No one should ever have to open a command-line window and type “sudo apt-get update” or other such instructions.
I would have liked to point out that with Windows, you have stuff like My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\Vid_067b&Pid_2501.
But even that is besides the point. The point is that with Linux, you can usually learn how to do this things by using a web search. With Windows, everything is a company secret; if you have a problem, you start paying for support or software tools that may or may not solve your problem; if you want to learn something, you have to pay for ridiculous certifications. Consequently, the public knowledge base is shallow and a web search tends to have a high bullshit quota.
Linux is not more complicated than Windows. All computing - as we do it today - is hellishly complex. The difference is that Linux, and open source software in general, deals with this complexity by openness and enabling users to solve their problems; while proprietary operating systems and software deal with complexity by trying to squeeze an extra dollar out of their customer, and if that does not work, by throwing their hands up and replying with a thinly veiled “not my job”.
Just looked it up. Seems like a very solid distro. Completely FOSS, forked off of Mandriva, can have both Cinnamon and MATE is very attractive, elected organization governance, non-profit and has transparent financials right on their site with a link to the details in the “About Us” section, pretty consistent release schedule, got a nice website full of info and a wiki, looks like a pretty active community. Seems like a classy group of froods there.
Well, sorry to tell you this but I’ve been running Sibelius 1.4 on Linux boxes since 2007; started out with Ubuntu 7.04. After they killed Ubuntu with an unusable desktop, Linux Mint does it all very nicely, thank you. I stayed with Sib 1.4 because it works fine with Wine, and I have thousands of files that may or may not play nicely with Sibelius updates. Happy to say it all works. Now up to version 17.2 with Mint, and delighted with it.
There was definitely an abrupt switchover to GNOME3. That’s why everyone was up in arms. The ability to choose between desktops came later to try and stop the bleeding. I remember distinctly installing a brand new Ubuntu when it came out and thinking “where the hell is my apps menu? Where the hell is my terminal?” then binning it, and falling back to Puppy Linux. At least I don’t have to use a gorram text search to find my apps.
is there a list or an article you would recommend that would enumerate what i’d still be stuck with in win10 if i didn’t use the cloud services you mention? - i’ve been putting off “upgrading” from win7 precisely on account of not being able to track down a clear answer on this - it sounds like you have a good sense of it - thx in advance
you asked for an article about W10 concerns. The ever excellent arstechnica.com is a good a source as any
In this case they turned everything possible off and were still able to monitor traffic between the computer running W10 and microsoft servers. Of course they can only speculate what it is , because its encrypted. Now, I dont suppose MS are doing anything evil, but we have to take that on trust , exactly because the packets cannot be interpreted outside microsoft.
It was this evidence AND all the crapware from ASUS I was not ALLOWED to delete on MY computer, which led me to finally wipe it and install Ubuntu.
That’s what I thought, but I don’t have anything to do with the classes. I’m just the guy in the building that knows something about computers. At any rate, this has definitely shown me that Ubuntu at least is certainly ready for the masses.
I actually disagree a bit. Printers for which CUPS profiles exist have usually been chosen by someone with technical knowledge and enough people wanted to do it to make it worthwhile.
In my experience (which is getting a little dated now) “real” HP printers (i.e. lasers and business inkjets that are not just rebadged - part numbers end in a 0 - work properly under Linux. So do Ricoh business printers. I have a GX e5550dn which is now 5 years old and works perfectly under every version of Linux I’ve used it with. Check with the CUPS compatibility list is my go-to advice.
Failing that, manufacturers who provide Linux drivers and PPDs tend to know what they are doing.
And failing that, there’s Google Cloud Print.
If you buy some crappy inkjet AIO rather than a real printer and a separate scanner, yes you may have problems. But a decent printer will last a long time and justify its up front cost (along with its cheap consumables).
Not enough links for this. I use a Mac now and an planning on building a Windows box just for games. I wish I could use Linux at work, but it’s so MS centric that there is no chance. Plus I’m low on the totem pole so have no say in what will be used.
could you maybe recalibrate your scale from absolute to relative?. I understand they are all dogturd, but I’m having trouble differentiating whether you think one is less or more dogturd.
I maintain a storage server along with a test server at home, but they’re both fairly walled off from the internet. In the past I’ve used OwnCloud on that home server and found it to be quite useful in replicating many of the cloud services I use from other providers. Of the caveats I found, the only one that’s kept me from going back to OwnCloud is the need to properly secure the server, given its exposure to the internet. In the past, I’ve gone to the effort to shut down all extraneous services/ports, but I found I was always worried about the server being hacked. In fact, I went so far as to install an IDS on the box, which only served to scare me even more, given the daily number of hacking attempts.
Anyone here feeling secure enough to run internet-connected servers at home? Anything special you’re doing on those servers/networks to secure them?
I’m sorry but Windows 10 is not a great OS. I had it on my PC twice and it broke inexplicably twice in a way I couldn’t fix it (Start menu issue, etc.). It’s also very inconsistent in its design and actually just downright ugly. I returned to Windows 7. That’s a great OS (as long as you don’t compare it to OS X, of course).
You can opt out, And I do have it turned off. You were always able to opt out of user experience. They do like to collect the telemetry (usage) data because then they know how the users actually use the produce. Hell Ubuntu does this if you opt into the program so don’t give me linux distros don’t do this. All the paranoia comes from the ability to link your cloud account to the local account as a single login so the EULA has wording for both.
Like I have and many many other have said in Cory’s other FUD about Win10 ummm just don’t do that and turn off the data collection (like you had to do previously when they defaulted to join user experience) and magic no phoning home outside of patching and while I am not gaga over the YOU WILL get patches point of view I totally understand why they do it cause I have had to deal with the mess of people not doing it and I shudder to think of what their support deals with.
For my needs I run a Linux box with only SSH exposed to the net, accepting only pubkey auth. Everything running on the server (like my owncloud instance, or the backup server for my computer zoo) is reachable via SSH tunneling. I feel quite secure with this setup.
