OS?

Dene said:
Windows 7 is not something I should venture towards. I have XP on my main computer and I downgraded from Vista to XP on my laptop after giving it a whole year to prove itself and giving up.

Personally, I see no reason to upgrade to Windows 7, which would not only require purchasing that (expensive as hell) but upgrading my computer just to support the OS, let alone anything else that I wanted. My laptop now has 2GBs of RAM doing absolutely nothing :/
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Price aside, windows 7 is my favorite OS by far. I've had out-of-the-box installs of XP/Ubuntu on my laptop for ~5 years, and Windows 7 at work for ~half a year. Linux isn't great in terms of usability, so trying to do actual work can be a lengthy/unintuitive process => headache. Why people still put up with command line is beyond me... I'd at least think after 40+ years of existence it would have improved to something on the level of Mathematica's interface. XP is great for most things I do... everything I want is generally 2-3 keycuts/clicks away => nice. Additional features in Windows 7 make almost everything I want a single intuitive click or keycut away => awesome: the OS is essentially transparent, and I can actually do work.
 
JBCM627 said:
Linux isn't great in terms of usability, so trying to do actual work can be a lengthy/unintuitive process => headache. Why people still put up with command line is beyond me...
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Actually, since i switched to GNU/Linux a couple of years ago, i've spent more time using it, and less time struggling with it, than when i used windows. And i don't understand the hatred towards the command prompt, i used to use DOS a lot before windows 95, and i was less than 8 years old, i knew how to create menus in it, and a lot of other stuff to take shortcuts i wanted, my point is, if a 7 year old can use and enjoy the use of a command prompt, it can't be that hard can it?. And i have to say 2 more things. First, i don't think you can get more transparent than a command prompt, and second, if you really hate it, it's almost completely avoidable for the average user.
 
lala47 said:
And i don't understand the hatred towards the command prompt
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It is tedious to type out unintuitively named commands, tedious to go back and edit commands if you made a mistake, tedious to execute more than one command at a time, and tedious to look up command or option references. Hence my Mathematica comment. A Mathematica-style interface addresses all of these issues.

lala47 said:
I don't think you can get more transparent than a command prompt
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I was using transparent in a different context.... what I meant was that there is minimal layering between applications I use and me. It takes no effort on my part to go through the OS to get to my applications.
 
JBCM627 said:
lala47 said:
And i don't understand the hatred towards the command prompt
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It is tedious to type out unintuitively named commands, tedious to go back and edit commands if you made a mistake, tedious to execute more than one command at a time, and tedious to look up command or option references. Hence my Mathematica comment. A Mathematica-style interface addresses all of these issues.

lala47 said:
I don't think you can get more transparent than a command prompt
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I was using transparent in a different context.... what I meant was that there is minimal layering between applications I use and me. It takes no effort on my part to go through the OS to get to my applications.
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And as i said, it's completely avoidable, i've installed ubuntu linux to friends who decided to "make the switch" and they are all more than happy, they don't know anything about computers, and some of them are not even aware of the existance of the command prompt, they use their computers everyday for IM, email, school, work, multimedia, etc. with no problems whatsoever. My personal opinion is that the only real reasons to prefer the use of windows / mac , is if you need something specific, for example, photoshop, or if you are a gamer.
 
lala47 said:
JBCM627 said:
It is tedious to type out unintuitively named commands, tedious to go back and edit commands if you made a mistake, tedious to execute more than one command at a time, and tedious to look up command or option references.
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And as i said, it's completely avoidable
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^^ I whole hartedly agree with that. Linux user friendlyness has progressed a long way since the days of hacking config files in vi. The idea that you absolutely need to be able to use a CLI is an outdated misconception.

@JBCM627 you clearly don't have much experience with the command prompt, and as such your judgement of it is from a novice's perspective. For experienced users command prompts are very powerful, allowing a lot to be done in a very short space of time. I agree that learning to use a command prompt can be a very tedious experience for many, but as ability increases it becomes so much easier, and provides a much more direct link from brain to computer ... god, that sounds geeky :o
 
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I have XP and Ubuntu installed, but since my XP installation has been a bit unstable recently, and I am to lazy to fix it, I've been on Ubuntu for the past few months... It's a nice OS, and I can do everything I need, so it works fine for me..
 
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