Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
Well Ubuntu and Mint are popular and specifically designed for Linux newbs. Ubuntu seemed okay when I used it? It's the only one I've ever used so I can't really compare.
^ I lol'd
^^^^ Fedora and Linuxmint (based on Ubuntu but a hell of a lot less resource hogging) are good enough for beginners. Also keep in mind you can generally switch between desktop environments and such just by spending a few minutes with the package manager and maybe a little configuring, so you can make things look different from the defaults.
^^^^^^ I haven't played much with Slackware/Slax, I should sometime. You could also try a minimal Debian install and install a few things yourself (and you'd still be working with the same package format/manager, though also keep in mind minimal does not install X or any graphical interface by default); Fedora and (probably) Slackware use different package formats but should be good enough, though I'm not enough of a fan of redhat based distros to really pay attention to what Fedora's been up to nowadays.
Also Ica, this is what Ubuntu looks like by default nowadays: http://vbprog.zonexus.net/randomcrap/ubuntu1204-default.png It's also stupidly slow in the virtual machine I'm running that in.
>taskbar on the side
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY HISSS
^Why not, I have my taskbar on the side as well. I have more horizontal space than I know what to do with and I like having the extra vertical space
Pretty much. There's no good reason to have it on the bottom or top on a widescreen display, especially if you're just going to have it show icons and not window titles.
I have enough pinned icons on my taskbar that they don't all show on a vertical display.
My school tasks generally show widescreen images, so I can see them much more clearly when I have more space horizontally. (Not a very good reason, but a minor annoyance nonetheless.)
Tabs become even smaller when I have a significant amount open and my taskbar is vertical.
But mostly, it's because I like having more horizontal space than vertical space, and I see no good reason to swap to vertical.
Er, rather, I guess it's not "no good reason," but still I think in general the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. However, obviously it's just a personal preference and it doesn't matter too much in the end.
Fair enough.
I'm alright with 7 at the moment. Call me when Win8SP1's released and then we'll talk
This is probably not completely true/full of exaggerations, but it's pretty funny.
Shit.
Apparently, it's worse than I'd expected.
That's...I wouldn't have thought that was possible.
My parents were thinking of getting a Windows 8 system, and I haven't been able to dissuade them.
Now, I can.
Can someone explain to me what these features are, please?
But what if we use tabs showing icons and window names--heck, what if we have separate tabs for each window? Like, in classic Windows 95/98 fashion?
You can put them in Quick Launch instead, and they'll take up far less space.
Regarding the "Windows 8: the Animated Evaluation" video:
First, holy shit. That puts lots of concrete reasons behind the negative reception that Windows 8 has seen.
How true are these factual claims that the video makes? Because if they are, then I would easily expect that my experience with transitioning to Windows 8 will be far, far more unpleasant than my getting a LG Rumor Reflex to replace a Samsung Restore.
----
(TLDR for this section at end)
Second, that review also put up this quote, from which I realized something:
Tell me something: Is it true that smartphones and tablets are mostly about "content consumption"?
Because, from what I've heard and seen of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, people always use them for information search and retrieval. Web searches to find webpages on lots of stuff. Mapping one's destination, and best and alternate routes (and possibly GPS functions). Reviews on nearby restaurants. Product reviews. Price comparisons between stores. Reading tweets, blogs, news, books. Watching movies and TV shows. Checking what one's acquaintances are up to on social networking sites.
The only information creation functions I can think of are instant messaging/e-mail, and status updates (such as Facebook posts or MyAnimeList list updates)--and these tend to be short e-mails, tweets within 140 characters, text messages within 160 characters, and other terse (even if frequent) communications. And arguably, gaming (as you're inputting your own customized set of commands into a programmed framework that responds to them). And whatever you do create is meant to be much more of a temporary thing--I don't think I've ever seen smartphones and tablets boasting large-scale storage capabilities for preserving content.
Writing extensive posts on forums seems to be a hassle, unless you're somehow far better with a touchscreen on-screen keyboard or a little smartphone's keyboard than a physical laptop/desktop keyboard. (Or unless you have an attachable keyboard on your smartphone/tablet, at which point you're starting to assemble a laptop anyway.) Writing whole essays is probably an even bigger pain. Writing research papers is probably completely out of the question (and also because of multitasking, which I'll get to later).
If it's true that people use mobile devices mostly for content consumption features, then I might have a bit more insight into why I don't want to replace my computer with a tablet. (This is a related topic that's come up occasionally.)
Thinking about my computer usage a bit, I seem to use my computer for three major categories of functions:
Consumption I've described above. Storage just means keeping lots of data on hand, ready for quick retrieval whenever the need arises--and I mean from the hard drive (or possibly from RAM even), not from the web. (Anything requiring retrieval from the web takes significantly longer, and is significantly less reliable because of uncertainty of source and uncertainty of connection.)
Creation is things like writing forum or blog posts. Doing assignments, writing research papers, composing music, designing programs and scripts, creating and editing images and videos. Printing, as well, is a form of content creation. Communications, as mentioned above. Gaming. And more.
When I ask myself what I do on my computer, it turns out I do quite a lot of content creation. Huge-ass forum posts like this one are just one example. Yes, I also use my computer for content consumption. But for that matter, I also use my computer for content storage. Writing research papers kinda depends heavily on my easy access to downloaded PDFs of scholarly journal articles, either directly electronically or in printed form (which would have required content retrieval (get it off the web), storage (save to drive, after which I don't delete for reasons I can elaborate on if you want to read them), and creation (printing) processes).
I didn't mention content storage earlier, because Ms. Budiu's quote didn't, but if you think about it, given the uses of mobile devices that I mentioned above, the only content stored on these devices is likely to be content intended for eventual consumption anyway -- music MP3s, podcasts, TV shows and movies, books. Aside from these, mobile devices need store only barebones web browsing data like passwords and history. In contrast, my computer is designed to store tons of different formats of data, as well as the many different programs designed to process these formats -- which gives me far more freedom on how to consume the content I acquire, and how to create new content.
Finally, multitasking. This is something that I really don't get with mobile devices yet (probably because I haven't really used one before). But it really does seem to be that you really do one thing at a time. And this is consistent with the output I've observed from peoples usage of mobile devices -- short and simple. I'm more likely to get a short, possibly-unsightly-formatted, and very terse e-mail response via a mobile device, than I am to get a formal one with metaphorical crossed t's and dotted i's and proper capitalization and such. Now I don't know how to multitask on a mobile device, but I can definitely say that even a laptop computer generally has a screen large enough to handle a large number of independently-running open processes -- some of which actually need to be used in conjunction with each other (such as my opening notepad to type up the quote from Ms. Budiu in the above video so I wouldn't have to scroll or zoom constantly or use very small text). I can have multiple chains of thought, multiple projects or intentions, multiple scenes of action going simutaneously -- while I wait for a game to load, I can check my e-mail; I can leave my e-mail and other communications (e.g. Skype) clients running while I do almost anything else; I can cross-check online and scanned (PDF) sources against a document I'm writing; I can synch two Youtube videos together, discover they go together really well, and post about it. This allows for potentially amazing synergies...and more importantly, it allows the freedom for me to create those synergies on my own.
And besides, laptops have larger screens.
Anyhow...TL;DR version: Upon some more reflection, I think I dislike tablets/smartphones because my computer use heavily involves activities that they don't handle well. Which just means that should Windows 8 try to turn my computer into a tablet, I am likely to be mightily pissed.
----
Also, anyone get this back-of-the-mind feeling that touchscreen controls to operate stuff are less likely to be able to fix stuff if it goes to shit? Like, how will you operate the command line prompt if the OS crashes?
It's not a solution for any and all problems, but Android devices (and I think iOS devices too) are required to have a bootable "recovery" partition which you can access without too much trouble, even in the event of a particularly egregious fuck-up where your device refuses to start normally. You need an unlocked bootloader if you're going to enter the recovery manually, but you will most likely have unlocked it anyway if you're willingly doing the sort of stuff that can cause such problems to form in the first place.
supposedly the new xbox is going to use windows 8 as it’s operating system