Windows is just not ready for the desktop

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: Arkaign

Originally posted by: Smilin
Don't put words into my mouth. I said nothing about it being universally accepted. I just disagree with this:

Originally posted by: Arkaign
..of all of the people who have come through my door over the past few months, I have YET to hear a positive comment about Vista.

I wouldn't expect anything to be universally accepted. You could give out free boobies and someone would turn em down. I just don't agree that Vista is universally disliked. If for some reason everyone you are exposed to hates it then the sampling of people you are exposed to is small, atypical, or biased (or you are full of it and the above statement isn't accurate).

Clarity : notice that my example is anecdotal, and applies purely to local customer traffic FWIW/YMMV/etc

I think you personally just want to flame whenever there's even the perception of a negative comment towards Vista. Whatever.

Yet another thing that you "think" that isn't true.

You want to throw out your "Well my customers don't like Vista." opinion whenever you get the chance. You do it thread after thread at every opportunity despite the fact it gets shown thread after thread that your view is distorted. You then pick a fight with anyone who pokes holes in your observation (me and bsobel in this case). Heck the OP here wasn't even about Vista at all and yet here you are somehow ensuring you poke that opinion of yours in here.

As for me supporting Vista: you won't find me sticking up for it unless someone is trying to pass off BS as fact. I won't challenge a pure opinion. This isn't P&N, facts matter here.

So back at ya: Whatever. :roll:

All I threw out there was personal anecdotal opinion and observation of the outlook locally as seen by me directly. You are the one who constantly has to nitpick and get hostile whenever possible. Bsobel and I had some misunderstandings, but we clarified ourselves and actually contributed a positive ideal of UAC improvement possibilities. You, on the other hand, seem to just ITCH for a chance to bitch at me. It almost seems personal. I have a suggestion in this case. Just ignore me. I'd appreciate it, especially since I'm not trying to pass off 'BS as fact', but rather local observations. I even qualified my statements with the undeniable logic that (A)- there must be people around here that like Vista, but (B)- they probably are the more computer-literate group who don't need a PC shop to help with anything anyways. Further, I express moderate confidence that Vista will improve with time. And lastly, I have, multiple times, thanked the valuable members of this very forum for their expertise and assistance with issues with Vista and otherwise, particularly Stash, and Bsobel as well.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: bsobel

When Windows is using the same kernel for 5 years it's easy to talk about easy updates, because there _isn't_any_. You using pretty much the same kernel as when Windows XP was released in 2001.

Drag, you know this isn't true. SP1 and SP2 add signifigant kernel changes.

For XP we're over 3093 builds from RTM.

 

[quikah]

Originally posted by: drag

It's simply not designed to work that way.

Yeah, I know, that is why I am bitching about it.

Originally posted by: drag

You mean Windows lack-of-updates.

Yeah OK, whatever, SP2 just updated calc.exe I guess?

Originally posted by: drag

If you want a similar experiance in Linux then don't use stuff like OpenSuse, Fedora, or Ubuntu. You want to stick with long-term stuff like Redhat, CentOS, or Debian Stable. That way you only have to deal with kernel upgrades every 3 years or so.

I guess I should have been more specific in my rant. My problems occurred between SuSE Enterprise 9 and SuSE Enterprise 10. Yeah I know, kernel change, that is why I was having problems, but I had the driver sourcecode, why can't I compile it? Because too much stuff changes EVERY Linux release with no facility for compatability with older stuff, that is my complaint.

But fine, all I am saying is that it is a LOT easier to work with Windows when you don't have to go hunting for drivers after every major update.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: Brazen


I'm guessing these were icons put on your desktop by an application install right? The reason it is prompting you is because those icons are not actually on YOUR desktop. but on the the "All Users" desktop. That doesn't really change the end effect it has on you, but just FYI.

edit: oops, I see bsobel beat me to this.

Yup, that's exactly right. I just tried to replicate it though without success :^/ I had a shortcut to CellFactor Revolution that I installed with UAC off, and after turning UAC on it let me rename it. Thinking that it was because it wasn't installed with UAC's knowledge I downloaded burnatonce and installed that. It let me rename that icon without prompts also. I don't know...I guess since I have UAC on now, I'll keep it and see how it works for me.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: quikah

Originally posted by: drag

It's simply not designed to work that way.

Yeah, I know, that is why I am bitching about it.

Originally posted by: drag

You mean Windows lack-of-updates.

Yeah OK, whatever, SP2 just updated calc.exe I guess?

A lot of userspace changes were made.

There was support added for "DEP" in the kernel I suppose. Guess what... It broke some drivers.

Originally posted by: drag

If you want a similar experiance in Linux then don't use stuff like OpenSuse, Fedora, or Ubuntu. You want to stick with long-term stuff like Redhat, CentOS, or Debian Stable. That way you only have to deal with kernel upgrades every 3 years or so.

I guess I should have been more specific in my rant. My problems occurred between SuSE Enterprise 9 and SuSE Enterprise 10. Yeah I know, kernel change, that is why I was having problems, but I had the driver sourcecode, why can't I compile it? Because too much stuff changes EVERY Linux release with no facility for compatability with older stuff, that is my complaint.

But fine, all I am saying is that it is a LOT easier to work with Windows when you don't have to go hunting for drivers after every major update.

The mechanism for handling this stuff is done by incorporating the driver source code into the kernel.org kernel. Once you have it in the kernel then aside from kernel bugs that may crop up the driver compatability is taken care of pretty much automaticly. They have no problem incorporating drivers for devices that have very small amounts of users, but I suppose some people want to have something quick-n-dirty and not have to deal with the stress of lkml-style code review.

If you have the driver in the kernel then the issue isn't weither or not your having to upgrade, it's weither or not your running a new enough kernel to support your new hardware. Then if your using a kernel that isn't very outdated then you can backport newer drivers to older kernel. It's generally considured much easier to backport drivers then it is to produce a driver for some static kernel version then try to forward port it to newer kernels.

That's why, for example, Dell has developed their DKMS to make this sort of thing easier to do.
http://linux.dell.com/projects.shtml

See this guy replied to me when I pointed out that the Linux kernel problem isn't so much what your talking about; it's providing newer kernel drivers fro older kernels you find in distributions that is a major problem.
http://lwn.net/Articles/228628/

I don't blame you for not liking it, that's not what I am arguing. But calling something braindead when that something simply does not exist in the first place is kinda silly. Trying to treat Linux drivers in the same manner you treat Windows drivers is not going to be a pleasent experiance.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: juktar
...
Instead of letting everything install into Program Files, the applications that you know you need to change all the time, make a folder somewhere and install it in there and give yourself permission to the folder.

A better idea, is to install it under your user. I have a folder called Programs under my user directory that I install things to that I know I can trust and I know I will be changing things in the folder alot.

These are horrible suggestions. If you need full permissions to the folder, install it under Program Files like you normally would and give yourself read and write access to THAT folder (not the Program Files folder, but the one under it with the app installed in).

 

[Nothinman]

I guess I should have been more specific in my rant. My problems occurred between SuSE Enterprise 9 and SuSE Enterprise 10. Yeah I know, kernel change, that is why I was having problems, but I had the driver sourcecode, why can't I compile it? Because too much stuff changes EVERY Linux release with no facility for compatability with older stuff, that is my complaint.

Did you expect all drivers that worked under NT 4 to still work in Win2K? Or all of the Win2K drivers to work in XP and Win2K3? Sure some do but some don't and it's the same thing with Linux except that the large majority of drives are bundled so they automatically get ported to any changes that happen during development. And anyone who doesn't want to submit their drivers upstream takes responsibility for updating the drivers themselves.

How many upstream kernel releases were there between SLED 9 and SLED 10? Novell's site sucks ass but from what I can gather from Google SLES 9 released with 2.6.5 and SLES 10 released with 2.6.16 which are just about 2 years apart. 2 years is a very long time in the life of a piece of software so if whoever was maintaining the driver that you're complaining about couldn't be bothered to update their driver after 2 years then something else is wrong.

As for userland visible interfaces, the ones you should really be caring about, those are maintained for a very long time. Excepting of course anything gregkh touches because he's a f'ing idiot. Hopefully gregkh will make one more visible mistake and Linus will stop accepting patches from him but I'm not holding my breath on that just yet.

 

[juktar]

Originally posted by: Brazen

Originally posted by: juktar
...
Instead of letting everything install into Program Files, the applications that you know you need to change all the time, make a folder somewhere and install it in there and give yourself permission to the folder.

A better idea, is to install it under your user. I have a folder called Programs under my user directory that I install things to that I know I can trust and I know I will be changing things in the folder alot.

These are horrible suggestions. If you need full permissions to the folder, install it under Program Files like you normally would and give yourself read and write access to THAT folder (not the Program Files folder, but the one under it with the app installed in).

They are not horrible suggestions at all and note I said only if your comfortable with it. Nesting permissions is a nightmare and should be avoided if you can as it can quickly get out of control. Also note I have exactly 2 programs that do this. I also said only for things that you need to change ALOT that give you problems.

 

[bsobel]

They are not horrible suggestions at all

Yes, actually they are. But since your not a security person, who dont understand that.

 

[quikah]

Originally posted by: drag

I don't blame you for not liking it, that's not what I am arguing.

Yeah, but that is what I am arguing. As I said, this is something which really annoys me about Linux as an end-user, to me it is stupid.

As an aside, my example is completely moot, the driver I was trying to run was never intended to be run on SuSE 10, there is another version for that. I simply found it rather combersome to my work, which is performance testing of my companies software. I wanted to do a performance comparison of our new product vs our old product, I had performance numbers for SuSE 10, but our old product doesn't work on it, so I was forced to run SuSE 9 instead. This was easy to do in Windows, the old drivers worked fine in Win 2003.

 

[juktar]

Originally posted by: bsobel

They are not horrible suggestions at all

Yes, actually they are. But since your not a security person, who dont understand that.

I guess I don't see the problem with a c:\crappy programs folder that you install it to, or install it to your own userspace if it is not working out for you, as long as they are kept together. If you want to change folders permissions in Program Files, go ahead. I have seen it abused way to much. I would much rather segragate the programs myself.

 

[DaiShan]

heh, no way I'm reading all of the posts in this thread, but when I still did Windows tech support work I always brought a LiveCD with me. I can't count the number of times Windows couldn't recognize the NIC and I had to boot into the LiveCD (which recognized it immediately) download the windows drivers to a usb key and reboot back into Windows. Linux helps install Windows