Mac is for usability
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@ubersoldat said:
Select some text and it's copied to the clipboard, paste it with middle button... why bother with copy/paste???
Because half the time I want to select text and NOT copy it.
Pasting with middle button might be ok, though.
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@boomzilla said:
@havokk said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Why the fuck is the toolbar at the top of the screen instead of the top of the window? This if flat-out retarded and indefensible.
I can defend that one (if I'm reading what you are saying correctly). It is the concept of the "mile-high menu". To get to the menu you just mash your mouse as far up the desk as you can reach. No fine motor skills required; can be done by people who haven't got the hang yet of moving the mouse.
No
Yes.
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@blakeyrat said:
Screens have a bit higher resolution than 512x342 here in the year 2012.
Even 5 years ago, I'd still agree with you. Today, sitting in front of two 23" 1080p monitors? No.
The infinitely large widget at the edge of the screen works regardless of screen size.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Why the fuck is the toolbar at the top of the screen instead of the top of the window? This if flat-out retarded and indefensible.
Menu bar at top allows for faster access and consistent location. For exactly the same reason, the
StartWindows button in the taskbar is active in the corner pixel of the screen, and applications in the bar are clickable at the very bottom pixel of the screen, an dthe Close button and window icon of a maximized window arce active in the top corners of the screen.This is basic UI theory. You really should have known this.
@morbiuswilters said:
Settings implicitly apply without me doing anything to save them. Backing out changes becomes a game of wits.
Agreed.
@morbiuswilters said:
Configurability: less-than-non-existent. If you don't like the way something works, tough shit.
Agreed.
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@ubersoldat said:
Because I don't want my clipboard contents trashed because I've selected something (either accidentally, or because I'm going to do something with that selection like move it or drag and drop it)?- Select some text and it's copied to the clipboard, paste it with middle button... why bother with copy/paste???
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@PJH said:
Because I don't want my clipboard contents trashed because I've selected something (either accidentally, or because I'm going to do something with that selection like move it or drag and drop it)?
There are actually two clipboards (at least in my ubuntu unity environment): The ctrl-c/ctrl-v clipboard, and the select/middle-click clipboard.
It works well for me, though there's one problem with the gnome terminal emulator: Selecting something and then hitting ctrl-c doesn't copy the selected content to the ctrl-c clipboard. (I guess it would kill the currently running process, because that's what ctrl-c *usually* does on a terminal) So I need to use the "select/middle click" clipboard from the terminal. Like, when I am viewing a log file in a terminal and want to google for some log message, I select the text and then I want to paste it into the firefox search box. However, double-clicking into the search box (to select all text, then delete, then middle-click) will select any old text in the search box and therefore remove the log message from the clipboard. That's pretty annoying. [strike]Luckily, firefox now supports "right click->paste and search" (or whatever it is called in english), which is a workaround for my only problem with linux clipboards. :)[/strike] (whoops, that's a lie. Of course that will paste thectrl-c clipboard. The actual workaround is to click into the box, then hold ctrl-delete and then ctrl-backspace until the box is empty, then middle click.)
I like how easy it is to set up and keep up to date most development environments on most Linux distros. Also, unity is fine IMO. I like win7, but I almost never use it because I'm used to ubuntu, and I'm tired of having to do most application updates manually. Never used a mac, so I can't really say anything about macs.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Now here are my complaints:
- Why the fuck is the toolbar at the top of the screen instead of the top of the window? This if flat-out retarded and indefensible.
So you can fling the pointer at it. It's easy to quicly hit a target if you can't overshoot it. Yes, it feels weird when you're used to the menu being part of the application window, but that doesn't make it bad, no matter how you choose to say "I'm scared of things that are different".
@morbiuswilters said:
- Why can't I maximize windows? I had this argument with an Apple zombie. *takes huge iBong hit* "Well, man, you don't need to maximize windows, man." "I want to. I'm viewing a web page and I don't want to see all of my other windows around the periphery, I want the web page to take up the whole screen." *silence* "You just don't get Macs, man." "Shut the fuck and get a job you worthless goddamn hippie."
You absolutely can maximise windows. If you feel the need, you can put pretty much anything into fullscreen mode as well, just to be gratuitous about it (Added in Lion/10.7, no I don't like the stupid cat names either).
@morbiuswilters said:
- The visual style. Brushed aluminum and plastic icons abound. It's tacky and unprofessional. I feel like I'm looking at a Fisher Price toy.
Windows styles look way more plasticy to me. The grey of the brushed aluminium (which has been toned down in later revisions) is something I don't find distracting in any way. Linux is improving, but is still at least 50% fucking awful.
@morbiuswilters said:
- Settings implicitly apply without me doing anything to save them. Backing out changes becomes a game of wits.
Yeah, this can be annoying, but the more important (e.g. system wide) settings require confirmation.
@morbiuswilters said:
- I have to "mount" a file (which then appears on my desktop) so I can install an application. Then I need to unmount it. What the fuck is this shit?
Ok, it's a strange way to behave, mimicking a physical drive. If you just pack an executable in there, it's a waste. If you're packaging useful docs, etc with an application, it's a lot cleaner than zip files.
@morbiuswilters said:
- Stability: non-existent. The Macs I worked with crashed the OS on a regular basis (at least once a week). It was like working with Windows 98 with Active Desktop again, but in 2009.
I definitely haven't had this experience. Current uptime for the macbook I'm writing this on is 6 days. Last restart was down to me being disorganised and not getting it back on AC power in time.
@morbiuswilters said:
- Configurability: less-than-non-existent. If you don't like the way something works, tough shit.
The only thing I've wanted to change that I can't is switching to a tiling window manager. Yes, this is a terrible situation, but it's not like I'd have more luck in Windows.
@morbiuswilters said:
- Package managers: there are 3 third-party package managers and none of them are worth a wet dog shit. Trying to set up a development environment with Apache and MySQL is like having your balls cut off. And forget trying to compile non-OSX packages.
Yep. About the only package manager I've ever genuinely liked is apt. Homebrew is pretty solid though, with a couple of exceptions (gnu-prolog package, I'm looking at you). MacPorts was horrible because it tried to build an entirely independent system next to the main mac system. Homebrew uses the base when it can and augments it. Yes, it's an add on, no it's not as bad as you claim.
@morbiuswilters said:
- Terminal.app is a piece of shit. iTerm isn't much better. Why the fuck don't HOME and END function properly? Listen, Apple: you lost the fucking desktop wars. Stop trying to be different and start trying to be useful.
I'm not thrilled with the keybindings either, but they are both capable of loading ZSH on multiple tabs and allowing me to interact with it, so that's pretty much job done there.
I can see absolutely fuck all there that Windows does better.
Oh, and just to be clear, my like of Apple products extends only to the MacBook line of products. Desktop machines, and any of their products beginning with 'i' can fuck right off.
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@Juifeng said:
though there's one problem with the gnome terminal emulator: Selecting something and then hitting ctrl-c doesn't copy the selected content to the ctrl-c clipboard. (I guess it would kill the currently running process, because that's what ctrl-c usually does on a terminal) So I need to use the "select/middle click" clipboard from the terminal.
You could right click the selected text and press 'copy', or use ctrl-shift-c.
Still pretty annoying to do though.
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@dhromed said:
Menu bar at top allows for faster access and consistent location. For exactly the same reason, the
StartWindows button in the taskbar is active in the corner pixel of the screen, and applications in the bar are clickable at the very bottom pixel of the screen, an dthe Close button and window icon of a maximized window arce active in the top corners of the screen.Stuff like the Start button makes sense. It's basically a system wide menu. An application's menu, however, applies just to that application. I suppose that if you are the sort to always run applications maximized (or at least docked to the top of the screen) then having the main menu bar at the top isn't a big deal. Maybe I just have more limited visual focus / tunnel vision or something, but having to jump around like that bothers me and really feels disruptive. It's like not having task bar on each monitor.
Also, when the menu is part of the window, I can go directly to the menu when the current focus is on another window. On the tiny screens of yore, it probably made very little difference, but I've managed to claw my way out of that sad hole, and now I have plenty of screen real estate.
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@SilentRunner said:
Eventually he swapped the motherboard to make his computer usable again. lol
WTF are you talking about?
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@Mr. DOS said:
@SilentRunner said:
Eventually he swapped the motherboard to make his computer usable again. lol
WTF are you talking about?Sounds like he set a BIOS password or something, and just swapped out the motherboard (where that's kept) to get rid of it.
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@boomzilla said:
Stuff like the Start button makes sense. It's basically a system wide menu. An application's menu, however, applies just to that application
In some ways I find OSX's method superior to Windows especially in the case of having multiple windowed applications open. With OSX you don't waste the same screen space that Windows does by having every instance of an application include its own menu - so theoretically the OSX windows are more size efficient. However I find the biggest advantage (or perhaps disadvantage to Windows) is when I jump back to Widows from OSX. In Windows with multiple applications open I find myself thinking "I need to go to file->open" (or some such) and then click on what I think is the applicable menu - only to find that I clicked on the menu of the application instance that was just peeking out from underneath the window I wanted to click on. In the case of OSX I know there is only one menu, so I am always guaranteed that the menu I am clicking on is that of the top most application. (of course I am discounting the disadvantage of having to bring an OSX window to the front before you can use the menu)
But given that we all drive our computers via the keyboard this difference in methodology between the two systems is pretty inconsequential. I'd rather bitch about how in OSX it was only in Lion that you could finally resize windows from any edge, instead of the bottom right corner.
But my biggest gripe right now is actually the App store. I use Textwrangler as my basic text editing app. Recently I upgraded to the latest version and did so via their App store version rather than download and install the program from their website. This week I wanted to do some apache configuration for the server running locally to my Mac. I found out that Textwrangler would not let me edit anything under /etc, even if I invoked it from the command line with sudo. Sure I could read the files, but I couldn't write anything back. It seems that Apple has set the condition that any app on the App store is not allowed to modify "system" files. Not even, "yes you can write, as long as you can authenticate an account with valid permissions" - instead it's a flat out removal of the functionality. Fortunately the authors of Textwrangler don't rely on the App store to distribute their software and I believe that if I download the app from their website I will get back the functionality that I want/need.
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@Juifeng said:
There are actually two clipboards (at least in my ubuntu unity environment): The ctrl-c/ctrl-v clipboard, and the select/middle-click clipboard.
And that's not because its a feature - it's indicative of a system that is a conglomeration of what came before it with no thought to uniformity. (or you could argue that it's extremely backward compatible)
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@boomzilla said:
@Mr. DOS said:
WTF are you talking about?
Sounds like he set a BIOS password or something, and just swapped out
the motherboard (where that's kept) to get rid of it.Sure, but
- that it was a Windows password was clearly stated ("That reminds me of a former boss's
son who set up a password to log into Windows when his computer booted.
Then he promptly forgot what the password was."), and - even if it
were a BIOS password, unplugging the machine and pulling the CMOS
battery for a few minutes would probably have removed it
I'm not necessarily calling bogus story, but I [i]am[/i] callling idiot.
- that it was a Windows password was clearly stated ("That reminds me of a former boss's
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@OzPeter said:
only to find that I clicked on the menu of the application instance that was just peeking out from underneath the window I wanted to click on.
That inactive menu is greyed out. I don't see how you can make that mistake. Advantage dismissed.
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@dhromed said:
Regardless of the menu state, if I still click on the wrong menu I am still clicking on the wrong menu - there is an advantage to implementing systems that eliminate a whole class of errors rather than just mitigate them (even if they are PEBKAC errors)@OzPeter said:
only to find that I clicked on the menu of the application instance that was just peeking out from underneath the window I wanted to click on.
That inactive menu is greyed out. I don't see how you can make that mistake. Advantage dismissed.
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@boomzilla said:
Stuff like the Start button makes sense. It's basically a system wide menu. An application's menu, however, applies just to that application.
The "Apple menu" is in the menu bar, so grouping menus together like that makes sense (in a way). Each window still has its own toolbar, so that's not dissimilar - though the floating palettes do annoy me somewhat, especially when to manipulate them only has a 2px hit area. OSX is going in the direction of iOS anyway with the Lion full screen mode - even Windows 8 is heading in a similar direction with Metro. Menus are so last century and ribbons are the bastard child of menus where you get the worst of both worlds.
UI features that annoys me the most in Mac: having to click to activate a window before it receives click events; and the only resize point is the bottom right of the window.
UI feature that annoys me the most in Windows: scroll wheel tends to scroll the active window (or active "frame"), but sometimes the thing that the mouse is over. Mac software is actually more consistent in this despite only getting more than one mouse button "yesterday". I guess this scrolling feature lulls one into a false sense of the current window.
UI feature that annoys me the most in "Linux": inconsistency between toolkits. If you want to be different from Windows or Mac, that's generally (often? sometimes?) fine, but at least be consistent about it! One could have a dozen programs running simultaneously each with a different way to scroll a window: different look on the scroll bars; or left click to scroll down, right click to scroll up; double arrows; middle click does something; etc. It is better these days, but some problems remain.There are probably other things that annoy me but I can't think of them at this second. Certainly my iMac has never properly crashed (the only Kernel Panic I've seen OSX do is on a Hackintosh) but then neither has any of my Windows 7 machines, nor XP post SP2, nor most of my Linux installs. Apps on all OSes are a different story. The Windows 2008 SBS BSODs all the time, though. It is running in VMware which might be its total problem: I got permission to migrate it to SBS 2011 on real hardware today, but since my wife is 8 months pregnant with twins I'll be waiting until after they are born!
I also started using a 27" iMac at work today, upgraded from a 20". Time Machine backup and restore was supposed to be quick and easy, but it didn't work properly for me: all the unix permissions were incorrect and I couldn't access my Documents. I eventually fixed it all though, with a lot more bother than the average person would know. All the extra resolution is pure luxury at the moment, similar to when I got the old (1920x1200) cinema display as a secondary monitor on the 20 incher. And having 12GB RAM means I can actually run Photoshop, Eclipse, Illustrator, Firefox, Flash, Acrobat, LibreOffice, and a few other things all at the same time, unlike where just four of those programs would cause the pinwheel of death on the maxed-out 4GB 20".
@dhromed said:
an dthe Close button and window icon of a maximized window arce active in the top corners of the screen.
I remember FVWM95 was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Windows 95's look and feel. A maximised FVWM95 menu still had a pixel of titlebar around the close button, so it wasn't an infinite size button. Which was jarring when you don't realise how much you depend on it being that way.
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@Mr. DOS said:
I'm not necessarily calling bogus story, but I am callling idiot.
Yes, that was the point of the story in the first place.
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@OzPeter said:
Regardless of the menu state, if I still click on the wrong menu I am still clicking on the wrong menu - there is an advantage to implementing systems that eliminate a whole class of errors rather than just mitigate them (even if they are PEBKAC errors)
Now you've traded one error for another. I need to know which window is active. Which may be a long ways away from the menu. So instead of having all of the information right there, I have to work harder to make sure I'm doing the right thing.
I accept that some people prefer that way of working, and it doesn't really bother me, since I have confidence that I'll be able to avoid having to use such an environment.
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@Mr. DOS said:
@boomzilla said:
@Mr. DOS said:
WTF are you talking
about?Sounds like he set a BIOS password or something, and just swapped out
the motherboard (where that's kept) to get rid of it.Sure, but
- that it was a Windows password was clearly stated ("That reminds me of a former boss's
son who set up a password to log into Windows when his computer booted.
Then he promptly forgot what the password was."), and - even if it
were a BIOS password, unplugging the machine and pulling the CMOS
battery for a few minutes would probably have removed it
I'm not necessarily calling bogus story, but I am callling idiot.
Sarcastic, but realistic, response: It's a good thing that no one ever refers to their personal computer as "Windows", otherwise the terminology could get conflated or something, causing confusion. It's also fortunate that everyone has anyone with enough knowledge to get in to the BIOS has also read the comprehensive, written-by-a-native-English-speaker manual front to back and knows that you can reset the BIOS. And in the rare case that one doesn't know how to fix something, actively looking for the proper solution is always the first thing you try.
Pedantic response: If you set a password that prevents logging into Windows, that's not necessarily the same thing as forgetting your Windows password. If you set your BIOS password, and then forget it, that will certainly prevent you from logging in to windows.
- that it was a Windows password was clearly stated ("That reminds me of a former boss's
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Sutherlands said:
- I can drag windows while holding the mouse button... why would I need the alt key?
Holding alt lets you grab any part of the window to drag, instead of just the title bar. It seems like a very minor feature.
It sounds like that would make it impossible for an application to assign some special function to alt+click. If that's the case I can see why no one else does it.
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@KattMan said:
You're locked in if you use an iDevice. Using a Mac as your main PC for work, not really. Most applications people use for work on the Mac exist on Windows too.@SandGroper said:
I always thought that macs got where they are by putting usability and design first.
See that's where you are wrong. They got where they are by having a kick ass marketing team. They kept thier customers by locking them in so they couldn't go anywhere else without rebuilding a lot of thier data.
Sounds like standard business practices to me.
I don't find Macs any easier or simpler to use than Windows. But they sure are pretty :)
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@boomzilla said:
I accept that some people prefer that way of working, and it doesn't really bother me, since I have confidence that I'll be able to avoid having to use such an environment.
It doesn't bother me either. Its only an issue when I swap from one system to another and don't properly reset my internal model from one system to the other.
I'm much more afraid of Apple seemingly trying to force the iOS model onto the desktop (and from what I have seen of Windows 8, MS looks to be going down a similar path as well). Some peoples love affair with iOS seems to blind them to the fact that it precludes overlapping windows and that it also is a move back to the pre-windows/mac days of interacting with only one application at a time, and not being able to easily share data between different Apps - which would kill my productivity.
As for trading off errors. Meh. yeah I don't think either methodology stands out from the other, but I still prefer OSX's style over W7 (although I do like W7 way more than XP - something I thought I'd never say).
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@morbiuswilters said:
Really, if you have to spend much time thinking about your window manager (beyond settings for "no effects" and "heavy eyecandy"), you have failed as a desktop OS. The competition between dozens of WMs in FOSSland hasn't produced good WMs, it's produced dozens of mediocre WMs. Most are just lame imitations of Windows or OSX. Where they have diverged from the Big Two, it's not towards better UX but towards who can shave the most kilobytes off memory usage by making the most minimal desktop possible. At best, they're toys for power users with OCD.
I use xmonad, but I stopped editing the config file once I had something that basically worked, so if I'm OCD I'm not very good at it.
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@dhromed said:
The infinitely large widget at the edge of the screen works regardless of screen size.
Not if it takes longer to move the mouse to the edge of the screen than it does to target something nearer the cursor, even considering the additional time needed for aiming. Also, my home computer has a non-rectangular screen surface, which really screws up the concept for several screen edges.
Yes, if I set my mouse speed to "uber-super-fast-ultra" then I'd be able to shoot it to the edge quickly. But I'd also never be able to use any controls, so that's not a very good trade-off.
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@Juifeng said:
There are actually two clipboards (at least in my ubuntu unity environment): The ctrl-c/ctrl-v clipboard, and the select/middle-click clipboard.
People (not uber-geeks, people) have enough trouble coping with the concept of one invisible clipboard. The Linux solution is to add another? That behaves entirely differently? Then, let me guess, we post whiny Slashdot stories like, "why aren't more people using desktop Linux?"
@Juifeng said:
I like how easy it is to set up and keep up to date most development environments on most Linux distros.
Too bad the resulting development environment is a shitty IDE with a shitty debugger which is only capable of compiling shitty languages.
@Juifeng said:
I like win7, but I almost never use it because I'm used to ubuntu, and I'm tired of having to do most application updates manually.
You should try setting up a development environment on it. Not only would it be quicker and easier, but you'd end up with a IDE that didn't suck. Also: no Java in sight.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Juifeng said:
There are actually two clipboards (at least in my ubuntu unity environment): The ctrl-c/ctrl-v clipboard, and the select/middle-click clipboard.
People (not uber-geeks, people) have enough trouble coping with the concept of one invisible clipboard. The Linux solution is to add another? That behaves entirely differently? Then, let me guess, we post whiny Slashdot stories like, "why aren't more people using desktop Linux?"
I would hardly call this a "solution". Frankly, I'm surprised there aren't more clipboards invoked in exotic fashions, or worse, multiple incompatible clipboards invoked in the same fashion.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Juifeng said:
There are actually two clipboards (at least in my ubuntu unity environment): The ctrl-c/ctrl-v clipboard, and the select/middle-click clipboard.
People (not uber-geeks, people) have enough trouble coping with the concept of one invisible clipboard. The Linux solution is to add another? That behaves entirely differently? Then, let me guess, we post whiny Slashdot stories like, "why aren't more people using desktop Linux?"
I think this is Linux's biggest problem: trying to satisfy two groups of people with mutually exclusive goals. The old guard uses Linux because it works like UNIX; the select/middle-click clipboard is for this group. People in the other group use Linux because they want a free replacement for Windows. If the Linux distros were only concerned with the old guard, they'd have something that works well for the old guard, but that no one else would use (see FreeBSD). Unfortunately, there's only one thing that will satisfy someone who wants a free replacement for Windows, and that's a copy of Windows that they don't have to pay for. So the attempt is doomed to failure, and because the underpinnings of Linux and Windows are fundamentally incompatible, the attempt also leads to major WTFs.
Desktop Linux is a fool's errand.
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@Sutherlands said:
@ubersoldat said:
- Select some text and it's copied to the clipboard, paste it with middle button... why bother with copy/paste???
- I like my clipboard only with things that I tell it to do. Also,
people actually use their middle mouse button for different things.
Weird, I know. It's not like there's any programs out there that can
configure keys for you.*As mentioned, select some text and I will do what I want with it - copy it to the clipboard, drag it to another location, etc.
The number of times I've selected text in apps under Linux to delete the line... only to find it's contaminated my clipboard is annoying.
@Sutherlands said:- I can drag windows while holding the mouse button... why would I need the alt key?
He's not made it clear here, but using ALT+left mouse means you can grab any part of the window and drag it, rather than only being able to drag it using the title bar. Also, ALT+right mouse allows you to resize any size/corner of a window without having to drop the pointer exactly on the border first, which I find a handy feature.
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@dhromed said:
Menu bar at top allows for faster access and consistent location. For exactly the same reason, the
StartWindows button in the taskbar is active in the corner pixel of the screen, and applications in the bar are clickable at the very bottom pixel of the screen, an dthe Close button and window icon of a maximized window arce active in the top corners of the screen.This is basic UI theory. You really should have known this.
I'm not really a UI guy, but I'm aware of that theory and I call bullshit on it in this case. It's not much easier to hit a menu item at the top of the screen vs. one at the top of the window. And is it more productive when I have to travel several inches of dead screen space between my window and the top of the screen, just to use a menu (especially since not having windows maximized is supposedly the "Mac way")? Having used it for a while, I can guarantee you it's a pain in the ass. Whereas in Linux or Windows if I wanted to activate a menu on a blurred window I would simply click on the menu, in OSX I have to click the window, wait for it to focus, move to the menu at the top of the screen and do my shit. Just awful.
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@PedanticCurmudgeon said:
@blakeyrat said:
@Juifeng said:
There are actually two clipboards (at least in my ubuntu unity environment): The ctrl-c/ctrl-v clipboard, and the select/middle-click clipboard.
People (not uber-geeks, people) have enough trouble coping with the concept of one invisible clipboard. The Linux solution is to add another? That behaves entirely differently? Then, let me guess, we post whiny Slashdot stories like, "why aren't more people using desktop Linux?"
I think this is Linux's biggest problem: trying to satisfy two groups of people with mutually exclusive goals.
No, it's a people problem. People have trouble with the concept of an invisible clipboard because they've never been shown how it works, and don't know the benefits it brings. It's not the job of Linux nor Windows to educate people like this, it's the job of people to learn how to use the tools they've been offered to bst use them in what they do.
The OS can do a certain amount to guide blisfully-ignorant people that there's additional functionality they may find useful, but fundamentally some responsibility lies with the user.
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@veggen said:
Used Win XP (and earlier) a lot : loved it (it's still sort of good)
Used Win 7 a lot : hated it's guts initially, but after heavy customizations and third-party additions, made itquite goodalmost as usable as XP, but still with some lingering shit-ass annoyancesThat's more like it.
For the record, by "heavy customizations and 3rd party add-ons", I mean (and this is just from the top of my head):
- Three registry hacks, to re-enabled the Quick Launch bar, and to ALMOST make IE9's menu bar work properly, and something else
- Gotta be at least ten distinct google searches for "How do I find xxx" or "How can I customize Y so it actually fucking works?", resulting in hundreds of tweaks that I couldn't reproduce if you paid me-- including that damn "show the fucking desktop" button
- Four different third party add-ons: One to access some customizations that W7 has no GUI for, one to restore a sane XP-like Start menu, and one to restore a sane XP-like task bar, and one to restoe a sane XP-like Explorer shell.It took, if I had to log it, about 8+ hours of customizations and hacks spread over a few days to just to get the machine almost as usable as XP wa. Sure, I have access to 64-bit whatevers, and got a RAM size upgrade, but damn-- how hard would it have been to put a checkbox somewhere that says "Make your box look and feel like XP so you can continue to be productive"?
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@PJH said:
@ubersoldat said:
Because I don't want my clipboard contents trashed because I've selected something (either accidentally, or because I'm going to do something with that selection like move it or drag and drop it)?- Select some text and it's copied to the clipboard, paste it with middle button... why bother with copy/paste???
Then you're in luck, because Linux actually maintains multiple clipboards! Yes, the highlight/middle-click clipboard is distinct from the Ctrl-c Ctrl-v clipboard.
What's even better is that in X the responsibility for holding the clipboard belongs to the application the content was copied from! So if you copy from a program and then close it, guess what: you've lost your fucking clipboard. You can imagine how awesome it is to copy from a browser window and then close it, only to discover that you've got to navigate back to the page so you can copy again. And then you end up with a bunch of orphan windows because you forgot to go back and close the browser once you were done pasting.
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@morbiuswilters said:
What's even better is that in X the responsibility for holding the clipboard belongs to the application the content was copied from! So if you copy from a program and then close it, guess what: you've lost your fucking clipboard. You can imagine how awesome it is to copy from a browser window and then close it, only to discover that you've got to navigate back to the page so you can copy again. And then you end up with a bunch of orphan windows because you forgot to go back and close the browser once you were done pasting.
Sadly, Windows also has that option. Excel, notably, uses it. (Although it will move content to the system clipboard if you close the Excel sheet-- unless its more than about 500k, in which case it will ask you whether to move it to the system clipboard because that isn't WTF-y at all is it.)
Mac Classic, the only well-designed OS I've ever used, always copied clipboard content to the system clipboard all the time-- and in fact there was no other way to do it. Additionally, it had a "clipboard viewer" window available in every application, allowing you to quickly preview at a glance what content is in the clipboard at any given moment.
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@Lorne Kates said:
It took, if I had to log it, about 8+ hours of customizations and hacks spread over a few days to just to get the machine almost as usable as XP was.
It would have taken a hell of a lot less time to simply learn how to use Windows 7.
And I'm guessing your "sane XP-like Start menu" also has the Windows 7 search box, right? Making it not-at-all-XP-like, right? (I have no idea what your complaint is about the "show the desktop button"... are you upset because it's not in the Quick Launch anymore?)
@Lorne Kates said:
Sure, I have access to 64-bit whatevers, and got a RAM size upgrade, but damn-- how hard would it have been to put a checkbox somewhere that says "Make your box look and feel like XP so you can continue to be productive"?
You build software for a living, yes? And you can't answer this question?
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@_gaffer said:
So you can fling the pointer at it. It's easy to quicly hit a target if you can't overshoot it. Yes, it feels weird when you're used to the menu being part of the application window, but that doesn't make it bad, no matter how you choose to say "I'm scared of things that are different".
Unlike you, I don't have Parkinson's and can hit the menu just fine; I don't have to "fling" the fucking pointer around like a goddamn chimp flinging his shit, you braindead fanboi.
@_gaffer said:
You absolutely can maximise windows.
Which button does this?
@_gaffer said:
Windows styles look way more plasticy to me. The grey of the brushed aluminium (which has been toned down in later revisions) is something I don't find distracting in any way. Linux is improving, but is still at least 50% fucking awful.
We're talking about bad software, not your utter lack of taste you tacky rube. And Linux is awful in many ways but at least my desktop looks 10x better than OSX.
@_gaffer said:
Ok, it's a strange way to behave, mimicking a physical drive. If you just pack an executable in there, it's a waste. If you're packaging useful docs, etc with an application, it's a lot cleaner than zip files.
It's not strange, it's retarded. Even Linux can treat a zip/tarball as a folder. On a supposedly easy-to-use OS I have to mount a goddamn file to install a program. Fuck Steve Jobs rotting corpse with an ice pick, that talentless hack.
@_gaffer said:
Current uptime for the macbook I'm writing this on is 6 days.
I really don't care about your experiences, I care about mine. I'm not sitting there with yet-another-crash-screen thinking "Boy, I'm so glad _gaffer is having a good time with his overpriced hunk of aluminum." And 6 days? Wow, real record-holder there. My record on a Linux laptop is over 180 days. And Linux desktop isn't particularly stable, either.
@_gaffer said:
I can see absolutely fuck all there that Windows does better.
I don't even like PuTTY but I can tell you it's far better than Terminal.app or iTerm. And OSX is supposedly a Unix OS. There's no excuse for this shoddiness. It's not like Apple hasn't had 12 years and billions of dollars to fix their fucking OS, and yet it's still riddled with security problems. They're so far behind Microsoft in terms of security and business use that it's shameful.
@_gaffer said:
Oh, and just to be clear, my like of Apple products extends only to the MacBook line of products. Desktop machines, and any of their products beginning with 'i' can fuck right off.
The iPod is a pretty good music player. And I'm heavily tempted to switch to an iPhone (although I'm going to give Windows Phone 8 a thorough looking-into). I have an Android phone right now and it's such a mediocre piece of garbage. It's like running Gnome 3 on a phone. Shit crashes for no reason and it just randomly lags like a motherfucker; there are times that dialing a phone number is difficult because the UI is so lagged (God knows what it's doing in the background). The only bright spot is Google Navigation which is, hands down, the best GPS in the world. It beats anything on iPhone. It's easily 50% of the reason I bought an Android phone in the first place and it will be hard to part with the one, single part of the ecosystem that works.
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@blakeyrat said:
Sadly, Windows also has that option. Excel, notably, uses it. (Although it will move content to the system clipboard if you close the Excel sheet-- unless its more than about 500k, in which case it will ask you whether to move it to the system clipboard because that isn't WTF-y at all is it.)
I can't speak to the internals of Windows, but it seems that the default is to use the system clipboard, so most programs behave sensibly. On Linux there is no system clipboard--if you want to retain some bit of content, you have to keep the originating window open.
What I really want is a clipboard with history. So Ctrl-c Ctrl-v works as normal, but if you use a different key combination instead of Ctrl-v you get a pop up which shows the last several items in the clipboard. I frequently find myself using a text document as a "buffer" for stuff I am copying. Also, an alternative to Ctrl-c which copied to the clipboard but not the history and which automatically "expired" after, say, 30 seconds would be nice for copying passwords, private keys, etc..
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@morbiuswilters said:
@_gaffer said:
So you can fling the pointer at it. It's easy to quicly hit a target if you can't overshoot it. Yes, it feels weird when you're used to the menu being part of the application window, but that doesn't make it bad, no matter how you choose to say "I'm scared of things that are different".
Unlike you, I don't have Parkinson's and can hit the menu just fine; I don't have to "fling" the fucking pointer around like a goddamn chimp flinging his shit, you braindead fanboi.
You arrogant 1%er asshole. You can probably afford multiple buttons on your mouse, too.
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@morbiuswilters said:
I don't even like PuTTY but I can tell you it's far better than Terminal.app or iTerm.
I'm used to some of it's annoying quirks. What do you dislike about it?
(talking about PuTTY, I mean)
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@Cassidy said:
No, it's a people problem. People have trouble with the concept of an invisible clipboard because they've never been shown how it works, and don't know the benefits it brings. It's not the job of Linux nor Windows to educate people like this, it's the job of people to learn how to use the tools they've been offered to bst use them in what they do.
The OS can do a certain amount to guide blisfully-ignorant people that there's additional functionality they may find useful, but fundamentally some responsibility lies with the user.
In an ideal world, that would be correct. In this particular universe, however, most people can't be bothered to learn the ins and outs of the mainstream OS, let alone one that's weird.
But let's try a proof-of-concept: I challenge you to explain the benefits of the select/middle-click keyboard to morbs. Just give me a few minutes before you start so I can get popcorn.
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@Lorne Kates said:
almost as usable as XP, but still with some lingering shit-ass annoyances
What? XP was useless, it was even worse than Gnome. I had both on my PC but I rarely even started Windows. What was the easiest way to move a maximised window to another monitor in XP? The only way I found was to "restore" it, move it and maximise it again. That sucks. Sure, setting up two monitors on Ubuntu was a pain in the ass, but at least it actually worked afterwards. Windows 7 is the first OS Microsoft got right.
@Lorne Kates said:
- Three registry hacks, to re-enabled the Quick Launch bar, and to ALMOST make IE9's menu bar work properly, and something else
- Gotta be at least ten distinct google searches for "How do I find xxx" or "How can I customize Y so it actually fucking works?", resulting in hundreds of tweaks that I couldn't reproduce if you paid me-- including that damn "show the fucking desktop" button
What? The "show the fucking desktop" button is in the bottom right, which is a much better place than where it used to be. Also, why would you want a Quick Launch bar, what's wrong with pinned applications? The fact that they're in a consistent order instead of randomly placed annoys you?
@Lorne Kates said:
- Four different third party add-ons: One to access some customizations that W7 has no GUI for, one to restore a sane XP-like Start menu, and one to restore a sane XP-like task bar, and one to restoe a sane XP-like Explorer shell.
What's wrong with the start menu? The fact that you can now just press the Windows key, start typing an application name and press enter is in all ways superior to looking for your app in an unordered list.
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@morbiuswilters said:
(blah blah redacted)
I just invented "Peter's law" (1)
Any post sufficiently laden with profanity is indistinguishable from a troll (2)
(1) Appologies to A.C. Clarke
(2) And not the good kind of troll
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@Cassidy said:
@morbiuswilters said:
I don't even like PuTTY but I can tell you it's far better than Terminal.app or iTerm.
I'm used to some of it's annoying quirks. What do you dislike about it?
(talking about PuTTY, I mean)
It's been awhile, but the thing that stands out is using its own key format. Also, am I mis-remembering that it doesn't do proper host key checking? (In other words, it still connects even if the host key has changed.) To round things off, it's really difficult to maintain a large network with it. In a Unix terminal I can just type "ssh $HOST" and away-we-go. In PuTTY you have to copy the profile to connect to a new host. I also remember some of the profile management stuff was clunky, like you have to edit the profile and remember to save before you connect?
Also, they missed out on an opportunity for an awesome feature: scp is a different program entirely whereas they could have added a button (or shell escape sequence) which allows you to enter a file name and have it scp back using the same profile you used to ssh in. Through some really clever scripting I've rigged something similar in bash which will let me type a command in the remote shell and "copy back" a file to an inbox-like directory of my machine.
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@OzPeter said:
Any post sufficiently laden with profanity is indistinguishable from a troll (2)
Do mommy and daddy know you're using the computer? Be careful clicking around, junior, you might find Daddy's "special folder" and be scarred for life.
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@blakeyrat said:
It would have taken a hell of a lot less time to simply learn how to use Windows 7.
No, it wouldn't. For starters, I didn't like anything about the UI. I didn't like how the notification icons were hidden, and the ones that were shown were useless to me. I didn't like how my most commonly accessed programs were hidden or moved. I didn't like that the "start" orb covered up part of my active screen (yes, it was only a few pixels, but still). I didn't like the Explorer breadcrumbs, or the missing buttons in Explorer, or-- any number of a hundred other tiny things. There were a crap-ton of all these little annoyances
The defaults sucked, and they had to change. There's a sunk cost there regardless of I'm going to "learn" 7 or not.
Half of those things to change either didn't have a UI, or a registry entry, or the option I wanted had been removed for my convenience. So I had to turn to 3rd party tools to get done what HAD to get done, and also allowed me to do what I WANTED to change.
The rest of the time is a crapshoot between "lost productivity due to learning curve/swearing" vs. "lost productivity due to customization". I don't have numbers, but I know that the second option took fewer hours, and was less annoying to me, personally.
@blakeyrat said:
And I'm guessing your "sane XP-like Start menu" also has the Windows 7 search box, right? Making it not-at-all-XP-like, right?
Wrong. 3rd party "like it was" add-on, with everything laid out where my muscle memory is expecting it:
@blakeyrat said:
(I have no idea what your complaint is about the "show the desktop button"... are you upset because it's not in the Quick Launch anymore?)
Yes, and more. It was moved to the opposite side of the screen, and the icon was changed. Worse, the icon was changed to a plain-looking box that used the same color as the new task bar (sky blue). So I didn't even know there WAS a "Show Desktop" button.
@blakeyrat said:
You build software for a living, yes? And you can't answer this question?
Everything I did was available either by modifying a setting in Windows itself, or by applying a (relatively simple) third party hack. So all the look, feel and functionality was already there. If they want the default to be Aero with Wowie, fine. But if it's POSSIBLE to customize it to look a certain, expected way (but still "function" like 7 under the hood), then yes, I'm asking that question.
And if the answer is "we don't have time to put in the checky box, google it", again, fine-- but since half the documentation I read to make these changes came from a Microsoft site itself, it means they already knew how to do it, and had take then time to write out how to do it.
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@Lorne Kates said:
re-enabled the Quick Launch bar
Why? Pinned elements works fine, of all the things I miss about XP, this was not one of them and to show the desktop I tend to use the keyboard shortcut
@Lorne Kates said:
one to restore a sane XP-like Start menu
There is a registry hack for that one as well, the only one I made in my win7 machine
@Lorne Kates said:
sane XP-like task bar
What is your complain? I really want to know
@Lorne Kates said:
sane XP-like Explorer shell.
Hmm, there are some things I dislike about the win7 explorer shell that I dislike, like the fact that you can select and view different elements resulting in deleting the wrong folder on my part.
@Lorne Kates said:
It took, if I had to log it, about 8+ hours of customizations and hacks spread over a few days to just to get the machine almost as usable as XP wa.
I think that blakey said this but is more productive to just learn the new environment.
@Lorne Kates said:
Sure, I have access to 64-bit whatevers, and got a RAM size upgrade, but damn
If this was your only reason for going for win7 then you should have installed xp 64 (although that one was a pile of turd)
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@serguey123 said:
@Lorne Kates said:
sane XP-like task bar
What is your complain? I really want to know
I didn't like the color, or shape, or glowy effects. I just wanted simple, blocky, non-distracting grey. Maybe I just have over-sensitive edge detection.@serguey123 said:
@Lorne Kates said:
Sure, I have access to 64-bit whatevers, and got a RAM size upgrade, but damn
If this was your only reason for going for win7 then you should have installed xp 64 (although that one was a pile of turd)
It's a work machine, and I was bought a new machine. I pushed for "Just buy me an extra 2GB of ram for my current box", but it seems $50 == $800, and buying new machines was "the same thing".
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@briverymouse said:
What was the easiest way to move a maximized window to another monitor in XP? The only way I found was to "restore" it, move it and maximize it again. That sucks. Sure, setting up two monitors on Ubuntu was a pain in the ass, but at least it actually worked afterwards. Windows 7 is the first OS Microsoft got right.
I'll grant you that, but I had to turn off the "automatically maximize as soon as it so much as brushes a corner" crap. I either have windows maxed, or I min them and sometimes have to move them to ALMOST the edge of the screen. Then, suddenly *BAM* blue outline and a maximized window.
It took a few googles to find out turning that off is buried three menus deep inside Easy of Accessiblity setting. Huh?
@briverymouse said:
What? The "show the fucking desktop" button is in the bottom right, which is a much better place than where it used to be. Also, why would you want a Quick Launch bar, what's wrong with pinned applications? The fact that they're in a consistent order instead of randomly placed annoys you?
1) Mentioned earlier, yes I was annoying it was not only moved, but the icon changed, and the color changed, so it blended in to the point of invisibility. If I have my hands on the keyboard, great, WIN+D. But chances are if I'm going to interact with the desktop, I'm in mouse mode. I have the Show Desktop location committed to muscle memory. I don't like that it moved.
2) My Programs aren't in a random order (anymore). I can find them by memory with a mouse, or the keystrokes are in muscle memory. WIN P M M <ENTER> and Visual Studio is up.
3) Yes, I like the Quick Launch bar. I absolutely hated that when I launched a program, it morphed the icon into a task tab. It made it nigh impossible to launch more than once instance of a program quickly. And I ended up with a "wrong" looking mix of (i) (i) [T A S K] (i) [T A S K].
4) I don't know why your Quick Launch bar is randomly ordered. Does your computer have syphilis or something?
@briverymouse said:
What's wrong with the start menu? The fact that you can now just press the Windows key, start typing an application name and press enter is in all ways superior to looking for your app in an unordered list.
See above for "ordered". And I just didn't like the look or re-arrangement. And I absolutely detested the Start Orb. When FF was maximized, the Start Orb would overlap the browser's status bar. Again, not by much, but just enough that when I would glance down, instead of seeing the browser status, I would see "GIANT FUCKING ORB!"
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@morbiuswilters said:
It's been awhile, but the thing that stands out is using its own key format.
Yup, that is particularly arse, but it's also handy to have separate keys per profile. Although the file format is particularly wank, loading it into PuttyGen separates them out and presents them in authorized_hosts format (just been doing that tonight).
@morbiuswilters said:
Also, am I mis-remembering that it doesn't do proper host key checking? (In other words, it still connects even if the host key has changed.)
It warns, and permits you to update your keys. I think there's a config setting that can change it from "prompt" to "reject".
@morbiuswilters said:
To round things off, it's really difficult to maintain a large network with it. In a Unix terminal I can just type "ssh $HOST" and away-we-go. In PuTTY you have to copy the profile to connect to a new host.
I think you mean "maintain shitloads of profile settings across different machines" but PortableApps managed to store the profiles in local reg keys, so I run portablePutty from a shared network drive. Lately I tried to use a profile manager to sort and export my sessions but... it's arse. I resorted to knocking up a quick perl script that reads my putty sessions and dumps the info out in HTML format so I can organise them properly.
@morbiuswilters said:
I also remember some of the profile management stuff was clunky, like you have to edit the profile and remember to save before you connect?
That's changed now - you can tweak (some) settings and store the changes with the session still open. I was dead grateful for this addition.
@morbiuswilters said:
Also, they missed out on an opportunity for an awesome feature: scp is a different program entirely whereas they could have added a button (or shell escape sequence) which allows you to enter a file name and have it scp back using the same profile you used to ssh in. Through some really clever scripting I've rigged something similar in bash which will let me type a command in the remote shell and "copy back" a file to an inbox-like directory of my machine.
I've used winSCP (that can import putty sessions & keys) and I tihnk pAgent permits the keys to be used in Filezilla... but native SCP/SFTP functionality would have been neat.
Bottom line: it's improved, but I think you'll still hate it at present. It's gots a ways to go yet.
nb: tried KiTTY?
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@Lorne Kates said:
it seems $50 == $800
With our Federal Reserve, you might just be right.
bah-dum-tish
