Windows 8

[ghost]

Until they buy a new device and plug it in and it doesn't magically work.

Like what?  Camera?

[kildorn]

Aside from video drivers, Ubuntu's pretty solid on the plug and play front so far. The main issue is lack of vendor buy in, so your brand new toy may not work because nobody's seen it yet.

The main video driver problem we have around the office is that the nvidia-current driver package is and always has been shit because it doesn't list the kernel source as a dependency, so it happily installs while erroring all the while that it can't actually do anything because there's no source package. All it needs is to require the damned headers and source and apt would fucking handle it.

[Ingmar]

Until they buy a new device and plug it in and it doesn't magically work.

Like what?  Camera?

Or an MP3 player, or a printer, or a USB headset, or any number of other things. You plug something into a Windows box and for the most part, it just works. Even that is pushing the limit for a lot of people in complexity. Having to figure out what a driver is, where to get it, and how to install/configure it? Forget it.

And yes, some flavors of Linux/unix are getting better at it. They're not at Mom level though, not close.

[Yegolev]

I'm really only asking that I not have to fuck with it once I get it installed.  Even that is an impossible request.

[naum]

Until they buy a new device and plug it in and it doesn't magically work.

Why should they have to do that?

Why can't they just tap a button on the "device" and have it propagate though "the cloud" or even the WiFi network?

Yes, I understand for more sophisticated users, not a viable solution, but for Mom and Grandma, it's a better UX model (if it works :)).

With all the Windows 8 hate in here, maybe this video will cheer you all up 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KPQNP1Z1s

[Ironwood]

Somewhere, some marketing cunt got paid for that.

 

[ghost]

I'm really only asking that I not have to fuck with it once I get it installed.  Even that is an impossible request.

Hell, you don't get that with Windows.  Mac is pretty good about it, but not perfect.

[Bunk]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KPQNP1Z1s

I still don't get the way they try showing "business apps" for tablets in commercials. Last one I remember showed someone clicking and dragging a bar graph to move the bar up - cool, I can use my tablet to ignore the data and just adjust my charts all willy nilly! This commercial above shows me how I can use a pen to draw big circles or check marks on a graph! That can be my new way of approving projects!

 

[Surlyboi]

Until they buy a new device and plug it in and it doesn't magically work.

Why should they have to do that?

Why can't they just tap a button on the "device" and have it propagate though "the cloud" or even the WiFi network?

Yes, I understand for more sophisticated users, not a viable solution, but for Mom and Grandma, it's a better UX model (if it works :)).

With all the Windows 8 hate in here, maybe this video will cheer you all up 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KPQNP1Z1s

I like the first one with the angry dancing school girls better.

[Yegolev]

I'm really only asking that I not have to fuck with it once I get it installed.  Even that is an impossible request.

Hell, you don't get that with Windows.  Mac is pretty good about it, but not perfect.

I do get it with Windows because people other than myself understand how it works.  I'm not talking about my own redneck-Shodan system(s) here.

[Yegolev]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KPQNP1Z1s

I still don't get the way they try showing "business apps" for tablets in commercials. Last one I remember showed someone clicking and dragging a bar graph to move the bar up - cool, I can use my tablet to ignore the data and just adjust my charts all willy nilly! This commercial above shows me how I can use a pen to draw big circles or check marks on a graph! That can be my new way of approving projects!

 

Obviously those are the most productive business-people in the world.

I'd never even sit for an interview in that place.

[Salamok]

I still think most of you are hemming and hawing over Linux based on some perception of what Linux was 5-10 years ago.  Seriously most shit just works in LMDE 64-bit (even hot detection of PnP devices), the only Linuxy things you will probably encounter during install are the drive partitioning and dealing with the package manager to install apps, just think of the package manager as an app store that you can bypass whenever you want.  

If you do want to take an hour out of your day and have some spare hardware laying about just download 64-bit LMDE w/Cinnamon and follow this partitioning guide, if you do need help just prefix any google queries with LMDE and if you can't find an answer there try prefixing your query with Debian.

I will say I haven't owned an nVidia card in quite some time so all of my experience is either with AMD or integrated graphics (Intel HD3000 was fine).

Shit if you want to play with a webserver I'll even post a guide on how to spin up, secure and configure the full LAMP stack in less than 30 minutes.  Being a checklisty sort of fellow + not being 100 percent confident in my Linux skills I generally create fairly thorough checklists for every build I do.

If your goal is to set up and configure a system, then just not have it break, Linux is far superior to Windows in this regard, very little malware, virtually no virus issues and just choosing not to update the thing make it superior to windows.  The problems are almost always encountered when you need to modify your machine (aka installing/updating software and major hardware).

[Merusk]

I still think most of you are hemming and hawing over Linux based on some perception of what Linux was 5-10 years ago.  Seriously most shit just works in LMDE 64-bit (even hot detection of PnP devices), the only Linuxy things you will probably encounter during install are the drive partitioning and dealing with the package manager to install apps, just think of the package manager as an app store that you can bypass whenever you want. 

I swear it's like some of you have never had to help a person with a computer problem, EVER.

[Salamok]

I'm not trying to help anyone, I am just giving direction to people who should be able to help themselves.

[Surlyboi]

And that's the point he was making. People here generally tend to know their asses from a hole in the ground when it comes to that kind of shit. Joe Sixpack and people like my mother haven't got a fucking clue about 99% of the shit you just posted.

[Ingmar]

I'm not trying to help anyone, I am just giving direction to people who should be able to help themselves.

Although I don't do much desktop support anymore, I still do some, and the point is most people *cannot* help themselves. Even some of my engineers would struggle with the stuff that Merusk highlighted in red, let alone legal, finance, HR, or Surly's mom next time I'm over at her place.

At work, they have me or people on my team, so if we wanted to spend the money on support time, yeah, we could eventually push people onto Linux. At home most of them have nobody to explain or do that shit for them. Thus, tablets, or Mac/Windows for the slightly more advanced.

[Salamok]

As has been pointed out by others above the venn diagram for the people you all are talking about and anyone who would install any OS (Windows, Linux or otherwise) looks like a pair of spectacles.  The people you all are talking about would probably be less likely to fuck up Mint machine than a Windows install, because when they inevitably open that virus ridden PDF that was emailed to them it wouldn't do dick to a Linux system.  They also wouldn't junk it up with malware because they probably would never figure out how to install software on the thing.

Linux has already been successfully dumbed down and ported to the consumer market, I know a few people who have the technical competence of a baked potato and are somehow still enjoying their Boxee Box.  They didn't need half the IT department to come over and hook it up for them and certainly don't seem to need any ongoing support from a technical person to enjoy the product.

edit - In fact I have encountered many technically incompetent people who seem to be perfectly fine with a scenario of buying a new machine every year because they screw up their old one and can't be bothered figuring out how to or tracking down someone to help them keep it maintained.  Without exception all of these users are windows users.

[Surlyboi]

I wouldn't let my mom use 'doze either.

And Merusk, she still owes you 50 bucks. You manwhore, you.

[Yegolev]

I mostly agree with Salamok except for the degree of "dumbing".  Two things:

1. I can do these things but I don't want to. I don't want to do any of it.  For shit's sake I support enormous enterprise computing systems, from low-level OS shit to high-level enterprise design shit.  Point is that I don't want to do this at home.  Although I can.  For my own use, I can just slap any enterprise linux distro into a VM and do whatever I might need linux for and I'd come out ahead of using a non-enterprise OS since it would effectively be hands-on job training.  In both directions, I might add.  So, I'm personally not in the market for Mint or Ubuntu at this time since learning a new OS needs to be worth my god-damned time.

2. Other people can't do these things.  Linux concepts are alien to people who have only used DOS computers.  I mean, fucking alien and I don't care how much Wintel they know.  I don't want to either teach them any amount (and they don't want to learn another OS; I don't blame them) nor do anything for them.  Because computers do break.

My perspective on it is: if all of my users are trained in one OS that gets the job done, why would I go through the effort of replacing a working tool and retraining everyone?  Zero ROI, in my mind.  Now, if the UI works at about 95% compatibility, I'm cool with that.

All that said, as long as some shitty Ubuntu application bar doesn't interfere, Firefox is Firefox.  As soon as someone starts doing "real" work and I have to explain octal file permissions or open file handles:

[kildorn]

I still think most of you are hemming and hawing over Linux based on some perception of what Linux was 5-10 years ago.  Seriously most shit just works in LMDE 64-bit (even hot detection of PnP devices), the only Linuxy things you will probably encounter during install are the drive partitioning and dealing with the package manager to install apps, just think of the package manager as an app store that you can bypass whenever you want. 

I swear it's like some of you have never had to help a person with a computer problem, EVER.

Honestly, we have corp guidance that all of Ops needs to run linux desktops. The admins have done okay (some shit still doesn't work out of the box, like any laptop with Optimus card setups), but the app people struggle pretty hard even with how easy most of it's become comparatively. X11 pretty much doesn't have any config to be done by the end user anymore (no more setting your available video modes, etc), and the Ubuntu software center is just as easy to use as any other software installer (search for your shit, it defaults to not displaying support packages only advanced users would install by hand like libwhatnot)

It's still not mom and pop desktop worthy by a few years at least. But it's come really far in a short amount of time with the newer distros actually putting effort into that front (Ubuntu and Mint mostly, I haven't seen Redhat put more than a token effort into the desktop in forever), and it's reflected in all the google searches for how to fix things now giving examples in apt-get instead of yum.

What I have seen is that Mac users translate to Ubuntu and Mint easier than pure windows users. And Linux admins translate to Windows terribly.

[Merusk]

I wouldn't let my mom use 'doze either.

And Merusk, she still owes you 50 bucks. You manwhore, you.

That was Ingmar what made the claim.

I wondered if anyone else caught it.  It was subtle. So subtle.

[Salamok]

The only thing I think Yegolev is missing is that Mint is actually a joy to use, unlike SLES or RHEL. If you game not so much but as a personal machine or for an old laptop reading mail, surfing the web, watching DVD's, and personal development projects it is just so flipping fast and smooth.  Add in some of the eye candy like conky/cairo dock or the level of integration with the internet and you have some serious tech nerdvana going on here.  

Furthermore I totally get leaving work at work but most of us got into this game for a reason and that reason is we have an aptitude for and curiosity about technology and most of the cool non-gaming related shit isn't happening on the Windows front at the moment.  Even just looking in your niche of the enterprise IT world and see what people are doing with AWS and the devops (yeah yeah the latest in buzzword bingo) behind it using products like puppet, chef and vagrant it is just flipping mind blowing.

[Surlyboi]

I wouldn't let my mom use 'doze either.

And Merusk, she still owes you 50 bucks. You manwhore, you.

That was Ingmar what made the claim.

I wondered if anyone else caught it.  It was subtle. So subtle.

Gah. I was distracted by someone texting me about getting phished. Your friends find out you work for a tech company and you're their go-to guy for everything.

And my stance is pretty much the same as Yegolev's. I do enough debugging code and troubleshooting both hardware and software at work, I don't want to have to do that shit at home if I don't have to and I don't want to have to be any more of a tech support bitch for my family than I need to be.

[Hammond]

And my stance is pretty much the same as Yegolev's. I do enough debugging code and troubleshooting both hardware and software at work, I don't want to have to do that shit at home if I don't have to and I don't want to have to be any more of a tech support bitch for my family than I need to be.

While I do not debug code at work I feel exactly the same. And thankfully my family is pretty tech savvy so its more people I barely know will ask me questions....

[Trippy]

And Linux admins translate to Windows terribly.

That's cause it's almost always easier/more efficient/better using the command line to admin Linux while on Windows it's the reverse.

[kildorn]

And Linux admins translate to Windows terribly.

That's cause it's almost always easier/more efficient/better using the command line to admin Linux while on Windows it's the reverse.

Pretty much. I always try to drop to command line, and then grep log files. It's sort of comical to watch our entire Ops team groan when we need to do something on the vcenter server. Fucking thing needs a linux port, stat.

[Engels]

Ironically, powershell was designed purposefully to get rid of the need to use a gui. Ironic because you have to actively tell the system you want powershell scripts to run before you can run them.

Still, it does always bother me to have my boss, a unix/solaris/linux dude, tell me to simply grab a hard drive from an XP machine from 2003 and throw it into a new box and have Windows automagically work. I start talking to him about chipset drivers, sysprep and licensing and his eyes glaze over. He really neither cares nor knows how the other half lives.

[Surlyboi]

I popped a drive out of the MBP I had previous to the my last one before the Retina. I had bootcamped it and had a Lion partition and a 7 partition. Popped it into the new machine and the Lion Partition picked up like nothing had changed. Going from a core 2 duo with 4 gigs of RAM to a quad i7 with 8 gigs? No big deal. The 7 partition? Shit the bed entirely. Had to re-install and update a ton of drivers.

[Engels]

A platform that doesn't allow its OS to be installed on anything but its own precious bodily fluids bemoaning the fact that its competition has some trouble running on a disk to disk transfer to entirely different hardware.
 

[Chimpy]

I popped a drive out of the MBP I had previous to the my last one before the Retina. I had bootcamped it and had a Lion partition and a 7 partition. Popped it into the new machine and the Lion Partition picked up like nothing had changed. Going from a core 2 duo with 4 gigs of RAM to a quad i7 with 8 gigs? No big deal. The 7 partition? Shit the bed entirely. Had to re-install and update a ton of drivers.

Had you sysprepped the Win7 partition it probably would have worked :D

[bhodi]

I didn't get my mom a mac because even though the usability is there, she only uses it for 6 things - web browsing, email, work VPN, turbotax, word, excel - and a mac can only do 2 of them.

[JWIV]

Honestly at this point, my default solution to people is going to be Get a Chromebook.   

[Engels]

Er, in Mac's defense, it does word, excel and vpn just fine.

[Venkman]

No, it does not. This becomes patently obvious when you're using both Windows MS Office and Mac MS Office at the same time (or in my case, on the same machine). Mac Office is sluggish and prone to crashing, though at least it only takes itself down, unlike video chatting in iChat which consistently prompts the multi-lingual you're-fucked message at roughly 10 minutes.

Sure it technically works. But only insofar as Defiance technically on Xbox 360.

MS Office even in VM Ware is a far superior experience.

I didn't get my mom a mac because even though the usability is there, she only uses it for 6 things - web browsing, email, work VPN, turbotax, word, excel - and a mac can only do 2 of them.

Unless her work has some ancient/obscure VPN rules, a Mac would be fine. But it will require the premium (above the premium that is Mac cost) to VMware.

However, Macs are no more intuitive out of the box than a PC. It's still all icons and double click vs single click vs right click vs wtf to the uninitiated. To people with limited needs and experience, the amount of confusion caused by computers is the same whether Mac or PC. The only difference is colors.

So anyway, you made the right decision

[Surlyboi]

I run a VPN on my mac daily. Office I avoid like the plague. And if iChat is causing your machine to kernel panic, there's something else going on. I suggest taking it to your local genius bar and letting them take a look at the logs.