I forgot that this offers the choice between a software compositor and OpenGL compositor. If notifications are wished for they're to be implemented in an obvious punishing way (e.g. feedback for volume keys. by default right windows key and menu key will map to them). A flag allows left windows key to default as the key to kill current application or window.
I have a good idea for a window manager. You launch your session, a background is drawn then a maximized terminal with transparency is launched (xfce4|mate|gnome-terminal). You can do CLI stuff and tabs. When you launch Firefox or something, it gets maximized, to get the terminal back you quit it. When you exit your last terminal, you find yourself staring at the desktop and you're stuck, cannot do anything. so hit ctrl-alt-backspace or do something.
That's all, sorry. Um yes, provide a title bar! Multi-monitor support in version 0.2, no reason to not have it.
Ubuntu has dozens of DE and window managers in the repos, it's trivial to set up yourself with some bland fluxbox or anything, there's even the antique mwm if you want to try. It's Windows 3.0 without the Program Manager, thus past the two minutes of fun I felt this was a glaring omission. (and that cool clock that would still show the time when minimized)
I would like to try CDE next time (on 16.04 / Mint 18) Lastly even the supported environments are available in an amorphous and free-form way. You can install lubuntu-desktop and get a load of crap:
Now, "real men tasks" : how about the ability to open and save files? From internal storage, USB or NAS share.
If the iPad Pro is Pro. Would it be too much to ask that iTunes can be run on the iPad. Then it would be usable to manage an iPhone etc., not just act as a slave device. As for running linux well most other computer either are capable of doing that directly, or can do it with a VM (with Windows, OSX, Android, Linux as the host), or some Unix-like environment (Cygwin on Windows ; OS X with or without an X11 server ; busybox on Android..)
iPad won't ever do, because it is disallowed for political reasons. Keep in mind it's a slave machine. (not a machine for slaves, it just is in master/slave relationship with other computers such as Apple servers running the App Store and the iCloud, or desktops running iTunes). So the way you would use linux is with an ssh cilent, or from a remote RDP or VNC session.
Yes Gnome 2 and Mate have always excelled in dragging launcher to the panels, including from the applications menu. The easiest way to describe Mate is : it's Gnome 2. It's a bit like the difference between Xfce 4.8 and Xfce 4.10, more of the same:). If you use something called "Gnome flashback" or "Gnome Classic" from a computer that has Gnome 3 or Unity installed : It's a trap! not Mate at all.
Where Mate seems dated is multi-monitor support. Works fine but it's like the classic Windows 98, XP and 7 thing where the secondary monitors only show application windows, not panels and such.
Whatsapp is SMS-alike for countries with overpriced SMS or communicating across a border. Although it should be a good idea to use something else (like Telegram), because Whatsapp belongs to Facebook so it would be harvesting your phone for them even if you never use Facebook.
Email on a phone? Why would anyone want that? just kidding.
Thanks for clarifying that. In my mind crazy customizations aren't really needed (if it e.g. amounts to a configuration file for the window manager in $HOME, I can't see how that would go wrong). Like custom versions of software, or adding stuff like Pulseaudio or NetworkManager to your dekstop session - here I would use the PC with Alsa only and install wicd instead. Setting up a daemon to automount USB drives?, with some custom config in/etc. I can see that sort of thing opening such can of worms (small or not I don't know), I never had to do that in the bad old days and can cheat around that by using pcmanfm (totally DE-independant file manager that mounts the drives on its own). CUPS may be fine.
Yea those considerations above are mostly irrelevant. But I believe it can be easy if you have fewer features rather than more, and you can enable/disable features or daemons the idiot way by using apt-get install and apt-get remove. New OS version? which is when software is changed. Start over or baby-sit the dist-upgrade.
A busy Unity taskbar on a 768-height display isn't pretty.
Anyway, with hig res both can be done. Xfce's vertical side bar is interesting, with probable room for improvement.
A Windows 95 taskbar served by Mate, XFCE etc. is nice too : you can set it thin (e.g. 26 pixels), keep it on a single row and the high width makes it better. There's room for everything : start menu and shortcuts in the bottom left, system tray and clock and applets in the bottom right, space for a good number of running applications or windows in the middle, ungrouped and with readable title.
With a narrow monitor (or more specifically a single narrow monitor) you more easily run out of space doing the same. I tried a dual row task bar, a single row task bar, went back to a Gnome 2 layout with both top and bottom bar (but modified in that the tray was on bottom right). With a wide task bar I can go single row, and not feel the need to use virtual desktops to make up for loss of task bar space.
Let's consider a dual row task bar or top + bottom bars on 1280x1024, and a single row task bar on 1920x1080 (as those are highly common monitor resolutions). The wide screen monitor would end up with considerably more available vertical space. (although a maximized word processor looks pretty ugly)
I have been a computer guru for 40 years, and the problem with this is... I don't even know how to do this anymore
Feel free to not burden with it, really. But on debian/ubuntu it's very easy : you apt-get install xorg, alsa (alsa-base and alsa-utils), a bare desktop such as lxde or xfce4 - bare enough to not come with a pdf reader and a CD-R burner, but still with the configuration GUIs, perhaps a basic selection of themes and in lxde's case a text editor and image viewer etc.
It all sets up automatically and if you install a login manager (either at the same time or after), to not have to run 'startx', that sets up itself too. Then you get to do petty choices about pdf reader, media players etc. (for example why have totem player installed in the first place if you'll close it every time it gets launched).
The work and how to replicate it mostly consists in the list of packages you want to apt-get install. That said I use Mint too and that needs really few changes.
I used or tested tha "manual" method above (with quotes, because how automatized it is) with debian squeeze, Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 12.04, debian wheezy. Mostly good on old or very weak hardware although would have I a need for straight Ubuntu (non-LTS, need to install from network) I would do that.
For the base feature of running three monitors, Windows 98 did that, with graphics cards from different manufacturers funnily.
GP claims OS X does the "advanced" features easily like each monitor has its own menu bar and dock bar, this is by no means impossible on other OS / desktops but if it works particularly well, why not. Still a tad expensive to save configuring taskbars/panels yourself.
One thing I'm wondering about is how to blank the screen you're not using. It could be triggered manually or automatically - and I want both options of physically blanking and displaying black. Then when you bring the mouse pointer to the secondary screen, it wakes up!
Sure, that is asking a bit much. Manual but software-based blanking and waking up of the secondary monitor would be fine, although as far as I know the model is you bump the mouse, every monitor is turned on. I wonder if anyone ever thought up about these ideas.
Money can't buy everything. Triple/Quad GPU is dumb and dual is debatable, you get more and more stuttering and high latency. Or idle GPUs with incompatible games.
You must have had some crazy fire sale price : cost of 980 Ti and 4790K add up to more than $950 on their own.
Even with the high-priced 980 you should be able to build something for under $1K. The next most expensive stuff is the CPU (non overclockable Core i5), then the rest is cheap : low end motherboard, 8 gigs of memory, power supply (high quality 400 watt or good 450/460 watt)
Still, that's $1K to play a few games. A 10-year-old PC with maxed out RAM does most of the other things to do with a PC nowadays.
Also, among the reasons cinematics (even if real-time rendered) can look so much better when specifically targeted like this:
Moreover all of the animation, camera work, story board is a custom job from start to finish. What I most saw from the short movie was the animation was exquisitely detailed (although perhaps this is common now in video game cutscenes) but try to make it a Quake clone with a human player walking around in the middle of that scene with the cyborg and none of that will work. What if you're blocking the passage or poking him with an axe or whatever else. Well you can't do that.
I would think one obvious application for tablet-like computers is to be able to write on hundreds of virtual sheets and recall them, be it notes, essays, whatever. Most people have spent one or two decades in school doing just that on paper. It's fairly ridiculous to sit there with so many gigahertzes and gigabytes, but unable to just take a pen and write because there's no paper sheet around and then, what to do with the paper? can't put it in/home/$user/Documents, email it to yourself, save it to a NAS, scp it to a host.
The only issue is you would need two of the things, one for reference material and one for writing (or reading your own notes, or reading something hard while trying to make sense of it from the other material). While low priority, some software support for that will be useful (sharing of context and documents between two units)
One suggestion : most everyone with this will also have a desktop or laptop and some will be old fashion fucks so please have a full size SD slot and provide a USB to SD stick-adapter in the package. Or a long USB cable for once - have both long and short. (with wifi, people might be using a hotspot so there's no easy networking between the PC and the tablet thing)
On the wish list : this kind of hardware is one more reason we need an "Android LTS" sort of OS (or an OS that piggybacks on Android linux kernel + proprietary drivers like FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Phone do/did). Don't care if it's frozen to the stone age but getting 10 years of updates just for the security flaws, encryption protocols etc. like you do on Windows or a few other ones would be fine. Afterall, for $700 you could buy a desk, some other furniture and stuff to store and organize a lot of paper, as well as considerable writing supplies. That would last for decades. But if all that stuff were electronic it would be more mobile, shareable, safe from fire, vandalism, eviction etc. Last note : can't be really done without a version 2.0 model but such a tablet would be most impressive with extremely low pen input latency. Also, for fun it would be interesting to be able to render previously entered notes/drawings with varying thickness or brush effects.
The 32X was a bolt-on but for no good reason, it was a console that plugged into another console basically and might have been better off as a standalone, perhaps including Megadrive hardware compatibility. That would have made it interesting for both Megadrive and SNES users.
You might still be able to get BIOS emulation and booting on MBR (though that'd be motherboard/hardware dependent!), USB mouse/keyboard support through emulation, VGA (obviously), PC speaker as well as e.g. serial and parallel ports which don't even require any emulation. I hope IDE mode is still a thing for SATA drives. Perhaps USB drive support if it's connected at boot. But if I had to guess : forget about running Windows 98 anyway.
What would be much more likely to run is DOS (including the one from Windows 98, which is nice due to fat32 support and getting > 600KB conventional memory, not that it matters anymore) and from that perhaps running Windows 3.1. Almost useless but seems to run on wildly newer hardware than intended. For added crazyness get that sound driver that plays real wave PCM on the PC speaker, and connect the speaker lead to some external amplifier or powered speaker. That should be rather horrible but you wouldn't lack CPU power to play arbitrary MP3 files.
DOS drivers for network cards are highly available funnily (no idea about current Intel networking. Options may be a random old PCI NIC or booting DOS from PXE and trying a universal DOS driver that piggybacks on the PXE). For crap networking use 115200 baud serial to a unix-like box that does PPP gateway. Try Internet Explorer 5 or an old version of Opera.
Metro can be ignored, Classic Shell allows a start menu that is sort of a mix of those from XP and Windows 7, and it's better than both.
I think the issue is there is no other freedom allowed. Sometimes we don't want an animated, 3D accelerated desktop. Give us a 2D, non composited desktop back with a traditional file manager and don't make us wait for it to launch. Even something the spinning balls thing that runs at 60 fps is something that runs too fast and catches the eye, it's unneeded besides looking hip and cool.
Windows 7 did allow an old-school desktop but somewhat restricted and half-assed to punish the user for doing that, but even that got removed. I would like trying Windows 10 if it had a 2D desktop and a more XP-like file manager. It's not complicated, the window should have : title bar, menu bar (made of File, Edit, View.. !), toolbar and then directory contents with or without a sidebar, which doesn't prevent modern features like support for USB drives and tabs. No non-standard GUI elements all over the place, for the god damn most used and basic application please allow at least the option of conforming to the GUI standards used in Windows 3.1, 95, XP, Gnome 2, XFCE, KDE and so on.
Windows 7 is decrepit now, but the only big issue that makes me say so is how horribly slow Windows Update is.
Or what about if Intel comes up with drivers for the Skylake CPU, GPU or chipset after 2018 and you go to Intel's website to download them. It's not a difficult concept. Had to do that on an oldish laptop to improve disk performance (driver auto-updater crapware doesn't work)
See, here's something petty to complain about but still annoying, it's called a motherboard not a logic board. Someone tell them the 1980s have ended. Also, weird how they have a "highway interchange" key but home and end are considered confusing or superfluous.
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I forgot that this offers the choice between a software compositor and OpenGL compositor. If notifications are wished for they're to be implemented in an obvious punishing way (e.g. feedback for volume keys. by default right windows key and menu key will map to them). A flag allows left windows key to default as the key to kill current application or window.
I have a good idea for a window manager.
You launch your session, a background is drawn then a maximized terminal with transparency is launched (xfce4|mate|gnome-terminal). You can do CLI stuff and tabs.
When you launch Firefox or something, it gets maximized, to get the terminal back you quit it.
When you exit your last terminal, you find yourself staring at the desktop and you're stuck, cannot do anything. so hit ctrl-alt-backspace or do something.
That's all, sorry. Um yes, provide a title bar! Multi-monitor support in version 0.2, no reason to not have it.
I'm not sure many are interested in multiple window managers, but if so then you run multiple X servers or a nested X server.
Wow. I find it sad.
Would mod you up for informativeness. An iPad Pro that is not Pro, that was a not so glorious idea.
I wonder if sandboxing your old crap is akin to restructuring into a "bad bank" and a bank that pretends that everything is A-OK :)
Ubuntu has dozens of DE and window managers in the repos, it's trivial to set up yourself with some bland fluxbox or anything, there's even the antique mwm if you want to try. It's Windows 3.0 without the Program Manager, thus past the two minutes of fun I felt this was a glaring omission. (and that cool clock that would still show the time when minimized)
I would like to try CDE next time (on 16.04 / Mint 18) :
Lastly even the supported environments are available in an amorphous and free-form way. You can install lubuntu-desktop and get a load of crap
Depends: abiword, apport-gtk, apturl, audacious, audacious-plugins, blueman, cups-driver-gutenprint, desktop-file-utils, dmz-cursor-theme, evince, ffmpegthumbnailer, file-roller, firefox, fonts-droid, fonts-liberation, fonts-nanum, galculator, gdebi, gecko-mediaplayer, gnome-accessibility-themes, gnome-disk-utility, gnome-icon-theme-symbolic, gnome-keyring, gnome-mplayer, gnome-system-tools, gnome-time-admin, gnumeric, gpicview, gucharmap, guvcview, gvfs-backends, gvfs-fuse, hardinfo, ibus, indicator-application-gtk2, language-selector-gnome, leafpad, libfm-modules, libgtk2-perl, libmtp-runtime, light-locker, light-locker-settings, lubuntu-core, lubuntu-default-session, lubuntu-software-center, lxappearance, lxappearance-obconf, lxinput, lxlauncher, lxpanel-indicator-applet-plugin, lxrandr, lxsession-default-apps, lxsession-logout, lxshortcut, lxtask, lxterminal, mobile-broadband-provider-info, modemmanager, mtpaint, network-manager-gnome, ntp, obconf, pidgin, pm-utils, python-gudev, scrot, simple-scan, software-properties-gtk, sylpheed, sylpheed-doc, sylpheed-i18n, sylpheed-plugins, synaptic, system-config-printer-gnome, transmission, ubuntu-release-upgrader-gtk, update-notifier, usb-creator-gtk, usb-modeswitch, whoopsie, wvdial, x11-utils, xdg-user-dirs, xdg-user-dirs-gtk, xfburn, xfce4-notifyd, xfce4-power-manager, xpad, xterm, xul-ext-ubufox, xz-utils
or the package named 'lxde', or even 'lxde-core' if for some reason you don't want a text editor, terminal emulator and a handful other tiny things
Depends: lxde-common (>= 0.5.0-4ubuntu4), pcmanfm (>= 0.9.8), lxpanel (>= 0.5.5), openbox (>= 3.4.6.1)
Recommends: xscreensaver, lxterminal | x-terminal-emulator, gksu
Now, "real men tasks" : how about the ability to open and save files?
From internal storage, USB or NAS share.
If the iPad Pro is Pro. Would it be too much to ask that iTunes can be run on the iPad. Then it would be usable to manage an iPhone etc., not just act as a slave device.
As for running linux well most other computer either are capable of doing that directly, or can do it with a VM (with Windows, OSX, Android, Linux as the host), or some Unix-like environment (Cygwin on Windows ; OS X with or without an X11 server ; busybox on Android..)
iPad won't ever do, because it is disallowed for political reasons. Keep in mind it's a slave machine. (not a machine for slaves, it just is in master/slave relationship with other computers such as Apple servers running the App Store and the iCloud, or desktops running iTunes).
So the way you would use linux is with an ssh cilent, or from a remote RDP or VNC session.
Yes Gnome 2 and Mate have always excelled in dragging launcher to the panels, including from the applications menu. :).
The easiest way to describe Mate is : it's Gnome 2. It's a bit like the difference between Xfce 4.8 and Xfce 4.10, more of the same
If you use something called "Gnome flashback" or "Gnome Classic" from a computer that has Gnome 3 or Unity installed : It's a trap! not Mate at all.
Where Mate seems dated is multi-monitor support. Works fine but it's like the classic Windows 98, XP and 7 thing where the secondary monitors only show application windows, not panels and such.
Whatsapp is SMS-alike for countries with overpriced SMS or communicating across a border. Although it should be a good idea to use something else (like Telegram), because Whatsapp belongs to Facebook so it would be harvesting your phone for them even if you never use Facebook.
Email on a phone? Why would anyone want that? just kidding.
Thanks for clarifying that. In my mind crazy customizations aren't really needed (if it e.g. amounts to a configuration file for the window manager in $HOME, I can't see how that would go wrong). /etc. I can see that sort of thing opening such can of worms (small or not I don't know), I never had to do that in the bad old days and can cheat around that by using pcmanfm (totally DE-independant file manager that mounts the drives on its own). CUPS may be fine.
Like custom versions of software, or adding stuff like Pulseaudio or NetworkManager to your dekstop session - here I would use the PC with Alsa only and install wicd instead. Setting up a daemon to automount USB drives?, with some custom config in
Yea those considerations above are mostly irrelevant. But I believe it can be easy if you have fewer features rather than more, and you can enable/disable features or daemons the idiot way by using apt-get install and apt-get remove.
New OS version? which is when software is changed. Start over or baby-sit the dist-upgrade.
A busy Unity taskbar on a 768-height display isn't pretty.
Anyway, with hig res both can be done.
Xfce's vertical side bar is interesting, with probable room for improvement.
A Windows 95 taskbar served by Mate, XFCE etc. is nice too : you can set it thin (e.g. 26 pixels), keep it on a single row and the high width makes it better. There's room for everything : start menu and shortcuts in the bottom left, system tray and clock and applets in the bottom right, space for a good number of running applications or windows in the middle, ungrouped and with readable title.
With a narrow monitor (or more specifically a single narrow monitor) you more easily run out of space doing the same. I tried a dual row task bar, a single row task bar, went back to a Gnome 2 layout with both top and bottom bar (but modified in that the tray was on bottom right). With a wide task bar I can go single row, and not feel the need to use virtual desktops to make up for loss of task bar space.
Let's consider a dual row task bar or top + bottom bars on 1280x1024, and a single row task bar on 1920x1080 (as those are highly common monitor resolutions). The wide screen monitor would end up with considerably more available vertical space. (although a maximized word processor looks pretty ugly)
I have been a computer guru for 40 years, and the problem with this is ... I don't even know how to do this anymore
Feel free to not burden with it, really. But on debian/ubuntu it's very easy : you apt-get install xorg, alsa (alsa-base and alsa-utils), a bare desktop such as lxde or xfce4 - bare enough to not come with a pdf reader and a CD-R burner, but still with the configuration GUIs, perhaps a basic selection of themes and in lxde's case a text editor and image viewer etc.
It all sets up automatically and if you install a login manager (either at the same time or after), to not have to run 'startx', that sets up itself too.
Then you get to do petty choices about pdf reader, media players etc. (for example why have totem player installed in the first place if you'll close it every time it gets launched).
The work and how to replicate it mostly consists in the list of packages you want to apt-get install.
That said I use Mint too and that needs really few changes.
I used or tested tha "manual" method above (with quotes, because how automatized it is) with debian squeeze, Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 12.04, debian wheezy. Mostly good on old or very weak hardware although would have I a need for straight Ubuntu (non-LTS, need to install from network) I would do that.
For the base feature of running three monitors, Windows 98 did that, with graphics cards from different manufacturers funnily.
GP claims OS X does the "advanced" features easily like each monitor has its own menu bar and dock bar, this is by no means impossible on other OS / desktops but if it works particularly well, why not.
Still a tad expensive to save configuring taskbars/panels yourself.
One thing I'm wondering about is how to blank the screen you're not using.
It could be triggered manually or automatically - and I want both options of physically blanking and displaying black.
Then when you bring the mouse pointer to the secondary screen, it wakes up!
Sure, that is asking a bit much. Manual but software-based blanking and waking up of the secondary monitor would be fine, although as far as I know the model is you bump the mouse, every monitor is turned on.
I wonder if anyone ever thought up about these ideas.
Money can't buy everything. Triple/Quad GPU is dumb and dual is debatable, you get more and more stuttering and high latency. Or idle GPUs with incompatible games.
You must have had some crazy fire sale price : cost of 980 Ti and 4790K add up to more than $950 on their own.
Even with the high-priced 980 you should be able to build something for under $1K. The next most expensive stuff is the CPU (non overclockable Core i5), then the rest is cheap : low end motherboard, 8 gigs of memory, power supply (high quality 400 watt or good 450/460 watt)
Still, that's $1K to play a few games. A 10-year-old PC with maxed out RAM does most of the other things to do with a PC nowadays.
Also, among the reasons cinematics (even if real-time rendered) can look so much better when specifically targeted like this:
Moreover all of the animation, camera work, story board is a custom job from start to finish. What I most saw from the short movie was the animation was exquisitely detailed (although perhaps this is common now in video game cutscenes) but try to make it a Quake clone with a human player walking around in the middle of that scene with the cyborg and none of that will work. What if you're blocking the passage or poking him with an axe or whatever else. Well you can't do that.
I would think one obvious application for tablet-like computers is to be able to write on hundreds of virtual sheets and recall them, be it notes, essays, whatever. Most people have spent one or two decades in school doing just that on paper. It's fairly ridiculous to sit there with so many gigahertzes and gigabytes, but unable to just take a pen and write because there's no paper sheet around and then, what to do with the paper? can't put it in /home/$user/Documents, email it to yourself, save it to a NAS, scp it to a host.
The only issue is you would need two of the things, one for reference material and one for writing (or reading your own notes, or reading something hard while trying to make sense of it from the other material). While low priority, some software support for that will be useful (sharing of context and documents between two units)
One suggestion : most everyone with this will also have a desktop or laptop and some will be old fashion fucks so please have a full size SD slot and provide a USB to SD stick-adapter in the package. Or a long USB cable for once - have both long and short. (with wifi, people might be using a hotspot so there's no easy networking between the PC and the tablet thing)
On the wish list : this kind of hardware is one more reason we need an "Android LTS" sort of OS (or an OS that piggybacks on Android linux kernel + proprietary drivers like FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Phone do/did). Don't care if it's frozen to the stone age but getting 10 years of updates just for the security flaws, encryption protocols etc. like you do on Windows or a few other ones would be fine.
Afterall, for $700 you could buy a desk, some other furniture and stuff to store and organize a lot of paper, as well as considerable writing supplies. That would last for decades. But if all that stuff were electronic it would be more mobile, shareable, safe from fire, vandalism, eviction etc.
Last note : can't be really done without a version 2.0 model but such a tablet would be most impressive with extremely low pen input latency.
Also, for fun it would be interesting to be able to render previously entered notes/drawings with varying thickness or brush effects.
How disingenious of you, the limit is 16 hardware sprites on a scanline. Way more can be shown on screen if you're careful.
Does it use AMD's tech from 2012 or 2013? no.
The 32X was a bolt-on but for no good reason, it was a console that plugged into another console basically and might have been better off as a standalone, perhaps including Megadrive hardware compatibility. That would have made it interesting for both Megadrive and SNES users.
You might still be able to get BIOS emulation and booting on MBR (though that'd be motherboard/hardware dependent!), USB mouse/keyboard support through emulation, VGA (obviously), PC speaker as well as e.g. serial and parallel ports which don't even require any emulation. I hope IDE mode is still a thing for SATA drives. Perhaps USB drive support if it's connected at boot.
But if I had to guess : forget about running Windows 98 anyway.
What would be much more likely to run is DOS (including the one from Windows 98, which is nice due to fat32 support and getting > 600KB conventional memory, not that it matters anymore) and from that perhaps running Windows 3.1. Almost useless but seems to run on wildly newer hardware than intended. For added crazyness get that sound driver that plays real wave PCM on the PC speaker, and connect the speaker lead to some external amplifier or powered speaker. That should be rather horrible but you wouldn't lack CPU power to play arbitrary MP3 files.
DOS drivers for network cards are highly available funnily (no idea about current Intel networking. Options may be a random old PCI NIC or booting DOS from PXE and trying a universal DOS driver that piggybacks on the PXE). For crap networking use 115200 baud serial to a unix-like box that does PPP gateway.
Try Internet Explorer 5 or an old version of Opera.
Metro can be ignored, Classic Shell allows a start menu that is sort of a mix of those from XP and Windows 7, and it's better than both.
I think the issue is there is no other freedom allowed. Sometimes we don't want an animated, 3D accelerated desktop. Give us a 2D, non composited desktop back with a traditional file manager and don't make us wait for it to launch.
Even something the spinning balls thing that runs at 60 fps is something that runs too fast and catches the eye, it's unneeded besides looking hip and cool.
Windows 7 did allow an old-school desktop but somewhat restricted and half-assed to punish the user for doing that, but even that got removed.
I would like trying Windows 10 if it had a 2D desktop and a more XP-like file manager. It's not complicated, the window should have : title bar, menu bar (made of File, Edit, View.. !), toolbar and then directory contents with or without a sidebar, which doesn't prevent modern features like support for USB drives and tabs. No non-standard GUI elements all over the place, for the god damn most used and basic application please allow at least the option of conforming to the GUI standards used in Windows 3.1, 95, XP, Gnome 2, XFCE, KDE and so on.
Windows 7 is decrepit now, but the only big issue that makes me say so is how horribly slow Windows Update is.
Or what about if Intel comes up with drivers for the Skylake CPU, GPU or chipset after 2018 and you go to Intel's website to download them.
It's not a difficult concept. Had to do that on an oldish laptop to improve disk performance (driver auto-updater crapware doesn't work)
See, here's something petty to complain about but still annoying, it's called a motherboard not a logic board. Someone tell them the 1980s have ended.
Also, weird how they have a "highway interchange" key but home and end are considered confusing or superfluous.