By your logic, if someone pulls a gun on you, and you cry "Help!", and there's a policeman around the corner who rushes up and intervenes, you are in the wrong because, while the guy had a gun and seemed to be making some intention to do you physical harm, he wasn't *necessarily* going to do such -could've been a joke gun with a BANG! flag for all you know- and in turn, you've made a false accusation and that's paramount, so disregard all the other facts and conditions accordingly.
Here's the most we were given to go on: "Well, we might, and then again, we might not. We're not telling." That's an inconclusive statement that could be interpreted any number of ways. This is a clear case of trying to generate publicity (negative at first, then "Look! We're still good guys!") through controversy. There was enough attention surrounding Apple's WWDC anouncements and launches and they didn't have to do this. Sure, it was successful, but also cheap, stupid, and unneccessary.
Apple had the opportunity to correct people on those statements ahead of time and didn't. Without even disclosing particular details, they could have even gotten away with a semi-cryptic, "No, guys, we're not turning our back open source...trust us, just wait and see."
There's no use in speculating over what exactly has gone on. That said, I don't think it's particularly likely that they'd abandoned it and chose to move back based on outcry in the relevant publications, blogs, and the like.
The reactions by interested parties should not be pooh-poohed simply because Apple wanted to keep up on it's showmanship --such would be a damned poor excuse, as they already had *plenty* to get their own community excited about, what with Leopard and the MacPro and all. Fact of the matter is that, at the time, Apple didn't behave or react in an immediate or explicit way that indicated their commitment wasn't gone, and as such has violated people's trust once again.
Perhaps you are confused about what the community understands already, and will consider other perspectives in the future?
Your statement implies that people contributing to open source and/or free software projects/efforts/whatever aren't always compensated, and also that compensation equates with financial gian. Contribution alone suggests that there is some interest already at stake. This list is by no means comprehensive, but here are some common motivations:
1) Challenge. Perhaps someone's working on something because the matter at hand intrigues them and is a good way to flex their mental muscles and solve an interesting problem.
2) Practical application. The task at hand may be somewhere between fascinating and dull, but the contributor has a problem that they need to solve somehow, and either starting a project that's FS/OSS or contributing to an existing one somehow helps to solve the problem, either in one go or incrementally approaching a solution.
3) Facillitating "The Greater Good" relevant to one's own field of interests. Things done out of the goodness of one's own heart are typically geareed towards furthering a particular ideal, community, or some goal; that is, the well-meaning, altruistic behavior occurs because, if nothing else, the acting body has some interest at stake, in this case wanting to better or facilitate an application or other project that crosses into other fields of personal interest.
4) Material/financial gain. Yes, it does happen: some folks do indeed get paid directly to work on stuff that gets put out under GPL or whatever other give-back license might be appropriate. They get paid to put something together because someone needs it, and then the code gets put back out there so fewer people have to waste time solving the same problem twice.
That's an over-reduction, mind you, but I felt compelled to remind you that there's often more at stake than *just money*. If that was really the prime motivation, a lot fewer people would being opting to work jobs that require intellectual engagement and consideration, problem solving, etc. Remember, cents aren't always just petty in terms of exchange rate, but interpretive value as well.:)
Think of it this way: when such alarge percentage of UI complaints are coming from folks who expect all raster image editors to not only work as easily as Photoshop, but *replicate* Photoshop's interface to a 'T', it's no wonder the devs ignore many of them. The GIMP is far from perfect (no CMYK support sucks a mean one), but a lot of people like to bitch and moan simply because they need to learn a different way of doing things.
As a person with professional experience in the graphic arts, I can say the GIMP is a very useful and capable tool for most image editing/compositing providing you don't need production-quality output for print. The interface is *not* that hard if you spend a little time with it and remind yourself that no, it's not the same. My primary gripe is that yes, it's confusing to have no central window for all of the app's own windows to live inside of, and that's probably an outgrowth of a half-assed stab to make it more "Mac like"...all this does is result in me having to spend extra time moving all its windows between my multiple desktops, rather than getting it all in one go. On the other hand, if you inadvertantly bury them, you've got too many damned other things open along with it, which means you're probably inefficiently organizing your desktop(s) most of the time anyway.
Cheers to your daughter for mastering it, though...living evidence that, without application prejudice and pre-conceived notions about how a graphics program should work, it's very useable.
I doubt it's going to be the "practical reason" a bunch of Linux users finally get around to ditching cards with non-native support. If closed-source drivers didn't do it, and the often-slow, very-less-than-perfect performance most cards exhibit when used in conjunction with ndiswrapper didn't do it, I seriously doubt one little exploit is going to convince them that "it's not great, but works good enough" is a piss-poor conclusion and that they should drop a measley $30 on a supported card.
You've got to be kidding! Apple has plenty of reason for DRM. The iPod was quite popular before iTunes. However, it's become extremely popular since the advent of iTunes. iTunes only became successful because of the content offered. That content -tons of songs by artists on labels that mostly bristled at the notion of offering *any* content online- exists because Apple agreed to use DRM. Without that content, far less people would be interested in iTunes, and the folks who just want to get that new pop song for $0.99 with minimal effort wouldn't own iPods.
They *are* to blame, because they popularized the business model, and did it successfully with songs lots of people would actually want to buy, and with DRM. Yes, otherwise we'd be blaming someone else (Microsoft or whomever else), but we're talking about reality and not hypothetical situations here.
I myself am so incredibly tired of people making "lesser evil" concessions and not phrasing them as such.
Apple's popularized the notion that music by popular artists can only be distributed online if the end users rights get saddled with enough limitations to utterly negate the cost savings and convenience. They've done little more than meet the bad guys of the music industry halfway, then used the stylish appeal of their products and branding to get the hip folk into it. And when the rich & cool are doing it, *simply everyone* wants to do it. This is one of the big reasons the industry was willing to deal with slightly lesser revenues than they'd originally anticipated. Afer all, how could Apple -purveyor of iPods, maker of sexy white boxen,favorite of artistic types, and champion of all things smug- fail in their endeavor to get the masses buying their music through their service?
That's it. It's really just a case of marketing leverage, and they got the bonus of duping the likes of yourself into thinking they've done something revolutionary yet again. It's still a cop-out.
"But OOo. It'll be a cold day in Hell before Microsoft recommends that on Windows."
What comes to mind:
PRESS: So, if it's a choice between a user who can't afford an MS Office license pirating MS Office, which would still keep your userbase up, or installing a legitimately free-of-cost alternative so as not to break the law and make a small short-term ding in your profits...what would you prefer? MS: Erm...
Your example is a piss-poor one. Wireless *isn't* that hard any longer.
Pick a wireless card that's got a native, compatible driver and a distro that has said driver available in its package repositories. A card based on the Atheros chipset is a good choice, because the MadWifi packages work *great*.
Then install the driver and a configuration frontend of your choice via your distro's GUI package manager. The package manager should get all the command line tools that run behind the frontend, but you don't have to touch them unless you want to; that's what the frontend is for.
Then run the configuration frontend, pick your ESSID from a drop-down list and set your WEP key (in ASCII or hex; both are options and there's no conversion required on your behalf). When you need access in a different location, load the front end and change your settings. It's *that* easy.
It's done and that's all of five minutes work, at most. Maybe that's a scant pube longer than it takes on your OS of choice, but it must not matter too much: despite your claim of having a life to lead and work to get done, you've still got plenty of time to get on Slashdot and bitch about someone else's OS and go on at length about how yours is oh-so-much better.
I use Linux because it meets my needs and I don't have to deal with issues like worrying about subsidizing a company which engages in practices with which I disagree. It's an *ethical thing*. You use the Mac because it meets your needs and you apparently don't have a problem with Apple's doings. That's fine: I strongly disagree with your choice, but your choice is your choice and has little bearing on my life. Use your machine to your heart's content.
Once again: get over yourself and stop evangelising. It's old.
I'm eager to see your camp drop the sehr-macho dickwaving and try a modern distro on hardware that's known to be compatible. You'll be astonished at how little hoop-jumping is necessary on Linux these days. Things are known to work for other people and work well, your own experiences be damned.
The evangelism's been going on since '84. Some people don't *need* to be saved. Deal with it.
Absolutely agree on why Opera and the Mozilla Suite haven't caught on. I'd lump in the fact that neither's had a big marketing push ala Firefox, but then one could argue that both of the former apps were never in fact intended for the average user...otherwise they'd have done a proper job in terms of interface implementation and design and not hinge the whole damned thing on the user taking the time to configure things themelves. Same reason why in 2006 plenty of people still use webmail, even though many webmail users may in fact deal with enough correspondance to warrant use of a proper client -too much percieved legwork when something else seems to work good enough.
And yes, Firefox popularized tabs. I'd like to pretend it originated tabs...:)
Close but not quite. Yes, the interface should be arranged in a logical way that's obvious to most users, but it should still be customizable. To put it another way: customization should be accounted for but remain optional, while common usability should be possible out of the box with little to no effort on the part of the end user.
The notion that imitation with only minor improvement is the key to success is the mentality that results in real-dog new versions of popular software. Much as I'm sick to death of hearing about Opera, they brought cool features like tabs to market...only hardly anybody used Opera. Others started to copy a feature that the average web user neither expected or would know how to use out of the box, and now its standard in the major browsers. That's pretty damned unexpected, wouldn't you say so?
And my point is that, since the latest version of the Flash player isn't available consistantly across all platforms that get used for web browsing, and since it isn't necessarily available for all browsers, you're still running into the same sort of problem. Flash is not a valid alternative or work-around to the CSS problem because there's a fair chance that it's not going to work right, if at all, for everybody who might visit your site, in which case you're negating the purposes of having a website in the first place.
The Flash problem will be solved at the whim of Adobe. The CSS problem will be decided by the disparate groups behind the large number of browsers out there.
You left out the part where the period turned into a comma and you continued, "provided there's the latest version of the Flash plugin available for the browser and platform in question." Flash doesn't work right everywhere. Building a site that's not going to work properly for as many visitors as possible is bad practice.
For the record, it's under Tools-->Transform Tools, as Crop & Resize. You then drag a box across the area you wish to crop and press ENTER. As such, I'm led to believe you didn't spend even as much as five minutes looking around, as you would have found it. GIMP's got some interface issues, but the people who typically complain about things like this are the folks who expect each and every interface to be the same. Remember: at some point, you had to learn the interface model with which you've since become most comfortable.
The same time at which everyone stops trying to use word processors when what they need is typesetting and/or page layout. In short: probably not any time soon.
It's because most browsers don't support it, and because a lot of people don't care much about graphics formats. Look how long it's taken the mighty PNG to come as far as it has.
Tear-off tabs, i.e. the ability to select a given tab, drag it outside of the browser window, and drop it anywhere not in a given window and have it open in a new window. Under a WM/DM supporting multiple desktops, this would be highly useful for grabbing a tutorial you're previewing, having it tear-off, and then tossing it onto another desktop for later use in conjunction with a terminal or given application window, and would prevent the user from having to bookmark quite so much material.
I installed Edubuntu on a spare machine at my job recently, as we do tech stuff for non-profits, and some of them cater to families and children. I'd heard great things about it, and as a bona-fide Linux booster, I was pretty jazzed about the idea of the potential "hey gang, it's fun and educational AND *cough* open source, too!" leveraging. Sadly, it seems less than stellar.
As an OS, it works just fine. Visually, the theming seems pretty kid-friendly. But beyond that, I don't see it offering all that much. The educational content ranges from very simple guessing games to slightly more complicated math skill-building to typing instruction to science software --all well and good, but there's not enough there to hold the interest of any given age group, especially given the popularity of hyper-active animation intensive and sound intensive "educational" software out there.
Yes, the ADD-ish stuff usually doesn't offer much in the way of real knowledge, skills, etc., but try explaining that to a kid. It's hard to motivate children with something comparatively dry and formal, unless of course they're larval geeklings, in which case they'll probably feel a bit insulted by the childlike theming and would be happier either learning real computer stuff or off playing with Legos and the like.
I didn't want to switch to Linux because I had the notion that it was too technical and oriented for computer programmers, and the Linux community was too arrogant to help out any new people with basic problems.
Mate, you're being arrogant courtesy of this particular assumption. If you get flamed or ignored it's probably your own damn fault.
Furthermore, it's all but scientifically been proven that ME is the dog's balls. You've got a respectable enough processor. Get some more ram in there. Get a Windows upgrade liscence if you're bent on sticking with Microsoft and turn off all the crazy graphics options. It'll run okay if you do all the proper maintenance stuff (Automatic Updates on, antivirus software (ClamWin's free and good), etc.)
And while you're at it, lose the "I'll only go where I'm supposed to" mindset. It's limiting you considerably.
Slashdot Mirror
By your logic, if someone pulls a gun on you, and you cry "Help!", and there's a policeman around the corner who rushes up and intervenes, you are in the wrong because, while the guy had a gun and seemed to be making some intention to do you physical harm, he wasn't *necessarily* going to do such -could've been a joke gun with a BANG! flag for all you know- and in turn, you've made a false accusation and that's paramount, so disregard all the other facts and conditions accordingly. Here's the most we were given to go on: "Well, we might, and then again, we might not. We're not telling." That's an inconclusive statement that could be interpreted any number of ways. This is a clear case of trying to generate publicity (negative at first, then "Look! We're still good guys!") through controversy. There was enough attention surrounding Apple's WWDC anouncements and launches and they didn't have to do this. Sure, it was successful, but also cheap, stupid, and unneccessary.
Why bother?
Apple had the opportunity to correct people on those statements ahead of time and didn't. Without even disclosing particular details, they could have even gotten away with a semi-cryptic, "No, guys, we're not turning our back open source...trust us, just wait and see."
There's no use in speculating over what exactly has gone on. That said, I don't think it's particularly likely that they'd abandoned it and chose to move back based on outcry in the relevant publications, blogs, and the like.
The reactions by interested parties should not be pooh-poohed simply because Apple wanted to keep up on it's showmanship --such would be a damned poor excuse, as they already had *plenty* to get their own community excited about, what with Leopard and the MacPro and all. Fact of the matter is that, at the time, Apple didn't behave or react in an immediate or explicit way that indicated their commitment wasn't gone, and as such has violated people's trust once again.
Perhaps you are confused about what the community understands already, and will consider other perspectives in the future?
:)
Your statement implies that people contributing to open source and/or free software projects/efforts/whatever aren't always compensated, and also that compensation equates with financial gian. Contribution alone suggests that there is some interest already at stake. This list is by no means comprehensive, but here are some common motivations:
1) Challenge. Perhaps someone's working on something because the matter at hand intrigues them and is a good way to flex their mental muscles and solve an interesting problem.
2) Practical application. The task at hand may be somewhere between fascinating and dull, but the contributor has a problem that they need to solve somehow, and either starting a project that's FS/OSS or contributing to an existing one somehow helps to solve the problem, either in one go or incrementally approaching a solution.
3) Facillitating "The Greater Good" relevant to one's own field of interests. Things done out of the goodness of one's own heart are typically geareed towards furthering a particular ideal, community, or some goal; that is, the well-meaning, altruistic behavior occurs because, if nothing else, the acting body has some interest at stake, in this case wanting to better or facilitate an application or other project that crosses into other fields of personal interest.
4) Material/financial gain. Yes, it does happen: some folks do indeed get paid directly to work on stuff that gets put out under GPL or whatever other give-back license might be appropriate. They get paid to put something together because someone needs it, and then the code gets put back out there so fewer people have to waste time solving the same problem twice.
That's an over-reduction, mind you, but I felt compelled to remind you that there's often more at stake than *just money*. If that was really the prime motivation, a lot fewer people would being opting to work jobs that require intellectual engagement and consideration, problem solving, etc. Remember, cents aren't always just petty in terms of exchange rate, but interpretive value as well.
Think of it this way: when such alarge percentage of UI complaints are coming from folks who expect all raster image editors to not only work as easily as Photoshop, but *replicate* Photoshop's interface to a 'T', it's no wonder the devs ignore many of them. The GIMP is far from perfect (no CMYK support sucks a mean one), but a lot of people like to bitch and moan simply because they need to learn a different way of doing things.
As a person with professional experience in the graphic arts, I can say the GIMP is a very useful and capable tool for most image editing/compositing providing you don't need production-quality output for print. The interface is *not* that hard if you spend a little time with it and remind yourself that no, it's not the same. My primary gripe is that yes, it's confusing to have no central window for all of the app's own windows to live inside of, and that's probably an outgrowth of a half-assed stab to make it more "Mac like"...all this does is result in me having to spend extra time moving all its windows between my multiple desktops, rather than getting it all in one go. On the other hand, if you inadvertantly bury them, you've got too many damned other things open along with it, which means you're probably inefficiently organizing your desktop(s) most of the time anyway.
Cheers to your daughter for mastering it, though...living evidence that, without application prejudice and pre-conceived notions about how a graphics program should work, it's very useable.
I doubt it's going to be the "practical reason" a bunch of Linux users finally get around to ditching cards with non-native support. If closed-source drivers didn't do it, and the often-slow, very-less-than-perfect performance most cards exhibit when used in conjunction with ndiswrapper didn't do it, I seriously doubt one little exploit is going to convince them that "it's not great, but works good enough" is a piss-poor conclusion and that they should drop a measley $30 on a supported card.
You've got to be kidding! Apple has plenty of reason for DRM. The iPod was quite popular before iTunes. However, it's become extremely popular since the advent of iTunes. iTunes only became successful because of the content offered. That content -tons of songs by artists on labels that mostly bristled at the notion of offering *any* content online- exists because Apple agreed to use DRM. Without that content, far less people would be interested in iTunes, and the folks who just want to get that new pop song for $0.99 with minimal effort wouldn't own iPods.
They *are* to blame, because they popularized the business model, and did it successfully with songs lots of people would actually want to buy, and with DRM. Yes, otherwise we'd be blaming someone else (Microsoft or whomever else), but we're talking about reality and not hypothetical situations here.
I myself am so incredibly tired of people making "lesser evil" concessions and not phrasing them as such.
Apple's popularized the notion that music by popular artists can only be distributed online if the end users rights get saddled with enough limitations to utterly negate the cost savings and convenience. They've done little more than meet the bad guys of the music industry halfway, then used the stylish appeal of their products and branding to get the hip folk into it. And when the rich & cool are doing it, *simply everyone* wants to do it. This is one of the big reasons the industry was willing to deal with slightly lesser revenues than they'd originally anticipated. Afer all, how could Apple -purveyor of iPods, maker of sexy white boxen,favorite of artistic types, and champion of all things smug- fail in their endeavor to get the masses buying their music through their service?
That's it. It's really just a case of marketing leverage, and they got the bonus of duping the likes of yourself into thinking they've done something revolutionary yet again. It's still a cop-out.
"But OOo. It'll be a cold day in Hell before Microsoft recommends that on Windows."
:)
What comes to mind:
PRESS: So, if it's a choice between a user who can't afford an MS Office license pirating MS Office, which would still keep your userbase up, or installing a legitimately free-of-cost alternative so as not to break the law and make a small short-term ding in your profits...what would you prefer?
MS: Erm...
MS, effing cornered.
Your example is a piss-poor one. Wireless *isn't* that hard any longer. Pick a wireless card that's got a native, compatible driver and a distro that has said driver available in its package repositories. A card based on the Atheros chipset is a good choice, because the MadWifi packages work *great*. Then install the driver and a configuration frontend of your choice via your distro's GUI package manager. The package manager should get all the command line tools that run behind the frontend, but you don't have to touch them unless you want to; that's what the frontend is for. Then run the configuration frontend, pick your ESSID from a drop-down list and set your WEP key (in ASCII or hex; both are options and there's no conversion required on your behalf). When you need access in a different location, load the front end and change your settings. It's *that* easy. It's done and that's all of five minutes work, at most. Maybe that's a scant pube longer than it takes on your OS of choice, but it must not matter too much: despite your claim of having a life to lead and work to get done, you've still got plenty of time to get on Slashdot and bitch about someone else's OS and go on at length about how yours is oh-so-much better. I use Linux because it meets my needs and I don't have to deal with issues like worrying about subsidizing a company which engages in practices with which I disagree. It's an *ethical thing*. You use the Mac because it meets your needs and you apparently don't have a problem with Apple's doings. That's fine: I strongly disagree with your choice, but your choice is your choice and has little bearing on my life. Use your machine to your heart's content. Once again: get over yourself and stop evangelising. It's old.
I'm eager to see your camp drop the sehr-macho dickwaving and try a modern distro on hardware that's known to be compatible. You'll be astonished at how little hoop-jumping is necessary on Linux these days. Things are known to work for other people and work well, your own experiences be damned.
The evangelism's been going on since '84. Some people don't *need* to be saved. Deal with it.
Absolutely agree on why Opera and the Mozilla Suite haven't caught on. I'd lump in the fact that neither's had a big marketing push ala Firefox, but then one could argue that both of the former apps were never in fact intended for the average user...otherwise they'd have done a proper job in terms of interface implementation and design and not hinge the whole damned thing on the user taking the time to configure things themelves. Same reason why in 2006 plenty of people still use webmail, even though many webmail users may in fact deal with enough correspondance to warrant use of a proper client -too much percieved legwork when something else seems to work good enough. And yes, Firefox popularized tabs. I'd like to pretend it originated tabs... :)
Close but not quite. Yes, the interface should be arranged in a logical way that's obvious to most users, but it should still be customizable. To put it another way: customization should be accounted for but remain optional, while common usability should be possible out of the box with little to no effort on the part of the end user. The notion that imitation with only minor improvement is the key to success is the mentality that results in real-dog new versions of popular software. Much as I'm sick to death of hearing about Opera, they brought cool features like tabs to market...only hardly anybody used Opera. Others started to copy a feature that the average web user neither expected or would know how to use out of the box, and now its standard in the major browsers. That's pretty damned unexpected, wouldn't you say so?
And my point is that, since the latest version of the Flash player isn't available consistantly across all platforms that get used for web browsing, and since it isn't necessarily available for all browsers, you're still running into the same sort of problem. Flash is not a valid alternative or work-around to the CSS problem because there's a fair chance that it's not going to work right, if at all, for everybody who might visit your site, in which case you're negating the purposes of having a website in the first place.
The Flash problem will be solved at the whim of Adobe. The CSS problem will be decided by the disparate groups behind the large number of browsers out there.
You left out the part where the period turned into a comma and you continued, "provided there's the latest version of the Flash plugin available for the browser and platform in question." Flash doesn't work right everywhere. Building a site that's not going to work properly for as many visitors as possible is bad practice.
For the record, it's under Tools-->Transform Tools, as Crop & Resize. You then drag a box across the area you wish to crop and press ENTER. As such, I'm led to believe you didn't spend even as much as five minutes looking around, as you would have found it. GIMP's got some interface issues, but the people who typically complain about things like this are the folks who expect each and every interface to be the same. Remember: at some point, you had to learn the interface model with which you've since become most comfortable.
The same time at which everyone stops trying to use word processors when what they need is typesetting and/or page layout. In short: probably not any time soon.
It's because most browsers don't support it, and because a lot of people don't care much about graphics formats. Look how long it's taken the mighty PNG to come as far as it has.
Tear-off tabs, i.e. the ability to select a given tab, drag it outside of the browser window, and drop it anywhere not in a given window and have it open in a new window. Under a WM/DM supporting multiple desktops, this would be highly useful for grabbing a tutorial you're previewing, having it tear-off, and then tossing it onto another desktop for later use in conjunction with a terminal or given application window, and would prevent the user from having to bookmark quite so much material.
I installed Edubuntu on a spare machine at my job recently, as we do tech stuff for non-profits, and some of them cater to families and children. I'd heard great things about it, and as a bona-fide Linux booster, I was pretty jazzed about the idea of the potential "hey gang, it's fun and educational AND *cough* open source, too!" leveraging. Sadly, it seems less than stellar. As an OS, it works just fine. Visually, the theming seems pretty kid-friendly. But beyond that, I don't see it offering all that much. The educational content ranges from very simple guessing games to slightly more complicated math skill-building to typing instruction to science software --all well and good, but there's not enough there to hold the interest of any given age group, especially given the popularity of hyper-active animation intensive and sound intensive "educational" software out there. Yes, the ADD-ish stuff usually doesn't offer much in the way of real knowledge, skills, etc., but try explaining that to a kid. It's hard to motivate children with something comparatively dry and formal, unless of course they're larval geeklings, in which case they'll probably feel a bit insulted by the childlike theming and would be happier either learning real computer stuff or off playing with Legos and the like.
I didn't want to switch to Linux because I had the notion that it was too technical and oriented for computer programmers, and the Linux community was too arrogant to help out any new people with basic problems. Mate, you're being arrogant courtesy of this particular assumption. If you get flamed or ignored it's probably your own damn fault. Furthermore, it's all but scientifically been proven that ME is the dog's balls. You've got a respectable enough processor. Get some more ram in there. Get a Windows upgrade liscence if you're bent on sticking with Microsoft and turn off all the crazy graphics options. It'll run okay if you do all the proper maintenance stuff (Automatic Updates on, antivirus software (ClamWin's free and good), etc.) And while you're at it, lose the "I'll only go where I'm supposed to" mindset. It's limiting you considerably.