Posts by phands 62 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2013
"Good desktop application design is hard, a balancing of both skill and art. The F/OSS community needs concentrate more on solving desktop user problems in a skillful, "artistic" and user-friendly way "
It's a skill that M$ have never developed. Windows apps and the desktop itself are clunky and old-fashioned looking. But worse...just as soon as you get used to the latest slew of changes to the desktop UI/UX, Microsoft change them completely, negating what they previously claimed was the best way to do this. Look at the appalling messes that were Vista and Windows 8. And now W11 has changed everything around from what we had got used to in W10, and not for the better.
If you want skillful and artistic (sometimes downright beautiful), look at the KDE desktop, or Gnome or XFCE or many others, all of which can co-exist and be switched between at will.
Not remotely true any more, and not for at least 10 years.
I went Linux in 2000 (Suse 5.3) and it was a bit rough around the edges - especially printer support, graphics card drivers and a lack of mature alternatives to many windows programs. A bit alter, it was lacking in WiFi drivers.
None of that applies now. You can test a distro from a USB stick on almost any arbitrary hardware, and be assured that it will run, support all the hardware, and often be faster and more stable than windows. If you like it, just press the "install" button, and it'll be added alongside your windows setup, dual-boot. The learning curve is not steep at all, especially if you choose one the many window managers that look like windows or mac os.
After that, it's learning what the alternate programs are called on Linux and clicking on the right icon or menu pick.
To be honest, ANY version of windoze is the past....all they do is change the lipstick on the pig (usually badly), but the core architecture is antediluvian.
The file systems are antiques - the fact that FAT still exists at all is shameful - and there are so many better file systems available on Linux. NTFS dates from 1993 and is awful.
The OS itself is still based on windows NT (also 1993) and has many anachronisms, like the Registry and utter idiocies like Pagefile.sys and Hiberfil.sys. Windows powershell is primitive compared to the rich range of choices on Linux. Windows NT was never really meant for networking, and IIRC, the windows TCP stack was ̶s̶t̶o̶l̶e̶n̶ based on the one from a version of BSD Unix. WinSock was a copy of BSD sockets - the BSD copyright notices are still in the string resources of the binaries. Most have, fortunately been rewritten since around the time of the joke called Vista, but they are still poor..
So...no, W11 is not the future...it's m$'s way of eking money out of the past.
You are, sadly, totally correct. M$ have no scruples about overriding user preferences.
Going to Linux is always a better choice. I recommend KUbuntu 22.04 or any variant of Mint. I cut my teeth on SuSE, and I recommend that too - use Leap and not tumbleweed for a good, stable and well-supported distro. Try most of them from a USB stick before you commit to any changes.
Also keep your w10 license, and transfer it to a W10 virtual machine once on Linux. That's what I did, and it's legal.
When I use W11, I use it as a Virtualbox guest....but VBox doesn't yet do TPM pass-through, so although I have a full TPM 2.0 chip on my Desktop, the W11 guest on my KUbuntu 22.04 can't see it yet...VBox 7 is supposed to fix that.
In the meantime, there is a Registry (shudder) hack to disable both the TPM and the Secure Boot checks, and allow upgrades. I won't post the links, in case it gets El Reg in trouble - or me with them! - but they're easy to find with Neeva (yes I use Neeva to avoid Google, and I run it on Opera and Brave), and trivial to set up....if you don't mind using regedit. The primitiveness of still having such an awful thing as the registry is staggering in 2022....but windoze still has Pagefile.sys and many other anachronisms from the 80s and 90s. Sorry - a personal hobbyhorse! The point is that you can use W11 without TPM and secure boot. I just can't see any good reason why you would want to.
I thought so too..at first. But FireFox has become less and less usable and less user friendly over the last few months. And since it moved to a default Snap on Linux, it broke a bunch of extensions.
FF has been losing market share for years now, and it's because their management don't seem to care about users.
I'm now using Brave and Opera with a view to settling on one or the other.
I have WSL on w10 and w11, and I just don't see the point. There's nothing I can't just do with Linux any more, and all serious development is done on Linux these days. Even Azure is dependent on Linux.
WSA makes me feel the same: what's the point?
I can do any Android development I want on Linux without the murkiness of a layer of Windoze slowing things down. As it is, I relegate windows to a guest VM hosted on VirtualBox on my Linux box.
I switched to what was a very immature Linux (SuSE 5.1) in late 1997, and went dual-OS for a while. In 2001, I opted out of windoze altogether - staying with Linux ever since. I've had to test software on all versions of windoze and Mac OS as well, but I use Linux to get work done. There is just no need for W11, and from what I've seen from the insider testing I've been running for a few months, it's a total mess. There is no compelling new feature that makes it a "must-have" upgrade, and the TPM 2.0 requirement is a positive disadvantage. Even the so-called gaming focus is a lie, with performance dropping quite a bit in many cases.
Even if they do get it secured with TPM, it'll still likely be vulnerable to a malicious GIF or font file. Windows needs to go away.
It's hard to believe that this has been running for almost 20 years. I've been through every twist and turn, watching SCO get demolished and going bankrupt. Linux was, and is, just fine. SCO's attempts to claim Linux had stole IP were pathetic - anyone remember the Greek font switch the tried to use to obfuscate the code? Or the claims that it was millions of lines, which then dwindled to....none at all? All that remains is Xinuous...and that's just another sham. If you want to get some tawdry views of this nonsense, there's STILL a stock-chat board for SCOXQ at Investor Village..but beware...it's a cesspool of right-wing lunacy rather than a serious discussion site.
I had a play for 3 days with a Duo in late 2020 here in New York. It was indeed underwhelming. I ended up getting the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2....it's a whole different experience. Four months later, I don't know how i did without it. The Fold is just excellent, even at the almost $2000 I paid for it. Add really great extras like Wireless Dex, and the Fold has completely replaced a couple of 7 inch tablets I used for things like Kindle books. I love being able to use the large inner screen as a big viewfinder for the cameras, and being able to open and close the phone without losing where I was - in most apps, anyway; instagram has to restart, but that's the only one I've seen misbehave.
Microsoft, yet again, cannot get phones right, and the Duo is not going to save them. And at that price, it likely won't sell in any real volume.
Windows hasn't been part of my life since 2001, when I switched to Linux and KDE/Gnome.
Windows was, and still is, an awful OS. It arguably held computing back by a decade because of its appalling deficiencies in networking and security.
Every time I see pagefile.sys, I cringe.
Azure doesn't work without Linux. Pretty much every serious advance in computing in the last 20 years has happened on Linux.
And now ESR speculates that windows will become just an emulation layer on top of Linux.
I won't miss windows.
Not really the case...the large majority of m$'s Linux contribution has been self-serving: it's own Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor drivers. I exclude them from my kernels.
Let's be clear...m$ isn't about embracing Open Source...it's about keeping people inside a windoze ecosystem, even if they want to use Linux. Plus Azure won't run without Linux....that's all you need to know.
I gave up with Chrome a while ago, and I'm an Xoogler! I mostly use Firefox on my KDE Neon desktop setup, but FF leaks memory, and after a while (a few days) has to be restarted.
I also use Vivaldi, which seems to work pretty well.
On my Android phone, I use the Free Adblock Browser...never Chrome.
As for this M$ overture, it's a waste of time....I gave up using M$ software (for Linux) in 2001, and I have zero intention of going back. And why swap Google digesting your data, and let M$ do it instead?
I've been in computing since 1974. Used pretty much every OS along the way...and windows has always been terrible. Recently, though, W10 has been an appalling mess...it can't even get basic OS basics right.
I use KDE Neon on a daily basis...and I'm a professional developer. Windows is becoming irrelevant.
What a joke that will be. I've looked at several m$ stores in the US, including San Francisco, Austin, New York.
They all tell the same story....more staff than customers. This afternoon, I walked past the m$ store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan at about midday, and again at 4:00pm. There were at least 20 staff in those pastel colour T shirts....and zero customers. Zero.
In contrast, the several close-by Apple stores are mobbed.
M$ is over as a consumer brand because w10 sucks dead bears out loud.
Unsurprisingly, this law is completely impractical and ultra dangerous - typical tory stupidity.
There is no good or workable definition of "terrorist material" - how and who draws that line? What happens with reporters and researchers who view stuff for all the right reasons? What about when I view Fox News (they are total terrorists) or one of my favourite sources, Al Jazeera? What if I sign up for an anti-Brexit site? I'm Scottish - does viewing Independence sites which advocate the break up of the UK constitute terrorism (yet)? Trump, the tangerine shitgibbon, is a global terrorist...is viewing his stuff terrorism (it should be)?
Not that it matters much any more...with Brexit, the lunatic unelected moron in #10 (yes...you, Theresa May) will destroy the UK, and cause it's break up and along the way, a return to the Ireland border "troubles", which is domestic terrorism in all but name.
I started using Linux way back in 2001, as I was already fed-up with m$'s software quality, lock in tactics, and bullying nature...not to mention what happens to m$ acquisitions...
M$ kills everything it touches.
Skype used to be the world leader, and worked well on Linux...now...it's unusable.
Anyone even remember Danger?
Navision is just gone.
AQuantive got written off in 2012...$6.2B wasted.
HotMail...a hot mess.
LinkedIn is already a sea of irrelevant adverts.
AND OF COURSE: NOKIA....need I say more?
I've been a Unix and then Linux and Mac OS X user for decades...m$ is a negative force, and has held back computing progress by 10 - 15 years because it can't stop trying to put everything in a windows straitjacket, despite the fact that the windows architecture is prehistoric, doesn't network well, is bad at scaling, is woefully insecure, has poor file systems choice. I cite as support, the fact that the unstable Azure needs Linux to run reliably.
My company, a small startup, uses GitHub at present...but not for much longer - I don't trust m$ even slightly, and will move ASAP.
M$ is over. W10 was the final straw after the horrid 8.
Linux won. No significant Major league software, and few promising startups in the last 10 years use windoze. Even the lamentable azure relies on Linux to work...and the windoze parts of it still suck. I used to work for a MAJOR cloud based SaaS company, and after a year of desperately trying to get it to run on azure, they gave up. In contrast, getting it to run on Amazon Linux took 3 months, and most of that was testing. Simply put, windoze was never designed for a connected network experience or security, and the architecture is primitive in that context. As an OS, windoze is appalling. Where are all the amazing file systems like BTRFS or XFS or even Ext4 on windoze? What serious OS uses an idiotic thing like Pagefile.sys? Don't even start me on the sheer awfulness of the idea of the Registry, and it's awful implementation in windoze
Windows is just so last century.
Yet another attempt to copy and displace a perfectly good Open Source mechanism fails.
When will the m$ dinosaur finally admit that windoze, and any ecosystem built on it, is the past? Tghis is now totally obvious in mobile, but even the desktop is done, as w10 is an appalling mess.
I worked at Mentor for 8 years, in the good old growth days. When Wally took over, revenues were around $1Billion, and all these years later, they still are - no vision at the top. I also worked for Synopsys and Cadence - much more dynamic companies than Mentor now is. The acquisition by Siemens is the death-knell for what was a wonderful company. Siemens is a stagnant dinosaur, and the culture-fit with Mentor is negligible. Mentor will hemorrhage people now.
This job cut is hardly surprising....but it's also a token gesture. How long will it take for a $67B investment to pay off, never mind turn a profit? Slicing off 3000 people to save under $2B means very little, except that they have no idea how make this whole thing profitable. It's going to a mess.
If EMC revenue remain in the $20 - 25Billion range they've been in, then it will be at least 3 to 4 years before this is profitable....but revenues were slowing....I think there's going to a be a lot more job cuts.
It isn't really moving about. The successor company to some bits of the carcass is a tiny outfit called Xinuos, who have a small office in Berkeley. They still try to sell the joke that is Unixware and Openserver. The rest is as dead as SCO's case.
ETA: there can't really be a case any more anyway, as at some point as it spiraled down into the farce it now is, SCO asked for, and got, permission to destroy all their carefully collected, rocket-scientist vetted "evidence".
Trying rm -rf / as a normal user should fail because non-root users don't have permissions by default.
In order for rm -rf / to do damage, other than to your own files in your home directory, you would need to use sudo (and even that can be further protected), or have su'd to root, or some other method of escalating privilege...or have done something idiot with permissions - which would need root access anyway. Certainly, ordinary users don't have write permission to /sys unless the system is mis-configured.
Most distros no longer allow direct log in as root from the keyboard, so su escalation privileges and password are needed. This should be a non-issue.
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