before. It introduced a new filesystem (NTFS) to end users which they had to worry about compatiblity, especially with removable media and external drives.
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Well I feel you are somewhat offensive. I understand it; your beloved windows is getting trashed, and you feel the need to fight that. But I have nothing to earn by entering into any arguments here. I will just observe that a) you seem to have more problems than my absolutely-non-tech friends have, and b) windows user experience gets worse and worsewith each new version, as demonstrated by this thread existence. No amount of copium will change that.
Have a nice day
Lol when lies didn't work, you move on to condescension. Did that playbook ever changed? :palm: And don't think I didn't notice lack of any substance in your response.
I don't "fight" for anything, and Windows is far from being my "beloved". But objective reality is what it is. Oh, and user experience has never been better in Windows, I have next to no issues to it when it comes to experience, all my gripes with it are of technical nature. But when it comes to day-to-day usage, modern Windows is the best with nothing else being even close. Linux is useable for my purposes (FPGA design, firmware/software development), infact Vivado/Vitis tend to work better in Linux as they were clearly designed for it first and foremost, but Linux requires ongoing maintenance, which is kind of annoying. I wish Linux would be closer to being maintenance-free, when you just press a button and in updates everything automagically - like it tends to work in Windows, yet like I said, in my experience updates still break things from time to time, while the last time I had a windows update cause any issues was many years ago - and even that one was a specific incompatibility with some of my hardware's driver. I rolled it back immediately, and the problem disappeared. That problem was later fixed with a driver update.
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Then after the many versions of 98, Windows 2000. Large fundamental changes, but because those were already tested on NT, was fairly stable and usable, so generally a real improvement. This is definitely a "good" Windows, most would agree I guess?
Then Windows XP. Small gradual improvements over Windows 2000. Saw some hate for reasons unclear in retrospect, really. Then again wasn't really game-changing either. But this coincides with the proliferation of home computers - I mean the period in history where "all those normies who still didn't have a computer" finally got one, and for them Windows XP is their first OS. So around 2001-2008, just before smartphones, was era in history where home computers were more relevant than ever. And Windows XP also was one of the longest-in-use operating system. People really ended up liking it.
So what, do we have TWO good Windows (2000 and XP) after each other? Wasn't they supposed to alternate?
I think Windows 2000 counts as "bad." It's an odd one -- It was originally promised as the OS to unify the home and business operating systems. But while it replaced Win9x on corporate desktops, it ended up not being suitable for home use so that had to wait for XP. It added DirectX, but still had massive compatibility issues with win9x/DOS, and poor gaming compatibility in general when games which were still *the* killer app for home computers as internet access was still uncommon. So MS had to abandon it as a home OS and keep upgrading win98 and release winME. It was super stable as a corporate desktop replacement for Win98, so in that sense it was good, but in the "alternating versions" theory, either Win2000 was a "bad" OS, or it wasn't in the lineup at all, and WinME was the bad one.
It also did have a lot of rough spots for end users who did adopt it. It introduced non-tech users to mandatory sign-ins with permissions checks to people who hadn't ever seen their own computer say "permission denied" before. It introduced a new filesystem (NTFS) to end users which they had to worry about compatiblity, especially with removable media and external drives.
I was using Windows 2000 Professional at work back then. I used Windows 98SE at home until XP was released in 2001. I recall Windows 2000 Pro being a workhorse. We ran our code/products directly on it, as we were selling into the Solaris and Windows 2000 Server markets. I remained on 2000 Pro at work till I think SP2 of XP. SP2 was, as I recall, when XP became a viable replacement for the aging Windows 2000 Pro. SP3 was the real gem of XP, of course. I just restored two XP systems for a friend's home management platform. That was a trip down memory lane.
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I think Windows 2000 counts as "bad." It's an odd one -- It was originally promised as the OS to unify the home and business operating systems. But while it replaced Win9x on corporate desktops, it ended up not being suitable for home use so that had to wait for XP. It added DirectX, but still had massive compatibility issues with win9x/DOS, and poor gaming compatibility in general when games which were still *the* killer app for home computers as internet access was still uncommon. So MS had to abandon it as a home OS and keep upgrading win98 and release winME. It was super stable as a corporate desktop replacement for Win98, so in that sense it was good, but in the "alternating versions" theory, either Win2000 was a "bad" OS, or it wasn't in the lineup at all, and WinME was the bad one.
It also did have a lot of rough spots for end users who did adopt it. It introduced non-tech users to mandatory sign-ins with permissions checks to people who hadn't ever seen their own computer say "permission denied" before. It introduced a new filesystem (NTFS) to end users which they had to worry about compatiblity, especially with removable media and external drives.
I think the problem of Win2000 was the same as with Vista - it was simply too radical of a change, and software ecosystem was not prepared for it. And so XP was better for the same reason Win7 was better then Vista - by the time of it's release software ecosystem has caught up with it for the most part, so that migration happened with much less friction. I remember I had to dual-boot between Win98 and Win2000 for a while as some software just pain didn't work in the latter.
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Lol when lies didn't work, you move on to condescension. Did that playbook ever changed? :palm: And don't think I didn't notice lack of any substance in your response.
I don't "fight" for anything, and Windows is far from being my "beloved". But objective reality is what it is. Oh, and user experience has never been better in Windows, I have next to no issues to it when it comes to experience, all my gripes with it are of technical nature. But when it comes to day-to-day usage, modern Windows is the best with nothing else being even close. Linux is useable for my purposes (FPGA design, firmware/software development), infact Vivado/Vitis tend to work better in Linux as they were clearly designed for it first and foremost, but Linux requires ongoing maintenance, which is kind of annoying. I wish Linux would be closer to being maintenance-free, when you just press a button and in updates everything automagically - like it tends to work in Windows, yet like I said, in my experience updates still break things from time to time, while the last time I had a windows update cause any issues was many years ago - and even that one was a specific incompatibility with some of my hardware's driver. I rolled it back immediately, and the problem disappeared. That problem was later fixed with a driver update.
:-DD :-DD :-DD
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I think the problem of Win2000 was the same as with Vista - it was simply too radical of a change, and software ecosystem was not prepared for it. And so XP was better for the same reason Win7 was better then Vista - by the time of it's release software ecosystem has caught up with it for the most part, so that migration happened with much less friction. I remember I had to dual-boot between Win98 and Win2000 for a while as some software just pain didn't work in the latter.
The ecosystem was part of it, but both of them also didn't actually support what people needed to do and required significant improvements to be usable.
Windows 2000 improved stability by eliminating most direct access to hardware. That obviously broke software that relied on it, but also the alternatives (i.e., DirectX) were not yet up to the task in terms of performance or capability.
Vista tried to fix the problem of people needing to be logged in as administrator, but they didn't fully develop the UI that made UAC actually usable.
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wish Linux would be closer to being maintenance-free, when you just press a button and in updates everything automagically - like it tends to work in Windows, yet like I said, in my experience updates still break things from time to time, while the last time I had a windows update cause any issues was many years ago
my experience is the opposite,cant remember the last time i had any issues with linux,and at least the updates get carried out in the background,no sitting waiting for updates to finish installing before your able to use/power off the machine
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Then after the many versions of 98, Windows 2000. Large fundamental changes, but because those were already tested on NT, was fairly stable and usable, so generally a real improvement. This is definitely a "good" Windows, most would agree I guess?
Then Windows XP. Small gradual improvements over Windows 2000. Saw some hate for reasons unclear in retrospect, really. Then again wasn't really game-changing either. But this coincides with the proliferation of home computers - I mean the period in history where "all those normies who still didn't have a computer" finally got one, and for them Windows XP is their first OS. So around 2001-2008, just before smartphones, was era in history where home computers were more relevant than ever. And Windows XP also was one of the longest-in-use operating system. People really ended up liking it.
So what, do we have TWO good Windows (2000 and XP) after each other? Wasn't they supposed to alternate?
I think Windows 2000 counts as "bad." It's an odd one -- It was originally promised as the OS to unify the home and business operating systems. But while it replaced Win9x on corporate desktops, it ended up not being suitable for home use so that had to wait for XP. It added DirectX, but still had massive compatibility issues with win9x/DOS, and poor gaming compatibility in general when games which were still *the* killer app for home computers as internet access was still uncommon. So MS had to abandon it as a home OS and keep upgrading win98 and release winME. It was super stable as a corporate desktop replacement for Win98, so in that sense it was good, but in the "alternating versions" theory, either Win2000 was a "bad" OS, or it wasn't in the lineup at all, and WinME was the bad one.
It also did have a lot of rough spots for end users who did adopt it. It introduced non-tech users to mandatory sign-ins with permissions checks to people who hadn't ever seen their own computer say "permission denied" before. It introduced a new filesystem (NTFS) to end users which they had to worry about compatiblity, especially with removable media and external drives.
Fair enough. I did use it in home environment and considered it being an improvement over 98SE; it went into right direction of unifying the two product lines, but sure enough the transition was not finished at that point. XP being not that different from the 2000 in my opinion shows though they were "almost there" with the 2000.
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Fair enough. I did use it in home environment and considered it being an improvement over 98SE; it went into right direction of unifying the two product lines, but sure enough the transition was not finished at that point. XP being not that different from the 2000 in my opinion shows though they were "almost there" with the 2000.
Another factor that helped XP was that hardware has become significantly faster in time since Win2000 release, so many of performance issues of the 2000 were "fixed" just by brute force alone. And again the same thing happened with Vista/Win7 - Vista was not very performant on the kind of hardware which was typical at a time of it's release, but by the time of Win7 release it has improved to the point that those issues were really non-issues anymore. That's not to claim that "tock" versions in Intel parlance did not actually make any performance improvements - they did, but hardware advances helped a lot for sure.
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Well, I don't think apps like Firefox or libreoffice look like made by geeks for geeks.
Well that's not a good example, is it! Firefox is specifically designed to be identical on all platforms.
But LibreOffice? OF COURSE it looks like it's a geek's paradise. Have you actually compared it with MS Office recently? LibreOffice is highly functional but plug-ugly with a messy UI. And it's not just me saying that - go and read some reviews of it. If you want to see what a good, modern, smooth, elegant UI looks like on your Linux machine, try SoftMaker Office. Unfortunately it is paid-for after 30 days, so against the Linux religion, sadly.
For that matter, almost all the apps that get into the PC on a default Linux install look very much the same than windows counterparts.
What do you mean, "their Windows counterparts"? Are you talking about cross-platform apps? If so, well of course they look the same - they are designed that way.
I'm talking about the commonly used Windows applications, and the commonly used Linux apps. MS Office on Windows vs LibreOffice on Linux. LibreOffice does not look like MS Office. And Linux users get the god-awful Thunderbird. You can't seriously tell me that has a good, modern UI. It's complicated, visually noisy, old fashioned. I can't believe many Windows users use Thunderbird by choice - they enjoy many better alternatives.
Find me a Windows graphics editor with an interface as obscure as GIMP. It is famous for its vertical learning curve.
I do care for a well developed app with an intuitive use a good GUI; but to me what really matters is: can it do the work I need?
I would be very surprised indeed if there is a problem doing the work you need in Windows. You and I aren't that unusual - there are 1.4 billion Windows users; that's a hell of a potential user base even for pretty obscure and specialised software. Usually, if there's a demand in the Windows world, someone will be able to fill it.
I'm willing to trade many things for the ability to escape from windows, as you can see. I think it's well worth the hassle. YMMV.
Why do you want to "escape Windows"? It sounds too emotional, too irrational. The apps are where the work gets done, not the OS. And the apps in the Windows world are, in general, better than Linux apps. Why? Because Windows users are willing and accustomed to pay for software, whereas Linux users pretty much insist that their software must be free.
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I would be very surprised indeed if there is a problem doing the work you need in Windows. You and I aren't that unusual - there are 1.4 billion Windows users; that's a hell of a potential user base even for pretty obscure and specialised software. Usually, if there's a demand in the Windows world, someone will be able to fill it.
You'd think so but it actually isn't the case. There is a myriad of tiny tools available on Linux allowing to do the most crazy things simply from the command line. Look at xxd for example. And easy to automate using shell scripting. For example: Around 2000 I was involved in a yellow-pages -ish website and we send faxes to companies to check their listing. We're talking about sending hundreds of thousands of faxes. Back then making phone calls during the night was free so I wanted to make use of that. None of the Windows fax software was up to the task. None where clever enough to adhere to the time limit when sending the fax, instead they applied the time limit when the fax was queued -sigh-. And none where able to use my ISDN fax modem efficiently. In the end I created a small shell script to run on my Linux server which took a text file with phone numbers as input and send the faxes during the night. This worked as intended and it was sending faxes about 2 times faster compared to using Windows software. In hindsight starting with the shell script would have taken less time compared to messing around with so called professional software.
And I have many more examples. Linux can do insane things where it comes to auto-modifying text and file conversions. But it is all from the command line. In the end you can't catch 50 options with over a billion of combinations into a GUI. Even less so when trying to combine several GUI programs to perform a function together. It just doesn't work.
This is one of the reasons I switched to Linux a long time ago. Fed up with the idiosyncrasies of Windows and having proper tooling ready at my finger tips instead of browsing through Tucows or Piratebay to find some obscure tool (that in the end typically didn't quite work). A VM is good for whatever needs to run in Windows nowadays but that is becoming less and less. And when Windows starts acting up, restoring the VM (and Windows) is a matter of seconds. Gone are days with meddling with Windows to get the PC going again after some registry entry got corrupted or something.
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Fair enough. I did use it in home environment and considered it being an improvement over 98SE; it went into right direction of unifying the two product lines, but sure enough the transition was not finished at that point. XP being not that different from the 2000 in my opinion shows though they were "almost there" with the 2000.
Another factor that helped XP was that hardware has become significantly faster in time since Win2000 release, so many of performance issues of the 2000 were "fixed" just by brute force alone. And again the same thing happened with Vista/Win7 - Vista was not very performant on the kind of hardware which was typical at a time of it's release, but by the time of Win7 release it has improved to the point that those issues were really non-issues anymore. That's not to claim that "tock" versions in Intel parlance did not actually make any performance improvements - they did, but hardware advances helped a lot for sure.
It is a while back, but wasn't W2K intended to merge the domestic Win98 with the business NT4? I think a significant part of that was moving to pre-emptive interrupts (W3.x was cooperative, can't recall W98 properly but I think it still retained that). Small matter of booting Windows from DOS too, so satisfying both sides of that particular 'feature' was going to be a bit tricky.
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When Microsoft has made major changes to Windows (often in the area of new UI "paradigms"), their first attempts have tended to be objectively poor, and they fixed this in the next revision -- with tweaks and sometimes significant back-pedaling. At the same time, users were alienated by the changes in the original release, then to some extent got used to them and accepted them in the next release.
I think this is the most credible explanation by far. In general, it takes a couple of versions - maybe more - for Microsoft to polish their latest marvellous idea.
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8
Windows 10
Windows 11
Windows whatever is next
In terms of this list, there are a couple of things I disagree with. I don't think W2000 should have a line through it.
With this I agree.
I still have an operating computer (my "scanning station") using Windows 2000 Professional. It was the computer + OS that the company I worked for used for their media duplication systems.
The only thing that was/is sub-par about W2K is its SCSI implementation, which was pretty flaky. Everything else about it is solid.
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It is a while back, but wasn't W2K intended to merge the domestic Win98 with the business NT4? I think a significant part of that was moving to pre-emptive interrupts (W3.x was cooperative, can't recall W98 properly but I think it still retained that). Small matter of booting Windows from DOS too, so satisfying both sides of that particular 'feature' was going to be a bit tricky.
It was more of attempt to make NT home-user-friendly as it was already established in corporate world. And user world was running Win9x at the time, they needed to make NT more compatible, but since Win9x kernel was very different, that transition was not very smooth. Also like you mentioned, NT kernel does not allow direct access to hardware while Win9x kernel did, so that was another common factor - especially in industrial space, as a result many pieces of industrial equipment were shipped with Win9x long after Win2000 or even WinXp was released. I worked with some car factories a few years ago and there were still a few stations powered by Win9x - and that was in 2020's! It just goes to show that this stuff cost a lot of money, so vendors are extremely resistant to changes because any change requires an expensive QA and re-certification, also users of this equipment tend to use it for as long as possible because they are so darn expensive. I admit it was hilarious to see the cutting edge luxury vehicle built on a line which was powered by 20+ years old software ;D, but apparently this is a par for the course in manufacturing.
With that kind of software you can imagine that changing a kernel it's running on is bound to cause issues, and it did. Of course situation improved over years, and by the time Xp rolled around it wasn't nearly as big of a problem as it was at the time of Win2000 release. But if you visit just about any factory which is old enough, you will see a toxic cocktail of everything from MS DOS to modern Windows, Linux, and everything in-between.
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2000 was never a home consumer OS. It was for servers and workstations. The consumer line went 95->98->ME->XP.
Most home users never experienced 2k because it wasn't typically sold to home consumers by companies like dell or preloaded on brick and mortar pcs. 2000 and XP were both good operating systems.
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2000 was never a home consumer OS. It was for servers and workstations. The consumer line went 95->98->ME->XP.
Most home users never experienced 2k because it wasn't typically sold to home consumers by companies like dell or preloaded on brick and mortar pcs. 2000 and XP were both good operating systems.
I bought a boxed version of 2000 Pro - back then it was still pretty common. Never had WinME, just heard many anecdotes about it :D
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2000 was never a home consumer OS. It was for servers and workstations. The consumer line went 95->98->ME->XP.
Most home users never experienced 2k because it wasn't typically sold to home consumers by companies like dell or preloaded on brick and mortar pcs. 2000 and XP were both good operating systems.
I bought a boxed version of 2000 Pro - back then it was still pretty common. Never had WinME, just heard many anecdotes about it :D
Ah, I remember the complete train wreck called WinME.
It was a crashing machine and I came to know the blue screen of death quite well. It smoked my HD master boot record twice which took hours to repair. Smoked one HD when it crashed and lost many files which just randomly disappeared. I believe it was the first OS with system restore which I had to use almost weekly.
Been running windows 7 and 10 with classic shell XP for years and have had basically no real problems.
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It is a while back, but wasn't W2K intended to merge the domestic Win98 with the business NT4? I think a significant part of that was moving to pre-emptive interrupts (W3.x was cooperative, can't recall W98 properly but I think it still retained that). Small matter of booting Windows from DOS too, so satisfying both sides of that particular 'feature' was going to be a bit tricky.
Originally that was the intent, but it fell considerably short and MS stopped pushing for that.
Also, "business" NT4 is a bit misleading. NT was heavily used in engineering, and in industries that were migrating from other centrally managed systems like mainframes or UNIX servers. But a lot of general business desktops for office workers were Win311/Win95/Win98. Windows 2000 saw considerable success in replacing Win98 for business users, as it has much better and more secure file sharing. Sneakernet was still very much the default but people were moving towards file sharing, and Windows2000 clients made that much more attractive.
Win95 was mostly pre-emptive for 32 bit applications, but used cooperative multi-tasking for 16 bit windows 3.11 apps, and also still had a significant amount of 16 bit code in the core OS.
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It is a while back, but wasn't W2K intended to merge the domestic Win98 with the business NT4? I think a significant part of that was moving to pre-emptive interrupts (W3.x was cooperative, can't recall W98 properly but I think it still retained that). Small matter of booting Windows from DOS too, so satisfying both sides of that particular 'feature' was going to be a bit tricky.
It's important to emphasise that the NT family never booted from DOS, and always had pre-emptive multi-tasking. It began as a brand new, clean sheet design. The "merging" you describe was only about two things: the UI and application compatibility.
W2K was supposed to look and feel like W98, in an attempt to attract non-professional users because Microsoft wanted to end-of-life the DOS/3.1/95/98/Me development stream.
I recall that W2K had some (slightly controversial) work under the hood to handle application incompatibilities. MS did a good job of ensuring the APIs of the two different operating systems were compatible, but various applications running on the DOS-based versions played a bit fast-and-loose with the APIs. As a result W2K had a few workarounds built in, in order to provide continuity for those wayward 16-bit applications. I recall someone (probably Microsoft?) published a very long list of Windows applications, showing which versions of Windows they would run on. Thank goodness that stuff is pretty much in the past now.
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2000 was never a home consumer OS. It was for servers and workstations. The consumer line went 95->98->ME->XP.
Most home users never experienced 2k because it wasn't typically sold to home consumers by companies like dell or preloaded on brick and mortar pcs. 2000 and XP were both good operating systems.
win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.
Windwos XP SP3 used the same codebase as "NT" . After XP SP3, to today 2026 W11... "It's all NT"
.permissions, registry entries/product keys determine home/ pro/server flavor; "rauch und spiegel" as they say in my village :)
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Another note about NT and Win2k, the other versions of windows, w95/98... limited the amount of ram you could have and only supported 1 cpu, 1 core. Kinda pissed me off, I went from my Amiga4000 to a PC with a dual socketed 500MHz PIII (hope memory serves correctly) with 512mb ram and Win98 couldn't do shit, couldn't even run my raid correctly.
NT4 only had software compatibility issues because of my 2 CPUs, but Win2K pro was really stable except for 2 programs, however, this was poor coding, not the fault of the OS. (Here's looking at you Protel98's PCB software, when drawing too many arcs and accidentally hitting that radius of 0 causing a divide by 0 error....)
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Cold Fusion has commented on this as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKjo8Oc2qLk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKjo8Oc2qLk)
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win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.
Windwos XP SP3 used the same codebase as "NT" .
What? No of course not. Every version of XP was primarily based on the windows 2000 (and windows NT) operating system. They all used NTLDR and booted directly into 32 bit protected mode with no underlying "DOS" startup phase. They all had versions of the NT kernel, and they all used vm86 mode to run dos applications in a sandbox that couldn't directly access the hardware.
Thats not to say there was no code sharing, especially with application level code such as Windows explorer. But the idea that XP SP3 was when they changed to the NT kernel is completely wrong.
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I recall that W2K had some (slightly controversial) work under the hood to handle application incompatibilities. MS did a good job of ensuring the APIs of the two different operating systems were compatible, but various applications running on the DOS-based versions played a bit fast-and-loose with the APIs. As a result W2K had a few workarounds built in, in order to provide continuity for those wayward 16-bit applications. I recall someone (probably Microsoft?) published a very long list of Windows applications, showing which versions of Windows they would run on. Thank goodness that stuff is pretty much in the past now.
And, to be fair, and this is coming from someone who definitely isn't a Microsoft fan, MS has done stellar job on userland application compatibility. You can mostly still run ages old 16-bit Windows 3 software many of which definitely do all sorts of hack with APIs and direct hardware access. For a such massive under-the-hood rewrite / complete redesign, I have little to nag about Win2000's software compatibility. Like, probably more than 99% of software just worked. 1% can be annoying, sure, still.
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You can mostly still run ages old 16-bit Windows 3 software
If only :(
W7 on basically killed off the 16-bit stuff. Be good if nlsnipes would work again.
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Fair enough. I did use it in home environment and considered it being an improvement over 98SE; it went into right direction of unifying the two product lines, but sure enough the transition was not finished at that point. XP being not that different from the 2000 in my opinion shows though they were "almost there" with the 2000.
Another factor that helped XP was that hardware has become significantly faster in time since Win2000 release, so many of performance issues of the 2000 were "fixed" just by brute force alone. And again the same thing happened with Vista/Win7 - Vista was not very performant on the kind of hardware which was typical at a time of it's release, but by the time of Win7 release it has improved to the point that those issues were really non-issues anymore. That's not to claim that "tock" versions in Intel parlance did not actually make any performance improvements - they did, but hardware advances helped a lot for sure.
It is a while back, but wasn't W2K intended to merge the domestic Win98 with the business NT4? I think a significant part of that was moving to pre-emptive interrupts (W3.x was cooperative, can't recall W98 properly but I think it still retained that). Small matter of booting Windows from DOS too, so satisfying both sides of that particular 'feature' was going to be a bit tricky.
As far as i remember that was Windows ME. ME was a hybrid of the old DOS based Windows 95/98, with several Features of NT added on.
2000 was never a home consumer OS. It was for servers and workstations. The consumer line went 95->98->ME->XP.
Most home users never experienced 2k because it wasn't typically sold to home consumers by companies like dell or preloaded on brick and mortar pcs. 2000 and XP were both good operating systems.
win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.
Windwos XP SP3 used the same codebase as "NT" . After XP SP3, to today 2026 W11... "It's all NT"
.permissions, registry entries/product keys determine home/ pro/server flavor; "rauch und spiegel" as they say in my village :)
No. Windows XP was always, from the beginning, a full fledged Windows NT. Essentially XP was Windows 2000 Part 2.
How little the Kernel changed was back then still visible looking at the Kernel version number.
Windows 2000 was NT 5. Windows XP was NT 5.1. Windows Vista was NT 6.0, Windows 7 was 6.1, Windows 8 even stayed on NT 6.1. Only with Windows 10 they upped the Kernel Version to 10.0, only to abandon this again with Windows 11, which is still identifying as NT 10.0
You can mostly still run ages old 16-bit Windows 3 software
If only :(
W7 on basically killed off the 16-bit stuff. Be good if nlsnipes would work again.
32-bit Versions of Windows 10 should also still be able to run 16bit applications.
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32-bit Versions of Windows 10 should also still be able to run 16bit applications.
Fair enough. Trade-off of nostalgia vs no RAM limit :-\
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win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.
That is completely wrong.
The DOS-based stream went: 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 95, 98, ME (ignoring service packs)
The NT-based stream went: NT3.1, NT4, W2K, XP, Vista, W7, W8, W8.1, W10, W11 (ditto)
This is such basic stuff, DimitriP. You can read all about it in Wikipedia.
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ME and Xp, operating system or virus?
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ME and Xp, operating system or virus?
<YAWN>
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As a side note, Windows 2000's original name was NT 5.0 and it was meant as a continuation of NT, not as an OS for home users.
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As a side note, Windows 2000's original name was NT 5.0 and it was meant as a continuation of NT, not as an OS for home users.
As history has shown us, those two things are not mutually exclusive.
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As a side note, Windows 2000's original name was NT 5.0 and it was meant as a continuation of NT, not as an OS for home users.
Yes, for most of the development period it was NT 5.0. They renamed it Windows 2000 really late in the project and while it was targeted at professionals, their goal was already to gather a wider user base than what NT 4.0 workstation had.
And that's what happened. Many PC manufacturers started to ship with Windows 2000 even for their "non-pro" machines. At work we were using NT 4 at the time and we switched to Win 2000 very quickly as it supported USB natively, which NT 4 did not. But I also installed it on my home machines around the same time and I remember many people had it on their home machines before XP got released, but it was short-lived in the "home" market.
MS decided to develop XP for the home market as the 9x line was clearly EOL, but I think it was a fierce fight within MS. IIRC, Dave Plummer has a video talking about that with some guests from MS.
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win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.
That is completely wrong.
The DOS-based stream went: 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 95, 98, ME (ignoring service packs)
The NT-based stream went: NT3.1, NT4, W2K, XP, Vista, W7, W8, W8.1, W10, W11 (ditto)
This is such basic stuff, DimitriP. You can read all about it in Wikipedia.
...the comment was in the vain of consumer vs server , not whether the OS was loading dos or NT.
As for reading it up on Wikipedia...we have an emoji for that ... :-DD
Thanks!
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win95 to XP SP2 were the original "windows" codebase different from NT, 2000.
That is completely wrong.
The DOS-based stream went: 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 95, 98, ME (ignoring service packs)
The NT-based stream went: NT3.1, NT4, W2K, XP, Vista, W7, W8, W8.1, W10, W11 (ditto)
This is such basic stuff, DimitriP. You can read all about it in Wikipedia.
...the comment was in the vain of consumer vs server , not whether the OS was loading dos or NT.
No it wasn't. You specifically referred to the codebase for versions up to and including XP SP2, saying it was "original Windows" and "different from NT, 2000".
That's wrong. XP was built on the NT codebase.
It's much better to own your mistakes - people will respect you more.
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OK, Linux fans and users: in my quest to switch to Linux I need help choosing a photo and bitmap graphics editing app. I expect this is a question several ex-W11 users would like advice on.
I've done the usual searches but keep coming back to GIMP. I tried it out this afternoon, confident I was smart enough to eat the learning curve for breakfast. WRONG!! WOW, that is one seriously steep curve! I think it would take days of working through tutorials and wrestling with the user interface to get properly up to speed with it. Also, it doesn't seem to handle high resolution displays properly - it appeared on my screen in miniature, like it doesn't do scaling.
Now, like you all, I've used loads of different graphics editors in Windows; there is a great choice, from simple stuff like Paint up to fully professional tools like the Adobe range. Between those levels are probably dozens of intermediate-level applications which vary in their work flow, their UI, their capabilities.... When it comes to photo and bitmap graphics editing almost everyone will find their needs met by one of the numerous choices. My choice for now is Paint Shop Pro, because I've been using it since version 3.
So, Linux: is it really all about GIMP? Is there not something intermediate-level with a clean, modern and easy UI that would feel familiar to a Windows refugee?
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OK, Linux fans and users: in my quest to switch to Linux I need help choosing a photo and bitmap graphics editing app.
Short answer: save yourself the trouble and go back to Windows.
I've done the usual searches but keep coming back to GIMP.
Still not gone back to Windows? All right. So GIMP was created by aliens for aliens. It can be used, of course, and it's a very powerful tool, but it requires perseverance bordering insanity to become a power user. They managed to make simple things difficult and every damn action is designed to work upside down and inside out from what any normal person would expect. On top of that, they keep making the UI worse with each release. Some changes, like the all-grayscale tool icons that you can't tell one from another, can be reverted, though.
Try Krita (available in standard debian repos and I think in every mainstream distro it's the same), you'll probably like it better. It's targeted at painters/artists, IIRC. I tried it, I liked it, it's much more conventional than GIMP, and yet the latter is still my usual go-to editor (and yet I regret launching it every single time). I guess I haven't had a chance to develop enough muscle memory with Krita, because I rarely need to edit bitmaps, so I just keep using the few techniques I learned with GIMP when I need to edit/draw something.
There are more tools, some curious ones like mypaint, some paintbrush-like simple ones (don't know the names, but they are out there).
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OK, Linux fans and users: in my quest to switch to Linux I need help choosing a photo and bitmap graphics editing app. I expect this is a question several ex-W11 users would like advice on.
I've done the usual searches but keep coming back to GIMP. I tried it out this afternoon, confident I was smart enough to eat the learning curve for breakfast. WRONG!! WOW, that is one seriously steep curve! I think it would take days of working through tutorials and wrestling with the user interface to get properly up to speed with it. Also, it doesn't seem to handle high resolution displays properly - it appeared on my screen in miniature, like it doesn't do scaling.
Now, like you all, I've used loads of different graphics editors in Windows; there is a great choice, from simple stuff like Paint up to fully professional tools like the Adobe range. Between those levels are probably dozens of intermediate-level applications which vary in their work flow, their UI, their capabilities.... When it comes to photo and bitmap graphics editing almost everyone will find their needs met by one of the numerous choices. My choice for now is Paint Shop Pro, because I've been using it since version 3.
So, Linux: is it really all about GIMP? Is there not something intermediate-level with a clean, modern and easy UI that would feel familiar to a Windows refugee?
I'm not really a fan of any OS, but under Windows I've been using mostly Paint.net, for Linux I heard about Pinta which was based on Paint.net. I haven't tried it myself as I use Linux for specific purposes which don't include graphics design, but you can give it a try and see if it's going to be enough. It's nowhere near feature-rich for a professional use, but it's been more than enough for my needs over last several years. And it's free and open-source: https://www.pinta-project.com/ (https://www.pinta-project.com/)
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So GIMP was created by aliens for aliens. It can be used, of course, and it's a very powerful tool, but it requires perseverance bordering insanity to become a power user. They managed to make simple things difficult and every damn action is designed to work upside down and inside out from what any normal person would expect.
I would love to read your take on Blender. :)
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It depends. Some things are very well standardised: file formats, much more so than proprietary platforms, others not so much.
The two things I hate most about Windows are the desktop and they way updates are handled. It would be good if someone were to develop their own desktop environment for Windows, which is fully customisable and doesn't change random things when updated.
I moved to Linux Mint about ten years ago and I am quite satisfied. I do not quite understand the complaints about "so many Linux versions". I have one and that is it. The existence of others does not affect me. I install Mint and I use it. I have installed more than a dozen in computers of friends and family and so far everybody is happy. They use it and that's it.
My main reasons to leave MS Windows were and still are:
- Spyware. No thanks. Not interested
- Bloatware and HW requirements. Linux can run on older machines which cannot run MS Windows any more. I am not going to buy a new computer just to run MS spyware and bloatware. No thanks. Not interested.
- Update handling. 'nuff said.
In summary, I want to own and control my OS, my machine; I do not want my machine, my data, to be controlled by someone else.
I do miss a few thing from Windows, like the device manager, but for me Linux Mint still wins big. As I say, ten years and counting.
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OK, Linux fans and users: in my quest to switch to Linux I need help choosing a photo and bitmap graphics editing app. I expect this is a question several ex-W11 users would like advice on.
GIMP is OK if you do relatively little / easy photo editing occasionally. If you expect nothing, it may be a positive surprise. If you expect Photoshop level capability, you are of course seriously disappointed and not able to do your job.
If you need Windows-only software, then it's obvious: just keep running Windows.
With hybrid needs, it gets more interesting. Like, you do programming/development and are much more productive on an unix-like environment, than on Windows, so you use that. But you also need, say, Photoshop, Solidworks, Altium, whatever. What do you do? Dual boot offers best performance for all those tasks, but pretty costly switching between them. Finding alternative software - e.g. running Cygwin on Windows, or running Gimp on linux - means half of your work is now cumbersome and really you are just working around, instead of working. I'm now relatively happy running a full VM, i.e. Windows 11 on VMWare, so that I can run Altium on it. 95% of my workload is still in the host linux.
But maybe this isn't for you. As you clearly are fine with Windows, and need Windows-only software, it is blatantly obvious to me you should be just keep using Windows. Me, I'm not fine with Windows, but I still need Windows-only software, so I limit my exposure to it by running the VM only when I need Windows software.
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OK, Linux fans and users: in my quest to switch to Linux I need help choosing a photo and bitmap graphics editing app.
Short answer: save yourself the trouble and go back to Windows.
I've done the usual searches but keep coming back to GIMP.
Still not gone back to Windows? All right. So GIMP was created by aliens for aliens. It can be used, of course, and it's a very powerful tool, but it requires perseverance bordering insanity to become a power user. They managed to make simple things difficult and every damn action is designed to work upside down and inside out from what any normal person would expect. On top of that, they keep making the UI worse with each release. Some changes, like the all-grayscale tool icons that you can't tell one from another, can be reverted, though.
Try Krita (available in standard debian repos and I think in every mainstream distro it's the same), you'll probably like it better. It's targeted at painters/artists, IIRC. I tried it, I liked it, it's much more conventional than GIMP, and yet the latter is still my usual go-to editor (and yet I regret launching it every single time). I guess I haven't had a chance to develop enough muscle memory with Krita, because I rarely need to edit bitmaps, so I just keep using the few techniques I learned with GIMP when I need to edit/draw something.
There are more tools, some curious ones like mypaint, some paintbrush-like simple ones (don't know the names, but they are out there).
Yes. I also find GIMP impossible to use, so much so, I mostly use KolourPiaint. GIMP gets used when I need to do something KolourPaint can't, in which case I Google it, follow the often long-winded procedure, then forget about it.
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OK, Linux fans and users: in my quest to switch to Linux I need help choosing a photo and bitmap graphics editing app. I expect this is a question several ex-W11 users would like advice on.
GIMP is OK if you do relatively little / easy photo editing occasionally. If you expect nothing, it may be a positive surprise. If you expect Photoshop level capability, you are of course seriously disappointed and not able to do your job.
Have you ever tried using Photoshop? IIRC Photoshop is notoriously difficult to drive. AFAIK Gimp is started as an alternative for Photoshop so don't expect Gimp to be easy to use all of the sudden. Bottom line: if you want to do hardcore photo editing, expect a steep learning curve either way.
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OK, Linux fans and users: in my quest to switch to Linux I need help choosing a photo and bitmap graphics editing app. I expect this is a question several ex-W11 users would like advice on.
GIMP is OK if you do relatively little / easy photo editing occasionally. If you expect nothing, it may be a positive surprise. If you expect Photoshop level capability, you are of course seriously disappointed and not able to do your job.
Have you ever tried using Photoshop? IIRC Photoshop is notoriously difficult to drive. AFAIK Gimp is started as an alternative for Photoshop so don't expect Gimp to be easy to use all of the sudden. Bottom line: if you want to do hardcore photo editing, expect a steep learning curve either way.
Of course, I have used Photoshop for its intended purposes, namely photo editing, and its strong point compared to Gimp is that the controls are normal and intuitive, so normal human being used to normal computer things can use it.
I'm sure 99.999% of people who have used Photoshop and Gimp would agree, but good trolling :-+
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I use many "advanced" programs but I can't use GIMP :--
+1 for KolourPaint. I found it randomly but it is what I needed. It has the same workflow of MS paint and supports transparency
By default the toolbar is useless, you should customize it:
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/windows-11-is-dying/?action=dlattach;attach=2733879;image)
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I moved to Linux mint mate since 1 year. It gives problems from time to time, but I can't stand windows 11 anymore.
Here some usesful programs:
Freecad 3D drawing
KiCad
LibreCad
Blender (not used yet)
Visual Studio Code (not happy about it) with Platform IO
Double Commander file explorer
Qimgv image viewer
Curtail Image compressor
KolourPaint Image editor
VLC video player
Shotcut video editor
OBS studio screen recorder...l
Cheese webcam
Audacity
Mousepad ligth text editor
Gnumeric fast simple xlsx editor
OnlyOffice (just installed, still to test, not satisfied with libreoffice)
Okular pdf reader
PDF Arranger
Xournal++ pen writing, annotation, PDF annotation
DigiKam organize photos....
ScreeRuler, a.... screen ruler ;D
Tracker Measure stuff from images and videos
ConvertAll offline converter
KmPlot plot functions
stopwatch
Diodon multi copy paste (shortcut: super+V)
Flameshot screen shot
NormCap extract text from images (shortcut: super+C)
FSearch instant file search! (shortcut: alt+spacebar)
>Measurements
PulseView
TestController
CuteCom serial port terminal
>Misc
OrganicMaps offline maps
Google Earth
Syncthing ! synchronize files (in my case between linux, android and windows)
>No gui
ffmpeg video compression
exiftool
git
yt-dlp download youtube videos... (yt-dlp -N 6 -f ba+bv -S "+codec:avc:m4a,res:720" --parse-metadata "description:(?s)(?P<meta_comment>.+)" --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail --embed-chapters "LINK")
*Many of these programs need some customization (lots of settings)
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OnlyOffice (just installed, still to test, not satisfied with libreoffice)
LibreOffice has excellent functionality, but I simply cannot enjoy using it so it's a no-no for me. OpenOffice offers only a subset of MS Office's functionality, so I recommend you give it a good going over before committing to it.
My favourite is SoftMaker Office - it has virtually all the functionality of MS Office but none of the cloud-oriented, touch-oriented bullshit Microsoft imposes on us. So - speaking only for myself - I prefer SoftMaker Office NX over OpenOffice, and even over MS Office.
The downside is you have to pay for it. But that's fine by me - I don't expect great quality software for nothing. You can have a subscription, or pay a one-off fee. EDIT: Oh, I forgot to say - they do a freeware version as well with reduced functionality.
ANOTHER EDIT: Don't be put off SoftMaker Office by the mention of 'AI'. They've done it properly: people who like it can use it; people who don't want it can eliminate all mention of it. That's what I've done.
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OnlyOffice (just installed, still to test, not satisfied with libreoffice)
LibreOffice has excellent functionality, but I simply cannot enjoy using it so it's a no-no for me. OpenOffice offers only a subset of MS Office's functionality, so I recommend you give it a good going over before committing to it.
My favourite is SoftMaker Office - it has virtually all the functionality of MS Office but none of the cloud-oriented, touch-oriented bullshit Microsoft imposes on us. So - speaking only for myself - I prefer SoftMaker Office NX over OpenOffice, and even over MS Office.
The downside is you have to pay for it. But that's fine by me - I don't expect great quality software for nothing. You can have a subscription, or pay a one-off fee. EDIT: Oh, I forgot to say - they do a freeware version as well with reduced functionality.
Have you used LibraOffice recently? The UI can now be made more MS Office like. What functionality was missing? Office software has had excess functionally for a long time. Most users, even those who've being using it for a long time, are only aware of a small percentage of the features.
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My favourite is SoftMaker Office - it has virtually all the functionality of MS Office but none of the cloud-oriented, touch-oriented bullshit Microsoft imposes on us. So - speaking only for myself - I prefer SoftMaker Office NX over OpenOffice, and even over MS Office.
I agree that SoftMaker Office comes closest to Microsoft Office, in terms of functionality and UI. Including a pretty decent "ribbon" UI, which is what I have come to prefer with MS Office. The similarity was important for me since I still use the MS suite at work.
Still, it was not close enough for me, and was one of the reasons why I ended my recent "let's move to Linux Mint" experiment and grudgingly installed Windows again. Many details are still rougher than in the Microsoft programs -- e.g. SoftMaker still relies on modal properties dialogs for all kinds of things (where your changes only take effect when you close the dialog), whereas MS has non-modal sidebars. And don't get me started on SoftMakers's printer dialog!
The other "killer app" for me was Fusion 360. I had assumed I would be able to use the browser version, but you need a commercial license for that. And yes, I know about FreeCad but don't like using it.
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Yes. I also find GIMP impossible to use, so much so, I mostly use KolourPiaint. GIMP gets used when I need to do something KolourPaint can't, in which case I Google it, follow the often long-winded procedure, then forget about it.
I use Linux Mint and I am still mainly using MS Paint and Irfanview with WINE and they do more than 99% of what I need. Than I also have Inkscape, mainly for vector graphics, Pinta, Drawing, Pix, Blender, Gimp, etc that I have downloaded at one time or another for something specific and never really used much.
I have now installed KolourPaint and will have a look. Thanks. Maybe in my next install of Mint I will not bother with Pait-Wine.
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I moved to Linux mint mate since 1 year. It gives problems from time to time, but I can't stand windows 11 anymore.
Here some usesful programs:
[...]
All of them free?
It's nice to have free stuff but I wonder what would happen if everyone used only free apps. Perhaps it's the same as many other things where a relatively small number are different so don't have a big effect. Ad blockers, for instance, were great when not many people used them, but once the numbers got big enough to register things changed quite a bit. If everyone used effective ones now, I bet the interweb would be quite different.
I have no problem paying for something that is useful to me, but that isn't saying I would pay a subscription or not throw a wobbly at online activation. I use free stuff and adblockers too, of course :)
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Yes. I also find GIMP impossible to use, so much so, I mostly use KolourPiaint. GIMP gets used when I need to do something KolourPaint can't, in which case I Google it, follow the often long-winded procedure, then forget about it.
Hmmm. I am going to have to give gimp a try, now :o
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Have you used LibraOffice recently? ... What functionality was missing? Office software has had excess functionally for a long time.
Yes, I'm on version 24. I'm sure that it has all the functions, but they don't work well.
I'm searching something with only the basic but reliable and fast.
gnumeric is an example: is not complete, but the basics are there, it's fast (instant launch, no delays) and reliable.
abiword, gnumeric's cousin, was basic, fast but totally unreliable (I really wanted to use it but I uninstalled it because of all the work I had lost due to errors...).
LibreOffice is not fast and worst is not consistent. Basic stuff, like resizing images, tables styles sometimes they work, sometimes no :palm: (for example, when you resize an image, sometimes it leaves a invisible object and you have to go back and resize it again)(or when you select text there's a delay before the formattation fields gets updated).
MS offfice is not that far: bloated, slow often inconsistent. For this reason I'm thinking of learning LaTeX
All of them free? It's nice to have free stuff but I wonder what would happen if everyone used only free apps...
Yes, most of them can be installed directly from the software manager, most of them accept donations. I'm 100% with you. At the moment I'm a student and I'm limited in $$. But for example I don't use an adblocker on youtube because I don't find it right (for creators and the expense of hosting the huge amount of data for "free"). I'm writing down all these program on a list to remeber them and do donations in the future.
Still, many of these apps are done with passion, not money. See microsoft, basically infinite budget, but all their new apps are almost unpresentable (put some rounded corners, AI and call it a day. Who cares about performance or bugs...).
To have effect.. having the money to add your programs by default on everyone PC helps...
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It gets funny sometimes. My thoughts as I've been reading your post:
LibreOffice is not fast and worst is not consistent. Basic stuff, like resizing images, tables styles sometimes they work, sometimes no :palm: (for example, when you resize an image, sometimes it leaves a invisible object and you have to go back and resize it again)(or when you select text there's a delay before the formattation fields gets updated).
WYSIWYG sucks. Works well for super simple one or two-page documents only. LaTeX is the ultimate solution.
...and then
MS offfice is not that far: bloated, slow often inconsistent. For this reason I'm thinking of learning LaTeX
As though you read my thoughts.
The underlying TeX engine is near perfect (see who created it). LaTeX is an excellent user-facing wrapper for it. However, it really requires getting and reading a good book on it before even starting. And don't even think of using WYSIWYG frontends for it, because see above.
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One of the pitfalls is trying to use a word processor to do (complicated) layouts. A word processor is for creating documents, not desktop publishing.
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Have you used LibraOffice recently? The UI can now be made more MS Office like. What functionality was missing? Office software has had excess functionally for a long time. Most users, even those who've being using it for a long time, are only aware of a small percentage of the features.
Yep, I was using LibreOffice in Linux Mint just a couple of days ago. I think its functionality is basically complete (it's the closest to MS Office in that respect that I've tried) but I find the UI to be a scrappy mess - even the latest version.
I've just signed up to a SoftMaker Office NX Home subscription. I'm generally anti subscription software, but it's so cheap at GBP24 per year. That's 50 pence a week - a bargain. Furthermore, that price allows you to install it on five separate machines. They do a version for Windows, Linux, Android, and a couple of Apple OSs as well. So for 50p a week I can run it on my Windows workstation, my Android tablet, my Windows laptop, my Linux system and still have a spare licence.
The UI is basically as good as MS Office (actually better because I like the more colourful elements) but without the non-standard Open... and Save... dialogs and without the OneDrive integration. I love it. To be specific, I love it way more than any other office suite, including Microsoft Office.
I can't dump MS Office altogether, though, because I'm a serious fan of OneNote, and nobody has come close to cloning it. Finally, there's another MS product I cannot live without: Visio. It is a fantastic diagramming and technical drawing tool*, and again, nobody makes anything like it.
*Microsoft acquired Visio from Shapeware, and messed it up by converting it into a data visualisation tool, hiding away all the powerful drawing tools. Luckily you can customise it back to being a great diagramming tool and switch off the ribbons you don't need.
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One of the pitfalls is trying to use a word processor to do (complicated) layouts. A word processor is for creating documents, not desktop publishing.
I agree, but MS Word gets pretty close if you use frames and text boxes.
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WYSIWYG sucks. Works well for super simple one or two-page documents only. LaTeX is the ultimate solution.
I don't agree with you about WYSIWYG, and I doubt very many people would. Not that I'm knocking your preference, just disagreeing with it. I've done a 1000-page training document full of diagrams and photos as well as lots of text using MS Word and it worked great. To be fair, the manual was divided into twelve lessons, which made it a bit more wieldy.
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I use Linux Mint and I am still mainly using MS Paint and Irfanview with WINE and they do more than 99% of what I need. Than I also have Inkscape, mainly for vector graphics, Pinta, Drawing, Pix, Blender, Gimp, etc that I have downloaded at one time or another for something specific and never really used much.
Today I installed the Windows versions of Pinta and Paint.Net. I started them up side-by-side for a detailed comparison. I hate to say it, but it was another big disappointment: Paint.Net wipes the floor with Pinta. Whoever said Pinta was basically a clone of Paint.Net.... well, I respectfully disagree. The Pinta UI is definitely weird, with icons in non-standard locations, and a row of teeny little icons - in black-and-white - up on the top right that do various important things. Once again it's a typical Linux app: reasonably good functionality, but a geeky UI.
Soldar: will Paint.Net run under WINE? If so you might want to try it - I was quite impressed and I'm going to use it for the smaller jobs. I use Paint Shop Pro for the big stuff, just because I'm very familiar with it. I wouldn't recommend it, though - "bloatware" is a massive understatement.
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I have been using Apache OpenOffice for years and it's MS word compatible. It's basically a clone of MS Office with most of the same features. I'm running it on windows right now but have also loaded it on a Linux system/Raspberry Pi.
https://www.openoffice.org/ (https://www.openoffice.org/)
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I can't dump MS Office altogether, though, because I'm a serious fan of OneNote, and nobody has come close to cloning it.
Are you using it for handwriting?
Xournal++!
I started with onenote (on windows 11) , but I got annoyed by the continuous updates breaking and changing stuff and the gigantic files.
I installed xournal++ before getting into linux. I started using it and I never turned back. Perfect to annotate pdf, take notes...
The default toolbar is not great but you can modify it (see mine) and you should disable autosave (it has given issues to me, I prefer to save manually).
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/windows-11-is-dying/?action=dlattach;attach=2733993;image)
Today I installed the Windows versions of Pinta and Paint.Net. I started them up side-by-side for a detailed comparison. I hate to say it, but it was another big disappointment
Everyone talks about Pinta and an other one, but I didn't liked them. You have to move a lot the mouse, click a lot of stuff, confirmations...
KolourPaint satisfied me, for me It's better than paint. It should be available also for windows
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KolourPaint looks like an interesting tool indeed! I'll give it a go :-+
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One of the pitfalls is trying to use a word processor to do (complicated) layouts. A word processor is for creating documents, not desktop publishing.
I agree, but MS Word gets pretty close if you use frames and text boxes.
I can attest to Micro$oft Word being an excellent tool for writing lengthy manuals.
That was my job at the company I worked for in the 1990s, writing user manuals (plus other stuff) for our products, media duplication systems.
I started out using Ventura Publisher, which was kinda-sorta OK for producing manuals, but clearly deficient in many ways.
I even had kind of a direct line to Rick Altman, who was the reigning Ventura guru at the time, since my boss knew him. Rick gave me some very helpful pointers.
But then I thought: why not give Word a spin? I had rejected that program out of hand, thinking it wasn't up to the job. I was surprised to find that I was wrong, and that it was even better in most respects than Ventura. So I switched.
Now this was the earlier version of Word that shipped with the Office that came with Windoze 2000. It was powerful, but also buggy: I remember several times opening my document and finding that all the dozens of pictures I had put in were replaced by boxes with a big red "X" in it. Goddamn it, have to replace all those pics! (This no longer happens with Word.)
My manuals all had tables of contents and indexes which were auto-generated by Word, as well as in-text references (e.g., "see page XX"). Very powerful. Many, many pictures, all with captions, some with graphic callouts, as well as text boxes used for pointers. Once you get used to the somewhat strange formatting capabilities you can do practically anything with Word. Almost as much as, say, with something like Adobe InDesign.
My complaint about the current Word that I use (Word 2003) is that Micro$oft boogered up the user interface, which was laid out just right in the previous version. Typical.
Oh, and I was able to take advantage of Word macros, another very powerful capability.
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One of the pitfalls is trying to use a word processor to do (complicated) layouts. A word processor is for creating documents, not desktop publishing.
I agree, but MS Word gets pretty close if you use frames and text boxes.
I can attest to Micro$oft Word being an excellent tool for writing lengthy manuals.
I'm using it too. It is the only one which works properly with my patent agent's files and our highlighted group edit tracking. Every time I tried using using another word processor such as OpenOffice, tables and page breaks/margins got messed up, highlight colors and editor notes always get all messed up when I try to save it as a .docx.
Though I am using an old offline MS-Word and MS-Excel, I would have to say the original products are very capable. I do not know about the new online junk, but I can take a guess.
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Former hard user of LaTeX here. Thanks to it learned the benefits of separating content from format, and thanks to it now able to use MSWord in a way that produces complex and pretty documents in a simple and painless way. OK, (La)TeX may be perfect, but also a pain in the arse if you want or need to do anything different from using a pre-canned template.
In any case, lately the complexity of the documents I must produce has decreased and now Markdown is enough much of the time (and Typora is a md editor I like. Available in Win/Linux/Mac, not free, but affordable and single payment. In fact it is the only non free software in my Linux machines).
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Why do you want to "escape Windows"? It sounds too emotional, too irrational. The apps are where the work gets done, not the OS. And the apps in the Windows world are, in general, better than Linux apps. Why? Because Windows users are willing and accustomed to pay for software, whereas Linux users pretty much insist that their software must be free.
Sorry for the late answer, I just don't feel this matter is worth my time. So didn't check this thread in some days.
I want to escape windows because I don't want to pay for being screwed. Like, having to sign into a microsoft account, being fed with publicity or spied upon. Also I don't want to use any antivirus software. An so on. May be you don't care about these things, but I do.
What about buying an Ipad that couldn't open a PDF, because Steve Jobs hoped to earn more money that way? As you can see, this isn't just about windows. I was a MacOS guy before discovering Linux. If you were in the printing business in 1990, you got a Mac.
OTOH, when I discovered what one could do with the command line, my productivity got about a 10.000% impulse. Any Linux program, even GUI ones, can be called from the command line, and set to do things automatically the way you want. I know, you think that's a geeky thing. And following your thinking, I guess geeky things are bad things. Wrong.
If you need to apply, say, a sharpen mask and resize some hundreds-thousands pictures, having to do one by one is a very big PITA. One can craft a little script in about 20 lines of shell code that will do it all for you. Just an example. No need to look for any app able to work with batches. Just make an script to send the commands you want to your app. So I'm all for that (and others) type of geeky things. I guess, that's not your case. Fine.
The biggest microsoft success was to sink Nokia, i think. IIRC, it was the number1 cell phone OEM back then? Put windows on them ant down the drain it goes. The most unforeseeable thing 20 years ago was desktop PC becoming a niche, down from mainstream. That's the only niche where windows remains leader. And losing market share with each new version. There's a reason for that. So much for you 1.4 billion users argument.
Come on, man. Get over it and give us a break.
Well, that's enough from me on this matter. Your arguments only reflect your bias towards windows and can't be taken seriously.
Have a nice day.
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I have been using Apache OpenOffice for years and it's MS word compatible. It's basically a clone of MS Office with most of the same features. I'm running it on windows right now but have also loaded it on a Linux system/Raspberry Pi.
https://www.openoffice.org/ (https://www.openoffice.org/)
I tried it a long time ago, so I can't remember what put me off it now. Now that I've paid SoftMaker I must resist the temptation to keep trialling other options. 😄
By the way, there is this in Wikipedia:
"As of July 2025, the Apache Software Foundation has classed its security status as "red" with multiple unfixed security issues over a year old."
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I can't dump MS Office altogether, though, because I'm a serious fan of OneNote, and nobody has come close to cloning it.
Are you using it for handwriting?
Xournal++!
Yes. It offers an infinite sheet upon which I can put handwriting, typed text, pictures, voice notes, hyperlinks, diagrams. It will OCR text in pictures and my handwriting in the background. It has vector drawing tools... Basically I think it is brilliant. However, I will take a serious look at Xournal++. Thanks for the tip. 👍😀
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I have been using Apache OpenOffice for years and it's MS word compatible. It's basically a clone of MS Office with most of the same features. I'm running it on windows right now but have also loaded it on a Linux system/Raspberry Pi.
https://www.openoffice.org/ (https://www.openoffice.org/)
BTW LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, which in turn was a successor of StarOffice.
Apparently at some point OpenOffice started to be considered not good enough from the whatever kind of purity standpoint, so they had to fork it.
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GIMP = GNU Image Manipulation Program
It's really not the same kind of application as "Paint". It has got freehand tools, but they are not really for drawing, they are for masks, overlays, tints, burns, etc. while editiing images/photos.
I tried to use it for drawing things and quickly gave up.
For image processing I moved to RawTherapee though.
For basic diagrams I use "dia".
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And losing market share with each new version. There's a reason for that. So much for you 1.4 billion users argument.
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Your arguments only reflect your bias towards windows and can't be taken seriously.
I think it's more true to say that I'm biased towards Windows applications, and that is based on years testing out various Linux distros, most frequently Mint.
I haven't explored the command line much at all, but your description does sound impressive. I wonder if the Windows equivalent has any similar functionality.
Is it true that Windows is losing market share? It rules only on the desktop, and I haven't seen a massive move towards Linux or MacOS in that segment. And although you are sniffy about the 1.4 billion number, it is still a seriously big number.
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Apparently at some point OpenOffice started to be considered not good enough from the whatever kind of purity standpoint, so they had to fork it.
That's not true. A bit of history:
Star Office's developers (Star Division) was purchased by Sun Microsystems, because it was cheaper for them to buy the whole company, rather than an MS Office licence for all of their employees. They then decided to release an open source version, OpenOffice.org, whilst selling the propitiatory Star Office.
Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems who abandoned the development of OpenOffice.org and discontinued Star Office. The voluntary developers forked it and continued working on it under LibreOffice. They couldn't use the name OpenOffice.org because Oracle owned the trademark.
Oracle donated OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation, who continued working on it, under the Apache OpenOffice name.
Well, that's enough from me on this matter. Your arguments only reflect your bias towards windows and can't be taken seriously.
Have a nice day.
Being objective. Both of your arguments are emotional and that's not a bad thing.
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WYSIWYG sucks. Works well for super simple one or two-page documents only. LaTeX is the ultimate solution.
WYSIWYG: Can't get images where you want them, can't get text flow like you want it. Fight and rage click randomly for 30 minutes until satisfied. Then don't touch anything.
LaTeX: Can't get images where you want them, can't get text flow like you want it. Google for Stack Overflow posts and apply them randomly, only to see nothing works and there are 9001 different ways to achieve what you want. Find snarky comments that you are not even supposed to choose where you want your images and how your text flows. It is apparently fine and normal that a Figure related to text on page 9 is on page 36. Finally, one of the proposed solutions nearly works and you spent half a day.
I'm back to WYSIWYG editors. Yes, they suck almost as much as LaTeX but not quite.
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One of the pitfalls is trying to use a word processor to do (complicated) layouts. A word processor is for creating documents, not desktop publishing.
I agree, but MS Word gets pretty close if you use frames and text boxes.
I can attest to Micro$oft Word being an excellent tool for writing lengthy manuals.
I'm using it too. It is the only one which works properly with my patent agent's files and our highlighted group edit tracking. Every time I tried using using another word processor such as OpenOffice, tables and page breaks/margins got messed up, highlight colors and editor notes always get all messed up when I try to save it as a .docx.
Though I am using an old offline MS-Word and MS-Excel, I would have to say the original products are very capable. I do not know about the new online junk, but I can take a guess.
Google docs works excellent for collaborating on documents. You can work on the same document with multiple people at the same time. It has been made for collaboration from the ground up.
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WYSIWYG: Can't get images where you want them, can't get text flow like you want it. Fight and rage click randomly for 30 minutes until satisfied. Then don't touch anything.
I find that, when I always use the pre-defined formats in Word (headlines, pictures, figure legends...) and adapt them to my needs, I get consistent and predictable outcomes.
I do adjust the position of larger figures and tables relative to the text manually, to ensure they are in meaningful positions and don't cause stupid page breaks -- which means I might have to move them slightly when revisions make the text significantly longer or shorter. It would be neat to have an automatic formatting option to "keep this figure as close as possible to text marker X, while maintaining good text flow across page boundaries". Maybe that option even exists. But the need for manual adjustments arises rarely enough for me not to care...
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The biggest microsoft success was to sink Nokia, i think.
Well, Nokia was already spiraling to death at that point due to earlier mistakes (and to be fair, keeping that sort of company running when technology changes all the time and you need to react correct and timely, is not easy task at all). Just maybe it could have been saved (as a large scale mobile phone manufacturer) with some genius-level management changes, but Microsoft involvement was obviously a conscious decision to do the opposite: to kill it deliberately, pull the plug so to speak.
And "being nasty" is definitely in Microsoft's DNA.
IMHO doing anything just to be able to avoid using Microsoft products is morally a sensible thing to do; I won't make fun about those "linux fanboys" whose primary motivation of using linux is only to avoid Microsoft, even though my motivation isn't. I'm pragmatic enough to keep using MS products when I clearly see the benefit of doing so. So I'm closer to the mindset of Torvald's himself: linux happens to quite suitable for the things I do with a computer, it's not an anti-MS statement.
But for some, it is, and that's alright.
One thing in this linux vs. Windows discussion is forgetting the Mac ecosystem. Many of those supposedly "Windows-only" programs (as enumerated in this thread) are available on Mac and work well there, in fact some were originally considered Mac-only (even though Windows versions existed, but professionals did not prefer to use them) - basically all related to photography, publishing, video editing etc. But clearly Apple lost some of the professional market dominance there.
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WYSIWYG sucks. Works well for super simple one or two-page documents only. LaTeX is the ultimate solution.
WYSIWYG: Can't get images where you want them, can't get text flow like you want it. Fight and rage click randomly for 30 minutes until satisfied. Then don't touch anything.
LaTeX: Can't get images where you want them, can't get text flow like you want it. Google for Stack Overflow posts and apply them randomly, only to see nothing works and there are 9001 different ways to achieve what you want. Find snarky comments that you are not even supposed to choose where you want your images and how your text flows. It is apparently fine and normal that a Figure related to text on page 9 is on page 36. Finally, one of the proposed solutions nearly works and you spent half a day.
I'm back to WYSIWYG editors. Yes, they suck almost as much as LaTeX but not quite.
Laughed out loud to that one. Sorry if I disturbed anyone!
I think there are really two issues here that we see also in programming. First is that driving via text (a la LaTex) was the only choice since there were really no graphics around, and certainly no WYSIWYG. It's not that it was better; it was the only choice.
But WYSIWYG suffers from the author/developer thinking at the WYSIWYG level. That is, if there is a paragraph that needs particular formatting, it is so easy to just highlight it and apply the format. Eventually the document becomes an unwieldy mess of local formats, probably all the same be treated individually. In programming, the equivalent would be a button place on a form which, when clicked, causes some action to be performed. So the developer places the button where it should be, makes it look nice (the same as every other button like that, but with its own custom values), and then puts the action code in the OnClick event.
tl;dr: I think the mindset that could utilise LaTex is needed to properly use WYSIWYG tools, and WYSIWYG mitigates against that.
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Well, Nokia was already spiraling to death at that point due to earlier mistakes (and to be fair, keeping that sort of company running when technology changes all the time and you need to react correct and timely, is not easy task at all). Just maybe it could have been saved (as a large scale mobile phone manufacturer) with some genius-level management changes, but Microsoft involvement was obviously a conscious decision to do the opposite: to kill it deliberately, pull the plug so to speak.
Do you really think so? To me it seemed like an honest attempt to rescue two losing technology positions:
Nokia had great phones with buttons, but the future was in touch-screen-only devices. Microsoft had a desktop OS with huge market share, but an increasing user base was moving to mobile devices. So a joint effort to "re-invent" Nokia phones with a Microsoft touch UI seemed like a worthwhile effort.
The fact that it was not well-executed, and maybe was too late to stand a chance in a market already dominated by Apple and Android, is another matter. But "kill it deliberately"? How would MS have expected to benefit from that?
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I have been using Apache OpenOffice for years and it's MS word compatible. It's basically a clone of MS Office with most of the same features. I'm running it on windows right now but have also loaded it on a Linux system/Raspberry Pi.
Better move on to LibreOffice as OpenOffice is basically dead (on life support).
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One thing in this linux vs. Windows discussion is forgetting the Mac ecosystem. Many of those supposedly "Windows-only" programs (as enumerated in this thread) are available on Mac and work well there, in fact some were originally considered Mac-only (even though Windows versions existed, but professionals did not prefer to use them) - basically all related to photography, publishing, video editing etc. But clearly Apple lost some of the professional market dominance there.
I considered moving into the Apple ecosystem. At risk of over-simplifying: Windows has the widest choice of applications, Apple has the best quality applications, and Linux has mostly free-of-charge applications. I was put off by the "walled garden" business model Apple employs, even though that works great for very many users. I prefer to specify and build my own PC, and then select my OS. Can't do that with Apple kit.
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Nokia had great phones with buttons, but the future was in touch-screen-only devices. Microsoft had a desktop OS with huge market share, but an increasing user base was moving to mobile devices. So a joint effort to "re-invent" Nokia phones with a Microsoft touch UI seemed like a worthwhile effort.
The fact that it was not well-executed, and maybe was too late to stand a chance in a market already dominated by Apple and Android, is another matter. But "kill it deliberately"? How would MS have expected to benefit from that?
I agree - it surely wasn't part of the plan because Microsoft faced a big write-down that year which must have pissed off the shareholders.
By the way, I might be the only person on the planet who thought Windows Phone 7 was excellent, verging on outstanding. It was the bravest thing I've ever seen a phone manufacturer do. Apple iPhone and Android phones were then - and remain to this day - unimaginative and boring. Windows Phone 7 on my Nokia 1520 was profoundly, radically different and I loved it. I mourn its passing.
Microsoft made two arguments: firstly, there is only room for two ecosystems in the mobile phone market, and they were too late to take number 2. Secondly, the fundamental architecture of the Windows Phone OS wasn't sufficiently scalable and flexible to handle apps with high functionality and a large feature set. I strongly disagree with that second point: I think it could have been if they'd invested more effort into it.
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I have been using Apache OpenOffice for years and it's MS word compatible. It's basically a clone of MS Office with most of the same features. I'm running it on windows right now but have also loaded it on a Linux system/Raspberry Pi.
Better move on to LibreOffice as OpenOffice is basically dead (on life support).
Or SoftMaker Office if you want a cleaner and more modern UI. The downside is it's not free (but it is very cheap).
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I'm in a lucky position, it's me who is mainly sending stuff and for other direction I can always ask PDFs.
So I'm fine with LibreOffice and GIMP, but for personal reasons PDF reader must still be from Mordor.
For professionals a new MS Office is a must if it is in use.
For vector graphics new PDF capability is also a must.
One problem is that generally people can't really use their OS.
They can use the application, but anything after that starts being out of bounds.
One major bad thing was hiding an extension of a filename.
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The downside is it's not free (but it is very cheap)
Does it require online activation?
I am thinking about if/when the company goes bust or otherwise goes AWOL. Also part of the reason why subscriptions, even at £24/yr, are bad news: you can be arbitrarily prevented from using something you rely upon.
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The topic of "command line" came up. Command line / shell is all about repeatability. Repeatability lends to script able which lends to automation. Even just hitting "UP" a few times to recall a previous command (or history | grep thing and a !1234 bang to rerun).
Automating a pointy-cilcky-draggy-droppy interface is not really worth doing, well outside of large commercial applications with macros etc.
As a software dev I am not the "average" user, but the basic tooling include a CLI or some form.
On Linux I use "Konsole" to have a multi-pane, multi-tab command line and "bash".
On Windows I use "git bash", which comes with the "git" package. It gives me a pretty functional bash shell on windows. For anything more involved there is WSL if you can't use a remote VM instead.
On Mac it defaults to zsh, but it's easy enough to just run "bash" or set the default to bash.
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Or SoftMaker Office if you want a cleaner and more modern UI. The downside is it's not free (but it is very cheap).
"very cheap" is an subjective concept. For me, 49.99 €/year is not cheap at all for a cleaner and more modern UI.
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Being objective. Both of your arguments are emotional and that's not a bad thing.
Well you are free to think so. But, even if that's not a bad thing, please note i, some time ago, recommended on this forum, to have some windows machine(s) for things like ...electronics, just because many times you can't drive some interesting gadget with linux.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/ee-bench-pc-what-os-suggestions/msg5624037/#msg5624037 (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/ee-bench-pc-what-os-suggestions/msg5624037/#msg5624037)
Now, for use as an EE bench system, you already learned that many devices have Windows-only firmware. You can use virtualbox; it has settings to connect to different peripherals out of the virtual machine. This means another learning curve however. Or you could have a dual-boot system and restart into the system you need at any moment. But, IMO, to have another machine for windows is the handiest thing to do. Usually we have more than a PC, and to have and old PC with, say, windows XP/7 and even perhaps another one with 10/11to be started if/when needed will probably be the most trouble-free way to go. Assuming you have the space in your workshop, of course
I still have that PowerBook G3 I paid an unholy amount of money for in 1998. The reason? "Desktop publishing" with QuarkXPress. WYSYWIG, absolute control of anything: picture placement, flow text, etc, etc. That's what was used professionally on any company in the printing business in the 90s. So perhaps I shouldn't say "desktop publishing", but i used it for that, for years. I still haven't found anything even near as good. I didn't need to do that, for more than a decade, but it's still there (should check if it still boots i guess)
About LaTex: working as IT guy for a music school, they choosed a LaTex based software for music sheets. They tried any WYSYWIG software I could suggest to them, but all were defective in some way. But the LaTex based one did the job perfectly at each test. So they hired a guy and trained him in LaTex just for that.
BTW, IIRC, LaTex was also used by Therion https://therion.speleo.sk (https://therion.speleo.sk) This is the cave mapping software i mentioned on a previous post. It was sewed together by two Czech guys using what was available in Linux. The result is a software that saves you a lot of work each time you close a loop in your centreline. Before, you had to redraw by hand all the contours effected by the error in your centreline, error that can't be found until you close a loop. Perhaps your error was just a few meters, but you had to redraw. With Therion this doesn't matter: even if the error is big, the cavity countours you draw with therion around your centreline, are automatically adapted to the new corrected centreline.
Yes, it was geeeky and the first time i tried it, i failed miserably. Had to ask for help in their forum. But after a couple hints, it was easy, and saved me from little to huge amounts of work, more than once, all the time I remained young and slim enough to consider caving worth my weekend time. So, viva las vegas los geeks
Call me emotional if you wish, but I'm all for anything that can do what I want with less work and best results. This seems quite objective to me.
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The downside is it's not free (but it is very cheap)
Does it require online activation?
I am thinking about if/when the company goes bust or otherwise goes AWOL. Also part of the reason why subscriptions, even at £24/yr, are bad news: you can be arbitrarily prevented from using something you rely upon.
You have to enter a licence number to activate it, so I guess that gets sent to SoftMaker for validation. As for whether it needs an Internet connection beyond that, I don't know. If I get time I'll try it and report back.
Regarding the company going AWOL: I have a couple of thoughts. Firstly, who cares? There are plenty of other Office suites that do much the same job. If something went wrong I would use the online version of Office or download LibreOffice until I'd got the situation straightened out.
Secondly, "What if...?" isn't usually a great argument because you need to know the probability of it happening before it becomes a useful or meaningful argument. So of course the company might go bust, but there are lots of things in life, and in computing, that could go wrong. If you allow these unquantified possibilities to dominate your thinking you will miss out on all kinds of things in life.
My assessment is that the probability of the company going AWOL is low, and the consequence of that is low as well.
risk = probability x consequence = low x low = "Don't worry about it"
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Or SoftMaker Office if you want a cleaner and more modern UI. The downside is it's not free (but it is very cheap).
"very cheap" is an subjective concept. For me, 49.99 €/year is not cheap at all for a cleaner and more modern UI.
Half that if you use the five-machine "Home" licence, like me.
But I really appreciate your comment! Instead of calling me a Windows fanboy, or saying I'm biased against Linux, you present a simple and irrefutable argument: for you, the benefits don't outweigh the costs. Good for you, and I totally respect that. For me they do. We're all different.
We've been discussing in this thread whether Windows 11 is dying. A big factor in that is whether there is a viable alternative. Without an alternative, W11 wont die. Is Linux a viable alternative? For me, yes, definitely. There is nothing about W11 that I would really miss, and Linux Mint definitely floats my boat.
But I'm much more interested in the applications ecosystem, and it is that, not the OS itself, that strongly dissuades me. I love using good quality, elegant, well designed tools, both at my workbench and at my workstation. The reason I keep banging on about it is because I believe most other Windows desktop users will come to the same conclusion. That's why I think it will be the ecosystem that keeps Windows alive, not the merits of the OS itself.
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Automating a pointy-cilcky-draggy-droppy interface is not really worth doing, well outside of large commercial applications with macros etc.
I agree with that, although there are tools which will achieve that. But you need to separate the processes of designing and building. For design you would typically do one-off things. Create a form, shove a gadget here, etc. You're not going to repeat that on a scale that would demand (or be achievable) with automation (normally!). But building you do often and mostly the same way. So your design tool(s) would be graphical but build tools CLI based and ripe for automation.
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I think there are really two issues here that we see also in programming. First is that driving via text (a la LaTex) was the only choice since there were really no graphics around, and certainly no WYSIWYG. It's not that it was better; it was the only choice.
I'm really fine with the concept. I have programmed for ages and I am fine modifying code, then producing outputs from it.
What I don't like is my figure related to text on page 9 being on page 36, and after adding the recommended keywords to the code, it still being on page 36, or maybe on page 33 or 37, then only to find another package after package.
Some programming languages / frameworks are similar - and I don't like them either.
Also the \ {syntax} is heavy, especially with Finnish keyboard layout which needs AltGr for {}. Maybe I just want to align text. It is utterly excessive I have to write \ begin{align} and \ end{align} to achieve that. HTML-esque <align> </align> is much more manageable, for example. No wonder people rather click one button or hit tab or whatever.
The concept of reusable styles that can be configured from one place is of course excellent, when properly implemented - easy to use. Many WYSIWYG editors also fall into the trap of making using those styles requiring weirdly many clicks. Then we are back to applying styles one by one, and not being able to modify them all at once again. That's life.
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Just a note regarding image creation under Windoze:
Someone here mentioned how GIMP wasn't really up to this task.
For creating images I use two programs:
- For pure bitmaps, Paint Shop Pro, version 7.00
- For images with geometric elements, Corel Draw, version 12
Both of these are outdated.
Both work wonderfully well for the image-creation work I do.
Anyone else here use these?
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Just a note regarding image creation under Windoze:
Someone here mentioned how GIMP wasn't really up to this task.
For creating images I use two programs:
- For pure bitmaps, Paint Shop Pro, version 7.00
- For images with geometric elements, Corel Draw, version 12
AK, may I ask what OS you are using? Paint Shop Pro has grown into a bloat-monster, and I am very tempted to wind back a few versions but I don't know which are compatible with W11.
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My impression is that Corel Draw is a one way street.
It's fine if you control the whole life cycle of production.
Nowadays many print shops don't accept stuff without Disteller at all.
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Just a note regarding image creation under Windoze:
Someone here mentioned how GIMP wasn't really up to this task.
For creating images I use two programs:
- For pure bitmaps, Paint Shop Pro, version 7.00
- For images with geometric elements, Corel Draw, version 12
AK, may I ask what OS you are using? Paint Shop Pro has grown into a bloat-monster, and I am very tempted to wind back a few versions but I don't know which are compatible with W11.
Windows 7. The latest version that I will tolerate.
Yes, the newer versions of PSP (post being acquired by Corel) are horrible bloatware.
This is basically the old XP version produced by Jasc software.
I have no idea where one would get this: I've just carried the executables along with me since Windows 2000.
It requires no installation, just run the .exe from whereever it lives on your disk.
My impression is that Corel Draw is a one way street.
It's fine if you control the whole life cycle of production.
Nowadays many print shops don't accept stuff without Disteller at all.
Corel can export to a lot of formats. Besides the usual bitmap and vector formats there's EPS and AI (Adobe Illustrator), so there should be some pathway to the print shop's page placement software. (When I owned a print shop I used Adobe InDesign, where I could almost always just "place" the customer's PDF into a document and burn plates from it.)
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Just a note regarding image creation under Windoze:
Someone here mentioned how GIMP wasn't really up to this task.
For creating images I use two programs:
- For pure bitmaps, Paint Shop Pro, version 7.00
- For images with geometric elements, Corel Draw, version 12
Both of these are outdated.
Both work wonderfully well for the image-creation work I do.
Anyone else here use these?
I use PaintShop Pro for images with stencils and multiple layers to generate final bitmaps with alpha channel transparency layer for my embedded devices which have bitmap displays and FreeBasic/C coding.
For fancier bitmap stuff, I use Adobe Photoshop Elements as it came for free with my laptop. It also supports alpha channel stencils.
For technical illustrations and drawings, I use Open Office Draw. Though, this work is usually just for flow charts. I'm still looking a better tool designed specifically for flow-chart generation.
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Windows 7 here, it does what I tell it to.
Runs CATIA not Fusion360, Kicad not Altium
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Blimey! CAITA is more expensive than Altium plus a month in a 5-star holiday apartment.
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Anyone else here use these?
Once upon a time, but not for a very long while. Currently use either Affinity Photo (1.x since 2+ don't like W7) for manipulating images.
Or XNView MP for fixing up luminance, contrast, etc. of jpegs before posting, and adding furniture like arrows, text, etc. XNView MP is nice for screen captures too. I guess everything that PSP did, but is actually supported and bug fixed.
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If Windows 11 is dying, well this thread is certainly quite alive.
And I think this thread might be staying on continuously for rather longer than a Windows 11 (or Windows 10 for that matter) machine with mandated updates can.
But mostly I'm commenting here to give anyone who is saying "Linux isn't a good OS for me because the inbuilt programs that $distro ships with aren't up to scratch", a reminder that Wine (now in a new release, Wine 11, which claims further increases in compatiblity for Windows programs that couldn't be Wine'd before) exists. As do Windows virtual machines (in to which you can put whichever version of Windows you prefer, security vulnerabilitirs in legacy versions don't matter if the VM is staying offline).
I am quite the Linux evangelist (Mint, MATE desktop, it just works... genuinely, it just works, the only time I've ever NEEDED to do terminal tinkering was when initially installing some programs) , but Linux fans who start saying that coming to Linux means you should only be using Linux tools, instead of those you are already familiar with, are doing the Linux community quite the dis-service. People want an OS which runs the programs they already know. Fleeing from Windows shouldn't mean you have to leave all your programs behind, nor does it.
P.S. I've never met a printing shop which couldn't take jpg (or svg where vectors are concerned, and even then a sufficiently high resolution jpeg can always be used for any given size of printing) images. These don't guarantee the precise colours the way that some proprietary colour models do, but for most printed graphics you probably don't care whether a colour on screen is precisely the same as on paper/canvas/cotton/mugs/shirts/coasters/posters...
On Linux I've used GIMP for advanced image editing, I've never used Photoshop so didn't have to unlearn it to learn GIMP, though I have had to force the latest GIMP versions to return to the older style of GIMP user interface (with lots of pop-up windows for various tools). I've also used KolourPaint (adding to Zero999 and TizianoHV 's recommendations) for the sorts of quick, simple tasks that old M$ Paint was good for. And there's a tool called Xournal for when I've needed to make annotations upon pdf documents.
P.P.S. Flowcharts... I have found this in the past https://www.yworks.com/yed-live/ (https://www.yworks.com/yed-live/) I'm not sure if there is a downloadable version, or if any downloadable version is fully standalone (can be activated on a new PC without a need to phone home), so I couldn't say whether this can be relied upon long-term... but for occasional one-off uses I've found it suitable.
P.P.P.S. Regarding claims of Linux being crash-prone vs Windows being stable... I've had close to zero real problems since leaving Windows for Linux in about 2017, all the more detailed technical tinkering has been when settings things up, once something is working on Linux I've found it stays working. And I've found Linux Mint has been perfectly happy with being cloned by dd between different machines, or having the same HDD swapped between different machines (though all the machines had some similarities, all UEFI, all similar era of CPU, all intel CPU, all SATA connection for HDD, all using inbuilt graphics of the CPU not dedicated graphics cards) and just booted without any modifications. And I've switched elderly relatives to Linux Mint from Windows, the sort of people who use nothing more than a browser, an email client, a document editor for simple text and a file browser. Did so because I found I couldn't assist them when Windows crashed as I couldn't keep up with all the ways Windows kept changing things, I've had zero requests for help since.
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If Windows 11 is dying, well this thread is certainly quite alive.
And I think this thread might be staying on continuously for rather longer than a Windows 11 (or Windows 10 for that matter) machine with mandated updates can.
But mostly I'm commenting here to give anyone who is saying "Linux isn't a good OS for me because the inbuilt programs that $distro ships with aren't up to scratch", a reminder that Wine (now in a new release, Wine 11, which claims further increases in compatiblity for Windows programs that couldn't be Wine'd before) exists. As do Windows virtual machines (in to which you can put whichever version of Windows you prefer, security vulnerabilitirs in legacy versions don't matter if the VM is staying offline).
I am quite the Linux evangelist (Mint, MATE desktop, it just works... genuinely, it just works, the only time I've ever NEEDED to do terminal tinkering was when initially installing some programs) , but Linux fans who start saying that coming to Linux means you should only be using Linux tools, instead of those you are already familiar with, are doing the Linux community quite the dis-service. People want an OS which runs the programs they already know. Fleeing from Windows shouldn't mean you have to leave all your programs behind, nor does it.
A self-proclaimed Linux evangelist immediately talks about running Windows while "Fleeing from Windows". Do you also believe the fairytale that Linux is more secure? Does Linux never change?
As I see it, your argument is that one can ditch Windows and run Linux and Windows. What a concept. Thanks, but, uhm, no.
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But mostly I'm commenting here to give anyone who is saying "Linux isn't a good OS for me because the inbuilt programs that $distro ships with aren't up to scratch", a reminder that Wine (now in a new release, Wine 11, which claims further increases in compatiblity for Windows programs that couldn't be Wine'd before) exists. As do Windows virtual machines (in to which you can put whichever version of Windows you prefer, security vulnerabilitirs in legacy versions don't matter if the VM is staying offline).
There is a published compatibility list showing what Windows applications will run under WINE. To be honest it isn't that great. As you know I don't care much about the OS, much more about the apps, so I might as well run Windows apps in Windows. I do use VMs, but they aren't really very convenient, so I've pretty much stopped using them. For example, I had a Windows XP VM because I loved a particular version of Visio, but it was too much messing about and in the end I moved to a more recent version.
I am quite the Linux evangelist (Mint, MATE desktop, it just works... genuinely, it just works...
So does Windows, for me. Probably for hundreds of millions of others, too.
Regarding claims of Linux being crash-prone vs Windows being stable... I've had close to zero real problems since leaving Windows for Linux in about 2017, all the more detailed technical tinkering has been when settings things up, once something is working on Linux I've found it stays working.
I haven't found Linux to be crash-prone in recent times, but it has happened to me in the past. It was probably running in a VM, so it hardly counts. I think both OSs are extremely stable and very difficult to crash unless you install a bad kernel-mode driver, which - let's be honest - can mess up any OS.
I found I couldn't assist them when Windows crashed as I couldn't keep up with all the ways Windows kept changing things, I've had zero requests for help since.
OK, but I don't believe Windows "crashed". We throw that word around like it's a normal thing, but both OSs are built to be uncrashable by the end user, and I think 99% of "crashes" - in both OSs - are nothing of the sort. Far more likely is an application crash or freeze, or some other event that the user didn't expect or know how to handle.
In my experience, the only way to crash either OS is to install a bad kernel-mode driver OR have a hardware fault. And when it comes to the applications, there's no reason why either Windows or Linux apps should be any more stable than the other.
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A self-proclaimed Linux evangelist immediately talks about running Windows while "Fleeing from Windows". Do you also believe the fairytale that Linux is more secure? Does Linux never change?
As I see it, your argument is that one can ditch Windows and run Linux and Windows. What a concept. Thanks, but, uhm, no.
I think you are misunderstanding what he is trying to say. Or, at least, I understand it differently.
I understand that you can transition smoothly from one to the other and I agree with that.
I have been using Linux Mint as my main OS for about 10 years now and I am very satisfied with it but I still use a couple of Windows programs with WINE.
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I have been using Linux Mint as my main OS for about 10 years now and I am very satisfied with it but I still use a couple of Windows programs with WINE.
Which was the last Windows version you used exclusively?
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It doesn't matter much if we like or dislike Windows. The most obvious problem with Windows (actually Microsoft overall) is that it has become a liability with the way Microsoft envisions its future, the monthly update disasters, the security debacles, data collection, enforced Microsoft accounts, general enshitification, and many things more. It's up to you to decide if you want to own your PC or being owned.
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but for most printed graphics you probably don't care whether a colour on screen is precisely the same
Heh.
When I owned a print shop...
Back in the day external and EPS meant just a size of it as a preview for a rotation.
No wonder Distiller was invented.
Old Corel had also its own coloring system, still ICC of something, no idea how general it is today.
Adding that to JPGs of the-only-possible-original-of-the-week and possibly "exotic" electric printing, no wonder mixing ecosystems is not a desirable state.
Other possibility for original may have been a PDF, but the same JPG in it is then a thump size.
Did you have a process camera?
Here all cameras were practically gone when color scanners appeared.
I saw one of the last old ones, with meters long chassis and stack of large rasterizing films of initially who knows how expensive.
No wonder electrical scanners were loudly greeted.
Did you do film printing or straight to plate?
Here my fist interaction was Linotronic 100 and multiple Mac something feeding it through 10base2.
Software was PageMaker and output obviously Postscript, no daylight film either.
I advised them to do RIP per workstation and send a bitmap, but maybe alpha channel didn't cooperate, something transparent became solid and they kept on struggling.
It was a new system and workers were still learning how to do it with PageMaker, very powerful union behind them also.
Pretty much a different world back then, where yesterday was scissors, glue sticks, light table and so on.
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A self-proclaimed Linux evangelist immediately talks about running Windows while "Fleeing from Windows". Do you also believe the fairytale that Linux is more secure? Does Linux never change?
As I see it, your argument is that one can ditch Windows and run Linux and Windows. What a concept. Thanks, but, uhm, no.
I think you are misunderstanding what he is trying to say. Or, at least, I understand it differently.
I understand that you can transition smoothly from one to the other and I agree with that.
I have been using Linux Mint as my main OS for about 10 years now and I am very satisfied with it but I still use a couple of Windows programs with WINE.
I think we are close. To be clear about my perspective. I want an OS to do OS stuff and provide a platform that runs the applications I use most efficiently. The friction of getting the applications I need to use is important to me.
If the applications I wish to run are best or easiest on Windows, it seems contrived to get WINE working on Linux and then get my preferred Windows app working on WINE on Linux, vs. just starting the computer and running the application on Windows.
Also, I should be clear. I don't run Windows. I use macOS for my user interface. I use Windows and Linux on other systems. I have at least 40 systems running at any given time, between hardware and VMs on my servers. All of the apps that I want to run as a user are native to macOS and no VM/WINE is required.
The other implications I've seen and addressed are that people believe a myth that Linux is more secure than Windows, and that Linux doesn't change. Both of these are falsehoods as far as I know. In fact, Linux tops the charts in most breached and most vulnerabilities.
And as for changes, the Linux desktop is so splintered that it's amazing anything works across them all. It would be better to say "move to linux where if you can't find a distro that currently does things the way you want, you're not looking." It's anything but consistent and stable.
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I think we are close. To be clear about my perspective. I want an OS to do OS stuff and provide a platform that runs the applications I use most efficiently. The friction of getting the applications I need to use is important to me.
If the applications I wish to run are best or easiest on Windows, it seems contrived to get WINE working on Linux and then get my preferred Windows app working on WINE on Linux, vs. just starting the computer and running the application on Windows.
Also, I should be clear. I don't run Windows. I use macOS for my user interface. I use Windows and Linux on other systems. I have at least 40 systems running at any given time, between hardware and VMs on my servers. All of the apps that I want to run as a user are native to macOS and no VM/WINE is required.
The other implications I've seen and addressed are that people believe a myth that Linux is more secure than Windows, and that Linux doesn't change. Both of these are falsehoods as far as I know. In fact, Linux tops the charts in most breached and most vulnerabilities.
And as for changes, the Linux desktop is so splintered that it's amazing anything works across them all. It would be better to say "move to linux where if you can't find a distro that currently does things the way you want, you're not looking." It's anything but consistent and stable.
Maybe it's just me but I seem to detect a confrontational tone. It's like you are looking for someone to contradict you. As far as I am concerned you can do and think whatever you want and whatever makes you happy and works for you. I'm not here to argue. If you are looking for the Monty Python Argument Clinic I'm afrarid it's not me.
The "Linux desktop is so splintered" I do not understand. I have used Mint (with the default Cinnamon desktop) for about ten years now and have yet to see any splinters on my desktop. The existence of other distros of Linux and other desktops affects me just as much as the existence of Windows or Apple: exactly zero.
I do not understand the complaint that there are too many distros of Linux. Well, I only use one and I don't care how many others exist. They don't affect me in the least. Just like the existence of Windows or Apple or Android or anything else.
The "it seems contrived to get WINE working on Linux and then get my preferred Windows app working on WINE on Linux" I do not understand. When I installed Linux Mint, I install WINE and my desired Windows program and from then on they just work. I click on the icon and it starts. Someone who does not know better would think the program is running natively. It's like installing a driver. You install it it once and then forget it. I really do not understand the complaint.
The "Linux doesn't change" seems like a strange thing to say either in the affirmative or the negative. In my experience everything changes. So Linux changes... so what? I dislike change but I just have to get used to change because I have no other option. The fact that I dislike change is the main reason I am running some Windows programs with Linux because there are other Linux programs which could serve the same purpose.
To each his own. I have chosen Linux because I dislike "telemetry" (spying), I dislike Windows' heavy handed update policies, and because Linux requires less resources and can run on older computers which can no longer run Windows. I have more control over my own computer and I like that.
If other people prefer Windows or Apple or other Linux distros or a walk in the park, well, more power to them. They do not affect me in the least.
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Well, Nokia was already spiraling to death at that point due to earlier mistakes (and to be fair, keeping that sort of company running when technology changes all the time and you need to react correct and timely, is not easy task at all). Just maybe it could have been saved (as a large scale mobile phone manufacturer) with some genius-level management changes, but Microsoft involvement was obviously a conscious decision to do the opposite: to kill it deliberately, pull the plug so to speak.
Do you really think so?
Yes. Really it seemed obvious to most people inside the corporation and also to most others that the MS deal is not going to end up working, like chances of success are exactly 0%. Now doing anything else could have been chances close to 0%, but still non-zero. Selling out to MS was obviously looking like total surrender, in a tight situation where fighting with own, sensible product line still was a remote possibility. In a desperate situation, doing something brave and unique could have worked, but nah, the whole demise of Nokia was problem of poor management - and bloated middle management - and when a large ship is going down because it's too large, it's very hard to save. Selling out to MS probably saved personal careers of many, and just like "no one got fired by buying IBM", no one also got fired for selling out to Microsoft, so then we can just look at the obvious result and say "oh we did our best".
But that also reflects the root issue, lack of passion, lack of interest of delivering excellent result for end users.
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Just a note regarding image creation under Windoze:
Someone here mentioned how GIMP wasn't really up to this task.
For creating images I use two programs:
- For pure bitmaps, Paint Shop Pro, version 7.00
- For images with geometric elements, Corel Draw, version 12
Both of these are outdated.
Both work wonderfully well for the image-creation work I do.
Anyone else here use these?
I used Paint Shop Pro, I think it was version 6.0 or something (maybe from 1999?), for a very long time, up until 2015 or so. It was - and still is - a program with very decent feature set for its age, and UX was just excellent - very intuitive. Corel Draw I didn't use but hear mostly positive comments, it seems to have similar cult following to Paint Shop Pro.
Good software is delight to work with - no matter the license, cost or age.
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The "Linux desktop is so splintered" I do not understand. I have used Mint (with the default Cinnamon desktop) for about ten years now and have yet to see any splinters on my desktop. The existence of other distros of Linux and other desktops affects me just as much as the existence of Windows or Apple: exactly zero.
I do not understand the complaint that there are too many distros of Linux. Well, I only use one and I don't care how many others exist. They don't affect me in the least. Just like the existence of Windows or Apple or Android or anything else.
Logically you are right of course, but you are missing the point these people make: they think that with fewer "splintering" and fewer distros the same amount of resources would be put into doing less of the repeated work, so that a better quality software would be delivered instead. Whether this is true at all is another question; I don't think it is. In world of free / open source software, many people/companies do whatever they want to do exactly because they can do what they want; they would not be doing something else instead just because someone directed them to. Plus, competition drives innovation, too. Duplicated work, while inefficient, increases security against single points of failure.
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The "Linux desktop is so splintered" I do not understand. I have used Mint (with the default Cinnamon desktop) for about ten years now and have yet to see any splinters on my desktop. The existence of other distros of Linux and other desktops affects me just as much as the existence of Windows or Apple: exactly zero.
I do not understand the complaint that there are too many distros of Linux. Well, I only use one and I don't care how many others exist. They don't affect me in the least. Just like the existence of Windows or Apple or Android or anything else.
Logically you are right of course, but you are missing the point these people make: they think that with fewer "splintering" and fewer distros the same amount of resources would be put into doing less of the repeated work, so that a better quality software would be delivered instead. Whether this is true at all is another question; I don't think it is. In world of free / open source software, many people/companies do whatever they want to do exactly because they can do what they want; they would not be doing something else instead just because someone directed them to. Plus, competition drives innovation, too. Duplicated work, while inefficient, increases security against single points of failure.
Actually, the distros aren't that important. They are like fixed menus in a restaurant. The chef selected courses and drinks which go well together. It is the underlying software that is being developed which is important. Distros can be conservative and choose proven recepies while other distros are on the cutting edge of fusion cooking.
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The "Linux desktop is so splintered" I do not understand. I have used Mint (with the default Cinnamon desktop) for about ten years now and have yet to see any splinters on my desktop. The existence of other distros of Linux and other desktops affects me just as much as the existence of Windows or Apple: exactly zero.
I do not understand the complaint that there are too many distros of Linux. Well, I only use one and I don't care how many others exist. They don't affect me in the least. Just like the existence of Windows or Apple or Android or anything else.
Logically you are right of course, but you are missing the point these people make: they think that with fewer "splintering" and fewer distros the same amount of resources would be put into doing less of the repeated work, so that a better quality software would be delivered instead. Whether this is true at all is another question; I don't think it is. In world of free / open source software, many people/companies do whatever they want to do exactly because they can do what they want; they would not be doing something else instead just because someone directed them to. Plus, competition drives innovation, too. Duplicated work, while inefficient, increases security against single points of failure.
Oh, OK, thanks, I see the point.
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Yes. Really it seemed obvious to most people inside the corporation and also to most others that the MS deal is not going to end up working, like chances of success are exactly 0%. Now doing anything else could have been chances close to 0%, but still non-zero. Selling out to MS was obviously looking like total surrender, in a tight situation where fighting with own, sensible product line still was a remote possibility. In a desperate situation, doing something brave and unique could have worked, but nah, the whole demise of Nokia was problem of poor management - and bloated middle management - and when a large ship is going down because it's too large, it's very hard to save. Selling out to MS probably saved personal careers of many, and just like "no one got fired by buying IBM", no one also got fired for selling out to Microsoft, so then we can just look at the obvious result and say "oh we did our best".
My memory of this is very different. At that time Microsoft was desperately trying push Windows Phone 7, and Nokia were one of the very few mobile phone manufacturers to have adopted it, turning out great products like the 1520 - probably my favourite mobile phone of all time.
Microsoft thought that buying a phone manufacturer would provide them with the same benefits Apple had with their relatively new iPhone: complete control over the software, the hardware, the marketing. It was a very reasonable strategy - they did not want the adoption of WP7 to be entirely at the whim of the phone manufacturers. Google did the same thing for Android: they started selling Google-branded phones as "exemplars" of what an Android phone could be. Seeding the market, if you like. Luckily for them they were pushing at an already open door, unlike Microsoft with WP7.
In more recent times Microsoft became frustrated with the fairly boring, fairly crappy Windows laptops that were being sold at that time. Chromebooks looked like they could make inroads into the mobile computing market, which was making them nervous. The market lacked a Windows laptop fit to be a competitor to the Apple range, so Microsoft "did a Google" and developed a range of top flight, premium portable computers to demonstrate that you didn't need to buy Apple if you wanted a top quality product.
It worked: the Surface range set a new standard for top flight, desirable Windows computers and - in my opinion - definitely raised the perceived value and status of Windows machines for portable computing.
So it worked with Surface: taking control of the hardware, software and marketing is a powerful tool for success - something Apple have enjoyed since the beginning. Unfortunately it didn't work with Nokia and Windows Phone 7.
I don't know what the management culture was like in Nokia at that time, but their phone products were right up there with the best. I also don't really understand why Microsoft failed with Nokia but succeeded with Surface.
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The "Linux desktop is so splintered" I do not understand.
Indeed,perhaps they need some sandpaper.The desktop im using now looks very similar the the desktop i was using when i first jumped ship 20ish year ago,yes the buggers tried to change things but a magic incantation put it back to how i wanted things,can you say the same for windows 11 ?
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The "Linux desktop is so splintered" I do not understand.
Indeed,perhaps they need some sandpaper.The desktop im using now looks very similar the the desktop i was using when i first jumped ship 20ish year ago,yes the buggers tried to change things but a magic incantation put it back to how i wanted things,can you say the same for windows 11 ?
"How I want things" changes over time. I'm quite proud to be open to change, provided it feels like change for the better. Sometimes it does, sometimes not. I've never resisted change for 20 years, though!
Even if the benefit seems questionable, I'll sometimes embrace it just to avoid boredom.
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but for most printed graphics you probably don't care whether a colour on screen is precisely the same
Heh.
When I owned a print shop...
Did you have a process camera?
Here all cameras were practically gone when color scanners appeared.
Not in this shop.
Up to this point I had only worked in shops (including one I set up when I was just a kid in a graphic-designer mentor's basement with a Multi 1250) which shot everything on litho film using a process camera and then burned plates from stripped flats. You know, Rubylith, red spotting ink, amber stripping sheets, all that stuff.
(I'll have to tell you about my camera setup I had in that old shop in a follow-up post. It was too weird to be true ...)
Did you do film printing or straight to plate?
Straight to plate.
The shop I owned was based on a Heidelberg Speedmaster 52-2. Incredible fucking piece of machinery (and also an incredible financial burden, since I was paying for it with a monthly lease).
The workflow was from computer (a Windows machine that I used, and a Mac that was used by a guy who came in and did prepress stuff for me) direct to an AB Dick platemaker that made polyester plates.
99% of the time, when customers came in with a PDF of their piece, I could just open up InDesign, plop their PDF into a blank document and send it to the platemaker. No adjustments needed, including page bleeds or any other imposition choices.
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A bit off-topic, I know, but I just wanted to describe my process camera I had when I was just a kid (20s) in my basement print shop with my Multi 1250.
The "press" (actually an offset duplicator) belonged to a graphic designer I ended up working for. It was sitting unused in his basement, not working.
He told me I could use it if I could get it working.
Luckily it came with a service manual. Not an official A-M (Addressograph Multigraph) book but a 3rd party one with complete teardown and rebuild instructions and lots of pictures.
I was able to get the thing running with the help of that book.
So then I needed some way to make plates for it.
This was in Chicago, so we went down to this place on Wabash Ave. ("Printer's Row") that sold used equipment.
There I found an ancient process camera, nice big horizontal jobbie, for $cheap$, so we bought it.
Turned out that this camera was once part of the original Xerox process.
It didn't take film; instead, the target was a polished metal plate at the back.
At that time, the xerography process consisted of these steps:
- This metal plate was inserted in a device that placed a high-voltage charge on the plate. (Dunno whether positive or negative.)
- The plate was put in a dark slide and inserted in the back of the camera.
- The plate was exposed to the copy material in the camera.
- The plate was taken (in the dark slide) to a thing that covered the plate with toner; the toner stuck to the unexposed (dark) areas of the plate and didn't stick to the exposed (background = white) parts.
- The plate was put into yet another device that imparted the toner to the copy paper, just like modren Xeroxes do: a hot fuser melted the toner into the paper, and voila! there's your copy.
Obviously this wouldn't work for my application; I needed to expose litho film.
So I took that silvery metal plate and drilled a bunch of small holes in a grid pattern.
Built an airtight enclosure onto the back of the plate holder using Masonite.
Attached a vacuum-cleaner hose outlet to the back of this box.
Ran an ancient Hoover to the box with a hose.
Now I could put a piece of film on the plate, turn on the vacuum, load it into the back, expose it, then develop the film.
It worked great.
My "platemaker" was just a wooden contact frame with a piece of glass and some foam rubber to squish the stripped flat onto the plate (I used foil plates) and a quartz lamp to burn it.
I loves ancient technology ...
I found a page that describes all this equipment (https://xeroxnostalgia.com/2024/02/12/xerox-standard-equipment/), which apparently was combined into what Xerox called the "Xerox standard equipment". All the separate steps were done by separate modules within one cabinet.
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Even if the benefit seems questionable, I'll sometimes embrace it just to avoid boredom.
And when it impacts productivity?i don't want to hover at the left hand side of the screen ,to click an icon on a side panel that pops out , to bring up a window to search for the program i want to run,whoever came up with that idea should be forced to run windows 2.0 ,for life,I'll stick with the "classic" look thanks
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Even if the benefit seems questionable, I'll sometimes embrace it just to avoid boredom.
And when it impacts productivity?i don't want to hover at the left hand side of the screen ,to click an icon on a side panel that pops out , to bring up a window to search for the program i want to run,whoever came up with that idea should be forced to run windows 2.0 ,for life,I'll stick with the "classic" look thanks
There speaks someone who hasn't used Windows in 20 years. You've no idea what you are talking about - that is not how Windows works (unless you deliberately frig it, but of course you can frig Linux to make it unusable as well). You might be interested to know that it takes just two clicks to launch any of the 20-odd programs on my Start menu - one for the menu, one for the icon.
This is what seems so sad to me: the most resolutely anti-Windows pundits here have clearly not used it for so long their opinions are completely outdated. And yet they still keep hating. It's as if their self-esteem depends on it, which is why they defend it to the last.
Fucking weird, if you ask me.
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A bit off-topic, I know, but I just wanted to describe my process camera I had when I was just a kid (20s) in my basement print shop with my Multi 1250.
The "press" (actually an offset duplicator) belonged to a graphic designer I ended up working for. It was sitting unused in his basement, not working.
He told me I could use it if I could get it working.
Luckily it came with a service manual. Not an official A-M (Addressograph Multigraph) book but a 3rd party one with complete teardown and rebuild instructions and lots of pictures.
I was able to get the thing running with the help of that book.
So then I needed some way to make plates for it.
This was in Chicago, so we went down to this place on Wabash Ave. ("Printer's Row") that sold used equipment.
There I found an ancient process camera, nice big horizontal jobbie, for $cheap$, so we bought it.
Turned out that this camera was once part of the original Xerox process.
It didn't take film; instead, the target was a polished metal plate at the back.
At that time, the xerography process consisted of these steps:
- This metal plate was inserted in a device that placed a high-voltage charge on the plate. (Dunno whether positive or negative.)
- The plate was put in a dark slide and inserted in the back of the camera.
- The plate was exposed to the copy material in the camera.
- The plate was taken (in the dark slide) to a thing that covered the plate with toner; the toner stuck to the unexposed (dark) areas of the plate and didn't stick to the exposed (background = white) parts.
- The plate was put into yet another device that imparted the toner to the copy paper, just like modren Xeroxes do: a hot fuser melted the toner into the paper, and voila! there's your copy.
Obviously this wouldn't work for my application; I needed to expose litho film.
So I took that silvery metal plate and drilled a bunch of small holes in a grid pattern.
Built an airtight enclosure onto the back of the plate holder using Masonite.
Attached a vacuum-cleaner hose outlet to the back of this box.
Ran an ancient Hoover to the box with a hose.
Now I could put a piece of film on the plate, turn on the vacuum, load it into the back, expose it, then develop the film.
It worked great.
My "platemaker" was just a wooden contact frame with a piece of glass and some foam rubber to squish the stripped flat onto the plate (I used foil plates) and a quartz lamp to burn it.
I loves ancient technology ...
When the printers moved to single-floor buildings in da ‘burbs, Printers’ Row high rises were converted to loft condos. The main selling point was huge floor loading, suitable for multiple pianos, since heavy presses were housed on upper floors.
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Even if the benefit seems questionable, I'll sometimes embrace it just to avoid boredom.
And when it impacts productivity?i don't want to hover at the left hand side of the screen ,to click an icon on a side panel that pops out , to bring up a window to search for the program i want to run,whoever came up with that idea should be forced to run windows 2.0 ,for life,I'll stick with the "classic" look thanks
Is that what W11 is now? Here on W7 there is the start menu where things not used too often are easily found (assuming one has organised it sensibly). For often used things there are shortcuts (aka icons) on the desktop, sometimes in a folder on the desktop. There's the 'pin to taskbar' feature if you like that (I don't), the search where you can type in (or start to type in) the name of the program (if you can remember it). Plenty of options.
There are start menu replacement utils that provide W7 and earlier start menus on W10, if you really do want the W3 look and feel.
Thing I really hate is a bunch of icons wasting space along the bottom of the screen. Taskbar with actual running apps is fine if they disappear when the app does, otherwise really annoying.
(But, of course, that's just the raw unenhanced Windows. I have some utils that make things even nicer for me.)
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There speaks someone who hasn't used Windows in 20 years.
Actually i wern't on about windows,i was explaining the reasoning for sticking with the old ways in linux instead of trying something new to relieve the boredom
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There speaks someone who hasn't used Windows in 20 years.
Actually i wern't on about windows,i was explaining the reasoning for sticking with the old ways in linux instead of trying something new to relieve the boredom
Hmmm... I don't think so, but whatever.
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I think we are close. To be clear about my perspective. I want an OS to do OS stuff and provide a platform that runs the applications I use most efficiently. The friction of getting the applications I need to use is important to me.
If the applications I wish to run are best or easiest on Windows, it seems contrived to get WINE working on Linux and then get my preferred Windows app working on WINE on Linux, vs. just starting the computer and running the application on Windows.
Also, I should be clear. I don't run Windows. I use macOS for my user interface. I use Windows and Linux on other systems. I have at least 40 systems running at any given time, between hardware and VMs on my servers. All of the apps that I want to run as a user are native to macOS and no VM/WINE is required.
The other implications I've seen and addressed are that people believe a myth that Linux is more secure than Windows, and that Linux doesn't change. Both of these are falsehoods as far as I know. In fact, Linux tops the charts in most breached and most vulnerabilities.
And as for changes, the Linux desktop is so splintered that it's amazing anything works across them all. It would be better to say "move to linux where if you can't find a distro that currently does things the way you want, you're not looking." It's anything but consistent and stable.
Maybe it's just me but I seem to detect a confrontational tone. It's like you are looking for someone to contradict you. As far as I am concerned you can do and think whatever you want and whatever makes you happy and works for you. I'm not here to argue. If you are looking for the Monty Python Argument Clinic I'm afrarid it's not me.
I believe you've read more there than is there. I started with "I think we are close, " which translates to you as "confrontational"? As you had an argument with my take on Infraviolet's post, wouldn't that have been you who came looking for the argument clinic? I can only assure you that I have no interest. I am just participating in the conversation and posting my experience and observations. I do not expect or ask that you agree with me. But to clear things up, I started by saying I thought we were close on takes of Infraviolet's post. Since you had provided yours, I clarified my views. They weren't directed at you. You have to remain in the context to make sense of it. Also, consider that text and writing are rarely very good at portraying emotion or inflection. It may be that you are emotionally attached to Linux and feel that my observations are negative about something you care about.
The "Linux desktop is so splintered" I do not understand. I have used Mint (with the default Cinnamon desktop) for about ten years now and have yet to see any splinters on my desktop. The existence of other distros of Linux and other desktops affects me just as much as the existence of Windows or Apple: exactly zero.
My statement isn't directed at you. You have to maintain the context. Put Infraviolet, mine, yours, and mine again into a notepad if it helps.
I do not understand the complaint that there are too many distros of Linux. Well, I only use one and I don't care how many others exist. They don't affect me in the least. Just like the existence of Windows or Apple or Android or anything else.
It's not a complaint. It's an experience and observation. I didn't say any of this impacted you at all, did I?
Again, the context of this thread is Windows 11 dying, and the sub-thread we are in is with a self-proclaimed Linux evangelist Infraviolet. I don't know why you feel I've attacked you. I am not attacking you or Linux. Just stating opinions, facts, and observations from experience. Don't take it personally.
The "it seems contrived to get WINE working on Linux and then get my preferred Windows app working on WINE on Linux" I do not understand. When I installed Linux Mint, I installed WINE and my desired Windows program, and from then on they just work. I click on the icon and it starts. Someone who does not know better would think the program is running natively. It's like installing a driver. You install it it once and then forget it. I really do not understand the complaint.
It isn't my experience that using WINE is as simple as you portray it. As late as last week, it took me over an hour to get a Windows program running in the setup I needed to test. The way I've seen evangelists post, one might think it's a double click, and away you go.
The "Linux doesn't change" seems like a strange thing to say either in the affirmative or the negative. In my experience everything changes. So Linux changes... so what? I dislike change but I just have to get used to change because I have no other option. The fact that I dislike change is the main reason I am running some Windows programs with Linux because there are other Linux programs which could serve the same purpose.
Again, in context Infraviolet had implied that Windows is always changing as a significant down side to using Windows. So I guess that's "what".
To each his own. I have chosen Linux because I dislike "telemetry" (spying), I dislike Windows' heavy handed update policies, and because Linux requires less resources and can run on older computers which can no longer run Windows. I have more control over my own computer and I like that.
If other people prefer Windows or Apple or other Linux distros or a walk in the park, well, more power to them. They do not affect me in the least.
I'm glad you got that off your chest. Maybe you and Infraviolet share that Linux evangelism? I am not an OS evangelist of any kind. I use all of them to the best of their abilities. I do think that Linux Distros are just as "heavy-handed" as you claim Microsoft is with Windows. There have been so many holy wars in Linux and in the distros that one can't even imagine counting them. Many were started because the distro maintainer decided to make changes.
I'm not trying to change your mind.
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for some reason SteveThackery decided to edit his post to removed from his original post
That's about Windows, isn't it? Doesn't sound like any Linux distro I've used.
No its not,were you using ubuntu when they first moved away from gnome back in 2011?
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The "Linux desktop is so splintered" I do not understand.
Indeed,perhaps they need some sandpaper.The desktop im using now looks very similar the the desktop i was using when i first jumped ship 20ish year ago,yes the buggers tried to change things but a magic incantation put it back to how i wanted things,can you say the same for windows 11 ?
Yes, you can maintain a desktop you want in Windows. Funny how this thread bounces between the User interface and the OS.
Windows' Explorer interface has had available replacements for a very long time. Total Commander is the one that comes to mind as one of the oldest, like 30 years?
So you could, if you wished, have run Total Commander for the past 30 years and never complained about Windows Explorer.
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for some reason SteveThackery decided to edit his post to removed from his original post
That's about Windows, isn't it? Doesn't sound like any Linux distro I've used.
No its not,were you using ubuntu when they first moved away from gnome back in 2011?
I edited it because I realised it was just continuing the argument to no benefit. I've never adopted Linux as my workaday OS, even though I can't resist endlessly fiddling about with it, and I'm afraid I don't remember what I was messing with back in 2011.
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Indeed,perhaps they need some sandpaper.The desktop im using now looks very similar the the desktop i was using when i first jumped ship 20ish year ago,yes the buggers tried to change things but a magic incantation put it back to how i wanted things,can you say the same for windows 11 ?
Yes, you can maintain a desktop you want in Windows. Funny how this thread bounces between the User interface and the OS.
Windows' Explorer interface has had available replacements for a very long time. Total Commander is the one that comes to mind as one of the oldest, like 30 years?
So you could, if you wished, have run Total Commander for the past 30 years and never complained about Windows Explorer.
I like to think of the programs that come with Windows as just examples of what a desktop computer can do for people to learn basic concepts from. They are not really supposed to be the best in their class. In fact, Microsoft got in trouble for packaging a (relatively) high quality web browser software with their operating system once.
I replaced all the sub-standard software that comes with Windows long ago. Wouldn't anybody who appreciates good software do the same? There are plenty of alternatives to Notepad, Windows Explorer, Terminal, Paint, Media Player, Outlook, and even the Start Menu. All the important operating system parts of Windows 11 still work as well as they ever did as far as I can tell. Compatibility with old software is still good, Power Shell is good, all the Windows tools like Regedit and Task Manager are still fine. The tracking and forced updates are a problem, but they can be mitigated to some extent. I somehow managed to get Windows update stuck on version 22H2, but security updates still come through, which suits me just fine.
Aesthetically, I find Windows 11 excellent. I think this is important as I've got to look at it for hours every day! This is what prevented me from updating from Windows 7 to 10 (8 was a joke and not even considered). Window 10 user interface looked unfinished, like place holder graphics. I tried 10 on a laptop for a few days but just couldn't get used to how ugly everything looked compared to 7. The title bars of programs didn't change colour or have any shadow so it was impossible to tell which window had keyboard focus. I would lose the find dialog in a text editor on the screen or think the program I was using had locked up when there was just a small modal dialog box was open that I didn't notice because everything looked 'flat'. Windows 11 looks much better, slightly rounding the corners on the windows and buttons makes all the difference. Changing title bars colours and window shadows are also back. It looks like an evolution of Windows 7 now, rather than some awful mistake, and I appreciate the change after looking at the 7 interface for so many years! I do have some software that was made during the Windows 10 era and they look like alien programs amongst rest of my software.
OTOH, when I discovered what one could do with the command line, my productivity got about a 10.000% impulse. Any Linux program, even GUI ones, can be called from the command line, and set to do things automatically the way you want. I know, you think that's a geeky thing. And following your thinking, I guess geeky things are bad things. Wrong.
If you need to apply, say, a sharpen mask and resize some hundreds-thousands pictures, having to do one by one is a very big PITA. One can craft a little script in about 20 lines of shell code that will do it all for you. Just an example. No need to look for any app able to work with batches. Just make an script to send the commands you want to your app. So I'm all for that (and others) type of geeky things. I guess, that's not your case. Fine.
Command line programs are excellent for doing repetitive tasks in an automated way, but I would question how often you need to do this. I have lots of command line tools installed on my computer, but typically don't use any of them day to day. Each one has a different syntax, so I need to read the manual for a while before use every time. I remember once using Image Magick (and perhaps Gostview) to cut the shipping address out of an automatically generated shipping label and insert it into another one of my own design. I got it all to work in the end, but it took several hours of work. If I only wanted to do it just once, could have done it in minutes with the GUI tools I'm already familiar with. If I'm making a document with images normally I would need some diagrams, which I can make with CAD or paint software, some photos which I will crop, adjust gamma, sharpen, etc on a per image basis. Some photos need to be annotated with arrows or text, which I have software for too. Then I can assemble them into my document with a HTML editor or word processor or whatever. I don't see how the process could be improved upon by using the command line.
I did use Linux an my primary operation system about twenty years ago (three years 2005-2007) thinking it was the future and Windows was on the way out. I gave it a good shot, but I had to come back to Windows when I realised that I just wasn't very productive on my computer. The only other guys I knew who used Linux in real life at the time were as some kind of play toy or system admin. At least at the time, the quality of the best GUI productivity programs was very low compared to what was available on Windows. The real problem was there was almost no commercial software available. I think I bought only one commercial Linux program in the entire time I used it which was the Opera web browser. I remember had to select which distribution of the ten or so it supported from a list, then the exact version. They must have had to maintain dozens of binaries to make that work!
It wasn't just the lack of commercial software - older Linux software was a problem too. If the latest version of a program was more than a couple of years old the likelihood of successfully compiling it was greatly reduced due to some compatibly problem with a library or the compiler itself. I didn't know programming at the time so I had limited ability to fix these problems. When I did manage to fix one I would usually break something else, so at any give time there was always something broken on my computer.
An there were some quite poor decisions than didn't make any sense. On thing that I remember was that typically in Linux programs 'open' and 'save as' dialog boxes didn't allow just copy pasting the full path of the file and hit enter, like Windows dialogs. You had to manually browse to the location every time. Then there was the excessive use of the middle mouse button, which is typically the scroll wheel, which is difficult to press and good way to get carpel tunnel syndrome. I could go on and on, but I don't want to rant.
It was really great to get back to Windows after that experience. I don't take it for granted any more. Windows is slowly deteriorating, it's undeniable. Linux has do doubt improved since I last used it, but I saw how rough it was a the time all the while other Linux users were saying how wonderful it was. Makes me wary of others opinion of it now... There still isn't much commercial GUI user software is there? What little there is often multi-platform and available for Windows too. A lot of the command line programs that were Linux only are now available for Windows.
The topic of "command line" came up. Command line / shell is all about repeatability. Repeatability lends to script able which lends to automation. Even just hitting "UP" a few times to recall a previous command (or history | grep thing and a !1234 bang to rerun).
Automating a pointy-cilcky-draggy-droppy interface is not really worth doing, well outside of large commercial applications with macros etc.
Oh, it absolutely is worth doing! I do it a lot with Auto Hotkey. It's a kind of secret weapon for Windows users. You can use it to toggle a feature that is buried in a menu somewhere with a function key, make five different schematic entry programs that each have their own way to zoom and pan behave the exact same way, add mouse gestures to programs that don't have them, swap key around for some programs only (good for games). I use a lot of different microcontrollers and other programmable parts. They all have their own programming dongles and associated software. Sometimes there is a command line tool available, but sometimes there isn't or it's broken or limited in some silly way (low cost silicon hardware companies are not known for quality software). It's easy enough to press a dodgy vendor supplied GUI programming tool into use for IDE integration or bulk device programming with an Auto Hotkey script. There was nothing like this available for Linux back in the day, I don't know the situation now.
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I like to think of the programs that come with Windows as just examples of what a desktop computer can do for people to learn basic concepts from. They are not really supposed to be the best in their class. In fact, Microsoft got in trouble for packaging a (relatively) high quality web browser software with their operating system once.
Yep, exactly that.
<wall o'text>
Excellent contribution, thank you. Gave me something to think about I wouldn't otherwise.
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As a general observation, it seems those, in this thread, who complain about things the most are also those who have the greatest inertia to change.
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You make that sound pejorative. Of course, if someone has spent many years refining their environment then they've not going to appreciate being forced to change and break it. Change isn't in and of itself great, good or desired. And those that aren't invested, get easily bored or like new shiney will think it great to often be trying something new.
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You make that sound pejorative. Of course, if someone has spent many years refining their environment then they've not going to appreciate being forced to change and break it. Change isn't in and of itself great, good or desired. And those that aren't invested, get easily bored or like new shiney will think it great to often be trying something new.
I get it in drips and drabs too. Or rather I have inertia to change, just a lot less of it, or I have to learnt to get started on that route before it hits you.
My "Mac for a Windows/Linux" user thread is an example where I am struggling with MacBook's conventions being utterly WRONG. Not wrong in opinion but wrong in the shape of people's hands and that some people can actually touch type.
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Aesthetically, I find Windows 11 excellent. Window 10 user interface looked unfinished, like place holder graphics.
Same. At first it was basically windows 10 with a new skin (setting app and taskbar renovated). When I got my pc it came with windows 11. I could have downgraded to 10 but I preferred 11.
I don't know why 10 is so praised. The settings app looked like a depressing gray office, the taskbar too. When it just came out made so many older PC unusable because it was so bloated.
When praising win 10 people forget of Cortana, all ads in the start menu, one drive, online seach in the start menu, bing by default always...
Up to 2 years ago I was happy with win 11. I just removed the unnecessary stuff and ok. But then they upgraded the file explorer, task manager, photo viewer, paint, notepad and many other to the current mess. Now they take a considerable amount of time just to launch and load. File explorer, when going through folders uses 10 times more CPU than before, while being slow. The CPU usage is comparable to a web browser. No comment :palm:
So I discovered TotalCommander file explorer, everything search and many other third party programs to substitute the new windows crap. But I couldn't completely replace the file explorer. Every time I had to "save as" I had to wait for the thing to load... and then they started removing many settings (windows snapping...)! If they want to be apple, I won't stay with them. So now I have a second SSD on my laptop with Linux. I use windows a few hours a month for university.
Regarding the "fail" of many: going on linux on one step (removing windows completely, without getting used to alternative programs) is a bit crazy. Many linux programs can be installed on windows. better to get used to them before trying a transition. And then is better to keep windows with double boot for emergency.
(I would use win 7 if I they continued support)
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Just another observation. In my experience Windows users tend to be "Single boxed" users. They debate on whether to install Windows 7 or Windows 10/11.
Linux aficionados tend to be multi-box, and/or dual boot.
So when it comes to "dedicated boxes for dedicated software/environments" that's just "normal". Here Linux's reality comes into play. The kernel, not the distro. You basically make an OS dedicated to that task. Look at Wifi Routers these days. Custom Linux OS, built to do what it does and nothing else.
I run dozens of custom OSes constantly. Each with their own purpose. From Nano-Linux's like "Alpine" in containers, to Ubuntu Server, KBuntu. Not just the OS or it's distro, but the purpose of the OS.
I have a completely separate set of dev machines on VMs. A Linux Dev machine and a Windows 10 dev machine. Both have 16Gb of RAM and 6 cores. Both can co-exist on either my "physical" Linux or WIndows desktop side by side. Why are the separate to my 'daily driver'? Which one? The office has a Linux + Windows, separate machines. The bedroom has Linux and the living room has Windows 10. I can access the VMs from all of them. They move to me.
Right now, at home, I spend most of my time in Linux, KUbuntu on a "litre PC" or the Windows 10 gaming PC. However I always have access to the dev servers (full graphical desktops on them in 4K 30fps).
Now I also have 2 Macs to sheppard in. The networking, power, USB, displays all went without any manually intervention except a wifi password and accepting the docking stations.
They have pros and cons across the board and the best solution is not "This over that", it's both, or all of them together.
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On running Windows 7. As long as you are aware of the risks are able to mitigate what you can and avoid what you can't. Sure.
If I had a need to run Windows 7 it will likely be some dumb USB device or interface to an old bit of hardware that only runs on Windows 7. So I appreciate that scenario exists. I have even seen Windows 98 on computers in commercial premises often running machines/printers/cutters etc.
Windows 7 however is unique for a specific reason. It is around that time that everything began "offline and local" and began moving at pace to "online, cloud and dynamic". The straggling dialup users became the minority. People were now online 24/7.
What I'm getting at is... as long as you remain on the "offline and local" focused use case for the Windows 7 box, you will be fine. Obviously your NAT firewall. However I would also add a Windows side "Personal firewall" and block ALL internet outbound traffic and then approve what you actually use/need. Treat it as a "normally offline, dials up if it needs it" style box.
Could "I" user Windows 7 in the day job? No. If I did it would be negligence.
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Linux aficionados tend to be multi-box, and/or dual boot.
That's a bit confusing, particularly given the rest of that post. It's not the stuff you run in a VM or headless in a rack that we are talking about here. This is about your primary machine, the one you use all the time. So, for instance, when I say I run W7 that's what I use all the time. It's my primary workhorse. But I have other PCs that run Linux and W10, and VMs that run all of that and some other stuff. It's that primary - W7 for me - that is being discussed.
Now, having got that out of the way, I can't believe that anyone dual booting is invested in their machine OS. Why? Because there is no possibility of just running up that app on the other OS for a moment to check something. No, it's a shut this down and everything I'm doing, wait for the reset, then the reboot, select the other OS, bo....ot, and now for a couple of seconds run that app and damn, I forgot what I was checking.
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Just another observation. In my experience Windows users tend to be "Single boxed" users. They debate on whether to install Windows 7 or Windows 10/11.
Linux aficionados tend to be multi-box, and/or dual boot.
......
..
As I read this, I was initially nodding. But after some thought, I don't think I agree completely with who the single-box people are.
In my experience, most technical people are multi-OS as you describe. I am for sure, I have hundreds of OSes running in my house, from a Proxmox server with the majority of the VMs, Kubernetes, Linux containers, Windows XP, 7, 10, and 11, to 2 Lab Windows 10 and 11 computers for my EE hobby. I have a Raspberry Pi for GPIB, one on my 3D printer, and 4 laptops, 2 running Windows and 2 running macOS. A dedicated DVR host, a Linux box running a firewall, and one running Home Assistant. And then the macOS daily driver that is my corp laptop. Those are just the ones I can think of right away.
People who treat their PCs as appliances are more likely to use macOS or Windows, and that's it. Linux desktop users will be hobbyists for sure. I think it will be rare to find Linux as the base OS on corporate desktops. It isn't compatible with MDM and so many other fleet management systems. Corporate IT/InfoSec would not allow it. I'm sure someone will say they use Linux at work, and that's fine, here's your corner case.
So, I'd refine a bit. The vast majority of people in the world see a computer as an appliance, and those are very much Windows and macOS.
There are going to be a few Linux users who somehow got there and still use the computer as an appliance. They could still be single-box users, but will lean in as hobbyists and likely have more diversity, as you mentioned. Then there's the larger group of hobbyists and professionals who use Windows, macOS, and Linux daily and have tons of diverse OSs everywhere.
I don't know, after writing the wall of text, I still may land with your generalization being best. :D
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Linux aficionados tend to be multi-box, and/or dual boot.
That's a bit confusing, particularly given the rest of that post. It's not the stuff you run in a VM or headless in a rack that we are talking about here. This is about your primary machine, the one you use all the time. So, for instance, when I say I run W7 that's what I use all the time. It's my primary workhorse. But I have other PCs that run Linux and W10, and VMs that run all of that and some other stuff. It's that primary - W7 for me - that is being discussed.
Now, having got that out of the way, I can't believe that anyone dual booting is invested in their machine OS. Why? Because there is no possibility of just running up that app on the other OS for a moment to check something. No, it's a shut this down and everything I'm doing, wait for the reset, then the reboot, select the other OS, bo....ot, and now for a couple of seconds run that app and damn, I forgot what I was checking.
Fair points. I didn't really see the thread as being about "your primary machine". It seemed to be mostly about bashing Windows or Microsoft. :)
But if it is only about the primary, are we only talking primary as in during work or after? I spend almost all of my time on my corporate laptop since I travel a lot, and there's no way I'm lugging two computers around the world. As I mentioned in my prior post, no corporations that I'm aware of are allowing their users to generally use Linux. They wouldn't allow your favored Windows 7 either.
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But if it is only about the primary, are we only talking primary as in during work or after? I spend almost all of my time on my corporate laptop since I travel a lot, and there's no way I'm lugging two computers around the world.
That's a good question. I could imagine someone spending all day on a corporate PC and then doing hobby stuff in the short time between dinner and bed. I think by 'primary' we would say that it is the on they have a choice over, so that PC doing the hobby stuff is the primary.
But that's a very different usage scenario to someone who, say, works for themselves or has a choice in their work-time machine (or maybe just doesn't work). If I used something for a couple of hours a few times a week it wouldn't have much impact on me and so what if the file manager was basic. But if I'm using it all the time then I would be much more intolerant of flaws, and appreciate smoother operating.
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My daily working from home is
* Personal Kubnutu on a 43" 4K HDR1000 144Hz monitor. A tiny little MinisForum with a 5600U laptop CPU in it. It is more than capable of keeping up with modern webbrowsing and 4K streamed videos.
* Corp laptop, 16" Macbook Pro
* Customer laptop, 14" Macbook Pro w/ 34" UltraWide which switch between the macs.
* 2 external keyboards and 2 external mice. All 3 channel switchable so can operate 3 different computers each.
So, while I am waiting on a build, deploy, test or something I can read the EEVBlog forum, or prompt claude on the personal PC or go catchup on admin on the corp laptop.
Travelling is where it becomes a bit more annoying. Like heading into the office. Then I have to lug 2 laptops for now. When things get settled and I setup "Customer->Corp eco system" logins and MFAs I should be able to do with one 90% of the time. It also means I have to use the corp or customer laptop for personal browsing/comms... which goes through corporate monitoring.
VPNs allowing full access into my home from work accounts, just don't work. Nobody's firewall is going to let you VPN to a random IP and create a bridge, 95% of the corp laptops I have sheparded have the networking more locked down than that. If not on the device itself at the first router.
When I connect corporate devices to my network, they go on a VLAN and are kept separate from my LAN, because laptops are nosey and MacBooks especially will go digging through anything they can find and upload it to your Apple cloud account.... or the companies account.
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It isn't my experience that using WINE is as simple as you portray it. As late as last week, it took me over an hour to get a Windows program running in the setup I needed to test. The way I've seen evangelists post, one might think it's a double click, and away you go.
Let me clarify about WINE. I have a few programs I run with WINE and they work flawlessly since the day I installed them. I know they work with WINE and I install them with every new Mint install I do. I am just saying that those Windows programs known to work, probably a minority of them, work fine once installed.
At the same time, my experience is WINE is not going to run reliably most Windows programs so if you just try a random Windows program with WINE not knowing if it works then my guess is that it most probably won't or, if it does, it might need tinkering which I am not going to even try.
So what you say about trying a random Windows program with WINE and having problems does not surprise me at all.
When i need to run something Windows which will not run on WINE then I either run it on a VM or even fire up a real Windows machine.
But, just to be clear, if I try to install a Windows program in WINE and it does not work right away, then I do not spend one more minute trying and I just assume it is not worth the effort. And I just run it with Windows.
Same as some programs which only run with Linux: I just run them with Linux.
I just wish they would make versions for both worlds.
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If you want to know if a Windows application runs with Wine you can check https://appdb.winehq.org/ for compatibility and additional info.
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Windows has been around for 30 years so its bound to get a competitor at some point.
I write Windows software and design websites so use Visual Studio.
So moving from Windows would be a nightmare.
Being a programmer makes me an unusual case though.
Most people just want a web browser and email client and a word processor.
If Linux covers that then go for it.
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Speaking of Wine, since the update to Wine 11.0, LTSpice suddenly shows a number of GUI issues, including occasional crashes. Has anyone run into that? It ran flawlessly on Wine 10.x.
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The shop I owned was based on a Heidelberg Speedmaster 52-2. Incredible fucking piece of machinery (and also an incredible financial burden, since I was paying for it with a monthly lease).
All self aware pros know Heidelberg is the way.
Maybe a decade ago a friend still did some occasional sheets with a single GTO 46 unit.
And a bucket waited on a shelf if the bank needed envelopes.
Locally a fully functional SM 52-4 is for sale, 45k€ excluding VAT, times change.
99% of the time, when customers came in with a PDF of their piece, I could just open up InDesign, plop their PDF into a blank document and send it to the platemaker. No adjustments needed, including page bleeds or any other imposition choices.
I'd say that Windows and Indesign is not a mixed ecosystem, Windows is irrelevant here.
Did you do any prepress graphics with Corel from customer's original?
That would be a mixed ecosystem.
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The shop I owned was based on a Heidelberg Speedmaster 52-2. Incredible fucking piece of machinery (and also an incredible financial burden, since I was paying for it with a monthly lease).
All self aware pros know Heidelberg is the way.
Yep, pretty much can't be beat.
Maybe a decade ago a friend still did some occasional sheets with a single GTO 46 unit.
And a bucket waited on a shelf if the bank needed envelopes.
Bucket? What, the plates were in the bucket? or the envelopes?
Locally a fully functional SM 52-4 is for sale, 45k€ excluding VAT, times change.
Really? 45K?
Is it running? I'm guessing that piece of gear here (U.S.) would fetch about 10 times that if in good operating condition.
It's not at all like those are obsolete pieces of equipment.
One of my dreams (never to be realized) would be to have a small basement shop with a Heidelberg windmill and a bunch of type cabinets ...
(In one job I had I learned how to make photopolymer plates for the owner's windmill; he made a lot of $$$ printing wedding invitations and such on letterpress. People like the tactile indentations ...)
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Color bucket.
Some big companies were supporting local small ones, like printing stuff.
That's pretty much gone now, everything is centralized.
Aluminum plates were also stored, but straight, short side up and covered with protection wax.
Pretty messy if you thought you'll reuse them on day.
For 52-4,
fully functional can have levels, I'd expect it's also for demand and installation difficulties, small country.
Windmill,
I think I've commented of it earlier somewhere, incredible machine when you see it operating first time.
It can also cover elevations, if you can match the position.
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Color bucket.
You mean like premixed PMS inks?
Some big companies were supporting local small ones, like printing stuff.
That's pretty much gone now, everything is centralized.
Tell me about it. When I owned my shop (ca. 2004), offset printing was just going away as a craft.
It has since become just a commodity.
Most of the work I would have done is now done by online companies who gang up jobs (sell sheets, brochures, etc.) on a big 4-color press.
They do good work but it's no longer craft-oriented.
Press checks? Fuggedaboudit.
Aluminum plates were also stored, but straight, short side up and covered with protection wax.
Pretty messy if you thought you'll reuse them on day.
I think you mean gum arabic instead of "wax". I've coated many a plate with that, buffed them dry and they're good to go for the next run. No mess at all.
Windmill,
I think I've commented of it earlier somewhere, incredible machine when you see it operating first time.
It can also cover elevations, if you can match the position.
Elevations?
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Color bucket.
You mean like premixed PMS inks?
Yes.
I think you mean gum arabic instead of "wax". I've coated many a plate with that, buffed them dry and they're good to go for the next run. No mess at all.
Yes, rubber of sorts.
Messy as disorganized short, middle and long time storage, finally including who knows what of regular shelved stacks.
Elevations?
Embossing.
It's an old area of technicalities, so we also have dedicated words for many parts and specific exclusive words for detailed operations.
Vocabulary is partially so that outsider just don't know what's happening, or is misled by their normal wrong context.
Language example.
Noun 'duuni' is a slang word for work, 'duunari' is a blue collar worker, the word is so regular that it's not really a slang word anymore.
Verb 'duunata' is originally an exact description of smearing ink of offset press, clearly a loan or maybe a sibling of Swedish slang.