have seen the loatest WindowsBlinds latelly and am not happy from what i see :

even worse : the new windows Vista is sucking more and more ram and CPU capacities......and WB will add about 30/45% to this.

So, have we to place 2Gb RAM to be sure that all is well, is it what the future preserving for us?....all slow PC's go to hell and give back the Dell

i finished by abondoning the idea about installing a new shell replacement ...just because of that!!!

I advise switching to a Mac as fast as you can.

This cannot be stressed enough... switch to a Mac.  You'll be really glad you did

The alternative?  Give Linux a shot.  I've been really pleased with several of the major distros although Ubuntu holds a place in my heart for ease (make sure you run the Automatix script).

BTW:  Anyone check out the LiteStep sites lately?  Really cool stuff happening there with all the new X-modules.  Looks like Andymon and Co. have kept the whole enterprise afloat and moving.  Smashing job!

I would think about switching to mac, but there are a few things that keep me from doing it.

1) I can't game at all on a mac. All the good games are PC only.
2) I can't customize a mac after buying it.
3) Halo 2 for PC will be Vista only, so no way in hell that I will be able to run it on a mac.
4) Money
5) I like a 2 button mouse. (I have heard rumors of these existing for mac, but have never seen one)
6) I REALLY LOVE GAMING!!! (I think I said that already)
7) The Mac advertising campaign right now is made up of a ton of lies and over doing stuff. I don't like a company that does stuff like that. I have had a PC for all my life and NEVER made a pie chart on it. I have ALWAYS had FUN with my PC and never been bored with it. Also, I have never seen someone throw a computer off the desktop by tripping over the wires. In my opinion, if you have your wires that exposed, you deserve to have your computer fall off a table.

Rich, this is nothing against you and your mac. I have all the respect in the world for you, I just thik the mac campaign is a little janky 

Well haxer : Jenky probably, but some of the reasons you give are the same with me!! a tons of progs are developped to PC only!!! the same thing with games....and so on!!

But as a curious person as i am, it will be fun to give MAC i shot, as i never worked with it before, and have absolutly no idea how it works....but i really will appreciates a hour of testing with it.

For UBUNTU i found one day an E-book on the net talking about it, but never really downloaded it to see whats all about!! hope i'll test the Mac Feel if i get a new (well payed) Job 

No offense taken!!

Personally, I find Apple's ads entertaining, although there's definitely some illegitimate jabs going on in 'em.  And you're absolutely right... you want high-end gaming, you're pretty much gonna have to run Windows.  Of course, now that Macs are Intel-based, you can install Parallels and run Vista and OS X simultaneously.

I do disagree with point #2, though: that you can't customize a Mac after purchase.  If you get an iMac or a laptop, it's true, as they don't have accessible PCI or AGP slots.  However, the bulk of hardware customizations these days are USB or FireWire.  On the software side, if you wanna skin OS X, There's always Unsanity's ShapeShifter.  It's like WindowBlinds for OS X.  They've got a bunch of nice OS customizations there for OS X.

I'm still a big linux fan, though, even though I lack the technical geekery of most of the Linux set.  Linux is so infinitely more customizable than Windows ever was, although the tools to customize it are conspicuously lacking.

So in a few next years we will see the next generation of systems : DATABASE, as in movies!!

Judging by some of the stuff I've been reading recently the future is definitely Linux... but yukk! I really don't like the Gimp. If I knew a way to run PS on Linux I'd install Unbuntu today ( I'd install it anyway, but it keeps trying to overwrite my current OS even though I set up a new partition for it ~ answers on a postcard please  ).

Incidentally here's what Stephen Manes at Forbes had to say about Vista ~ http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0226/050.html

I've got Photoshop 6.0 running under Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft using WINE.  Some things look different, though, like the palette buttons at the bottom of the palettes are gone.  Seems to work fine otherwise, though... no futzing around with settings or anything.  Maybe if I did, I'd get my palette buttons back.

Oh joy, and Microsoft's forcing gamers to buy vista by making Halo 2 PC a vista only game. UGH. I just want to cry...

Bit like a bungey jump Rich.... ( actually I wouldn't mind doing a bungey jump.... stuff like that doesn't bother me, having to go through a complete reinstall does  )

Haxer, it was always M$ forced... that's why someone who ( allegedly ) nicked the code from a couple of students is the richest man in the world.

No-one understood why W95 didn't work, just as they got the bugs sorted out we were forced to have W98 on any new machine, then we were given hundreds of patches, and Win 98SE was the new "world of computing" [ to be honest it was a pretty good system... and should have been the basis for future OS's ] , then it was XP ( w98  patched ).... even that had problems!.... now we are being shunted Vista ( which all new machines in the UK are being sold with ), and it is known to be full of glitches.
In effect M$ has always been profit based, and only someone with deviuos creditation has been the benefactor!
In this country we would have hanged the bastard for his dastardry!

In fact next year, to save money, the French Govt. are going to issue thousands of students with their own plugin drive so that on arriving at school they can, plugin, login and pick up where they left off ... ergo, they can log into a database of relevant information thereby avoiding the future cost of text books. At the Elysess they have decide that the software for these drives should be Open Source. In other words not only would it give the opportunity for constant improvement, but it should theoreticaly be virus free.

My parents, not exactly the tech-savvy bunch, recently purchased a new computer with Vista on it.  They even enlisted the help of Geek Squad, or some other organization as part of the purchase to transfer over all the old stuff from an existing computer to the new one.  They said things couldn't possibly have been worse.  Apparently Vista wouldn't recognize any of the software.  They tried to install said software from scratch after uninstalling the botched versions - no luck.  With on-site tech support it took them a full week to get it running.

I'm still floored by how much M$ charges for even a basic full-install of their operating system.  Apple's got it right on the money: I can get a complete operating system for about $80.  Compare that with Vista Home Full for what is it, like $179?

I think the French Gov't has it right on the money by doing the FLASH drive thingy.  Portable apps on a thumb-drive are an incredible idea!  It's nice to see a complete government adopting it.

So many resources and even full-blown applications are web-based these days.  Couple that to the ubiquity of high-speed internet and you have a recipe for OS-independence, get your stuff on whatever system has a browser in it.

Sounds like Vista is a new adventure awaiting me. Of course, I'm only putting it on either a partition or a cheap HD.

Yep, i know, *Holy thread ressurection, Batman!*

1) Boot Camp / Parallels : Boot Camp allows you to dual-boot windows XP on intel processor macs (any new mac, pretty much.) This lets you play games at native speed. I'm not sure about the specifics of parallels, but I think it's something to do with paravirtualisation (run two operating systems AT THE SAME TIME )

4) Cost : You do pay a premium for mac hardware, but it's much better built. iMacs are very portable by desktop computer standards. MacBooks have all kinds of nice touches and don't feel clunky or flimsy like some other laptops I've used.

5) Mice : New macs ship with mighty-mice, which are two-button + scroll... thingy. Mighty mice are still really strange and I hate them, but i just bring my own USB mouse (i use a Microsoft Optical mouse i've had since forever ) You can BYO keyboard, too - the logitech k/b I use actually has marking for both windows  metakeys (ctrl, win, alt) as well as mac keymappings (ctrl, option, clover.) Pity it doesn't have *nix ctrl, alt, meta, super markings




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Wrt linux :

Photoshop : Yes, the GIMP sucks. GIMPshop sucks just as much. Photoshop is one of the few things i actually miss from windows. Apparently you can run photoshop 7.0 or photoshop CS with WINE without too much hassle - CS2 and CS3 are apparently a little more tricky. VMWare/qemu are not good solutions, at all.

Also : customising linux is a little different to customising windows. Windows customisation usually consists of 'install software Y, muck around with it' (Y = aston|windowsblinds|stylexp...). Linux customisation, as well as the aforementioned 'install and muck around' - like most other things in linux, mainly consists of 'google for FAQs on how to do this' There's also a healty dose of stumbling across nice software while looking in the repositories for other stuff... i was looking for a word processor and i found a game that consumed my life for a month or so


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[micke]
>No-one understood why W95 didn't work, just as they got the bugs sorted out we were forced to have W98 on any new machine, then we were given hundreds of patches, and Win 98SE was the new "world of computing" [ to be honest it was a pretty good system... and should have been the basis for future OS's ] , then it was XP ( w98  patched ).... even that had problems!.... now we are being shunted Vista ( which all new machines in the UK are being sold with ), and it is known to be full of glitches.
>In effect M$ has always been profit based, and only someone with deviuos creditation has been the benefactor!
In this country we would have hanged the bastard for his dastardry!

Win98 was terrible! :| The win-9x/ME branch of windows was absolutely horrible, technically. It had all kinds of fun design issues. Win XP (which descends from the NT kernel line - fwiw, NT is actually descended from BSD, courtesy of the 'do anything you want' spirit of the BSD license) is actually a really good OS, just with a lot of crap on top of it and some questionable implemenation details. I still hold that windows 2000 is the best of the lot


Wrt cost of windows - "<uni student> : you can BUY windows? I thought you could only download it from mininova!"

The cost of windows in no way represents how much it's actually worth. OSX, on the other hand, is a bit more reasonably priced.
Linux has a different kind of cost - it costs you no money, but it does demand that you spend time getting it working the way you want. If your time is worth $10 an hour, say...

AMEN!!!

Re: Linux - It's one of those things you can take as far as you want.  My kids get along just fine finding TuxPaint and their favorite games on an Ubuntu computer as they do in Windows or OSX.  My wife can install software via Aptitude easily, although the command line is daunting in her case.  S*cR*t used to complain about Ubuntu all the time, but it can't be that bad if average people can pick it up that quickly.

Tangent:  Why does everyone hate aptitude so badly?  Sure, I prefer to use "apt-get install" at the terminal to get stuff I want, but for people that are afraid of the terminal, aptitude ain't TOO bad.  It seems like a good gateway for people that want to use a computer without administering it.

You might want to read this before you commit yourself haxer... http://aaxnet.com/editor/edit043.html
I agree with Wes that the Gimp has a long way to limp before it can compete with PS... and for that reason I'm still running a slim version of XP. But I've installed PCLos so I can also get used to Linux before this system ties itself into a Gordian knot... then it's bye bye MS for me! However I still maintain that 98SE was a good OS, I ran it for years without a single glitch... however when it screwed up it did it bigtime ( I recently tried reinstalling it but during the install it comes up with a page saying the disk has a virus, and then it shuts down on me  )