Windows vs. Linux [my usage]

[GreyGeek]

Play on Linux.

Simon, are you the author of this wiki page? http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User:...f_Aragon/Linux

Amazing, Snowhog! Earlier this morning I read your post asking about Simon and POL. At noon today my 14 year old grandson called and asked me to install a game for him. The file he was trying to load was STWORsetup.exe, for Star Wars Old Republic gamine on Windows. My first thought was simply to boot into the Win7 side and run it from there, but neither he nor I remembered the Win7 login password. Also, I gave him that machine two years ago and he has not booted to the Windows side since since he got it. There would probably be tens of thousands of updates to download and install, along with multiple reboots and updating of the AV software, Not so good. My second thought was to install WINE and create a WINE bottle for it, but then I remembered POL A quick check found it in the repository and I installed it. Then I pointed it to the exe he downloaded and after the installation was complete (including downloading a bunch of windows files) the login screen was presented. My grandson entered his login credentials he had created earlier and the game took off. I was amazed at the LONG list of games that could be installed with POL. I don't know how well it played but he hasn't called back in the last two hours to complain.

[xennex81]

Nice. I should check out that POL. By the way, you can turn Windows update off. You don't need to install those updates.

[TiberiusDuval]

My 10 cents: Only reason you'll need to work beyound /home is tinkering with system. And needing to do that constantly is quite rare. At least that's my experience. Even portable mass storage can be mounted from leftmost panel of Dolphin without need to go to /media (or whatever it is nowadays).
And changing FHS is not very easy thing to do, it'll most likely break backwards compatibility, and also thoroughly wreck whatever portability Linux still has with other unix-like systems. Also quite many users would not like it. With current system for example I can figure out pretty fast where some setting file will be located (usually /etc) and so on. Do something like change it to Windows-like system, and all that old knowledge becomes obsolete.

[xennex81]

My 10 cents: Only reason you'll need to work beyound /home is tinkering with system. And needing to do that constantly is quite rare. At least that's my experience. Even portable mass storage can be mounted from leftmost panel of Dolphin without need to go to /media (or whatever it is nowadays).
And changing FHS is not very easy thing to do, it'll most likely break backwards compatibility, and also thoroughly wreck whatever portability Linux still has with other unix-like systems. Also quite many users would not like it. With current system for example I can figure out pretty fast where some setting file will be located (usually /etc) and so on. Do something like change it to Windows-like system, and all that old knowledge becomes obsolete.

So you're quite right that I want to create something new because the bare Linux system doesn't work for me. That's why I spend my time tinkering, of course. Thus far I have achieved this (not much):

* I know how to create logical volumes in LVM, how to encrypt them, how to encrypt partitions, and with a lot of effort (that stuff is not easy) how to shrink existing partitions and create new setups out of them when you already have encryption and LVM running
* I know (barely) how to use Aufs to merge two folder structures in a good way
* My preference is to mount volumes (other than root) in a /mounts structure (listing) and remount them from there to their needed locations.
....That creates doubly visible folder structures but at least you know where to put things, and if you could finetune your filemanager you could achieve an appealing display (view) of your data.
....This also makes it very easy to use Aufs to create merged directories of any kind.
* I am still met by someting (that btrfs solves) which is the fact that you cannot mount any subdirectory of a filesystem anywhere just like that. For instance, supposing you want one volume with both /home and /projects (just saying anything) but you want /home to be mounted in /, and you want /projects to be mounted under /store. It's not possible. You first have to mount the thing somewhere and then you can rebind it somewhere else (hence the previous point).

Also something: I believe a good audio/album structure for music files should use a form of virtual filesystem to display different types of organisation according to metadata. This *can* be achieved quite simply in Linux using symlinks and something that updates those symlinks. What you'd get is that you have like a single database (of music) but you can split the view according to, for instance, lossless vs lossy, genre, artist, album+artist, whatever you want. It would be very easy to create a new view -- this is of "album-contained" data. So yes, I am about development; I like to develop better systems and solutions and I come across them everywhere, I'm not short of ideas for a thousand more years of development/programming ;-).

In that way: power to the people because you can simply copy anything out of or into that virtual filesystem (if it is a real virtual filesystem) that you want and it will be correctly organized in the "true static backstore". All you need is a perfect model and then everything else is easy and not very costly.

I am seriously simply in the business of making people more effective with their time by creating software that doesn't put up blocks to what you want to achieve. Much of the software we have today is a great time-waster and this is especially true of non-commercial applicances and applications. Someone who doesn't care about the end-user generally doesn't care about the end user.

I was just on the OwnCloud forums, and ... more on that later ;-).

[xennex81]

With current system for example I can figure out pretty fast where some setting file will be located (usually /etc) and so on. Do something like change it to Windows-like system, and all that old knowledge becomes obsolete.

You're assuming that nothing good will replace it. You can see nothing on the horizon yet so you are just making up nightmares that don't really exist. Any creative endeavour starts out with nothing. And if a system is much easier you don't even NEED that old knowledge ;-).

[TiberiusDuval]

I usually follow philosophy of "if it is not broken do not fix it". Maybe something replacing FHS would be better than it, but will it be so much better that problems arising from replacing FHS are fully mitigated by such betterment?