Will there ever be a decent alternative to Windows?

[Agathon]

Nope. The Skinny Mac is the original. It was a beige all-in-one box, with a floppy slot, a small monochrome monitor, and 64K RAM (or was it 128K)? I forgot.

OK. I thought you were talking about something else.

Hot Dog was cool. I am not sure if we are talking about the same thing, though

I meant Windows 3.1's Hot Dog Stand theme. Surely the vilest theme ever to exist.

[i]Hot Dog[/q] for the System 80 was a pretty weird game though.

[Agathon]

BTW

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/ballmerwindows.wmv

[Agathon]

Oh and... now we know why the gay guys love Windows.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Agathon
I meant Windows 3.1's Hot Dog Stand theme. Surely the vilest theme ever to exist.

You have to mention it don't you?

I thought it was eradicated from my memory. Argh, my poor eyes!

[Agathon]

Still better looking than Luna, though.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by BeBro
Doors

At least it plays the song "The End" when you have to reinstall.

[Sikander]

I hated the Mac when I first encountered it at a university computer lab. I just wanted to type up some things and print them out. I was familiar with Dos machines and CPM machines and knew how to find out what programs were on those sorts of machines and run them.

Now I was confronted by an ugly R2D2 looking piece of sh!t with a miniscule monitor and some sort of icon on its screen. There was no place to type anything. There was nothing to read on the screen and clicking the mouse on the picture did nothing useful (I later learned that the picture was supposed to represent a trash can). I felt as though I had been transported back in time to the era where hieroglyphics were the norm and alphabets were not invented yet. A superior interface method (the keyboard) was largely replaced by an inferior method (the mouse).

Now of course Microshaft has gone along with the GUI wave. It works fine for organizing data on the screen if properly implemented (as it was in many CPM and DOS programs before the GUI existed on the PC), but the real problem is the mouse. It is very slow and wastes an immense amount of energy to use, and most of the time it is being used to do something that the keyboard does better. When properly designed, interfaces which support the keyboard are blazingly efficient. But unfortunately it is very common these days for such support to be completely missing from programs. Now we have the worst of both worlds, where we have to switch regularly between the keyboard and the mouse. The mouse is simply inadequate for many actions (such as text entry) while the keyboard is often inadequately supported by developers.

[Urban Ranger]

Asher - have you tried ubuntu?

[Q Classic]

ubuntu, a debian based distro. it's supposed to be good.

unfortunately, it doesn't have portage.

(though you can install it... )

[Asher]

No, haven't tried it.

I'm going to give Gentoo 2005.0 for AMD64 a shot when it's out.

Any ETA?

[St Leo]

Hot Dog Stand:

[Sava]

that's ugly

[Urban Ranger]

Asher - ubuntu supposedly have good hardware support.

Originally posted by Q Cubed
ubuntu, a debian based distro. it's supposed to be good.

unfortunately, it doesn't have portage.

(though you can install it... )

Vidalinux does

[Q Classic]

vidalinux, a gentoo-based binary distro.

already heard about it.

[Urban Ranger]

It looks nice, though, combining the power of Portage with a GUI. It's like installing a stage 3, but with a more automated installer.

[Q Classic]

it uses redhat's anaconda to install.

[Urban Ranger]

It looks like the best bits are merging together, which is what should happen.