Trying Linux

[ancient_mariner]

Still, in a few years they won't look anything like they do now.

I guess we'll have to see, but TBH windows 10 doesn't look enormously different from windows 3.0, other than being much more polished, ditto OSX, and where microsoft and Gnome tried to break the mold they met with very considerable resistance. The only thing I would expect to drive an interface change is the ditching of mouse & keyboard in favour of a touch interface, but that's a poor option for anyone doing serious work at present.

 

[LC2]

but TBH windows 10 doesn't look enormously different from windows 3.0,

What! Are you serious?
It's hugely different, from usability, GUI, connectivity, configuration...
I'll see if I can dig out some DOS 3 and win 3.0 floppies for you.
Have fun with the multiple boot disks for different apps, the ahem multi tasking, 16 (or if you're lucky 256) colours, externally sourced NetBIOS connectivity etc.

 

[keeweeman]

i tried to build a linux system a few years ago with the intention of using it as a home server. I think i used amahi if memory serves, the core system was good and stable just as a pure file server but i had massive issues with getting plex to work properly on the media sharing/streaming front and after a few months of toil, lots of learning bits of code and quite frankly very little progress i gave up and installed windows 10 instead using the storage pool function to make one disk clone the other storage wise. Worked flawlessly from the off and hasn't skipped a beat since so i have no great love for linux or desire to try again anytime soon. I will concede windows 10 is more hardware hungry than linux but i keep it stripped right down in terms of what is installed on that machine so its basically just windows 10, the core programs that get installed with windows, and plex and that is really about it.

 

[ancient_mariner]

What! Are you serious?
It's hugely different, from usability, GUI, connectivity, configuration...
I'll see if I can dig out some DOS 3 and win 3.0 floppies for you.
Have fun with the multiple boot disks for different apps, the ahem multi tasking, 16 (or if you're lucky 256) colours, externally sourced NetBIOS connectivity etc.

I said look - not function - which was about Ian's point. Calm down feller - I remember the days of installing office from 65 floppies as well as anyone, and FWIW I still own a set of floppies with DOS6.2 and a box I kept for gaming with W2000 and a 3DFX card.

 

[Retune]

I suspect anyone brought up with XP and later would find 3.0/3.1 rather traumatic! Windows 95 was the first recognisably modern Windows, with the familiar trio of window control buttons, the Start menu, and a desktop that could contain files and folders. A lot of work went into the interface, including usability testing ( http://prior.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/kds_txt.htm ), and it shows. At one point they rejected an additional, simplified tile-based interface because "users had to learn two ways of interacting with the computer, which was confusing" (a lesson that seemed to have been forgotten by the Windows 8 designers). A shame that most users had to put up with poor stability until the consumer and much more solid NT lines were merged in XP.

 

[ancient_mariner]

I suspect anyone brought up with XP and later would find 3.0/3.1 rather traumatic! Windows 95 was the first recognisably modern Windows, with the familiar trio of window control buttons, the Start menu, and a desktop that could contain files and folders. A lot of work went into the interface, including usability testing ( http://prior.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/kds_txt.htm ), and it shows. At one point they rejected an additional, simplified tile-based interface because "users had to learn two ways of interacting with the computer, which was confusing" (a lesson that seemed to have been forgotten by the Windows 8 designers). A shame that most users had to put up with poor stability until the consumer and much more solid NT lines were merged in XP.

I remember being really excited about W95, and then effectively killing my own home system by installing an incorrect mouse driver, requiring a full reinstall (in retrospect I suspect it could have been recovered, but it was easier to wipe & start again.

I used to be a regular part of a bass forum, where one of the guys worked for microsoft and had been involved in the user-testing side of W8. For whatever reason, the sample of 'ordinary people' selected to evaluate W8 found it natural, obvious and highly intuitive as finally delivered, and the public rejection of the new style OS was a big surprise. *Personally* once I had a couple of key things about W8 explained then I found it very easy to use too, and 8.1 was an enormous performance step up from W7, but microsoft really shot themselves in the foot by failing to ease their userbase into the new way of working. Hence why I am sure, the basic interface for computers isn't going to change much for a long time.

 

[LC2]

I said look - not function - which was about Ian's point. Calm down feller - I remember the days of installing office from 65 floppies as well as anyone, and FWIW I still own a set of floppies with DOS6.2 and a box I kept for gaming with W2000 and a 3DFX card.

Calm down, calm down. - I'm not from Manchester fella
Typed on the phone on the way into work, so it was a bit more forthright than intended...

But 3.0 / 3.1 / 3.11 really look nothing like anything that came later, with perhaps a nod to windows 8 The 3.x progman tiles don't really have a compardre in anything 95 and later, and the File menu bar at the top of 3.x's progman, well OSX has copied it, but Bill dropped it from 95 onwards.
And from a look and feel perspective, you can't ignore way 3.x implemented multitasking. Basically the background app stopped running to give access to the foreground app (it's a bit more complicated than that, but not much)
Office on 65 floppies? Office 4.3 was around 45 iirc (I'm not digging my copy out to count them), on 3.0 you'd be hard pushed to run Word 2, and that was what, 4 disks?
Seems I was wrong about the colour gamut. It looks like 16 colours were all that were available with the inbuilt drivers. Can you imagine viewing a modern image in that !!!

On the plus side, 3.0 came with cardfile.exe and cal.exe

 

[onomatopoeia]

And from a look and feel perspective, you can't ignore way 3.x implemented multitasking. Basically the background app stopped running to give access to the foreground app (it's a bit more complicated than that, but not much)

Cooperative multitasking, rather than pre-empttive. Did mean you could lock the whole system with a busy loop that didn't Yield() or make one of the other API calls that gave the OS a look in to task switch.

Was it 3.11 that introduced pre-emptive or win95? So long ago I can't recall ...

 

[Retune]

I used to be a regular part of a bass forum, where one of the guys worked for microsoft and had been involved in the user-testing side of W8. For whatever reason, the sample of 'ordinary people' selected to evaluate W8 found it natural, obvious and highly intuitive as finally delivered, and the public rejection of the new style OS was a big surprise. *Personally* once I had a couple of key things about W8 explained then I found it very easy to use too, and 8.1 was an enormous performance step up from W7, but microsoft really shot themselves in the foot by failing to ease their userbase into the new way of working. Hence why I am sure, the basic interface for computers isn't going to change much for a long time.

Perhaps they asked the test users the wrong questions? The W8 release had the feel of groupthink about it, like they'd convinced themselves this was the way to go without checking what everybody else thought. I was an early adopter as I happened to be buying a PC soon after the launch, and remember 8.0 as a real mess out of the box, with the conventional and Metro UIs crudely nailed together. Metro wasn't bad by itself, but there were jarring shifts between the two environments, especially as MS has decided to 'expose' the user to their new toy by having it replace the Start men, and registering a bunch of file types to Metro apps. Settings were arbitrarily divided between the Control Panel and the new PC Settings app (something we're still stuck with in W10). Things that should have been obvious weren't easily discoverable, and the hot corner thing was just irritating. Fortunately, most of this was easily tamed with Classic Shell and judicious re-registering of common file types to more sensible applications, after which W8 turned out to be fast and stable, and rather less irritating than W10 is now with its frequent forced 'upgrades'.

It's even harder to get away with this sort of thing in the Linux world, where attempts to make the original version of Gnome 3 and Ubuntu's Unity the mainstream standards were pretty much doomed to failure by the vast choice of competing distributions and desktop environments. In the end, all this did was to give us even more choice by encouraging developers to revive Gnome 2 as MATE and create Cinnamon as yet another fork of the Gnome 3 shell. Mint got quite a boost by supporting the former and developing the latter, while more conservative distributions waited until Gnome 3 was sensibly re-jigged with extensions to give a more traditional UI. Even Ubuntu has now ditched Unity for a revised Gnome 3 desktop, and there's a MATE spinoff that has become my current favourite Linux distro.

And now, once again, everything looks suspiciously like Windows 95...

 

[ianp5a]

Perhaps they asked the test users the wrong questions? The W8 release had the feel of groupthink about it, like they'd convinced themselves this was the way to go without checking what everybody else thought. I was an early adopter as I happened to be buying a PC soon after the launch, and remember 8.0 as a real mess out of the box, with the conventional and Metro UIs crudely nailed together. Metro wasn't bad by itself, but there were jarring shifts between the two environments, especially as MS has decided to 'expose' the user to their new toy by having it replace the Start men, and registering a bunch of file types to Metro apps. Settings were arbitrarily divided between the Control Panel and the new PC Settings app (something we're still stuck with in W10). Things that should have been obvious weren't easily discoverable, and the hot corner thing was just irritating. Fortunately, most of this was easily tamed with Classic Shell and judicious re-registering of common file types to more sensible applications, after which W8 turned out to be fast and stable, and rather less irritating than W10 is now with its frequent forced 'upgrades'.

It's even harder to get away with this sort of thing in the Linux world, where attempts to make the original version of Gnome 3 and Ubuntu's Unity the mainstream standards were pretty much doomed to failure by the vast choice of competing distributions and desktop environments. In the end, all this did was to give us even more choice by encouraging developers to revive Gnome 2 as MATE and create Cinnamon as yet another fork of the Gnome 3 shell. Mint got quite a boost by supporting the former and developing the latter, while more conservative distributions waited until Gnome 3 was sensibly re-jigged with extensions to give a more traditional UI. Even Ubuntu has now ditched Unity for a revised Gnome 3 desktop, and there's a MATE spinoff that has become my current favourite Linux distro.

And now, once again, everything looks suspiciously like Windows 95...

Yes Ubuntu Mate is liked by a broad range of different user types. Probably because you can simply click through different desktop styles to see which layout you prefer. As they contain many different app menus, docks and task bars.

Ubuntu Mate is good choice for new users.

 

[ancient_mariner]

It's even harder to get away with this sort of thing in the Linux world, where attempts to make the original version of Gnome 3 and Ubuntu's Unity the mainstream standards were pretty much doomed to failure by the vast choice of competing distributions and desktop environments. In the end, all this did was to give us even more choice by encouraging developers to revive Gnome 2 as MATE and create Cinnamon as yet another fork of the Gnome 3 shell. Mint got quite a boost by supporting the former and developing the latter, while more conservative distributions waited until Gnome 3 was sensibly re-jigged with extensions to give a more traditional UI. Even Ubuntu has now ditched Unity for a revised Gnome 3 desktop, and there's a MATE spinoff that has become my current favourite Linux distro.

And now, once again, everything looks suspiciously like Windows 95...

It's often difficult to make major changes stick in the Linux world because every 5 minutes someone gets bored & insists on throwing all the 'new' OS interface pieces up in the air to see how they land for a different configuration. Gnome 3 was really interesting, though felt like a blend of W8 and OSX as it was at the time - I used Pear Linux based on Gnome 3 as my main distro for a number of years before David Tavares, the originator, was required to pull the plug. Unity I found to be generally poo - Ubuntu only really worked when someone else used it as a base, but the stuff from canonical generally seemed to suck, both in terms of desktop & instability.

I'm typing this on Mint mate.