"I actually think MS is changing"

I actually think you are quite wrong. Didn't they just recently manage to bribe a standards body into ratifying their totally unimplementable document standard just so they could muddy the waters and try to fool people into thinking that MS cares about standards? Even though they themselves don't even have a working implementation of their own "standard"?

I hope most geeks have better memories than geekoid here for all our sakes.

Cool. Given that slashdot readership is quite high, then the 5% of 'dotters who apparently do care will come out to be quite a large number.

Solr_Flare must be quite chuffed with that.

Well, firstly, I would think that the users of those applications would think "godamm this app is slow, maybe I'll go look for an alternative"

Hmmm, I may be wrong but I'm sure I recall MS suing camera makers for using FAT in their cameras and that was thrown out of court.

This is more about the long filename hack rather than FAT itself.

I'm sure it will end with the same result tho

"UAC basically changed Windows so that you weren't expected to run as an administrator by default"

Not really. Users still effectively run as Administrator, it's just that now UAC pops up with (on average) 17 "are you sure you want to do that?" messages every time the user clicks on something.

"Personally, I'm looking forward to desktop file sharing and synchronization, as it will mean I can stop running all these FTP servers everywhere."

Uh, FTP servers? For desktop syncing? Have you not heard of rsync?

The mind boggles.

Ummm, will you have my babies?

"They used to release as they patched, but that was even more problematic"

Translation: Admins were sick and tired of rebooting servers on a daily basis.

Rather than do the impossible and redesign their OS from the ground up to make the constant rebooting issue irrelevant, they did the only thing possible wh

Clump all their updates into bundles so that reboots were "scheduled" and admins got used to the cycle.

Unfortunately, that is true.

I've been trying to get Matrox Dual Head running with dual Acer P191w LCD's for two days straight now and can't even get a single screen to work in anything but vesa low graphics mode @800x600.

Actually, that is not entirely true. I recently discovered that if I turn off framebuffer support I can get it to work at higher resolutions but still only in 4:3 aspect ratio. Unfortunately, without Frame Buffers things like video do not work.

The latest Ubuntu release comes with the newest iteration of xorg which does away with xorg.conf completely in favour of a "everything is automagically configured by the system and you can't change things" approach, which is fine if in fact the system can make things work properly.

In cases like mine however it just plain sucks. Ubuntu fails to configure X and for the life of me I can't find any documentation that describes where the stuff that used to be found in xorg.conf is now kept in an editable text format.

Maybe oneday when this new xorg system matures and everything does indeed "just works" the Linux experience will be improved, but right now I'm actually finding myself wishing that I could still hack about in xorg.conf when i want to.

Yeah, you often hear windows fanbois telling linux fanbois that Windows is just as good as Linux because they use server 2K8 and have none of the problems that linux fanbois are wont to point at and laugh.

What none of the windows fanbois seem to want to acknowledge is that;

a) They have paid at least several hundred dollars for a copy of win2k8 or

b) They are using a pirated copy that they stole from work or dl'ed from TPB

Personally, neither one of those options really appeal to me so I'll stick with Ubuntu I think

So Optarse are volunteering for the trial eh?

I couldn't ask for a better test case really. Those cretins are so goddamn incompetent that they have not a hope in hell of getting it working to an acceptable level.

Roll on the trial I say!

P.S. Yes, I realise the NTUSER.DAT is a problem for moving the profiles rather than My Doc's, I should have proof read my post before hitting submit

"Right click My Docs and see if you can't figure out how to do that on Windows."

Been there, done that. Once you reinstall you have to go through (every user) and reinstate those "non-standard" My Documents locations manually, all the while hoping that each NTUSER.DAT file doesn't spit the dummy because something has changed in the god-forsaken clusterfuck that is the registry that it doesn't like.

No thanks.

"if you want the profile you'll have to right click my computer and change some settings in Computer Management."

You have obviously never had to re-instate a Windows box with multiple user accounts. You make this process sound easy, whereas in reality it can be a huge pita, which multiplies by the number of accounts you have to do it for.

By contrast, on Linux, you have to do . . . ummm, nothing

"On a network there is something called group policy and active directory that lets you set this for the entire domain"

Yes, well, when you have a domain at your grandmothers house please get back to us, until then you are nothing but a tosser with an overpriced MS certification looking to justify your ill-advised training investment.

"your[sic] assuming they update"

Ummm, no, I'm responding to the OP who said;

"Many people are going to shout "UBUNTU!!! They can just do the updates themselves."

and went on to recommend apple products as an alternative.

Please try and read for comprehension before posting in future.

"1.) /tmp is still under /, which he wants to mount read only "

See what the AC said or if you really want it is shit easy to symlink it to another partition.

"2.) And if /home were its own partition, does that necessarily make it immune to hard poweroffs?"

It means the whole system does not get hosed due to "Unnanounced poweroffs", just the latest "Mahjongg" save game or whatever. I'm sure you'll agree that this will lead to a lot less in the way of critical fuckups overall.