Another rant

[Liam Proven]

On 17 November 2017 at 23:59, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Arch and Gentoo like to promote themselves as not for noobs but it's
> more of macho posturing than reality. But what does this have to do
> with maintaining a wiki? Also the Gentoo wiki's far less useful than
> it used to be. Given that it's more complex than Arch, this doesn't
> fit into your complex-distribution-means-good-wiki, if that's what you
> meant with the above.

Archo doesn't even have an installation program.

Both make no particular effort to be easy to install or to configure.

Therefore, since you have to hand-construct your own installation from
a command line, copious documentation is a _necessity_. The projects
_must_ provide a lot of instructions since their extreme
customisability, with users rolling their own installation by hand, is
the entire point of their existence.

Whereas Ubuntu goes as far as it can the other way. It asks as few
questions as it can. It even tries to work out your timezone and
localisation automatically. So, far less documentation is needed, as
the company is trying to make it as easy as possible.

Fedora is more complex. SUSE is more complex than that. Etc. There's a
continuum.

> Thanks. I didn't know that there were so many versions. I hope that
> they fix their interface schizophrenia sooner rather than later.

It does seem to be gradually getting simpler. This is long overdue.

> I've wiped out the Windows partitions. I was kicking just its tyres
> when I first received the laptop.

Fair enough. With disk space being cheap & plentiful now, I always
keep it around so I have something to re-flash the BIOS with and so
on.

Win10 is a work in progress. Even Win8 was, and although it's seldom
talked about, the relationship between Win8 and Win10 is like that
between Vista and Win7.

Vista (NT 6.0) == Windows 8.0  (NT 7) -- new UI, significant internal
reorganisation
Vista SP 1 == Windows 8.1 -- fixes up a lot of omissions and issues
with the first release
Windows 7 (NT 6.1) == Windows 10 -- same core OS, given a facelift.
Controversial features removed (e.g. Vista's Gadgets sidebar removed;
Win8's Start Screen removed).

MS has said Win10 is the last ever release.

As such, new products are coming, more often than before, but they're
not _called_ new products. They're not even called service packs any
more. They're "updates", even though they re-install the OS and leave
the old install backed up in a subfolder.

It's currently on the 5th such update, coming at very approximately
6-monthly periods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Updates_and_support

Not all have been as significant as each other, though.



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