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The End of Windows

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Re: The End of Windows

#301

Post by jacquesm »

walterbell wrote: post #246
jacquesm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the market was super fragmented with each and every platform trying to lock in their customers as much as possible. The PC changed all that by virtue of the clones, which offered compatible systems and components from a large variety of vendors. Compaq arguably was the biggest force in establishing the clone market and even though as a brand they are gone today (though some of their legacy lives on in HP's s…

What do you think of http://opencompute.org ? They provide open blueprints for whitebox servers and network gear, for manufacturing by ODMs, with cloud provider purchases driving economy of scale.

I really hope they will succeed but I also wished that they would have at least one product aimed at the desktop. It's understandable that they focus on the datacenter when you look at who is behind the project but one of the things that I love about Linux is that I have a degree of continuity between my desktop environment where I develop software and the servers where it all gets deployed.

Re: The End of Windows

#302

Post by badestrand »

bhauer wrote: post #288
dannyw wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to assume a large portion of users are software engineers or tech people. You may consider a 16GB ‘bare minimum’, but not everyone needs that - nor can even afford that (or a laptop more than, say, new or used for $750).

> (or a laptop more than, say, new or used for $750). To me, the hardware report shows technology is quite stagnant on display resolution and memory. 1366x768 is a resolution from 2002 or thereabouts. 4GB was common in desktop computers in 2005. ~15 years have passed and consumers in the $750 price range are still hamstrung with 1366x768 and 4GB of memory? I would expect better from a $750 phone , let alone a compute…

My 1-year-old MacBook Air runs 1440x900 with 8 GB and it cost >$1.000 IIRC. So neither "very old" nor $200-$400 range.

Re: The End of Windows

#303

Post by criddell »

simonh wrote: post #225
Micoloth wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>immature and unproven technology Wasn't old windows desktop technology the one proven to be bad? I mean I can say this because I like windows, but people have made fun of windows bugs and viruses for three decades now.. Granted, Windows Store still sucks ass years later its introduction, but building a new ecosystem with unified and modern tooling was probably a necessary step for them to make

There as nothing wrong with their desktop core technology. Visita at least allowed them to solve the security issues, and with seven they had a really great, solid desktop OS. The problem was actively undermining all that with Metro and RT. What’s popular and effective about 10 is all the crud they stripped off it, much more than anything they added, just as with 7.

> with seven they had a really great, solid desktop OS. The problem was actively undermining all that with Metro and RT.

I sometimes wonder if maybe they should have done a hard fork between 7 and 8 and continue to develop 7 for commercial users and 8 would be the consumer version.

In the commercial branch, they could undo some of the moves they made years ago (like putting GDI in the kernel rather than user space) to eventually get a more stable, secure OS.

Re: The End of Windows

#304

Post by badsectoracula »

pjmlp wrote: post #232
thedoctor79 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tip: when X hangs, press Ctrl-Alt-F1 or F2 to switch to console mode, then Ctrl-Alt-F7 (or F8 on some distros) to go back to X. While in terminal mode you can investigate which process is reponsible for the X issue (high CPU? memory? disk I/O?) If that does not fix it, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will kill X and every X application and you won't have to reboot.

That only works if console mode and X escape keys are configured. Which is usually not the case on desktop oriented distributions.

X escape is usually not configured, but personally i haven't seen any desktop distribution to disable virtual terminals. Regardless, even if that is the case, it only takes a single PC restart for you to notice that the terminals are disabled and enabled them back so next time you need them they'll be there.

Re: The End of Windows

#305

Post by rogerbinns »

bhauer wrote: post #243
cpeterso wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see a nice graph showing (Firefox) users steadily upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 from Mozilla's Firefox telemetry: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-os-and-architectu...

That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways. * In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. * In 2018, the most popula…

It is worth contrasting with the Steam survey which covers several million gamers (of varying degrees of dedication) -- http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Of note, 8GB is most popular with 1920x1080 resolution.

Re: The End of Windows

#306

Post by nostalgeek »

ant6n wrote: post #258
bhauer wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways. * In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. * In 2018, the most popula…

> I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768 It seems that most people who make websites nowadays think similarly. I don't get why they are making websites for themselves, rather than for their users.

> It seems that most people who make websites nowadays think similarly. I don't get why they are making websites for themselves, rather than for their users.

Because most people making websites don't care about basic usability, even though they have stats that shows their users use small laptops they'll still stick a fixed header that takes 1/5 of screen real estate because it's the latest "bootstrap/material design fad". Google does this a lot, which is ironic with them pushing "AMP" on mobile, they can't even give regular people a good on experience on their laptop.

Re: The End of Windows

#307

Post by badsectoracula »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #180
PeanutNore wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a pretty edgy edge case to me. In a more typical deployment like a laptop with a built in display or a desktop with a single 1080p or 1440p monitor you can pick from a variety of distributions that on firm "it just works" territory.

I have a nice laptop, with a 3k display. I plug it to a normal screen, with a 1080p display. What happens? Well, it works but it looks like ass. Wanna fix it? Sure, just google around for 2 hours until you find a complicated xrandr command that you have to run every time on startup (but the OS will break every time you unplug the screen). Also, high DPI support is still garbage, which means that half the apps will ha…

It still is an edge case when the case is rare and people with high dpi Linux laptops (or monitors in general) combining them with regular dpi monitors is rare. Hell, high dpi monitors by themselves are still rare.

Re: The End of Windows

#308

Post by dawnerd »

rogerbinns wrote: post #305
bhauer wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways. * In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. * In 2018, the most popula…

It is worth contrasting with the Steam survey which covers several million gamers (of varying degrees of dedication) -- http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey Of note, 8GB is most popular with 1920x1080 resolution.

Would probably be higher if memory prices weren’t so damn high. Same goes with video resolution. I bet we’ll see a quick bump once video card prices start to drop.

Re: The End of Windows

#309

Post by cptskippy »

criddell wrote: post #291
cptskippy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One wonders what would have happened if they just sort of let Windows be Windows. I.e. if they had continued iterating on core stuff but left UI and general philosophy resembling Win7's trajectory and not tried to force people into WinRT/UWP/store. With Windows 8 they tried to do too much too quickly and not well, however their motivations and intention were spot on in my opinion. Security has always been a pain po…

Is there any metric that doesn't show the Windows Store to be an abysmal failure? Have any Windows Store apps gone viral? Despite the enormous installed user base, there seems to be a definite lack of excitement around Windows apps (other than games) compared to the Android and iOS app stores. And for games, Steam feels like it's more dominant.

No but recently I started using the App Store version of the Arduino IDE. It's been a lot less trouble to setup and deal with cross device. If more Apps moved to the Store I would consider using them over managing updates across all of my devices.

Re: The End of Windows

#310

Post by watwut »

Micoloth wrote: post #194
asveikau wrote: post #33

I still can't wrap my head around everything that was wrongheaded about Windows 8, and I was working there for most of its dev cycle. One wonders what would have happened if they just sort of let Windows be Windows. I.e. if they had continued iterating on core stuff but left UI and general philosophy resembling Win7's trajectory and not tried to force people into WinRT/UWP/store. Even though Win10 attempted correctiv…

>immature and unproven technology Wasn't old windows desktop technology the one proven to be bad? I mean I can say this because I like windows, but people have made fun of windows bugs and viruses for three decades now.. Granted, Windows Store still sucks ass years later its introduction, but building a new ecosystem with unified and modern tooling was probably a necessary step for them to make

Define proven to be bad. What is the metric there? And note also who considers it "proven bad". It was winning and also the better ui at the time. It did indeed had bugs, but not really that many of them affected most users - who were fully comfortable restarting and go. The viruses were issue through.

The thing with "people making fun" through is that a lot of it was by-product of culture war between linux and windows world. between radical ideological open source and closed source - where Microsoft engaged in a lot of ugly tactic. Between techies who wanted tech focused on their needs and commercial company that cared significantly less about needs of admins, tinkerers and such.

Meaning, the jokes were much more political and much less technical. They were often result of people hating Microsoft (recall their ugly tactic).

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