11-08-2015, 12:33 PM
(11-08-2015, 11:53 AM)ppppenguin Wrote: [rant]
Call me a luddite but I like the look of W2K (and W95, W98 before it) and have XP in "classic" view. No gimmicks, no slides, no fades, just everything happening as fast as possible when you ask for it. The more I hear about W8 and W10 the more I feel the pull of Linux. The question is: "Which Linux?" I think the answer for me is one that looks and feels as much like W2K as possible. I'm not scared of command line stuff - I did MSDOS back in the 1980s and still use the command prompt on occasion.
I still use Office 2000 and see no reason to move on. They seem to do everyting I need of them. Though DOCX and XLSX files are a nuisance. I've got the add-on that allows Office 2000 to view them. Otherwise it's Libreoffice which feels slow by comparison.
[/rant]
Luddite!
I quite liked the XP "Luna" theme. The blue and green does feel a bit dated, but a few years back I discovered the "Zune" theme, which is a free download from Microsoft, and feels a bit more modern, being a bit more monochrome. With a bit of gentle customisation, it's very nice.
I've never liked XP in classic mode. But I'm quite happy with that look on my Windows 98 machine. In fact, I spent an age copying the (subtly different) colours from W2k to my W98 machine, which are a bit warmer and nicer. I have a .reg file that W98 users can merge to get the theme - works well...
Generally, I switch off most animation and other screen effects - they mostly just get in the way. I don't mind the Aero transparency in W7, but I change the opacity setting to make it less transparent, and usually choose a monochrome theme rather than the default bright blue.
We have Office 2010 at work, and I must admit that I think it's a big improvement on earlier versions. That wasn't my first impression by any means, but it's a big part of the job, so you just have to get on with learning how to use it. I honestly wouldn't go back. LibreOffice is good for the price, but after 10+ years of development they still can't fix the screen drawing routines! Perhaps they need to move away from Java?
As for Linux, be careful what you wish for. Like you, I'm not afraid of the command line, and as well as DOS, I became quite familiar with OpenVMS, which is a lovely OS. However, the Linux command line is absolutely terrible - I hate it with a complete and all-consuming passion. The total lack of consistency between commands is the main bugbear. I do the absolute minimum possible with it, and resent having to touch it at all (because if I need to do something at the command line, then the GUI tools have failed me). With Windows, I generally do things at the command line because it's a quicker alternative to wading through the GUI, but it's a positive choice I make, rather than a path I'm forced to go down. And in practice, you have a problem, you search the forums, and in-between the usual rabid "newbie haters" you'll eventually find something that looks promising, so you'll copy and paste that into a terminal window and perhaps it'll fix your problem. In the process, you've learnt precisely nothing, and you'll probably never run into that exact thing again anyway. And anything clever you do pick up probably won't be applicable to another distro anyway. Horrible!
But, I have several Linux machines, and I use them daily. I appreciate the Windows-like stability (yes, really), and the fact it's free. I don't appreciate how resource-heavy most builds are, and although I'm trying my best, I'm not convinced by Ubuntu's ideas about GUI design. A few years back I was quite impressed with L-Ubuntu, but it had no way to set a proxy server via the GUI (and I wasn't going to do it at the command line, thank you very much!), so it was no use for work. Generally, I prefer distros based on Debian, and think the package management is very good indeed.
In short, it's far easier to have lots of machines so that you can get the advantages of all of them, and you're not tied in to a particular bit of hardware or a particular OS. KVMs are great bits of kit for that! I pick up second-hand machines for peanuts - and keep a stock of spares. But then I find it interesting. I can understand that many regard PCs as tools, and just want them to work. Understandable, but not the reality, sadly. Like all tools, the better you understand them, the easier life is.
