Reasons I love my laptop



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    Also, +1 for tiling window managers. And if I'll ever hear the "spatial" crap again, I'll have to drink more. I assure you, that no one of the 30+ people I know good and interact with everyday, don't have that oh-so-common spatial memory governing their way of life. It's easier to remember names than locations.

    How do they remember where they put their keys, or the TV remote?

    Remembering locations is what humans have been doing for millions of years. Remembering names? Tens of thousands, at best.



  • @Lingerance said:

    @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
    What I'm getting from your whining is that despite having worked out that the way you're doing something isn't a very good way to do it, you're so used to hopelessly bad Linux UIs that you didn't try any of the myriad alternative methods in Windows to find the one which works for you.
    Wow massive logic fail here. "He's saying that there should be a way to get enough information that all of the common HD/TS calls could be closed in a minute but Windows clearly can't do that so I'm going to say something completely unrelated to the argument because I like having HD/TS calls take longer than they should."



    Edit: There's another benefit to having all of the common support information provided from a single application, eventually the users will realize we need something from the support information application and we won't even have to walk them through opening it, they can explain their problem, we can ask them for the information we need immedately without having to walk them through getting it from whatever random place it's in. 1/5 calls will need to give information that isn't in that, but 4/5 will be dealt with in 1-2 minutes of call time instead of 3-5. For a busy HD/TS this is a massive time save.

    Sorry, perhaps I was mislead by the earlier Windows bashing. Since I'm currently trying to start a company training users in what they can expect from tech support, how to raise an issue with the helpdesk, etc etc. I'm not going to disagree that much of what helpdesks do is wrong, and much that Windows does could be made better. A lot of the problems can be solved with correct set-up to start with. The UI is the least of it, though.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    It's easier to remember names than locations.

    I'm sorry, but this is untrue.

    Call me when you've clicked "Cancel" by accident because some idiotic application decided to swap the OK/Cancel buttons. It's a very common annoyance when switching between Mac and Win systems, because Windows does OK/Cancel while OSX does Cancel/OK. You get used to it, because things usually stay in the same place.

    VSS is a particular offender because virtually none of its OK and Cancel/Close buttons are in standard locations.

    And how do you think typing works? Surely you don't stop to read the letter in each button? Random passwords? I have no idea what my email password is, but I can type it in anyway, because I remember the button locations and movements.

    @bannedfromcoding said:

    I assure you, that no one of the 30+ people I know good and interact with everyday, don't have that oh-so-common spatial memory governing their way of life.

    They do, but one hardly thinks about it because it's so basic and efficient.



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    I'm not going to disagree that much [...] that Windows does could be made better. A lot of the problems can be solved with correct set-up to start with. The UI is the least of it, though.
     

    For the record, from my usage of Ubuntu/GNOME over the past time, I have not seen any particularly better or worse UI elements. It works rather the same.

    I could make a list, but I don't see the point.

    Ubuntu 10 has a shitty theme, though. Dayum that shit is ugly.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Do you use a Linux distro from 2001, then complain about its shortcomings? No? Then maybe you should upgrade.

    If Vista hadn't been such a failure, that might actually be a valid point. However, there was so much negative feedback about Vista that Microsoft decided to provide a downgrade option back to XP for new computers that came with Vista. Due to all the problems, businesses were not keen on adopting it and opted to stay with the tried and true XP. Windows 7 was only released a bit over a year ago. It's common for businesses to replace computers only every 3 years, so there's still a lot of XP computers from the pre-7 era still in use (even more if you consider that not all might have adopted 7 early on). Various sources quote XP market share between 43% and 60%, with Vista and 7 combined racking up 43% at best (these statistics come from website hits and might not accurately represent the OS distribution in business use, but I believe they're at least in the right ballpark).

    Consider also that Vista was released 5 years after XP, and Windows 7 was released almost 3 years after Vista. That's only three releases in almost a decade. Ubuntu Linux was founded in 2004 and has cranked out 12 releases since that, with the 13th coming in about a week. Even Debian, notorious for its slow release cycle during most of the decade, has managed to get four releases out, with the fifth coming soon. So I don't think it's entirely unjustified to compare a Linux distro from 2007-2009 against XP, from a tech support perspective.

    Case in point, our company's workstations are mostly between one and three years old, with some older ones which are in the upgrade queue. We're a Linux shop and our user support likes to keep things somewhat uniform and stable, so most of us are running Ubuntu 8.10. A few lucky ones with newer machines have 9.10 I think. Our sister company which does Windows development still has XP installed on the majority of their computers.



  • @dhromed said:

    They do, but one hardly thinks about it because it's so basic and efficient.

    +1

    I have lived in my current apartment, which has sort of similar kitchen layout as my parents' house, for two and a half years. Before that I lived two years in an apartment with a completely different kitchen. Yet I still occasionally open the cupboard with plates in it before realizing that I'm keeping glasses in a different cupboard.

    With computers, I think I rely on shapes and colors (when available; my OS and GUI toolkit of choice has icons for common actions like ok and cancel) even more than exact locations. Overall locations do apply though - if a dialog has its action buttons somewhere else than teh bottom row, it'll take longer to find them. Not a lot longer, maybe on the order of a second, but still.



  • @pkmnfrk said:

    In the off chance that you ever do actual support for desktops (shudder), here's a handy reference chart:

    WindowsLinux
    1.Right click on the Network notification iconOpen xterm
    2.Click StatusType "su -"
    3.Click the Support tabEnter your password
    4.Tell me your IP addressType in "/usr/bin/ifconfig eth0"
    5.Okay, try "/sbin/ifconfig eth0"
    6.No no, ee, tee, aich, zero.
    7.Tell me your IP address.

    Note: The Linux column is derived entirely from a few quick google searches. YMMV.

    Revised chart:

    WindowsLinux (Gnome)
    1.Double-click on the network notification iconLeft-click on the network monitor icon
    2.Click the Support tabClick the Support tab
    3.Tell me your IP addressTell me your IP a ddress

    I'm certain KDE has something similar.



  •  

    @tdb said:

    +1
     

    Thanks for the kudos, appreciatin', but:

    @tdb said:

    If Vista hadn't been such a failure

    My failure is running quite fine here. I think it's a gross overstatement to call it a failure.

    @tdb said:

    Ubuntu Linux was founded in 2004 and has cranked out 12 releases since that, with the 13th coming in about a week.

    Ubuntu is currently at 10.x. Where do you get the extra three releases?

    Also, an Ubuntu "release" is akin to say, half a service pack for Windows. Each major version is a tiny change compared to each major version of Windows. The most fundamental change I've experienced since I first began with Ubuntu 8 is the theme and minor shuffle of UI elements and menu items. U10 also messes up the app manager. This can hardly be compared to the great changes from XP to Vista to 7.

    Every time I visit the Ubuntu website, I see a new major version. I really can't take that too seriously. Hell, Apple have been releasing "minor" versions since the original OSX, and they've done far more in those 0.1 versions than Ubuntu has in the last three majors.

    So as to not let my point get lost in the reciting of observations; what I am saying is the following:

    - Ubuntu major releases are relatively small and their integer values must not be compared to Windows' versions' integer values.
    - Version numbers can not be compared because there is no standard. There is no de facto document that decrees "change X is minor, change Y is major".

    @tdb said:

    We're a Linux shop and our user support likes to keep things somewhat uniform and stable, so most of us are running Ubuntu 8.10.

    9.x is less uniform and stable than 8.x? Just asking.

     

     

     



  • @dhromed said:

    My failure is running quite fine here. I think it's a gross overstatement to call it a failure.

    I guess it eats heaps of memory and processing power though, and you probably have a beefy graphics card to run it smoothly? Back when it came out, the Internet went aflame with complaints about Vista requiring at least two, preferably four gigabytes of RAM and a reasonably powerful discrete graphics card to even run the OS itself smoothly. And then there was the introduction of the new driver model which caused support for even slightly uncommon hardware to be flaky at best. These reasons made it a failure back in 2007, which doesn't mean it's still a failure. I don't know if they ever fixed the resource-hungriness in Vista, but at least Windows 7 fares a lot better on that front. Driver support has certainly improved.

    @dhromed said:

    Ubuntu is currently at 10.x. Where do you get the extra three releases?

    Two releases per year. Note that the "version number" has a format year.month, not major.minor, so the first ever release was 4.10 (released in October 2004).

    @dhromed said:
    Also, an Ubuntu "release" is akin to say, half a service pack for Windows. Each major version is a tiny change compared to each major version of Windows.

    True, that. However, the point was not so much the amount of changes made, but rather the number of available upgrade points for businesses. As I explained, with Vista release flopping like it did, many businesses didn't have a real alternative to XP until the release of 7 last year. If some release of Ubuntu had a bad kernel or buggy X server, it wouldn't be more than half a year until the next release was out, with a high probability that the problems were fixed.

    Turning the tables around, we could also call Windows XP with SP3 an OS released in 2008, again making it fair to compare against a Linux distro more recent than 2001.

    @dhromed said:

    9.x is less uniform and stable than 8.x? Just asking.

    What I meant by uniform is that they like to run as few different versions of the OS as possible. Likewise for stable; upgrading the OS twice a year would disrupt our work more than the upgrade is worth.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Fixed in 7.
    Not in classic theme (I'd use Aero if it didn't limit the colour customization so much it's as if it wasn't there).@blakeyrat said:
    But this brings up another quirk in Windows 7... 7 has a bit of code to prevent you from dragging the window controls above the viewport to prevent them from getting clipped.
    Speaking of this, is there any way to disable this code? I often want to place a non-maximized window to the edge of the screen (nearly hiding it's mostly useless titlebar - it's functionality would still be fully accessible thanks to the infinite edge), but the stupid window manager always bumps it down.@blakeyrat said:
    @dhromed said:
    - systen tray notification area :(((
    Fixed in 7.
    Again, not in classic theme (the notification area is actually pretty broken with it, the icons sometimes arrange themselves in 2 rows, other times in 1 row - apparently because sometimes the taskbar is 2 pixels higher than other times, though I have no idea what decides it's initial height - it's completely random).@blakeyrat said:
    because then I'd try to drag them around 15 times a day and then get confused/annoyed when they refused to move, then have to do that stupid "minimize, drag to other monitor, maximize" thing which is annoying.
    You're using Windows 7, right? You can drag maximized windows without restoring them first.@blakeyrat said:
    True; but you can't do that on the left monitor anyway.
    You can, if it's positioned higher than the right monitor (there's an interesting UI feature at work here though: if you move your mouse towards the corner too fast, Windows will bump the cursor to the next monitor, even if it would have to get caught in the corner).@blakeyrat said:
    Ah yes, I remember now. But the visual appearance didn't imply that it did, so it was still a bit goofy.
    IIRC, it was XP that added the feature, which moves your mouse 2 pixels to the actual button when you click in the corner. @blakeyrat said:
    It... it does? How do you turn it on?
    Only works with top/bottom edge, not left/right.@pkmnfrk said:

    In the off chance that you ever do actual support for desktops (shudder), here's a handy reference chart:

    WindowsLinux
    1.Right click on the Network notification iconOpen xterm
    ...
    For Windows 7 it's actually: click the network icon in the notification area; click the Open network and sharing center link/menu item (depending on whether you left/right-clicked; hopefully you didn't double-click it, because that'll ensure nothing happens). Find the "Local area connection link" on the page and click it (hopefully you don't have any VPN clients or similar, which could add several of these links). Click the Detauls button. Locate the line that says "IPv4 Address".
    With Linux it greatly depends on the desktop environment, but opening any terminal and running /sbin/ifconfig should work everywhere (you don't have to become root if you just want to view the IP).@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
    I think he's talking about needing to use ctrl-tab occasionally in badly written 3rd party apps to switch focus from a dialogue box to a main window. Not a Windows issue.
    Actually, he's talking about modal dialogs, which prevent you from using the window behind them. Some people find them very annoying for some reasons.@tdb said:
    If Vista hadn't been such a failure, that might actually be a valid point. However, there was so much negative feedback about Vista that Microsoft decided to provide a downgrade option back to XP for new computers that came with Vista.
    Downgrade was always available when the new OS started shipping - it was the same with XP/2000. Vista's problem was that it required 2GB of RAM for normal work, at the time when OEMs were shipping computers with 512MB as standard. Windows 7 slightly optimized RAM usage, and in the mean time computers with 2GB became standard, so it didn't suffer the same fate, even though it's more Vista 1.1 than anything else.


  • @tdb said:

    I don't know if they ever fixed the resource-hungriness in Vista, but at least Windows 7 fares a lot better on that front.
     

    I don't know either. I've got 32-bit Vista here, and SP1 offered itself after some time, and the graphics card is an onboard Ati 3680 with 256MB that's probably stolen form main ram. I don't think that's 'beefy'. For comparison, My home card is an Ati 4850 with a gig of RAM, which is plenty beefy for the time being.

    I've never had any performance issues.

    @tdb said:

    Note that the "version number" has a format year.month, not major.minor,

    I didnt know that. It seems a shame that there is yet another arbitrary version system that appears to mimic major.minor, but is in fact something quite different.

    @tdb said:

    As I explained, with Vista release flopping like it did, many businesses didn't have a real alternative to XP until the release of 7 last year. If some release of Ubuntu had a bad kernel or buggy X server, it wouldn't be more than half a year until the next release was out, with a high probability that the problems were fixed.

    Good points.

     @tdb said:

    Turning the tables around, we could also call Windows XP with SP3 an OS released in 2008, again making it fair to compare against a Linux distro more recent than 2001.

    That sounds fair to me, especially as it's a very good comparison, XPSP3 and Ubuntu 8+ being roughly on par with eachother. So far, I really prefer Vista to Ubuntu, but I should make work of upgrading to U10 on the ol' hobby box, and see how I fare. I've been meaning to transfer to a VM instead of a physical machine, but VPC is not quite compatible and VMware Free requires a registration. VNC works quite well for now.

    My main goal with all this Ubuntu futzing is basically to gauge the out-of-the-box experience. So far I think it's okay, but there's nothing that, as a normal user, really makes me jump ship. Perhaps GNOME is trying to be Windows too much and thus blanding itself into the Meh zone.



  • @ender said:

    he's talking about modal dialogs, which prevent you from using the window behind them. Some people find them very annoying for some reasons.
     

    Aero has an interesting and highly annoying behavioural change for Alt-Tabbing and modal dialogs. This affects the following programs I use:

    - Editplus's Search dialog, which is a nonmodal i.e. you can click on the text area and it becomes unfocused but still in the foreground. Alt-Tabbing to it will focus the main window instead of the dialog.

    - Photoshop's color picker is modal, but due to the strange way in which Adobe compatibilitizes its apps with Windows,  Alt-Tabbing to PS with the picker open leads to the odd situation of nothing at all being focused.

    Confusion: when switching from Classic to Aero, this effect does not come into play until next reboot.

    It's probably very explainable in terms of Aero's window manager, but it really sucks.


  • @tdb said:

    If Vista hadn't been such a failure, that might actually be a valid point. However, there was so much negative feedback about Vista that Microsoft decided to provide a downgrade option back to XP for new computers that came with Vista.

    Well, ok, but all that doesn't change the fact that XP was designed in 2001.

    I mean, look, I know what you're getting at. And it bugs me, because so few of the things that went wrong with Vista were Microsoft's fault*, or even under Microsoft's control... but the point I was making is that XP is old and creaky. You saying that a lot of people use XP doesn't change that fundamental point. My company started putting Vista on new desktops and laptops about a year after it came out, and we've had zero problems-- most people are perfectly happy with it. It just had a really rough first few months.

    Asterisk: Problems that Microsoft had control over:
    Strategic Error: Assuming that Vista would only need to run on medium-to-high spec software, which had the effect of completely shutting it out of the netbook market. Since netbooks were non-existent when Vista's hardware specs were nailed down, this is understandable, but still a problem.
    Tactical Errors: Vista's first-run experience was significantly worse than it's performance after being installed a few days. It aggressively indexed files, it threw up a ton of UAC prompts while users installed the first round of software, etc. Since reviewers only run the OS a couple days, they got a lot of bad reviews due to this.

    Problems Microsoft didn't have control over:
    Laziest hardware developers on Earth!

    @tdb said:

    Consider also that Vista was released 5 years after XP, and Windows 7 was released almost 3 years after Vista. That's only three releases in almost a decade. Ubuntu Linux was founded in 2004 and has cranked out 12 releases since that, with the 13th coming in about a week.

    Well maybe they should slow down until they can reliably sleep my laptop.



  • @ender said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Fixed in 7.
    Not in classic theme

    Yeah, you're CHOOSING the broken theme. If you go out of your way to use the broken theme, you don't get to complain about it being broken.

    @ender said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    because then I'd try to drag them around 15 times a day and then get confused/annoyed when they refused to move, then have to do that stupid "minimize, drag to other monitor, maximize" thing which is annoying.
    You're using Windows 7, right? You can drag maximized windows without restoring them first.

    I did not know that, thanks. But then again, I never maximize windows, so.

    @ender said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    It... it does? How do you turn it on?
    Only works with top/bottom edge, not left/right.

    Ah, I see what he was talking about now. People need to stop playing Vague!



  • @dhromed said:

    - Photoshop's color picker is modal, but due to the strange way in which Adobe compatibilitizes its apps with Windows,  Alt-Tabbing to PS with the picker open leads to the odd situation of nothing at all being focused.

    Anything Adobe's shitty-ass shit does, you can't blame the OS on. They go so far out of the way to break the OS' window manager, it's a miracle it runs at all.

    Edit: The real craziness here being that there is a correct OS-approved way of skinning widgets-- look at Expression Web 3, it has a very Photoshop-esque appearance using native Windows widgets. Adobe just doesn't use it, presumably so they can use a single code-base across Windows and OS X? I dunno why.



  • @pkmnfrk said:

    @dhromed said:

    @pkmnfrk said:

    In the off chance that you ever do actual support for desktops (*shudder*), here's a handy reference chart:

    Windows
    1.Right click on the Network notification icon
    2.Click Status

     

    Addenda:

    1. in XP, the icon may also be double-clicked. This is an action that most normal users will know, even before they know how to single-click. I forget what happens in Vista+
    2. In XP, the icon is off by default on any new installation.

     

    1. Oh, hey, I didn't know that. Cool, I'll update my chart. (Edit: Actually, no I won't, since you can't edit old posts? WTF? I hate this forum)
    2. Really? I know wireless connections are displayed by default...

     

    In XP, by default, the wired network connections icon is hidden when everything's working properly. If the connection is broken for some reason, the icon pops up to let you know about it. There is an option somewhere to change this behavior so that the icon is always displayed.

    By default, the wireless connections icon is displayed at all times, connected or not.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Adobe just doesn't use it, presumably so they can use a single code-base across Windows and OS X? I dunno why.
     

    Adobe's teams hardly swap notes, except when it's by decree of management. The widgets are often almost the same but not quite. Ai and Ps's color pickers, for example, look almost the same and work almost the same, so I'm rather certain there is not a whole lot of shared, generic, standardized code between them.

    Turns out Illustrator on Windows doesn't spawn a normal window. This is evidenced by the fact that Taskbar Shuffle (an indispensible UI enhancement tool!), which supports middle-click on a taskbar item to Close, cannot close Ai with a middle-click.

     





  • well, at least we know novell doesn't overspend on marketing.

    I also stopped having the linux vs windows debate several years ago. Linux just works, have been using it fulltime since 2000. Couldn't care less if there are still people who think you need to use the terminal to work with linux, not my problem.



  • @stratos said:

    Couldn't care less
     

    Bonus points for using the correct version of this expression.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Yeah, you're CHOOSING the broken theme. If you go out of your way to use the broken theme, you don't get to complain about it being broken.
    You just described Aero for me. Not being able to reverse text/background colours makes it broken for me, since my eyes start hurting.



  • Reading this thread has forced me to vent about my recent Windows v Linux experience...



    My Windows 7 box hardlocks when I play games (and sometimes just sitting there) and I don't know why. I've tried everything: HW replacement, drivers, OS reinstall, 32 & 64 bit, testing every little thing. It just hardlocks. So I've just put up with it.



    But a crash corrupted my Assassin's Creed 2 save file and it sent me over the edge. In desperation I ripped my HDD out of my old, creaky Ubuntu box, slammed it in my Win7 box, installed Wine, and holy crap the game runs. Kind of slow sometimes BUT IT DOESN'T HARDLOCK.



    Not only that but my 360 controller works better, too. I can actually use all the buttons on it. My 360 controller. No, really.



    To add insult to insult to injury Win7 now says my Windows key is invalid. (It's not.)



    I use Win7 -and- Linux (and even Mac) and usually have the same amount of headaches everywhere... but this experience, just, well, WTF.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    It bothers me, I have a friend like you who's big into Linux (well, OS X, but same shit) and spends all his time just doing stupid shit. "Hey look I wrote a decompiler for shared libraries!" "Why?" "IT'S FUN!!!" Not only is it not fun, but he spends hours and hours on these dumb projects and they're all completely useless... I keep trying to talk him into making something useful and bringing in some moolah, but he thinks it's more "fun" to play some geeky haxor version of "capture the flag" involving stealing passwords from-- I don't even know the whole thing was so stupid.

    [image]
    Sorry but this just had to be said.



  • Ugh, haven't we instituted the XKCD Death Penalty yet?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Ugh, haven't we instituted the XKCD Death Penalty yet?

    That makes the assumption we care.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Ugh, haven't we instituted the XKCD Death Penalty yet?
     

    Because XKCD is FUN!

    I mean that. I like it.



  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Ugh, haven't we instituted the XKCD Death Penalty yet?
     

    Because XKCD is FUN!

    I mean that. I like it.

    The problem isn't that the comic is bad, the problem is that it crops up on forums like this ALL THE FREAKIN TIME.

    Remember when everybody used to quote Monty Python skits constantly? Remember how goddamned annoying it was? That's not to say Monty Python skits are bad.

    XKCD is the new "quoting Monty Python skits". If you can't write your own material, just don't bother posting at all.

    In any case, I still move that writing a shared library decompiler is not fun. And I think that anybody who believes that it is fun is mentally deficient. And I think that anybody who spends their time writing shared library decompilers would be better off spending their time writing something other people would buy.



  • @ender said:

    opening any terminal and running /sbin/ifconfig should work everywhere (you don't have to become root if you just want to view the IP)
    You know, this works on Windows too, except the command is "ipconfig".



  • @blakeyrat said:

    the problem is that it crops up on forums like this ALL THE FREAKIN TIME.

    Remember when everybody used to quote Monty Python skits constantly?

     

    Fair enough.


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