Do we need Win95/98/Me support?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Kagamin" <spam at here.lot> wrote in message 
news:wqjqzbckwmahpotnfeom at dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net...
> On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 05:30:48 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> can they? Talk about digging one's own grave. Heck, I wouldn't be 
>> surprised if Vista and Win7 (and Win8) have not only caused people to 
>> stick with XP, but also caused a lot of Win->Lin converts - I'm getting 
>> closer and closer to that myself.
>
> Well, bought new notebook recently and decided there's no difference 
> between migrating to win7 and linux, tried ubuntu 11 and linux mint 12, 
> got too bad user experience with them. Linux causes high CPU load in idle 
> mode - critical for notebooks - and that's in comparison with win7 loaded 
> with OEM crapware.

Those are "newbie" Linuxes that, by default, use GUIs[1] which are known to 
be insanely bloated. Try something more like XFCE or LXDE. (Of course, you'd 
likely have far worse first-time user experience with anything other than 
Ubuntu or Mint :/ )

But yea, I'll grant the ones you tried shouldn't be as bloated as they are, 
and you shouldn't have to resort to more minimalistic UIs. I don't know what 
it is with Linux: Ten years ago, we had XP/2k, GNOME2 and KDE3. There was 
all this blah, blah, blah about Linux being soooo much more efficient, runs 
on a damn 386 or whatever, unlike "M$ bloatware". And yet, on the same 
hardware (rather sensibly-spec'ed, too) XP/2k ran smooth as silk, and 
GNOME2/KDE3 were absolute dogs. It was absolutely *rediculous* how bad 
Nautilus was - it felt *just like* when I tried to run Win95 on 4MB RAM. 
Things in Linux-land aren't nearly as bad now, but MS still seems to have 
their "efficiency" hat on a little straighter than they do.

> If you want vdpau (dxva for linux), you'll need nvidia driver, but its 
> installation is poorly automated and I had to install it from nvidia site 
> without automatic dependency resolution. Also hit one bug with Empathy IM 
> software. So linux still seems not an option to me.

Yea, stuff that isn't 100%-OSS can be a PITA with Ubuntu :(  But I guess 
it's pretty bad though if that's a problem in Mint, too.

[1] I don't even know what the fuck to call any of them anymore. "Window 
manager", "Desktop Environment", "Shell", "Compositor", and if I'm not 
mistaken there's even some damn hybrids or some such, and some can be used 
together, some can't, bleh. They're all the same damn things as far as I can 
tell :/