a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1389 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The day Facebook was diagnosed with Stage 4 terminal cancer

    and not just because it's unfamiliar but because shit breaks constantly, configuration is hard to get to, the update mechanism is downright sadistic, usability in most applications (consumer or not) is often questionable at best, yada yada yaa.

I have a hockey puck. It takes fifteen drivers. If it doesn't update properly you have to packagerape the download, extract a .bat file, thrash around in the registry, then run each driver individually, restarting after each one. If any of the fifteen don't work, nothing works.

Windows is a Galapagos operating system. Unfortunately much of the world runs on a remote island in the Atlantic.





orbat  ·  1389 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Galapagos – being a remote smattering of volcanic islands in the middle of nowhere – at least has plenty of redeeming features like being a remote smattering of islands in the middle of nowhere, and it's something I'd personally want to experience.

Windows seems more like the creepy uncle of operating systems. Everybody knows about the scandals, has probably been personally subjected to abuse (like you with your mouse), nobody really likes them much less actually wants to have anything to do with them, but you're sort of expected to get along because that's just how things work and you don't have much choice. Every Christmas you grit your teeth and pour another glass of wine, carry on.

A friend of mine who's also an old-timey IT nerd does all his Serious Computer Stuff™ on macOS or Linux but has a Windows setup for gaming, and he jokes about the fact that with Windows, reinstalling the OS is pretty much "Tuesday". And here's me with my current setup which is based on a backup image that I've been using for almost 10 years old now; while I've obviously updated the OS and hardware (but not too often…) along the years, I'm not sure I've ever had to do an actual reinstall in OS X / macOS. This despite the fact that the disk image has absolutely archaeological accumulations of cruft in it that I'm honestly a bit astonished that some combination of obscure config files I've modified over the aeons to do god knows what to who knows what hasn't triggered enough edge cases to make the OS just give up and die. I mean, parts of this image have been with me since before Apple moved to Intel hardware which was like in 1875

kleinbl00  ·  1389 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh don't worry if you do have to reinstall the OS god help you. Especially if it's old.

You need to throw it into rescue mode, set the clock to 2011 or some shit and then it'll let you download Lion. If you don't know the clock trick you get to spend half a day finding the clock trick. Sofaking stupid.