Posts by Doctor Syntax

As regards Boris, don't rule him out when thinking who might have a hand in the leaks - about Sunak's green card as well as his wife's taxes. Any time he's been in political trouble it's Sunak who gets seen as the possible successor.

Re: How about Quicken?

The Windows - or in this case Quicken - balls in the vice subscription approach.

Re: Dell XPS Ubuntu version discontinued in the UK

Any Linux-enabled Dell I've looked is way above my budget and AFAICR a poxy small screen job. The current laptop, as near as it gets to be suitable for ageing eyes, came sans-OS from PC-Specialist. In fact they seem to build them with the Windows in the form of an installer but not installed, IYSWIM but installing it would presumably cost money so you still have to blow it away.

Re: Helped by Microsoft

"to the point that a tipping point is probably imminent where learning a new Linux environment is as difficult."

I'm not sure that that's what you meant to say.

Re: WTF

I really suggest you go back and read the original comment.

He downloaded it from a hardware vendor's website.

Not a community website.

Not a distro's website.

Not Sourceforge.

A hardware vendor.

The only one here who thinks it's somebody else's fault is you.

Re: WTF

Why? He downloaded it from the NVidia website? Don't you think it might be their problem?

Re: Simple? My arse!

Yes, Pinta does a lot of what I need - largely adding extra layers to old maps. Check out the .ora file format as it preserves each of the layers as a .png inside a zipped file. Simple cropping, resolution changing - Gwenview. More complex stuff goes to Gimp.

"Though Windows Store is perhaps a worse example of a festering hole of crap applications Ubuntu or RedHat repos."

IoW it isn't a tookkit problem, GTK or otherwise. It's that designers took over the look from developers, all wanting to show off their "creativity".

"The appearance of applications shouldn’t clash with each other or with the desktop UI."

I'd suggest consistency of function is more important than consistency of appearance. You're never going to get consistency of appearance with, say cross-platform applications. Either they present one appearance on multiple platforms and get slated for not looking native or they're made to look native on their platforms and then there will be complaints about them not looking like the tutorials.

The worse problems are in functional design. There would always be the occasional individual developer or small company going off at a complete tangent and usually producing something really awful, very likely because they wanted to show how different they could be. But the mainstream started off with the old character based CUA and evolved interfaces which were consistent in at least general approach even if their cosmetic appearance varied slightly from one vendor to another. Now we seem to have all manor of variations. Ribbons, flat design, minimalism achieved by removing functionality, or at least hiding it. We have iconography that looks like it was designed in crayon by a three-year-old with no artistic inclinations or a Babylonian making an attempt to draw hieroglyphics with a cuneiform tool set. The best you might hope for is consistency in the current release of a vendor's product line as each team of designers tries to look cooler than their rivals.

Re: ... and to a racing driver, F1 isn't hard, either

"But why do you want to re-arrange a menu?"

Back in '95 and for a few years after that You could arrange the Windows start menu to be easily navigable to find what you want. In recent years it seems to have become an illogical mess. If I pop up the KDE menu it's organised by application group - graphics, internet, office etc. If one of those gets too large I can subdivide it, maybe shunt the less used stuff into a sub.menu. If something seems to fit more than one category I can enter it into those categories.

Of course the expert Windows users go into search and type in the application name. Yes, after all their railing about its supposed prevalence in Linux, they've reinvented the command line.

"99% of users don't."

I think the word you were looking for is "can't".

Re: One reason to stay with Windows - Outlook

"-> Thunderbird's UX is horrible

I wonder who put it together. Somebody who has no idea how to design GUI software, I guess."

Standard practice these days. There are options that retain the original interface. Someone will be along to say they look like something from the '90s like that's a bad thing.

Re: The joys of Linux

My little experience of Windows is that it takes ages and demands reboots - the downloads appear extremely slow compared to Linux update. YMMV.

Re: "Linux Desktop"

I'd forgotten that W8 was so wildly popular that it was replaced by 8.1.

Re: "Linux Desktop"

Same thing for package managers. The look at a tutorial and how to use RPM Windows but they are using Debian Mac

Is it really so difficult to work out that you follow the tutorial for what's in front of you?

Re: "Linux Desktop"

"Most people want their computers to work and to run the applications they want to run."

That describes me.

"Linux in large part does not fit the bill."

That does not describe my experience.

Re: "Linux Desktop"

"Dunderheads everywhere I look..."

Put that mirror down.

Re: "Linux Desktop"

.doc to .docx is, in fact, an improvement of sorts. It resembles a proper standard* and not something designed not to be backwards compatible or a dump of a chunk of memory**.

* It's a real, de jure standard but that's not the same thing.

** At least in early versions there was a risk of sensitive data from some other material finding its way into a .doc.

Re: Linux "Desktop"

"There are a lot of linux zealots in denial, cannot face up to the stranglehold of AD and Group Policy has because there is no alternative on the linux zealotosphere."

I'm told that Sambe provides a good domain controller but that's beside the point. Exactly why do you need AD? Or to put it another way, what might make it redundant?

Re: Mint needs to drop Ubuntu as its base distribution

They have Buster & Bullseye based versions. I wonder if their rejection of Snap might be a step to moving away from Ubuntu altogether.

"The penguins will tell you to try another desktop rather than admit one of the key problems with Linux on the desktop."

What if you don't like the Windows desktop? What do you try then?

AKA the Linux wall.

AKA the balls in the subscription vice.

FTFY

Re: ... and to a racing driver, F1 isn't hard, either

"Sure, these sentiments do not come from IT professionals, but they do come from people who want computers to work the way they expect them to. To deny that is one of the biggest failings of the Linux community. Which could explain why most Linux desktops strive to look like Windows or Macs."

But then I find Windows to be a largely a hard to use mess - why can't I arrange the menu, for example.

Familiarity is the issue. Are Windows or Macs any easier to someone coming from the opposite camp? And can that be eased by making the one look like the other? The big advantage of Linux is that the UI isn't baked in, it can be made to present something close to whatever you're familiar with, even CDE if you want. I can fairly quickly reproduce my preferred UI on any new Linux installation. With the commercial alternatives I'd simply have to adopt the vendor's changes as and when they choose to impose them - and that really seems to be the harder alternative.

Re: "Linux Desktop"

one desktop UI (which you cannot change)

Microsoft, of course, will, whether you want them to or not.

Re: Linux "Desktop"

"My wife refuses to use a Linux desktop"

Miy wife uses Linux. If it were Windows there'd be a problem every time I have to help her with something - invariably application related. (Usually that's "I can't close this tab". The answer is "You just did. It's now showing the next tab which is on the same page as is the next one again and the next after that." Maybe tab proliferation is Pinterest's party trick.)

Re: One reason to stay with Windows - Outlook

You could turn that round. There's the Windows wall where something you take for granted on Linux doesn't exist such as an equivalent to Gimp or Inkscape that doesn't need a subscription. And if you suggest Photoshop or Illustrator you can have your inodes back in the form of a load of NTFS disk fragments.

Re: The joys of Linux

I mean Windows has its own day of the month – Patch Tuesday – just for fixes

And Linux has so many patches that practically every day is patch day. And don't deny it.

The difference is that Windows needs a day for its slow and long-winded updates and forced reboots. Then maybe an out-of-band update to fix the breakages.

I'll have Updates available showing once every few days - as like as not for applications (e.g. Signal desktop once a week) - and it takes seconds to deal with. Every few months there'll be a kernel update but even then the system keeps running with the old kernel until I restart at my convenience.

Re: "Linux Desktop"

"multiple choices of UI"

You say that as if it isn't a problem with Windows. And yet every time MS bring out a new version of Windows there are complaints about the fact that they've changed the UI. Every time. The difference is that on Windows you don't have a choice other than to stick to the old version until MS manage to overcome your efforts and manage to foist the new one on you.

OTOH the article author says he prefers the Cinnamon UI. At a guess he originally preferred Gnome 2 but not Gnome3. So did a few others so there was rapidly a choice of two other desktop managers, both providing a UI as close as possible to the old Gnome 2. Personally I never got along with Gnome, KDE plays well with the way I work although Ken G above doesn't like it. It doesn't matter - Ken & I can both have the desktop we prefer.

Would you have liked multiple work spaces? You didn't get them until MS said you could. Would you like a tabbed file manager interface? You might be lucky on the next iteration of W11? If you don't like a tabbed file manager interface will you be able to turn it off when it arrives? Who knows? I've had choices of these things for years. I have the desktop which is pretty well what I want. You have the desktop MS wants. That's choice.

Re: re. Anyone who tells you Linux is hard to use wasn't paying attention

Our TV is occasionally used for live broadcasts but mostly as display for MythTV (mini-ITX, venerable Ubuntu release) or Kodi (Pi). I did have a lot of grief with resolution using our old TV, eventually traced to it reporting back its resolution as being that of a PDA! (StackOverflow strikes again?) That was cured by snipping the appropriate pin of the VGA connector.

Re: students can't learn Fortran ?

Not being able to learn a simple language like FORTRAN doesn't sound like the best and brightest. Maybe that was one of those throw-away lines said without thinking and intended to diss the language.

Re: A language they cannot read?

Yup. My introduction to computing was a 5 day FORTRAN course of which I missed the first day.

Not being able to read it isn't much of a recommendation.

Re: Cool, but why are Microsoft doing this?

"Also, I don't know about you, but I don't (knowingly) run any software written by my local government."

I'm not suggesting governments write software*. What I'm suggesting is that if someone is running a malicious server on behalf of one country in the territory of another I'd expect the government of that other country to be the one that puts a stop to it, not Microsoft acting as investigating office, judge, jury and jailer.

* I don't expect many members of any government to write software. I, on the other hand, have been a Civil Servant, i.e. employed by a government, and as part of that employment, have written software and run it. OTOH I'm most reluctant to run software written by Microsoft.

Re: Finally- a solution for the homeless

The problem with cities like London is the separation of housing from work places end hence commuting. What they need is it to replace some of the existing office space into homes so that there is a balance between the remaining office space and homes for the people who need to work in them. The functions of the replaced office space can then be moved out to where the former commuters live, either as working at home or by provision of local office space.

Re: As an ex

Then tell him not to moan - didn't ask for extras.