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For context, my normal desktop environment is wmii running on Linux. I also find Windows physically painful. The problem is that the reason this works for me is

For context, my normal desktop environment is wmii running on Linux. I also find Windows physically painful. The problem is that the reason this works for me is that I'm able and willing to put up with an awful lot of bullshit and have a reasonably good ability to debug things when they're not working properly.

pdonis 13y ago
I pretty much agree with your description of what it's like to run Linux. However, I don't see how that makes Windows or OS X better than Linux. With Windows, you have to put up with at least as much BS, if not more, and whether or not you can debug things is irrelevant because the system is opaque. At least in Linux there are plain text configuration files if the worst comes to the worst. With OS X, things work fine as long as you don't try to do anything with it that Apple didn't explicitly design for. As soon as you try to color outside those lines, it's at least as much BS as Linux, and while the configuration files are technically text files, they're not plain text, they're XML (PList files), which means that you end up having to use customized tools to hack on them instead of a plain text editor. So debugging things is not as easy as on Linux, although it's still a lot easier than on Windows.
eric_bullington 13y ago
I also find Windows physically painful. With Nuget, third-party devs have started addressing the worst part of using Windows, which is package management, but it's still nothing like using apt or aptitude. Furthermore, I rarely have to put up with debugging strange Linux problems. I use Linux Mint with Mate and it just works 99.9% of the time. The technology behind Mate is the old Gnome 2 environment, so it's very battle-worn. I have to wonder what distro all the people complaining of strange Linux desktop bugs are using. Yeah, they happen, but are increasingly uncommon when using non-beta software (like Debian Wheezy or an Ubuntu or Ubuntu LTS release).

pdonis 13y ago

I pretty much agree with your description of what it's like to run Linux. However, I don't see how that makes Windows or OS X better than Linux. With Windows, you have to put up with at least as much BS, if not more, and whether or not you can debug things is irrelevant because the system is opaque. At least in Linux there are plain text configuration files if the worst comes to the worst. With OS X, things work fine as long as you don't try to do anything with it that Apple didn't explicitly design for. As soon as you try to color outside those lines, it's at least as much BS as Linux, and while the configuration files are technically text files, they're not plain text, they're XML (PList files), which means that you end up having to use customized tools to hack on them instead of a plain text editor. So debugging things is not as easy as on Linux, although it's still a lot easier than on Windows.

eric_bullington 13y ago

I also find Windows physically painful. With Nuget, third-party devs have started addressing the worst part of using Windows, which is package management, but it's still nothing like using apt or aptitude. Furthermore, I rarely have to put up with debugging strange Linux problems. I use Linux Mint with Mate and it just works 99.9% of the time. The technology behind Mate is the old Gnome 2 environment, so it's very battle-worn. I have to wonder what distro all the people complaining of strange Linux desktop bugs are using. Yeah, they happen, but are increasingly uncommon when using non-beta software (like Debian Wheezy or an Ubuntu or Ubuntu LTS release).