Steam is the number one piece of software that prevents me from removing Windows. If there is a game that I want to play, it is generally on Steam. Getting Steam on linux with the majority of its inventory will send people to linux in droves.
Xorg and its configuration is the number one piece of software that prevents me from using my hardware the way I want it. Its undocumented, impossible to just figure out if its possible to do something, and punishes you with an unbootable window manager if you make a syntax error. I mean really? It blows up rather than simply ignoring an unexpected token? Xorg needs to make serious changes, or needs to be deprecated in favor of something better.
Fix all of the little things that people need to use. Number one grievance here is trackpad support. I have a Sony Viao with an Alps Glidepoint. Double tapping doesn't work. Side scrolling doesn't work two finger swiping doesn't work. It says its working... but it doesn't. It all works fine in windows.
Number two grievance is Multi-monitor support. I think a lot of this is driver related, but it also goes back to xorg.conf. In windows, when you plug in a second monitor, it says "hey you plugged in a new monitor" and it just works. In linux, you have to go to a settings panel (depending on what type of graphics card you have) click around, tell it the type of monitor, enter some settings, save, restart X, and then you get to see that your virtual desktop is cropped on the new monitor and it decided to put the login box over there, so you have to blindly use your muscle memory to login because you can't see what you're doing and... bah I'm pissed off please just undo what I just did... 20 minutes later, you realize that it would be easier to just boot your laptop and ssh into your box and revert your xorg that way... All said and done, you've wasted 30 minutes of your life and you've learned your lesson not to try to use two monitors.
For the majority of things, linux is great, and I do use it as my primary machine. But every once in a while it punishes you for trying to do something that windows has done right for the past 12 years. Its simply retarded and has to get fixed before consumers will use it.
I think this is a great solution to the problem at hand, however, I believe the problem at hand is being obfuscated and skewed by misinterpretation.
The problem: Historically, IE versions have had bugs that have cause rendering issues. This is further compounded by the fact that because of IE's wide adoption, companies have designed their internal applications around these bugs. When such companies are inevitably forced to upgrade, they are also forced to spend time and money to correct their applications that no longer work because IE has fixed the bugs that the company's application relied upon.
The solution: Fix IE and make it render compliantly (debatable here) and package the legacy IE rendering engines into the modern browser and allow render-engine hinting to allow a single header to tell IE that this application relies on quirks from an older browser. This allows a company to spend little development time to adopt the latest browser
Another great side-effect of this is that once the render-engine hinting is in place, Microsoft will BE ABLE to push updates to users without fear of breaking the Internet (like they do on every release). This will allow Microsoft to provide updates much more frequently.
Think of this as a migration path. The upgrade to IE 8 should be pretty painless because of this feature, and once its in place, it allows IE to be improved upon. Once IE becomes compliant (still debatable), they provide the EDGE keyword to indicate that the legacy mode should be disabled (as in, use the most current rendering engine), which means developers can set it and forget it.
Let me debunk one thing before I'm done. Microsoft isn't making a browser (or OS) specific tag. They are interpreting an optional header (which isn't part of HTML), which is being represented here as a tag. This is the least obtrusive way Microsoft could solve this problem and personally think its great because I will spend 2 minutes of development time in order to support IE8.
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Steam is the number one piece of software that prevents me from removing Windows. If there is a game that I want to play, it is generally on Steam. Getting Steam on linux with the majority of its inventory will send people to linux in droves.
Xorg and its configuration is the number one piece of software that prevents me from using my hardware the way I want it. Its undocumented, impossible to just figure out if its possible to do something, and punishes you with an unbootable window manager if you make a syntax error. I mean really? It blows up rather than simply ignoring an unexpected token? Xorg needs to make serious changes, or needs to be deprecated in favor of something better.
Fix all of the little things that people need to use. Number one grievance here is trackpad support. I have a Sony Viao with an Alps Glidepoint. Double tapping doesn't work. Side scrolling doesn't work two finger swiping doesn't work. It says its working... but it doesn't. It all works fine in windows.
Number two grievance is Multi-monitor support. I think a lot of this is driver related, but it also goes back to xorg.conf. In windows, when you plug in a second monitor, it says "hey you plugged in a new monitor" and it just works. In linux, you have to go to a settings panel (depending on what type of graphics card you have) click around, tell it the type of monitor, enter some settings, save, restart X, and then you get to see that your virtual desktop is cropped on the new monitor and it decided to put the login box over there, so you have to blindly use your muscle memory to login because you can't see what you're doing and... bah I'm pissed off please just undo what I just did... 20 minutes later, you realize that it would be easier to just boot your laptop and ssh into your box and revert your xorg that way... All said and done, you've wasted 30 minutes of your life and you've learned your lesson not to try to use two monitors.
For the majority of things, linux is great, and I do use it as my primary machine. But every once in a while it punishes you for trying to do something that windows has done right for the past 12 years. Its simply retarded and has to get fixed before consumers will use it.
I think this is a great solution to the problem at hand, however, I believe the problem at hand is being obfuscated and skewed by misinterpretation.
The problem: Historically, IE versions have had bugs that have cause rendering issues. This is further compounded by the fact that because of IE's wide adoption, companies have designed their internal applications around these bugs. When such companies are inevitably forced to upgrade, they are also forced to spend time and money to correct their applications that no longer work because IE has fixed the bugs that the company's application relied upon.
The solution: Fix IE and make it render compliantly (debatable here) and package the legacy IE rendering engines into the modern browser and allow render-engine hinting to allow a single header to tell IE that this application relies on quirks from an older browser. This allows a company to spend little development time to adopt the latest browser
Another great side-effect of this is that once the render-engine hinting is in place, Microsoft will BE ABLE to push updates to users without fear of breaking the Internet (like they do on every release). This will allow Microsoft to provide updates much more frequently.
Think of this as a migration path. The upgrade to IE 8 should be pretty painless because of this feature, and once its in place, it allows IE to be improved upon. Once IE becomes compliant (still debatable), they provide the EDGE keyword to indicate that the legacy mode should be disabled (as in, use the most current rendering engine), which means developers can set it and forget it.
Let me debunk one thing before I'm done. Microsoft isn't making a browser (or OS) specific tag. They are interpreting an optional header (which isn't part of HTML), which is being represented here as a tag. This is the least obtrusive way Microsoft could solve this problem and personally think its great because I will spend 2 minutes of development time in order to support IE8.
What the article does not state is that there reason for such slowness is that behind the game, Vista is poping up the message:
"You are attempting to refresh the screen. Cancel or Allow?"