Quote from wien :

If your definition of userfriendly is "works with any piece of random hardware I plug into it", then yes. I guess it is. That's hardly what I was arguing though.

but thats a large part of userfriendliness
just a few weeks ago i had to use a usb=>rs232 adapter that worked within a few seconds (the only part that took a bit of time was getting the driver on my laptop which hasnt got a cdrom drive) i wouldnt want to think about what that experience would have been like with linux

and not having to browse through some gigantic list of compatible hardware every time i think about buying a new graphics card or whatever is something a value too

Quote :

I was talking about general desktop use. You know, moving files about, email, IM, browsing, multimedia. For that job Linux provides me with the far superior experience.

i was under the impression that you were talking about configuring your network cards (have i mentioned that in eg ubuntu im required to use some random console app to configure my pppoe modem? good luck figuring that out without an internet connection to search for the solution online) and windows forgetting folder options (which is very annoying and pisses me off all he time as well but the flipside of user preferences with having windows open where id like them to isnt exactly great either)

Quote :

I may not be able to plug the latest and greatest graphics card into it on release day, which is why I keep a Windows box as well since I like that kind of stuff, but I don't care even a little bit.

well good for you but i dont like that kind of clutter with different boxes stacked everywhere in my place for different purposes

Quote :

The Intel integrated chip in my laptop is good enough, and works out of the box. You see, that's why I bought that instead of buying some Nvidia job and then proceeding to complain when it didn't quite work with the proprietary POS drivers they supply.

except laptops rarely give you that kind of flexibility... id love to bake me my own perfect laptop the way that i can configure my desktop hardware to my liking but its just not possible
its not my fault that laptop makers dont see the perfect market opportunity of one customer in making a via nano based non glossy tablet netbook with some kind of decent integrated graphics/hardware video decoder and 7+ hours of battery life

Quote :

I meant to point out that complaining because unsupported hardware doesn't work is rather pointless. It's not supposed to work, so it's probably easier to just get something that does. If you actually care about getting a working Linux desktop and aren't just whinging that is.

but ive been spoilt by windows for over 10 years now in that whatever i want and feel is right for me works instead of having to make concessions to please some picky bastard of a penguin

Quote :

But that bit is tiny

then i either have some seriously exotic hardware (although i wouldnt consider a 5 button mouse particularly exotic) or i must have been doing something seriously wrong so far because up until now every single time i installed linux i spent so much time getting everything to work properly or at all that at the end i was fed up enough to give up on the whole thing for another year or so

Quote from Shotglass :

because even the most random hardware always comes with a useable windows driver

So it's the evil penguins' fault if they don't want to support your random hardware?

Nothing so childish: it's the random manufacturer that's choosing not make Linux support available. Drivers could be developed free of charge by the open source crowd, but somehow the manufacturer doesn't want them to... maybe to avoid harming certain business liaisons by acting unthoughtfully.

This is competition, but as soon as it hurts the consumer and hampers the development of alternative pieces of software, it becomes unfair. Though anyone who has followed IT long enough knows the Redmond guys are quite agnostic when it comes to abstract concepts such as fairness and unfairness...

Quote from Shotglass :

linux is a hobby not an os

I'm not sure what the guys that work fulltime on linux would think about this. I wouldn't be so quick to say people at Intel are messing with software a bit just for fun.

And, for each and every horror story you can come up with, there's at least another one which is more ridiculous or alarming and the subject is Windows.

Just think what you Fritz!Box or router would work like if it has Windows in it: it would probably be half as fast, cost 10 times more and kids would be hacking it something like 5 times a day.

Quote from Shotglass :

(the only part that took a bit of time was getting the driver on my laptop which hasnt got a cdrom drive) i wouldnt want to think about what that experience would have been like with linux

It would have played like this: the kernel would have automatically recognize the USB device and configured it for you. No need to install any driver. No need to reboot.

Quote from Shotglass :

(have i mentioned that in eg ubuntu im required to use some random console app to configure my pppoe modem? good luck figuring that out without an internet connection to search for the solution online)

My PPPoE modem just works. It also has linux on it, go figure.

Luckily it is a device which follows standard, open protocols which were not devised by some genius trying to make the other makers' systems incompatible with its own.

Tested Win7. Catastrophic fail. Spent the last two days trying to recover the data from the corruption it caused on my harddisk...

It was really strange, after a few minutes of usage a popup would tell be to run chkdsk because my system drive was corrupted. A boot to XP (including chkdsk) would always fix it for a while and XP itself had zero problems. Then on one reboot it just completely destroyed the partition table, all recovery tools refused to even try anything, except "Active@ Partition Recovery".

My only explanation is that the Uli/Ali chipset driver Win7 comes with is broken. So be warned.

I liked the desktop slideshow and the fact that it can play divx, xvid, avc and mpeg-2 out of the box, without extra codecs but all in all it felt more like some buggy open source project than a usable OS. Lot's of small bugs like not remembering settings, desktop gadgets only work if UAC is on none of the automatically downloaded drivers actually worked (TV cards) etc.

Just as a quick reminder for the rose-tinted users:

Win98 was a complete bag of shit. It was always a complete bag of shit - it was never suitably repaired - it remained a bag of shit OS for its entire life.

WinME was a complete bag of shit. See above.

Vista is a slightly less complete bag of shit. Only slightly.

I'll buy OSX before I buy another Windows OS.

Quote from Shotglass :

the bit of effort is the thing... linux is a hobby not an os

Not true. I installed Ubuntu on my laptop and EVERYTHING worked out of the box, even the wlan. On first boot it even detected the wireless network in the house and asked if I wanted to connect.

I have kept an eye on Linux for many years but never jumped until recently. Ubuntu 8.10 is a huge leap if you have not looked at Linux in a few years.

There is new wireless code now that normally detects and correctly installs most common hardware. If you have esoteric hardware that is only used by 1 or 2 people don't expect Linux support otherwise you might be shocked.

Even the ATI drivers work well on my ATI mobility 2600. I can't even get new drivers for Vista apart from the one supplied with my lappy. Go figure!

And if you tweak the Compiz settings the effects make Vista Aero feel a bit dull. Months in and I am still not bored of windows being made of rubber when you move them

Quote from Woz :

Ubuntu 8.10 is a huge leap if you have not looked at Linux in a few years.

cant remember if it was 8.04 or 8.1 but one of these had the infamous 640*480 problem on my pc which pretty much would have required me to handrewrite my xorg.conf... unacceptable
and no i dont consider my 7800gtx exotic hardware

Quote :

I am still not bored of windows being made of rubber when you move them

great fun when you pin them between 2 or 3 screen edges and the woobly windows plugin turns into a complete mess (which hasnt been fixed in 1 or 2 years now)

Quote from Shotglass :

cant remember if it was 8.04 or 8.1 but one of these had the infamous 640*480 problem on my pc which pretty much would have required me to handrewrite my xorg.conf... unacceptable
and no i dont consider my 7800gtx exotic hardware

Use the hardware driver tool to install the nvidia drivers then nvidia-settings to do the legwork with xorg.conf. Rather easy.

Quote from Shotglass :

great fun when you pin them between 2 or 3 screen edges and the woobly windows plugin turns into a complete mess (which hasnt been fixed in 1 or 2 years now)

I don't use wobbly windows on my machines, I prefer them being rather more solid. It's true that bug is still going around though...

Anyway, back to the original topic. I recently got rid of Windows totally from my machines, but will be trying Windows 7 to see if it's actually any good. If it's not much of an improvement I won't bother getting it when it's final, and it'll have to be damn good to replace Linux on my machines. (I'm someone that needs to be able to set up a system exactly how it's wanted, not having to stick within silly limits given by vendors).

Quote from JohnUK89 :

Use the hardware driver tool to install the nvidia drivers then nvidia-settings to do the legwork with xorg.conf. Rather easy.

except it doesnt work because when youre stuck at 640 the screen is too small to fit nvidia-settings on rendering the tool utterly unuseable

Quote :

I'm someone that needs to be able to set up a system exactly how it's wanted

which is in many ways part of the whole linux as a hobby problem
you could probably waste the better part of a year just trying to find the gui you like best

Quote from Shotglass :

except it doesnt work because when youre stuck at 640 the screen is too small to fit nvidia-settings on rendering the tool utterly unuseable

In which case you hold down the alt key and drag the window around (assuming Compiz is disabled, yes...another window bug)

Quote :

which is in many ways part of the whole linux as a hobby problem
you could probably waste the better part of a year just trying to find the gui you like best

Not when you can have several GUIs installed at once

Quote from JohnUK89 :

In which case you hold down the alt key and drag the window around (assuming Compiz is disabled, yes...another window bug)

i not sure anymore but iirc every time i tried to click anything the windwo jumped back into its normal position
not sure if that was a compiz thing or not though

Thanks for your interest in the Windows 7 Beta. The volume has been phenomenal -- we’re in the process of adding more servers to handle the demand. We’re sorry for the delay and we’ll re-post the Beta as soon as we can ensure a quality download experience.

Does the drivers for XP/Vista work under Windows 7?

From what I've seen video drivers for Vista work with 7, and all other Vista drivers work, with the 64 bit ones requiring driver signing.

That's my major problem with 64-bit. Until they find a way of porting all 32-bit drivers into 64-bit, only half the hardware you get will actually work. I literally have a stack of hardware that just won't work with 64-bit Vista, yet works fine with 32-bit XP.

Apart from that, Vista isn't all that bad. People complain about it's performance, but I haven't seen any difference between it and XP on both my gaming PC, and my laptop (1GB RAM, 1.5Ghz dual core) I will be getting 7 when it comes out though, mainly to have an excuse to "downgrade" to 32-bit

Quote from Byku :

Does the drivers for XP/Vista work under Windows 7?

Lmao?

Quote from simscube :

.... and the fact that an early beta can make many other well established OSs feel slow and broken truely shocks me, and I'm looking foreword to officially upgrading to it when it comes out.

Be prepared to be disapointed then, MS has a habit of releasing final versions that bear little relation in terms of functionality and performance to their beta software.


As for Linux, I tried Kubuntu a year or so ago (7.1 IIRC) and whilst I quite liked it in many ways I found it frustratingly lacking in surprising ways.
For example:

a) It didn't have a video player that supported many windows media files built in. Getting one installed that did was no easy point n click job, requiring compiling etc to get working.

b) Despite all my efforts I just couldn't get a webcam to work reliably, and webcam support was generally not well dealt with.

c) Certain things that are native in Windows drivers, (such as 3D graphic support), require complicated installation techniques that should rightly remain the purview of software developers not desktop OS users.

It's for c) alone that Linux will never truely challenge Windows for desktop OS market share. It's also something that will never be resolved in Linux until the decision is made to choose a single distro to champion the Linux cause.

Got my download + 64bit key

Now all i need is another Sata hard drive to install Window's 7 on

its amazing how badly the whole thing works even today... the download servers usually just stop sending you data at some point and resuming works in 0.0001% of my attempts
ms hosting now with 99.9999% downtime

I bagged the ISO last night and managed to get a key a few minutes ago - now I need a blank DVD and a burner

btw you guys better grab the mp3 patch somewhere too

Quote from Shotglass :

btw you guys better grab the mp3 patch somewhere too

It's on Windows Update AFAIK - and I'm going to be copying any MP3s before Windows can touch them anyway

Any alternate download locations for the beta? Even if I download a leaked version, will my evaluation key still unlock it? (Sorry for bringing up warez, I do have a valid evaluation key though, but the MS download won't start for me )

There's a few proper Torrent's about of it (Be careful though as there are a few dogy one's too, check rating's etc).

It isn't illegal anyway as it's a free public beta in the first place

Just it's being "spread around" in another way.

And yes your key will work fine.

All right, a torrent will probably be quicker anyway, thanks

Quote from dougie-lampkin :

All right, a torrent will probably be quicker anyway, thanks

Just remember warez is when you download a product for free that should be paid for

As this is a free beta you are doing nothing wrong imo