Multithreaded I/O in the DMD compiler (DDJ article by Walter)

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:36:11 -0400, Daniel Keep  
<daniel.keep.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>> I desperately wish my computer-illiterate family members would move
>> off of Windows as well, since it would eliminate basically every tech-
>> support call I field from them.  Perhaps I've simply had good luck with
>> other OSes, but Windows is the only one I've had regular problems with.
>
> It's funny, but for me it's exactly the opposite.  I make an effort to
> switch to linux about once a year.  There's always, ALWAYS, something
> that goes horribly wrong that just can't be fixed.

I had the same experience.  Recently, I switched my laptop from XP pro to  
Fedora 10, and was pleasantly surprised:

1. The graphics look better than Windows, it's almost MAC like.  better  
Anti-aliasing of fonts.
2. The sound just "worked".  I've not had a problem from the beginning.
3. It automatically detected my wireless network card and the little  
applet that is used to configure it is better than the windows one.
4. I was disappointed in the lack of media playing support, but I found  
that there was a yum repository that has "questionably" licensed packages,  
which include support for playing almost all media formats, including WMV  
(rpmfusion.org).
5. The updates work just as cleanly as windows.

Once I had that, I'm not finding much missing.  I use Firefox in windows,  
and firefox works just fine in Linux.  It's faster, uses less memory for  
apps (my antivirus "guard" uses 70MB of virtual memory on my windows PC,  
does that make any sense at all?), and looks better.  The only thing it  
lacks is iTunes (yeah, screw you, I like iTunes :) and it doesn't support  
my printer properly (but it looks like it supports a ton of other  
printers).  I also don't really like nautilus, but I'm too lazy to try and  
install another file manager :)  BTW, does anyone know how to make  
nautilus NOT pop up a new window when you open another folder?  That  
drives me nuts!

It's been about 8 months now, and I'm still using Linux, haven't had any  
major issues.  Maybe eventually I can kill the windows install on my other  
box, and just put it on a virtual machine for games.

-Steve