Because Shiny Things Are Fun - The New New Windows v Linux Thread

At the time I worked by a internet pc vendor, I have made the experience, that it is never a good idea, to put faster RAM then DDR3-1333 into a AMD system, if you think about upgrading your RAM to 8GB in the future. We had problem over problem with this combinations. Go for DDR3-1333, and you will be on the safe side, the performance drease is not even feelable.

I have an 8 gig Phenom-II system with DDR3-1600 that is overclocked to about 1715 MHz. Works fine, rock solid. I also changed the latencies to 8-8-8-24 from the stock 9-9-9-24 (or some such)

The performance increase over the stock 1333 MHz is about 1.5-2% for the vast majority of things and as high as 9% or so in some very specialized situations.

I see no reason why DDR3 1600 shouldn't be used in that kind of system.

Originally Posted by Kenny_Strawn Please also note that both the Debian package and the RPM are very poorly designed package formats.

That's one of the reasons I'm sticking to Arch. As a brand new distro independent of Debian or Red Hat, it has its own package manager, and it's much better.

All it is is just a gzip or xz compressed tar archive of the files, plus a metadata file called .PKGINFO. That's it. No strange archive formats, no archives in archives, no multiple metadata files, just simple.

Also, as opposed to Debian's dpkg, dpkg-dep, apt, apt-get, apt-cache, etc. there is just one utility: pacman.

Frankly I find the bashing of Microsoft rather boring. Also I have used quite a few flavors of Windows, stretching back from Win3.11 For Workgroups. The best Windows experience I ever had (wasn't XP, pun intended), but it was under Windows NT 4 Workstation and 2000Pro.

I only used W7 a little bit but I don't quite like the layout. If whenever I do have to use W7 more often, I am hoping that I can at least change things to resemble the more classic feel of WindowsNT. Luckily when XP came out, you could still change things to make XP feel more like classic NT when you press ctrl-alt-del you get the classic NT dialog box, or the classic ctr-alt-del to login; I just don't like the new login used in XP and 7.

P.S.

It seems I am not the only one who has more fond memories of NT, let alone it is another Slacker -> http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/how...orkstation.htm

Originally Posted by Jeebizz Frankly I find the bashing of Microsoft rather boring. Also I have used quite a few flavors of Windows, stretching back from Win3.11 For Workgroups. The best Windows experience I ever had (wasn't XP, pun intended), but it was under Windows NT 4 Workstation and 2000Pro. I only used W7 a little bit but I don't quite like the layout. If whenever I do have to use W7 more often, I am hoping that I can at least change things to resemble the more classic feel of WindowsNT. Luckily when XP came out, you could still change things to make XP feel more like classic NT when you press ctrl-alt-del you get the classic NT dialog box, or the classic ctr-alt-del to login; I just don't like the new login used in XP and 7. P.S. It seems I am not the only one who has more fond memories of NT, let alone it is another Slacker -> http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/how...orkstation.htm

You can do that in W7, change it to classic.

The Arch packages actually have two metadata files (.PKGINFO and .INSTALL; the latter is a script to configure post-installation actions), but Debian (and also RPM, if I'm not mistaken) actually has a whole directory in the top level of the archive dedicated to metadata files.

In general I do like the Arch package manager very much. However, other aspects of Arch (such as having to manually rebuild the initrd every time you transfer the system to different hardware, the BSD-style init, and configuration file templates that you have to manually edit instead of ready-built configuration files throughout the system) can be rather annoying.

Originally Posted by leopard You can do that in W7, change it to classic.

Can I still have my classic 'press ctrl-alt-del to login' as well as the ctrl-alt-del bringing up the old school dialog box?:

http://www.viterbo.edu/general.aspx?ID=31570

Frankly that is the only way I can 'tolerate' the new versions of Windows, is if I can still go back to the older (and frankly in my opinion better way) of doing things under Windows, classic NT.

Heh, that's exactly why I love Arch. BSD-style init rocks, and I love the rc.conf file. I'm thinking about selling my MacBook Pro (if I can) and buying myself a Dell Latitude E6410 so I use Linux easily again.

I miss Linux. I want to be able to start helping people in the technical forums again.

Originally Posted by Jeebizz Can I still have my classic 'press ctrl-alt-del to login' as well as the ctrl-alt-del bringing up the old school dialog box?: http://www.viterbo.edu/general.aspx?ID=31570 Frankly that is the only way I can 'tolerate' the new versions of Windows, is if I can still go back to the older (and frankly in my opinion better way) of doing things under Windows, classic NT.

That's standard in W7. It looks a lot different, but has the same idea and options.

I don't know if you can get that exact style though. I never tried to do that.

Oohh, yea that is actually what I was alluding to. Even in XP I disabled the crappy 'new look' and went back to the old 9x style, I mean why mess up a good thing?

Originally Posted by Kenny_Strawn configuration file templates that you have to manually edit instead of ready-built configuration files throughout the system) can be rather annoying.

Actually, I believe this is supposed to be one of Arch's strengths: you get what is basically a blank slate that you can shape into whatever you want. I like it this way...of course, I've done quite a bit of configuring of my system over time, and I'd definitely like to keep it that way, but just the fact that you have the freedom to configure it however you want (e.g. as a desktop, a server, a media center [if you have the patience], etc.) is good enough for me.

One thing I will say, though, is that it is a bit of a pain if you screw up your rc.conf...just yesterday I had done a pacman -Syu update which came with a new set of init scripts. When I tried rebooting, I noticed things were going slower than usual, so I then tried rolling back the initscripts package to the previous version. Stupid me didn't realize this would mean overwriting my rc.conf. Luckily pacman makes backups of rc.conf, inittab, and rc.local as .pacsave files, so I was able to restore my configs from that.

Speaking of which, that is one reason I don't like Windows. It changes too much from version to version.

Originally Posted by Jeebizz Frankly I find the bashing of Microsoft rather boring. Also I have used quite a few flavors of Windows, stretching back from Win3.11 For Workgroups. The best Windows experience I ever had (wasn't XP, pun intended), but it was under Windows NT 4 Workstation and 2000Pro. I only used W7 a little bit but I don't quite like the layout. If whenever I do have to use W7 more often, I am hoping that I can at least change things to resemble the more classic feel of WindowsNT. Luckily when XP came out, you could still change things to make XP feel more like classic NT when you press ctrl-alt-del you get the classic NT dialog box, or the classic ctr-alt-del to login; I just don't like the new login used in XP and 7. P.S. It seems I am not the only one who has more fond memories of NT, let alone it is another Slacker -> http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/how...orkstation.htm

I still have a functional NT4 virtual machine and when I started with Linux, it was a dual boot with NT4. I still have a functional NT4 partition on this system, which I keep because some of the data remains valid. My booting organization no longer includes the capability to boot this NT4 system, though.

I still use a Windows 2000 virtual machine every day. I like it a lot better than NT4; NT4 was somewhat unrefined and Win2K improved a lot of things. Some of my business administration is still done in Win2K and Wordperfect 8, and my Win2K VM functions as a server for the rest of my LAN (including all my other VMs), sharing out some partitions that are NTFS so that the other Windows systems (all but one are VMs) can access that data.

In fact, at this moment, my Linux workstation has 3 VMs running; that Win2K installation and two copies of OpenSUSE 11.3 64 bit.

Originally Posted by leopard Speaking of which, that is one reason I don't like Windows. It changes too much from version to version.

Yeah, it almost turns into a whole different OS sometimes.

And that's one of the strengths of Linux over Windows: Linux constantly gets improved, but it's always the same core OS and if there are any big changes, you can always recompile the source code of all your apps (try that with your proprietary Windows apps!).

Originally Posted by jiml8 I still have a functional NT4 virtual machine and when I started with Linux, it was a dual boot with NT4. I still have a functional NT4 partition on this system, which I keep because some of the data remains valid. My booting organization no longer includes the capability to boot this NT4 system, though. I still use a Windows 2000 virtual machine every day. I like it a lot better than NT4; NT4 was somewhat unrefined and Win2K improved a lot of things. Some of my business administration is still done in Win2K and Wordperfect 8, and my Win2K VM functions as a server for the rest of my LAN (including all my other VMs), sharing out some partitions that are NTFS so that the other Windows systems (all but one are VMs) can access that data. In fact, at this moment, my Linux workstation has 3 VMs running; that Win2K installation and two copies of OpenSUSE 11.3 64 bit.

Yea 2KPro had more improvements, particularly USB support. Also if I can remember, under NT4, you had to create a FAT16 partition for boot purposes, you couldn't boot NT4 right off NTFS (at least I couldn't, maybe I kept doing something wrong? ), but even in 2KPro you could create NTFS only partition, and boot it without issue. Oh and support for FAT32 in 2KPro as well.

IMO I kinda wish MS kept NT separate from the 'average' user. To me with XP, they began to turn NT into something it was not designed for in the beginning, since the average user was migrated from DOS-based Windows, to the NT kernel. NT was purely workstation or server. Microsoft should have made a different OS from the ground up for those wanting only play games, along with other multimedia functions and left NT alone as purely workstation or server. Oh well.

http://en.windows7sins.org/