As I said earlier, I miss using RiscOS sometimes. I had a system that would boot that fast 20 years ago. Still, having the OS on a ROM chip helped … 
Then I’m not understanding your comment about unix-a-likes being superior for math/programming.
If something is designed for plain-old-windows it simply works that way. There’s no “integration” to be concerned about…it’ll launch command.com and do it’s thing…so I’m not understanding this comment.
It’s always seemed to be more of an IT crowd tool…but I don’t care…I’ve bash (other unix-flavor shells of course) so I don’t need to dick around with some unknown tool…I’ve real work to do.
Of course. Most packages can be built in exactly the same manner as if you were working under a unix-a-like. I think the window-speak is reparse points.
My personal experience is that linux requires more handholding…but I don’t do much micro-management of being on the cutting-edge of releases. Of course YMMV.
All of this stuff used to be configurable via MS’s tweetui. If that doesn’t exist anymore, then surely some third-party freeware will handle it. I certainly prefer focus-follows-mouse, click to promote. Again I don’t bother to change it because GUI crap just slows me down.
WRT: BSOD - I’d had exactly one in the past 10 years. Steam was the cause (still don’t get that one). I’ve had much less driver trouble with windows than linux.
Don’t see your point. Why install crap programs? And if pre-installed stuff, why sweat the disk space. Setting up a machine from scratch is a PITA regardless of OS.
The Raspberry Pi boots in just a few seconds. Only to a Linux login prompt though. Eeergh.
What I hate about Windows Vista/7:
- Desktop window composition. Slow, resource hungry, and dare I say, just basically ugly. Especially those transparent window bars and so on. Also the way it takes an age to init and uninit DWC when using fullscreen OpenGL applications.
- The new taskbar in Win 7, and grouping, in Vista. I basically have a little panel of all my most useful shortcuts, then for every window I’ve got open, I want something I can see the name of and instantly navigate to. I rarely use Alt-Tab because it almost always takes much longer than a flick and click of the mouse on my taskbar. I usually have about 5-6 windows open at a time.
- Somehow the whole OS seems to feel slow and turgid, taking ages to launch things, and I’ve got a monstrously powerful computer. I’m not sure how they’ve managed that.
- The start menu is somehow rubbish. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it’s the reliance on the search function now. Whatever it is, XP did it better.
- Somehow, shared network drives is now difficult, when it used to be easy. So I don’t really use them any more.
- The way the preferred directories APIs and such keeps changing. Grr. Hopefully it’ll settle for a while.
- How you can be typing in one window and then another window will pop up unbidden and steal text focus. Often this seems to happen when I’m typing a password in.
What I hate about Mac OS X in all its incarnations:
- Inability to resize windows from any corner
- Sluggish, unresponsive UI, probably again brought about by desktop window composition.
- The dock. FFS. It’s awful. So awful Windows 7 copied it. Grr.
- Can’t change system mouse pointer to a bigger arrow for my tired old eyes (first thing I do on Windows installs. After installing Textpad of course)
- Menu bar at the top of the screen.
- A general reliance on the desktop as some sort of giant MDI interface.
- Can’t tell and can never remember which pleasantly coloured window widget blob does what, and anyway, the only one that works as expected is the close button. The other two appear to have random effects, which are never useful in any way.
- A general insistence that the UI is designed around a single mouse button. I understand why they’ve done it this way for so long. I just don’t agree.
- The whole walled garden thing. I don’t like where it’s headed, especially as it’s supplied by Apple, maker of the OS. Microsoft would have got in big shit for something like this only 10 years ago, but Apple are getting away with it somehow.
- iTunes. Grrr. Worst music application ever made. (Impressively, even worse on Windows).
- The Finder. Oh God, the Finder. Unbelievably difficult to use effectively.
What I hate about Linux:
- A general reliance on knowing a vast amount about how computers work in order to get a lot of things working. Google has the answers… but only if you a) know why you’re looking b) know what you’re looking for c) understand the answer and d) have more patience than time
- So many daft configurations of addon software - DBus, Compiz, GNOME, KDE, OpenGL drivers, window manager addons - literally 50% of the time stuff just doesn’t work. This is annoying. Very very annoying.
- A huge reliance on shell scripts and the commandline to make stuff work. If only shell scripts looked comprehensible to the layman programmer. Unfortunately most of them look like PERL explosions.
- Total lack of a standardised way for people to install 3rd party software. Eg. Windows: double click an MSI or installer executable; it goes off and does its thing. Mac OS: optionally double click to unzip, then simply drag .app (usually) where you want it (on that note - would love a pure Java solution for creating DMGs which allow that lovely drag-n-drop to the Applications folder). Linux: RPM, DEB, tar.gz, .bin, shellscripts, Apt-get, pacman, gconf, er… more ways than I care or dare to understand. I just want a solution exactly like Windows or Mac OS, across the board.
- Having to compile something, ever. NO.
- Usually horrid UI from the desktop manager. Eg. Unity - what have they done to the scroll bars? Insane.
- Awful file explorer app. Don’t know what it’s called, but the ones in GNOME and KDE that seem to be kicking about are risible efforts.
- Obscure anachronistic names for system folders, and system commands
- Seriously unreliable. Several times in the last few years I’ve had some Linux install, and tried to upgrade it to a newer version, to find it simply no longer boots and I’ve no idea how to recover it. If it were my main machine I’d be shit outta luck. I suspect this is because of the monolithic distro packaging and dependency mechanisms being incredibly complicated. Bound to be some serious bugs in the tree somewhere.
- Somehow the desktop UI never feels quite as fluid as I’d expect despite lack of shitty features like composition.
- Arcane and bizarre startup sequence and management of “daemons” vs. Windows nice and simple “Services” concept
- I could go on
What I hate about all of them:
- A tendency towards trying to make the window management look fancypants over making it work properly. Shaking windows to arrange them? WTF? Can’t resize from any edge? WTF? Resizing edge too narrow to actually grab? WTF? Composition making the whole thing run at half the perceived rate? Arrgh
- They all have utterly shit file managers. I spend a surprising amount of time managing files. Windows is probably the least shit.
- Multi user support at home. Why the hell did they bother with this. Imagine if your car booted up differently when the Mrs. got in the driving seat. NO. Stupid. Switch it on. It works. The whole concept of multiple users should be totally hidden I think for 99% of people who use these machines at home (but not the concept of Administrator access).
- Tediously long boot times, mostly as a result of doing all sorts of clever stuff behind the scenes that actually no fucker cares about like indexing your entire Documents folder, etc. On Windows for example I usually disable about half the services it comes with by default because they are a pointless waste of time.
- I actually hate the multiple-desktop switchy paradigm. It’s disorientating, ugly, and totally unlike my real desktop, which is simply large and covered with stuff. I want Amiga Screens back, which somehow seem a more fluid and approachable way of doing things, though exactly how that’d work these days with multiple monitors I don’t know.
- I cannot stand icons on the desktop by default. I use the desktop background as an anchor for helping me arrange windows. Normally all of my windows are maximised anyway. I almost never - almost - have a use for normal applications running in little windows beyond accessories like calc, textpad, file manager, and the commandline.
Grumpy old man, me.
I saw Haiku years ago. I bet it’s going nowhere fast.
Cas 
All of this stuff used to be configurable via MS’s tweetui. If that doesn’t exist anymore, then surely some third-party freeware will handle it. I certainly prefer focus-follows-mouse, click to promote. Again I don’t bother to change it because GUI crap just slows me down.
[/quote]
Pretty much any “feature” can be added/tweaked through registry hacks, third-party tools, etc. This isn’t an argument for the operating system.
I’ve only experienced a few BSOD’s, but I’ve experienced hundreds of fatal errors on a wide array of PCs that lead my Windows to crash/freeze/reboot/etc.
Regarding a few of your points, Cas:
Last time I tried to change the system mouse pointer it simply made the existing one “larger and uglier”. What I really wanted was simply to change to look exactly like the Magnfied scheme under Windows. My old tired knackered eyes are trained to look for it on the screen. Every extra moment hunting for the mouse… thousands of times a day…
Also you’re not seriously trying to suggest Mac OS encourages people to use keyboard shortcuts!? The precise opposite of its design philosophy? And how exactly do you use a keyboard shortcut on a window that’s not focused?
Glad to hear resizing from all other edges and corners is finally in though after, what, 20-25 years. (When did Windows 3.0 or hmm even X Windows come out?)
My Mac’s a dual core Mac Mini. Granted not the fastest car in the race. But they’ve all felt similarly slow. I think what it actually is, is not speed so much as lag. I can detect a frame or two of lag with mostly every interaction - even typing single characters - and it bothers me immensely.
Cas
Damn…such an old grumpy man!
Yeah, such a large list of minor things does indeed add up to one gigantically whopping one that can make you dislike the OS.
That’s why I stopped listing irritations
I do use the same apps on Win/Linux but I listed many OS level reasons point by point as to why I’m enjoying Linux more for the type of math/programming work that I do. I’ve used Windows exclusively for work for the past ~15 years btw. If you don’t understand I guess we can drop it.
If you like Windows more, I’m not trying to flame you or really argue with you, I just rediscovered Linux, and wanted to hear this crowd’s thoughts.
I’ve tried Linux a few times in years back but it was so frustrating getting something simple working like audio or WiFi or VPN, that I eventually gave up. Even with myself, who was willing to spend dozens of hours on forums and tinkering with the command line and config files, I still couldn’t get some things working and stuck with Windows. Today, I install Ubuntu, and all the basics just worked absolutely perfectly on the first try.
It’s not like I go out of my way and voluntary install crapware. When I wanted to use a scanner, printer, or copy files from my HTC Android phone from my Windows system, these tasks required that install special software that also co-installed non-optional crapware (in my words) alongside it. Uninstalling the crapware also stopped letting me access the device. On Linux none of the above required manual driver installation and none of it installed annoying crapware.
This is the reason I used to hate Linux. Today, the new Linux distros just work for common functionality.
The defaults with any good distro just work and they include most of this stuff. It’s only when you want to do your own customization that there is risk, but that is understandable.
Like what? I haven’t had to write a single shell script yet… Except for modifying my shell profile to set JAVA_HOME. And I added ~/bin to the PATH. And that’s it.
Ummm… it’s not that complicated. There are two major ways:
1: package manager. You install via command line via apt-get and it’s super simple. There is an optional GUI version of apt-get but IMO it’s unnecessary. Then there are .deb downloadable package manager packages (don’t use .rpm for Debian OS) which are double clickable. The advantage of package manager is that dependencies are handled for you. The disadvantage is if you want to use bleeding edge releases or get products from some organization that doesn’t submit to repos.
2: manual. I install Oracle JDK, Scala, IntelliJ, Gradle, and games this way. Just download the .tar.gz or the .zip, unpack it and you’re done. To uninstall, just delete. I put all this stuff in a directory like ~/opt//. For example, for IntelliJ, I unpacked as downloaded to ~opt/idea/idea-IU-117.418 and I have a simlink at ~opt/idea/current.
The above is far simpler than using Windows .msi installers. All the installation dialogs and GUI elements are typically unnecessary. And even on Windows, some software is manually by simply unzipping to a local directory.
I remember having to do this in the past and was similarly frustated. I don’t want to spend time learning and fiddling with someone else’s build process. On my new install, I haven’t had to do this at all.
I feel the default Ubuntu UI is simpler/cleaner than Windows/Mac. It’s definitely not a work of art or anything, but it’s nice and it doesn’t get in my way. And the xmonad window manager looks extremely practical although I’m not diving in quite yet.
I haven’t experienced any reliability issues, but I’m still new.
I’m interested if most of your grievances are no longer relevant. You typically don’t need to compile other people’s software or do much config file tinkering for normal use cases. The basic computer use cases should be fairly idiot proof if you stick to the defaults.
what gene9 is saying that: “Adapting to linux is easy.”
However easy is really relative.
And it’s not the point, nobody should have to adapt - it should adapt to me and do things intuitively.
Amount of ways you can install things and of course the amount of completely different distros show how chaotic the linux world is.
More options are always good for people who know what they are doing and/or what to spend more time.
But we are all user first and IT people second.
And personally I want do more things with my pc than just programming… like I said software has to work: popular creative software, GAMES, emulators, everything
Basically linux would only be reasonable when there was a WINE which can run every windows app and driver without problems.
Screw WINE under linux and X under windows…just run virtualbox and make your life easy.
Regardless of windowing system, the first thing I do is disable as much of the flashy-BS crap as quickly as possible. My pet-peve is any kind of animation of transitions. WHAT A MAJOR WASTE OF TIME! If I want animation I’ll watch a movie or play a game thanks.
Which is exactly what Ive been saying. If the OS’s default GUI has any impact on your workflow, then there are some rough edges you could sand away.
From start of the NT family (actually I avoided all the other flavors) I’ve had very few problems…but I skipped on Vista. On multiple Win7 boxes I’ve had exactly one crash…the previously mentioned BSOD. Of course YMMV…it’s a combo of exact hardware devices and drivers of each box. The problems of the NT family seem to be way overstated by linux fanboys while there’s always a great excuse if a similar problem exist in their favorite flavor.
I’m actually quite happy to have the option. That way I can actually compile stuff up to the specs of my machine rather than be stuck with something targeting a much lower-end machine.
I don’t like any of the major OSs…I think they are all garbage. But ultimately they’re just toasters that I use whichever one works best for me for a given task. This is not to say that I don’t think that each have superior features than the other two, but for day-to-day work these differences rarely matter that much. Being stable and being able to run the programs you need is all that really matters. Again, my thinking is don’t choose (OK I have no reason to bother with Mac ATM)…virtualbox is your friend.
Sure. I had to install HTC sense to get the driver and my canon photo-printer installed some worthless (to me) programs. But I don’t really see what the big deal is. All OS default installs dump a bunch of stuff I don’t want as well. All this stuff consumes some small amount of disk space that it’s worth the effort to recover. So to my mind, stuff like this is a non-issue.
I must present a rebuttal!
You can do that as of Lion, maybe earlier too.
Unless you’re referring to visual effects which I commented on earlier I don’t know exactly what you’re referring too. And you can turn off almost all this stuff, albeit with buried menu or console commands.
I mostly agree, but I’m curious what you would use in replacement? I have Quicksilver installed and I use that for all app-launching stuff (Command-Space, start typing an app name, press enter). I have the dock hidden.
Yes you can. Go to accessibility in the system menu. You can do this, change monitor colors for color blind people, have text read off to you, etc. You can also hold Control and zoom to see any part of the screen zoomed in at any time.
Personal preference? As a Mac-mostly user I hate it at the bottom. No way to change this that I know of.
Is this really Mac OS only? I personally practically never use the Desktop, instead I use Quicksilver for almost everything (it’s basically a faster version of Spotlight) and use Command-Tab (switch between apps) and Command-` (switch between windows in the same app) to do everything. There is also exposé, mission control, and many other ways to get at different apps and windows.
Haha, this made me laugh. Unfamiliarity with Mac, it seems. For future reference - Red(x) - Yellow(-) - Green(+). Red closes the window (Command-W), Yellow minimizes the window into the dock (Command-M), Green sizes the window to be fullscreen or down to whatever size it was before it was fullscreen, depending. I’ll agree with you that the coloring is odd, as are the symbols. I wouldn’t be surprised if this eventually gets replaced, as it’s not very intuitive. Because I also don’t like the dock, I use Command-H to hide the window rather than minimizing it. Then it’s just invisible until to switch back to that app.
This is pretty legacy (Mac OS 9). They fully support right-clicking just as well as Windows now. It’s basically designed at this point so that it’s possible to do absolutely anything with either one or two button mice. Which I think is a good thing. Why constrain?
Absolutely agree. Things are moving closer and closer to the way the iPhone is and it totally sucks. Apple wants to make money off your app. The company has incredible attention to detail, but they are also megalomaniacs.
Meh. I’ve tried other options and they all seem to be worse. This might be because they are all copy-catting iTunes at this point, but still. My biggest issue is that it uses up a whole buttload of RAM when it doesn’t seem like it should be. And Ping is unbelievably stupid. And the store is difficult to browse.
Sounds like you’re not experienced with it. I feel fairly retarded when I try to do things on Windows and inevitably need to do a lot of Googling. It’s just kind of the way it is.
It’s not a big deal, but it’s refreshing when I boot my Linux system I don’t have to wait an extra 20 seconds watching various splash screens boot up and have a pool of icons I don’t want on my system tray because of the various scanner/printer/usb devices from different vendors that I used six months ago.
Cas means that the menubar is not at the top of the window.
I fully agree with him. OSX (and Unity) for some reason feels it’s OK to detach the menubar from the application that created it.
This has three problems:
[x] the context is gone, when looking for functionality of an app, you need to search outside of its borders
[x] you have to move your mouse to the edge of the screen, instead of the edge of the window, which means you have to move a lot further.
[x] if you have multiple apps open, and you focus app 1, you cannot see the menubar of app 2. you first have to focus it, then move your cursor all the way back to the top of the screen, make your choice, and move the cursor back to the app - to continue whatever you were doing.
I honestly cannot see any advantages.
Interesting point. I get annoyed at the opposite in Windows, but your reasoning for the pros of having individual menu bars is sound. I still think it makes sense to have a single unified menu bar though. You save space in each app, and in order to access the menu in a certain window, you need to click in that window anyway, thereby changing focus (which would update the menu bar at the top in Mac). Admittedly I do get confused about app context sometimes, but this is 100% an issue for hotkeys, not for using the menu. Because very prominently in the menu is the app that currently has context. So if you select any menu item, you see that and know where you are.
this is the problem I’m talking about:
Windows:
[x] click the menu-item in any of the windows (this 1 click does 2 things: make the window focused and perform the menu-action)
[x] continue your work
OS X & Unity:
[x] click the window you want to see the menu-bar of
[x] move the mouse to the top of the screen
[x] click the menu-item
[x] move the mouse back to the app
[x] continue your work
I happy trade in some screen space for not having to move my mouse back and forth and adding a 2nd click.
N.B.
Not really anything to do with OSX, but in Unity, the menubar ever so often fails to update when I click a window, causing major confusion in my braincells.
You can uninstall the global menu in Unity if you don’t like it. Canonical created the menu to free some vertical space because many modern notebooks or netbooks have 16:9 screens with a low resolution. They will probably change it with the next release of Unity.
@princec: When did you try a good Linux distribution for the last time and how long did your try last?
Okay that’s unfair. There is one extra click in Mac OS X, that isn’t even necessarily a click. You put in a bunch of steps (move the mouse to the top of the screen etc) that exist in Windows too. The only difference is the extra click (or other action, like Command-Tab) to get the proper app in focus.
I still say this is a matter of preference, because having so many extraneous menu bars hanging around whenever I use Windows always drives me crazy. It reminds me of Mac OS 9 where a new window was created every single time you double clicked a folder (rather than opening that in the same window). You just don’t need that behavior 99% of the time. When you do occasionally want a new window it’s annoying that this doesn’t happen, but I’m so happy that is no longer the behavior.
I’ve tried every version of Ubuntu since v9, and it gradually was getting better. Until Unity. I’ll never look at it again - it’s so different to how I use a computer I can’t be bothered with it. Mint now looks to be a possibility.
Riven has hit the nail on the head with menu bars.
gene9 lives on a different planet to me and Roquen I think. I love the way he describes a manual installation: “Just download the .tar.gz or the .zip, unpack it and you’re done.” I have to look up the commandline switches for gunzip or whatever it is every single time. And in respect to Windows installers - “All the installation dialogs and GUI elements are typically unnecessary.” - you are surely joking. But then I suppose this sort of thinking is why Linux mysteriously hasn’t suddenly taken the market by storm and obliterated Windows. Ballmer can sleep soundly in his gold-plated bed for a few years yet.
Cas
