Give your Raspberry Pi a retro Windows makeover with Linux RaspbianXP Professional and Linux Raspbian95

Make that pre-alpha news. You can't install anything in Windows, mouse+keyboard often fail and need a reboot, the Pi overheats so badly that it crashes and needs cooling off before it can restart again.

Having my Raspberry Pi 4's lovely Mate desktop transformed in to a flakey Windows 95 or XP Telly Tubby land, is something that I've had nightmares about!

---druck

Yep, my RPi would have an XFCE desktop if it had a desktop at all. OTOH, if somebody cooked up a desktop that looked as though it had come from the "Brazil" movie....

Patient: "Doctor, every time I do this it hurts." Doctor: "Then don't do that."

That's why the first thing I do when installing XP (I run it under VirtualBox on my Linux machines) is to go into the Control Panel, open up Display Properties, and on the Theme tab select "Windows Classic". That gets rid of the Fisher-Price look.

IMHO Windows' usability peaked somewhere between 2000 and XP, and has been doing downhill ever since. Besides, I can boot a Linux box from power-on, fire up VirtualBox, and boot XP under it, and still be ready to go faster than a native Win10 boot.

I wonder if you have some numbers, cause my expectation is that linux desktop share is very low. I would bet to something like 0.5%

usability != usage

About the inverse of the mobile device share.

I hate Windows but my Win10 machine boots very fast (5 year old athlon, os on sata ssd). Faster than a RPi.

Is the Pi booting from an SSD too, or a slow SD card?

---druck

SD card. Tested it, and it's actually about the same, sorry for misinformation. Pi4 4GB with SD card needs ~25 sec to boot to desktop and ~31 sec to reboot from/to desktop. Apparently I don't use Windows enough to remember that without registry edits or netplwiz (I looked it up) you can only boot to the logon screen ... D'oh. That was 20 sec from power on on my machine. So I guess it's a little bit slower to full desktop probably (I didn't enable boot to desktop).

still the numbers are needed to make a statement. In many regards I find windows in recent years much better than the common Linux desktops in terms of usability. And notice I use the pronoun "I" to refer to my opinion.

It's not a big deal, but I was curious if you have somewhere a data to share.

"Deloptes" wrote

| It's not a big deal, but I was curious if you have somewhere a data to | share.

I don't know where there might be figures, but my sense is that Windows still rules in nearly all business settings, Macs have greatly expanded into "consumer" markets, and Linux is generally not used as a desktop but is in wide use as a server and in science.

Those trends also represent the interests of the purveyors. Microsoft's real customer has always been business. The home market just reinforced their monopoly. And now it provides them with an unpaid army of suckers to beta test their Win10 Enterprise rental OS before they ship updates to corporate customers.

Apple have never wanted to serve business. Lord Jobs thought he was an avatar of good taste and spiritual computing, selling high-priced elegance to the unwashed masses. They buy it because it's pretty and well designed and intuitive and they believe it can't be attacked by malware.

Linux supporters, generally, don't want the system to be usable by the average doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief. If it doesn't require convoluted console incantations to make it work then "everyone and his brother" will get in and the secret geek club will be spoiled.

I'd agree with you on usability. I'm writing this on XP, which took some effort to civilize. I also have a Win7 box, but that's less well behaved, more bloated, and generally less well behaved. (By well behaved I mean that I can set it up to do what I want without an argument. I still haven't entirely succeeded in getting rid of those inane windows that come up when I insert a USB stick: "What do you want to do with this?" "This might not be formatted. Want to do that now?"

Win8 is a bloated mess but somewhat usable. Win10 is spyware beta software, which I hope I'll never have to use. But it's not easy to find motherboards and CPUs for XP anymore, so one of these days I might end up on Linux.

Actually, Raspbian has similar annoyances to Windows. It pops up the same idiotic window when I plug in a USB stick. It asks me to confirm that I want to tentatively delete something. But I'm not using it as an OS, so I don't really mind. I'm just using it to stream movies and youtube from the Internet to the TV. It works well enough for that without me needing to master the system. And it's a perfect tool for that. No data at risk. Entirely usable as an Internet browsing device. Yet at the same time it's a fullscale OS that I can control and use for any purpose, unlike the various commercial middleman, spyware devices like Roku or Firestick.

The thing that always puzzles me is that anybody thinks there is a a best desktop for everyone. That "I" of yours is *very* important IMHO. I find Windows and most common Linux desktops irritating in the extreme.

I work effectively with a little known, quirky window manager on a unix workstation - for which FreeBSD serves admirably, just about anything else irritates me more. I use an idiosyncratic selection of tools that do the jobs I need and want to do in the ways I want to do them (at work I have less choice and use what is provided). I have built this up over many years eliminating irritations from it as I went - this process is of course ongoing.

My choices certainly don't suit everyone (others have used my workstation but nobody seems to like it much or know how to do anything I don't tell them about) but they suit me very well and that is one reason why a monoculture is a bad idea.

"Ahem A Rivet's Shot" wrote

| The thing that always puzzles me is that anybody thinks there is a | a best desktop for everyone. That "I" of yours is *very* important IMHO. I | find Windows and most common Linux desktops irritating in the extreme. |

Usability is not a complicated thing. It's a measure of how successfully the average person can accomplish what they want to do. Of course it varies between people, but not that much. That's why Linux is not popular as a desktop OS. It doesn't have either the tools or the polish.

If you can't run MS Word you lose a lot of customers right there. If you don't have a decent GUI for settings and software then you lose all but the geeks. But usability also links to popularity. People learn how to use things and then expect consistency. If there's an Edit -> Copy menu in one program you expect it in other programs. That's very much brass tacks usability. Probably the most important factor is discoverability. It should be possible, by searching menus and icons, by looking at hover tooltips, to figure out the gist of how to use a program.

And finally, the programmers should anticipate what you want to do. That also needs to be combined with flexibility. You might want a bookmarks toolbar in your browser. But it's also important that you don't have to have that, and that the method to remove it is not a big secret. Microsoft have been getting worse in recent years in that respect. As have many other companies. They've decided what they want you to want to do and they try to lead you in that direction. That's not usability.

| My choices certainly don't suit everyone (others have used my | workstation but nobody seems to like it much or know how to do anything I | don't tell them about) but they suit me very well and that is one reason why | a monoculture is a bad idea. |

You just described the problem. Without consistency, your particular system is unusable to most people. You may work well with your "quirky window manager", but that's not usability. On the other hand, if you decided to market your system and said, "OK, I want to make big bucks on this. What changes do I need to make so that people want to buy it?".... I'm guessing you'd end up with usability. :)

Or Linux Mint.

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote

| On 02/05/2020 14:17, Mayayana wrote: | > Linux supporters, generally, don't want the system to | > be usable by the average doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief. | > If it doesn't require convoluted console incantations to | > make it work then "everyone and his brother" will get in | > and the secret geek club will be spoiled. | | Take your bigotry elsewhere. |

Exactly my point. You don't address the criticism. You strike out. Someone criticized Linux. That won't do. Attack them.... That's why Linux is not a desktop OS. The hardcore devotees have an emotional relationship with it. They find social connection and cameraderie in the geek clubbiness and they don't want that to change.

That's OK. Linux doesn't need to be a good desktop. The problem arises when you *think* you want it to be a popular desktop OS but also don't want it to be usable. When you get angry at criticism of Linux usability, but then resent people who don't want to use command line. You can't have it both ways.

It is not criticism, it is bigotry.

I use linux. It is not like that. I am not like that.

I am pointing out your straw man for what it is.

I transferred to Linux when it became better more stable and more user friendly than Windows.

#Yawn. Linux is a desktop OS. Linuc Mint at least us a VERY GOOD desktop OS. Way better than win98 or XP. Its just that if you want it free it wont be installed on your computer for you, unless its android or the odd net book and since there is no money to be made its not suitable for people who want to pay and then expect support.

No it is not important to me, it is important to understand subjectivity of statement.

I find it sad that no one has come up with a useful desktop in the past 10 years or so.

For the record: I use TDE (former KDE3) as desktop and Sailfish OS on the phone. Unfortunately neither KDE (4 or 5) nor Gnome are stable enough to satisfy my needs (I must admit, I have not tried KDE5 lately, but I follow the bugs and it can not convince trying it out again).

Secondly in the office I am forced to use Windows 10 at least for the common part. Inevitable, but in terms of usability as desktop it is far superior - unfortunately I would add. Not that I could not run some of the office stuff under linux, but I do what I am payed for. At the end I see myself as the train driver and I have to bring the train from point A to B. I do not care if the train is model X or Y and a good train driver can drive any train. There were many initiatives on the linux side that died prematurely somewhen between 2005 and 2008.

The question was regarding Windows and Linux usability ... so I do not get it what is better in the linux usability. Linux as server - yes 100%. Linux as desktop - no. But this is exactly the usability, because ... well, windows did never had a server ... it had rather a joke.

Again it is personal impressions.

I still don't understand though, why one would want to run Windows on RPi ... sounds to me like another bad joke.

and sorry for the noise ... I wanted to see some number - not inflame a pointless discussion about personal preference ... though I shared some.