Using XP was almost the same as using W2K, except uglier, but more sci-fi-feeling. IIRC.

But yes, I too remember W2K as the best one.

From the PoV of a kid visiting websites, reading books on the Web, playing forum RPGs and some video games, and downloading MP3s. And talking over ICQ.

From that PoV it was fast, clean and without distractions and I liked the icons, the sounds and the wallpapers.

It’s part of that FOSS I’m calling neutered and sterile.

FOSS is about following laws and making contracts that would be convenient with existing laws.

That’s fine, but it’s just a cultural stage, a projection of the wider idea onto our reality in its local form.

When you reduce that wider idea to FOSS with copyleft, you kill it.

Underground culture is important.

That’s how evolution works, mathematically. What’s more likely to survive and give offspring, survives and gives offspring.

And unless unlimited time and resources become firm reality, that’s how it will work further.

Anyway, that’s so galaxy-scale that I don’t want to think about it.

It doesn’t.

Imagine displaying a window list without GPU acceleration.

Which would mean it should have been rewritten long before. =\

More like preserved them since saner times. I think I’ve read about you being able to choose from 20+ payment systems in Japan, everywhere. And it’s also normal to use cash.

They have also kept a saner version of IP laws for fan fiction. You can legally produce and sell fan fiction there, with some limitations to genre and kind of media.

Because you did in the past and taught them you will do that again.

There’s a rule - don’t deal with assholes. No matter how big and visible their shop is.

You are mistaken. “Distro” is a word for Linux distributions because they have kernels with the same one upstream, and userspace programs assembled of many different projects into different versions of the same dish.

BSDs are different operating systems, they don’t share one upstream, they do share one ancestor (like 30 years ago, so - not very relevant now). Including userspace, except for common software, of course.

And Darwin is another operating system, including its own userspace tools, which are partially derived from BSD code, but its kernel is different, it’s Mach plus some BSD-derived code. It’s not a BSD.

And while mostly Apple’s OSes are Darwin, I think I’ve read some of them are NetBSD. Not sure which.

And it’s a store, not a package manager. It’s in the name.

you can do whatever even it it doesn’t make sense to the majority of users.

If they could do math, they’d know that you should fit every decision for all users you can think about, not the majority. Because the majority is different for every dimension, and if you choose a different strategy, your end result won’t be usable for anyone.

when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists

That might be a bit obsolete as a state of things. Like 15 years obsolete.

Windows 98 felt as if it was very sensible (when it didn’t hang). Windows 2000 Server I still remember as the best one. XP was too bright in visual design, but homely.

Windows 8 and metro were not so bad compared to what’s happening now. They at least had a consistent picture in mind. I liked those things even if I wouldn’t use them (moved firmly to Linux by then).

My own humble opinion is that Windows in all its parts (perhaps except NT and basic layers) is as a project too much legacy. Simply existed too long with backwards support for various versions of involved libraries, with MS carrying the burden of maintaining old versions (while applications developers could package them similarly to how they package patched versions). Many tools to do the same thing.

They should put all that on life support, installable separately, and make a clean set of libraries and tools that forms their new normal desktop installation. Preferably tabula rasa, no compromises.

A file manager, a configuration manager, a set of desktop widgets. It’ll take them much less effort and time to just write a new set of tools.

A normal configuration manager supporting all that it should is the hardest thing. But it’ll also be the killer feature, imagine one UI to configure everything in a Windows installation, it’d be as cool as YaST2 in OpenSUSE or drakconf. IIRC, their system configuration tools for Windows 98 were a bit more user-friendly than NT-inherited for 2000 and XP, and haven’t (the old ones) improved much since then ; they can fix that.

That means dropping backwards compatibility for such a clean installation - well, who wants to run old applications, will run them in, sigh, that installable compatibility environment (might be cut down somehow).

I’m almost certain that’ll be both cheaper and more popular among users than what they are doing.

This is madness. Madness? This is Wiiiiindoooows.

Why the hell …

They could just make another application. With compact mode to have as a prompt in the corner of the screen, similar to DigiCam or Winamp or other such.

They could even eventually deprecate tools allowing to do the same things it provides.

I can even say that conversational user interfaces are not all idiocy - at some point I dreamed of them replacing all the bright buttons and icons we have.

People making this are not idiots.

But putting a conversational user interface everywhere people expect to have one prompt and a response, preferably with clear logic of that response, - it’s just socially hostile behavior.

There really is progress behind this! Or, more precisely, there is sanity, it’s not all hype. Making a useful GUI requires learning something about ergonomics and human psychology and tests, most UI designers don’t have a clue. And a conversational interface, like in old text quests or MUDs and with these AI chatbots, solves the problem. It doesn’t require memorizing a thousand commands and interpreter syntax like a command shell.

Unless you make a UI with downsides of both and upsides of neither. Takes Microsoft to do this.

Or you could have a widget just showing it for a few timezones. FvwmButtons, Exec exec date ... and Schedule Periodic ... in FVWM can do that.

This is written as if a taskbar were a complex piece of software. It has to display a window list, a start button, a few shortcuts and a tray, right?

Nothing is trivial, but they are a company that can buy some nation-states with their citizens as slaves. Surely they can buy that much labor.

Using BSDs is for Unix fetishists, honestly. I’ve been such. It’s very pleasant to use FreeBSD on supported configuration, or OpenBSD on supported configuration and when you don’t need anything impossible (like Wine).

But when you are a normal person who just wants to do normal things and live, Linux is more likely to be the thing, and Fedora will do.

In practice. In theory you might think you’d like GuixSD or NixOS, but in practice you won’t spend the time on setting them up. Or Slackware, but it’s even more bother. Or Arch, but it’s too messy, stuff breaks and it’s normal. You either want experience similar to BSDs or lack of bother similar to BSDs. For the former, there are plenty of distributions with ideology to spend days on setting up. For the latter, just install Fedora.

I’m using Void because that’s what I installed the last time and forgot. But if I were choosing now, I’d probably, yes, just install Fedora.

And it’s a shame they are slowly killing Windows. It could have been a nice desktop OS. There’s some cultural similarity to Amiga that isn’t felt under Unix-likes. And NT is interesting to read about.

I hope we’ll have more pluralism in future. On the humus of today’s tech.

I’m not talking about greater things and over-achieving, just about being right on something when the rest don’t care. I’m not an over-achiever. I’ve always had some interest in “what life really is” and beautiful things and ideas around me, but often lost my way.

Then we’d be free to do the jobs we want to do, not what has to be done or what has a high work to reward ratio

Then the question arises if we are capable of choosing jobs good for us.

Choosing a good book over Lemmy. Choosing life over dreams. Choosing sport over narcotics.

I said theory. Theory may, like Star Trek, assume no scarcity of resources. Still even in that setting no kind of communism aimed for luxury ideologically.

More culturally mature in which ways? Very curious to read anything about it.

I think I’ve already said that.

Say, if someone is a very good programmer, that doesn’t mean they are better than a random drunk on any other subject.

But in FOSS they usually assume otherwise.

OK, it’s not scene being more mature than FOSS, it’s scene being normal and FOSS being less mature than in general.

There’s like an infinity of viewpoints on why people contribute to foss, but I think if people do, it’s because they’re getting value out of it, and as a result, the whole community does. Most foss contributors mind that.

Yes, well, that objective value direction is too a limitation. I’ve been reading one good book recently, still under impression (and probably will be for much longer). There are no good architects without bad architects, no good poetry without bad poetry, and no good contributions without bad contributions. And about usefulness for the whole community - a good system serves each and every use, not the majority use.

Similar to inclusiveness, except it’s ideological and not racial\medical.

In FOSS even something like PulseAudio or SystemD is spread by pressure. No, it really doesn’t matter which advantages they have in someone’s system of values or in all systems of values possible to describe. Only the pressure matters while it shouldn’t be there.