Oracle is being Oracle, claim people who can't do anything without Oracle.

Well, they needed the study for that.

You could have also asked any long-term power-users from the times of dial-up Internet.

Back then I ran a NAT + Squid web proxy + custom ad-cutting rules in Squid, and it was reducing the amount of traffic by pretty hefty margin. In fact, it was so much, that some ad-laden web sites were actually becoming responsive. And no endless "Waiting for ..." messages in the status bar. (Granted, pretty quickly the ad agencies invested in the capacities and stopped being the bottleneck, but still they were a huge drain on the bandwidth.)

Today, I use AdBlock with rather long list of JavaScript blocking rules. Makes some unusable web-sites actually useful. Previously it was the limited bandwidth of the modem lines. Today it is literally seconds some websites take to render (while CPU is at 100% load; that actually bothers me more). The only problem that in the past I could reliably block the offenders, today I cannot: JavaScript and HTML5 shit is totally different ballpark and at times I wish all the hipster "web-developers" would just die.

Well, yes, annoyed is an alternative to bored.

A fellow AHK user here too.

Frankly, I never had this kind of problems under Linux.

For simple reason that on Linux virtual desktops are standard feature since early days, and allow you to manage any number of applications, spread any number of desktops.

Better yet, they allowed since early days to have literally a direct keyboard shortcut to the desired application (or combination of applications): a shortcut to switch to the virtual desktop where the application is running. (For which Win-<n> is really a poor substitute.)

On Windows, you have everything packed on single screen, into a single task bar. Anything helping to manage this mess helps. But on Linux, the problems the tricks solve often have better solutions or simply non-existent.

But sure as hell, AHK on Linux would have been nice. But I mostly use it on Windows to "fix" the "broken" applications. E.g. I can play/pause VLC with a mouse click on the video, something I would definitely miss after the move to Linux. (But it is not all that bad. There are also GUI automation tools under Linux: Autokey (an attempt to reimplement the AHK on Linux), wmctrl, xdotool.)

From security perspective, the small code base is an advantage of its own.

Support for limited subset of encryption protocols is also a benefit of its own. E.g. OpenSSL still supports MD5 hashes and would happily use them if one forgets to blacklist them.

Man, I do Unix (and shells) for something like 15 years now. Before that 5 years Windows.

From all your words I can see that you simple failed to grasp what Unix shell is.

Which is the whole point of the suckage of the PowerShell.

And the quirky syntax, as if they wanted to make sure that the developers would suffer just like they did with VB.

I did actually handled PowerShell, though stupid security policies make it a non-starter in enterprise and limit its usefulness to developer workstations. You can't run PS1 files out of box == Universally useless.

Otherwise, I have failed to see anything new in the PowerShell beside the retarded reinvention of the "host VB".

They had a clean start - a rare and real chance to do it right - and they still have came up with that atrocity.

And even at the VB emulation, the Perl with Win32::OLE beats PowerShell handily. Because it is real programming language and the Win32::OLE gives pretty much unlimited access to every Windows capability.

LOL. Heard. Tried. Dismissed it. Definitely a tool for VB aficionados.

Anyone comparing a Unix shell to PowerShell is either illiterate or hasn't mastered the Unix shell. (Especially Bash, which not only Turing complete (aka "real programming language") but in recent version even supports the associative arrays. IMO redundant, but nice.)

It's not the look of the user interface. It is about how the different user interfaces change what information is accessible via them.

Even your PowerShell, for example, when working with files, as retarded as that whole idea is, provides much much more meta data to crunch compared to the GUI of the (file) Explorer. But PowerShell, no matter how hard you try, can't display the thumbnails of the image files.

Not so fast.

Under Linux, a terminal with the standard shell is immensely powerful tool.

On Windows there is simply no alternative. And if you use the huge big name tool - PhotoShop or Visual Studio - then the OS is useless to you anyway, since Windows provides only bare/no tools for the specialized tasks. And the big tools tend to eventually reimplement huge chunks of the OS inside of them, making the user often oblivious to the OS.

On Linux, you (can) have bunch of command line tools. And you can do (and automate) one hell out of literally any specialized (or generic) task using the same OS interface: the shell.

Taking DTP as an example, one of the first times I have seen Linux outside my office was a publishing agency. They had used the GIMP scripting interface from the command line to automate processing of the huge batches from the photoshoots. (PhotoShop gained the batch capabilities much much later.)

Under Windows, it might be true that seeing the OS means you are doing something wrong or inefficiently. But under Linux, the OS is a huge bonus.

Nah. Win10 looks like the modern GNOME3 desktop: beatiful as a hand-drawn picture, but just as useful.

DTP was always a branch on its own. Most of the time you just start PhotoShop/etc, and pretty much never switch to another application. I'm not sure how Win8 could have improved (or changed) your workflow, because you rarely see the OS anyway.

In a way, it is similar to the Internet surfing workflow. The only time you see or use the OS is to start the browser. After that, everything is done inside the browser, which is largely OS independent and can be used to the same effect under literally any OS.

Welcome addition. Who knows, probably Win20 would finally allow users to configure system keyboard shortcuts. Then it would be almost at parity with Linux of 15 years ago.

Interfaces are dumbed down for touch UI. That's the main problem.

Application are also getting increasingly dumber and dumber. Because from perspective of some, if you can't make feature "beautiful" for the touch UI, then there is no point in providing the feature.

The modern OSes, including Win10, as if competing who can make a bigger clusterfuck out of the UI.

Some say it is because of the touchscreen support. But in my experience it sucks even more with the touchscreen. Unless you play movies or listen to music. Because even moderately involved browsing (say going through the bug tracking) is already rather tedious.

At least under Linux, I can replace the UI with something user-friendly like Xfce or LXDE. Useless with touchscreen - but fully usable with the mouse and not fucked up.

And even at that - legal boring stories: USA company comes to another market and ignores the local laws; but drat, USA can't bomb it to ruin provisionally, because unfortunately they are both members of the NATO. Oh tragedy.