For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

In the end, my dad actually got on board with Firefox which was awesome! But then Chrome came out and he won't try it and I'm not about to try to push it more than the passing comment I made about it a few weeks back. My mother on the other hand won't switch to anything. She won't even let you upgrade from IE7. She's now dating a guy who does IT work for the IL State Gov and she listened to him and at least upgraded. Thank god for her new boyfriend. Now I go to him whenever she needs computer help. I call and say "hey, you're the new computer guy in the family. Mom needs X done. Can you go over there?" and I no longer do computer support for my mother.

So chill out, man. We may be a community of techies but we can't possibly know it all. What may seem a obvious to you may not be to another one of us. It doesn't mean we're stupid. For example, its like the back end web programmers who know little to nothing of front end stuff. It may seem like someone who knows that complicated back end stuff can easily figure out HTML and CSS in an hour but sometimes not. Just chill.

Yes, network manager is pretty bad especially if you want to configure multiple static IP addresses. I happily just uninstall it and configure by hand for a server or static desktop. The problem is when you are using a laptop and want to hop between a number of different networks, setting up a wireless network from the command line is a major PIA and not something I'd want to do just to use my laptop in a coffee shop.

You can set update manager not to get new versions of Ubuntu but in that case you had better install an LTS release otherwise you'll possibly stop getting security updates after a year or so plus you will want to keep their browser reasonably upto date (although a 3rd party PPA may solve that).

See, that's what I'm talking about. Lots of the crap Windows throws at you is simply accepted because people do not even realize anymore that it's crap.

To name a few which annoy me every time I am forced to use Windows:

-No or very limited customization of the entire GUI (or the OS in general, for no reason whatsoever - this goes for OS X, too, btw).

-Forced mouse usage, either because it's impossible to do something with the keyboard or it's highly inconvenient to do so.

-Hiding basic functionality (for example, showing/hiding hidden folders) deep in some non-intuitive system menus.

-Often being forced to do something in a specific way because someone at Microsoft thought this should be the only way to do something, whether that's intuitive and/or efficient or not. More often than not, it's neither.

I could go on like this for hours, but I'll admit that I am in fact biased myself. Still, many of the things that annoy me have been noticed by people I know (and who use Windows) as well. Any single one of the points I noted above are deal breakers for me.

>Sure you have more problems with virus/crapware etc but getting their long suffering nephew to come around every few months to re-install everything may well be less of an inconvenience than not being able to use their Windows only cross stitch software or train simulator etc.

I don't think so. That's what wine is for, and 95% of all programs will run flawlessly with it. If you set it up correctly on a user-friendly distro, they will not even notice the difference.

Maybe you can even find free (as in Freedom) alternatives. For lots of applications, these exist, and for the most part, they are either on par or sometimes better than their Windows-only counterparts. I already try to convert people to cross-platform applications on Windows (for example, Pidgin) so they could more easily switch to a better OS some day.

>My point is that looking at badly rendered websites and having poor usability may still be better for them than losing use of this app.

And my point is that badly rendered websites is the price those corporations will have to pay if they want to continue to use their application. The retarded, foresight-lacking decisions of corporate management years ago are no - I repeat, NO - reason for catering to IE6 users. It's like we are rewarding their stupid decision when instead we should punish it - by stopping to support (and consequently, block access for) IE6, completely.