Having multiple virtual desktops allows me to have windows set up for different aspects of projects where each one has a well defined focus.
GNOME 3 still has multiple virtual desktops. Although it sounds like you dedicate specific VDs to specific tasks, and leave these VDs there even when they're not in use.
Where do I put applets, if not on panels? I don't want applets always to be visible, but I want to be able to see/use them quickly.
From memory, applets in GNOME 3 live in the systray area, which is hidden, but appears on mouseover (bottom-right).
As far as I remember, GNOME 3 had buttons and areas that where for particular purposes, and a background you could not change.
I'm not sure what you mean here. It has buttons for particular purposes? As opposed to buttons that don't have a particular purpose? "A background you can't change"? You can change the wallpaper, or were you referring to something else?
The main problem with GNOME 3 is that it is _NOT_ an improvement on GNOME 2.
The main problem with GNOME 3 is that it is a dramatic change from GNOME 2, with very little in common. Whether it is better or worse is subjective. With no easy path back to GNOME 2, users are forced to switch to another desktop environment and deal with the unique differences and problems of those.
I'm going to go devil's advocate and ask why a "serious user" needs those things. There are still applets for GNOME, although they can't be placed on panels anymore and I'm not sure what you mean by "cluttered" background. My GNOME desktop has 0 icons on it and is completely clean (they way I like it).
However, if GNOME doesn't meet your specific needs, nothing is forcing you to not switch to KDE or another desktop environment. The problem with Windows 8 is that Modern UI is not optional. You have to use it in some form, even if only a little.
Wake me up when there's a cross platform intermediary "object code" I can distribute that gets optimised and linked/compiled at installation time for the exact hardware my games will be running on.
It's more similar to how swiping a list that is already scrolling continues the scrolling "gesture", but with a multitouch gesture (or perhaps not limited to a single touch)
I thought the "pinch to zoom" patent was actually a lot more specific than that: it referred to continuing a multi-touch gesture after releasing and replacing one of the points involved within a certain duration. This was not in the "prior art" shown.
I've gotten used to the start screen and I quite like how it actually uses my screen space when I'm looking for an app - unlike the Windows 7 Start menu which is restricted to a relatively tiny proportion of the the available screen space. Also, the new Task Manager is really nice and the menu you get (in desktop mode) by right-clicking in the bottom left corner is handy. But the learning curve is steeper than it needs to be eg. why is the shutdown option hidden in the "Options" charm?
On the other hand, while.NET 4.5 and VS2012 have some nice new features, VS2012 is the ugliest thing I've seen from Microsoft since Windows 3.1. Why does "Metro" look (IMO) fantastic while VS2012 looks horrible? Why is the visual contrast and (relatively) attractive color scheme from VS2010 gone? All caps menus? The garish blue-highlights-on-greys color scheme? It's just tiring to use for any significant period of time.
The fast boot time is great and I'm surprised at how much snappier it feels overall compared to Windows 7 (even on older hardware). It doesn't seem significantly faster to me, just smoother and more responsive.
MCA was a proprietary standard that lacked hardware manufacturer support and never took off as a result. It's not valid to compare it to an open W3C standard.
Rambus is another proprietary standard that again failed to take off because it never gained widespread support. DDR RAM was significantly cheaper to manufacture and support (both the DRAM modules and the controller) and performance rapidly outstripped Rambus.
NetBeui was just NetBIOS over Token Ring. NetBIOS was never intended to be "better" than TCP/IP, nor even a replacement for it (it's not routable) and it still exists today in NBT (NetBIOS over TCP/IP). So no, I don't remember.
Little Endian is (slightly) more efficient and Big Endian is more "natural". Neither has won, because most programming is done at a higher level where the endianness is abstracted away from the programmer. In this case, neither is significantly "better".
Thanks for the lengthy reply. I understand better where you're coming from now.
It's going to go from 'use steam like everyone else' to an ungodly mess of dozens of companies all trying to be the matchmaking service.
That's the way it is now. Steam may be the dominant digital distribution platform, but GFWL, Origin and UPlay also exist and a lot of high-profile games use these. It's a mess as it is now, but I agree that adding another service to an already cluttered market is a bad idea.
and skip over the windows 8 store
I thought that the Windows Store was going to be the only way to distribute Windows 8 (Metro)-style apps? This is, possibly, the major reason why Valve is hedging against Windows 8. Sure, you can publish your games as "classic" Windows apps, but that cuts out all the WinRT users (which you may want to target) unless you want to maintain two separate builds for different SKUs of Windows.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft bans bundling steam into games on the windows store.
I may be wrong, but I thought that Microsoft only wanted "Metro-style" apps distributed via the Windows Store. If that's the case, then yes, they'd effectively be banning bundling Steam (or at least, Steam wouldn't be able to distribute the app)
I'm not sure where you get this idea. While I'm not a fan of Windows 8 in the slightest, I'd like to point out where you are clearly talking out of your ass:
With the app store it will probably suck at actually being an app store, you won't be able to find good apps easily (unless you know the name of what you want)
There's a rating system and apps are sorted into categories. No different to the iOS (or Android) stores. That's not necessarily a point in its favour, but it's perhaps better than the way things are in Windows 7 and earlier (you have to manually find, download and install applications all by yourself)
and the apps themselves won't connect you to other users
Windows 8 has a system similar to Android's intents where an app can (with users' permission) read from your user account's "People" list, which aggregates contacts from various sources (again, like Android). It would be trivial for a game to use this list to find contacts who are currently playing the same game as you, assuming both are running Windows 8, or it could be done outside of Windows 8's system pretty easily too.
Granted, GFWL was and is pretty horrible, but that doesn't automatically mean that MS won't win. The app store on Windows 8 just has to be "good enough" to beat the competition: if it does the job adequately, then the fact that it's bundled means that it wins. GFWL was never bundled and even now struggles to even be adequate, but perhaps MS has learned from its mistakes with that.
the new search won't even let you hunt for a document by some of the wording in its text.
It does for me? I'm not sure what you're doing wrong, but I know that it definitely brings up documents with the search phrase in them, although they appear to be lower priority than file or directory names that match.
Wubi, pulseaudio and networkmanager, off the top of my head. They may not be "Ubuntu projects" but they certainly gained their popularity primarily from Ubuntu
If you're talking about 4e, you clearly haven't even looked at it. There is a system in 4e for obtaining abilities from other classes (like your arcane-spell-casting warrior), although it's rarely worth the effort. Also, there are multiple choices of abilities for each class, not to mention Paragon Paths which are similar to 3e's Prestige Classes.
If you're talking about NEXT, well, the playtests have (AFAIK) only included prebuilt characters, so of course there's not going to be any choice of abilities.
Now which OS often forces the user to pull up a shell to fix things
I've been using ipconfig/[release|renew] semi-regularly to "fix" a borked network connection for at least a decade now. I don't know if there's a GUI way to request a new IP other than disabling/enabling the interface, and that's far slower and more cumbersome (which could be said for a lot of GUIs, really)
I knew that FunnyJunk was basically the new ebaumsworld - or at least the subsequent iteration (9GAG is the next one) of the "take other people's content, add advertising, profit" business model - but little more than that. Now I also know that its lawyer is unbelievably ignorant about the internet and the Streisand Effect.
it craps out on you and dumps you back into a VGA console (if you're lucky)
If you're unlucky you get a kernel panic or no display at all or that VGA output is on a disconnected screen or many other things
ATI drivers are even more flaky
I've given up on AMD's closed Linux drivers. The OSS drivers may be slower and less power-efficient, but manually setting the GPU to minimum power mode brings the battery life to ~3/4 of what I get in Windows, even with desktop effects enabled.
It just means that all three are horrible companies, and that the GPU market really needs a shake-up.
At least AMD releases the specs for their GPUs so the OSS community can write open drivers that aren't horrible. Well, they do have (relatively) horrible performance, but at least they're stable
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, this is actually an option for Google advertising.
Having multiple virtual desktops allows me to have windows set up for different aspects of projects where each one has a well defined focus.
GNOME 3 still has multiple virtual desktops. Although it sounds like you dedicate specific VDs to specific tasks, and leave these VDs there even when they're not in use.
Where do I put applets, if not on panels? I don't want applets always to be visible, but I want to be able to see/use them quickly.
From memory, applets in GNOME 3 live in the systray area, which is hidden, but appears on mouseover (bottom-right).
As far as I remember, GNOME 3 had buttons and areas that where for particular purposes, and a background you could not change.
I'm not sure what you mean here. It has buttons for particular purposes? As opposed to buttons that don't have a particular purpose? "A background you can't change"? You can change the wallpaper, or were you referring to something else?
The main problem with GNOME 3 is that it is _NOT_ an improvement on GNOME 2.
The main problem with GNOME 3 is that it is a dramatic change from GNOME 2, with very little in common. Whether it is better or worse is subjective. With no easy path back to GNOME 2, users are forced to switch to another desktop environment and deal with the unique differences and problems of those.
I'm going to go devil's advocate and ask why a "serious user" needs those things. There are still applets for GNOME, although they can't be placed on panels anymore and I'm not sure what you mean by "cluttered" background. My GNOME desktop has 0 icons on it and is completely clean (they way I like it).
However, if GNOME doesn't meet your specific needs, nothing is forcing you to not switch to KDE or another desktop environment. The problem with Windows 8 is that Modern UI is not optional. You have to use it in some form, even if only a little.
Wake me up when there's a cross platform intermediary "object code" I can distribute that gets optimised and linked/compiled at installation time for the exact hardware my games will be running on.
I hear LLVM is heading in this direction
It's more similar to how swiping a list that is already scrolling continues the scrolling "gesture", but with a multitouch gesture (or perhaps not limited to a single touch)
I thought the "pinch to zoom" patent was actually a lot more specific than that: it referred to continuing a multi-touch gesture after releasing and replacing one of the points involved within a certain duration. This was not in the "prior art" shown.
They already do. It's called robots.txt
I've gotten used to the start screen and I quite like how it actually uses my screen space when I'm looking for an app - unlike the Windows 7 Start menu which is restricted to a relatively tiny proportion of the the available screen space. Also, the new Task Manager is really nice and the menu you get (in desktop mode) by right-clicking in the bottom left corner is handy. But the learning curve is steeper than it needs to be eg. why is the shutdown option hidden in the "Options" charm?
On the other hand, while.NET 4.5 and VS2012 have some nice new features, VS2012 is the ugliest thing I've seen from Microsoft since Windows 3.1. Why does "Metro" look (IMO) fantastic while VS2012 looks horrible? Why is the visual contrast and (relatively) attractive color scheme from VS2010 gone? All caps menus? The garish blue-highlights-on-greys color scheme? It's just tiring to use for any significant period of time.
The fast boot time is great and I'm surprised at how much snappier it feels overall compared to Windows 7 (even on older hardware). It doesn't seem significantly faster to me, just smoother and more responsive.
You can have one Modern UI app fullscreen at a time, optionally with another tiled at 30% screen width.
Alternatively, you can ignore Modern UI apps entirely and use traditional desktop apps as you always have
MCA was a proprietary standard that lacked hardware manufacturer support and never took off as a result. It's not valid to compare it to an open W3C standard.
Rambus is another proprietary standard that again failed to take off because it never gained widespread support. DDR RAM was significantly cheaper to manufacture and support (both the DRAM modules and the controller) and performance rapidly outstripped Rambus.
NetBeui was just NetBIOS over Token Ring. NetBIOS was never intended to be "better" than TCP/IP, nor even a replacement for it (it's not routable) and it still exists today in NBT (NetBIOS over TCP/IP). So no, I don't remember.
Little Endian is (slightly) more efficient and Big Endian is more "natural". Neither has won, because most programming is done at a higher level where the endianness is abstracted away from the programmer. In this case, neither is significantly "better".
Thanks for the lengthy reply. I understand better where you're coming from now.
It's going to go from 'use steam like everyone else' to an ungodly mess of dozens of companies all trying to be the matchmaking service.
That's the way it is now. Steam may be the dominant digital distribution platform, but GFWL, Origin and UPlay also exist and a lot of high-profile games use these. It's a mess as it is now, but I agree that adding another service to an already cluttered market is a bad idea.
and skip over the windows 8 store
I thought that the Windows Store was going to be the only way to distribute Windows 8 (Metro)-style apps? This is, possibly, the major reason why Valve is hedging against Windows 8. Sure, you can publish your games as "classic" Windows apps, but that cuts out all the WinRT users (which you may want to target) unless you want to maintain two separate builds for different SKUs of Windows.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft bans bundling steam into games on the windows store.
I may be wrong, but I thought that Microsoft only wanted "Metro-style" apps distributed via the Windows Store. If that's the case, then yes, they'd effectively be banning bundling Steam (or at least, Steam wouldn't be able to distribute the app)
I'm not sure where you get this idea. While I'm not a fan of Windows 8 in the slightest, I'd like to point out where you are clearly talking out of your ass:
With the app store it will probably suck at actually being an app store, you won't be able to find good apps easily (unless you know the name of what you want)
There's a rating system and apps are sorted into categories. No different to the iOS (or Android) stores. That's not necessarily a point in its favour, but it's perhaps better than the way things are in Windows 7 and earlier (you have to manually find, download and install applications all by yourself)
and the apps themselves won't connect you to other users
Windows 8 has a system similar to Android's intents where an app can (with users' permission) read from your user account's "People" list, which aggregates contacts from various sources (again, like Android). It would be trivial for a game to use this list to find contacts who are currently playing the same game as you, assuming both are running Windows 8, or it could be done outside of Windows 8's system pretty easily too.
Granted, GFWL was and is pretty horrible, but that doesn't automatically mean that MS won't win. The app store on Windows 8 just has to be "good enough" to beat the competition: if it does the job adequately, then the fact that it's bundled means that it wins. GFWL was never bundled and even now struggles to even be adequate, but perhaps MS has learned from its mistakes with that.
the new search won't even let you hunt for a document by some of the wording in its text.
It does for me? I'm not sure what you're doing wrong, but I know that it definitely brings up documents with the search phrase in them, although they appear to be lower priority than file or directory names that match.
Browsing its catalogue to find applications that do what I'm after is not what I'd describe as a great user experience.
Never tried apt-cache search then? Synaptic? The Ubuntu Software Center?
Wubi, pulseaudio and networkmanager, off the top of my head. They may not be "Ubuntu projects" but they certainly gained their popularity primarily from Ubuntu
If you're talking about 4e, you clearly haven't even looked at it. There is a system in 4e for obtaining abilities from other classes (like your arcane-spell-casting warrior), although it's rarely worth the effort. Also, there are multiple choices of abilities for each class, not to mention Paragon Paths which are similar to 3e's Prestige Classes.
If you're talking about NEXT, well, the playtests have (AFAIK) only included prebuilt characters, so of course there's not going to be any choice of abilities.
Now which OS often forces the user to pull up a shell to fix things
I've been using ipconfig /[release|renew] semi-regularly to "fix" a borked network connection for at least a decade now. I don't know if there's a GUI way to request a new IP other than disabling/enabling the interface, and that's far slower and more cumbersome (which could be said for a lot of GUIs, really)
If I were designing this CLI interface for a search engine, I wouldn't use a "keywords" flag so it would be something like:
$ google cats --type=images --image-size=medium
for an ordinary search for cat pictures. Safe search preference would be set in a configuration file (possibly overridden by a command-line flag)
just knowing to save and reload to that state the next time you launched the program
Metro-style apps do this.
I knew that FunnyJunk was basically the new ebaumsworld - or at least the subsequent iteration (9GAG is the next one) of the "take other people's content, add advertising, profit" business model - but little more than that. Now I also know that its lawyer is unbelievably ignorant about the internet and the Streisand Effect.
I can't be the only one who still has a PC with a chipset that requires the "forcedeth" reverse-engineered drivers for ethernet, right?
it craps out on you and dumps you back into a VGA console (if you're lucky)
If you're unlucky you get a kernel panic or no display at all or that VGA output is on a disconnected screen or many other things
ATI drivers are even more flaky
I've given up on AMD's closed Linux drivers. The OSS drivers may be slower and less power-efficient, but manually setting the GPU to minimum power mode brings the battery life to ~3/4 of what I get in Windows, even with desktop effects enabled.
It just means that all three are horrible companies, and that the GPU market really needs a shake-up.
At least AMD releases the specs for their GPUs so the OSS community can write open drivers that aren't horrible. Well, they do have (relatively) horrible performance, but at least they're stable
There's still no KMS, though. And it took them how long to add XRandR 1.2 support? The reverse-engineered drivers had it pretty much from day 1.