I'd like to use Linux but...

> Nah. Hit win key, type name of app, hit enter.

until you install audacity and audacious2 and audacious-gtkui at the same time...

and you can't remember the name 'ekiga'

(and 'ti' brings up mahjong, with no explanation as to why)

― koogs, Tuesday, 3 May 2011 22:24 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Agh yeah, that does suck. I use Launchy on Win XP and Spotlight on this Mac: Launchy will pick up any segment of any word; Spotlight won't. As Unity has pretty much done away with menus, it needs to be better than both.

While I'm at it, I also don't like that the win search and the win+A search bring up two different sets of things. There's no excuse for that.

ummm anyone else finding that windows (or even parts of windows wtf?) seem to suddenly lock up and not respond to mouse clicks? i can't quite pin down what's going on but it's very weeeeeird and happening on both machines i installed natty on.

Not yet. I've heard of people having various issues with the GUI, though. An update will hopefully sort it out.

ummm anyone else finding that windows (or even parts of windows wtf?) seem to suddenly lock up and not respond to mouse clicks? i can't quite pin down what's going on but it's very weeeeeird and happening on both machines i installed natty on.

is your problem is that you'll click somewhere, and then you'll move the mouse and click somewhere else but the interface will act like you're still clicking in the place you originally clicked?

(and refuse to change focus to a different window?)

yeah that sounds like it could be it. not 100% sure though.

it's a really hard problem to describe but we might have had the same one. it happened to me not with the natty update but with a recent update to the x.org display drivers. but i didn't narrow it down to that until after i'd wiped and reinstalled the OS. but that's ok i kinda like reinstalling the OS.

this thread says the problem's fixed in the new version, but i'm just avoiding x.org updates for now (after the OS reinstall rolled back to before the problem). at least until the weekend, when i'll have time to fuck with it and won't have scheduled any of that bourgeois corporate-stooge stuff like "use" my operating system to "do things".

thanks for that info, it sounds similar if not exactly what i'm experiencing. i'm sure after a few more days of trying to "do things" i'll be able to describe the problem much more precisely.

i maintain about 20 machines at the office that are all running various older version of ubuntu. definitely going to wait for these problems to be ironed out before upgrading any of them to natty.

"Fucking with it" is an acceptable and expected solution to problems with Debian and Slackware, not Ubuntu. If Shuttleworth wants to conquer the universe he needs to get on top of the bugs that break the deal. It's better than it used to be (Edgy oh jesus) but it needs to be better.

Oh and Xubuntu is out if you need a reliable Gnomealike.

when i installed natty on my desktop on first boot it presented me with a message "you do not have the hardware required to run unity" and dropped me into a classic-style environment. having just installed it on my netbook i know this is bullshit so try to open the restricted drivers thingy and install the nvidia driver. but having clicked on the restricted drivers tool nothing happens. at this point i start trying a few others things and realise apt isn't managing to connect to the repos, after changing the repo location everything works fine. it's a minor/obvious thought process for someone used to linux/ubuntu but a first-time user is going to give up on the spot.

it's a minor/obvious thought process for someone used to linux/ubuntu but a first-time user is going to give up on the spot.

this is key to the whole Linux Thing and they really really really need to get on it. the community's improved in the past few years, but that thing still happens where well-meaning people switch to ubuntu for whatever reason and then go to a forum and ask how to do such-and-such, and the linux people get bitchy like UM IT'S PRETTY SIMPLE HAVE YOU TRIED TYPING SUDO MOUNT -T NTFS /DEV/SDA1 /MNT/NTFS and it's like no they haven't tried typing that because it's not nineteen eighty-fucking-five.

(i <3 doing things in the terminal though it makes me feel cool)

but whatever, the last wine update randomly made morrowind work again, so i'm happy.

xp the "helpful" Linux community is the exact opposite ime. If someone ever bothers to acknowledge your question the answer always begins with "oh GOD why am i wasting my time with this crap, okay look just go to launchpad and log a bug BUT MAKE SURE IT'S NOT A DUPLICATE" etc etc. Unacceptable even to people like us, and the absolute end of the line for your average nanna.

When I properly installed Natty at the weekend it took nearly two hours to download the updates at 13.7 kbps. That's another major thing they need to sort out, especially with Canonical treating Ubuntu as a trojan horse for paid services these days.

at some point last year i had a c++ problem and i went on irc to see if anyone could help. a guy was so obnoxious to me about asking for help with something "obvious" i called him out for being such a prick and was swiftly banned. honestly had to have a time out from the computer i was FUMING hahaha

wow

buncha neckbeards.

> it's a minor/obvious thought process for someone used to linux/ubuntu but a first-time user is going to give up on the spot.

but i felt the same with windows update problem this morning:

"Failed with error C87923749879238749872934879879.
Click here for more information."

(click)

"Uknown update error C87923749879238749872934879879.
Was this helpful?"

NO

"Why wasn't this helpful?"

...

Yeah, Windows has been creating that false sense of security since Win95, chucking up helpful friendly troubleshooting tools that ask you a load of questions, get you to check obvious things ("IS YR COMPUTER PLUGGED IN Y/N") and in the end just leave you stranded. Never helped me once.

but that's ok i kinda like reinstalling the OS.

so true <3

So, I've got quite a speedy Win7 machine, why should I have a go at Linux? What's the advantages?

I'm hoping for a more measured response than most articles I've seen written by Linux superstans.

haw, feel like on this thread you're more likely to get snark

this is actually a really hard question. i don't know about 'advantages' really it's quite specific to what you use your computer for. for me i can do everything i need to do in linux (except for the odd frustrating thing) so why would i not use it? once you get used to having a vast amount of free software and downloading stuff with one command at the terminal it's hard to go back imo. whenever i try to use a windows machine now i spent hours searching out software to do what i want and then discover i have to pay for it.

i have no experience with this (but am considering it), but isn't another appeal of linux the idea that it can 'rejuvenate' old hardware? i'm thinking that i'll reconfigure my 2008 MBP as a linux box when i get a new computer soon-ish. ideally i could have it as a dedicated 'media' box or something.

that's definitely true. the main distributions themselves probably aren't suitable for this but there are many lightweight linux distros out there. i managed to install linux on my old pc in my childhood bedroom that has like 32MB of RAM :)

Yeah, I have a low-powered atom board in a mini case running linux effectively as a torrent box (something I don't mind leaving running overnight because it uses a tenth of the power of my main machine) and file server (so I can stream mp3s from there instead of downloading them to the desktop and then wanting them on the laptop or whatever)

it's not running a particularly lightweight distro, just an out-of-the-box Debian, but command-line only - there's no monitor attached and all logins are over ssh

before that I was running xubuntu on an 8-year-old laptop which someone else was throwing out because it was too old to run XP, but not too old for me to run Linux and read ILX, tit about with Perl and some basic OpenGL and making music in schismtracker, etc

I'm hoping for a more measured response than most articles I've seen written by Linux superstans.

― Yossarian's sense of humour (NotEnough), Friday, 6 May 2011 05:06 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Until Win7 came along, the main reason was simply and compellingly that Linux was not Windows. Vista was a condescending harassing piece of shit, and everything from WinXP back underperformed against Linux.

Now that Microsoft's slowly getting its shit together and W7 is decent (so I've been told – I've not used it) the main reason to dump it is malware. Yes you can slow down your machine with a security solution, or you can just go with any other OS on the planet and not have to worry. Linux fits the bill here because it's free and because it runs on hardware built for Windows.

If you use Win7 and you're happy with it, then, the two real points of value that Linux can offer you are:

- free stuff
- no malware

Those two points are countered by:

- the loss of some applications you probably rely on (e.g. Office*)
- limited support if things go wrong

* despite what you've been told, OpenOffice/LibreOffice is not a good enough substitute

i.e. i am talking you out of linux

i was going to suggest get vmware player for windows and try out any number of linux distros.
but vmware makes you go through this whole signup thing and i dunno...
if you can get it working, it's great for virus-free browsing, installing demos of things that you don't want infecting
your actual machine.

or just do this

or this

AA's post is pretty comprehensive. i've been out of the windows loop since xp (not because i've been using linux so long but because i used xp so long) so i have nothing to say about either vista or 7, but that is indeed What I Hear. i've never had any problems with openoffice but i basically only use the word processor (i've heard bad things about the excel/powerpoint manques) and i've never had an office job. actually i've gotten really snotty and hippie lately and started filing all my writing in plaintext. which i edit in emacs.

but yeah you're basically getting free stuff and security in exchange for your computer becoming more of a hobby and less of an appliance.

(oh and if you play any game more advanced than spider solitare stay far away)

ha unity just froze

xp oh yes Linux is now the worst OS in existence for games (and I mean that factually i.e. of the 11 current distinct platforms I can think of it's #11)

did they port tux racer to PS3??

let me log into psn and check, oh wait

Right, I've installed that Wubi thing and I'm posting from Ubuntu. Ain't it speedy! A few things are a bit annoying (transferring bookmarks and t0rr3nts over from Chrome and utorrent, Flash doesn't seem to work in Chrome) but I'll have a play over the weekend.

I'll need to keep Windows for gaming, but I could get used to this!

After a couple of days unity freezes and the machine needs to be restarted. The solution offered by your friendly helpful linux community is "FILE A BUG REPORT". >< THIS close to dumping linux forever.

I don't know if that is better or worse than the other standard fanboy-of-slightly-esoteric-software response "it works perfectly for me, you have clearly done something wrong and know nothing about computers (p.s. how dare you complain when you could just find the bug and fix it and recompile everything ever and submit a kernel patch, just like that)"

Yeah that, or a third outcome: "there is no open source driver, blame the manufacturer, sign this petition and this petition and this one and this one and then submit a complaint to the manufacturer"

btw I found that bug and yes it asks people to try compiling alternative kernels until they find one that works

(i.e. in the 21st century a suitable and technically feasible response would be "click this link and say 'yes' when prompted, if it fails then follow these simple steps to remove it")

I just put Ubuntu (Bitchy Baboon) on an external bootable drive but during upgrade process it totally fuxored the whole filesystem- I couldnt even boot. Good thing I hadn't done anything with it and I can just start over. Still, it is fast when its working.

Bitchy Baboon

laughed

glad i gave this nonsense up on the desktop when the developer preview of os x came out.

got End of Life messages trying to update ubuntu 9.04 this morning 8(

(am using 10.4 day to day but keep 9.04 around just in case (and it was 32bit rather than 64). plus there are things there that i still haven't migrated, like my thunderbird folders full of mail)

spent the last day trying to use rpmbuild and just plain NOT GETTING IT

i think i get it now, the different files have to exist in a directory before you tar them up?