I'm going to post this with the proviso, asking in the nicest possible way, can those who don't like windows please restrain themselves to a mild form of glee.
I've been trialling windows 10 for over a month now, and it has been brilliant. However, yesterday it updated itself to "build 10041" and this has broken windows. It crashes every ten minutes, becoming so slow even the mouse takes 30 seconds to move across the screen.
The licence agreeement said this might happen, so there is nothing totally unusual there.
So I uninstalled windows 10, and tried reinstalling 8.0 but it says I have this already on a machine (yes, this one, which is now 10, not 8, oh forget it...) so then I rummaged around in the man-cave, but no windows 7, and I don't really want to go windows 95 or 98, but I did have several copies of windows XP so I upgraded to this.
Well, here I am, back on the forum, saying that windows XP is absolutely brilliant! Why? Well for the simple reason that it boots up in under 20 seconds. Windows 8 and Windows 10 can't even come close to that. Windows 10 insists on installing a virus checker, and so you have a choice - a computer that is so slow it can't be used due to viruses, or a computer so slow it can't be used because the virus checker has taken over 99% of the resources. And as for all the automatic updates..
So here I am, on old-skool XP, with a super fast boot speed, super fast program launches, things like "calculator" loading in under a second instead of it trying to search bing for "calculator", .txt files loading with default wordpad in under a second instead of office taking 20 secs and overall, everything working about 10x faster.
This is complete madness!! Have we made any progress at all in the last 15 years?
And more to the point, has anyone got any suggestions for a decent operating system?
Here's a challenge for the boffins. Forget 5 minute bootups with endless restarts for "upgrades". Forget 2 minute bootups. How about an operating system that is ready to go in under 1 second.
I think I shall write one for the Propeller. Kyedos and the ESP8266 wifi module, here we come...
Have we made any progress at all in the last 15 years?
I believe so. You have heard of Linux right? I believe there is a BSD that is quite usable as a desktop machine as well although I have not looked into that.
And more to the point, has anyone got any suggestions for a decent operating system?
Yes. Debian Linux with the KDE Plasma desktop.
With my Sublime Text editor, SimpleIDE, PropellerIDE, even Arduino IDE (dare I say here), prop-gcc, OpenSpin, LTSpice, Quartus, Firefox, Chrome and a bunch of other stuff it makes little difference if I'm on Linux or a proprietary OS. Except for the "madness" part that is. Oh and there is a vast ocean of other essential software available, it's all worth it just for a decent command line ssh client for example.
Here's a challenge for the boffins. Forget 5 minute bootups with endless restarts for "upgrades". Forget 2 minute bootups. How about an operating system that is ready to go in under 1 second.
Ah, you might have got me there. I am not "boffin" enough for that.
A quick reboot of my slow old AMD64 box shows it takes 40 seconds. 20 seconds of that is spent in the BIOS so there is not a lot I can do there.
I think the Raspberry Pi comes up quicker.
However, I hardly ever shut down anything so I don't worry about it much. An app installation/update never requires a reboot. An OS/driver update might very occasionally.
DrAc: IIRC XP was amazing after a fresh install, but less so after 10 years of Microsoft update. Sounds like Win10 cuts to the chase and gets bogged down much quicker, so yes that's progress.
Even my ancient T60p running an XP updated throughout the whole time beats the newer Windows in terms of most response times for most tasks.
It is off the net, and only gets booted to recover things, or run something.
I liked XP a lot.
Win 7 is good, when the AV is used sensibly, but I had to get an SD a ton of RAM and a nice i7 for that to happen.
Frankly, I second what Heater said. Linux is missing a lot of things a Windows user will find handy. But, those things are also very often not needed.
I have seen it take from a few months to a couple years for people to map most of their skills over to Open Source and once done, they are productive and running lean in terms of cost.
Heck, I have been working on a Pi and it's fine. A Pi is a little under powered for some things, but it is plenty for programming and many other activities.
Currently, I run Linux, Mac OS, and Win 7. I'm putting all my time into Linux again so that I get some portability.
I just ditched my Max OS virtual machine, and either do it native. Or on the Pi and I'm happy.
Win 7 has to be in the mix due to expensive MCAD software I use professionally.
All else is going to be Linux or Mac OS.
Heck, I would be completely at home on a mere Pi, if Sublime were part of the mix.
The reality today is we either go UNIX or Windows. Most UNIX stuff works across most devices. Windows does not.
[XP] things like "calculator" loading in under a second instead of it trying to search bing for "calculator",
That's funny.. does it actually do that? (on 10). I'm asking because when I occasionally have to do something on my GF's Win. system it seems impossible to enter a URL in Internet Explorer.. it always goes searching on bing, whatever box I use to enter the URL. Makes me crazy.. could be that I'm just unable to use (modern) IE. So, are you saying that Win 10 actually searches for apps too.. if so, that must be part of the grand plan!
I'm using an old Acer Aspire One netbook right now with XP. Still useful for many things. Internet Explorer 8 is the "latest" version supported, and is all but useless. That made a Chrome believer out of me, it works just fine.
Make shortcuts (old way), or bind to the task bar (Win 7 way), or bind to the Metro screen (new school way) for those things you want quickly. I've got a win 8.1 box or two to admin right now, and after I did that for the users, I got no complaints.
The Win 8 and 10 kernels are actually quite a bit more efficient than the Win 7 / Vista ones are. Truth is, if you do the work to setup apps and navigate, the newer OSes actually perform quite well. And they do much better under heavy load than XP ever would.
...but you gotta do that work.
And it's the same for Linux, though you get to keep the work products with less hassle more of the time, in my experience.
Windows 10 insists on installing a virus checker, and so you have a choice - a computer that is so slow it can't be used due to viruses, or a computer so slow it can't be used because the virus checker has taken over 99% of the resources. And as for all the automatic updates..
This has practically become the story of my life.
A couple weeks ago I bought a used Dell laptop w/Win7 on eBay. It cost a whole $100. All I put on it was PropTool, Arduino, and Octave. Despite it being an old machine with a small hard drive and a relatively primitive microprocessor, it's a delight to use right now. For some reason it doesn't spend 99% of its time grinding on virus checker software or downloading endless 'updates'.
Maybe the answer is to have more and cheaper laptops with much less on each one.
Or maybe the answer is what a FOAF does - reformatting and reload everything every month. (I've always hated that idea. Who has the time?)
EDIT: Just after posting this I stopped all virus checking on main computer. So far so good. Perhaps for very conservative browsing (Wikipedia, Google, Parallax, etc) and very conservative downloading (Quartus, Arduino, LPCXpresso, Octave, etc) virus checking is overkill. (I also use NoScript.)
Comments
"The presentation is silent on whether OEMS can or should provide support for adding custom certificates."
If OEM's can provide such, this would render much of the FUD here irrelevant.
I'm going to post this with the proviso, asking in the nicest possible way, can those who don't like windows please restrain themselves to a mild form of glee.
I've been trialling windows 10 for over a month now, and it has been brilliant. However, yesterday it updated itself to "build 10041" and this has broken windows. It crashes every ten minutes, becoming so slow even the mouse takes 30 seconds to move across the screen.
The licence agreeement said this might happen, so there is nothing totally unusual there.
So I uninstalled windows 10, and tried reinstalling 8.0 but it says I have this already on a machine (yes, this one, which is now 10, not 8, oh forget it...) so then I rummaged around in the man-cave, but no windows 7, and I don't really want to go windows 95 or 98, but I did have several copies of windows XP so I upgraded to this.
Well, here I am, back on the forum, saying that windows XP is absolutely brilliant! Why? Well for the simple reason that it boots up in under 20 seconds. Windows 8 and Windows 10 can't even come close to that. Windows 10 insists on installing a virus checker, and so you have a choice - a computer that is so slow it can't be used due to viruses, or a computer so slow it can't be used because the virus checker has taken over 99% of the resources. And as for all the automatic updates..
So here I am, on old-skool XP, with a super fast boot speed, super fast program launches, things like "calculator" loading in under a second instead of it trying to search bing for "calculator", .txt files loading with default wordpad in under a second instead of office taking 20 secs and overall, everything working about 10x faster.
This is complete madness!! Have we made any progress at all in the last 15 years?
And more to the point, has anyone got any suggestions for a decent operating system?
Here's a challenge for the boffins. Forget 5 minute bootups with endless restarts for "upgrades". Forget 2 minute bootups. How about an operating system that is ready to go in under 1 second.
I think I shall write one for the Propeller. Kyedos and the ESP8266 wifi module, here we come...
/end rant.
With my Sublime Text editor, SimpleIDE, PropellerIDE, even Arduino IDE (dare I say here), prop-gcc, OpenSpin, LTSpice, Quartus, Firefox, Chrome and a bunch of other stuff it makes little difference if I'm on Linux or a proprietary OS. Except for the "madness" part that is. Oh and there is a vast ocean of other essential software available, it's all worth it just for a decent command line ssh client for example. Ah, you might have got me there. I am not "boffin" enough for that.
A quick reboot of my slow old AMD64 box shows it takes 40 seconds. 20 seconds of that is spent in the BIOS so there is not a lot I can do there.
I think the Raspberry Pi comes up quicker.
However, I hardly ever shut down anything so I don't worry about it much. An app installation/update never requires a reboot. An OS/driver update might very occasionally.
Well, you did ask:)
It is off the net, and only gets booted to recover things, or run something.
I liked XP a lot.
Win 7 is good, when the AV is used sensibly, but I had to get an SD a ton of RAM and a nice i7 for that to happen.
Frankly, I second what Heater said. Linux is missing a lot of things a Windows user will find handy. But, those things are also very often not needed.
I have seen it take from a few months to a couple years for people to map most of their skills over to Open Source and once done, they are productive and running lean in terms of cost.
Heck, I have been working on a Pi and it's fine. A Pi is a little under powered for some things, but it is plenty for programming and many other activities.
Currently, I run Linux, Mac OS, and Win 7. I'm putting all my time into Linux again so that I get some portability.
I just ditched my Max OS virtual machine, and either do it native. Or on the Pi and I'm happy.
Win 7 has to be in the mix due to expensive MCAD software I use professionally.
All else is going to be Linux or Mac OS.
Heck, I would be completely at home on a mere Pi, if Sublime were part of the mix.
The reality today is we either go UNIX or Windows. Most UNIX stuff works across most devices. Windows does not.
Linux has not been as robust in this area. But it still is a minute worst case, and the Pi is the worst case.
With mains powered Linux machines, I just don't boot em. Don't need a display most of the time either.
A shift in how you work is likely to marginalize boot concerns no matter what OS you run.
My RPi 2 with everything that is installed on it (almost 8Gb) I just timed @ 23 seconds from power on to the desktop screen.
Re: App searching.
Make shortcuts (old way), or bind to the task bar (Win 7 way), or bind to the Metro screen (new school way) for those things you want quickly. I've got a win 8.1 box or two to admin right now, and after I did that for the users, I got no complaints.
The Win 8 and 10 kernels are actually quite a bit more efficient than the Win 7 / Vista ones are. Truth is, if you do the work to setup apps and navigate, the newer OSes actually perform quite well. And they do much better under heavy load than XP ever would.
...but you gotta do that work.
And it's the same for Linux, though you get to keep the work products with less hassle more of the time, in my experience.
This has practically become the story of my life.
A couple weeks ago I bought a used Dell laptop w/Win7 on eBay. It cost a whole $100. All I put on it was PropTool, Arduino, and Octave. Despite it being an old machine with a small hard drive and a relatively primitive microprocessor, it's a delight to use right now. For some reason it doesn't spend 99% of its time grinding on virus checker software or downloading endless 'updates'.
Maybe the answer is to have more and cheaper laptops with much less on each one.
Or maybe the answer is what a FOAF does - reformatting and reload everything every month. (I've always hated that idea. Who has the time?)
EDIT: Just after posting this I stopped all virus checking on main computer. So far so good. Perhaps for very conservative browsing (Wikipedia, Google, Parallax, etc) and very conservative downloading (Quartus, Arduino, LPCXpresso, Octave, etc) virus checking is overkill. (I also use NoScript.)