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[Iggy]

Not sure I'm ready for this yet (I don't own a Smartphone or any other multi-touch device).
Who knows? Maybe in the future.

[partycentralpartygirl]

Not sure I'm ready for this yet (I don't own a Smartphone or any other multi-touch device).
Who knows? Maybe in the future.

I resisted smartphones as long as possible. Now that I have one I couldn't go without the ability to check my calendar on the go. That's the main thing I use it for, and to prove my friends that I am right during arguments.

I do like Siri on my friends phones because I can ask it where Steve Jobs is buried, and where Tim Cook parks his car. I also take their phones and change it so Siri thinks their name is "Bitch please" and other silly things.

Android is great though for nerds, you can get UAE4Droid and use wii controllers to play "them games"

[psxphill]

I resisted smartphones as long as possible. Now that I have one I couldn't go without the ability to check my calendar on the go.

Feature phones had calendar's too, how old was the phone you used to have?

[commodorejohn]

Only feature I've ever used on my feature phone is the alarm clock. I don't even have text-messaging. Suits me fine.

[TheBilgeRat]

As I said in the two-part rant I wrote when I finally gave up this past November, I've been trying for the last...oh, seven or eight years to get into Linux, and with multiple distros, none of which have been tech-head stuff like Slackware. If you want to insist that what I'm saying is false, that's your business, but I am speaking from personal experience here - Linux is just plain not suitable for people who want to install and use more than a web browser, LibreOffice, and a handful of whatever games come in the repository that don't require mutually exclusive sound libraries unless you build them from source.

I've tried moderately technical distros like Fedora and run up against the fact that Linux, as an operating system (so let's not get bogged down in "it's just a kernel,") has as its underpinnings a writhing, labyrinthine mess of intricately inter-dependent toolkits, libraries, and scripts, any one of which can fail without warning or explanation the moment you change anything in any part of the system. I've tried "friendly" distros like Ubuntu (ugh) or Debian (yay,) and all they do is sweep that mess under the rug of a very nice package manager and pretend it's not there, until something goes wrong, somewhere in the works, and failure symptoms start crawling out of the walls and you realize, like a Lovecraft protagonist, that the madness was here the whole time.

Unix is forty years of cruft accumulated in turning an operating system for time-sharing mainframes with VT-100s into an operating system that can do modern desktop kind of stuff. Linux is those forty years of Unix cruft painstakingly ported to PC, and apparently at no point in the process did anybody stop and say "hey, guys, maybe some of this stuff is more complicated than it needs to be?" Except: oh wait, lots of people said that the whole time and nobody listened to them. Because the people behind Linux (and yes, I know there is no central agency - that's the problem, it's a whole culture of this disease) don't care about simplifying the needlessly complex. They thrive on needless complexity. They codify it, canonize it, worship it, appoint themselves its high priests and make their living handing down bits of its functionality to the unwashed masses, and call you a heretic if you question it.

It's too damn complicated and it's never going to get fixed until the people who steer it finally own up to that. Google had the sense to do it, but that only helps people on Android systems. As for Linux at large, the biggest change it's looking at at any time in the near future is Wayland - and don't get me wrong, XWindows is a ripe candidate for an overhaul, but that does nothing to address all of the other insane complexity.

I get it commodorejohn.  You use Photoshop and XP.  You KNOW photoshop and XP.  That's what you use.  You could not make whatever linux flavors you tried do what you could do productively with your normal setup.  You tried it and didn't like it.  It sounds like linux is NOT the right OS for you.

However, that does not change the underlying fact that your conclusions on linux are nowhere in the realm of accurate or factual to the state of the linux world.  You rant and rave about a few apps in userland.  I specifically mentioned earlier the reason people don't switch to linux is due to specific sandboxed userland programs.  Photoshop happens to be a huge one.  Of course the Gimp is a crappy program compared to Photoshop.  A quick google would have brought that to light.  There is no Photoshop for linux, and the solutions to get it working under linux would have taken a little light reading, some downloads of compatibility software (wine, etc) and some tweaking.  Why bother if that is so soul crushing?  Stick with what is easy and what works.

I was responding specifically to your assertion that you have to spend considerable time and effort to maintain a linux installation or that it requires "correspondence course" level awareness.  That is false.  I want the stupid assumptions and FUD to stop.  I give two sh**s what you run.

Now, on topic.  Evidently first shallow impressions count a lot.  Windows 8 sucks because there is no startmenu widget and the metro equivalent is so in your face.  It shows me everything I may want to start, including my old non "app" ified programs.  I don't know where anything is because I do not have the patience to learn something new.  I can't operate google so I don't know how to set anything up.  Also I refuse to follow the helpful hints because...what does it think I am, stupid?  This is obviously Microsofts fault because they made this so damn complicated to work and install.  I had to click almost 8 times before it would install!  EIGHT!  Many of my odd OS specific programs don't work properly, therefore I predict a total collapse of Microsoft and a huge spike in Windows 8 certifications just so that normal users can operate it.  I mean, come on!  This is such a bloated piece of crap - windows is just tons of kludge built onto a crap disk operating system that barely ran on 1 mhz processors.  I want it to JUST WORK, and my definition of broken is not conforming to my narrow worldview of what constitutes a real operating system.

[psxphill]

Um, yeah, IF you're using a current version.
AND btw, even WinXP SP2 isn't current enough for Windows update to work with correctly.
As I've mentioned before, in order to use a 2005 copy of Win XP Media Center I had to manually install SP3, then let the system install 119 software patches, then install Java, Flash, a PDF reader and a bunch of audio and video codecs (so that I could play DVDs and work with video and audio files).
 
So no gentleman, it doesn't "just work".

That actually sounds like a breeze. The only thing that makes it sound slightly annoying is that going from SP2 doesn't automatically download SP3. It always used to, but I never used media centre & it could have broken in the mean time. Big deal that it downloaded 119 patches automatically, that counts as it just works.
 
The rest of the software is stuff that doesn't actually belong in an operating system. I'm surprised about not being able to play DVD's, I thought that would have been one of the points about media centre. But bundling a DVD player with windows means they have to play for a license based on the cost of the OS, which is why they've made it separate again.
 
IIRC Microsoft used to bundle Java, but Sun stopped them. If they bundled Adobe PDF reader then they'd probably receive an anti-trust case from foxit and vice versa. They are even forced to provide E & N versions of Windows that don't include things like Windows Media Player or IE in Europe.

[Iggy]

That actually sounds like a breeze. The only thing that makes it sound slightly annoying is that going from SP2 doesn't automatically download SP3. It always used to, but I never used media centre & it could have broken in the mean time. Big deal that it downloaded 119 patches automatically, that counts as it just works.

Actually, my primary complaint is being forced to manually download SP3.
It used to work via Windows update, but Microsoft has decide to stop supporting older (than SP3) versions of XP. Which is silly because they'll still let you have it if you use the method IT managers use.
 
And no, I don't consider spending a couple hours sorting out an instillation to be a case of "it just works".

[partycentralpartygirl]

Feature phones had calendar's too, how old was the phone you used to have?

I mean google calander, I need to be able to let multiple people access my calender one confined to my phone wont work.

[runequester]

Only feature I've ever used on my feature phone is the alarm clock. I don't even have text-messaging. Suits me fine.

You're a bad consumer. Please turn on your TV for re-education.

[Iggy]

Just kill the TV (or use it as a monitor).
Except for news and weather, I only watch AMC or DVD/Blu-Rays anyway.

[commodorejohn]

You're a bad consumer. Please turn on your TV for re-education.

I'm afraid I never bought an HDTV converter box...I may have to report to the Ministry of Consumer Re-Education directly... :eek:

[TheBilgeRat]

I'm afraid I never bought an HDTV converter box...I may have to report to the Ministry of Consumer Re-Education directly... :eek:

Oh my.  Please tell me you at least watch the Hulu Plus and let them know which ads are applicable to you!

[commodorejohn]

Oh my.  Please tell me you at least watch the Hulu Plus and let them know which ads are applicable to you!

...umm...uh...no?

[Bif]

That actually sounds like a breeze. The only thing that makes it sound slightly annoying is that going from SP2 doesn't automatically download SP3. It always used to, but I never used media centre & it could have broken in the mean time. Big deal that it downloaded 119 patches automatically, that counts as it just works.

My wife's aging laptop ran XP until it died about a year ago. Re-installing XP and all the updates seemed to take about 2 or 3 days each time it needed a re-install. Between the speed of her laptop and then having to wait until morning to see if the updates were done before another reboot, etc., is why it took so long. It was utterly painful having to go through all that. This is one area where things could have used some serious streamlining on the installer side, at that point it would be better just downloading some latest distribution of XP with all the fixes in places and install it all at once.

For our computers I always just run the version of Windows it came with and never upgrade it. No way in hell I'd ever fork out $$$ for a new version of Windows. Especially when traditionally you can get a new computer with OEM Windows for not much more than the cost of Windows purchased separately. Honestly I don't really care much either, I'm fine with running Vista or whatever until the computer craps itself.

I played around with Ubuntu in that time thinking to move her on to that as I was so sick of the install issue. I have to say it seemed way less painful getting a distribution up and running. At least it's always up to date since you can just freely download the latest. However, it did turn out her laptop wasn't 100% compatible so it was a no go (I was trying Ubuntu on some other computer). That's the main thing that has kept me off Linux, compatibility issues, I seem to have weird computers that aren't well supported. Otherwise I'd probably be all over Linux throughout the house, even just for more piece of mind on the malware side.

I don't know why but she seemed to be good at getting viruses, that's why all the re-installs. Damned evil crafting sites or something. Funny enough that's why I got back into Amiga, I was wondering if I could hook her Amiga 2000 back up to see if she could connect to the internet on that ... pretty sure she couldn't cock that up with a virus.

[Thorham]

The only thing that makes it sound slightly annoying is that going from SP2 doesn't automatically download SP3.

Actually, it can with the auto update feature. However, it's better to turn that crap off, and use the network installation version of service pack 3. Much easier and faster.

[kedawa]

Why would any one ever install windows with anything other than the most current install disc?