Since I put up a new site with an archive of my software, a few have asked me to return the non-blog online as well. I don't think that will happen. I can't be arsed to start blogging again; it's a waste of time. I shortly entertained the idea of combining the good/essential material into a longer “Goodbuy, suckers!” anthology, but... even pissing on Linux (desktop *nix) is a waste of time. Ignorance is a bliss, and I'm much happier ignoring it all and sticking to Windows. Windows 7 is, in fact, not that bad at all.
Yeah, I have been using Windows 7 for some weeks now. It's surprisingly good, far more keyboard-usable than previous releases of Windows.. let alone popular Linux DEs, which have always been inferior to Windows. Of course, I'm looking at everything through the Trackpoint-glasses; I probably would find W7 far less usable if I only had a normal mouse or, *shudder*, or had to rely on the shotgun err.. touchpad. One reason for the improved keyboard-usability is the integration of search into Windows 7. No more browsing of endless menu and dialog hierarchies (esp. control panel and startmenu), just search. No need for third-party launchers, which never worked very well on XP; just hit the Windows key and start typing. In a way, this is a partial return to the command line interface. Maybe there's still a trace of sanity left in the world. Windows 7 even supports proto-tabbing and proto-tiling. By "pinning" an application/shortcut to the taskbar, you can use Win+number to cycle through instances of that application. (The visual indication of the chosen instance when cycling is too weak, though; the currently focussed instance is much more strongly indicated.) And with Win+left/right arrow, you can throw a window to the left or right side of the screen, which is almost the only layout I ever used in Ion, aside from full-screen (and Ion4, if I had started working on it, would have been more based on restricted layouts like this). I just wish you could adjust (maybe you can) the widths of windows thrown this way, as in the "split-float" tiling mode of Ion, where frames could partially overlap each other. On a small laptop display, most windows are simply too narrow without some degree of overlapping. In any case, the ideas introduced in PWM and Ion seem to be catching on, at least in diluted forms. My first gripe is that it still doesn't have a sensible "safely remove" feature. Still a fly-crap-sized system tray icon... which is even hidden by default, an otherwise excellent feature for all that annoying crap that everyone wants to put there. That or opening explorer (which is the only way by default to even mount anything on the POS OpenSUSE at the office...) And even with all the other improvements on keyboard-usability (after you enable the display of accelerator keys, which is idiotically disabled by default) the fact remains that the choice of keybindings suck, a lot of things depending on poorly-accessible cursor keys etc., instead of something closer to the typing position. Fonts... difficult to say, because the display on the Thinkpad X201 is so awful -- the worst I've ever come across -- that the constant shifting of everything on the display in reaction to minute movements of the head is more annoying than the blurring that W7 almost insists upon. (You need to do a lot of work to replace the semi-hard-coded Segoe UI everywhere, to get rid of the blurring.) That said, the blurring on W7 seems better than on any other OS... depending on the font of course, and the fact that the display has so crappy contrast. I should try to get around to trying it on a semi-decent display. But all desktop displays have so horrible DPI that any kind of blurring immediately induces uncontrollable vomiting. It really sucks that there are no decent displays these days: desktop displays have shitty DPI, although you can get IPS, and laptop displays are too shallow and generally el cheapo TN-film crap, although the DPI is somewhat more reasonable. (But most smartphones have even better DPI... and have higher-quality displays too, with far better viewing angles than laptops.) Yeah... I finally gave up on trying to run Modern Bloatware(tm) on the aging T43 (with its splendid although a bit dim IPS panel), and got a new laptop. I'd have preferred a desktop computer with an IPS panel, but since a desktop display is difficult to lug when moving around the world, that's presently no option for me. And the low DPI would make my eyes bleed anyway. I was also not going to buy a big laptop with a shallow display, so a netbook or an ultraportable was the only option. Preferrably a cheap netbook, as I wouldn't want to pay much for the crap that you get as laptop displays. But netbooks are not significantly more powerful than the T43... so X20[01] it was, as I need the pointing stick. Fortunately you can get a little-used demo machine on Ebay for a somewhat more reasonable price than the list price. For idling use - random web surfing, etc. - even the 12" shallowscreen dimensions suffice, but viewing PDFs is painful as expected due to the lacking vertical dimensions of the screen. And no photo-editing, etc., can be done thanks to the piss-poor quality of the display. At least my ears love the computer with its SSD, when my eyes don't... (Well, ok, that turned out to be some kind of substitute for a new non-blog entry, and a waste of time. Just to show you suckers that I'm sticking to Windows.)
