Posted on 02/12/2013 10:00:36 PM PST by doc1019
What ever happened to the massive updates predicted my Microsoft for Tuesday? (vanity).
Who perdicted? The Mayans or Saint Malachi?
http://www.howtogeek.com/137384/week-in-geek-microsoft-preparing-for-massive-patch-tuesday-release/
I would have liked to know this too, had I not switched to Linux a couple years ago. In fact, I might change my tagline to, “Virus-free since switching to Linux.”
I’d tell Windoze to kiss my ass, but I’d be afraid of catching something.
Although I applaud your boldness and insight in going “Linux”, your response doesn’t answer my question. But thanks anyway.
It was probably intended as comedy, just like my reply. Wait for the Mac comedians next!
Sorry, my response wasn’t meant to give you an answer, but rather a solution ;)
A solution beyond my capabilities. A solution beyond my wishes. A solution that doesn’t answer my question. A solution ... well you get it.
I would love to be running Linux, but I have a computer with megs of stuff and converting would be a real pain.
After today’s update Desktop manager was not working on WIN7. After couple of restart, it start behaving. Even Adobe is with update.
Lot of update for today.
You got updates? I didn’t get anything, and I have checked often. (running windows 7 64 bit home Premium addition).
Does anyone know a while back somebody posted a link to a site that does support or offers fixes for XP and Windows 2000 still? I think it was run by a bunch of ex MS techies.
I shoulda bookmarked it...
There’s really nothing to convert. The open-source LibreOffice suite can open all your MS Office docs (Word, PowerPoint, Access, Excel). Digital photos and music files need no conversion.
Nor do you need any special capabilities; I’m nowhere near a computer geek, but Linux has come a long way, looks and functions pretty much like Windows now. The only program I haven’t found a really good Linux alternative for is Quicken. So I still keep a Windows computer for that.
If you have even the slightest interest in trying it out, do what I did. Start gradually. Take an old junk computer (who doesn’t have one of those lying around?), and install a Linux distribution on it. Linux can run great on older hardware; it doesn’t have the bloat that Windows has. I have Linux installed on a ten-year-old desktop, and that thing runs better than my much newer Windows 7 computers at work.
Feel free to FReepmail me if you ever want to give it a go.
I run Windows and Linux.
I use Linux for servers; the usual Apache and MySQL, Subversion, a shopping-cart, an image-processing library.
I use Windows for everything else.
To get the high reliability of Linux, you’ve got to use the command-line interface. Which for me is a royal pain. I don’t like having to pore through a half-dozen websites to get the answer if I can’t find it on one of my half-dozen cheat sheets.
Tried Debian last summer. Tried both Gnome and KDE GUIs. Couldn’t get used to KDE’s weird organization, and Gnome was considerably less reliable than Windows. Couple of times a day I’d be doing things in Gnome, opening files, installing software, editing stuff, and all of a sudden... =POOF=. No more Gnome. Screen goes black. Hit a few keys to get to the command line. Linux still there, but Gnome collapsed.
Re-launch Gnome, great. There it is. Only problem: my whole session, everything I was doing, is gone.
Sure, no BSOD. Sure, the underlying Linux OS didn’t crash, and was still operating. Sure, Apache didn’t skip a beat.
But the GUI part of it dumped everything I was doing into intersteller space. That’s a pain. That doesn’t happen with Windows 7, and it didn’t happen with Windows XP.
GUIs are hard. They have to be able to handle an incredible range of different missions, different user habits, different configurations, different combinations of apps. Lots of asynchronous events. Lots of variables.
Windows is a more solid GUI. Linux is a more solid OS, maybe, but only if you’re doing a limited number of relatively simple things.
Wow, that’s not been my experience at all. I’ve been using PCLinuxOS, with KDE GUI. On any given day, I’ll have Firefox open to FR (of course) and my webmail, several “Word” documents open for editing (LibreOffice), perhaps a spreadsheet also, and an mp3 music program going in the background. Never one crash in almost two years. What kind of and how much stuff did you have open to make the GUI crash?
Ran manual updates on my XP desktop, there were 12. Now doing manual updates ( 11 ) on the Win 7 laptop.
==
1. Mepis
2. Knoppix
3. Kanotix
==
OK so far? These are all very good and stable Linux live distros that you can play with without touching your current setup at all. I listed them in order of personal preference, however YMMV. Mepis Linux is the one I prefer most, and is the one I am using right now as a matter of fact. I also installed an earlier version on a friends older laptop about two years ago and she has yet to experience any sort of crash or problems. Granted, she is still a fairly new user and not really proficient with the 'Doze OS either, but other than a few games that are not available for Linux she is still up and running.
Personally, other than a couple or more specific programs that I just HAVE to have that are simply not available in Linux, pretty much everything else I want to do has an equivalent that has worked out well thus far, with no crashes or viruses over several years now. In fact right now I am downloading the latest episodes of two tv series for later offline viewing, converting an m4v to an mp4 video file to burn to a dvd, watching FoxNews in a Mozilla Firefox browser while I post/FReep in a separate Opera browser, and backing up some critical files to an external USB drive as I type this.
Very stable, very happy with this distro. Others prefer other distros of course, and there are literally hundreds of versions out there to play with. Stick with the live distros only for now to play with to see if you like one. For the really brave, there are also the BSD and Sun Unix options, or even OS/2 if you wish.
Of course, you could always go 'retro' and fall back on win XP, 2k, ME, NT, or 98. They are still out there and work quite well on older equipment.
I was using Gnome, not KDE. As I said, KDE took too much getting used to.
As far as what kind and how much stuff did I have open, this was last summer and into the fall, so memories have faded, but I was trying to get my feet wet a little. I was using Firefox. I was opening files using one of the file opening utilities (don’t remember which one). I was loading new apps to try them out.
Sometimes I had to switch to one of the command-line terminals to do something related to the front end. Sometimes I did this by means of a terminal app, and sometimes I did it by means of F1-F6.
I was trying all kinds of things to try to figure out whether I could make the jump and abandon Windows completely. Believe me, the idea of switching Windows off forever was an appealing one, and still is.
I installed Ubuntu from the Ubuntu website. I burned an installation disk which got the process started, and went through a plain-vanilla install of the latest distro at that time (which was - if I recall correctly - “Oneiric Ocelot”).
Then we began to get more experienced Web development people involved, and they said “oh, you should switch to CentOS, it’s more stable, it’ll be easy to switch.”
It may in fact be more stable, but it wasn’t easy to switch (there were several “small” differences that each took a day or two to deal with).
I’m sure I can install a GUI onto CentOS, but we’ve moved all our servers to a remote colo (in another city), and I control everything through SSH and various consoles (Webmin, SWAT, and Subversion Edge, among others).
For every day stuff I still use Windows, as I said. I like it. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good, and is less “high maintenance” than Linux was for routine stuff.
Using Linux for everyday computer apps is like using a high-performance Italian sports car for tooling around town. You can do it, and it’s fun, but you pay for it in downtime, fooling around with tweaks and occasional deep dives under the covers.
You pay for using Windows too, but in money. As long as you stay within Microsoft’s “consumer” pricing model, the price/problems ratio is acceptable.
When you move to their “commercial server” price model, forget it. In fact, that’s why we moved our servers over to Linux (after buying several copies of W2K8 R2 and getting several more “development licenses” from MS, revokable at any time at their whim).
Uh oh! Here’s something big coming in from Microsoft! It wants to reboot me. It’s been loading something in the background for some minutes now, maybe for a half hour or so.
Utilizer I’d like to pursue your suggestions but will have to do so tomorrow. I’ve got to close up a bunch of things here before allowing the reboot of Win 7, and I’ve got to go to sleep as well (I’m on East Coast time).
I’ll get back to you. Thanks, both, for your comments and suggestions.
I tend to prefer KDE. Yeh, I know, you are more used to Gnome as you have already stated, but I tend to find more useable apps with KDE ties and capabilities than when I go Gnome. If I see an app that is linked to Gnome right away I know two things about it; first, that it will be 'prettier' than an equivalent KDE app, and second, that it will be a bit less 'capable' than a KDE one. Brasero as compared to K3b (cd/dvd burner apps) comes immediately to mind.
Of course, you can always try another desktop. I would stay away from the newer versions (Cinnamon, Mint) or Ubuntu types as they are not as stable as say the straight Debian-based distros provide. You can also play with Xfce, lxde, windowmaker, or even Plan9 -but these are more for those purists looking for minimal processing demands and/or disk space for the desktop than for the Office-style environments the more popular desktops provide.
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