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Old 02-06-2015, 05:33 PM posted to uk.rec.gardening
Bob Hobden Bob Hobden is offline
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"Emery Davis" wrote

Bob Hobden wrote:

Why the manufacturers ever sold non-touch Win 8 machines goodness knows,
it's damaged their reputation, the reputation of Microsoft, and driven
some users elsewhere, I suspect permanently.


The HW manufacturers are not Microsoft. They just sell kit, MS told them
they could sell non-touch versions so they did.

Start of rant:

As for MS, they don't care about you, they've got you (mostly because you
volunteer for it) by the gonads. As witnessed by this thread you'll
continue buying that "the next version will fix whatever." Because of
MS's near monopoly the herd instinct is very strong in the consumer PC
world. In the server and portable world, not so much: Linux is dominant
in servers (and very dominant in HPC), and of course Android is linux
derivative. (Apple's iOS IIRC is based on BSD, so similar but different.)

On the subject of Linux today, it has a number of slick user interfaces
available that are similar to Apple or Windows. It's easy to use. It's
also free. My wife and children are essentially computer illiterate.
They all use it without problems (we have a Mac too, it causes far more
problems, constantly). I don't administrate Linux for them, because
there's nothing to do. All the drag and drop stuff works find. It's
true that there are some obscure HW configurations that are hard for
Linux to deal with, the same is true of Windows and Mac also. I have an
Intel-made server card that Windows can't make sound run on. (BTW I was
working with MS who bought this computer, and their engineers were unable
to figure out the problem!) Our Mac has never figured out how to talk to
one of our printers, a major brand.

My daughter is going off to Uni this year and needs a new laptop. Based
on her own experiences -- believe me she would never dream of taking my
advice! -- she is only considering Linux laptops. In her words: it just
works, I don't have time to faf around with windows.

So if you love Windows and want to stay with it, by all means. If you've
got a killer app that is only supported on windows, by all means. But
lets not pretend that other alternates don't exist.

BTW if you'd like to try other operating systems it's quite easy to do
under Windows as virtual machine. Sounds complicated but isn't.
Curiously I found that applications running on a virtual Linux machine
under Win2008 server were faster than on the server itself...

End of rant.


I put Ubuntu on an old Vista laptop and it works well but I'm not sure I
want to change over everything especially as the printer of the newsletter I
publish insists on MS Word being used.
--
Regards. Bob Hobden.
Posted to this Newsgroup from the W of London, UK