On 2009-01-11, Klaus Umbach <treibholz-...@sozial-inkompetent.de> wrote: > Hi, > Just out of curiosity, I'm interessted in what you are using on your > desktop/notebook. I just want to have new ideas. Maybe other ion3 users > have the same needs as I, but found better solutions.
Windows 7. If it's come out when I get a notebook. If one can find an affordable notebook with a *matte* screen anymore, when I finally need a mobile computer; right now I don't. Glossy *trinkets* attract the herd like fly traps attract flies, and so it's hard to find anything that doesn't hurt your eyes anymore. Another thing I've noticed is that even tabletops tend to come with _shitty_ laptop-like keyboards these days with too short movement of the keys to be comfortable to type. But the herd is happy with them, and so all the time it becomes more and more trouble to find even something half-decent -- that was standard a few years before -- let alone something actually good. Yes, W7 is Hitlery [1], but better than Vista (or Modern Linux, and worse than XP or Old Unix. But you need Modern OS to run a Modern Browser to use Modern Internet Services, etc. All of them shit, but all the time getting more complicated to live without. Unfortunately.) All the glyphs look like swastikas, they're so blurred [2]. They've actually finally _removed_ the option to disable font blurring from the panel where it was easily accessible in XP, and which you had to hunt a bit in Vista, and even after then didn't disable all blurring. They've added a Smeartype tuner that lets you choose between a zillion types of blurring, but not to disable it altogether. But it still seems to be possible to disable blurring by a) switching to a theme with non-shitty fonts, e.g., the W98-lookalike (Segui UI is shit), and b) setting some FontSmoothing values in the registry to zero. (However, switching the theme resets them.) Other than that, W7 seems clearly faster than Vista -- it's even usable in VMWare after some initial disk crunching on my Athlon XP 2500+ / 768MB. The sorry attempts at tiling by throwing the window to the side of the screen seem like they could be quite nice on a tablet, but clearly doesn't scale due to lack of tabbing. The Ribbon UI actually seems like it could be quite nice if it served as _documentation_, displaying the keys corresponding to the buttons etc. when e.g. a modifier is pressed. But of course, since Vista, Windows has _hidden_ all the keyboard shortcut (*beep* the term "shortcut" implies fundamentally flawed design) by default; you've had to enable them fron the accessibility options in the control panel. > Terminal emulator: rxvt-unicode pfft. xterm. > Text editor: vim pfft. joe. (joe.sf.net) > Mail: mutt with offlineimap and lbdb to read my Palm's addressbook. > Browser: Firefox with "It's All Text", "vimperator" and "FireGestures" All browsers that can the technological shithole of the World (Wide Web), can do nothing but suck, but Opera sucks the least. > Audio-Player: amarok (looking for something better with ipod, DAAP and > podcast-support!) http://moc.daper.net/ A simple player that lets me use the file system for organising my music, instead of reinventing the wheel and enforcing an aoverbearing playlist system. (The ever so popular mpd sucks donkey balls.) I've heard good words about foobar2000, though. > Calculator: bc bc? What use is it? Try calc. (Probably http://sourceforge.net/projects/calc/ as I get ~$ calc -v C-style arbitrary precision calculator (version 2.12.1.5) ) > Backup: rsnapshot I've yet to find a backup tool that wouldn't suck. For *nix anyway. Using duplicity ATM (to another local disk), because I had plans of a network backup. But it can't handle file moves sanely, i.e., just storing the action, not a new copy of the file. Brackup seemed like it would be nice, being based on hashes, but it's just broken. But *nix has got these inode numbers which would really suffice... [1]: http://xkcd.com/528/ [2]: http://iki.fi/tuomov/b/archives/2008/03/20/T13_47_17/ -- "[Fashion] is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." -- Oscar Wilde "The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion." -- RMS
