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I just re-installed my Windoze desktop after getting hit with malware from a bad download. First time in the 2+ years I've been running 'doze as my primary desktop OS.
Happens to the best of us once in a while, I guess.
This one was *bad* ... it messed with the hosts file, proxy settings, installed services, autostart apps, browser extensions, desktop icons, and the good old "you can't run this antivirus program because the requested resource is already in use" driver.
I probably could have gotten through it eventually but after a couple of hours I decided to cut my losses and reinstall.
Microsoft Windows ... still a complete piece of garbage after 32 years. But it still beats being in Apple's world. [ http://tinyurl.com/mcuatqe ]
While Windows 10 is defintely better than previous versions, it's still a suckfest.
My Mac's work. Flawlessly. I can't remember the last time I had a problemn that wasn't related to something stupid I was doing, or trying to get some oddball open source thing running.
I sticks to my philosphy - easy when I want it to be, but I can get under the hood more than enough when I need to.
In the 21st century, the only true unix is Linux. Period. End of discussion.
Thankfully none of this really matters all that much anymore, since almost everything runs on the other side of a network connection now.
One of the things I enjoy most about my macs is, that the ui feels a lot like my old Amiga Workbench.
And the fact that it behaves as much as a linux box when you install iterm.
Most of the time, it stays out of the way. For work and business related stuff, I can live with windows. But I would rather not use it at home, for anything.
In the 21st century, the only true unix is Linux. Period. End of
discussion.
There's also the *BSD family.
Also, I really miss Tripos-style command-line argument handling. Say what you will about its verbosity, or how awesome -dafaq is because it's so much easier to type over and over again, I *really* enjoy having keywords that are at least mnemonic (even if only in the Z-80 or 6502 opcode sort of way) about what they mean. Additionally, --long --options --like --this --are --every --bit --as --annoying as -dafuq or -d -a -f -u -q. If verbosity is such an issue for system administration purposes, then you can always script things (makefiles work great for this kind of repetitive stuff).
To summarize, I find Unix has problems where options are either too short or too long, and in either case, the syntax is incredibly annoying to me, even after all these years. Windows' choice to use / for the option prefix dates back to RT-11 (IIRC), and VMS similarly shares this syntax. It's ugly, but at least their option names tend to be mid-length, and thus both more useful and easier for me to grok.
I think the best syntax I've ever seen is, ironically, found on IBM mainframes.
Command option1(blah) option2(blah) option3 option4(subopt1(...),subopt2 subopt3), etc. You get the idea. It's natural, and it falls out of common programming practice. But, oh well. While MVS and VM/CMS opt for infix applicative syntax which I find quite nice, AmigaOS/Tripos opt for an almost Smalltalk-like approach, which is similarly nice, if less expressive.
BLEH, rambling again. Sorry. :)
And although I would have preferred if AmigaDOS were unix-based -- which is kind of hard when you don't have an MMU -- the thing I loved most about the underlying OS was its multi-root filesystem. No drive letters, no mount paths, you just referenced the volume you wanted, and if it wasn't already mounted, the program paused and you were prompted to resolve the volume. You could do that any way you wanted -- by inserting a floppy disk with that volume name, by creating an alias to some other volume location, etc. And then the program would resume operation. So easy, and modern OS's *still* can't do it.
Also: Jay Miner, unlike Steve Jobs, is not 100HE(tm).
Speaking of which ... since it's clear that Linux has not taken its rightful place as the dominant desktop operating system, and probably will not for the foreseeable future, it is time to assign blame.
I am assigning 100.0% of the blame to Miguel de Icaza. He willfully, deliberately, and maliciously sabotaged the platform, for that exact purpose. There are few who deserve more pain and suffering than he does (just a few -- Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc).
Thankfully, Linux has become the dominant platform everywhere *except* the desktop. This includes mobile, where Android reigns supreme, even though Miguel Hitler de Icaza and Nat Hitler Friedman tried as hard as they could to sabotage it there as well.
Windows is tolerable these days. And the fact that Windows 10 can run most Linux software natively makes it even more tolerable. Microsoft says that the Linux layer is intended for web developers, who they saw using a lot of Apple laptops to develop web software that would be deployed into production on Linux servers. I actually think they're up to something a little bigger, maybe a year or two down the road: it seems that if they can make Windows answer most of the Linux kernel ABI, then there's no reason they couldn't get Docker containers running on Windows servers.
Think about it ... since a Docker image contains all of the necessary userland to make a software stack run, all they really need is a Linux-compatible ABI and a supporting toolset to manage it. I'd be very surprised if this wasn't already in the works.
PC/GEOS had *rabid* followers. AmigaOS had *rabid* followers. Even OS/2.
What were they doing differently?
Highly responsive UIs with unique operating characteristics that actually optimized a user's workflow, for at least a certain class of work if not more broadly. They all had something _unique_ to appeal to users.
Ahh well.
Let me be clear about something, though.
1. KDE was created because CDE was insufficiently free.
2. GNOME was created, ostensibly because Qt was insufficiently free, but actually because Microsoft was paying Miguel to sabotage the platform.
The above is true.