Microsoft strikes again

fhunter
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Re: Microsoft strikes again

Post by fhunter »

Paolo wrote: Sun Aug 21, 2022 7:07 pm For me, Linux Mint might have looked pretty much the same, and acted the same in many ways as Windows, but it was still frustrating enough, and slowed me down enough, to deem it unusable. I never did figure out how to move a file from a Windows PC on a flash drive to the Linux computer, and then be able to open it and work with the file. Something that simple?

Surprisingly, what looks simple on the surface, is... not so simple, if you go deeper.

Some filesystems are undocumented or badly documented (NTFS, I am looking at you). Some file formats are even worse in documentation (from undocumented to well... microsoft's document format specification (the .docx one) grew to ~6000 pages during standardization process, and still allows for undocumented inclusions in the file. And I am not starting the discussion that M$ doesn't even read it's own older formats that well. (And do not start me on documents that lose normal formatting if you lack EXACTLY SAME fonts on computer, I dealt with that shit one too many times). But in general - unless file format is relatively exotic - most generic files do work and open.

At worst - you'd have to install the software from windows on linux machine (may be a quest in it's own right, but can work).
racerboy (imported)
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Re: Microsoft strikes again

Post by racerboy (imported) »

Software development, ah yes.

I remember years ago (before the era of the "personal computer") becoming lead of a team of badly overworked programmers. A user would suggest something and the team would get right on it, delivering it in a few days...to which the user would say, "What? Oh, THAT! Yeah, but...well...."

At that point I insisted that requests for software changes be put in writing. The workload became manageable and we stopped delivering upgrades "the users" weren't really interested in.
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Re: Microsoft strikes again

Post by WheelyCurious »

Paolo wrote: Sun Aug 21, 2022 7:07 pm I guess I still have this hangup from my high school computer science class, which was 3 hours a day for the whole Senior year. Our teacher's philosophy was that when the user became confused with your software, stopped, and had to get help, or got frustrated with it, you failed as a programmer.

He would run our software, and if he hit a glitch, you got an "F". It was then either redo it, or take the fail. If you redid it, you could only earn a "B". Fail again, and you could only earn a "C".

"Just because you know 'how to drive it', doesn't mean the users will!" was his motto.

:cut

This goes totally against everything I read about how Free Software is supposed to be developed - the mantra for most projects is 'release early, release often' with the idea of getting the basic functionality up and then work on bug smashing and enhancements as the project evolves... The big thing is to listen to users and others who report issues and especially the ones that submit fixes... Users are MUCH better at finding problems as they will try to do things the devs never thought of...

It ends up with most projects being far more responsive and open than the closed source stuff. I've lost track of how many times I've gotten personal responses from program developers when I've made suggestions... With the proprietary stuff you are lucky if you get a form letter acknowledgement...

WheelyCurious
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Re: Microsoft strikes again

Post by ToTheQuick (imported) »

WheelyCurious wrote: Mon Aug 22, 2022 9:41 am This goes totally against everything I read about how Free Software is supposed to be developed - the mantra for most projects is 'release early, release often' with the idea of getting the basic functionality up and then work on bug smashing and enhancements as the project evolves... The big thing is to listen to users and others who report issues and especially the ones that submit fixes... Users are MUCH better at finding problems as they will try to do things the devs never thought of...

It ends up with most projects being far more responsive and open than the closed source stuff. I've lost track of how many times I've gotten personal responses from program developers when I've made suggestions... With the proprietary stuff you are lucky if you get a form letter acknowledgement...

WheelyCurious

Mhm, that "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" ethos is exactly why it's "GNU/Linux" instead of just "GNU" lol.

(For the folx that don't waste their lives on Wikipedia, the GNU foundation was trying to build the ultimate Open Source OS, but spent way too much time getting things lined up. Then comes a Finnish nerd named Linus Torvalds who finnish-ed [insert snare drum here] a rough kernel as a hobby project and released it as a lark and... boom. Linux. GNU still contributed a ton of important add-ons, but their dreams of being their own OS were over.)

Of course, that ethos also presents an enormous barrier of entry for normies.
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Re: Microsoft strikes again

Post by Losethem (imported) »

I just wiped my Mac this morning. It only took 5 years for it to get to the point it needed it. Windows machines? I was rebuilding at least once a year.
WheelyCurious
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Re: Microsoft strikes again

Post by WheelyCurious »

ToTheQuick (imported) wrote: Fri Aug 26, 2022 5:57 am Mhm, that "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" ethos is exactly why it's "GNU/Linux" instead of just "GNU" lol.

(For the folx that don't waste their lives on Wikipedia, the GNU foundation was trying to build the ultimate Open Source OS, but spent way too much time getting things lined up. Then comes a Finnish nerd named Linus Torvalds who finnish-ed [insert snare drum here] a rough kernel as a hobby project and released it as a lark and... boom. Linux. GNU still contributed a ton of important add-ons, but their dreams of being their own OS were over.)

Of course, that ethos also presents an enormous barrier of entry for normies.

Actually they are still working on getting the GNU "Hurd" working and usable, at least to some degree... I don't know (or really care) how many dev's are actually still working on it, but I do occasionally see progress reports. AFAIK, it isn't anywhere close to usable, so IMHO not terribly interesting...

Arguably more interesting is the GUIX / Reproducible Builds effort... Supposedly the same source code will give slightly different binaries depending on the exact toolchain used to compile it, which can lead to subtle and hard to trace bugs. The Reproducible Builds project basically tries to nail down the tool chain as dependencies so that you always end up with the same binary... GUIX is a both a distro and a package management system that implements the reproducible builds system...

I'm in the process of upgrading my two desktop systems w/ SSD's and updating the Debian version from Buster to Bullseye - this post is the first one I've made on one of the machines with the SSD upgrade, seems really nice.

WheelyCurious
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