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Burn My Windows

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271–280 of 282 posts

Re: Burn My Windows

#271

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 loved it then I grew to love even more low effect, dark-style simple UIs as a result of the constant slowdowns, uselessness, desktop crashes that came with compiz. But god was it cool to brag.

Re: Burn My Windows

#272
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the fad of Compiz effects. Sure they were silly but it added a little fun to the desktop. I never really got into desktop themes preferring something plainer and smaller (because screen real-estate was still a commodity back then) but wobbly windows and closing effects largely didn't take much away from usability while still adding a little personality.

You can still use compiz today with MATE or XFCE

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that.

Re: Burn My Windows

#273

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 really miss this Linux era. Yeah, probably all these effects were not useful, but at least we had something innovative and fun going on in the Linux community, now the best we can hope for is to copy Apple interfaces...

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the quality of the Linux desktop of today, but I don't see anything really different from Windows/Mac apart from getting subpar support from many software/hardware vendors.

Maybe is just nostalgia, or maybe I'm growing old and grumpy...

Re: Burn My Windows

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> linux is still far from being a diamond of UI design or consistency YMMV. I myself am very happy with Gnome and would say it's about as nice to use as a Mac. You can, of course, install ugly applications with horrendous UIs, that use Athena or Motif widgets, limited only to X bitmapped fonts or an ncurses UI that would work on a VT-52, and so on - but that's kind of a feature of Linux - it's Unix and it runs a lot…

I think Gnome apps in Gnome are actually pretty alright. Not really jarring anymore with ok functionality between apps. I wish gnome-shell was more stable and shipped with a dock…

> I wish gnome-shell was more stable and shipped with a dock…

It does. It's just that it's hidden now by default.

What I really would like is a simple e-mail/messaging program to consolidate my mail, Slack and Teams inflows on a single threaded timeline.

Re: Burn My Windows

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then after I spent a day getting it all working I'd be staring at my computer and it wouldn't take more than an hour or two to think "Ok, that's cool but I want to play a game" or something else that I couldn't do in linux. Hah, for me, this was when I started getting deep into WINE and also some of the games available for Linux (SuperTux, that one game where you shoot a ball and it sticks to other balls and if eno…

> that one game where you shoot a ball and it sticks to other balls and if enough of them are the same color they disappear Frozen bubble.

I remember making a Rox AppDir of that. It was written in Python[0] IIRC and I had to modify a few lines to account for relative paths. I miss Rox...

[0] I misremembered, it was actually Perl.

Re: Burn My Windows

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And here lies the problem with people who say one is better than another: they look at the differences and say “I don’t like it” but think it’s a technical decision when in fact it’s just an emotive response based on what they’re comfort zone is. Give me a way to interpret this other than condescension. You're saying that people who espouse a preference are not doing so based on valid reasoning, and the only eviden…

You’re literally the only one who’s been name calling and insulting people. You keep making wildly inaccurate technical claims that even a beginner in Linux would know better then admit that others have pointed out to you how deeply ignorant you are on this subject. And at no point agreed your opinions were subjective, repeatedly stating they were based on technical merit and even going as far as accusing me of think…

You know what? You're right, I have been a little more insulting here than need be and I apologize for that. Twenty years of the same arguments from Linux Desktop's die-hard fanboys has made me a bit unkind to people I interpret to be Linux Desktop evangelists.

However, I submit that your language is not as clear as you might think it is. I am still not sure if you're trying to say that most people prefer certain behaviors purely out of comfort, or if you're agreeing with me that there is a good chance they prefer behaviors for legitimately technical reasons that just happen to be subjective. Your initial post on the subject very much strikes me as the former, and frankly so do nearly all your posts after that, yet you seem to insist that I am misunderstanding.

Re: Burn My Windows

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 purchase…

I completely believe you've experienced these. TL;DR: Linux, like all other systems, mostly has issues with hardware. For a proper experience, get a system that's known good under Linux (and you need to use a non-ideological distribution like Ubuntu which will ship proprietary drivers). Linux-focused or business models of major manufacturers are your best bet. 1) sounds like a hardware issue or hardware compatibility…

I strongly disagree with your assessment. First of all I don't know what kind of frankenstein Windows environment you are running to get those sorts of issues so lets put that aside.

With Linux the issues are fundamental to how the OS is designed and maintained. Several of these issues were fixed only to come back one or two releases in the future. These sort of terrible regressions don't inspire confidence.

You have listed excuse after excuse to justify these failures when in reality both other OSes have had these functions worked out over 10+ years ago.

1) I have heard this excuse before that I should stick to official Linux hardware. I have had issues with Thinkpads as well and some of these issues happened on a Thinkpad. I have also been hesitant to jump onboard System76 or Purism because their systems just look like junk and in 2021 when we have stunning Mac laptops with beautiful trackpads and retina displays and me entering my 30s I just don't have the stomach to spend hundreds of dollars on laptops that look like they came out of the mid to late 2000s. In the case of System76 they are rebadged Clevo systems from what I understand(could be wrong about this). So in reality I am paying for QA for this year of distro with no specific guarantee that I won't start hitting the same issues a few years down the road when the regressions start to come. There is no garuntee that System76/Purism will fix some small regression in a multi year old system. They suffer from the fact that the community will move on without them and so they have to maintain support. Mac systems have been supported for 7+ years. I have a 2012 Macbook Air that still runs pretty decent with no regressions on the latest MacOS (well second latest since they finally discontinued it giving it ~9 years of support).

2) I have never had any doubt as to Windows's ability to correctly write data to a USB drive ever since I started using this functionality back in Windows XP!

No I specifically mentioned that I bought Sandisk and direct from them to remove this commonly used excuse where Linux people blame everything but the OS itself. The flash drive is fine. Windows has written to it successfully without ever throwing an issue. MacOS has written to it multiple times without issue. The flash drive is not at fault!

I want you to stop for a moment. Picture yourself as the user. You have come to expect over the years that when you copy a file to a USB mass storage device, the file is correctly written. You don't do file integrity checks or other silly stuff. You just copy your files to the drive, unmount it and then move on. Now imagine you are trying linux out and you follow the same mindset. You copy files over and then unmount and move on. The horror and shock of losing precious data will definitely put permanent anxiety and distrust into the User's mind that will be very difficult to restore. If you cannot trust copy and paste then what can you trust? The OS is fundamentally flawed because these copy and paste operations in the GUI are basically abstracting command line operations that may or may not fail silently. This is garbage design compared to MacOS and Windows. When these other OS'es fail, sure they don't show you the error most of the time but the GUI is strongly tied to the operations that are occurring and so when they fail, you know they have failed. You're not in limbo because you are looking at a GUI that is not correctly tracking what the underlying command line application is doing.

3) All I know is that I have never had display issues in Windows and it is not even a thought on MacOS. In fact MacOS handles multi display so beautifully because it scales things perfectly. This is better than even Windows because while Windows always gets multi-monitor working without fuss, things like font rendering leave a lot to be desired. MacOS give you everything: Stable muti-monitor support, beautiful scaling and excellent font rendering across displays with different resolutions. Linux is not even in the same ballpark because you don't really know if the display you hook up will even start up properly and then when you need to do config changes you are stuck doing some stupid stuff like installing xrandr. You cannot expect to plug in the damn display and move on with your life. I recently hooked up a 640x480 CRT along with a 4K display to mac and to my surprise, it handled scaling across these wildly different displays perfectly. I couldn't believe it! I have gotten so confident in the Mac ecosystem that I don't even doubt it anymore. It just works and that freedom allows me to remove that cognitive load off of my mind.

Re: Burn My Windows

#278
dumb question: is there any way to get similar effects on a Mac? are there third-party tools that can change macOS appearance so dramatically?

Re: Burn My Windows

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely believe you've experienced these. TL;DR: Linux, like all other systems, mostly has issues with hardware. For a proper experience, get a system that's known good under Linux (and you need to use a non-ideological distribution like Ubuntu which will ship proprietary drivers). Linux-focused or business models of major manufacturers are your best bet. 1) sounds like a hardware issue or hardware compatibility…

I strongly disagree with your assessment. First of all I don't know what kind of frankenstein Windows environment you are running to get those sorts of issues so lets put that aside. With Linux the issues are fundamental to how the OS is designed and maintained. Several of these issues were fixed only to come back one or two releases in the future. These sort of terrible regressions don't inspire confidence. You have…

> I strongly disagree with your assessment. First of all I don't know what kind of frankenstein Windows environment you are running to get those sorts of issues so lets put that aside.

I am happy to see you strongly disagree while making such a wild assumption even after I said it was factory pre-installed system.

I'm not using any "frankenstein Windows environment": this is factory installed and up-to-date Windows installation on a recent high end Windows laptop.

You are dismissing my experience in a worse way than you are saying your experiences are being dismissed. It's also not hard to find evidence of Windows messing up flash drives online too.

If all you can do is discuss in bad faith, there is no reason to discuss further.

Re: Burn My Windows

#280
Compiz has been my daily driver for the past 10 years, I highly recommend it to everyone (make sure you use CompizConfig Settings Manager to configure it).

If you do try it out, please _please_ ignore all the gimmicky effects (yes, including burning windows)- they're a distraction from the pure utilitarianism that compiz offers.

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