There's LinuxMint. Not precisely a fork because it's based on Debian itself, but there's the fairly recent SolusOS which is a real beauty. It actually has up-to-date versions of the kernel and major software. (I know. Whoever heard of such a thing, right?)
So the countdown went through 0 and has been in positive numbers for years already.
Preinstallation, preinstallation, preinstallation. That's all that matters. Preinstallation with icons already on the desktop. Why do you think Microsoft fought so hard and long to keep anybody else's browser icons off their precious desktop? Why is the stupid desktop icon worth any price to companies who want their commercial crapware pre-installed?
People will use whatever is in front of their faces. Linux is never in front of their faces. It's not commercial, there are no kickbacks, so it's never going to be in front of their faces. Business IT departments want an 800 number they can call and scream at when things go wrong. Linux has no 800 number. Business IT depts aren't going to demand it, no matter how much sense it makes for the business.
So is it all hopeless? I don't think so. The only thing we can do, you and me, is hold installfests. Help people over that initial hurdle. I've gotten about ten people moved over to Linux (ubuntu) in the last four-five years purely by doing installations for them. And they're thrilled. No more virus problems. Everything works. They're not worrying about the artwork or whether it's a "modern" interface. If we could propagate the get one - install one meme, you can calculate how long it would take for every desktop and laptop to run linux.
You must have forgotten what I said between reading my comment and your reply. The short answer (since any other kind might overtax your reading comprehension) is "No."
Air rage will be a major cause of interrupted flights, if people blather on their phones in the air like they do on the ground. Bus rides usually aren't that long. In trains you can move to a different car. But cooped up in a tin can on a long-haul trans-Pacific flight with someone who won't stop yakking?
Death penalty. It's the only punishment that fits the crime.
But how much do you want to bet that once they magnanimously allow blathering, the airlines will start charging more for seats outside the blather zone?
Seriously, Mozilla. Wrap your collective mind around the concept of respecting the user. You used to be really good at it. Get back to your roots.
I run LinuxMint Debian. I'm playing with Nemo on my Nokia N900. I wouldn't have a clue how to hack the kernel, but I'm also not a complete idiot. And you know what version of firefox I'm on? Five. Because I got so fracking sick of having my extensions broken and my UI messed with.
Haha. I'm in the boondocks of greater Los Angeles and sometimes I have T-Mob cell signal inside my house, and sometimes I don't. (Since I mostly use VOIP over wireless, it doesn't matter that much, but still.) When I absolutely have to send someone a text via cell, I walk around the sidewalk in front of my house until I get a signal. I don't know what the neighbors think.
(I should add that it's worth putting up with because I'm getting cell service when I'm out and about for $10 per year. So there's that.)
Debian has excellent help. I'm just saying most people know way too much for me to be of any use to them. I tried straight Debian and stumbled on stupid stuff like figuring out how to set permissions for my sftp backups and stuff. Debian can handle networks of any complexity, so for a household user, their permissions are set up more strictly than what I was familiar with and I ran out of time on the learning curve. You know how it is. I keep playing with it though because I like their attitude. One of these days I'll have learned enough to switch.
Since I-don't-remember-when (Hardy Heron?), I was spending more and more time recustomizing stuff after every upgrade. They kept pushing gwibber and telepathy and f-spot or shotwell or whatever-the-hell back on. I had a small hard drive and a slow connection and didn't want programs I never used taking up space and bandwidth during updates.
With Unity and its "you VILL haff ze launchbar on ze left and like it" attitude, it looked to me like the whole philosophy was headed straight down the porcelain fixture. That's why I changed distro. Sure, I could install xfce or kde (which is what I did, I'm kind of a sucker for eye candy), but as I say, I got increasingly fed up with having to fix things I hadn't broken and being told, in effect, to get used to it.
Ubuntu helped me completely switch over to linux back in 2004-2005. But once they changed to Unity, I moved to Linux Mint Debian and haven't looked back.
Sad, really. Their forums were one of the best things about them. As I learned tips and tricks, it became sort of a hobby to visit the forums and try to answer questions for even bigger noobs than me. Not much I can do there now. And the Debian boards are more of a listen and learn place for me. I miss the community, but the OS has made itself unusable. Wayland sounds like a way of piling that mistake higher and deeper.
I think they're saying consumers won't, i.e. don't want to, flash the phone. If it's a meego phone, i.e. linux, gaining root is simple. And then flash away. Aren't people misunderstanding what Hurmola said?
News organizations do the exact same thing -- find sources and publish their stories -- and you don't see the US gov going after the Guardian or the NYTimes. (They're some of the news outlets that did the actual publishing. Wikileaks worked through them precisely because they were trying NOT to endanger people on the ground.) The US can't go after news outlets. There's this little thing called the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech.
But by de facto torture of Manning and by making an example of Assange (they hope, if they can get their hands on him) they figure they can "discourage" repeat embarrassments.
Because that's all they are: embarrassed. I didn't see anything come out we didn't already know. All Wikileaks did was provide hard evidence of the obvious.
More agreement from another satisfied Pair user since forever. (2002? 2003?) As the parent says, not the cheapest, but you do get your money's worth. I have had two gnarly problems getting software to run and they have helped me through it both times, through dozens of emails and several days. Any minor problem gets solved within hours.
As for trustworthiness, I believe I saw somewhere that one of their accounts is the White House. (?)
I use Kde 4.8 and like it a lot. But I have a core i7 with 4GB system memory, etc. etc. The other user in the house switches between two identical legacy laptops which are so old I don't even remember the specs. They'll run Ubu-pangolin with Mate or Mint with Mate, but Kde runs just long enough to think, "Wow. Nice. Shiny!" (which it really is!) and then crashes. (Yes, desktop effects are turned off, and so on.) Kde needs a lightweight streamlined layer.
What iridology does tell you is that people noticed changes in irises decades ago. And they do change a lot and quite quickly in a noticeable number of people with medical conditions, eye irritation, trauma, etc., etc. The researchers at Notre Dame needed to walk across the quad and get some feedback from ophthalmologists before they published.
Your list is a lot more thorough than mine. (I didn't read TFA. I'm on/.) But that was my first thought. Whuuut? "Windows To Go, which allows you to take a portable installation of Windows 8 with you.... including the return of the Start button on the desktop, virtual desktops...." These are new things?
I haven't used Win since 2005 (except XP in virtualbox to do my taxes) so I'm only tenuously connected to what's possible in Win. I did download the free dev Win8 version they had a while ago and set up a vm to look at it. Tiles. Okay. Move your most-used stuff up from the panel and put it into big blocks. Rearrange tiles. Okay. I can do that, too. Thumbnails on mouseover. Yeah, cool. I turned that off on my desktop a couple of years ago because, honestly, if I don't know why I'm running a minimized thingy it's time to close it. I can open contacts by clicking on it. Uh-huh. Been doing that since the mid-90s. And then I got kinda bored and I haven't looked at it since.
Ads? ADS? Say it ain't so. Ubuntu was my main OS since Dapper, but Unity moved me to LinuxMint Debian and KDE. Now that I've heard about this, I'm not even going to bother checking out their new releases in virtualbox.
First: completely agree that it's (much?) cheaper and more or less as good to get prints from Costco et al.
Second: should you want to do it yourself, the crucial difference is whether the printer uses dye sublimation technology. The Canon Selphys are the cheapest-and-best-at-the-price that I've come across. Buy archival photo paper to feed it, and you have your own set up for under $200.
I've been doing a tiny test by putting a few prints on the fridge which gets direct sun for a few months of the year. They've been there for five (six?) years now and have only just started showing a tiny bit of fading. In an album, they'd be fine for decades at that rate. The ink-jet prints (HP Deskjet? Canon something?) I had up for comparison faded to very bleached-looking in less than a year.
I think it was 2007. Linux was taking off all over the place. Governments were talking about adopting open standards. Schools and municipalities were deploying Linux. You could see it really starting to take hold.
Microsoft's no stupider than everybody else. They could see it, too. And I seem to remember they dropped the price on Windows to $3. (That was on whichever version was old, but still dominant at the time. XP?) Not in the US, but elsewhere, where the danger was highest. Then they also really, really, really pushed to prevent adoption of open standards and, if that wasn't possible, to water those standards down to something that interfered less with their business model.
And, as far as I can see, they've successfully held back the tide that time.
Which isn't to say that the problems with Linux people have identified upthread aren't right. They are. Linux does have problems with lack of advertising and sudden holes where important stuff ceases to work. That is very important and something we really need to get our act together about. But the real problems shouldn't blind us to the equally real problems that have nothing to do with Linux itself.
Really? That's all? Let's see... 2000 lbs, about 150 lbs/person... some thirteen people. In my view, when only thirteen people want to corral themselves in a walled garden, with or without ads, that's real progress.
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There's LinuxMint. Not precisely a fork because it's based on Debian itself, but there's the fairly recent SolusOS which is a real beauty. It actually has up-to-date versions of the kernel and major software. (I know. Whoever heard of such a thing, right?)
So the countdown went through 0 and has been in positive numbers for years already.
Preinstallation, preinstallation, preinstallation. That's all that matters. Preinstallation with icons already on the desktop. Why do you think Microsoft fought so hard and long to keep anybody else's browser icons off their precious desktop? Why is the stupid desktop icon worth any price to companies who want their commercial crapware pre-installed?
People will use whatever is in front of their faces. Linux is never in front of their faces. It's not commercial, there are no kickbacks, so it's never going to be in front of their faces. Business IT departments want an 800 number they can call and scream at when things go wrong. Linux has no 800 number. Business IT depts aren't going to demand it, no matter how much sense it makes for the business.
So is it all hopeless? I don't think so. The only thing we can do, you and me, is hold installfests. Help people over that initial hurdle. I've gotten about ten people moved over to Linux (ubuntu) in the last four-five years purely by doing installations for them. And they're thrilled. No more virus problems. Everything works. They're not worrying about the artwork or whether it's a "modern" interface. If we could propagate the get one - install one meme, you can calculate how long it would take for every desktop and laptop to run linux.
You must have forgotten what I said between reading my comment and your reply. The short answer (since any other kind might overtax your reading comprehension) is "No."
Air rage will be a major cause of interrupted flights, if people blather on their phones in the air like they do on the ground. Bus rides usually aren't that long. In trains you can move to a different car. But cooped up in a tin can on a long-haul trans-Pacific flight with someone who won't stop yakking?
Death penalty. It's the only punishment that fits the crime.
But how much do you want to bet that once they magnanimously allow blathering, the airlines will start charging more for seats outside the blather zone?
And I should add that I've already tried 10ESR. It's so corporate-oriented, it's a pain for regular users.
Seriously, Mozilla. Wrap your collective mind around the concept of respecting the user. You used to be really good at it. Get back to your roots.
I run LinuxMint Debian. I'm playing with Nemo on my Nokia N900. I wouldn't have a clue how to hack the kernel, but I'm also not a complete idiot. And you know what version of firefox I'm on? Five. Because I got so fracking sick of having my extensions broken and my UI messed with.
Just quit it.
Haha. I'm in the boondocks of greater Los Angeles and sometimes I have T-Mob cell signal inside my house, and sometimes I don't. (Since I mostly use VOIP over wireless, it doesn't matter that much, but still.) When I absolutely have to send someone a text via cell, I walk around the sidewalk in front of my house until I get a signal. I don't know what the neighbors think.
(I should add that it's worth putting up with because I'm getting cell service when I'm out and about for $10 per year. So there's that.)
Debian has excellent help. I'm just saying most people know way too much for me to be of any use to them. I tried straight Debian and stumbled on stupid stuff like figuring out how to set permissions for my sftp backups and stuff. Debian can handle networks of any complexity, so for a household user, their permissions are set up more strictly than what I was familiar with and I ran out of time on the learning curve. You know how it is. I keep playing with it though because I like their attitude. One of these days I'll have learned enough to switch.
Since I-don't-remember-when (Hardy Heron?), I was spending more and more time recustomizing stuff after every upgrade. They kept pushing gwibber and telepathy and f-spot or shotwell or whatever-the-hell back on. I had a small hard drive and a slow connection and didn't want programs I never used taking up space and bandwidth during updates.
With Unity and its "you VILL haff ze launchbar on ze left and like it" attitude, it looked to me like the whole philosophy was headed straight down the porcelain fixture. That's why I changed distro. Sure, I could install xfce or kde (which is what I did, I'm kind of a sucker for eye candy), but as I say, I got increasingly fed up with having to fix things I hadn't broken and being told, in effect, to get used to it.
Ubuntu helped me completely switch over to linux back in 2004-2005. But once they changed to Unity, I moved to Linux Mint Debian and haven't looked back.
Sad, really. Their forums were one of the best things about them. As I learned tips and tricks, it became sort of a hobby to visit the forums and try to answer questions for even bigger noobs than me. Not much I can do there now. And the Debian boards are more of a listen and learn place for me. I miss the community, but the OS has made itself unusable. Wayland sounds like a way of piling that mistake higher and deeper.
Well, maybe not so much the free-as-in-beer stuff, but otherwise, yeah.
I think they're saying consumers won't, i.e. don't want to, flash the phone. If it's a meego phone, i.e. linux, gaining root is simple. And then flash away. Aren't people misunderstanding what Hurmola said?
He may be dogmatic, but he's also right WAY more than he's wrong. All of open source owes him a lot.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Vote parent +20.
Why are monolithic methods even discussed any more when we're talking about configurable computers? Well? Why?
News organizations do the exact same thing -- find sources and publish their stories -- and you don't see the US gov going after the Guardian or the NYTimes. (They're some of the news outlets that did the actual publishing. Wikileaks worked through them precisely because they were trying NOT to endanger people on the ground.) The US can't go after news outlets. There's this little thing called the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech.
But by de facto torture of Manning and by making an example of Assange (they hope, if they can get their hands on him) they figure they can "discourage" repeat embarrassments.
Because that's all they are: embarrassed. I didn't see anything come out we didn't already know. All Wikileaks did was provide hard evidence of the obvious.
More agreement from another satisfied Pair user since forever. (2002? 2003?) As the parent says, not the cheapest, but you do get your money's worth. I have had two gnarly problems getting software to run and they have helped me through it both times, through dozens of emails and several days. Any minor problem gets solved within hours.
As for trustworthiness, I believe I saw somewhere that one of their accounts is the White House. (?)
The morphometrics of the hand prints shows those first artists were women, Neandertal (or -thal), but not Vandal (or -dhal).
I use Kde 4.8 and like it a lot. But I have a core i7 with 4GB system memory, etc. etc. The other user in the house switches between two identical legacy laptops which are so old I don't even remember the specs. They'll run Ubu-pangolin with Mate or Mint with Mate, but Kde runs just long enough to think, "Wow. Nice. Shiny!" (which it really is!) and then crashes. (Yes, desktop effects are turned off, and so on.) Kde needs a lightweight streamlined layer.
What iridology does tell you is that people noticed changes in irises decades ago. And they do change a lot and quite quickly in a noticeable number of people with medical conditions, eye irritation, trauma, etc., etc. The researchers at Notre Dame needed to walk across the quad and get some feedback from ophthalmologists before they published.
Your list is a lot more thorough than mine. (I didn't read TFA. I'm on /.) But that was my first thought. Whuuut? "Windows To Go, which allows you to take a portable installation of Windows 8 with you. ... including the return of the Start button on the desktop, virtual desktops...." These are new things?
I haven't used Win since 2005 (except XP in virtualbox to do my taxes) so I'm only tenuously connected to what's possible in Win. I did download the free dev Win8 version they had a while ago and set up a vm to look at it. Tiles. Okay. Move your most-used stuff up from the panel and put it into big blocks. Rearrange tiles. Okay. I can do that, too. Thumbnails on mouseover. Yeah, cool. I turned that off on my desktop a couple of years ago because, honestly, if I don't know why I'm running a minimized thingy it's time to close it. I can open contacts by clicking on it. Uh-huh. Been doing that since the mid-90s. And then I got kinda bored and I haven't looked at it since.
Ads? ADS? Say it ain't so. Ubuntu was my main OS since Dapper, but Unity moved me to LinuxMint Debian and KDE. Now that I've heard about this, I'm not even going to bother checking out their new releases in virtualbox.
First: completely agree that it's (much?) cheaper and more or less as good to get prints from Costco et al.
Second: should you want to do it yourself, the crucial difference is whether the printer uses dye sublimation technology. The Canon Selphys are the cheapest-and-best-at-the-price that I've come across. Buy archival photo paper to feed it, and you have your own set up for under $200.
I've been doing a tiny test by putting a few prints on the fridge which gets direct sun for a few months of the year. They've been there for five (six?) years now and have only just started showing a tiny bit of fading. In an album, they'd be fine for decades at that rate. The ink-jet prints (HP Deskjet? Canon something?) I had up for comparison faded to very bleached-looking in less than a year.
It's a regulatory agency. Just order it, you doofi.
I think it was 2007. Linux was taking off all over the place. Governments were talking about adopting open standards. Schools and municipalities were deploying Linux. You could see it really starting to take hold.
Microsoft's no stupider than everybody else. They could see it, too. And I seem to remember they dropped the price on Windows to $3. (That was on whichever version was old, but still dominant at the time. XP?) Not in the US, but elsewhere, where the danger was highest. Then they also really, really, really pushed to prevent adoption of open standards and, if that wasn't possible, to water those standards down to something that interfered less with their business model.
And, as far as I can see, they've successfully held back the tide that time.
Which isn't to say that the problems with Linux people have identified upthread aren't right. They are. Linux does have problems with lack of advertising and sudden holes where important stuff ceases to work. That is very important and something we really need to get our act together about. But the real problems shouldn't blind us to the equally real problems that have nothing to do with Linux itself.
Really? That's all? Let's see... 2000 lbs, about 150 lbs/person ... some thirteen people. In my view, when only thirteen people want to corral themselves in a walled garden, with or without ads, that's real progress.