Okay point. Home file server is something I would put up with managing.
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Seconded. Maybe with a still from āThe Professionalā next to a still from āBlack Swanā next to a still of a bowl of grits with no pepper or butter just to keep things a little uncomfortable.
I object to the word stupid in this context.
I had my first experience of a computer in 1965. I have worked with real time processing, DSP, secure messaging, data mining and even ERP. I freely confess that Windows is now so complex, bloated and does so many things in the background that, in a sense, I am too stupid to use Windows. I stay out of trouble defensively by using Windows to do as little as possible with only well known and well tried applications.
For probably 90%+ of users it is not being too stupid to use Windows, it is Windows getting in the way. I use the analogy of the manual gearshift. The manual gearshift is not part of the business of getting from A to B. It is an engineering kludge to get around the IC engine having the wrong characteristics for a road vehicle (on the other hand the Diesel engine has the right characteristics for a boat or a ship, which is why most of them have simple forward-reverse transmissions.)
The US has voted with its feet for auto boxes, but elsewhere an awful lot of people pride themselves on their ability to use manual boxes. They do not make you a better driver (i.e. safer and able to get from A to B efficiently). People think they are clever because they can do something which should have been engineered out long ago. That is like people who know how to fiddle with Windows. If James Joyce had had Windows and knew how to play with the Registry, Ulysses would not have been a better book.
Modern Linux distros (and Chrome OS and Android are both just that) are easier to use than Windows if you want to get a job done. Because most users are brainwashed by Windows and Office, there is a conversion job to do, but once it is done they tend to be less trouble than Windows users, in my experience.
My kid who is a lawyer has IT support from a spouse who is a mathematician. One of them relies on someone else to look after Windows, the other one doesnāt get to address the Supreme Court. It is not stupidity but relevance.
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And also this. Life is complicated and very specialized. If I take time out of my life to know windows/linux/android/osx/etc forwards backwards and sideways that means I lose out on time to know things that help pay the mortgage and grocery bill. I will be upfront and say supporting a MSFT world at work pays my bills so I know a bit more about the ins and outs of it in particular. I also support linux as well and have been learning more about some of the fun ways it handles file sharing and such. This is also why I want to avoid it at homeā¦ gah been dealing with it and the dumb users all day already.
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Downgrade his user privileges, and make yourself admin with full admin (w full privileges)? Itās pretty hard to get all those nag box prompts to turn off inside the newer Window OSes.
We did that for my mom a few years ago. Idiot-proofed. Itās mostly worked out. Sheās 84 and still using her MacMini, more or less for YouTube and email and the odd PDF or legal doc she insists on printing out.
OT: Please, someone, anyone, let me know if youāve been able to break your elderly family membersā habits re: printing out emailā¦ those damn ink cartridges aināt cheap, and every time mom thinks her printer is ābrokenā she simply goes to BigBox OfficeStore and buys another friggen printer. I am now tempted to relieve her of her credit cards and checkbook, because if I have to go through one more convoluted returns process, Iāll need a weekās vacation in Hawaii by myself.
Thank Jah she doesnāt shop onlineā¦
ETA: typo to fix āthinksā (not āthingsā which is not a verb) (embarrassed English major is embarrassed, should get AFK and make the dang coffee already)
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Hi Tobin
The reports Ive read online suggest Win10 still communicates something (unknown) with MS servers even with evnrything turned off. Maybe this link is a bit old. Has this situation changed?
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Buy her a decent printer with cheap ink and forget about retraining. Donāt buy one of those horrible inkjets where the cartridges move backwards and forwards because they are beyond the ability of many elderly people to replace. Buy a Ricoh gel printer or an HP business inket where the cartridges plug in and out behind a simple little door in the front and the display says āReplace black cartridgeā or similar. It saves money and patience in the long run.
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I am guessing here that the only sure way to well and truly opt out is to either yank out the network cable from the computer, or power cord on the wifi router. And I havenāt even gotten a chance to watch Citizen Four yet.
Agree that security updates and OS patches are totally necessary. I canāt say Iām enthused trusting Microsoft or really any similarly supermassive corporation to do a good job of it, where āgoodā is a given value of nonmalicious, nonstupid, nonbloaty āgood.ā
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Iām saying the people in the Adverts are too stupid for windows āprinting is soooo hardā not mac users in general.
I have used a macbooks for years now and apart for a few niggles and having to delve into the terminal to solve a few esoteric problems, and a couple of hardware issues (badly positioned snapped wifi cables)
This is agreat series of comments. Can I have suggestions for a good GUI?
RGW
I agree with you about Win7 being generally excellent. I still have it on a self-build machine , and I wont be upgrading. I just still need to disable all the effing irritating popups nagging me to download 10.
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Ehā¦ that cheap ink angleā¦ I hear youā¦
Off to go scrutinize Ricoh gel printers. I had a Ricoh many decades agoā¦ it wasnāt a bad printer, come to think of it. Thanks!
I declared war on all things HP in 1990 and I have to say my lifeās been better in every way for it. Am on the verge of doing same with a Lexmark Pro915 (grrrr) and that was a ācheap inkā option from 2010: NIC blown, wifi connection kaput, and now it only prints if from USB sticks jammed into the front socket. Not enough time and way off-topic once I start with the āslagging of the printersā rant. Ahem.
At our place, our workhorse is the Brother HL-2140. Zero smart chips in the toner carts and we just keep topping off that toner powder. That thingās built rock solid. An engineering office I run used a Brother MFC that lasted 11 years with one drum change. What a tough beast. Those laser toner carts were notably uncheap though.
Purchasing more patience from Amazon or New Egg is not an option. Iād be first in line if it were. Thanks again for those tips!
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Btw the love for this is legionā¦
Maybe Microsoft does a subsidized hardware thing if they run classes using their software? So in both cases theyād be using the cheapest OS for the job.
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I donāt necessarily disagree with you, but I think youāre overstating things a wee bit.
I switched to āLinux Onlyā in '94 (Yggdrasil, if anyone remembers that distribution), and aside from a job where I sat in front of XP for a few years and my current job (MacOS), Iāve pretty much been linux-only. And I do audio (for example, released an album that was entirely produced with linux tools).
But it doesnāt work out of the box. These days I use Ubuntu, so the first thing I had to do was port, compile, and install a kernel with real-time support (Ubuntu doesnāt supply one). Now, āStep 1 ā install your own custom kernelā is beyond most users, but itās not impossible.
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Thereās just a windows update or two that you need to remove. Itās just a google away. Simple and fast to get rid of the windows 10 update nagging - so far. I just donāt know how long that will stay true, and it worries me. Win 7 does what I want it to, better than any windows I have used before. Dreading the time when I have to either spend serious time learning some variety of Linux, or use windows 10. I live a lot of my life on the computer. I donāt want anyone snooping if I can avoid it, and after this windows 10 debacle, I donāt trust MS not to, settings or no settings.
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CMYK
I know the geek mantra is that āPrint is Dead.ā However, thereās a ton of print work going on every day, and GIMP not doing CMYK simply disqualifies it for anything other than web work.
Yeah, there are plugins that bring a kludgy sort of CMYK to GIMP, but itās not really a solution for anyone doing CMYK work professionally.
There is that but then there is no access to all that is fun about the internet. And seriously it comes down to trust. Even with securing your side completely, using tor, etc. If the guy/sever/whatever on the other end has been compromised , well you are compromised. Do you trust Apple/MSFT/Google/Ubuntu/etc or not? Do you trust them with your email, your cloud docs, etc. Do you trust your host service? Do you trust the data center guys if you have a physical server in a rack? Do you trust your house to not be broken into while away at work? Even if you are running Linux of any flavor do you personally go through all the code to find out where things are listening? (I donāt have free time to read the specifics of hotfixes/patches much less audit the code)
Just how paranoid do you want to live your life?
Maybe I am just resigned to a certain amount of snooping as thanks to a grandparent who did intel work for the DOD I already have a file and I already know what can be easily be done without all the fancy computing technology of today and that is a whole lot more than most people would think. Honestly if you donāt want it tracked donāt do it online, donāt special order it, and use cash, and as Fats Waller says at the end of a song, ādonāt use your right name, no no noā.
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Audio under Linux is crap.
Video is meh, but only if you use nvidia hardware, otherwise is crap.
General usability is somewhat good.
Privacy is top notch.
Globally I would rate Linux a solid 5/7
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