5 ms·

I agree with a lot of this. For me, it's mostly Windows computers that I hate. Issues like bad capacitors and flaky memory are of course OS agnostic, but it

by spudlyo 17y ago

I agree with a lot of this. For me, it's mostly Windows computers that I hate. Issues like bad capacitors and flaky memory are of course OS agnostic, but it seems to me a bulk of his complains go away with OSX or Linux.

randrews 17y ago
A lot of his complaints are Windows-specific, but some are general, like the filesystem thing, or application-specific "computer classes". Edit: Well, since you edited yours... Yeah, a lot of the problems go away when you get away from the PC world, or from Windows. And some, like the error message thing, are by design: if a more descriptive error would actually help you, you probably know how to look in the log file to find it. But no platform is perfect. I've had Macs do ridiculous things (like only keep a Firewire drive mounted for about ten minutes until I have to replug it), and even though the state of the art has come a long way, computers still aren't perfectly usable by people who don't understand them. But, I mean, neither is anything else.
jrockway 17y ago
For me, Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu all suck. They try to do stuff to "help me", get it wrong, and then make me do more work as a result. I've fucked over my Debian unstable system more times than I can count over the last 10 years... but it's never annoyed me much. On the other hand, my Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu machine annoy the living fuck out of me every time they say "updates installed, you must restart". I guess I hate sitting down to use a computer and having it tell me, "sorry, I did stuff without your asking, now you need to clean up the mess". I still haven't fixed the nvidia driver on my Thinkpad with Unbuntu. I tried, failed, and just put the machine in a closet somewhere. It worked a few times, but now I can't get it to work, and I don't know what steps to take. Everything is so magical, and all I can do is be helpless. With Debian, I make the mess myself, so when I have to clean it up, I am already in the mood. (And of course, the nvidia driver works perfectly. Yeah, I had to build it with module-assistant. But that always works! Every step in the process exists for a good and logical reason -- there is no magic. And magic is what makes me mad.)
- tjgabbour 17y ago
  He also mentions that new tools designed to alleviate problems and up just causing more. I think this is a symptom of inflexible computing "architecture" -- what Alan Kay refers to in "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet". Our own tools cause incidental complexity -- complexity arising not from the problems, but from the way we solve them. And so it becomes harder to build things, as we strain against architectural limits.
- Vivtek 17y ago
  100% on this one. I just upgraded to Windows 7 (i.e. bought a new box with Windows on it) and the default patching behavior was to reboot every few days. Problem is that I keep windows open to mark places in tasks, and always have. It is not OK to reboot without asking me.
- delluminatus 17y ago
  It is for this reason that I use Arch Linux. Building a system from the ground up is, quite honestly, a wonderful experience (it does get tedious after four or five installs on different computers, but meh). I don't have any Crappy Crapware, or Auto Updates (sometimes this bites me), or Evil Bloat ... like a desktop environment. It's a breath of fresh air. As you say, there is no magic.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    I don't think I could ever move away from Debian... but Arch is indeed nice.
delluminatus 17y ago
My Windows partition is slowly dying. First I had to set the clock back on it to avoid doomsday for Windows 7 RC1, which of course breaks all sorts of date-reliant security certificates. Then, Google Chrome starts pissing all over me (Gmail.com is a redirect loop, really?) * "All Programs" in the start menu doesn't work (search function still does) * My Creative audio card sometimes doesn't work, I have to reboot. * Will occasionally boot into some sort of auto-user and not my user account. Known Windows 7 RC bug. * Java has flipped its shit and updates every 15 minutes (exaggeration there, bucko) but doesn't work. * Steam does all sorts of things wrong all the time. Like, 30% of the time it doesn't work and I have to restart it. Fortunately most of my main stuff isn't affected: DrScheme, Emacs, foobar2000, Firefox, and mah g4m3s still work. I'm still using Windows because i <3 games and because I can watch Netflix on it. I wish I wasn't using it, though. tl;dr windows sucks lol, but at least it gamez dude.
- varaon 17y ago
  You admitted that two of the problems you listed were known RC bugs. Have you upgraded 7 from the release candidate?
norswap 17y ago
While I use linux more and more (archlinux), I kinda like Windows because it's straightforward to use. Linux is much more powerfull, and it can do wonders, but to unlock this potential you have to spend hours learning the innards of it's working. And it ain't pretty. Most software nowadays are incredibly complicated, and what Windows does in essence is hide this complexity from you. That comes at a steep cost as you lose control over the machine. But let's face it, the common user rarely needs more than windows has to offer. Also, what this article bash is complexity, and I dare say that Windows is simpler than Linux. Perhaps not under the hood, but Windows gives you a neat interface to the machine. And under it everything mostly works, sometimes it doesn't and you get a piece of frustrating error message. In Linux on the other hand, you need to have a hand at everything to keep things smooth, but you can shape the interface any way you want and fix almost everything. The problem is I have found the rate of software failure to be much more important on linux which kind of cancels this effect out. Finally, when you see that the article states "But the damned computers get in the way of all the things the computers help us do. There’s this whole artificial paradigm about administrator accounts, and security, and permissions, and all other manner of things that people don’t care about. A host of ancillary software is required just to keep your computer running, but that software introduces more complexity and more points of failure, and ends up causing as much grief as it’s intended to resolve." It's hard to defend that switching to linux would help like computers. Ancillary software has more to do with linux 10.000 libraries at a package each, than with crapware, which is not required and can easily be removed.

by spudlyo 17y ago

randrews 17y ago

A lot of his complaints are Windows-specific, but some are general, like the filesystem thing, or application-specific "computer classes". Edit: Well, since you edited yours... Yeah, a lot of the problems go away when you get away from the PC world, or from Windows. And some, like the error message thing, are by design: if a more descriptive error would actually help you, you probably know how to look in the log file to find it. But no platform is perfect. I've had Macs do ridiculous things (like only keep a Firewire drive mounted for about ten minutes until I have to replug it), and even though the state of the art has come a long way, computers still aren't perfectly usable by people who don't understand them. But, I mean, neither is anything else.

jrockway 17y ago

For me, Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu all suck. They try to do stuff to "help me", get it wrong, and then make me do more work as a result. I've fucked over my Debian unstable system more times than I can count over the last 10 years... but it's never annoyed me much. On the other hand, my Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu machine annoy the living fuck out of me every time they say "updates installed, you must restart". I guess I hate sitting down to use a computer and having it tell me, "sorry, I did stuff without your asking, now you need to clean up the mess". I still haven't fixed the nvidia driver on my Thinkpad with Unbuntu. I tried, failed, and just put the machine in a closet somewhere. It worked a few times, but now I can't get it to work, and I don't know what steps to take. Everything is so magical, and all I can do is be helpless. With Debian, I make the mess myself, so when I have to clean it up, I am already in the mood. (And of course, the nvidia driver works perfectly. Yeah, I had to build it with module-assistant. But that always works! Every step in the process exists for a good and logical reason -- there is no magic. And magic is what makes me mad.)

tjgabbour 17y ago
He also mentions that new tools designed to alleviate problems and up just causing more. I think this is a symptom of inflexible computing "architecture" -- what Alan Kay refers to in "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet". Our own tools cause incidental complexity -- complexity arising not from the problems, but from the way we solve them. And so it becomes harder to build things, as we strain against architectural limits.
Vivtek 17y ago
100% on this one. I just upgraded to Windows 7 (i.e. bought a new box with Windows on it) and the default patching behavior was to reboot every few days. Problem is that I keep windows open to mark places in tasks, and always have. It is not OK to reboot without asking me.
delluminatus 17y ago
It is for this reason that I use Arch Linux. Building a system from the ground up is, quite honestly, a wonderful experience (it does get tedious after four or five installs on different computers, but meh). I don't have any Crappy Crapware, or Auto Updates (sometimes this bites me), or Evil Bloat ... like a desktop environment. It's a breath of fresh air. As you say, there is no magic.
- jrockway 17y ago
  I don't think I could ever move away from Debian... but Arch is indeed nice.

delluminatus 17y ago

My Windows partition is slowly dying. First I had to set the clock back on it to avoid doomsday for Windows 7 RC1, which of course breaks all sorts of date-reliant security certificates. Then, Google Chrome starts pissing all over me (Gmail.com is a redirect loop, really?) * "All Programs" in the start menu doesn't work (search function still does) * My Creative audio card sometimes doesn't work, I have to reboot. * Will occasionally boot into some sort of auto-user and not my user account. Known Windows 7 RC bug. * Java has flipped its shit and updates every 15 minutes (exaggeration there, bucko) but doesn't work. * Steam does all sorts of things wrong all the time. Like, 30% of the time it doesn't work and I have to restart it. Fortunately most of my main stuff isn't affected: DrScheme, Emacs, foobar2000, Firefox, and mah g4m3s still work. I'm still using Windows because i <3 games and because I can watch Netflix on it. I wish I wasn't using it, though. tl;dr windows sucks lol, but at least it gamez dude.

varaon 17y ago
You admitted that two of the problems you listed were known RC bugs. Have you upgraded 7 from the release candidate?

norswap 17y ago

While I use linux more and more (archlinux), I kinda like Windows because it's straightforward to use. Linux is much more powerfull, and it can do wonders, but to unlock this potential you have to spend hours learning the innards of it's working. And it ain't pretty. Most software nowadays are incredibly complicated, and what Windows does in essence is hide this complexity from you. That comes at a steep cost as you lose control over the machine. But let's face it, the common user rarely needs more than windows has to offer. Also, what this article bash is complexity, and I dare say that Windows is simpler than Linux. Perhaps not under the hood, but Windows gives you a neat interface to the machine. And under it everything mostly works, sometimes it doesn't and you get a piece of frustrating error message. In Linux on the other hand, you need to have a hand at everything to keep things smooth, but you can shape the interface any way you want and fix almost everything. The problem is I have found the rate of software failure to be much more important on linux which kind of cancels this effect out. Finally, when you see that the article states "But the damned computers get in the way of all the things the computers help us do. There’s this whole artificial paradigm about administrator accounts, and security, and permissions, and all other manner of things that people don’t care about. A host of ancillary software is required just to keep your computer running, but that software introduces more complexity and more points of failure, and ends up causing as much grief as it’s intended to resolve." It's hard to defend that switching to linux would help like computers. Ancillary software has more to do with linux 10.000 libraries at a package each, than with crapware, which is not required and can easily be removed.