OT. Windows 8 nearly drove me insane

They said that about nappies, too.

All those things are already there just maybe haven't been found yet. Switching off support doesn't change anything within the OS.

No idea.

They have. It's called Windows Update.

No?

IMO, LInux has just gone sideways over the last few years. It was looking really promising at one point for non-nerd useability, but just like the situation with Windows 8, oftentimes I find that an updated version of a Linux distro is a retrograde step in at least one significant respect. Half the problem is complexity. Operating systems are so damn f*cking complicated. :(

En el artículo , John Rumm escribió:

'route -f' deletes all gateways. That might work for the OP, but it won't persist over a reboot. Maybe 'route -f -p' would.

And I agree. Changes for the sake of change.

set default route to self or something arbtirary.

Sigh. Yes. spent two days trying to upgrade laptop before reinstalling the last thing that worked on it (MINT 14).

Seems that a combination of newer drivers and graphics cleverness to support yet more eye candy, with legacy hardware, has resulted in a video layer that either goes mad on CPU cycles* or segfaults ...

Investigation of the Asus EEPC shows that that too, stops at Mint 13, as that was the last known release that supported its graphics driver.

Why would I need to upgrade? Once again the terrifying stranglehold of Microsoft was the reason. I wanted to be able to read an MS word docx, and the latest but two release of Libre office didn't understand the one I got sent.

The later ones do, but they are only supported by later and different versions of the underlying Ubuntu releases.

The horrifying truth is that its Microsft that is driving the development of Linux at the eye candy desktop level, and its Microsoft and the need to be compatible with it that is driving the development of alternative office suites.

Changes to match microsofts changes, rather.

It's perhaps time that "the operating system" and "the GUI" became greater separate entities in themselves, and one could be changed without impacting the other. In a way, a Linux distribution is like that (Gnome upon flavour of kernal) & Microsoft/Apple certainly not.

But then Ubuntu tries to import bits of Apple GUI screen candy, and import Aero snap from Windows. Ugh.

Why are 'they' trying to turn the traditional computing desktop into a games console?

Apple IS in fact a gui built on BSD unix.

Because that's what they think people want.

Look the desktop is dying back to a niche: most people want to consume content, not create it, and creating it with a 'soft' keyboard or in the case of graphics, with a fingertip is actually good enough for people who are not writing long text. I'd massively benefit from a voice recognition that would allow me to dictate instead of type, too.

Ergo Linux people are trying at the GUI level to emulate that.

That fine as long as others are trying to get a bug free trad style desktop as well, for 'business' use.

Xfce is perhaps the most sane of those.

Well I'm always willing to learn, so please explain to me how code suddenly changes just because the authors say they are not going to change it anymore.

You have to hope that the coders will continue to want a sane and reliable desktop. That's one of the things that puzzles me about Windows 8: how come MS's own development teams didn't point out the obvious?

Which are inextricably glued together. If ye wanna keep the OS current, ye will change the desktop (and with Apple, that also means the hardware and the rest...)

Youngsters yes :(

I'd much rather they got a nice TV advertising campaign* going, a straightforward desktop, a branding with some trustworthy charity (Linux Shelter Edition), and get the word Linux in the public perception as the sane choice, much like Android has done.

Forget about PC manufacturers attempting that, let the grass root users start off funding the commercials via kickstarter.

"Windows Crap? - come to Linux"

No.

Cos they were developing on Linux?

(I'll get my coat..)

No "in a way" about it. Our Unix/Linux servers have no GUI installed on them.

Quite.

Because the "traditional computing desktop" is going away?

In fact on OS X, anywhere that can accept text (i.e. that you'd normally type into) can take dictation. Any recent app using a recent API can do it - the app doesn't have to have it built in (TextWrangler and Word 2008 were OK with it, but Thoth was not).

"Quite handy when I totally got the job of transcribing A letter which was normally done on a typewriter that needed to be e-mailed."

Just the one word wrong and a missing comma in the sentence above (dictated into TW and copied here)..

On Sat, 19 Apr 2014 13:37:15 +0100, The Natural Philosopher

Er, are you QUITE sure about that? BSD has a poor rep for running on mobile devices; doesn't seem like a suitable foundation for such an OS where reliability and ease of use are key to the Apple market.