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Did the Netbook Improve Windows 7's Performance?
Arnie87 writes "One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: 'If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista's successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'"
WARNING: The following post is spazzy, and also a huge wall of text. Don't get flattened.
Linux has an annoying security model, for one reason - it's not very unified between cmdline and GUI.
I've been using Ubuntu for about a month now. There's a few things that just don't make sense, but most do. Now that I'm thinking about them, I may as well list them.
1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?
2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?
3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal.
These fail:
cd etc/X11/
cd etc/X11
cd /etc/X11/
cd /etc/X11
cd etc /X11
cd
cd etc
cd X11
This doesn't:
cd /etc
cd X11
Would it hurt to be a little intuitive about where I wanted to go? Apparently so...
4) More #2. It would be much easier to have a way to kick gedit up to root so I can save xorg.conf. That'd save me having to navigate to that folder, which took 10 minutes the first time.
5) Argh. More #3. My Windows partitions often have folders about 8-20 deep. Navigating with the terminal is... horrible. I may have to resize my linux partition and just stick everything on it, because accessing stuff on a shared partition with good organization is such a huge PITA.
6) Oh dear god. I made a shortcut to a file on an NTFS partition and put it on the desktop. The thing is, when I open it, I can't go "up" to the folder's parent folders - it takes me "up" (back) to the desktop. Great. I guess I'll get into the habbit of opening the terminal, typing "gksudo nautilus" in, then navigating manually to the folder I need on my NTFS partition, so that I can go "up" properly and copy stuff around...
And btw, this only takes 1-3 seconds on Windows, because I have a modified run box that opens the correct folder based on the name and some simple heuristics. Why can't linux have a decent find feature? And for that matter, why can't Microsoft create one for Windows? Bleh. They both fail at finding - but at least I can navigate quicker under Windows thanks to brilliant third party coders.
And now some more subjective personal peeves...
7) I hate bash. I really really hate it. A misplaced space, and the whole script breaks down. It's actually simpler for me to script stuff in java than in bash - perhaps because of the more lenient syntax of java. O_o
8) What is up with all that MIME handling rather than extention handling? I have some folders that take a second to display on Windows, but literally take 25-40 seconds in Ubuntu, because of all the identifying of file types.
9) I love the desktop security. Just about everything I try to run off the desktop fails. I tried running a java jar that loads and displays a PNG file from the same folder. It failed - no read permissions! Then I tried un-taring something, and that failed too! (tar -xvvf blah.tar?) I tried to copy it to my NTFS partition, but that also failed, so I re-downloaded it. After verifying they had identical MD5's, I deleted the one on the desktop and un-tar'd it successfully from the NTFS partition. Very cool desktop security. I'll make a note not to download stuff there. That's not really a peeve, to be honest - it was more fascinating to me than anything else.
Final Note: Right now I'm happy and a bit annoyed.
I got systester to compile a little while ago. After that, I installed Fennec, which I had to manually un-tar into /usr/share/, then set up privs so th