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She can type in Firefox and VIOLA there it is, no clicking on menus or anything. To further this, she needed to scan something and, according to her, she typed in "scanner" and VIOLA XSane opened up and she could scan whateverthehell it was she needed.

If only there had been some reliable, full-featured way to do this already...

The basic idea of a theme isn't new. A friend of mine had an XP theme on his desktop, and had a guest at his home using his computer for over half an hour without noticing anything. He asked "Do you find my Linux computer easy to use?" and the guest hadn't even realized it wasn't Windows XP.

That sort of thing is mainly useful as evidence to counter the idea that a Linux desktop is "hard to use".

The major new thing with Windows 7 is its dock. I have never much been interested in docks but it seems like they are popular. Do you use a dock in Linux? If so, could you please answer these questions:

0) Which dock do you use?

1) Why do you prefer your dock to others you have tried?

2) Is your dock similar to the one in Windows 7?

I know someone who uses Gnome Do and Docky, so I'm interested in those, but I know there are others around.

steveha

The Gnome version of that is Gnome Do, which started as a project to port Quicksilver to Linux. Quicksilver was purchased by Apple and put into OSX 10.3 several years ago. I use Gnome, and I no longer have any sort of task bar or "start menu"; they are pointless wastes of screen real estate. If I want to chat with my buddy Mike, I just hit meta-space, and then type "ch", which auto-completes to "Chat", then I hit tab and type "mi" which auto-completes to Mike. Gnome-Do will then launch Pidgin and open a chat window for Mike. If I want to listen to Rhapsody In Blue, I hit meta-space, and type "rha", it auto-completes the song name, I hit enter and then Rhythmbox starts playing Gershwin. It really is an amazing riff on all the quick launchers. It's much better than Spotlight (Apple's version of Quicksilver); I wrote a plugin for Gnome-Do last summer -- it's all written in C#/Mono and very accessible for coders of any level.

Try GNOME Do.

The "Docky" frontend is a fantastic dock experience as well.

And Gnome Do, Banshee, F-Spot and other more complex stuff than Tomboy?

I don't get what's so complex about Gnome-Do. In fact, it looks like an app that should have been imlemented in Python (to make it easy to write plugins)

How easy would they be to port (feature complete) to C or C++?

C is a stupid strawman here. Nobody is porting anything to C.

Everyone on either side gets everything they need, and I get a nice and productive language to work with that has extremely useful features (garbage collection/memory management, good event hooks, delegate methods, easy extensibility, etc).

Obviously, C# does all of this worse and Python, though it has a faster vm.

I find it funny how kids these days think C# brings something new to table. They don't have what it takes to do it in C++, but require the safety wheels of static typing in order to keep their spaghetti manageable.

And Gnome Do, Banshee, F-Spot and other more complex stuff than Tomboy? How easy would they be to port (feature complete) to C or C++?

I'm doing some work at the moment on a personal project. The back-end is core C# only, and eventually I'll add in Mono.Addins, which can be redistributed and used on MS's .Net and are part of Mono. There's a System.Windows.Forms front-end made through Visual Studio (because it's the only way to get a decent GUI editor for it). There's a GTK# front-end made through MonoDevelop (because S.W.F on Linux is ugly). Everyone on either side gets everything they need, and I get a nice and productive language to work with that has extremely useful features (garbage collection/memory management, good event hooks, delegate methods, easy extensibility, etc).

You should try Gnome-Do. It gives you a dock, if you want one, and also a QuickSilver-like interface for launching apps, which is far, far better than a dock.

It also gives you mono

You should try Gnome-Do. It gives you a dock, if you want one, and also a QuickSilver-like interface for launching apps, which is far, far better than a dock.

wot, gnome-do? ( http://do.davebsd.com/ )

Want to know why I spend 2/3rds of my time in Windows (the rest in SuSE 10.3 on KDE 3.x)

I would like to point out that age obviously has nothing to do with computer literacy. From your previous statements I'm much younger than you and I use Linux 100% - to the point where I refuse to use Windows.

1) The games I play, play in Windows. I have no inclination to fumble-fuck around with emulators or what have you trying to get MS Flight Simulator 2004 or STALKER or Team Fortress 2 running on Linux, not sure it's even possible.

I don't think you've tried the latest wine. I was able to install Portal with steam extremely easily - I sincerely mean that. I just double clicked on the stupid .exe and it worked just like in windows (I assume, I haven't used windows in quite some time).

2) The fonts in Windows have been optimized at the per-pixel level to match up with LCD monitors. In KDE 3.x the fonts are about where they were in the Windows 3.1 world, circa 1995. Big pudgy letters that my eyes have to fight to glom. Especially in FireFox on Linux.

You know, that's strange, I've got better fonts on Linux than I've seen on windows. All the fonts in windows looks terribly thin and aliased while in Linux they are full and plump, like a young woman's... lips. ;)

3) For fucks sake - where's the calculator? It's bad enough that I can't hover over the different parts of the start menu (or what ever it's called) and just see what's under there, drill down without it hiding all the other stuff because it 'page flipped' - but the calculator isn't called 'calculator'.

For me, this is as easy as + then typing "calc". I use a program called Gnome-do. But then again, I also use gnome.

It's called kcalc. And the movie player isn't called 'movie player'. It's called ICEwigga or something. And the music player isn't called 'music player' - it's called kude or some shit like that.

You sound frustrated to me. I get the feeling you've been using a Linux that is too much of a pain. I used to have those issues too.
Then, I switched to a debian based distro. You know the one I'm talking about. Join the Brown side, and together we can rule as -*.. Sorry got lost in the moment there :P