As I said (maybe in my earlier accidentally-AC post) I've tried before, much more seriously. Seeing that page just reminded me what a mess it was, and why I'd given up the other times. I've tried actually working in it, and find that I'm spending loads of time looking at a cheat sheet but not retaining enough to confidently (without said cheat sheet) do something as simple as open a document, replace one line, and save it.
I just fired up Gvim to try some of the stuff you mentioned, and aside from its absurdly huge default tabs (7 characters? really? heh, I'm gonna have to figure out how to fix that crap) I'm not having too much trouble so far. We'll see how it goes.
I think I might be starting to get the rudiments of it--I can now tell that part of my previous trouble was seeing things like "G$ will take you to the end of the last line in the document" and failing to understand that each character was its own command that's executed as you type it, rather than executing the whole command. For whatever reason, that never clicked before, even though I had to have been aware of it.
Dear god, I just edited my.vimrc to remap the [esc] function so I don't have to reach way out of my way to leave edit mode. And I did it in Vim.
Anyway, update: I've given up again after getting about 1/6 of the way down this page and seeing the diagram detailing movement commands. ctrl+e, ctrl+d, and ctrl+f to move various portions of a page up? Ok, it makes no damn sense, but maybe I can learn to just bash that part of the keyboard when I want to go up (lord knows I'll never manage to remember exactly how much each one scrolls up), but then, ctrl+u,ctrl+y, and ctrl+b for the corresponding ones going down? WTF? The "b" doesn't even fit the keyboard-geography theme I thought they were going for--it's off on its own!
Then I saw the next diagram, which I think is talking about how to move around on a line. I can't really tell. There are twelve commands shown. TWELVE. For moving around on a line. Three more below that that have to do with moving around on a line that's wider than the screen (why it's necessary to have special commands for that is not explained)
I honestly have no idea how people learn to use this program. Every time I try, I feel like the butt of some sort of in-joke--like I'm being sent on a snipe hunt or something. I'm sure I could learn to use it, but there's no way I'd remember enough of this shit to be any more productive in it than I am in Geany or even Nano. I feel like I could learn it well enough to operate in editing mode 100% of the time and do OK there, but I'd still have to look up things I can just do in the "edit" menu anywhere else.
Please tell me this is some sort of coder hazing ritual that I just haven't caught on to. I've been bugged by my inability to grok vim for nearly ten years, and I still can't even figure out where to begin to try to make this program even a little bit useful to me.
Without compositing, X can still look and feel slow (even if it's not). Those artifacts when you drag a window just scream "processor and/or video card is so overloaded it can't draw a proper 2d screen element", even if that's not the case.
May not be the parent poster's problem, but it's the first thing that comes to mind.
The closest thing I've found in Linux is Geany, and it's a pale imitation. God, I wish I could get it to do highlighting on the corresponding open/close (x)html tag to the one the cursor is in--among other things.
I'm seriously considering running it in Wine; it's actually good enough to be worth that hassle. It's the only non-Adobe, non-game program that I miss from Windows.
Unless Kate has gotten better about resource usage and start time since I last used it, it's kind of a pig on any platform. So's Gedit, though to a much lesser extent. I've used both at different times, but eventually dumped them; even a featureful text editor has no business being so bloated.
But if we're talking about applications, the biggest target of my wrath will always be Nautilus. I fuckin' hate it. To be fair, I also hate Dolphin (because it's just another Nautilus), but Konqueror's good, and Krusader's amazing. Krusader might be a solid one third of why I use KDE.
Agreed. Nautilus blows. It is, to be fair, WAY better than it used to be, but then again, so is Konqueror, which was so bad when I first started using Linux that it's what drove me to Gnome.
I still don't like Konqueror, but it's probably the best full-featured file manager on Linux right now. I can't wait 'till something else beats it (or it gets even better).
You can already buy damn near every issue in digital form on Amazon for next to nothing. 50+ years on a DVD or two. "Absolutely Mad" it's called, and Amazon has it listed for $32, which is probably less than a year's subscription to the mag.
I bounced around from distro to distro for a while, too. Used Mandrake for a while because Red Hat was terrible, Debian's installation confused me (this was quite a while ago, mind you) and wanted some sort of "floppy calibration" test thing that I still don't understand (and haven't seen since) before it would happily install.
Switched to Debian when Mandrake began to suck (after version 8) and Debian had gotten mildly more user-friendly.
Then Gentoo, after a brief but annoying flirtation with Fedora and Suse. Gentoo was a gigantic pain in the ass, but it was still less of a pain in the ass than the other distros I'd used. That's how bad the others were.
I tried Ubuntu in its second release, and knew that they were on to something, but it wasn't quite all there yet. Their third release won me over and I haven't looked back. It is different from its most similar competitors (Red Hat/Fedora and Suse)--specifically, it's less fucked up under the hood and has much more user-friendly admin tools, which integrate well with the rest of the UI rather than looking like something tacked on. Ubuntu has a tendency toward sensible defaults that I believe it inherits from Debian, but doesn't stop you from doing other things. Its stock set of programs makes more sense than any other I've seen.
Its Debian roots serve it well, but I never have to worry about downloading the source for a program and then needing to use a non-official repository or compile a newer GTK (or some other library) to compile it because the one I've got is so ancient, as can occasionally happen even in testing and unstable Debian (or at least it used to be a problem--I haven't used Debian at all in nearly two years, admittedly). It keeps me up-to-date but still feels more-or-less like Debian beneath the surface.
It's easy enough for a n00b but flexible and powerful enough for power-users and Linux geeks (at least, those of us who have had our share of mucking around in/etc to achieve basic functionality and have no desire to continue doing that). None of the other "user friendly" distros have impressed me so much.
I'm 99% sure you can do this in Gnome. In fact, I believe I've caused it to happen by accident a couple of times:)
2. Rearrange items in the task manager.
You can do this, too.
3. Figure out where my settings live. gconf can kiss my ass.
Yeah, it sucks. Then again, I've only ever had to use it once in several years, and that was back when I was a Gentoo-"you configure everything so we don't have to, and we call that a feature not a bug" user.
4. Okay, here's a cool one. Qt4 (and don't ask me how, because I have no idea) "translates" (forgive me, I know that's the wrong word) non-Qt apps into native Qt widgets. So when you open up Firefox, it's displayed with Qt, not GTK. I don't know how this is done, but it's frickin' awesome.
That's kinda cool. I stopped regularly using QT apps in Gnome when some non-QT disc burning apps finally became as good as K3B (damn, did that ever take a while!) so I don't really remember how they looked, but then again I usually use fairly plain widget sets so I doubt it would have been jarring for me. Good feature for people who use some of the more out-there visuals, though.
5. The KDE application suite knocks the shit out of Gnome's across the board, all day every day. I mean, Rhythmbox? Evolution? Nautilus, for cryin' out loud? Pfft.
This is actually the main reason I don't use KDE (the two other biggies being that I find the interface to be poorly-designed in general, and it took way longer to compile in Gentoo than Gnome did and took up significantly more disk space)
I feel like the whole thing is designed around using a homogeneous set of QT apps, and the moment I start using apps that don't have that magic "k" in their name, I'm missing the point of it. Konqueror over Firefox or Opera? HA! Rhythmbox is inferior? I actually like it better than Amarok--which I really wanted to like, after everything I'd heard about it, and especially with it supposedly going cross-platform soon; I found it to be prettier, but it performed poorly and had an interface nearly as clunky and slow as Itunes. I'll use Openoffice.org and Google Docs, not Koffice (ugh).
So, every time I try KDE I slowly get fed up with the default apps and switch them, and pretty soon I'm just using all the apps I would use in any other DE/WM, at which point all the extra cruft of KDE feels like dead weight. I'm sure some people love the default apps, but some of us like few or none of them, which makes running KDE kind of pointless. On the other hand, even if I liked none of the default apps in Gnome (and, in fact, I've never liked many of the ones that were often bundled with Gnome, which is why I like Ubuntu's "use the best apps for defaults, not the 'right' ones" approach--I don't want Abiword/Gnumeric and Galeon or Epiphany, I want Openoffice and Firefox!) I never feel like Gnome itself is any worse if I run non-default apps, or even QT apps.
Consequently, KDE has for a long time (certainly since 3) felt like the most confining of my DE/WM options to me. Everyone--even a lot Gnome people--seem to think it's the other way around, and Gnome is the one that boxes you in, but I still don't see it.
I've never been able to figure out what all these things are that I'm missing out on by using Gnome over KDE. Any time this discussion comes up on Slashdot, someone always mentions Gnome being limited in some way--but I've never thought, "hm, I'd really like to do that, but gnome won't let me". Likewise, the times I've tried KDE over the years, I've never seen any compelling features that would make me want to stay. There was never a, "oh wow, I can do that in KDE? How cool!" moment, and I've done my share of poking around its config options.
I'm amazed that more people don't use this technology.
Like most things, it's not for everyone.
Our quote for installation here was about $25,000 for a system that would heat/cool a 3000sqft house.
The house cost us less than $100,000, and we probably won't be here more than 3 years or so. No way in hell the house's value will be increased by at least the difference between our savings and the remaining cost of installation when we sell. Conclusion: we would lose money putting in that system.
It's sad, but unless these kinds of improvements become more highly-valued by home buyers or people stop being so damn mobile, for many of us it's just not worth it to make long-term energy efficiency investments in our houses.
10GB install with no real apps (where did the space go)? yay solitaire.
Seriously, what the hell are they doing with all that space? Freshly-installed Vista eats more space than Ubuntu with every app I might conceivably want to ever use installed, even with Vista's disk-swap turned off!
That was one of the things I liked about Ubuntu: the default applications are the ones I actually want. I don't want Gnumeric, because I'll need OpenOffice anyway, and I don't want two spreadsheet apps. I don't want Galeon or whatever--I want Firefox.
I like Ubuntu because I don't have to worry too much about deleting all the dumb little default apps cluttering up my menus before I start installing my dev tools and stuff; the defaults are a good starting point.
The latest release is pretty stable. The last one was embarrassingly bad. Worst release I'd seen from them... well, ever, and I started trying it out around their 2rd release and using it full-time when the 3rd came out.
I think the next is due to be a long-term support (LTS) release, so it ought to be good, too.
Ubuntu won me over from Gentoo, which certainly has an image of being one of the more "hardcore" distros.
Why?
Ubuntu had nearly Debian-level stability, but new-ish packages, so it wasn't like the dunking-your-head-in-a-bucket-of-cold-water experience of going from bleeding-edge Gentoo to Debian Unstable or whatever. Everything was new enough that at least you wouldn't have to compile updated libraries to get some app from outside the repositories to build properly.
Ubuntu automated the stuff that I wanted to be automated, and pretty much nothing else. It even did a few things that I'd wanted to do in Gentoo but had never gotten around to doing because it was too much of a pain. At the same time, it stayed the hell out of my way when I wanted to do something manually, which is more than I can say for some other "user friendly" distros.
Ubuntu's default package set was smart. Concise, but not incomplete. The default applications were almost exactly the same ones I was using on Gentoo, minus a few development apps.
Dpkg and apt-get. I still like Portage better, but it's a close second. Portage is a 9 out of 10, dpkg/apt-get is an 8. Everything else is a 5 at best. Nearly as good as Portage, but no compiling (which I never cared about anyway)--awesome.
The only thing I really miss is the Gentoo runlevels system (there's a better name for it, but I can't recall at the moment) but then again I don't have to mess with that stuff very often in Ubuntu so it's not a big deal.
I can't be the only one who used the first game for nothing but playing the battle of Hoth over and over. Single-player, because I wasn't dedicated enough to the game to want to play it online.
The second one was horrible for that. There were slight improvements to the Hoth map, but far more harm was done to it than good.
Also, I found single-player mode in II to be nearly impossible. Not the campaign, but the "conquer the galaxy"-type single-player thing, or individual maps played with bots. Even on its easiest setting my bots were incapable of holding two of the victory locations while I went after a third. They were too far apart for me to be always bouncing around defending the ones we already had, and the moment I left a point it came under dispute again. This happened over and over. The time it took me to run to a nearly-undefended enemy point, blast the 2-3 guys who tried to defend it, then stand there while it transfered to my side let the enemy take at least one of my other points. I never managed to win a single one of those maps, and while I'm not a god at FPS games, I'm pretty damn far from being bad. The only exception was Hoth, but I'd played it a ton of times and it's a mostly linear map.
I don't know what other people thought of II, but I uninstalled it after just a couple of weeks and haven't even considered trying it again. I still install the first one every now and then, though, just so I can take another crack at those AT-ATs in my snowspeeder:) Hopefully III will feature a larger, better Hoth map. Otherwise I've got no use for it.
Looks to me like it's unethical in the same way that refusing to pay any scammer after you figured out they're scamming you is unethical, regardless of prior agreements.
I know that Europe has much better consumer protection than the U.S., generally speaking, so she may be able to get a refund or somehow officially reject the product and not pay.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said (maybe in my earlier accidentally-AC post) I've tried before, much more seriously. Seeing that page just reminded me what a mess it was, and why I'd given up the other times. I've tried actually working in it, and find that I'm spending loads of time looking at a cheat sheet but not retaining enough to confidently (without said cheat sheet) do something as simple as open a document, replace one line, and save it.
I just fired up Gvim to try some of the stuff you mentioned, and aside from its absurdly huge default tabs (7 characters? really? heh, I'm gonna have to figure out how to fix that crap) I'm not having too much trouble so far. We'll see how it goes.
I think I might be starting to get the rudiments of it--I can now tell that part of my previous trouble was seeing things like "G$ will take you to the end of the last line in the document" and failing to understand that each character was its own command that's executed as you type it, rather than executing the whole command. For whatever reason, that never clicked before, even though I had to have been aware of it.
Dear god, I just edited my .vimrc to remap the [esc] function so I don't have to reach way out of my way to leave edit mode. And I did it in Vim.
What have you done to me!!???
Oh, uh, dunno why that other one posted AC.
Anyway, update: I've given up again after getting about 1/6 of the way down this page and seeing the diagram detailing movement commands. ctrl+e, ctrl+d, and ctrl+f to move various portions of a page up? Ok, it makes no damn sense, but maybe I can learn to just bash that part of the keyboard when I want to go up (lord knows I'll never manage to remember exactly how much each one scrolls up), but then, ctrl+u,ctrl+y, and ctrl+ b for the corresponding ones going down? WTF? The "b" doesn't even fit the keyboard-geography theme I thought they were going for--it's off on its own!
Then I saw the next diagram, which I think is talking about how to move around on a line. I can't really tell. There are twelve commands shown. TWELVE. For moving around on a line. Three more below that that have to do with moving around on a line that's wider than the screen (why it's necessary to have special commands for that is not explained)
I honestly have no idea how people learn to use this program. Every time I try, I feel like the butt of some sort of in-joke--like I'm being sent on a snipe hunt or something. I'm sure I could learn to use it, but there's no way I'd remember enough of this shit to be any more productive in it than I am in Geany or even Nano. I feel like I could learn it well enough to operate in editing mode 100% of the time and do OK there, but I'd still have to look up things I can just do in the "edit" menu anywhere else.
Please tell me this is some sort of coder hazing ritual that I just haven't caught on to. I've been bugged by my inability to grok vim for nearly ten years, and I still can't even figure out where to begin to try to make this program even a little bit useful to me.
Without compositing, X can still look and feel slow (even if it's not). Those artifacts when you drag a window just scream "processor and/or video card is so overloaded it can't draw a proper 2d screen element", even if that's not the case.
May not be the parent poster's problem, but it's the first thing that comes to mind.
Notepad++.
The closest thing I've found in Linux is Geany, and it's a pale imitation. God, I wish I could get it to do highlighting on the corresponding open/close (x)html tag to the one the cursor is in--among other things.
I'm seriously considering running it in Wine; it's actually good enough to be worth that hassle. It's the only non-Adobe, non-game program that I miss from Windows.
Unless Kate has gotten better about resource usage and start time since I last used it, it's kind of a pig on any platform. So's Gedit, though to a much lesser extent. I've used both at different times, but eventually dumped them; even a featureful text editor has no business being so bloated.
Agreed. Nautilus blows. It is, to be fair, WAY better than it used to be, but then again, so is Konqueror, which was so bad when I first started using Linux that it's what drove me to Gnome.
I still don't like Konqueror, but it's probably the best full-featured file manager on Linux right now. I can't wait 'till something else beats it (or it gets even better).
Funnier than at least 90% of the other shit that gets labeled as "funny" online, IMO. Every now and then, they're even good.
You can already buy damn near every issue in digital form on Amazon for next to nothing. 50+ years on a DVD or two. "Absolutely Mad" it's called, and Amazon has it listed for $32, which is probably less than a year's subscription to the mag.
I bounced around from distro to distro for a while, too. Used Mandrake for a while because Red Hat was terrible, Debian's installation confused me (this was quite a while ago, mind you) and wanted some sort of "floppy calibration" test thing that I still don't understand (and haven't seen since) before it would happily install.
Switched to Debian when Mandrake began to suck (after version 8) and Debian had gotten mildly more user-friendly.
Then Gentoo, after a brief but annoying flirtation with Fedora and Suse. Gentoo was a gigantic pain in the ass, but it was still less of a pain in the ass than the other distros I'd used. That's how bad the others were.
I tried Ubuntu in its second release, and knew that they were on to something, but it wasn't quite all there yet. Their third release won me over and I haven't looked back. It is different from its most similar competitors (Red Hat/Fedora and Suse)--specifically, it's less fucked up under the hood and has much more user-friendly admin tools, which integrate well with the rest of the UI rather than looking like something tacked on. Ubuntu has a tendency toward sensible defaults that I believe it inherits from Debian, but doesn't stop you from doing other things. Its stock set of programs makes more sense than any other I've seen.
Its Debian roots serve it well, but I never have to worry about downloading the source for a program and then needing to use a non-official repository or compile a newer GTK (or some other library) to compile it because the one I've got is so ancient, as can occasionally happen even in testing and unstable Debian (or at least it used to be a problem--I haven't used Debian at all in nearly two years, admittedly). It keeps me up-to-date but still feels more-or-less like Debian beneath the surface.
It's easy enough for a n00b but flexible and powerful enough for power-users and Linux geeks (at least, those of us who have had our share of mucking around in /etc to achieve basic functionality and have no desire to continue doing that). None of the other "user friendly" distros have impressed me so much.
Nice proper use of an uncommon definition of "rent", AC.
1. Run without panels.
I'm 99% sure you can do this in Gnome. In fact, I believe I've caused it to happen by accident a couple of times :)
2. Rearrange items in the task manager.
You can do this, too.
3. Figure out where my settings live. gconf can kiss my ass.
Yeah, it sucks. Then again, I've only ever had to use it once in several years, and that was back when I was a Gentoo-"you configure everything so we don't have to, and we call that a feature not a bug" user.
4. Okay, here's a cool one. Qt4 (and don't ask me how, because I have no idea) "translates" (forgive me, I know that's the wrong word) non-Qt apps into native Qt widgets. So when you open up Firefox, it's displayed with Qt, not GTK. I don't know how this is done, but it's frickin' awesome.
That's kinda cool. I stopped regularly using QT apps in Gnome when some non-QT disc burning apps finally became as good as K3B (damn, did that ever take a while!) so I don't really remember how they looked, but then again I usually use fairly plain widget sets so I doubt it would have been jarring for me. Good feature for people who use some of the more out-there visuals, though.
5. The KDE application suite knocks the shit out of Gnome's across the board, all day every day. I mean, Rhythmbox? Evolution? Nautilus, for cryin' out loud? Pfft.
This is actually the main reason I don't use KDE (the two other biggies being that I find the interface to be poorly-designed in general, and it took way longer to compile in Gentoo than Gnome did and took up significantly more disk space)
I feel like the whole thing is designed around using a homogeneous set of QT apps, and the moment I start using apps that don't have that magic "k" in their name, I'm missing the point of it. Konqueror over Firefox or Opera? HA! Rhythmbox is inferior? I actually like it better than Amarok--which I really wanted to like, after everything I'd heard about it, and especially with it supposedly going cross-platform soon; I found it to be prettier, but it performed poorly and had an interface nearly as clunky and slow as Itunes. I'll use Openoffice.org and Google Docs, not Koffice (ugh).
So, every time I try KDE I slowly get fed up with the default apps and switch them, and pretty soon I'm just using all the apps I would use in any other DE/WM, at which point all the extra cruft of KDE feels like dead weight. I'm sure some people love the default apps, but some of us like few or none of them, which makes running KDE kind of pointless. On the other hand, even if I liked none of the default apps in Gnome (and, in fact, I've never liked many of the ones that were often bundled with Gnome, which is why I like Ubuntu's "use the best apps for defaults, not the 'right' ones" approach--I don't want Abiword/Gnumeric and Galeon or Epiphany, I want Openoffice and Firefox!) I never feel like Gnome itself is any worse if I run non-default apps, or even QT apps.
Consequently, KDE has for a long time (certainly since 3) felt like the most confining of my DE/WM options to me. Everyone--even a lot Gnome people--seem to think it's the other way around, and Gnome is the one that boxes you in, but I still don't see it.
I've never been able to figure out what all these things are that I'm missing out on by using Gnome over KDE. Any time this discussion comes up on Slashdot, someone always mentions Gnome being limited in some way--but I've never thought, "hm, I'd really like to do that, but gnome won't let me". Likewise, the times I've tried KDE over the years, I've never seen any compelling features that would make me want to stay. There was never a, "oh wow, I can do that in KDE? How cool!" moment, and I've done my share of poking around its config options.
Amen.
I use the microwave for popping popcorn and pre-cooking pepperoni so it crisps up better in the oven. That's about it.
Oh, and heating up soup.
Like most things, it's not for everyone.
Our quote for installation here was about $25,000 for a system that would heat/cool a 3000sqft house.
The house cost us less than $100,000, and we probably won't be here more than 3 years or so. No way in hell the house's value will be increased by at least the difference between our savings and the remaining cost of installation when we sell. Conclusion: we would lose money putting in that system.
It's sad, but unless these kinds of improvements become more highly-valued by home buyers or people stop being so damn mobile, for many of us it's just not worth it to make long-term energy efficiency investments in our houses.
I'd call my 1998 car a clunker.
My wife's 2002 is quickly becoming one.
Of course, both are GM products, so that may be the problem.
Anticipate the videos you might need and download them the night before. There are extensions to Firefox that will do this for you.
That's what my wife does.
Seriously, what the hell are they doing with all that space? Freshly-installed Vista eats more space than Ubuntu with every app I might conceivably want to ever use installed, even with Vista's disk-swap turned off!
+1 to the "Gentoo user who switched to Ubuntu" stats here.
That was one of the things I liked about Ubuntu: the default applications are the ones I actually want. I don't want Gnumeric, because I'll need OpenOffice anyway, and I don't want two spreadsheet apps. I don't want Galeon or whatever--I want Firefox.
I like Ubuntu because I don't have to worry too much about deleting all the dumb little default apps cluttering up my menus before I start installing my dev tools and stuff; the defaults are a good starting point.
The latest release is pretty stable. The last one was embarrassingly bad. Worst release I'd seen from them... well, ever, and I started trying it out around their 2rd release and using it full-time when the 3rd came out.
I think the next is due to be a long-term support (LTS) release, so it ought to be good, too.
Ubuntu won me over from Gentoo, which certainly has an image of being one of the more "hardcore" distros.
Why?
Ubuntu had nearly Debian-level stability, but new-ish packages, so it wasn't like the dunking-your-head-in-a-bucket-of-cold-water experience of going from bleeding-edge Gentoo to Debian Unstable or whatever. Everything was new enough that at least you wouldn't have to compile updated libraries to get some app from outside the repositories to build properly.
Ubuntu automated the stuff that I wanted to be automated, and pretty much nothing else. It even did a few things that I'd wanted to do in Gentoo but had never gotten around to doing because it was too much of a pain. At the same time, it stayed the hell out of my way when I wanted to do something manually, which is more than I can say for some other "user friendly" distros.
Ubuntu's default package set was smart. Concise, but not incomplete. The default applications were almost exactly the same ones I was using on Gentoo, minus a few development apps.
Dpkg and apt-get. I still like Portage better, but it's a close second. Portage is a 9 out of 10, dpkg/apt-get is an 8. Everything else is a 5 at best. Nearly as good as Portage, but no compiling (which I never cared about anyway)--awesome.
The only thing I really miss is the Gentoo runlevels system (there's a better name for it, but I can't recall at the moment) but then again I don't have to mess with that stuff very often in Ubuntu so it's not a big deal.
I can't be the only one who used the first game for nothing but playing the battle of Hoth over and over. Single-player, because I wasn't dedicated enough to the game to want to play it online.
The second one was horrible for that. There were slight improvements to the Hoth map, but far more harm was done to it than good.
Also, I found single-player mode in II to be nearly impossible. Not the campaign, but the "conquer the galaxy"-type single-player thing, or individual maps played with bots. Even on its easiest setting my bots were incapable of holding two of the victory locations while I went after a third. They were too far apart for me to be always bouncing around defending the ones we already had, and the moment I left a point it came under dispute again. This happened over and over. The time it took me to run to a nearly-undefended enemy point, blast the 2-3 guys who tried to defend it, then stand there while it transfered to my side let the enemy take at least one of my other points. I never managed to win a single one of those maps, and while I'm not a god at FPS games, I'm pretty damn far from being bad. The only exception was Hoth, but I'd played it a ton of times and it's a mostly linear map.
I don't know what other people thought of II, but I uninstalled it after just a couple of weeks and haven't even considered trying it again. I still install the first one every now and then, though, just so I can take another crack at those AT-ATs in my snowspeeder :) Hopefully III will feature a larger, better Hoth map. Otherwise I've got no use for it.
WTF happened to it, then? XP w/ 512MB ram used to be a hot-shit gaming rig with more ram than it knew what to do with.
BS. XP runs fine on 0.5GB ram. Hell, when it came out, what was the norm for a new machine? 128MB? 256?
You're thinking of Vista.
Looks to me like it's unethical in the same way that refusing to pay any scammer after you figured out they're scamming you is unethical, regardless of prior agreements.
Which is to say, not at all.
Any way to 'return' the 'product'?
I know that Europe has much better consumer protection than the U.S., generally speaking, so she may be able to get a refund or somehow officially reject the product and not pay.