Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[TELVM]

Hi! We're Windows 8.1 engineers. Ask us anything! ( Reddit 2013-10-17 )

Epic, just epic!

When is the desktop version coming up?

__________

Why? The start menu did nothing to you.

__________

It is clear that, with Windows 8.x, Microsoft has surrendered the desktop to Linux. Was that a deliberate decision?

__________

Will windows nine get rid of all this touch centric bul***** so we can go back to a usable multitasking desktop or should I just move completely to Linux?

__________

I would fire everybody in your department. You forgot your customers. Your shoving a tablet OS on your desktop market. Remember Motorola back in the 80's ? They owned the cell phone market at one time and lost it overnight when they failed to embrace digital. Keep on Microsoft. Make more blunders like this and watch your market jump to the other guys. Seriously, fire your product development VP. Your arrogance is appalling.

__________

Did you have anything to do with putting the Metro interface into Server 2012? If so I hate you and everything you have ever done.

__________

Yes, why is windows 8 so terrible? Did Microsoft go out of its way to make the UI terrible or did it just happen?

__________

In the next update, can there be an option the completely disable metro?

__________

Have you ever considered just replacing IE with Firefox and replacing the logo with that of IE9?

__________

[serious] What is morale like in your teams? There is a rather large segment of your customer base unhappy with a product you each dedicate multiple years of your life on. Do you find it a struggle to put your best effort forward when so many people disagree with your teams vision of what the next evolution in UI should be? How do you find ways to innovate - and how does the dog fooding of beta versions of Microsoft products impact your daily productivity?

__________

Are your resumes up to date?

__________

First off, windows 8 is trash. I'm not a fan of apple. I have several microsoft certs and I have always been a Microsoft supporter. But windows 8 is trash. The tiles are trash. It is literally the stupidest move I have ever seen a company make. You really think that s*** is useful in a business environment? I can tell you right now I will never roll that out to my users.

Second windows 8.1 puts the start menu back. Which is a good start. But it just starts to the tiles!!!!! Wtf?!?! Also, it's not even an update? I seriously have to go to the windows store to get that s***? You're killing me Microsoft. You're literally killing me.

__________

Why, dear god, would you have unleashed such a terrible product on the masses? Are you secretly trying to euthanize people through aneurysm?

__________

How do you live with yourselves...

__________

Hey, congratulations on listening to exactly zero customer feedback again! Keep up the great work!

__________

Has any of your staff committed Seppuku so far?

__________

Why would you purposely say you added a start button, when everyone really wanted a start menu. You know what you did. Why be such dicks about it?

__________

While I appreciate them coming here to do this, the 8.1 changes the whole 8.0 experience, and most of their answers here leave me feeling like MS STILL has NO IDEA what people are asking for.

People want the option for a proper start button that performs like we are used to. Not a button, labeled "Start", that does something else. We want control over our options, not a hard to navigate, counter-intuitive, list of dumbed down steps to get to ALMOST what we want. We want to not LOSE ease of use and functionality as the product "matures".

"Dear MS, we asked for a start button but instead you began raping us aggressively."

"Dear user, we HEAR you, and are making changes. You'll be happy to know that we'll be rolling you over and plowing your pooper in 8.1."

"Dear MS, What.... no... no that isn't it at all. I'm starting to think that you are not listening, and instead just doing whatever the hell you were going to do anyway."

"Dear user, Thank you! We are also proud of our reviews."

__________

In case you hadn't noticed the negative vibe regarding the Start Button, I'd like to point out that the only way you could have implemented this worse was by making the Start Button image that of a big middle finger to us.

__________

Not that anyone will ever read or respond to this, but the windows server 2012 user interface is absolutely horrible. Simply staggering in how badly it works. The traditional start menu system from windows 2003 is just fine, I can only assume that people responsible for windows 2012 have never actually had to maintain a network.

__________

I. Want. My. Bios. Back.

__________

as a windows 8 user all i have to ask is WHY GOD WHY?. also thanks for making me want to beat my laptop to death with a stick.

__________

I hate to ask such a loaded question, but what do you think went wrong with Windows 8.0? Did anyone voice doubts while the UI was being designed?

__________

Can you actually smell Microsoft imploding when you walk down its halls? The stink of failure, the fall of Rome, 2008 Detroit Lions...

__________

Hi. Was Windows 8 just an elaborate prank? Honest question.

__________

What sort of psychedelic drug did you take in order to conceive the ideas held within this operating system?

__________

Why did you decide to create a whole new OS that essentially strips 7 of its open platform properties, instead of expanding upon 7 alone?

__________

Hi, before you launched windows 8 did you ask a single consumer what they wanted?

__________

I don't have a question.

Just please murder whoever felt that any part of the metro experience should be on Windows Server 2012.

Thank you.

Signed,

All admins everywhere.

[GrofLuigi]

Hi! We're Windows 8.1 engineers. Ask us anything! ( Reddit 2013-10-17 )

Epic, just epic!

How did you manage to read it? I gave up after third "load more comments".

GL

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Hi! We're Windows 8.1 engineers. Ask us anything! ( Reddit 2013-10-17 )

Epic, just epic!

Yes it is! I love these that you pointed out. ...

Have you ever considered just replacing IE with Firefox and replacing the logo with that of IE9?

__________

Are your resumes up to date?

__________

In case you hadn't noticed the negative vibe regarding the Start Button, I'd like to point out that the only way you could have implemented this worse was by making the Start Button image that of a big middle finger to us.

__________

Can you actually smell Microsoft imploding when you walk down its halls? The stink of failure, the fall of Rome, 2008 Detroit Lions...

__________

I don't have a question.

Just please murder whoever felt that any part of the metro experience should be on Windows Server 2012.

Thank you.

Signed,

All admins everywhere.

That one comment gave me an idea ...

The Start Button Returns!

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

How did you manage to read it? I gave up after third "load more comments".

Yeah, I also couldn't find any controls to "expand all". :angrym:

Maybe you need to sign up first? I don't know.

[sparkles]

Remember a few months ago I posted about the WinH8-inspired redesign of Yahoo Mail? I'm seeing a common theme appearing across the comments on the numerous sites reporting about their latest changes...

Anger explodes at Yahoo Mail redesign disaster: Key functions removed or broken

LMAO....Believe it or not, Windows 8 played a role in this. Several months ago Yahoo 'updated' the UI of their email to give it a more ' Windows 8 metro' appearance....just as Microsoft did with Outlook email. Apparently, they've now done a complete rethink of that design decision and have decided to completely ditch the Windows 8 theming they had (foolishly) adopted. I'm not surprised by this latest turn of events; I thought back then that theming Yahoo mail based on Windows 8 was a very bad idea. Now it seems that they're aiming for a single look across multiple hardware form factors and on multiple OSes with an emphasis now on mobiles...and obviously the Windows 8-based theming that they introduced months ago has to be abandoned as a result.

-------------------------------

If I wanted my email to look like Gmail, I'd get a Gmail account

-------------------------------

Why do tech companies give up what they're good at in a desperate bid to ape competitors? This is like Microsoft gutting Windows out of iPad envy.

-------------------------------

I've seen a few websites that are becoming more like the Windows 8 UI. What is wrong with people? They first won't adopt the new UI then some start to give in and now we got internet companies starting to make everything look like Windows 8. Microsoft should sue, but they probably won't because they want people to adopt the new UI. That silly new trend is pathetic.

Best comment from here:

They are definitely NOT ignoring their users.

They are pandering to the emergence of the id*** Elite.

Think of it, all those features could be argued as "power" features, which have been stripped out or dumbed down to pander to a growing populace of people too lazy or otherwise unable to figure out how to learn something a little more advanced than point and click.

I mean Microsoft pulled the start menu because ALL iOS and Android users are used to accessing apps by slapping a hairy knuckle against a grid these days, no fancy "tree" lists, categorizations or having to type to find something. Microsoft might have pissed off their power users, but guaranteed there are more people that actually like the Metro interface then the vocal minority that hate it. People are NOT complaining about the dumbed down simplicity of other Tablet OS'es these days.

So nerds, geeks, and dweebs do not rule the tech universe anymore, we are just along for the ride. We used to drive the market by wanting faster and better and more powerful in every generation, but eventually companies could not keep up and realized taking a large regressive step backwards made these products more accessible and desirable by the non-tech elite. Instead of upgrading to a new more powerful 16 core desktop, the id*** elite were dazzled by the simplicity of a tablet or phone with only a small fraction of the processing power and abandoned traditional computers, as they are with other services and games. People would rather fling a bird at pigs or harvest Smurfberries for 6 hours a day rather than exploring a world in an RPG or even getting out their aggressions in a state of the art FPS.

Every company today is crafting their services and products to pander to the id*** Elite because they know they can profit more from them rather than trying to appease the power user...Companies are not ignoring their demographic, they are just beginning to realize how naive they are.

[JorgeA]

The alternatives I'm looking at are some flavors of Linux, mainly Netrunner ...

Thanks . It's interesting to compare what's happening in Windows against this declaration of principles:

"... We want to give you, the user the feeling again, that you actually _own your computer_, that you’re in control and have the freedom to make it work any way you want it ..."

Yeah, so far they've been pretty good about it. Here's a sample image of my Netrunner desktop (with some tweaks to create a more familiar Windows look):

(Click on the image for a full-size view.) Note the 3D window buttons and the translucent window borders.

I have a lot to learn yet about this OS (or about Linux in general), but this is a promising start!

--JorgeA

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

I read this story in the print version of USA Today yesterday on page-3. Long and high profile piece going after iOS 7 and Jony Ive, and absolutely parallel to many of the Windows 8 criticisms ...

Apple loses some of its magic touch with iOS 7 ( USA Today 2013-10-17 )

SAN FRANCISCO Apple's iOS 7 launch is fast becoming its most troubled mobile operating system update, increasing concern that the technology giant has lost some of its magic touch since co-founder Steve Jobs passed away two years ago.

Since iOS 7 was released Sept. 18, the list of bugs and flaws has grown.

[...]

Some users of Apple's new flagship iPhone 5s have even experienced a so-called blue screen of death, familiar to many who have seen a Windows computer screen freeze and turn blue.

"It did feel more like a Microsoft release," Retzlaff said. "I've never had an issue like this with one of their updates, so it's pretty shocking."

[...]

"It's Apple's most problematic operating system launch so far," said Raluca Budiu, senior researcher at consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group, which released a report on Oct. 12 saying the design of the new operating system makes it harder to use.

Buttons that used to stand out now blend with the background, and links that used to be visible may now be mistaken for plain text, the consulting firm said.

[...]

Apple's iOS 7 mobile operating system iteration took a radical leap from iOS 6. Before it was even launched, those in the design world were sharply divided over Apple's plans to flatten its look.

Apple's move to do away with such design cues as yellow legal pads for Notes, fake glass and other faux vintage effects to resemble objects did away with what's known as skeuomorphism.

"Overall I like the functionality of the new OS, but the visual style looks unfinished. The color design is awful, and it's flat to a fault.," said Mark Rolston, chief creative officer at Frog Design, whose firm designed early Macintosh computers.

All I can say is BINGO. Unlike most tech press, this thing will get seen by Wall Street and boardrooms. Though it has nothing to do with us and Windows, it is good nonetheless because it might grease the skids for some similar articles about Microsoft in the major media ( in fact they'll likely feel obligated to bash them now, or will do it because of pressure from iTards ). Microsoft might get a chuckle from reading this piece about their "hated enemy", but they also must be worrying that their worse disaster with the childish Playskool Microsoft Tiles GUI will be called out next.

Naturally the iTard fanboys immediately pounce, attacking it from every angle here ...

USA Today prints contemptuous trashing of Apple's latest iOS 7 release ( Apple Insider 2013-10-18 )

Not gonna quote them though. They're crybaby fanboy enablers who need to man up and call out these dumb moves before it's too late. And if they hated that USA Today article they're really gonna hate this graphic I made ...

EDIT: typos

Edited October 19, 2013 by CharlotteTheHarlot

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

More things for the iTards to chew on, not to mention the MicroZealots ...

Security research firm says Apple can read your iMessages ( TechSpot 2013-10-18 )

iMessage May Not Be as Secure as Apple Claims ( Tom's Hardware 2013-10-18 )

Apple denies claims that it can or will read users' iMessages ( NeoWin 2013-10-18 )

Here's the backstory: On June 6, a top-secret document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggested that several major communication companies, including Apple, were part of a government surveillance program called PRISM.

Apple denied that it worked with the NSA to spy on its users in a June 16 statement, in which it also emphasized iMessage's security.

[...]

What did they find? Apple's boasts of iMessage's security are "just basically lies," said Quarkslab researcher Cyril Cattiaux at the Hack in the Box presentation.

iMessage uses an encryption protocol called public-key encryption, which means that each iMessage user has two encryption keys: the public key is used to encrypt messages so that only people who possess the corresponding private key can decrypt and read them.

But iMessage users don't actually possess their encryption keys Apple manages them, and the means by which it does that is unclear.

That means that it's entirely possible for Apple to switch the keys and their corresponding users, or add another private key to a given public key and intercept the contents of an iMessage conversation.

That's gonna leave a mark. I guess the hardest thing to determine going forward is which companies are really trying to fight the spooks and preserve privacy, and which are just blowing smoke, issuing weasel-worded statements that admit nothing and deny everything. I'm pretty much convinced that Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, and Google are all willing collaborators and probably the most evil in that exact order ( given all the articles we've seen here since summer ).

Google Stock Tops $1,000 Mark for First Time ( Maximum PC 2013-10-18 )

Well this should reinvorgate the Google-envy up in Redmond and down in Cupertino. I guess well see another round of dumbing down products and angering their core supporters in a vain effort to participate in a race they already lost. Aside from chair-throwing there isn't too much more damage that Microsoft can do to itself at this point, though I'll bet they'll sure try.

[jaclaz]

The actual article/whitepaper is this one:

http://blog.quarkslab.com/imessage-privacy.html

What techspot and other media didn't publish (or understand or both ) are the not-so-trifling effects of possible proxification in a business enviroment (on company issued hardware or on BYOD).

In a nutshell, probabilities (as always completely faked ) that:

• Apple is BOTH Evil AND interested in your messages, and thus will read them (for advertising needs) 3.33% <- overall issue of very little relevance in practice
• NSA (which is most probably Evil ) is actually interested in your messages, and thus will read them (for security needs) 0.333% <- overall issue of even smaller relevance in practice
• The IT guy in your company is either Evil or more simply a nosy peep and wiil pwn your accounts (for his own fun, or asked to do so by your boss that is finding an excuse to fire you) 17,33% <- this is preoccupying IMHO (and doesn't even take into consideration another number of possible man-in-the-middle atacks)

jaclaz

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

We've seen this in so many fields, the consumerization-commercialization that ruins something. [...]

Arts and crafts peak, and once they do, they go downhill. [...]

Dittos. And the acceleration we see now is from a smaller world, ironically because of computers and instant communication. [...]

RE: Above ... Totally coincidental, but National Geographic TV has been running a show about factory mass production from Henry Ford to the present and spends some time talking about JIT and related concepts. I swear I hadn't seen that show before writing that post above. They have a decidedly Nu-Corporate bias in the episode, spinning it to mean that it's all great for the workers and of course profits. What's missing is the reality and that is that there is far more to it than simple JIT efficiency. As rolled out by big corporations it's a massive effort to cut costs and no mention of the customers or quality is to be found. Certainly there could be a happy medium, but no company that answers to Wall Street these days is gonna search for it. Also, JIT and some of the concepts attributed to Deming literally means no inventory kept on hand, little to no redundancy, and of course an extremely tight timeline on the factory floor.

The downside which I have seen with my own eyes is that any kinks in the supply or manufacturing chain can be catastrophic to the entire production. It is voluntarily flying by the seat of your pants. A good analogy IMHO would be keeping just enough food and water and eating exactly enough calories and drinking just enough to stay alive every day thereby leaving yourself open to a big problem in a snowstorm or if the car dies. Or, putting just enough fuel in the airplane and removing every mechanical and electrical redundancy to reduce weight and costs. I can assure you that this concept will never fly ( ).

In a sense, Microsoft Tiles and many of their latest strategies are an outgrowth of this consumerization and pandering to the masses at the expense of all else. We even hear it right from the mouthes if the fanboys with their explanations that the Start Menu was redundant.

EDIT: clarity, typo

Edited October 20, 2013 by CharlotteTheHarlot

[JorgeA]

We've seen this in so many fields, the consumerization-commercialization that ruins something. It has happened steadily in music with a rapid decent, a race to the bottom in the 80's, the 90's, 2000's. We watched it happen but also noticed that the classic stuff not only survives, but thrives. The Stones and many others are still touring while so much crap from the 90's and beyond is already collecting dust. Even in the studio and onstage we saw equipment evolve and devolve to electronic crap but hardcore Marshalls and many other tube amps, effects and guitars from 30-50 years ago are priceless.

Arts and crafts peak, and once they do, they go downhill.

Take literature: I would say it peaked in the 19th century around with Dostoyevsky, Hugo, Goethe, Dickens, Tolstoy and went downhill from there. Sure, there were some great works in the 20th century, but they haven't reached the greatness of Brothers Karamazov etc. and the 21st century so far is an utter trash heap compared to the 19th.

Music: You've said it yourself. And by the way, where's the new Ninth Symphony? That story is pretty similar as with literature here.

And arts peak far sooner now: Movies, despite a far younger medium than the above, have already peaked, too. 70s and 80s (and many 90s) films wipe the floor with most newer productions. Even straight action films twenty-thirty years ago had a lot more heart and skill than today's "teal and orange" abortions.

Computer games: The retro scene is thriving, and for very good reasons.

Engineering: The dumberization in computing, the still unmatched designs and reliability of "classic cars", CRT monitors from 12 years ago often have STILL superior color representation than the newest flat displays (along with no ghosting and blurring), analog radios from the 20s can still work while the newest digital models die due to missing codecs and stuff, analog TV was able to withstand anything and produce a picture, while the newest digital TVs die once the signal becomes slightly distorted. There are examples galore here.

Stuff turns to s*** a lot faster nowadays, and progress moves backwards quite a lot.

That's pretty downbeat, but I'm going to give my reply anyway even if it is a bit OT...

Sometimes I get the feeling that we're living in a civilization which has run out of cultural and spiritual steam and has begun to decline, the only question being how steeply. And the things that you bring up are illustrative of this. It's as if in literature all the important philosphical points have been made and in music all the interesting combinations of notes have been composed already, and there's nothing new left to say. We see it in film, too -- sequels and remakes seem to be the order of the day. Not to mention painting, where simple geometric shapes and random drippings and other stuff that even I could do have dominated the landscape for decades.

Art used to inspire, then it delighted or sparked curiosity or admiration, next it meandered into incomprehensibility, and having exhausted that mine finally it has descended into simply shocking and offending as much as possible. But now the culture has lost so many standards (of beauty, of propriety) that before long there will be nothing that can give offense and no one to shock anymore. Maybe at that point inspirational art will return to shock the adherents of Anything Goes, but I'm not banking on it -- the art world is losing its relevance and soon there will be nobody left who gives a hoot.

We see a similar trajectory in tech. I wasn't in on the dawn of computing, rather shall we say sometime in the morning. The IBM PC with its stark DOS prompt was a source of unending fascination for me, and more importantly for countless others who went on to make their mark on the industry. It was an almost purely intellectual challenge: "what can you do with me?"

Then Apple introduced the GUI to the broader public (I do know that it was first devised by Xerox) and interest in computers began to explode. Though the GUI represented a decline in the amount of mental effort needed to understand what's going on, the multi-window environment did enable users to see more of those inner processes simultaneously, so ultimately it was a boon to exploration, understanding, and creation.

But now, with the introduction of Metro and consumption computing devices, access to the inner workings of the computer is being slowly closed off. If the Windows Desktop (and with it the command line) disappears completely -- as Mary Jo Foley predicts and Paul Thurrott seems to advocate -- then where will the next generation of IT savants and geniuses, tinkering with their machines in their bedrooms, come from to bring the next wave of technological breakthroughs? They will have been too busy updating their profiles and watching the tiles scroll up the latest inanities to bother. Superficial people in a culture of people whose diminishing capacity for attention focuses on the ephemeral.

Well, maybe there won't be a need for a next wave of breakthroughs. By then our civilization will have become one of people lurching from one short-term impulse to the next, devoid of meaning or purpose and ripe for conquest by some alien culture that still believes in something, even if that something is anathema to the one value of Tolerance that we still nominally believe in but aren't willing to do anything about other than bleat.

After writing this, I'm so depressed now, I'm going to surf the Web for some pr0n to snap out of it. See you in 5-6 hours.

--JorgeA

[TELVM]

Yeah, so far they've been pretty good about it. Here's a sample image of my Netrunner desktop (with some tweaks to create a more familiar Windows look):

snapshot.jpg

(Click on the image for a full-size view.) Note the 3D window buttons and the translucent window borders.

I have a lot to learn yet about this OS (or about Linux in general), but this is a promising start!

--JorgeA

I overcame my stubborn resistance to change and gave it a try booting from USB. Liking it much more than Ubuntu (which I tried last year right after the shock of first testing The-Horror-Whose-Name-Must-Not-Be-Pronounced). It's alien environment for a Windows old-timer, but you quickly feel that they've tried to make your life as easy as possible (as opposed to massively kicking you in the balls and making your existence as miserable as possible :angrym: ).

I'm going to install it in a secondary guinea-pig comp for more in-depth familiarization. Searching for some Linux fan-controlling solution à là Speedfan now.

@ Charlotte: I humbly float this as potential inspiration for your art .

Edited October 20, 2013 by TELVM

[JorgeA]

TELVM,

That is a ROFL on the illustration!!

Yeah, with most Linux distributions that I've seen (except for Ubuntu and maybe Fedora, which I tried once and couldn't make heads or tails out of), I get the sense that they RESPECT users, instead of looking down on us as if we were barely trainable monkeys who are capable only of punching big blocks on a screen.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Oh yeah, another reason (not) to do your work in the cloud:

Outage Disrupts East Coast Internet Traffic

Internet users from Brooklyn to Philadelphia suffered slow to nonexistent service Saturday after equipment at a New York-area network hub broke down, disrupting service for several hours.

A spokesman for the Internet service provider Level 3 Communications Inc. said technicians were working quickly to fix the outage, which cascaded down to customers using Cablevision Systems Corp.'s Optimum service and Time Warner Cable Inc., among others.

[...]

It wasn't immediately clear Saturday why traffic from cable subscribers in New York and New Jersey wasn't rerouted around Level 3. Customers reported that some sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, were unavailable, while other Web addresses reached subscribers smoothly.

So let's say I'm hip and have eagerly joined the ranks of the cloud, thinking I'm helping to bring in the future. I'm preparing a crucial analysis spreadsheet, or I'm putting together a complex price estimate for a customer, or I'm on a deadline to submit a magazine article. Not quite ready for submission yet to my boss/customer/editor, there's some work yet to do -- and then all of a sudden the Internet goes down "for several hours" and I can't get to my critical document. I must wait until the 'Net goes back up and only then get to finish up what I was doing and send it. As a result, my company misses an investment opportunity, or I lose the bid with my customer, or my editor cancels the article. What's the cloud service going to do for me in that case, huh? Maybe give me a prorata reimbursement out of the monthly subscription for the time the service was down? Big whoop.

Note that this hazard is in addition to the danger of the Internet going down just when you need to send that file. In cloud computing, because you are dependent on the Internet 100% of the time, the probability of an ill-timed harmful failure of this type increases exponentially.

¡Viva Windows 8 and the Brave New World of computing that it's helping to bring about!

--JorgeA

Edited October 20, 2013 by JorgeA

[jaclaz]

Yeah, with most Linux distributions that I've seen (except for Ubuntu and maybe Fedora, which I tried once and couldn't make heads or tails out of), I get the sense that they RESPECT users, instead of looking down on us as if we were barely trainable monkeys who are capable only of punching big blocks on a screen.

Well, not really.

As a matter of fact it is actually the opposite (generally speaking).

The actual "developers" of Linux (and more or less of any other *nix flavour) despise the common user and out of either a perverted mind or superior knowledge of the OS make things incredibly complex (even when they would be simple), scarcely (if ever) document usage (you are told to read the source code when asking something that is not in the man) and even when there is an actual complete man page (most are outdated, or miss some switches) there is always ONLY the syntax, but NEVER an example, which makes actually grasping the concepts more difficult and requires an insane amount of failed attempts to get a fully working command line.

The actual developers of most "GUI" releases despise the common user as well, and, considering (not being entirely wrong, given the complexity of the "base" above) complete morons, and thus attempt to hide from them the underneath commands/way of working by replacing it with "dumbified" GUI "automagic" tools.

So we have a "base OS" that is very complex (not in itself but because it is often poorly documented for the layman) and on top of it a - usually very limited (and completely undocumented) GUI.

Additionally each different distro/build has a few essential aspects changed (for no real - apparently - reason).

Typically:

• bootloader/bootmanager (and relative cheatcodes)
• automounting of devices (fstab sometimes called a different name and placed anywhere but where you would expect it to be)
• placement of essential files in different places/subdirectories
• different naming of devices (particularly mass storage devices)

Mind you, I like Linux as an OS and usually like most of the GUI distro's, but I cannot but underline how IMHO the limited success it had is due - at least in part - to the lack of actual "customer respect" (for one reason or the other) that most builds reflect.

jaclaz