Windows 8

[Lantyssa]

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.

For me, say at work, I just don't know Linux well enough to troubleshoot it as decently when something goes wrong.  It takes a lot more investment of time than dealing with all the quirks of Windows I'm familiar with.  (Kind of a devil-you-know problem.)

I've always been a generalist.  There are people who can run rings around me on any given IT topic, but then I can do just about anything given time.  Sometimes even better because I can pull from multiple areas of knowledge.  Then I met our programmer...  (I have never worked with a straight-up programmer other than some grad students.)  He has the technical skills of my mother.  I would never, ever, ever give mom a linux box simply because when something went wrong it would be a nightmare to fix.  It might work great for two years out, but then she somehow manages to do one thing wrong and it's all over for my sanity.  A company full of those people?  I'll just crawl under my desk now.

So yeah, Linux was great for turning our ancient desktops into thin clients which actually function, but all my users interact with is clicking a button that opens an RDP session.  Anything more would be too much for them.

[Ironwood]

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.

Powershell changes that.

 

[Lantyssa]

My green sense is tingling.

[Venkman]

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.

I'd avoid Office if I had the option at work. I use Google for everything else. iChat by itself is fine for everything except vidchat. At first I thought overheating. I mean, I can share desktop and have 50 concurrent conversations going and all that and it's fine. But 10 minutes of vidchat it goes crazy.

I'd take it to the genius bar if I could get past my IT group. Last time I asked them to fix it, well, yea, we'll just say that resulted in granting me admin privileges.

[Viin]

I prefer using a Mac for work (having access to a *nix shell is amazingly useful).  However, 90% of my job is meetings and the Mac Entourage client absolutely blows for Exchange calendar integration.

[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.

I'd avoid Office if I had the option at work. I use Google for everything else. iChat by itself is fine for everything except vidchat. At first I thought overheating. I mean, I can share desktop and have 50 concurrent conversations going and all that and it's fine. But 10 minutes of vidchat it goes crazy.

I'd take it to the genius bar if I could get past my IT group. Last time I asked them to fix it, well, yea, we'll just say that resulted in granting me admin privileges.

Go to applications.utilities/console. Check the date your last KP occurred and PM me the logs.

[MahrinSkel]

I'd take it to the genius bar if I could get past my IT group. Last time I asked them to fix it, well, yea, we'll just say that resulted in granting me admin privileges.

See, I just take it for granted I'm supposed to have admin on any network I'm using.  No need to bother ops about it, after all what kind of admin would I be if I couldn't take care of that myself?

--Dave

[Venkman]

I had to "ascend" to that level twice. This time should stick though.

Surlyboi: will do. Thanks for offering!

[luckton]

So, they're working on releasing Windows 8.1 sometime soon.  Recently leaked builds of it seem to show that booting straight to the desktop and ignoring the tile interface is in, along with a bunch of other creature comfort and customer bitching/complaints satisfaction issues resolved.

[schild]

The entire "people won't want to make apps" for blah blah shit shit from Microsoft is just dumb. People have been making apps for Windows FOREVER. Since "Day 1" if I could be so repugnant with my cross-genre colloquialisms. They just don't want their desktop to be a shitty iPhone.

[Fabricated]

Again if the best thing that can be said about your OS is that it's as good as the old one when you turn off the new main feature(s), your OS fucking sucks.

[Engels]

The Windows 8 task manager is nifty. Does that count?

[Yegolev]

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.

Doing this stuff at work would definitely be exciting.  I'm just wetting my feet there.  2013 will see a big surge in *EL installs in the spheres I float in.  I'm supposed to be figuring out how to set up and deploy some sort of network image install repository for RHEL but too busy with other things.  I'm also acutely interested if linux can do <enter technical item> that I have enjoyed in AIX forever.  Without, you know, being a huge pain in the ass.

Also at work, I don't associate with end-users.  This makes all the difference.

I'll give Mint a test drive as soon as I can.  I think the KDE flavor.


Did someone say Windows command line?

[Phred]

My point is not that I have trouble with drivers; my point is my mom would.

I don't know about that unless your mom doesn't buy off the shelf hardware. The newer computers have a pretty standardized network and sound chips on board. That's a lot easier to deal with than the old days of a million cheap network cards and sound cards.

[Phred]

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

Of course not, you'd dance for it.

[Venkman]

So, they're working on releasing Windows 8.1 sometime soon.  Recently leaked builds of it seem to show that booting straight to the desktop and ignoring the tile interface is in, along with a bunch of other creature comfort and customer bitching/complaints satisfaction issues resolved.

I KNEW my change.org petition would make a difference!

[Yegolev]

I don't know about that unless your mom doesn't buy off the shelf hardware.

I'm not really sure how my mom will next wreck her computer.  I wish I did.

[Morat20]

I hope so. We just got a contract renewal pushed through (another 5 years) which means our 8 year old XP machines are likely to get replaced and I was not looking forward to working with the current 8 desktop.

Especially when it's only 50/50 I'll have admin rights.

[Yegolev]

You can still get W7.  The IRS is about to starting to upgrade to it.

[Surlyboi]

I've still got a couple of 7 pro licenses.

Just in case.

[rk47]

I can't find it anywhere. I'm so angry.

[Trippy]

Buy an OEM version.

[Chimpy]

I hope so. We just got a contract renewal pushed through (another 5 years) which means our 8 year old XP machines are likely to get replaced and I was not looking forward to working with the current 8 desktop.

Especially when it's only 50/50 I'll have admin rights.

Volume License customers get access to current version and all previous versions of the comparable SKU until extended support ends. Thus, a company with a Win 8 volume license can install all the way back to XP (until next year when all support ends).

The University's Dell rep went over their roadmap stuff with us today and he flat out said that one of the reasons to only buy optiplex/latitude machines was that Dell will continue to make drivers for older OSes until MS stops all support. Hell, you can't even buy a business class laptop from Dell with a touch screen currently. It isn't even an option. That pretty much tells you how much interest business customers have in Win 8.

[Surlyboi]

I can't find it anywhere. I'm so angry.

Newegg's got ya covered.

[Sky]

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.

Heh. Have fun cleaning out the malware. 

I just set up a new set of laptops for our instructors and got a couple emails thanking me for not installing Win 8 on them. And asking me if this is the new Vista. Microsoft has trained users well, when even end users are learning the 'skip a generation' rule.

[Salamok]

Doing this stuff at work would definitely be exciting.  I'm just wetting my feet there.  2013 will see a big surge in *EL installs in the spheres I float in.  I'm supposed to be figuring out how to set up and deploy some sort of network image install repository for RHEL but too busy with other things.  I'm also acutely interested if linux can do <enter technical item> that I have enjoyed in AIX forever.  Without, you know, being a huge pain in the ass.

Also at work, I don't associate with end-users.  This makes all the difference.

I'll give Mint a test drive as soon as I can.  I think the KDE flavor.

I would think KDE to be one of the least common desktop managers for Mint, they seem to push Mate and Cinnamon the most with gnome as a fallback.  A coworker of mine just did the Mint switch and was in love for like 2 days then had an issue where Cinnamon started to ignore the settings for desktop icons (aka he can't remove the icons for computer & trash), he is now less in love and considering a switch to Mint+Mate.

[Yegolev]

I would think KDE to be one of the least common desktop managers for Mint, they seem to push Mate and Cinnamon the most with gnome as a fallback.

Cursory investigation indicated KDE would be light on system resources, which is important for what I'll be installing it on.

[Salamok]

If you are looking for a lightweight desktop manager try XFCE.  

I won't say it is the best solution but I currently have Mint 14 + Cinnamon running on a a 5 year old dell Pentium Dual Core (not to be confused with a core2duo) w/2gb of ram, this box is running a full webstack and a moderately complex ruby on rails application (redmine).  It obviously isn't as fast as the Mint installs on my HTPC or my laptop but it is functional and I do use it for some web browsing.

edit - Oh yeah and it is the unpatched 32bit version of Mint that only utilizes 1 core.  In my eyes this is by far the single biggest PITA with Mint.  There are some simple guides to patching the Kernel to provide multicore support for the 32 bit version but if something goes wrong during the process you will most likely find yourself down the rabbit hole.  I would almost say just go with 64bit Mint even if you are on a system that doesn't really need 64bit.

[Yegolev]

If I can run the 64-bit on a 32-bit machine, sure.

The fact that there are easy web guides to enable multicore support on a "user friendly" distro is a perfect example of why I don't trust linux developers any further than I can throw Toady One.

[Fabricated]

Windows 8 "Blue" (which will cost money btw) is pretty much a gigantic white flag on Metro:

    One of my sources confirmed this is now looking like the plan and added that Microsoft is also considering bringing back the Start button as an option with Windows Blue.

    It's not 100 percent sure that either/both of these options will be baked into the final Blue release, which is expected to be released to manufacturing on or around August 2013. I guess we'll have a better indication once the next milestone build, a.k.a. the Blue Preview, leaks — or when the public version of that preview goes live around June.

    "Until it ships, anything can change," said my source, who requested anonymity.

    Microsoft officials have publicly maintained that users are not confused by the new Windows 8 interface and that they find it "easy to start to learn," especially on touch screens. I, myself, have adapted to the new UI well on my touch-screen Surface RT, but like a number of business users, I find the new UI more of a curse on non-touch-screen machines. As a result, I am still running Windows 7 on two of my three Windows devices.

[ghost]

I didn't like KDE at first, but i'm warming to it.  

[Fabricated]

I haven't used KDE in like a million years. Does it still have like 50 fucking buttons on every window for some reason?

[ghost]

No.  It's much more reasonable now. 

[Yegolev]

Remember when we hated the Start button?  Good times.

[Numtini]

I never hated the start button. I use about 20 programs and keep the top 5 on my task bar and another 10 or so pinned on start, but I just checked and I have 228 different menu items under "programs." I don't know how you keep those organized other than a heirarchical menu.