On 22 September 2013 01:38, Peter Alexander <peter.alexander.au@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Saturday, 21 September 2013 at 15:07:17 UTC, Manu wrote:
>
>> I have fuck-all tools available, it's near impossible to debug. Something
>> that I know would take me 5 minutes in windows with that toolset has taken
>> me a whole day so far...
>> I honestly don't understand how linux users think it's okay.
>>
>
> Well, you aren't alone. Valve recently announced that they're working on a Linux debugger. They wouldn't bother wasting time and money doing that if the debugging experience on Linux was any good. As far as I'm aware, they're not working on a debugger for Windows, and I can only assume that's because debugging on Windows is bearable.
>

Yeah, there is discussion about this in another thread somewhere else. I'm very much looking forward to what they bring to the table. But like I said before, I fear they've got a LOT of catching up to do...

On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 12:11 PM, Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20 September 2013 00:25, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 03:04:44PM +0200, Wyatt wrote: [...]
>> > Dolphin is pretty nice, though there are cases where Konqueror still runs circles around it. For example, if you want a horizontal split or more than one split.  Also, I don't think Dolphin has the file size view plugin, which is nice for finding hidden monsters in your ~.
>>
>> du ~ | sort -r -n | less
>
>
> This is exactly why linux is shit.
>
>
>> :-)

By far the best way of doing that I have found of dealing with that problem is the program filelight. I have tried to find something as good on windows but so far no dice.

As far as I can tell Dolphin was an attempt to take the best features of konqueror and make them discoverable if not as flexible.

I use mono develop (on ubuntu).

On Sun, 22 Sep 2013 01:07:08 +1000
Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:

>[...lots of stuff snipped...]

Believe it or not, my opinions on Linux, Windows and everyday usability are actually very, very similar to yours (including the vague impression that Linux GUIs are just facades - which they actually sort of are just by design, but I digress).

In fact, all that stuff is why I'm still on Windows for my main system.
Luckily, things like driver issues and major failures haven't been an
issue for me on Linux for quite some time. But it's other
everyday-productivity things like finding a filemanager and taskbar
that aren't too rough-around-the-edges (because I rely on them *sooo*
heavily), Tortoise-like VCS integration (I don't understand how
people can use Git's command line for anything non-trivial), non-manual
HDD SMART monitoring like HD Sentinel, etc. Finding suitable
replacements for all these things I use every day takes some work, and
I'm still not entirely finished.

And even when I do find what seems to be the best, it isn't always as good as Windows: For example, there is *no* taskbar on Linux I've found that's as well-designed as the one Windows has already had for nearly 20 years. There are a bunch of OSX-dock-alikes that, I assume, might do a good job of emulating the OSX experience (I haven't tried since I never liked the dock). But over a decade since I first tried them, the taskbars in KDE, XFCE, etc still don't quite match the quality of design that MS already had in Windows 95.

That said, I do find that Xfce 4.10 is good enough to be acceptable for me, but it still isn't up to Windows standards.

The odd thing is, I've been finding that each new version of post-XP Windows has required more and more effort to undo all of their...what I find to be productivity-hindering UI "enhancements". So Windows is requiring more and more effort (for me), and simultaneously I've been getting more and more proficient with the ever-improving Linux (due to my server work and doing cross-platform testing), and I don't see any signs of MS or Linux altering their current trajectories. So the writing's on the wall, as it were, and for me Linux is becoming a better bet for everyday productivity. (But this is all just "FWIW" side comments, not an argument of Linux being "better".)

I think it was mainly your reaction to H. S. Teoh's story that irked me. It's kinda like watching a mechanic rebuild the engine of some "known to be gearhead-friendly" car just because he'd been trying to squeeze out some extra horsepower and erroneously saying "Wow, that must be a bad brand of car if you have to muck with the engine just to drive it."

Also, I disagree with your implication that a command line actually needs to be more user-friendly in more ways than just less cryptic names. Obviously I wouldn't have a problem if the commandline actually was more usable to everyone (naturally that'd be a good thing), but I don't think that's a significant issue, being that it *is* the command line after all, and non-experts would mostly just stick to GUIs anyway.

> I'm also not 'average-joe-numskull', at least I don't like to think I am,

As far as I'm concerned, a programmer is by definition *not* an average-joe-numskull. If you can write one line of code, run it, and properly understand it, you're already waaay more advanced than 90% of computer users.

>The only way I can reason that people can be happy being so unproductive, is that they don't actually know what it's like to be really productive in the first place. (see: my comment prior about the mouse scroll-wheel)

I must have missed that mouse scroll-wheel comment and I can't seem to find it. What was it again?

FWIW, And I find this somewhat ironic: I find the mouse scroll-wheel to be FAR more usable on Linux than Windows. On linux you just point to what you want to scroll and...scroll it. On windows you have to go out of your way to give the desired control focus (clicking on some innocuous part of it, tabbing to it, whatever) and only *then* will the scrollwheel actually do its job. Then you want to scroll something else? Repeat the process. Imagine if you had to do that to right-click! I actually find that scrolling issue to really get in my way quite frequently when trying to do work on Windows. :(  I was able to fix that on XP, but not on 7.


>If I had visual studio and PIX, I would take a screen capture, clicked on the bad pixel, it would immediately present a stack of every rendering event contributing to that pixel, and the entire state of the rendering hardware at every step of the way, and I'd find the problem in a couple of minutes.

Whoa, now that's pretty damn cool. I'd never heard of PIX before.

>I have a strong suspicion that linux works better if you use it daily. I'm starting to realise a pattern emerging that things tend to fuck up after I perform a bulk round of updates.

I've learned through pain, even in Windows land (heck, so much software is cross platform these days anyway), that software updates are opportunities for things to go wrong (or to force ill-conceived UI changes that hurt my productivity, but that's another matter).

Regardless of OS, I've ended up in the habit of avoiding software updates unless I have a real reason to (which is a shame, because I *like* security updates). *Especially* on the server: Sysadmins have a reputation for not updating as much as the programmers would like, but I totally understand it because I run my server the same way: If it's already working, then updating...say...PHP, can only end up breaking five hundred things, and then guess who has to drop everything and fix it? ;)

> I can very happily say, I have NEVER compiled a windows kernel.

I can say the same about Linux kernels. I'm afraid to, and don't ever want to have to, and I've really never needed to. I hear it's easy and, honestly, I'm sure it is. But, ehh, at best it could only be a bore.

>I've tried to use debian, precisely for this alleged stability. My experience was a whole bunch of software that was simply out of date.

Yea, that *is* the tradeoff they're famous for making. It'd be great if they didn't have to but, meh.

That's actually the reason I've just switched to Mint for desktop Linux. Being based on Ubuntu, it lacks Debian's "out-of-date from day one", but it also lacks Ubuntu's FOSS religiousness and their seeming ambivalence towards anything but Unity (An OSX-clone, in my observation - which is great if you like OSX, but, eh).

On the server I'm still Debian though, because stability is everything there. Heck my server is still back on Debian 6 just because I haven't wanted to deal with the risk of breakage updating to Deb 7 (which I *do* really need to bite the bullet and just get done, I know that).

>> And if you bring up some broken Linux distro, I'll bring up WinME, and then we'll all have added a whole lot of usefulness to the discussion ;)
>
>I don't think that's a fair comparison at all, that's like saying there was one broken version of ubuntu 10 years ago, but it's all better now...

IMO, Linux in general was pretty bad 10 years ago. I gave it a genuine try and ran away screaming...

On 21/09/2013 16:07, Manu wrote:
> I'm also not 'average-joe-numskull', at least I don't like to think I
> am, but that doesn't mean I want to know how a car is built, and then in
> turn how each individual part was built, and how to fix it, before I can
> have confidence it will get me to Sydney in one piece.
> I don't actually really care about how linux works, or any of the little
> bits and pieces that form it's awkward foundation... and I shouldn't
> need to in order to like the premise of an open system, and want to use
> it on that merit alone.
> I don't actually enjoy OPERATING a computer, I enjoy the creative
> process of working, and getting work done. Solving interesting problems.
> If the computer gets in my way, it has failed me at some level.
> That might sound strange coming from a software engineer, but I guess
> that's how I see it. I just don't have the patience to mess with my OS
> anymore.

My feelings exactly. I learned about Linux and studied it when I was in high-school (Windows 98/Me era), and I was quite excited about it. Windows was more shite those days, and I knew Linux was not for the average user, but I thought that once I learned it well enough (shell, network, configuring partitions, automounting, the X server, etc.), it would be worthwhile to use.
That wasn't the case unfortunately. There was always new stuff that would come up that you would need to learn how to configure, or need to thinker, or there would be shortcomings in application functionality. After a certain point it was just annoying. It might be "fun" for people who get kicks out of working the innards of a system and being closer to how things work, but on my computer I wanted to either have my leisure time, or get real work done. And spending time configuring stuff (that in Windows just worked out of the box) is not a productive use of one's time in any way, shape or form.

True, this was like 10 years ago and Linux distros got better, but so has Windows, and nowdays there is little motivation now for me to try a different OS/desktop-environment.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer

On Monday, 23 September 2013 at 11:52:28 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> On 21/09/2013 16:07, Manu wrote:
>> ...
>
> My feelings exactly. I learned about Linux and studied it when I was in high-school (Windows 98/Me era), and I was quite excited about it. Windows was more shite those days, and I knew Linux was not for the average user, but I thought that once I learned it well enough (shell, network, configuring partitions, automounting, the X server, etc.), it would be worthwhile to use.
> That wasn't the case unfortunately. There was always new stuff that would come up that you would need to learn how to configure, or need to thinker, or there would be shortcomings in application functionality. After a certain point it was just annoying. It might be "fun" for people who get kicks out of working the innards of a system and being closer to how things work, but on my computer I wanted to either have my leisure time, or get real work done. And spending time configuring stuff (that in Windows just worked out of the box) is not a productive use of one's time in any way, shape or form.
>
> True, this was like 10 years ago and Linux distros got better, but so has Windows, and nowdays there is little motivation now for me to try a different OS/desktop-environment.

Ironically, this is exactly the reason I have never succeeded in using the Windows for daily work. Amount of manual configuration and subverting the defaults needed to make it actually usable for my programming flow is outstanding. In the same time on my Linux distro it is mostly `pacman -Sy gnome gnome-extra xorg-server nvidia dlang vim git` and I am ready to work on a fresh install.

On 09/23/2013 02:01 PM, Dicebot wrote:
> ...
>
> Ironically, this is exactly the reason I have never succeeded in using
> the Windows for daily work. Amount of manual configuration and
> subverting the defaults needed to make it actually usable for my
> programming flow is outstanding. ...

I have never figured out how to even get it into that state, but it might have been lack of motivation. I had to work under Windows a while last year. It does not work for me, no matter how loudly one might assert it does. Eg. the (default?) file system is a joke. It will lock files, not even tell you in which unimportant program it is still considered open, and prevent you from getting work done. The OS has to mandate an awkward UI that eg. randomly hides windows behind other windows in a way that induces hair-pulling or wastes screen space and power for useless colour effects on overly thick margins and "title bars". (Not to speak of the task bar, which eats up significant screen space just in order to offer a really lousy interface to everything.) One needs to be a master in handling of the pointing device in order not to accidentally miss some button at the other end of the screen (that should have been a named command in the first place) and wreak random havoc that swaps around some windows or re-configures the current GUI application into a state that one likes (even) less than the one before. Resetting this requires careful research, with multiple roundtrips to a search engine in order to look at awkward procedural descriptions of how to access the "Blah-Configuration-Whatever-Dialog" referred to in the last step, in the most unexpected places. (The descriptions are always text only and imprecise.) And those are just a few examples. A lot of trivial and less trivial things I attempted to do under Windows ended up feeling exactly that way. There's so much time wasted for random micro-management not at all related to the task at hand.

I'd rather deal with compatibility issues. (I rarely had to though.)

I am well aware of, and respect the fact that some need to use Windows because it happens to be compatible with some Software they need or want to rely on, but I cannot relate to any statements attributing any kind of positive quality to the experience offered by the OS itself.

(This is from a guy who installed his first non-Windows system three years ago.)

On Monday, 23 September 2013 at 23:42:39 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> I have never figured out how to even get it into that state, but it might have been lack of motivation. I had to work under Windows a while last year.

Yeah, one week I simply went into stubborn "I want to make it work" rampage and after finding and installing dozen of 3d-party tweaks/tools (like multiple desktops implementation, SFTP mount, file handle tracker etc) and integrating cygwin into PowerShell it was almost fine. I have spent a week for it and still had no slightest idea if all that 3d party stuff is not actually a malware behind the scene. Also there still does not seem to be a single good Jabber client for Windows (with voice&video support).

It is not surprising I have soon abandoned it :)

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 08:51:13PM -0400, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> BTW my terminal emulator is moving along pretty well...
> 
> I'm posting this message from it now. On Windows! (It is talking to my linux box over an ssh connection. It pipes to/from plink.exe to get its data.)
> 
> Still a few bugs. In mutt, there's some lines too tall. I think the cursor isn't erasing properly as it draws the line with a xor brush. And it feels slow on Windows, tho that could be because I'm on an ssh link right now, out of the house.
> 
> But one of the cool features is I implemented an xterm escape sequence... that doesn't actually work in my xterm... that changes the cursor shape, and I added a few lines to my .vimrc so the cursor changes in insert mode.
> 
> It kinda feels like gvim, but it is just plain vim over a simple ssh connection. Boss.
> 
> Speaking of vim and bugs, if I scroll past long lines, that glitches too, but eh it is usable.
> 
> So yeah, how exciting, now I'll start adding extensions, and be able to use them right over ssh thanks to the Windows one compiling. (It also works reasonably well over remote X - I have it pretty efficient, only redrawing what it must, even using an XImage for true type fonts. But now I'll have all the flexibility I might want.)

This is really late, but I meant to ask, is your code up in github? I'd like to play around with it a bit.


T

-- 
Famous last words: I wonder what will happen if I do *this*...

On Friday, 27 September 2013 at 17:41:46 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> This is really late, but I meant to ask, is your code up in github? I'd like to play around with it a bit.

Not yet, I'm actually working on it right now though, trying to get X copy/paste working. What an obscure process with just xlib!

I just got paste basically working, after I get copy working I'll post it and email you or something.

After that, my basic xterm replacement will be set up. Then it is bugs and extensions. I'm still trying to think of a good way to do the extensions - I'd ideally like something that would just be ignored by xterm for compatibility sake, but failing that, at least I need an activation sequence that no other program would even put out.

I'm kinda leaning toward something like \033[?5000h to activate it - xterm uses 1000h for its mouse extension function and i believe ignores ones in that pattern it doesn't know. Then once magic mode is activated it can just look for invalid unicode characters to activate a command, perhaps even using a simple checksum so cat /dev/random isn't likely to trigger them. (This would be a lot easier if I didn't care at all about compatibility with existing unix programs!) Worst case, we can use an environment variable to signal the library to never send magic commands, so at least then xterm won't get trash.

anyway yeah i'll post it later and let you know.