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Burn My Windows

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Re: Burn My Windows

#111

Post by dredmorbius »

leephillips wrote: post #95
marcodiego wrote: post #26

Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance; - it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts; - it showed the advantages of modular software; - many plugins we…

What does “mid 2000's” mean? I don’t mean to be dense, I just can’t figure it out.

Mid '00s if you prefer.

Referencing decades in two-digit form fell out of favour with the Y2K issue. Perhaps it should be resurrected.

At the turn of the 20th century, fashion was to refer to "oh-eight" and such, IIRC. I don't know that the decade had a common nomenclature. I suspect there's a Wikipedia article on that somewhere....

Hrm ... not really, or at least not readily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade

Re: Burn My Windows

#112

Post by Zak »

nebula8804 wrote: post #97
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bunch of rose-tinted hogwash, this. > It pioneered useful things like selecting an area of the screen and saving it directly to a file Pioneered? This was a standard feature on Macs since January 1997. > It also showed how important compositing was on the desktop. No, that would be the Quartz and Quartz Extreme compositors released with Mac OSX 10.0-10.2 years prior. Compiz in the mid 2000s was a mixture of catching…

I'll have to agree with this. Compiz was great at drawing curious people in but I'd argue that Compiz helped many people write off Linux. It definitely made Windows XP look outdated but after you scratch the surface and adopt Linux, you discover a world of hurt whether it be bad drivers that break your desktop and throw you to a different run level, poor interoperability between the different components or just the g…

> I install a clean copy of Ubuntu on to my PC, start using it and then stop when I discover some serious bug

What do you do when you encounter a serious bug in your OS of choice?

Re: Burn My Windows

#113

Post by brnt »

marcodiego wrote: post #26

Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance; - it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts; - it showed the advantages of modular software; - many plugins we…

It was just plain fun! Nowadays, the only thing to look forward to is what functionality the Gnome devs ripped out this time...

Re: Burn My Windows

#114

Post by quadrifoliate »

marcodiego wrote: post #26

Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance; - it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts; - it showed the advantages of modular software; - many plugins we…

I instinctively expected to hear the notes of "Here Comes the Hotstepper" when I clicked on that video. I was expecting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ; which was somewhat popular to send around to show comparisons of how Compiz was so far ahead it could not just replicate Vista's interface, but could also better it in some aspects like the famous 3D cube.

Thanks to you and others for working on it! Looking at the video almost 15 years later, I feel wistful for the joy that accompanied some of these desktop effects, and wonder where it has gone today.

Re: Burn My Windows

#115

Post by nebula8804 »

marcodiego wrote: post #104
nebula8804 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll have to agree with this. Compiz was great at drawing curious people in but I'd argue that Compiz helped many people write off Linux. It definitely made Windows XP look outdated but after you scratch the surface and adopt Linux, you discover a world of hurt whether it be bad drivers that break your desktop and throw you to a different run level, poor interoperability between the different components or just the g…

> An OS is much more than cool looking visualizations [...] At the time it was easy to hear people complaining about how ugly linux was. Compiz helped a lot in that front. We were used to people saying "you can't do that on linux" and then things quickly changed to us saying "you can't do that on your OS". Let's not fake it: linux is still far from being a diamond of UI design or consistency, but well, competition ha…

I guess I can sort of agree with you. Although during that time was the height of GNOME2 and even today I find myself leaning towards Gnome2/MATE because it feels so much more stable than anything else(despite me always giving the main Ubuntu distro a chance every year as well because I feel it is the most looked at distro).

>Another evidence of the impact it had.

Well for me it wasn't Compiz that brought me into Linux, it was this idea of something different from WIndows but it may have had this impact for others. Compiz was a gimmick to me and after trying it once I put it aside to try and just make my regular Linux installs remain stable.

Re: Burn My Windows

#116

Post by leephillips »

timemct wrote: post #96
leephillips wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does “mid 2000's” mean? I don’t mean to be dense, I just can’t figure it out.

Years 2003(ish) to 2008(ish).

Thanks. I was being dense. The first thing I though was, “around 2500?”, which is silly.

Re: Burn My Windows

#117

Post by nebula8804 »

laumars wrote: post #101
nebula8804 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll have to agree with this. Compiz was great at drawing curious people in but I'd argue that Compiz helped many people write off Linux. It definitely made Windows XP look outdated but after you scratch the surface and adopt Linux, you discover a world of hurt whether it be bad drivers that break your desktop and throw you to a different run level, poor interoperability between the different components or just the g…

I switched to Linux full time before Compiz took off and did so for exactly the reasons you cited the other platforms were superior: Linux was more stable, easier to reason with (as it was doing less magic behind the scenes), components worked better with each other since POSIX is designed for interoperability. Driver support was patchy at times, but then it wasn’t exactly easy on OSX (Apple: “if we don’t support you…

>I switched to Linux full time before Compiz took off and did so for exactly the reasons you cited the other platforms were superior: Linux was more stable, easier to reason with (as it was doing less magic behind the scenes), components worked better with each other since POSIX is designed for interoperability.

Good for you that you had this experience but this is the standard talking point I have been hearing for 15 years. Yes if you are willing to put in the work Linux is more powerful than a closed source OS. However you forget that the primary job of the OS is to provide a stable platform to enable you to run applications. Instead you are ignoring this and praising other aspects of the OS that do not directly correlate to improvements for regular non IT end users. If I do not want to spend time fixing a broken config caused but a bug, I am out of luck. If I do not want to deal with poorly made system utilities that do not correlate to what the config files do then I am out of luck. If I want different components of the OS to have a unified design language so they work together I am out of luck(ex. Even today GNOME bundles a bunch of old garbage tools and expect them to be equivalent to their Windows/Mac counterparts, no thought is put into the usability and uniformity of these tools).

Re: Burn My Windows

#118

Post by harles »

So many neat things going on with Linux desktops. It’s unfortunate high DPI/mixed DPI support lags so far behind Windows and Mac. This has essentially killed Linux as a daily driver for me.

Re: Burn My Windows

#119

Post by fartcannon »

marcodiego wrote: post #26

Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance; - it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts; - it showed the advantages of modular software; - many plugins we…

It also taught me the value of enthusiast built software. A nearly blind friend of mine was able to use Linux for music recording in Ardour (thanks again Ardour/Paul, you rock) with the ezoom function in compiz! The only problem was that it had a limit of something reasonable like 8x, but my friend often required a bit more than that. I emailed the maintainer and he added it within an hour! We were both so used to dealing with the various exploitative zoom software providers on Windows that charged an arm and a leg for support, and new features were only added in future expensive upgrades that our minds were totally blown. Thanks again, Kristian! If you ever read this, you really made our year.

Re: Burn My Windows

#120

Post by nebula8804 »

Zak wrote: post #112
nebula8804 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll have to agree with this. Compiz was great at drawing curious people in but I'd argue that Compiz helped many people write off Linux. It definitely made Windows XP look outdated but after you scratch the surface and adopt Linux, you discover a world of hurt whether it be bad drivers that break your desktop and throw you to a different run level, poor interoperability between the different components or just the g…

> I install a clean copy of Ubuntu on to my PC, start using it and then stop when I discover some serious bug What do you do when you encounter a serious bug in your OS of choice?

>What do you do when you encounter a serious bug in your OS of choice?

When I say serious bug I typically mean serious OS breaking bugs.

Some examples from these past years(these all happened different years):

1) After clean install, desktop crashes after first reboot and I am thrown into terminal. Result: Stop usage and move on.

2) After Clean install, I wish to copy some files to an fat32 USB drive(Sandisk purchased directly from them). I get some error while the file is being copied, the drive is unmounted and then when I go to another system running Windows to check if my file was copied, the drive is corrupted causing all my files to be lost. Result: Stop usage and move on.

3) After clean install, I go ahead and connect a second monitor. Now my desktop becomes a garbled mess on both screens. I disconnect screen and the desktop remains a garbled mess on the main screen. I force reboot and upon reboot now I have been dropped to the terminal. Result: Stop usage and move on.

These issues don't happen on Windows and Mac in my experience. Don't get me wrong, Windows is degrading in usability and Mac is as well (at a much slower pace) but they are not falling apart in these fundamental ways. The very foundations of Linux seem to be built on sand and that does not convey trust when you expect your system to be more than just a toy. This is a machine to get work done on and I depend on it. I cannot be dealing with silly issues like this.

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