Subj : Re: Old computer To : boraxman From : DustCouncil Date : Tue Jun 28 2022 09:35:36 bo> Well, that is kind of my point. People who are used to Windows will see bo> an alternative as "deficient", wheras people used to Linux will find bo> Windows deficient. This shows that much of the "deficiencies" that are bo> claimed are really a matter of the alternative not matching their habits. Well, this has been an interesting bunch of messages because I just spent the last week migrating back to Linux after about a decade of using Windows. Windows 10 Home Edition was a travesty of an operating system. A travesty, for no other reason, than its forced-reboot crap, which caused me initially to lose data in the event I left a document open (not a good habit but it happened a few times), or in cases where I was rendering a fractal or something and Microsoft made the decision for me to reboot. This is intolerable. The idea that I have to pay more to have Microsoft not forcibly reboot my system steams my proverbial clams. I am sympathetic to Microsoft's reason for doing this, but my suggestion to Microsoft is when people aren't installing updates and rebooting with any regularity, change the theme to Hot Dog Stand and have an annoying pulsing thing in the notification area or something until they do -- don't reboot their damned systems forcibly so they lose work. I was also convinced that Windows 10 would be, in essence, the last version of Windows, receiving endless incremental updates. When Windows 11 came out, I thought, "you have to be kidding me." And, of course, it won't run on my current system. By the time Win10 is officially EOL'ed, I'll have a more current system but frankly that little blip a few months ago where they were experimenting with ads in the file manager, I thought, "Yeah...no. I think I am done with this company." I spent 2002-2009 running Gentoo on my desktop, and that was, in the end, disastrous because while I loved the whole philosophy behind Gentoo (it's like Linux for BSD fans), when it broke, it *really* broke, disastrously. After one too many times of that happening I went back to Debian Stable for two years and at the time there was no decent video editing solution, and so I switched to Windows 7 out of disgust, keeping a headless, shell-only Linux system on a separate system. This was a nice combination. I lived in PuTTY all day and had the best of both worlds. The best Linux desktop I've ever used was KDE 3.5.9 - it was probably the high water mark for the Linux desktop, and, well, I'd hoped that modern KDE would be even better. I'm typing this on Kubuntu now, and I have to say the migration to it has been...irritating. I can't speak for the Linux desktop as a whole, but Kubuntu is sloppy. Quirky. And full of little irritations, most of which I've fixed but I've noticed my patience for these quirks is not what it once was. There is an old saw that Linux is a great operating system if your time is worthless. Well, that's absolutely *not* true for the shell, which is the real draw for me, but as for the desktop (well, at least Kubuntu), it has taken far too much time to get myself to where I'm at now. Sound is still stupid; whole inputs are missing in Audacity, like my line in, which I need to record from. Just doesn't show up. As to your point, though, workflow on operating systems is an issue. How much can you stand to change workflow based on habits which may be decades old? One truly infuriating thing I can't fix is desktop icons will execute with a single click, which is not what I am used to (and will never be used to), and the settings option will make double-clicking necessary everywhere (like in Dolphin, the file manager, for instance) - EXCEPT on the stupid desktop. And here's a major annoyance: Linux is fairly terrible with cloud storage, except for Dropbox. And Dropbox has this piddly little free plan, and then it wants me to pay $120 a year for way more storage than I need. There is no lighter usage tier. Cloud storage is worth $60 a year to me - $5 a month, so of course Dropbox doesn't have any such plan. I use an iPhone (I had three Androids before it, and I definitely prefer the iPhone for a variety of reasons), and forget iCloud - at least, forget mounting it as a drive anywhere (you can do this with Dropbox). So now I have this clunky web-only interface with iCloud, and have had to move various other resources over to the piddly free Dropbox tier. I have two cloud services now and I don't want two. I want everything integrated nicely, and Apple would, of course, like me to buy a Mac, which I do not want to do. One of my tasks over the coming months, and I have little patience for this anymore, is to try some other distributions, and especially window managers/windowing environments, to see if they better suit my needs. I think have replicated about 90% of my needs in Kubuntu now, after a lot of profanity and manual compiling, and that brings me to another gripe. I don't like all of this chaotic packaging business, with flatpaks, snaps, and the traditional package managers. I don't have any problem with any *one* of them, but by now I really wish there was a single standard way of packaging things. Then there are the multiple network configuration methods, and I need to untangle all of that business at some point. I guess I could compare this to the pure ugly chaos of Windows 10's weirdly inconsistent configuration/settings pages, the need to *sometimes* go into the control panel and get those old Windows NT looking settings dialogs...SOMETIMES, only for other things to be modern. Maybe it's just me but right now things really seem messy to me on both the Microsoft end and the Linux end. I'd love there to be some order. The BSDs have order but what they don't have is, oh, the ability to basic everyday things like play Netflix videos, on account of the futile DRM Netflix insists on using. I'd love to listen to the suits rationalizing that, like, oh if we don't DRM our shows, people might pirate them. I can capture them with OBS just fine as it is. And I can, of course, pirate the hell out of them with Bittorrent if I am so inclined. But what I cannot do is play them legally in FreeBSD, which seems downright stupid since, it is at least rumored, Netflix is using one of the BSDs on the server side. Here is one last gripe: there is no equivalent of Irfanview for Linux. Irfanview is, so far as I can tell, the best image viewer I've ever used, and gwenview, the Linux alternative which is widely recommended in its place, is fairly pathetic by comparison. Surprisingly, it won't even display HEIC files, which is the default image file the iPhone uses. I had to compile a plugin from github to enable that. I don't know if it's a patent thing or what. In any case, it is a *major* gap, to not be able to display the default image format of iPhones (whether Apple should use this widely unsupported format is a fair question, but it is what it is.) Anyway this is a VERY long whine, but it is fun reading this discussion now as I am in the middle of moving my daily driver to Linux. I want to like Linux. But it is slovenly on the desktop. Some of it may be my distribution choice. I don't know. --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64) * Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (21:1/227) .