And everyone here lives in a constant fear that they might get into an application crash because they can't handel their program with a different ui in sudden situations. :rolleyes: Not to mention I frequently use, on a daily basis, XP, ME, 98 and linux and I get along fine. Sure I'll do something like control-alt-f2 in windows because of the different ui, and you know what windows does to that. It sends a ton of high voltage/amp energy to the monitor which glows red and explodes and sends electric beams directly into my eye. :eek:

Other than speed, and restriction... If all you allow/have/use are KDE apps, then you are missing a world of choice out there:
www.freshmeat.net

Cool

That's gotta hurt :jawa:

:D

Cool

That must hurt a lot, Darin :)

Here's a less benign slip-up, then. Typing up a long reply in an online form, I typoed and wanted to delete the word. The shortcut for that in Windows is Ctrl-Backspace. I hit Ctrl-W. Try it sometime. Just make sure it's an especially long reply, and you're in a hurry.

Let's see if I understand the situation here:
Basically, you're agreeing with me that the difference in UI does cause problems. The disagreement we're having is more on whether those difficulties are important enough to be fixed.

Is that right?

What is there to be fixed? Just because the shortcuts are different between two UIs doesn't mean that one is better than the other and so the 'defective' one needs fixing. Taking the examples given above, wouldn't that mean that Microsoft should create a shortcut key of CTRL+ALT+F2 to open up a fullscreen dosbox? The action the user took caused a problem (exploding monitor :D), so the software (Windows) must therefore be defective and should be fixed? To take another example, most people are familiar with the number pads on telephones. The number pad on computer keyboards is the opposite way up, so does that mean that one of them is defective and should be fixed? No. It doesn't cause problems to the user if and when they are used to it. I personally find using Windows excruciating because I have become so used to my shortcuts. I use the Sawfish window manager, where I have 6 virtual screens setup and I switch between them with CTRL+ALT+\ or z. I can't do this in Windows and it annoys me. I'm not complaining about it though. When I have to use Windows, I just get used to it - not having multiple desktops, etc. It's not a problem.

ctrl back and ctrl w both delete the last word, so what? I am agreeing that a different ui does cause problems, but no enough to have all the problems fixed. You should expect things to be different, its a different os.

*hands Darin a clue*
Ctrl-W in Windows closes the active window.

oh, well don't do that then. :)

Are we still on topic? Just curious.

no, not at all really, but this thread is growing so fast that in the last hour I have gotten about 10 notices that people have replied to this thread. :)

Which topic?

:)

Of course, it's all windoze/linux related, differences, things that need changing, things that don't, it's all related somehow ;)

Cool

Okay, let's unconfuse the issue a bit.

1) It looks like we're in agreement that differences between interfaces do cause difficulties, whatever the importance and level of those difficulties may be.

2) I have no objections whatsoever to having different UIs for different programs.

3) I object to having needlessly different UIs. For example, BBcodes use square brackets instead of the greater-than, less-than HTML standard. There's a good reason -- BBcodes supercede HTML and must have a way of distinguishing the code from other tags. The reason is security.

Back to Mozilla under GNOME/Sawfish.

To navigate using arrows: arrow keys OR numpad.

To select text using arrows: Shift+arrow keys. Shift+numpad produces numbers, instead.

To select entire words using arrow keys: Ctrl+Shift+arrow keys. Ctrl+Shift+numpad does shit-all.

To browse one page forward/back: Alt+Numpad. Alt+arrow keys does shit-all.

Give me one good reason for this internal inconsistency.

Oh, and Thymox, physical objects are a whole different story. Physical objects have certain affordances and visual ques which lack in a severely multi-modal environment like the computer.

Yeah, yeah, I should take this to an IRC channel. What can I say? It's my day off :)

(I think I'll update my profile to say "professional troll")

PS. I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting useful stuff out of this:

So far:
1) Xandros as recommended distro for newbies.
2) KDE as recommended DE for newbies.
3) peoplepc (and possibly, Dell) is a place to get a machine pre-loaded with linux.(Dell used to, as mentioned by Ricdave)
4) Mandrake has the automount pretty much built-in. This is helpful for newbies, too.
5) Thymox can drive rh and lh cars equally well. :)

Dell? Those come with XP on them no matter what.

Whoa, and neither does peoplepc. That's what I was trying to say ;) Those people need to allow this as an option...

:)

Cool