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OS X Is No Longer On My Main System, But I Already Have Regrets

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  • Originally posted by russofris View Post
    This is an interesting perspective, and deserves some thought before responding. My initial reaction is that the work done from 6.04 through 10.04 was nice, but almost entirely unnecessary when compared to the work that needed to be accomplished on the presentation layer. In 2010, when they finally figured out that they needed to focus on the UI, they went the entirely wrong direction.

    I believe Apple is a great example of how the underlying technology (display server, drivers, etc) can be sub-par as long as the UI is air tight.

    Can someone that is not totally offended by the Unity Desktop chime in here? I would be nice to hear your opinion, despite how tagically wrong we think it is.
    You think the osx scaffolding is weak? That's not how I see things but I could be convinced otherwise. They seem to have done an excellent job with virtually all aspects of development. We still need something like iokit in Linux.

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    • Originally posted by russofris View Post
      This is hard to explain, and even if I do, a number of people won't understand.

      Many of us don't want to 'configure' our desktop. We want to make videos of our kid's soccer games and send the highlights to their grandparents. We don't want to choose a distribution, we want to book reservations at a campsite. The people who want to tinker will always exist, and it's good that they do, because it fosters innovation and evolution. Unfortunately, tinkerers often do not understand that non-tinkerers exist and have their own non tinkering agenda.
      How can you not want to do at least a preliminary configuration to the tool that you want to use?! Computers are complicated machines, they are not something like a hammer (hell, even hammers come in a variety of sizes and shapes). You're doing it wrong.

      Linux based operating systems have the potential to become the dominant Desktop/PC/Workstation OS, but every time someone puts money behind it, they blow it. All it would take is a beautiful pre-configured UI, and stringent UI guidelines for application developers. Every time it appears we're about to get this, we end up with a re-incarnation of the Office95 toolbar or a UI designed for a 4-8" personal-device forced onto our 27" screens.
      The companies have NIH syndromes or are scared of lawsuits if they use something made by the community. Most often they have both, that's why they struggle to do something "their own" and ruin it. Remember the first gen netbooks, when m$ forbid the OEMs to install winxp on them? Many came with a GNU system preinstalled - but it was mostly with very exotic distros (Linpus Linux Lite anybody? c'mon, its great, it only doesn't have X! No? How about an ancient version of Xandros with a so old kernel that it didn't have the drivers for the used hardware and only a root user set up?), and even if they used something good (MSI installed SUSE, the commercial SLED version) they completely blew the install&configuration (MSI Wind had /home on the same small partition as root, which had ~100 MB of free space, and the rest of the disk was a new partition mounted in /mnt that the default user didn't have write permissions!) - clearly showing that they left the install to be done by some morons that never even used GNU in their lives. It just looked as if somebody paid them to give GNU/Linux a bad name.
      Last edited by Cyber Killer; 14 March 2014, 01:28 AM.

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      • Improving Power Consumption

        You can make some pretty decent improvements to your battery life by using powertop. It added roughly an hour of battery life for me.
        See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/powertop

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        • Originally posted by Cyber Killer View Post
          How can you not want to do at least a preliminary configuration to the tool that you want to use?! Computers are complicated machines, they are not something like a hammer (hell, even hammers come in a variety of sizes and shapes). You're doing it wrong.
          Saying "You're doing it wrong" about what people prefer is incredibly stupid.
          "Oh you prefer red than blue? Red is a warmer color, so you're wrong."

          Using a tailored desktop makes you gain time while you use it, but lose time to configure it.
          If you change machines and OS regularly, it might not be worth the effort. Especially when using an OS that is well configured out of the box will make you gain the same time while losing none.
          And sophistication of the tool is not an excuse, I don't fine tune a car's injection and suspension when I buy one. I adjust the seat and the mirror in 10 seconds (and without googling or checking the user manual), and I expect the rest to work seamlessly.

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          • Originally posted by erendorn View Post
            And sophistication of the tool is not an excuse, I don't fine tune a car's injection and suspension when I buy one. I adjust the seat and the mirror in 10 seconds (and without googling or checking the user manual), and I expect the rest to work seamlessly.
            But you do so after a multiple week drivers license training, where you get taught the theory and later practice under a tutors eye. After a similar amount of computer science training you'd adjust your desktop workstation to your liking in similar "10 seconds" without checking any manuals & "just do your work".

            It's the same story - people expect something to work like they want, without any training, any knowledge or knowledge about totally different software. They just need to learn.

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            • Most of the "typical users" I know would rather not have a computer than have to worry about configuring something (or even having to listen to an explanation of how they would do it). The comments by russofris and others are right on the money.
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              • Originally posted by Cyber Killer View Post
                But you do so after a multiple week drivers license training, where you get taught the theory and later practice under a tutors eye. After a similar amount of computer science training you'd adjust your desktop workstation to your liking in similar "10 seconds" without checking any manuals & "just do your work".

                It's the same story - people expect something to work like they want, without any training, any knowledge or knowledge about totally different software. They just need to learn.
                My driver license training was quite short on the "customizing your car" part (except, well, the seat and the mirrors)
                I consider myself much more trained in computers than in cars, and yet I still appreciate good defaults / out of the box behavior in any OS.
                As a matter of fact, my Cinamon, Win 7 and and Gnome desktops at home are not customized, and my work desktop is only slightly so (some pinned programs, some Favorites, task bar on the side of the screen and done).

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                • Originally posted by liam View Post
                  This is why fedora is making reliable and easy rollbacks a priority for the desktop. It's something that all distros should be working on. in addition there is the problem of in place updates (I'm not sure how dist-upgrade works but I'd assume it downloads everything and reboots you to a safe initrd to provide a safe upgrade environment but given your problems with X I suspect it used some shortcuts).
                  It's not just about having easier rollbacks; higher-level support is important.

                  Back in my schooling days (during the Vista period) I was working as a temp in my campus's IT support dept to earn a little extra pocket money and the department had a problem with a Windows update that, for some reason, affected only staff and students using notebooks from a certain OEM (which shall remain anonymous) that had the school's software installed; other notebook makes and brands were not affected.

                  The dept wrote to OEM for help since it only affected their machines, but the OEM claimed that it was a Windows issue and they were unable to assist. So we had no choice but to ask Microsoft. In 4 days Microsoft sent down a specially written patch that solved the problem.

                  There was also another incident where an OEM loaded a bad Windows image into its notebooks for sale at the campus which results in the school's software failing to install correctly, and in the rare instances where it did successfully install, crashes frequently; this was not observed on other OEMs' notebooks. As usual, this OEM claimed that it was not its fault, so the school had to ask Microsoft for help. Within a week Microsoft sent the IT dept a specially written patch to fix the faulty image so that the school's software can be loaded into the OEM's notebooks.

                  You don't get this kind of special treatment with Linux; everything goes to the bugzilla where you have to wait for the developers to successfully recreate the issue so that it can be pushed with a general update package for all users. Which is not acceptable for an enterprise environment.

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                  • Originally posted by Sonadow View Post
                    It's not just about having easier rollbacks; higher-level support is important.

                    Back in my schooling days (during the Vista period) I was working as a temp in my campus's IT support dept to earn a little extra pocket money and the department had a problem with a Windows update that, for some reason, affected only staff and students using notebooks from a certain OEM (which shall remain anonymous) that had the school's software installed; other notebook makes and brands were not affected.

                    The dept wrote to OEM for help since it only affected their machines, but the OEM claimed that it was a Windows issue and they were unable to assist. So we had no choice but to ask Microsoft. In 4 days Microsoft sent down a specially written patch that solved the problem.

                    There was also another incident where an OEM loaded a bad Windows image into its notebooks for sale at the campus which results in the school's software failing to install correctly, and in the rare instances where it did successfully install, crashes frequently; this was not observed on other OEMs' notebooks. As usual, this OEM claimed that it was not its fault, so the school had to ask Microsoft for help. Within a week Microsoft sent the IT dept a specially written patch to fix the faulty image so that the school's software can be loaded into the OEM's notebooks.

                    You don't get this kind of special treatment with Linux; everything goes to the bugzilla where you have to wait for the developers to successfully recreate the issue so that it can be pushed with a general update package for all users. Which is not acceptable for an enterprise environment.
                    That's not really a fair comparison, though. Microsoft makes its products available to educational institutions cheaply or completely without cost, and in that environment you get better support from Microsoft than you could expect from an open source vendor.

                    But most medium size companies are paying Microsoft on the order of $50 per employee per year in software licenses, or more. If the same business used Ubuntu and paid Canonical a $50,000 annual support contract, Canonical engineers would fix their problems every bit as quickly as Microsoft engineers. Likewise if the company used Red Hat, or SUSE, or even Debian and one of the companies that support Debian, they would enjoy the same benefits.

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                    • Originally posted by erendorn View Post
                      My driver license training was quite short on the "customizing your car" part (except, well, the seat and the mirrors)
                      I consider myself much more trained in computers than in cars, and yet I still appreciate good defaults / out of the box behavior in any OS.
                      As a matter of fact, my Cinamon, Win 7 and and Gnome desktops at home are not customized, and my work desktop is only slightly so (some pinned programs, some Favorites, task bar on the side of the screen and done).
                      As a practical matter, most of the people coming to Linux have used Mac OS X and especially Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, or 7 before. So I think it's only sensible for Linux desktop environments to closely mimic OS X or Windows 7 by default.

                      Users dislike change. As I think I said earlier, the people angriest about the changes in Microsoft Windows 8 were the Microsoft fans. So you want to help adoption of Linux? Give yourself the biggest possible target audience and make your default desktop look like a prettier version of Windows 7. That's exactly what Cinnamon and RazorQt do, and I wouldn't be surprised if they become the two most popular Linux desktop environments in the next five years.

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