* Posts by Mage

9265 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

How a single buck bought bragging rights in the battle to port Windows 95 to NT

Mage Silver badge

NT 3.51

I had a Explorer 95 style "preview shell" on NT 3.51. The eventual NT 4.0 was less stable and easily BSOD by a dodgy printer or graphics driver because of the stupid decision to put GDI into the Kernel for about 10% performance increase on video in an era when performance was doubling for video in less than a year. Stupid. So till late 1990s we continued to use NT 3.51 for servers.

Even the 3.5 to 3.51 was due to win95 adding Win32 calls so Office 95 wouldn't work on Win3.11 / WFWG3.11 with Win32s installed, because Office 95 wouldn't work on NT 3.5.

It took IT and MS years to recover from Win9x which should never have been sold to businesses. It was best for games.

Good news: HMRC offers a Linux version of Basic PAYE Tools. Bad news: It broke

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: Perl

I wrote a Perl program once and concluded it was a wrapper with I/O for regex, which can end up being write only. I still use regex when editing but run find before doing a replace...

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: Welsh a Latin-based language/locale

Font/Alphabet but not language.

Even English has a lot not Latin, though many of the Norman imports have Latin roots.

There are some Latin loan words in Celtic languages that predate Christianity on these Islands and may in some cases date more than 2,000 years. Cornwall and Cork cooperated in trading tin and copper for Roman and Greek bronze production. Hence the Latin for gold and silver in Celtic Languages.

Time to examine the anatomy of the British Library ransomware nightmare

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Re: Force of Islam or Romans?

Or "staff" selling off scrolls as firelighters for a few hundred years.

Alexandria was under resourced for centuries. More stuff, relatively speaking, has survived from Sumer and Akkad because when you burnt down the town or city that preserved the tablets. Thousands sit unread in Paris, London and Chicago.

A Chinese Emperor had a nationwide book/scroll burning campaign.

Carnegie funded libraries world wide but now funding is cut in many countries. The British Library situation is symptom of a wider and deeper malaise.

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: on a COPY of the production database

Ideally on a separate computer that's accessed directly with its own keyboard and mouse (No KVM switch etc) and the network unplugged, because you never know :(

Thinks, am I accessing the test server in the basement of the office in another country, or the live co-located server in the data centre? I know, i'll copy the data to a VM on my own laptop just to be sure to be sure.

3 million doors open to uninvited guests in keycard exploit

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: absolutely totally safe safe

That's sarcasm?

The safe has at least two codes. The one you put and the one the hotel puts, assuming it's not still the default.

“It does have an override,” Jimmy read out the default numbers from the webpage and Marion tried it.

“At least they have changed the default,” said Marion. “That doesn’t work.”

They decide not to put the laptop in the room safe while out.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re: I'd left my laptop in my room.

At least you aren't a Syrian general with air defence secrets.

I'd only leave my laptop alone in my house or those of close trusted family members.

All bets are off if someone has physical access. Which is worse: stolen or secretly rooted?

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

Mifare

Hasn't there been a long history of vulnerabilities on these, including weak cryptography and thus fare dodging?

Also hotel related: you may not want to trust the room safe.

Fujitsu to shutter operations in Republic of Ireland

Mage Silver badge

Re: Not us! That other group did it!

You are thinking of Capita, who have people in NI 'cos they can pay much less there than in England.

Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: What about Coq au vin?

Statistically I expect half the chicks to grow up into cockerels. So historically most capons and chickens were juvenile cocks. You only need one to increase the flock. See also the reason for veal, calf, lamb. The eggs and milk are desirable. Loads of cocks, rams and bulls are undesirable.

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

Re: I'm French. You say the recipe is about garlic chicken

I think your nationality is irrelevant in this case.

The recipe is a lie.

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

this is a new problem

No, it's not. People been vandalising phone boxes, cable TV coax (since before it was used for broadband), stealing cables, shooting telegraph pole insulators etc at least sinc 1960s. I'm not old enough to remember earlier.

Also anyone could easily tap analogue phone or fax from the local cabinet. I explained to the cops 30 years ago that their fax wasn't secure.

Crypto wallet providers urged to rethink security as criminals drain them of millions

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Elephant in the room

Is so-called Crypto-coins or Cryptocurrency.

An environmentally damaging technology, and like Blockchain, a solution looking for a problem.

Just protect consumers by making the scam illegal. Why does Revolut offer it?

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

Mage Silver badge
Linux

Pi OS

Installs quickly

fast boots

Negative

Low compatibility (Wayland?)

Near zero theming and desktop customisation. Very like Windows 10 and the only advantage of Win 10 is running x86-64 Window programs.

Slow GUI

Slow Applications

So I installed the Ubuntu Mate ARM64 on a second SD card.

Not a fan of Ubuntu, though used it for years. Much longer to install and slower to boot. I was able to install debi and symantic package manager from the Software Boutique and then install ARM versions of Linux Mint + Mate applications I use and also ditch some of the Ubuntu specivfic stuff.

Fully customisable desktop

GUI faster

Applications faster

More compatible

Uses X rather than Wayland.

All on 2G RAM Raspberry Pi 4B I'd just bought and a Lexar 32 G micro SD card. Configuration of updates, kernels, installing packages etc all a bit iffy compared to Mint on Ubuntu PI, but better than Win10!

Wayland isn't ready and why try to imitate one MS worst GUIs (in terms of flexibility and usability) since Windows 2.x? Vista and XP could easily be made like Win2K / Win98. Win 7 isn't to bad.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: there were the foxes, and horses, and camels, and...

Cane toad.

Hedgehogs in New Zealand from England!

Japanese Knotwood

Killarney: The great rhododendron disaster, also lilies. Ireland has 66 regulated Invasive Alien Species of special concern.

There is even an Irish island inhabited by wallabies.

North American Grey Squirrels in Britain.

Zebra mussels in loads of places.

I'm suspicious of slugs, snails, squid, octopus and horseshoe crabs. A passing Alien ship?

Nvidia rival Cerebras says it's revived Moore's Law with third-gen waferscale chips

Mage Silver badge

Ivor Catt

Ivor Catt developed and patented some ideas on Wafer Scale Integration (WSI) in 1972, and published his work in Wireless World in 1981, after his articles on the topic were rejected by academic journals.

I remember those articles. Also later ones about autorouting to avoid defects.

He's still alive.

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

Mage Silver badge

Re: It was very nearly ready

What this product shows is that strategy could have started some 3-5Y earlier, with Win3 as the low-end OS and OS/2 2 as the high-end OS.

But it would have made no difference to Apple, phones, Mp3 players, tablets etc, and eventually IBM & MS would have fallen out and there would have been NT, but delayed.

A better What if, is what if IBM had used DRDOS (CP/M 86), and eventually multidos and GEM?

Or if MS had never done Win9x, but a game console and NT 4.0 in 1995. Actaually there was MSX in 1983, but wasn't quite right. Win9x should never ever have been sold for business and it's why we ended up with NT security model getting broken, stupid programs that needed you to be admin etc.

I did use DRMultidos and serially connected PCs in early 1990s for computer lessons.

Mage Silver badge

Re: 8088 & 8086

Not proper 16 bit. Only 64 k segments. The 80186 was maybe Intel's first real 16 bit in that family? However the 80286 was a real 16 bit CPU (usable without 64 K segments) The 8088 and 8086 really only differed in I/O bus. There were real 16 bit cpus. IBM even had one (i.e. flat addressing without 64K boundaries). The 8088 & 8086 were closer to 8080 & 8085 than to a 80286.

Mage Silver badge
Pint

Re You forgot

Yes, SCO only bought the code MS added and an AT&T licence, which makes the SCO 2.0 litigation even crazier.

And BSD, GNU, Linux and actually everything after AT&T/Bell Labs UNIX was because AT&T pissed off all the Uni folk that did most of the work and said, "sorry folks, we entirely own it".

That's the big what if, not OS/2, but what if AT&T had admitted that too many people not paid by them had worked on it and so it should be "commons", belong to the Human Race, everyone, free. AT&T practically "stole" it.

MS did to a fair bit to Xenix* to make it run on the rubbish 8086. I'd only seen it on a 386, though I had a giant Wang box that was using a 286 and enormous cards and not the stupid ISA bus, designed for "proper" 16 bit Xenix. They had an extra board that was needed to run DOS and Win 2.x and maybe Win 3.0 in standard mode.

Have a virtual beer.

(* Xenix sale Karma? MS later paid out nearly $11 Billion to have a licence for Nokia brand for a year, and get ZERO IP. Then have the cost of shuttering the unwanted phone factories and distribution etc. Whose Trojan was Elop? TCL, who made all the Alcatel phones still has the Alcatel badge and has the Nokia one. Nokia is still there for Infrastructure, the ex-paper and welly boot maker that made TVs and Set Boxes. TCL was #2 in TVs not long ago, but other people's badges on them!).

Mage Silver badge
Windows

Re: Very Different

Sorry, win 3.x (the win 2.x was less use than DR GEM) and my 1987-1989 project had a pen.

Pens with digitisers are "in" again. Apple Pencil, Wacom's pen on Android, reMarkable & Kindle Scribe (not PC graphics tablets, though had been on a 1990s tablet), NTrig/MPP on MS Surface and some Kobos. The USI2.0 Pen on Android tablets.

Google's off-line Gpad handwriting conversion does work with a finger, but a pen is better.

All these things were envisaged and worked on before IBM even did one 8088 PC with Microsoft's "wide boy" bought in DOS. MS had made a success with BASIC ported from Dartmouth College. IBM only picked MS because they were not actually serious about the PC, almost built out of a catalogue and the 8088 barely more than an 8080, which is why it was so easy to port CP/M, Wordstar, Dbase, Supercalc etc. 64K segments and similar instruction set. The 8088 could even use the 8 bit 8085 bus/peripherals. IBM didn't use the more expensive 16 bit bus 8086.

So OS/2 was a belated IBM attempt to cash in on the unexpected PC success. Some good ideas, but too late. The 32 bit Intel 80386 launched in 1987 and crippled by legacy 8086 mode.

Intel had good manufacturing. But the x64 being from AMD, selling off their ARM portfolio (most from DEC), getting suckered into HP's Itanium all suggest Intel is living on past reputation. What happened to Optane?

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Very Different

There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone, no fondleslabs. Twenty-first century computers would be unimaginably different.

Interesting article, but this paragraph is hyperbolic nonsense.

Also Win95 was two years AFTER NT and should never have existed. The Explorer shell was separate and was on preview on NT 3.5x

It's got nothing to do with the Mac. Nothing to do with iPod, iPhone or Tablets and a Win 3.1 Tablet existed. (iOS, Linux, Android, Windows 10).

Lisa, precusor to Mac, was released on 19th January 1983. Development started earlier. This MS OS/2 SDK was 1990. I think there was an MS OS/2 from 1989.

CPUs with 32 bits and flat addressing meant OS for them would be developed. Intel was behind.

Most of the WIMP GUIs were inspired by 1970s Xerox.

Apple iPod succeeded because of iTunes 99c track deal. They were late into PMPs/MP3.

The iPhone a success due to the data contracts. It was 9 years after smart phones came out and 2 after Nokia politics killed their better than S60 GUI on Symbian.

MS was shipping Xenix in 1982. All internal Microsoft email transport was done on Xenix-based 68000 systems until 1995–1996, when the company moved to its own Exchange Server product.

MS doing NT was inevitable. The IBM - MS "partnership" on DOS and then OS/2 was never going to last.

Nokia switched from 486 to ARM for Communicator 9210 in 2001. The ARM CPU was first used in desktop Archimedes and also funded by Apple (and usein Newton, started in 1987 and released in 1992). Acorn's ARM made it possible to have decent battery life on PMPs, Smart phones and Tablets.

Acorn's Archimedes had RiscOS and Unix by 1988, running on ARM

Tablets:

Alan Kay's Dynabook "A personal computer for children of all ages (1972)"

PDAs were an early form of tablet and I was designing one in 1987-1989, with aspects inspired by Dynabook, Project Xanadu, Apple Hypercard, the digital cordless system that later became DECT, and DOS based FutureNet CAD/CAE (which used hyperlinks).

Hitachi patented a touchscreen tablet in 1979.

Atari 1992

EU / Acorn Newspad 1994-1997.

1992, IBM shipped the ThinkPad 700T running GO Corporation's PenPoint OS.

1992 MS also had a Pen version of Windows.

OS/2 was interesting. I did some support on MS OS/2 with LanManager server maybe 1992 and migrated IBM OS/2 Textmode applications for a Finance Dept to NT4.0 in 1998. I played with OS/2 Warp and the kids had Win9x for games consoles. We were installing NT 3.5 servers, then NT 3.51 after Win95 came out, migrations from Xenix or Netware. Installing WFWG 3.11 as workstations with Win32s till NT4.0 came out.

1993 AT&T's EO Personal Communicator on the Hobbit CPU

1993 launch of Apple Newton on ARM

Intel was behind on 32 bits and the 8088/8086 wasn't even a real 16 bit. That held PC OSes back for years. The 80286 was first real 16 bit PC, and 386 the 32 bit. But DOS, win3.x and Win9x started them in 8086 mode. Win95 executed older code natively, but NT, already 2 years old, used a VM for 8086 code (pseudo 16bits because segments). It ran only 32 bit. Win9x killed the Pentium Pro because it had no simple switch back to native 8086 mode.

IBM was caught out with PCs being successful, but the PS/2 and OS/2 were typical IBM dead ends. They were selling AS/400 computers shrunk to a PC Tower format when OS/2 and PS/2 were both essentially dead.

The MS OS/2 with Lanmanager was probably always going to be a stop gap as servers for Win 2.x. They obviously decided Xenix was never going to be what they wanted as they sold it to the original SCO (I installed that once!). Not the later litigating SCO.

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Wayland!

Wayland is likely to join Unity, died in 2017. It's stupid and essentially beta.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

Mage Silver badge

switch your account to Ireland if you want to keep an English language

No.

Malta also officially uses English.

Also the language you use is likely irrelevant.

Lawsuit claims gift card fraud is the gift that keeps on giving, to Google

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

"DO NOT ALLOW GIFT CARD PURCHASES"

The problem is that in fact the opposite. Google refuses to redeem valid cards.

Also Google treats your payment method like a Direct Debit. You have to go to web page, not playstore, to end it and also get the payment provider to remove Google. Also it's suggested in T&C that they may then block gift cards if you cancel a payment method. Yet, Gift cards are suggested by Google as the sole cash payment method.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

How much fraud by who?

Get the sales receipt and the validation receipt from the gift card giver or you can never redeem it.

In 2015, Google was sued for allegedly refusing to redeem Google Play gift cards once the balance dropped below $10. That case appears to have been settled…

They won't say why an account is blocked once they admit the card is valid. It looks like they still block redemption for any account with no other payment method, or no balance. Four accounts tried. Eventually Google unblocked one, but never explained what the issue was. You need to email everyday for a few weeks and send photos of receipts and card.

Microsoft: Copyright law didn't stop the VCR and shouldn't stop the LLM

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

VCR?

Selling your VCR recordings was copyright violation, or giving away multiple copies. That was never permitted.

MS Lawyers are deluded if they think a corporate scrape is comparable to VCR use on TV broadcasts which was mostly personal time-shifting. Anything else was quickly stamped on.

Meta's pay-or-consent model hides 'massive illegal data processing ops': lawsuit

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Pay for Meta vs free

You can't offer free and insist on tracking.

They are indeed welcome to make it a pay only site. And then the only "tracking" that can be imposed is the log-in cookie.

It's not about the adverts or being a pay walled site as such.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re:numerous websites in France that follow this model

Which is illegal.

Other people breaking the law doesn't make it OK for Meta.

Apple's Titan(ic) iCar project is dead as self-driving dream fails to materialize

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Was it ever serious?

I'd always assumed this was a combination of PR, and that really rare thing, actual serious Apple research.

Not cancelled because it needs windows, but likely too much competition and probably was never a serious product development.

Telsa will have problems as traditional car makers produce more electric cars and stop buyying carbon credits from them.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Mage Silver badge

LO Writer will only re-open a document .. at the beginning

Not if you use ODT format and put a name into Tools-> Options -> User Data.

Though some recent versions of LO Writer have a bug and you need to press F5 to jump to last position.

We do need a concept of documents as well. See project Xanadu, Apple Hypercard and also the Nebo App on iOS and Android.

A document should have a history axis, different kinds of objects (text, images, data, audio, video etc), parents, children and siblings and metadata. Tradition file systems are too limited, See also having a reading library via a Kobo or Kindle ereader with the metadata interface vs trying to organise books, collections, tags, subtitles, genres, series, authors, translators and editions via simply files and directories. Or Calibre on Mac/Windows/Linux

See any professional document management system. The user can more easily create / find / edit information via metadata. Win10 with it's reliance on search is a failure for accessing programs or information.

Mage Silver badge
Thumb Up

cut Oberon down into a monolithic, net-bootable binary, and run Squeak

Great idea and great article.

But OTOH, I wrote C++, C, and VB6 as if I was writing Modula-2 with co-routines, generic typed functions and opaque modules.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

NV RAM never entirely went away & predates Optane

Even in 1980s we had NV RAM / PRAM. It was static memory with a lithium coin cell. Microcontrollers could be powered off and resume. Some could "sleep" due to having a static design. You could literally stop the CPU external clock to pause execution.

Also magnetic core memory was non-volatile.

Mine's the one with the 8K RAM cartridges in the pocket.

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Windows NT

It did have a method of treating files as a memory array, but hardly anyone used that. Something like 16 exabytes of virtual memory. The Windows on DOS (win 3.x, 9x & ME) couldn't do that, nor even create named pipes. Win9x/ME didn't have much more 32 bit NT compatibility than Win 3.x with Win32s installed.

Google releases Gemma – LLMs small enough to run on your computer

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Interesting

But is it much better than Eliza?

Inside of Emacs, type M-x doctor to launch Eliza. For those of you like me from a Vim background who have no idea what this means, just hit escape, type x and then type doctor.

Is it a toy or really useful?

How do we know it wasn't partially trained on copyright material, which I regard as plagiarism and unethical, not fair use?

What does it tell Google?

The successor to Research Unix was Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Mage Silver badge

Re: Take the small example of MeDearOldMum

There are two kinds of multi-user.

1) Different user accounts and only one user is logged in

2) Multiple users at the same time.

UNIX systems did both, Non-NT "windows shell" barely did (1) as you could simply access with no login, the log in was only for network. NT for years only had sense 1.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: little to no _technical_ resemblance between them

I didn't imagine there would be. I was thinking generally. I did look at Oberon OS and decided it was educational. I did manage to write DLLs in Modula2 for VB6 programs that ran on NT 4.0, Win2K and XP. One had to assign a VB string to a desired length string before passing, or "Bang!". I spent slightly less time on Oberon OS than Minix in maybe 1992, as I considered Minix for a course, but decided against it.

And Linux succeeded in the sectors where it's a success because of compatibility and similarity and free, not because it's hugely better than UNIX or XENIX would be today if Linux hadn't existed. Likely some BSD + GNU would have replaced the commercial expensive Unixes for servers, routers, eink ereaders etc if Linux had never existed.

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

So...

How does Plan 9 / 9Front / Inferno compare to Oberon?

Applications are the thing. Gradually migrating to non-MS applications on Windows available on Linux allowed me to entirely switch to Linux in 2017. But I'd used UNIX first in about 1986, NT in 1994, Linux in 1998. It took a long time.

Android succeed for two reasons, one was Google and the other was Java. It leveraged all the programmers and apps on Symbian which due initially to resources and at the end due to stupid Sun licencing couldn't run full Java, but the cut down mobile version. Lack of applications and compatibility has hampered ARM versions of MS Windows. Apple switched 68000, Power PC, x86-32 and then x86-64 only and has more control than MS, so was able to switch to ARM Mac.

And Android is terrible.

Maybe it doesn't matter how good Plan 9 / 9 Front / Inferno or any other OS is, it's a nearly impossible task to dent the dominance of existing platforms. Servers & gadgets & chrome books have linux, TVs, tablets and phones have Android. Phones and tablets have Android and iOS. MS couldn't save Windows phone and Nokia knew the phone division was a millstone, there was no MS Trojan; Nokia got 11 Billion from MS for something worthless, now rents phone brand to TCL and has other businesses. They were successful before the did phones and still are. Amazon Fire is Android.

Where is Sailfish, OS/2, RiscOS today? MS once had PDAs, set-boxes (a load were changed to Linux OTA), phones and Servers. Inertia and corporate compatibility leaves them dominant on desktop and nowhere else. How long did Xbox make a loss?

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Mage Silver badge
Pint

Re: Ummm Wayland...

Perhaps, if we are lucky, Wayland will, like Unity, get scrapped (happened to Unity in 2017).

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Did I blink and miss it?

One of the reasons for GNU, BSD etc was conflict between AT& T / Bell and the Universities. A lot was done by universities and others and wasn't an AT&T contract or paid for them. But Bell/AT&T turned round and said that AT&T owned it all.

Linux is strictly speaking just the Kernel and lots of the OS are GNU family tools. Simply reinventing, rebuilding what AT&T said was theirs. Very sad.

However, great article.

Out with the old, in with the new as 100 Starlink satellites take atmospheric exit

Mage Silver badge

Re: are some places on earth that will never get a fibre link

And Starlink is only one service. There are others, not just Geostationary either. Also less well known ones that Inmarsat and Iridium (bought by US Military when it went bust) as well as regional services.

Mage Silver badge

Disposible like BIC or Gillette razors

Would the money be better spent on fibre in most places, with some masts and higher orbit or fixed geo sats (Yes, the latency is rubbish) for extremely remote areas?

What is the environmental cost?

Anywhere with mains gas, sewage, water or electricity can have fibre cheaply.

Is there sufficient oversight if they are having to junk 100 due to a design flaw?

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

Mage Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re:

Or are they going to sue you afterwards if you disparage it later?

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: smart watch the benefits are:

Don't need any of those.

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Eye-watering?

$3,500 plus tax is an eye-watering price. Most places have Sales tax or VAT. I'd expect it to be €3500 plus VAT here.

Might make your eyes water even if a present!

For that I can get a 65" 4K HDR screen, paper-like colour screen 11" Android tablet with pen (128 G + 256 G SD Card), decent laptop (SSD + HDD) and an 8" eink with note taking, new glasses, new coffee machine and still have change.

Worried about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give ChromeOS Flex a try

Mage Silver badge

Re: ChromeOS Flex does not support Android apps or Google Play

So might as well install Linux Mint with Mate desktop. As indeed some windows 7 users with 64 bit CPUs are doing. 2G RAM works, though 4G is better. Also 80 G HDD and no GPU is feasible. Legacy BIOS or UEFI installs.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Mage Silver badge
Linux

Feel of NT 4 to 5

Or run Linux Mint, Mate desktop and suitable themes.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

Mage Silver badge

Re: all the commands you frequently use

What about the ones you need once or twice a year? A good menu system is important.

Then the frequently used buttons on one or two tool windows

The ribbon, hiding active scroll bars, removing least used commands from menus, flat, text that might be button or a browser link or open a window or a setting or text, slide switches in stead of a checkbox, etc are all retrograde UI UX decisions. Vista "aero" was one kind of stupid. Win8 "Phone GUI for a Desktop" a third and Win1x with only really a totally flat dark or totally flat light theme with only one accent colour is ghastly. Like Window 2.0 on a Hercules mono card or CGA Mono. Sack all the so called "graphic designers" that think they are designing corporate laser printed stationary and know nothing about GUI design.

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: running actual Windows is easier.

Sadly sometimes that's true like if most of your day job uses SW with no Linux equivalent.

Plenty of my Windows programs don't run on Win10, there will be no new version and in some cases the developer is dead.. That's why Win10 comes with a VM option.

Run the OS that runs most of your programs. I've not used Dual boot either since 2016. At worst I only need to run one XP program every 11 days. My weather station program that saves the actual weather station data to Access.

Mage Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: thoroughly embedded in school IT classrooms

Unlike Android, which is only sort of using Linux Kernel, Chromebooks are basically a Linux Distro.

Some schools entirely use iPads instead of text books.

Other schools use Chromebooks.

The School IT teaching MS Stuff was always pretty useless and wasn't universal. Mainstream education isn't dominated by Apple Mac in US and MS on PC in UK and Ireland today.

Home use of PCs/Laptops has collapsed due to phones, tablets and consoles, esp. Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Playstation. PC gaming is a niche now. A lot of the corporate stuff is now practically using laptop as a terminal.

Mage Silver badge
Linux

Re: Linux's moment

No, the best way to use Linux is without WINE. Need Accounts or Payroll that's only on Windows? Use a VM. MS on Windows 10 & Win11 recommends the SAME VM as Linux commonly uses for all those XP or Win7 or 32 bit programs that won't run on Win10 or Win11