Don't Ship Broken, Contemplated

[krinndnz]

Recently I've been reading a lot of Nathan Bowers. It's interesting, opinionated work that makes me look at things I'd been looking through. His most recent post is Don't Ship Broken, which isn't an in-depth post, but it's relevant to me right now. I've been working with Windows XP a lot in school. Part of this is because I'm on my way to the

Comments

[tracerj]

I'm literally just about to clear out my main system - an XP system, at that! - to stick Win7 on it. Perhaps I should document the steps I have to take for it to feel comfy. (Windows Classic look is definitely one of them. I don't need my OS to look like the interface to some bloody MMO for kids.)

[krinndnz]

That'd be neat to see!

I know I had to go back and keep editing this - I'm still poking one particular XP install, and I keep finding things where I go "ARGH why so stupid."

[silveradept]

Sounds good. Win7 will have its own share of things you do to it so as to make it into a Proper Operating System, rather than what it ships as, but as with most OSes, the really good stuff for it doesn't come out until after people have had the chance to play with it a bit. Kind of wish that MS was better about it and with each service pack/update, it would go back an add in the functionalities that the really popular third party software has been grafting on it.

[krinndnz]

I'd actually like to see MS do slightly less - I think that they've overextended a little. I think that being a supermassive corporation harms their software arm, and especially their Windows arm by demanding that the OS do absolutely everything. They would do themselves far more good by distributing some third-party tools and acknowledging that Windows should have focus. This is what linux basically does, is my impression.

[silveradept]

Ah, okay, so leaving Windows to be the core OS / Window Manager (oh, wouldn't it be nice if we could run other window managers on top of a Windows kernel...), and then letting application designers build on top of that to produce awesome things. If they do, I hope that Microsoft doesn't charge draconian fees to get into the repositories.

Or that they take a cue from their hardware buildings and package the third-party tools with the purchase of the OS.

[masstreble]

The first computer that I purchased for myself shipped loaded with Windows ME. Within sixth months, somebody hooked me up with XP. Eventually, I got it where it behaved itself, for the most part. I ended up, piecemeal, doing much of what you do with every XP machine

[krinndnz]

Well, I already have an Ubuntu server running, have for a couple of years now, that I've been using for more and more stuff. It started as just file storage and torrents, and now it's my development box.

[masstreble]

Ubuntu is a fork from Debian, so I'm not surprised. To be honest, Debian was my first Linux OS, as weird as that sounds. Ran it on my old laptop for about six months before I decided I wanted to be closer to the edge.