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I just tried to install SP2 for XP on the Windows box I use at home. Halfway through the process, I get an error message whining about a missing file. I verify that the original cab contains a compressed version of said file. I look in the directory where the installer unpacked itself; same file there too. I try to uncompress it with extract.
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I went through a long phase of not using any flavor of Unix on my systems after the catastrophically awful RedHat 5.x series. As I spent most of my development time writing in Java, I just didn't see much of a point. I started to get back into using Unices in my daily life when I purchased my Sun station back in 2001. My laptop, until recently, had a partition for a Mandrake installation on it.
My feeling- in something like 5 years, not all that much has changed in desktop options. Yes, RedHat's Fedora distro is really easy to install and, for the most part, it works without too much oversight, but, IMHO, the same irritations I've always had continue to persist.
The first one is that good multimedia support is still lacking. I'm not an artist or anything, but damnit, when there's a funny video on the Internet, I don't want to yell at things while I try to play it. My Homestar Runnner addiction alone would frustrate me, as I seem to recall Flash support in Linux being behind. Please note that, on most of my Unix boxen at the moment, I mostly just do C programming, so I haven't been on a quest to get a good multimedia setup going on them, but I also shouldn't have to go on a quest. The time or two I've tried to get RealVideo off the Internet or watch a Flash cartoon, it's not been pretty.
The other big one is that it seems most of the attempts at making a smoother desktop experience on any Unix system have been attempts to paint over the implicit system administration needs of said system. The slicker desktop experiences I've had in Linux (and I use Linux as the example) lose their slickness the moment some program has an error. All of the sudden, the desktop experience feels just like the console experience...just with pretty windows. I know Unix systems pretty well, so I'm often not deeply bothered by this, but as I've said before, I would rather do my work than have to babysit my system. Also, a lot of the home-rolled repairs to complaining parts of my system often leaves the thing looking like some sort of Frankenstein's monster. Maybe I'm a bad admin and that doesn't happen to others. God forbid my X server breaks...
After that is the relatively minor issue of the persisting "Unix attitude". Things are annoyingly hard because they're better that way...stuff is incompatible because it's better that way...write your own fixes to critical software, because nobody cares...again, a lot of this just keeps me from doing my work. I get this mostly from Linux crowds, though. Nothing in Solaris has given me much to bitch about, but then, Sun built the workstation and its OS- if you can't get it right then, you need to stop trying.
Regardless, no matter how much I enjoy having Unix systems because I enjoy the level of flexibility they give me (and because I find that their systems programming interface is more intuitive), I really feel like their offerings for modern desktop needs are kinda like a silk dress on a pig. Really, the pig's getting a bit prettier, too, but not at a rate commensurate with the clothing it wears.
Personally, I wish the promise of BeOS had been delivered.
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:)
there are some wierd java-flashy-internet-doobie things that don't work on PCs too well either... that might just be firefox. i dunno. i miss homestar but i use someone else's computer when i need it. whichi s just as well or i might lose an entire day to sbemail.html :)
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Well, what made this such a disaster was the "Windows attitude". Halt the patching process with an error message which gives little hint of the root cause; reboot without asking, even though the rollback failed; when a service fails during boot, bluescreen instead of limping along so the admin can fix it; run chkdsk /f on an unrelated disk without prompting first.
Windows is just so goddamn opaque. When everything is working, it's more or less fine, aside from a few design mistakes (file locking, GDI in ring 0, multiple users as an afterthought, confusing untrusted data with trusted code, etc.) But when something breaks, you don't get any best-effort subset of functionality, and you can't easily change the system internals by hand.
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Ultimately, I have a love-hate relationship with most things. I love the "honesty" of C, but get annoyed when de minimis leaves me groping for gdb. I like the safety of checked exceptions in Java, but I get tired of endless do-nothing try-catch constructs when I'm in a rush. It's just something I do, I guess. I bitch about both Windows and Linux, but I actually do like the things they get right.
As for the "Unix attitude" bit, I actually wasn't talking about attitude in design, but the attitude people tend to have about the social relationship one has to one's computer. I've read great stories about bugs going unpatched because the bug was too much of a tradition to kill, and I've been told before that, if Linux breaks on my machine, I should learn enough to fix whatever is wrong with Linux. The design attitude in Windows is awful, and the "Windows attitude" of "your problem is nobody's issue until Microsoft says so" is awful, too. It's all kinda a mixed bag in the end.
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