Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Welcome to the future! The skies are full of flying cars, the waters are full of personal submarines and our digital wallets are full of 57 varieties of mutually incompatible blockchain-based monetary currency. Food is consumed in the form of nutrition pills. The outdoor temperature is determined by Weather Control in Berlin. …

[wayne 8]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"find drivers" "configure OS" - Have you any personal experience with Linux Mint in the last five years?

[Chemist]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Have you any personal experience with Linux Mint in the last five years?"

Or indeed other distros - in my case SUSE/OpenSUSE since , oh, ~1998

[Pookietoo]

Re: They'd not have a clue where to find drivers

You must be thinking of Windows - any Linux I've installed over the past few years hasn't required finding drivers - they were all included and ready to run.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

You must surely be a Microsoft troll. I have been running Linux for 10 years now and it has given me

no more grief than Windows did. In fact Linux has come to my rescue more than once when Windows

trashed the filesystem. The worst thing about Linux is the fact that the word processor(s) and spreadsheets cannot emulate the Microsoft offerings 100%. However, part of that problem can be laid firmly down to the fact that Microsoft didn't want to play nicely with anyone else due to its predatory nature and therefore the open source guys had to backward engineer any proprietary code/specs.

Windows treats people like idiots, Linux treats people as if they had some intelligence. An idiot is just as likely to get in to trouble when Windows fails them (which it will at some point) as they are with Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Windows treats people like idiots, Linux treats people as if they had some intelligence. An idiot is just as likely to get in to trouble when Windows fails them (which it will at some point) as they are with Linux."

Because--Guess What?--90% of computers users ARE idiots. They expect solutions as easy as turning the key in the door or the car. Microsoft has to cater to the idiot whose first complaint basically amounts to "Da Intanetz iz brokez" and thinks the computer is turned on and off from the monitor (hey, that's how the TV works), a keyboard hangs on a wall, and a mouse eats cheese.

[IsJustabloke]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"I don't know what you;re smoking, Lucrelout, but my experience says entirely different - getting close to double figures..."

So nine people eh? yep that's me sold!

[GrumpenKraut]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

> It's Windows gives yer average user grief, not Linux.

They do something that is much worse and often overlooked: people get used to unstable bloated dysfunctional crapware and assume that this is NORMAL.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Well, technically, from the viewpoint of statistics it IS normal. (Bit like Leibnitz' 'best of all worlds', really. Far from perfect - but that's all there is. Sorry for the inconvenience...)

[John 110]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

@ Esme "Most recently a couple in their 60' s who installed Linux Mint without assistance"

Here, I'm in my 60's and I've got LXLE on my hacked Acer chromebook (scariest bit was stuffing tinfoil into a tiny socket on the mainboard so I could reflash the BIOS)!! That's just ageist, that is!!! Young people today...(wanders off muttering.....)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

@John 110 (grins) not really - close to my own 60th! I should have said 'a non-computery couple in their 60s'. Apologies, mea culpa :-) Have an upvote from me!

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Here, I'm in my 60's... Young people today"

So you're a youngster.

[Wensleydale Cheese]

Most recently a couple in their 60' s who installed Linux Mint without assistance

"Most recently a couple in their 60' s who installed Linux Mint without assistance..."

LOL!

Many over-60s went through the hell of fighting with DOS config files and Windows 3/3.1.

Don't underestimate the technical skills of that generation.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Most recently a couple in their 60' s who installed Linux Mint without assistance

"Many over-60s went through the hell of fighting with DOS config files and Windows 3/3.1."

Come to that, just who were those who were the first to take up those 8-bit jobbies and put them to real use back in the '70s and how old are we now? Big clue - it wasn't our kids with the Beebs and Spectra; they came along later.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: Most recently a couple in their 60' s who installed Linux Mint without assistance

"Many over-60s went through the hell of fighting with DOS config files and Windows 3/3.1.

Don't underestimate the technical skills of that generation."

^Exactly! Getting an XT-compatible box to accept that you had swapped one of the two 5.25" 360kB floppy drives for an 3.5" 720kB drive and put in a 20MB HDD could take some time.

Reminded me of a line from 'Titus': "Once you've driven your drunk dad to mom's parole hearing - what else is there?"

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Users left to secure Linux and keep it up to date on their own would make an even worse job than they did with Windows"

You may have seen somebody running Linux updates and thought that because they didn't have to wait half an hour for downloads and reboot three time that it had failed. You were wrong.

[LucreLout]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

You may have seen somebody running Linux updates and thought that because they didn't have to wait half an hour for downloads and reboot three time that it had failed.

Erm, no, not exactly. I have Linux running in VMs (Kali, and Ubuntu) at home that I use for various tasks, and I'm quite comfortable with that. If you think that translates into a technology illiterate person being able to use it, then you're delusional. At best they'd end up running everything as root, with a lot of stuff they don't need left starting up, and the chances of their keeping it all up to date would be even lower than with Windows.

Patching on Win 10, because its so *cough* granular and frequent, rarely requires a reboot and never takes long to start up. I've been running it for months now and on 7 year old i3 hardware with spinning rust, it *never* takes more than a minute to restart. On a modern computer it would be a lot faster.

The reason users have long start up times is because of all the crap they install. That doesn't change when you change the OS.

[Mark 110]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

I tried switching to Linux (Mint) again the other day but had to give up after a few hours. Some basic stuff that Windows just does was an utter ball ache. Not worth the effort.

Its not Linuxes fault its just that the software / drivers aren't available and often if they are available aren't packaged in a nice friendly way. I used to be a bit techie (Cisco networking mostly) but really can't be arsed any more - your average never been techie user is never going to be arsed unless Linux is all packaged up nice and friendly like Android.

Current issues to be fixed for me to switch:

- nice easy way of getting the auto screen rotate for my Lenovo Yoga working

- nice easy to install media server that will run in the background for streaming sound and video off the hard drive

- a Linux version of the Garmin Connect software I use very often (yes I know it might work in a Windows emulator but thats beside the point and whether it will run as a nice little background service that just does what I need it do whenever I am in the room is another matter)

- MS Office - yes I know the alternatives. Not interested. Its bad enough working out where they have hidden stuff in the Office interface sometimes without having to learn a new one. And last time I tried to do a trivial thing with a PivotTable in one of the other spreadsheet programs it just wasn't capable (this was about 10 years ago though). And yes I know I can run the Office webapps in the browser - might be a passable solution if the other stuff can be fixed.

I would like to switch. Linux seems to be a better OS. I just can't get off the ground without getting annoyed about the compromises I have to make.

[GrumpenKraut]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

> ...unless Linux is all packaged up nice and friendly like Android.

Gasp! I really do not think Linux is right for you.

> MS Office - yes I know the alternatives. Not interested.

So stay with it!

[Rol]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Even Luddites, had to agree, that learning how these new fangled machines worked, would help to better destroy them, rather than ignorantly scratching at the paintwork for hours.

[Timo]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

>> - nice easy to install media server that will run in the background for streaming sound and video off the hard drive

Go get Plex. It comes as an installable package for Mint, and it streams wonderfully to just about any device. I've got it on a laptop serving up files to various Roku boxes through the house.

Best way to get into Linux may be to download Mint and load it onto a spare laptop that you can use to surf the web and get acclimated, then you may discover how much or how little you need Windows.

I do understand the switching anxiety, but then there are many other apps out there that are available on Linux that work, that require a lot of hassling to get them working in a Windows environment.

[Mark 110]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Ta - will give it a go. Just the screen rotate to sort now.

[Captain DaFt]

Hey, I can play "Linux Sux" too!**

"I tried switching to Linux (Mint) again the other day but had to give up after a few hours."

I too, have suffered heart break from Mint.

When I switched to Mint from my old distro*, it was the first distro I'd used in years that violated my old benchmark of "15 minutes from iso to web surfing".

Pesty thing took nearly half an hour! Intolerable, I tells ya!

Then it had the unmitigated gall not to have SeaMonkey in its repository... Took me another whopping 5 minutes to get it installed from Mozilla's website and set up with all my favorite add-ons.

It was HELL!!, I tell ya!

By the time I had it set up to my liking, I'd wasted nearly an hour of my life that I'll never see again!

>sputter - fume<

Why I could have simply booted Windows for the first time, and had hours of free time to do what I wanted while it endlessly updated and rebooted, preparing my computer for a Win 10 upgrade that I'd've had to try to roll back to something useful.

>More outrage noises<

Why if it weren't for the fact it works perfectly on my computer, I'd trash it in a second!

*A hardened version of Racy Pup. Maintainer retired, and last year its repository was finally deprecated. No more updates, getting insecure, so I had to take it "to a farm in the country".

**Post may contain slight traces of snark. Use carefully.

[Alistair]

Re: Hey, I can play "Linux Sux" too!**

@ Captain Daft:

For 30 seconds there I was thinking you came over to the darkGentoo side.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"And last time I tried to do a trivial thing with a PivotTable in one of the other spreadsheet programs it just wasn't capable "

There are so many easy to use, free database programs nowadays that if you are using a spreadsheet and doing pivot tables you are almost certainly doing it wrong. And yes, I do include the free versions of SQL Server, which are easy to use and capable, as well as MySQL and PostgreSQL.

[heyrick]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Some basic stuff that Windows just does was an utter ball ache."

I tried Ubuntu on an older P4 box. It started nicely, it looked quite good. That Unity shit was shit but I'd expect I'd get over the lack of a "here are your programs" menu and figure out how it does stuff.

The killer though was sound. The PC, an HP Compaq of some sort, has some sort of special audio chip inside. Standard Windows could beep, and a simple driver download makes it all work nicely. Linux, on the other hand, appears to have detected the hardware correctly (after downloading a system information tool as the bloody distro comes with loads of things but no UI tool capable of telling you what hardware is attached (the one that was there basically said "this is a computer" and offered no specifics). Problem was, no sound. Not a muffled meep. Nothing. Smiley face with the audio test tool, but no sound. No button for help. And with the iPad in one hand and the machine's keyboard in the other I searched for what might be going wrong. Result? A lot of gibberish that didn't make sense, plenty of arcane things in the command line (some of which didn't work), an expectation that it's a doddle to edit files using vi, and ultimately nothing to say whether this is a simple configuration issue or the driver just doesn't work with my hardware.

Back to Windows. As many have said, it is far from perfect, but getting sound in XP took me about two minutes. Later versions probably have the driver already built in. I swapped the CD-ROM for a spare DVD-R drive so can now watch movies on the machine. That's what I want to do, not beat my head off the wall.

This may be that this is a very simple thing to fix, that's more than can be said for the process of trying to get useful information on how to do so.

[GrumpenKraut]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

A "technology illiterate person" will never be able/willing to do nontrivial things with a computer.

Any attempt to change that will end in tears. You try, you cry.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"A "technology illiterate person" will never be able/willing to do nontrivial things with a computer."

I'd even go further than that. IME it's always the 'not willing' bit, and it starts at the trivial things. But then, that's the mindset that keeps them illiterate technology wise.

@Grumpenkraut: given your handle, you know "Ich kann nicht wohnt in der Ich-will-nicht-Straße", don't you?

[GrumpenKraut]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

> ... it's always the 'not willing' bit, ...

Yes, with very few exceptions.

> ... "Ich kann nicht wohnt ..."

Exactly!

[Andy Davies]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Excuse me! - could you direct me to the non-win-v-linux comments please?

[Teiwaz]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"At best they'd end up running everything as root, with a lot of stuff they don't need left starting up, and the chances of their keeping it all up to date would be even lower than with Windows."

There was rather a lot of 'run as root' confusion back when Lindows was a thing from new users, some of them seemed to want to gksudo everything(or whatever was the tool at the time, might have been a precursor to gksudo). If you've used the Ubuntu installer, youll notice root isn't even assigned with a password on the installer, it sets sudo access up for you.

I've met a couple of Ubuntu users who didn't even know what 'sudo' meant, or 'apt' as they'd never used the terminal, content to let the update dialog pop up every so often and ask for their password to update the system.

As for installing crap, that is a universal constant (at least you can argue they are being curious and trying something new), last time I used windows though, (XP) almost everything installed seemed to load something into the system tray and want to add itself to autostart. Things may have changed on Windows, but linux has never had quite the same issue.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"At best they'd end up running everything as root"

Ubuntu and its derivatives require a certain amount of config fiddling (?confiddling) to run as root. I don't thing your postulated IT-illiterates would get there unaided.

[Alistair]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"The reason users have long start up times is because of all the crap they install. That doesn't change when you change the OS.

Actually LL, *that DOES* change. The crapware, malware, toolbars, browser addons and junk, at least for the moment, due to attitudes like yours, just doesn't exist in the linux context. Certainly - its *far* easier on my 9 year old's linux system to keep him from killing the system.

Three quarters of the $h17 I have to rip out of mangled windows installations is stuff the end user downloaded and installed trying to get to ... free porn .... free music ... free movies ... bull$h17 driver updates from spamsites etc. 99% of the virus infections I've cleaned up in the last 4 years have been due to "driver update" sites injecting god knows what else into their javascript launched ASP.

[Stoneshop]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

A shrinking market isn't about to convert over to a different OS to save a hundred bucks when the one they have patches itself.

Whether or not they'll save a hundred Euros tends to count less than not having to unbork (especially when having to pay someone else to do so) that "auto-upgrading" OS. Tends to get old the third or fourth time.

And auto-update is what Linux does substantially better and faster (both having updates available, and performing them) than Windows, whose speed makes glaciers look positively frisky.

[GrumpenKraut]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

> The home PC is fading, ...

I do all my work on my PC. Give me a shiny phone or tablet any time if you want to watch it being thrown out of the window.

I do not know a single person doing serious programming on a system without keyboard, do you?

[John Sanders]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Family members and friends choosing the laptop over the tablets or the mobile to watch youtube videos, browse Farcebook and use webmail gave me a good impression on how much of a FAD the tablet thing was.

Not to mention kids trying to do any kind of homework.

As per me, I only use the phablet for two-three purposes, the rare voice calls, browsing/reading on the train, and playing the odd game when bored and not having a computer close.

[David Nash]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Homework. This. It seems to be universally expected that kids can "research" online and produce printed documents. I dare say schools will accept alternatives but this is why people do still use PCs rather than tablets.

[LucreLout]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

@GrumpenKaraut

I do all my work on my PC. Give me a shiny phone or tablet any time if you want to watch it being thrown out of the window.

I do not know a single person doing serious programming on a system without keyboard, do you?

I too do all my work on a PC. And no, I don't know a single person doing serious programming on a system without a keyboard either.... but then, 99% ish of home users aren't doing serious programming; They aren't even building Android fart apps, they're just browsing the web.

[Code For Broke]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

@LucreLout: you didn't happen to write your message from an Android or ChromeOS device, did you?

I'd tollerate an argument that desktop at large is dead. But the remainder of your argument is just plain ignorant.

[LucreLout]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

@Code For Broke

I'd tollerate an argument that desktop at large is dead. But the remainder of your argument is just plain ignorant.

That you can't follow the argument doesn't mean that it is the argument that is ignorant. Try a mirror.

[Chemist]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"As technologists we can, and in some cases do, use Linux on a desktop properly and without significant problems."

As scientists and academics we do use Linux on a desktop properly and without significant problems - and have done for years !

[Chemist]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

I note that MS shills are really very slow on the uptake

[Fihart]

Re:Updates

Quite the reverse on patches. One of the things that most impressed when trying Linux was how quickly and painlessly it updated. Certainly, compared with Windows where the only option sometimes is to switch off disruptive and lengthy automatic updates.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Re:Updates

Yesterday I was the local University where someone was about to demonstrate QGIS. He had a W10 laptop. Switched on to wake it up & it started the spinning thing. So he rebooted & again went into the spinning bit, eventually rebooted & started properly. Presumably it had latched onto the local wireless network and found some updates. What's the point of trying to do something like run a demo on a platform like that. As it happens I run QGIS on this Debian laptop which, if I wanted to do so, would be able to run updates in the background without interfering with the foreground, would certainly not tie it up unasked at startup time and wouldn't force a reboot as part of the process.

[Stevie]

4 LucreLout.

"The home PC is fading, being replaced with one tablet or another, that either updates itself or simply never gets patched."

Not in any home in which the creation of stuff is the reason for having the device in the first place it ain't. TYhe form factor too small, the "cloud or nothing" storage/interchange untrustworthy and the software toylike at best and a joke at worst.

Apropriately, ths is my second attempt to post this from my iPad. Using the soft keyboard induced my repetitive stress issues, I fat-fingered a key and the entire page vanished at "untrustworthy". I had to deploy a third-party bluetooth keyboard to get the job done reliably. awkward and a waste of time.

Everybody howls about IE. I'm the only bugger howling about how naff Safari on iPad is.

[DainB]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Have an upvote. Anyone non-IT professional who uses Linux desktop does not really need any desktop at all, they will be happy if their device boot directly to Firefox and automatically logins to facebook.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Anyone non-IT professional who uses Linux desktop does not really need any desktop at all, they will be happy if their device boot directly to Firefox and automatically logins to facebook."

Shows your grasp of the topic !

[Chemist]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Anyone non-IT professional who uses Linux desktop does not really need any desktop at all"

What an extraordinary claim. Almost all the people I know personally who use Linux desktops are NOT IT professionals but are scientists & academics. The reasons are complex but the simplest is that a lot of scientific software was written for UNIX and has been ported to Linux. The subsequent ports have been improved, extended and adapted to newer hardware. The other major reason is the availability of compilers/interpreters for a range of languages as a lot of scientific software is written/adapted by scientists for peer consumption.

If you doubt the existence of commercial software of a highly complex nature for Linux can I suggest :

http://www.schrodinger.com/Maestro/gallery

http://www.schrodinger.com/supportedplatforms/

http://www.schrodinger.com/products/

It's even (mostly) available for Windows these days

[DainB]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Thanks, you just proved my point that noone in the real world needs Linux on desktop.

[Chemist]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Thanks, you just proved my point that noone in the real world needs Linux on desktop."

Your view of the real world obviously is at odds with mine.

Apart from the scientific angle I use Linux for everything I do. RAW photo development/editing, video editing, PIC programming (MPLAB works perfectly in WINE) and now there is a Linux version anyway, and all the usual stuff - except I don't use cr*p like Facebook (sob !) but e-mail, browsing, Google Earth, LibreOffice, VirtualBox and lots of other stuff.

In fact I can't understand your problem - why would you want everyone to use Windows ?? What's it to you ?

[DainB]

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"In fact I can't understand your problem - why would you want everyone to use Windows ?? What's it to you ?"

You can't understand the very simple fact - is that Linux Desktop is a collection of incompatible libraries, wildly and poorly designed applications that do not follow any UI concepts and do not work with each other (take universal copy-paste between all apps as a most vivid example of that).

There's no Linux vs Windows. If Windows disappeared today Linux Desktop will still remain to be exactly the same crap as it was for last 20 years until someone with brains, experience and lots of money completely redesigns pretty much everything.