Posts by BobChip 270 posts • joined 15 Feb 2010
Linux. That's how I do it. I'm on a less than 10 Mb connection, and most "big" updates are completed - download and install - in less than 5 minutes. Silently, in the background, with no lost working time (and only very rarely, the need to re-boot). Windows? Never again.
Having had to prepare many documents - fortunately in english language only - that would format properly and print out legibly in almost every country on earth (see weird Japanese paper sizes, for example, and note that the US rarely uses A4), I have reverted to creating documents in Libreoffice and exporting as PDF. This seems to perfectly in the great majority of cases. Else use Latex or a Pagemaker clone. You will hear quick enough if it comes out junk at the receivng end. Jump on a plane and take a paper copy with you if it is that important - and your boss will wear the cost....
The boundaries probably will blur, but having made the switch to Linux years ago I will stick with it. I will never go back to anything made by / associated with $MS. Think of it as a cultural preference. OH - and a fondness for stuff that actually works, as if functionality actually mattered when I am trying to do productive WORK.
Have you never noticed how easy it is to make pain and irritation go away by simply ceasing the activity which is causing them. Tis is exactly what I found about eight years ago when I -GAVE UP_on MS WINDOWS and migrated to a totally Linux environment. YES, I did have some early MINOR Issues, easily redolved by seeking help from the highly supportive LINUX COMMUNITY. I am now a very happy bunny, doing CAD work, and corresponding frrely with colleagues. (Libre office)
NEVER AGAIN WILL I EVER PAY THE MICROSOFT TAX FOR THE " PRIVILEDGE OF RUNNING (OR TRYING TO RUN...)"SECOND RATE SOFTWARE
No. Not on the machines I build. One HDD for the (usually Linux) OS and software, and a second, separate HDD for user data. In case the system HDD crashes.
If you are really nervous about data security, you can even leave the data drive unmounted except when you actually want to save fresh data to it. But never forget to backup, backup, backup.....
Sounds like a recipe for a permanently screwed up machine. Unless your principal pleasure in life is playing catch up and trying to sort out where M$ got it wrong. And of course, you don't actually need the machine to do any work.
As another comment on this article says, "I hear Linux is good." Yes. It is. Very good.
You are far from alone. All our desktops and laptops are now on Linux Mint, and both kids university laptops are Chromebooks (AKA Linux).
Did I mention that none of these systems ever nag you? About anything? Or that they update silently and in minutes, not hours?
Linux is the only upgrade you will ever need.
For me, this IS the year of the Linux desktop, just as it has been for the last eight years or so. It does all I need and more with Mint 18.3 and FOSS software. CAD, graphics, documents, spreadsheets, photo editing etc..
Yes, I enjoy a tinker as much as anyone, and I could easily run Windows inside my Linux system.
But why on earth would I ever want to???
I did guess. Saw this coming a long time ago and migrated to Linux. Home built PC(s), Mint 18.3, Libre Office, FreeCad, Gimp and Inkscape do all I need. VirtualBox for an old copy of Win 7 if I need it, though a quick look at the log says I have not fired it up for almost a year.
I don't pay the Microsoft tax now, and have no intention of ever doing so in the future.
Happy bunny.
OK, I am guilty of almost every behaviour identified in previous posts, and possibly some quirky ones of my own. But I will make a case for keeping SOME old kit. For example, I have an old Minolta 35 mm film scanner, for which Windows support was dropped around Vista time. However, it is recognised by Mint 18 and still works perfectly well. It is probably far better built than most modern equivalents costing £00s to £000s. Why throw out anything that still works? Linux OS seems to have a remarkable ability to breathe new life into (some) old kit.
OK, so I am Scottish and traditionally tight fisted, but it is my money.
An IT salesperson asked me this week how I could possibly prefer Linux to Microsoft. I asked him if he had ever tried, or even looked at Linux, to which the answer was unsurprisingly, an emphatic NO! Why on earth should I? (Wrong religion, I guess)
It does not seem to matter how terminally broken Win 10 is, like a car with a written off engine, unthinking fans will continue to sing its praises. Even though it is not going anywhere. Corporate users, who cough up for MS's profits, are bound to see things differently.
Microsoft has announced that its customers will finally be able to remove more of the cruft that arrives with a Windows 10 installation. In 2019.
I'd rather be able to remove the entire OS - i.e. all of the cruft.
Or, preferably, not have to install any of it in the first place.
Microsoft have always been legendary for their ability to get it wrong, but someone has raised the bar dramatically this time. And still, they have cleared it with ease.
Contrast Linux. I have been a user for more than six years now, and have NEVER had an update bork the system. (I have done it myself, by buggering about in ignorance, but that's my fault.) Not only will it run on a wider selection of hardware, but it will also support a large number of older peripherals (printers, scanners) which still work perfectly well, but have long been abandoned by Windows.
The hobbyist system? Windows, obviously, because you can spend endless hours trying to get it to work. Trouble is, I thought you were supposed to enjoy your hobby.......
Quite so. I started using Linux seriously about six years ago, dual booting with Windows at first. I then found, after a couple of months, that I was preferentially booting into Linux almost all the time. I now run a Linux host with Win 7 in VirtualBox, which I sometimes use to open and convert old Corel Draw files.
But run Linux under a Win host? What on earth for? "You cannot be serious!"
Icon because Big Brother is NOT watching me.
Yes, people are now switching to Linux, but still in relatively small numbers. It is only AFTER you have made the switch, AND you have become comfortable with the new system, that you begin to appreciate just how very much better than MS Windows (Win 10 in particular, but that's not difficult) it really is. I have NEVER had a BSOD, or an update bork my system, in 6 years of daily use. I love the support it provides for my legacy film scanner. Updates are not forced on me, and take from a few seconds to two or three minutes, silently, in the background, with no need for repeated reboots etc. etc. etc. Modern printers and scanners are easily supported, and the major manufacturers all provide Linux drivers these days.
Linux may become dominant in time, but only after a large enough body of day to day users has become established for the word to spread. And M$ have lost their stranglehold on the supply chain, where they continue to push out a seriously unsatisfactory OS on new hardware that, more often than not, customers really do not need. Sad.
Remember the "Reveal Codes" feature? This allowed you to see exactly which text and formatting codes - features - were in use at any point in a document, and to edit or delete them if you wanted to. Never seen anything half as useful in any "modern" word processor. Dug me out of some horrible formatting holes in tables and forms, that did. I really miss it. WP 5.1 was pretty damn good really, even by today's standards. (I still have a copy, on 5 floppies....)
The system I am typing this on is a somewhat elderly - 4 years ish? - home build put together as follows :-
Gigabyte motherboard
Intel i5-2500 @ 3.3 Ghz quad core chip
Nvidia GTX 550 Ti graphics card
1Tb Western Digital system disc (Spinning tin - have not gone SSD yet)
2Tb W.D. data hard drive (manual switch, not powered up on boot unless I think I will need to access it)
24 Gb RAM (I use CAD and play about with virtual machines)
all running Mint 18.3 Cinnamon 64 bit V3.6.7 on 4.15.0-29 generic kernel
In other words, absolutely nothing special at all. Hope this helps.
The only thing that will make MS sit up and take notice of it's (Windows) customers is that they start losing them. Losing money will do it.
That said, since they seem determined to move to being a "cloud and services" business, and have suddenly decided to "love" open source and Linux, could it just be that they have simply lost interest in Windows - not making enough money - and are preparing to abandon it?
Interesting times.
OK. Let's fill it with the entire UK population, all presumed guilty in the first place, on the basis that all of us will commit some sort of offence sooner or later....... Stuffing a database full of false data only makes it harder to search for the good stuff. If you do not know whether any bit of data is true or false, can you really call it a "database" in the first place?
Scrap the ruddy thing.
Adblocking is NOT stealing. Unsolicited advertising hogging my bandwidth IS. The adslingers are soaking up bandwidth I have paid for, without my consent, meaning that I cannot use it for the purposes for which I paid for it. Taking someone else's goods without their consent satisfies every definition of theft that I have ever seen.
There are fundamental issues of data security and privacy here. If the Court finds against Microsoft - and it looks very likely that they will - the US government will feel free to trawl through any data they like, provided that :-
a) It is "owned" by Microsoft, for which read produced or transmitted using any MS licensed product, or has passed through MS's hands from other sources, and / or,
b) Is held on any cloud service operated by any US provider, and / or,
c) Is "secured" by any cryptographic method provided by a US company.
I admit I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but no company should be held to ransom in this way. How on earth can they be expected to sell SAAS and claim to provide customer privacy and security under these circumstances? I think I'd be selling my MS shares pretty smartly.
I also download to my local device, and then back up to an external HD. This is unreadable until it is powered up. My family know where it is, and how to read it if necessary. Then I delete everything on the provider's server. Nothing is stored in the cloudscape, ever. Job done!
EXCEPT THAT..... What do I actually know about what happens when I delete emails on the server? Deleting files on most systems merely deletes the address, not the data. And that is easily enough recovered. And what about backups? I'd like to think (hope?) that my provider backs up my data until I tell it to stop doing so, but how thorough is that deletion process?
What with software revisions, corporate takeovers and defunct companies, there are probably hundreds of copies of all my old emails lying around somewhere. Somewhere........
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