OT -- Windows 8

Not for everyone .... AAMOF, no longer even for one of the most famous famous Linux users, proponents, and programmers alive, Miguel de Icaza.

LMAO when I read this last week:

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Reply to
Swingman
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Don't believe all the naysayers about the underlying OS itself, as technically it is one of MSFT's best operating systems yet, very resource efficient, fast and relatively more secure than any MSFT consumer OS to date (notice the word "relatively", no such thing as a totally secure OS, just one that hasn't been targeted).

It is the GUI that throws everyone, and that can be infuriating because it is such a drastic sea change and humans simply don't like change. I'm not a big fan of the Win8 GUI myself, but having run it on a seven year old laptop since it came out I find myself getting used to it, and appreciating most parts of it.

Short story - because you are human you will NOT like it at first because of the GUI, but you will like the benefits of the underlying technical aspects, so try it for an extended period and see if the angst doesn't become more tempered than not ... and do keep in mind it is a first iteration, and you do have the option to use the classic desktop.

And yes, it does run Sketchup, handily.

As far as your media center:

Get a Raspberry Pi for $40 and load up xbmc:

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Reply to
Swingman

My objection is to the touch interface. On anything of any size, the motion of the hands and fingers on the touch screen will create a whole new set of syndroms. The act of hold your arms outward for any lenght of time is going to create stress in the upper arm shoulder areas. To move the to the exteme for the point imaging use 70" screen with a touch screen.

"Any size" is any thing that one would use for spreadsheets, accounting, word processing, or presentation programs. Serious user will not be running these programs on a 4X6 screen.

For those people alread with movement problems, the extra arm movement will be impossible.

Personnally my screen has not icons. All of my programs are accessed from the tool bar at the bottom of the screen.

The screen is for my photographs that I use as wall paper. I don't like the idea of having the screen covered with large icons that prevent seeing the background.

Reply to
Keith Nuttle

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That is not the way things are headed, and a good argument can be made that the necessity to "hold your arms outward" is fast becoming a thing of the past, AND _particularly because of the advent of technology very similar to the Win8 GUI!_

You are with most folks ... and I actually agree with you to a large extent with regard to the Win8 GUI.

But, lets look forward to the future big picture, particularly in the context of historical human behavior/interaction with "content" presented by advances in technology (the quill pen, paper, the Gutenburg press, computers, et al).

Until the last 30 years, most of human reading and writing as been done on a horizontal surface, with a book or paper on a desk top.

It has only been in the last 50 years that the switch to a predominant vertical display has been present in human interaction with technological advances in the display of content ... basically since the advent of the computer, movie screens, etc.

There is no doubt that the vertical display (computer monitor) excels in the area of "presentation" of content, but not necessarily in the world of "design" and other similar workplace tasks, particularly with regard to "collaboration"in those areas.

Fast forward to the current cutting edge of technology where there have been many studies relating to the benefits of horizontal displays (displays built into the desktop itself), particularly in enterprise situations where collaboration is most often a necessity.

Now, take a look again at Win8 and tell me where MSFT is betting the future of computing is headed (the traditional PC, as we have known it for 30 years, is fading fast, witness declining sales and prices), particularly with regard to a more traditional human form of computer interaction. ;)

Enter tablets, mobile devices, and _horizontal displays in the workplace environment_.

IOW, it all depends on how you look at it. LOL

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What's ironic is that the one's screaming the loudest about the Win8 glimpse of the future, the Enterprise (their IT departments, mostly), will most likely be the biggest beneficiaries over time.

Human's just don't like their damn cheese being moved ...

Reply to
Swingman

One way to have the best of both Windows and Linux is to install vmware player on windows and install linux as a virtual machine. This works well with the large amounts of RAM and drive space on newer machines and linux as a vm will perform almost as well as running natively. You can do the same in reverse by running linux natively with windows as a a vm.

Reply to
Doug Winterburn

The "junk" is not from Microsoft. It was installed by the laptop manufacturer to make a few bucks. Fortunately, it's easy to get rid of.

Download and run "PC Decrapifier," and handy program that will walk you through removing unwanted stuff.

Available here:

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For crap not on Decrapifier's list, you should also have in your toolkit "Revo Uninstaller."

Reply to
HeyBub

they let a few nutjobs take over the design of this OS when the A-team was out to lunch. Nothing is intuitive. Simple things, like moving a file from one folder to another, require one to use Explorer. Even "my computer" no longer resides on the desktop. There are two interfaces -- the tiles version and one that kinda mimics the familiar XP version. The former is loaded with a lot of junk.

spend more enjoyably in the shop.

employer come retirement date (May 3).

About a year ago I started thinking it was time to replace my old laptop (Windows XP). I kept hearing negatives about the upcoming Win 8 (programming for 42 years gives me access to all sorts of goodie info), so back in September I picked up an HP laptop with Win 7 on it. I feel for those who are now having to deal with Win 8.

Matt

Reply to
Matt

they let a few nutjobs take over the design of this OS when the A-team was out to lunch. Nothing is intuitive. Simple things, like moving a file from one folder to another, require one to use Explorer. Even "my computer" no longer resides on the desktop. There are two interfaces -- the tiles version and one that kinda mimics the familiar XP version. The former is loaded with a lot of junk.

spend more enjoyably in the shop.

employer come retirement date (May 3).

You might consider this program to make the transition easier and more like home.

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Reply to
Leon

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I had not even thought of that. My big objection has always been the finger prints on the screen, something that is a constant situation with my iPad and iPhone.

Reply to
Leon

Phooey on the new Gnome shell, Unity, and the other alleged "improvements" to linux desktops, too.

Reply to
Larry W

If you don't like those desktops, take a look through this:

Reply to
Doug Winterburn

they let a few nutjobs take over the design of this OS when the A-team was out to lunch. Nothing is intuitive. Simple things, like moving a file from one folder to another, require one to use Explorer. Even "my computer" no longer resides on the desktop. There are two interfaces -- the tiles version and one that kinda mimics the familiar XP version. The former is loaded with a lot of junk.

spend more enjoyably in the shop.

employer come retirement date (May 3).

An office mate just returned his new Win 8 laptop, and paid more to get a Win 7 machine. He said it was the worst piece of Garbage he has seen for a laptop. It is really geared for tablets, but I am hearing from others it's not as good as the IPAD.

As far as Win7 I was lucky enough to buy my laptop before win8 came out. It's ok, some nice features. I miss the shortcuts of hitting start and typing a letter and firing off my program, now it brings up a search of all programs that start with that letter. The problem is it requires you to mouse rather than hit return. Many of the keyboard shortcuts are gone. Idiots at work.

Reply to
woodchucker

Oh man! But yes, that's exactly how I feel about it too.

Reply to
Richard

We've purposely raised a generation of them and now they're doing the designing and development ... you reap what you sow.

Reply to
Swingman

Windows 8 is aimed at the hand-held market, not the desktop. MS has apparently decided that's a dying market. Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, has decided to go the same way. That may also include Mint and Kubuntu, which are Ubuntu derivatives, but I don't have that info.

I'm still running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (April 2010 Long Term Support) and will for a while. But I've already started looking for an alternative. I may even skip Linux entirely and go with BSD (Berkeley Unix) - or maybe back to Slackware which is what I started Linux with long ago.

It's also possible to run Ubuntu (or any other release) with one of many window managers, each of which has a different look and feel. But that may be more than a newbie is willing to handle.

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

And on what do you base that? I have no problem with email, news groups, Web sites, Office documents, spreadsheets, databases, or presentations.

I could see your problem if you're mainly a CAD user. While several free CAD programs are available for Linux, none of them, IMNSHO, are as good as TurboCad. I drop into Windows XP for that. But if I wasn't so lazy, I'd install WINE (Windows emulator) and run TurboCad in Linux

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

Matt wrote in news:513b660b$0$13612$c3e8da3$ snipped-for-privacy@news.astraweb.com:

I haven't played with Windows 8 much, so the jury's still out as far as I'm concerned. However, I'm not liking what I see. Windows 7 got most of the Desktop UI right, and actually set the bar very high for the next version of Windows. (I'd like to go into the office of the guy who turned autosort on all the time and start rearranging his stuff automatically. Grab the pencil right out of his hand, too.)

What I don't understand is Windows RT. They put that on the cheap version of the Surface tablet and waited almost 4 months to release the full version. What good is Windows if you can't run Windows programs?

Puckdropper

Reply to
Puckdropper

Gotta disagree on this one ... IT folks are the most change resistant bunch on the planet, bar none, and have to be dragged kicking and screaming to anything new that upsets their current technical infrastructure.

I'm willing to bet with anyone that the next decade sees more "Win8 type" UI in Enterprise computing than most can currently imagine. Might not be a MSFT OS, but it will certainly be a similar iteration GUI, and it will not be readily accepted by IT, just as tablets and iPhones were not welcomed by IT just three years ago.

But, and it's a big but ... We gotta go through the FUD cycle first, just as was done with Vista's UAC component, which caused most of the teeth gnashing.

Reply to
Swingman

No one understands that ... that was a stupid move on Ballmer's part, and you can't fix stupid.

Reply to
Swingman

Brought home a new laptop today with Windows 8 installed. First impression: they let a few nutjobs take over the design of this OS when the A-team was out to lunch. Nothing is intuitive. Simple things, like moving a file from one folder to another, require one to use Explorer. Even "my computer" no longer resides on the desktop. There are two interfaces -- the tiles version and one that kinda mimics the familiar XP version. The former is loaded with a lot of junk.

It's going to take me hours to get this machine set up -- hours that I could spend more enjoyably in the shop.

BTW, this is being written on my old machine, which needs to be returned to my employer come retirement date (May 3).

Larry

After considerable work, and the addition of a couple third-party utilities, I've got my Windows 8 system running so that it's almost indistinguishable from the Windows 7 system that preceded it. As a software developer, I find the Win8 UI completely useless. It's not unusual for me to be flipping among six or eight different applications that are all running at the same time and spread across two monitors. Win8's one-application-at-a-time orientation, with nothing but full-screen windows and maybe a sliver of another at the side of the screen, just doesn't work for me.

The key to the conversion was a start menu replacement called Start8 from Stardock

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for a big $4.99. I restored my sidebar gadget environment with another called 8GadgetPack
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The Start8 software has many options that let you avoid the Windows 8 UI experience, including booting directly into the desktop. There are other start menu replacements available, perhaps even for free, but Stardock's been in this business a long time, and Start8 is a smooth piece of software.

There's a variety of other tweaks that completed the setup. Google or Bing for Windows 8 tweaks or Windows 8 tips and you'll see a bunch of things you can do to avoid the parts of Windows 8 that you don't like.

Yeah, I know, it's a lot of work that you shouldn't have to do - that was the point of your post - but it can be done and the result is at least as good as the OS you were running before.

Tom

Reply to
tdacon

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