I'd do-release-upgraded many 1404 machines after it went EOL
I don't know about Windows, nor care about it, I don't use it. I may have many OSes that I do use, but I only have one on my desktop with a monitor plugged in, and it's been the broadly the same for 21 years (debian, then ubuntu)
Yes the buttons on the monitors are rubbish, they're also what there is. My TV which has my monitoring screen and music on is controlled from a remote control, one button to mute, one to turn it off completely. If I didn't have the remote though, the button would be awful (it's on the back, and again is a multi stage menu system to turn off)
What stands out to me though is how clear and straightforward to use the control panels were for e.g. mouse, keyboard, timezone and display. Their current counterparts are a bit of a mess and I find very difficult to navigate.
Although they did lead to the infuriating click "Apply" then click Ok behaviour that people got into the habit of.
And yes, that Desktop area of 640 by 480 pixels was what we started off with, and we liked it!
Once I got a monitor that supported 1024 by 768 then it was just luxury.
Same here. WMI and perf counters have been around a long time though.
I recently used Win10 for work and was amazed at the combination of awe-inspiring tech and plain awe-full complexity. Just the control panel goes four layers deep attempting to make things easier but in practice is several times harder to find options than it was in Win2k.
If there were a distribution with all the corporate goals stripped out I'd jump on it.
Still doesn't handle multiple monitors as elegantly as Win7 though, unfortunately. The Win7 windows management is so intuitive, most of the features I discovered accidentally, as I went about the process of manually doing what windows should have done for ages.
The control panel situation is astounding. It's clear that there are a bunch of different silo'd teams in MS doing all this work, because I can't really think of why they would do this "transition" over years of half-baked lavaflow features. It seems like there are 2 or 3 places to access any given setting. Some of them have the same UI toolkit from 2000, and others look like an Xbox application.
In Linux/BSD it always blows my mind that you can do "crazy" configuration changes like bring a LACP/LAGG interface online with essentially one command and zero downtime, while on Windows you will peck around 23 different UI's like a chicken in the sandbox only to break yourself.
Oh, totally agree that it's much better than it used to be. And far fewer reboots. Solid kudos to them on that.
Still happens though. Thought they maybe had a clever way to make it invisible to more legacy software that forces reboots, or to make it so windows update never required one, or something similar new. That would be pretty amazing to me and worth an announcement. UI change, less so.
For me it is not that difficult, but I am not saying that it is a better desktop interface than in Win7, and I can see how people with large monitors may find it a bit jarring.
Indeed.. i remember when i was so proud to have a nice looking desktop manager with really old hardware running, it was awesome.
Nowadays i am not sure.. i will try E17 again and see how it compares today :)
(p.s.: i even did a screencast of my "wunderful" E17 Desktop 5 years ago and it still has effects and a look and feel that is ahead of gnome/unity/xfce with a laptop that was over 5 years old back then.
I don't understand why everybody is concerned about the settings or the control panel interfaces. Is that really what you're dealing with all day? I spend as little time as possible messing with that stuff.
Does it run your apps? Is the window management bearable? Are things running fast and responsive? Those are my concerns.
This gets said about 5000 feature on windows. A good OS doesn't require you to spend an hour turning off 400 toggles only to have them turn back on in an update
Those parts are easily removed by doing a vanilla install the first thing you do. Windows (esp 10) still had some built-in things you don't get away from though. And also all the dialogues from self-updating software and plugins.
I haven't used it much lately, but a few years back I was working on a Windows Server system (whichever was the version that was basically Windows 8) and remember it being really janky (latency spikes, image artifacts, etc.) over my pathetic DSL Internet connection. Then I noticed some other admin installed TeamViewer on it so I gave it a try and it was way faster and smoother so I switched to it permanently, despite the constant annoyances because we were too cheap to pay for a license.
Admittedly, it's been almost a decade since Windows 8 (!?!), so this is a very dated experience.
Everyone needs to know all of the things. Just because it's a pain to get now doesn't mean people wouldn't use it if it were there. Remember when monitor mode meant patching drivers and running a weirdo kernel? It's like that.
One has got to admit the Windows 7 interface is great.
Opinions. I hate the Windows Interface with a passion, the same goes for OS X, and I'm not too fond of G3 either. It's just needless clutter, completely pointless blingbling, bloat and is generally unusable.
I say that as someone who hasn't been on Linux for too long (about a year now), and slowly worked his way from Ubuntu 10.04 to a custom Arch Linux install running Xmonad, and I'm never going back to stacking WMs on my main machines. Ever. All they do is hinder productivity.
Enterprise windows is probably much, much better than the retail version in that admins have an incredible amount of control through GPOs and the like, including turning off many features that we dislike. That does not mean that it doesnt require a lot of work. And, we the little guys still get stuck with the retail version that makes it difficult to turn all of these options off in a central location with clear settings.
I really liked this comment war, even if you guys don't seem to like each other :P I'ma throw in my two cents because I like throwing myself amongst the lions. But I'm starting with comments from the top of tree though.
> I guarantee there's no way that the Windows WM is "more flexible" than any linux WM.
The new version of Nautilus is competitive for being less flexible!
> I assume you have workspaces in Windows?
I personally never used workspaces, I prefer alt-tab. When I have 2+ monitors workspaces seem clunky and just another layer of tab switching with different buttons. Monitors have gotten big, cheap, and plentiful enough that the original use case of workspaces is falling by the wayside. Not saying the option to use them is bad, just that I have no use for them personally, for the reasons above.
> It's consistent. It's been consistent for 7 iterations. 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8.
The original explorer.exe was a wrapper on the DOS terminal and would regularly crash when trying to open something because the kernel wasn't preemptive. Wasn't really consistent UX at all. The old Windows 9X everything was always buggy, blue screen prone, and crash happy. The introduction of Aero in Vista also significantly changed a lot of the WM UX (start menu search, layout, composting, etc). The changing the of the start bar to a pinnable dock in 7 was also a pretty radical shift.
> Consistent + Stable = Win
I'd argue consistency doesn't matter as much in Linux world, because you can just use an old WM if you like it more than a new one. And if you like it more, it is probably stable. If it starts breaking, someone will probably fork it.
> It's the driver availability, quality, and support. And that, of course, comes from market dominance.
I haven't found many devices in recent memory that don't have some Linux support without the manufacturer going out of their way to obfuscate the implementation. A lot of people put in a ton of effort to make hardware work under Linux that the manufacturers don't care to properly document.
> They're all drag-and-dropable, they're all resizeable.
I get really annoyed in a lot of Linux WMs / DEs because of how they don't support drag and drop on the panel / launcher. XFCE requires writing obfuscated launchers, for example. I could get into why I'm not implementing that feature myself, but the intricacies of X drag and drop are something I don't have the patience or intelligence to dig into.
> You are restricted to hardware that works on your operating system of choice.
Windows won't run on a raspberry pi, anything based on powerPC, ARM (at least in a functional version, Windows RT is a trainwreck in my book by branding alongside Win8 without x86 emulation). If you are arguing that traditional laptop / desktop manufacturers are making sure their devices work with the pre-installed OS, color me shocked.
I never got on board with the crusade to make Linux run on every piece of hardware ever, because I think that is giving hardware manufacturers too much credit. Trying to reverse engineer everything is basically giving them a pass on making devices that don't work the way they are intended. If they don't want to give the kernel devs even the crumbs to replicate functionality, just telling people that company is an asshole is plenty in my book. There is nothing beholden to an OS to support everything you can plug into a usb port, even though it is neat when a wiimote works.
> I buy any hardware I want, with the full knowledge that it will work properly on Windows the way the manufacturer intended. Even Apple, the only major manufacturer out there that doesn't make hardware targeted at Windows, puts out drivers for Windows.
I have had plenty of printer / NIC / sound card driver issues under Windows, even in 7. Software doesn't suddenly become bug free, especially complex software like an OS, just because it has profit motive behind it.
> So Linux doesn't run on specific hardware that require hand crafted drivers from the manufacturer. Off topic much? We were talking about consistency of window mangers.
The argument devolved into Windows vs Linux when it is apples and oranges. Microsoft is a for profit company that incentivises you buying their OS (either prebundled or in a box) and Linux could care less, even though Ubuntu / Red Hat like supporting you for money when you use it. But Linux is developed because OSS developers want a desktop they like (or a server, or a seismometer, or a robot..) and Windows is developed to be sold to you. Different use cases.
> Again, you've listed NOTHING about the Windows WM that you are "used to" or is "particularly consistent". Because, you and I both know what those things will be and that most Linux DEs have the exact same configuration.
Some things I like about the Windows desktop:
Windows don't randomly open in strange places (a lot of gtk apps have a habit of launching half off screen depending on prevous resizing, Evince does it a lot). Windows has GUI based kernel hooks to recover from a bad process (if I want to do the equivalent of ctrl-alt-del in Linux, I need to switch off X to a TTY and try fixing it from the terminal, because there is no Gnome based (to my knowledge, at least) way to override a fullscreen openGL application that crashes, ex: Space Pirates and Zombies, recently).
The system tray in Windows is a lot easier to work with since you can select options right from it, rather than through system settings in some Gnome desktops, and I still don't know how to configure it under Cairo Dock, Docky, Cinnamon, or XFCE.
Windows had a really nice out of the box behavior where I could just stick the taskbar on the left side of the screen and have the entire screens worth of vertical space available. In something like Firefox, that would mean the maximized app would have tabs in the title bar, so I had an entire 1080 pixels of Firefox, and on a 16:9 monitor that is really useful. I still can't find a WM that lets Firefox (I think Chrome can do it in some) do the tabs in the title bar thing. I figure it wouldn't even be hard - I could imagine a WM just giving the application whatever space the title bar occupies to work with, with some statistics about where the navigation buttons are, so it can control the transparency and draw in the title bar as well, and just avoid those buttons. That was a tangent. Also not going to try to get that implemented in Muffin / Mutter or whatever, because it sounds hard.
Anywho, only KDE seems to allow the same UX (vertical panel on left with system tray, time, etc, built in, letting applications have the entire vertical pixels for the rest of the screen, with a panel like pinnable launcher bar, and they don't have neat mouseovers like Windows has previews of open windows or system controls).
Alt tab is nicer in Windows (even though some Compiz active corner effects are neat in Unity / Cinnamon with whatever they replaced Mendacity with I don't even remember now) since it shows the open Windows. Cinnamon has a smart corner that intelligently fills the screen with active windows though, which is also really cool. But alt-tab in Unity / Gnome (by default at least, I have even tried reading a bunch of manuals on these desktops and I still don't know 5% of potential configurations) just shows icons.
Another thing is the super-key behavior, Windows does it really well with the ability to just type and enter commands, or have a dynamic search that is intelligent by remembering your history, recent files, etc. Unity is similar, Gnome 3 is close, and KDE is close too, but respectively, Unity and Gnome have terrible / almost no configuration and dumb top bars as a result and KDE is slow as hell (at least on startup, but it even lags my i7 920 on some of its composting).
I do use Linux almost full time now - I have been transitioning off Windows for the last ~6 months, since Steam was announced on Ubuntu. I got SC2 / TF2 / League running under Wine since then, so I don't have any real reason to restart in Windows (except Darksiders 2 for a fwe weeks, that game was amazing and I'm too dumb to create custom Wine environments and find all the DLLs it needs without a playonlinux script).
I use IceWM for well over a decade now. It's a nice WM. It is close enough to Win 95/98/2000/XP to not feel too new in the beginning, with its start menu and regular window decorations. But it also has the features of a real Linux WM, with virtual desktops, window rules, mouse focus settings, configurable shortcuts, integrated command runner etc. I don't use use the taskbar anymore (replaced it with a combination of conky/simdock/trayer, but the desktop still works with IceWM at the core), but the integrated network and load indicator was very useful to get additional feedback, that a program is starting or stuck, or a download finished or paused.
It's a complete package, but at the same time a very lightweight WM. It's great.
Just back then the default theme was ugly. Coming from Ubuntu I'm still using https://www.box-look.org/p/1018090/ - doesn't look any worse than a modern DE to me now.
Interesting, for me Windows keeps getting better - additions of virtual desktops and windows (windows of applications, not system itself) management became much better - things like automatic layout restore on attaching external monitor to laptop and so on are very welcome.
I don't know about Windows, nor care about it, I don't use it. I may have many OSes that I do use, but I only have one on my desktop with a monitor plugged in, and it's been the broadly the same for 21 years (debian, then ubuntu)
Yes the buttons on the monitors are rubbish, they're also what there is. My TV which has my monitoring screen and music on is controlled from a remote control, one button to mute, one to turn it off completely. If I didn't have the remote though, the button would be awful (it's on the back, and again is a multi stage menu system to turn off)
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