Do we need Win95/98/Me support?

[Kagamin]

On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 12:31:28 UTC, Kiith-Sa wrote:
> You click a "Additional Drivers" button, that will just pop up 
> as
> a notification if you have an AMD or NVidia GPU. Then you click 
> at
> the driver you want to install, and click "Activate". And maybe 
> "Ok"
> or "Close" after that.That is the way it works both on Ubuntu 
> and on Mint.
>
> It's not easy to miss.

Dunno, Driver manager (or something like that) showed me an empty 
list saying I don't have proprietary drivers installed. Don't 
know how to find prepackaged drivers. Missed it in both Mint and 
Ubuntu.

> You don't install the driver from NVidia's site - you have the 
> newest
> driver prepackaged already.
>
> In general, on Linux you don't install software by searching on 
> the net,
> you use the package manager/software center GUI or do "apt-get 
> install program".

Well, the complicated thing is that my notebook is new and it has 
latest hardware: support for GeForce GT 520MX was added to driver 
285, but nvidia-current is 280. I don't know what this "support" 
means; if vdpau will work with prepackaged driver, that's great.

> That said, it is true that some Linux vendors have gone crazy
> trying to "reinvent the GUI". Gnome3 and Unity (Ubuntu) are 
> both tabletized
> (Win8 is also going in similar direction) and both much more 
> inefficient than Gnome2 was.

Wikipedia mentions that Ubuntu has an issue with high power 
consumption. I'm not sure whether it's my problem, but they try 
to address it in Ubuntu 12 using very nifty tricks like putting 
USB controllers to low power mode and hunting down software with 
frequent wakeups and filing bugs against them. They don't 
consider GUI system as a culprit at all.

> That said, KDE, which used to be bloated, has been optimizing 
> quite singificantly over the last few releases, and seem to 
> plan to continue doing it.
> KDE however always comes with some useless "Social desktop" 
> features enabled
> by default, which kill the performance (and make people think 
> KDE is still bloated - great PR, KDE!). Anyway, once that is 
> disabled, at least on my notebook Ubuntu/KDE is faster than 
> Win7.
>
> XFCE is even faster, and is getting full-featured - it doesn't 
> have much
> visual flair, though, if you want that.

I don't have performance issues, I have high CPU load in idle 
mode. I'm currently on win7 and the cooler seems to be off, in 
Ubuntu and Mint the cooler worked at high speed and quite warm 
air was coming from the radiator.

> From my experience, OpenSUSE is now both stable and friendly to
> Windows power users. Ubuntu/Mint are more oriented towards 
> complete newbies
> or people who only browse/use office suite.

The wubi option is quite amasing, I hesitate to go for 
full-fledged dual-boot installation.