Thanks taylor_venable!

I appreciated your answer ^^. It is true, without hacks or third part programs, Windows can't easily be customized. That leads us to another problem as posted by aysiu:

You see, if MS has included all the tools necessary to customize the Windows Interface, everybody would be saying that Microsoft is trying to kill third part companies. When MS included a Firewall on XP, everybody said that. When they created the Spyware removal tool, the crowd said something about MS trying to kill applications such as Addaware. Until IE 6.0, everybody was saying how bad it was, especially for the lack of features such as tabbed-browsing. IE 7.0 came out and guess what? It is now a Firefox "rip-off" according to many for adding tabs...

No matter what happens, MS will be seen as a bad, evil, money grabber company. While MS is no angel, they are in a difficult position and they will never be able to satisfy every person on the planet. Jesus did not do it, Linux did not do, Bush certainly could not do it... But I found very unfair when peoples blame MS for no apparent reason, or at least without carefully analyzing why that feature is or not on Windows...

But if it were not for some of the things Linux apps has done M$ would still not have the features they have. My fiance said she hated tabs and wouldn't have any of it. She just got a notebook, guess what, it has tabs. She thought tabs was a Linux pest and now she has them too. I'm just glad Linux leads the pack. Let M$ follow the leader.

The thing I dislike most about M$ is the way they run their business then the OS. I don't think I could sleep as good as Billy does if I done people the way he has.

My $.02 worth, again.

I agree with you about the double-standard around Windows bundled software, but I'm not even talking about including tools. I'm just talking about the way the interface is structured--deliberately making it difficult for people to change.

Gnome and KDE are built in such a way as to make the interface easy to modify. All icons are .png, .svg, or .xpm files in logical places (/usr/share/icons), not weird embedded and hard-to-find .ico or other files.

Changing the Start Menu button should be a mere matter of doing a find/replace for an image file. It is not.

I think including some more themes or free themes that are easily installable instead of asking people to pay for Themes Plus! would not give them any criticism any more than they get criticism for a GUI that allows people to change their desktop wallpaper.

I see where you're coming from there; that makes sense, but the level of this "Microsoft is killing the third-party developers" sentiment depends somewhat on the kind of support being included. It seems to me that there's an important difference between UI configuration and firewalls / malware removal tools.

The level of anti-Microsoft sentiment regarding third-party companies also depends on what kind of unique coupling the new MSFT software has with the underlying OS or with other MSFT tools. I think if Microsoft completely changed the way the GUI is handled, then created a GUI configuration tool that does the same thing WindowBlinds does, I'm sure StarDock and others would be very upset. But if they merely introduced some free tool that still allowed WindowBlinds to work for those who wanted it, the playing field would obviously be more level, and less people would wind up hating MSFT at the end of the day.

Plus the real big argument came from the courts; and it was not because MSFT creates these products, but the fact that they bundle them with the OS, which inherently causes people to pay for them if they want Windows. And since most people want to use what they buy, they just use what comes with Windows, and that's what causes decline in third-party profits. You could take this argument then, and use it to say that "clearly, MSFT shouldn't bundle UI configuration tools with Windows." But again, in my mind, there's a big difference between changing the GUI and keeping evil hax0rz out of your computer.

I agree with you there, it's certainly hard to please people. Actually, didn't Firefox get the tabs idea from Opera?

True, indeed. And I appreciate your ability to defend what could be considered (at least in this place) a somewhat indefensible organization. But I wasn't trying to smear MSFT unjustly; the original question was "But if you had to use windows, what features to [sic] you wish it had?" I suppose from the terseness of my answer, it may have seemed like I was crudely bashing Windows' GUI, but in reality I was merely trying to succinctly state what I think are its shortcomings. And I still don't think it would hurt MSFT that much to make some UI customization tools available with the core OS, even in light of your argument regarding third-party utilities.

But I guess that in the end it doesn't affect me that much. I choose not to use Windows because I have found an alternative that works better for me, on every front that I need. And that's probably the moral of the story - use what you like best. I agree with that wholeheartedly; after all, I'm a BSD user who hangs out constantly on a website called LinuxQuestions. But it's also healthy to have debates about such things as Windows vs Linux, and Linux vs BSD, and such things; even if it's just from a sociological, community-based standpoint.

with linux when something breaks, the system atleast tries to tell you what broke, how , when and all the related stuff it can muster up so that you can google and try fix the problem yourself. It gives you a sense of purpose. On the other hand, with windows, you wouldn't know. It just plain dies and its logs are damn useless. M$ wants people to come back to them again and again, their vision though is worthless. They want people to come back to them for support all the time even when they can fix the problem themselves if M$ has given them proper support through their os in the first place. The lack of substantial error msgs void in both meaning and purpose has become a trademark of M$. On a console screen with no mouse support- the error message is something like this-"The system has encountered ... Click Ok to continue" and "Keyboard failure: press f4 to continue.."
The often misleading messages are also a prime factor. The problem develops in one portion of the system and the error messages point to completely wrong direction. Instead of knowledge, experience counts in such situations. If you have faced the problem before and worked it out somehow then you are lucky else M$ error msgs sends you to a futile tour to a different universe than you are supposed to go looking for an answer.
I have used M$ products/os for quite a while and they are quite good till they are running smooth but when one chain breaks (because of virus, bad apps) all hell breaks loose!

I have had quite an experience with win systems. I have often found myself in situation when common sense tells you exactly how to solve the problem, you try and it should have solved it but didn't. The plain method of solving such problem is REBOOT!

This is called the megasuperthread, but can a moderator somehow absorb all the other non-megasuperthreads into this one?

I'm talking about these:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=293690
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=334161
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=292124
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=453454
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=455777
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=116958

As a relatively new person to linux I have found all I need to "get anything done" is a group of supportive intelligent people to walk me through the steps it takes me to get where I am going. Some interesting projects to do with scripts or perl would probably help too. Any Ideas?

What about hat one? :)

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=260575



Cheers,
Tink

Which brings back my most favourite analogy:

If people were learning a new language and they said:
"I want Mandarin to be more like English; English is so easy!"


Cheers,
Tink

Mod Note: Get. Off. My. Internet.

Thank you.

Hi (to moderator, please move to Lin vs. Win forum if and when there is one)

I just wanted to say that it is wrong, in my opinion to
make linux windows-like. As a newbie in linux I am struggling but I know it is because I got used to being lazy minded. The power of linux is derived from sense of responsibility that linux users maintain. Windows users are people who belive in "magic wands" and I dont think we want that kind of crowd to tailor operating system that has superior security structure. Sure linux could use a better hardware configuration tool or at least good manual/tutorial already installed in new distro. It's just that I firmly belive that if linux were to go mainstream (windows like system), all those spyware, virus companies (Am I supposed to think all viruses are made by some overworked lonely hacker/attacker who hates world) will turn their attention to linux or open source project would start to disappear.
Well, what was I writing about anyway.
Signed: Computer addict with trucking problem

Linux is great.

Linux can pretty much clone everything WinXP can do and customize Linux to interact exactly and as easy as WinXP. So easy that even my grandmother can use it.

But no one have done it yet. Not everyone is interested to work for free.

There is probably a hundreds-of-messages thread about this sort of thing, but I would like to mention a few things and reraise old issues.

Linux STILL doesn't have adequate text-to-speech programs that I have found or adequate speech recognition programs that I have found. Yes, I have tried Festival. Compared to, say, TextAloud in Windows, it is pathetic. Where are the good voices? And AFAIK, there is no decent excuse for speech recognition. By the way, Windows Vista has excellent speech recognition, right out of the box. And there's Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is expensive, but it works.

However, I am using Suse 10.1 and WindowMaker and enjoying myself in Linux. It is just that I LOVE speech recognition and I LOVE text to speech, so I occasionally have to reboot and go into Windows Vista. And I HAVE TO RUN Dreamweaver, and I HAVE TO RUN Sound Forge. In other words, if I want to do anything significant besides browse the web, I have to leave Linux.

In addition, I have another problem. I can't find my Windows files. Maybe it has something to do with my running Windows Vista on the other boot. Previously, I would just point and click around and I would easily find a Windows directory or something. With Suse 10.1, I can't find my files!

So, I would LOVE to leave Windows behind and just run in Linux. Any suggestions for the above Linux limitations and problems and lacks?

see if there any speech recognition apps that could for you: http://www.linux.com/howtos/Speech-R...software.shtml

As for seeing your Vista files, have you mounted the drive or partition?

For HTML editors, Nvu is popular, check out this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=459809