My last memory of both Amarok and Rythmbox both still required a change in the string to change the bitrate for mp3's. I don't have a Linux box close by right now so I can't check it. It was an example but is representative of some small issues that you find on both DE's.
I can't confirm or deny it since I usually used something just for ripping like GRIP. And those small issues are non-issues for most people. 128kbps or 192kbps, whichever it defaults to, is good enough for most people and those that care should be using something lossless like flac anyway.
The problem with Compiz is that YMMV depending on which company is providing the graphics output. Aero seems to work similar on recent Intel, AMD and Nvidia video chipsets.
Compiz just requires OpenGL support via GLX I believe, so as long as the drivers don't suck it's fine. And I can't say I've had many problems with the nVidia drivers over the years.
Compiz is also still in a beta state, even today and is not as smooth (On Nvidia using AIGLX instead of XGL) plus it is choppy at times and has a lot of tearing. Then add that it has too many plugins and options that are lets say pretty but useless from a end user standpoint. Aero compliments the usability of Windows but Compiz can get in the way of usability. I do think Ubuntu has the right balance on what they allow by default on Compiz.
Compiz was largely a demo so it makes sense that lots of the plugings are all flash and little substance. Besides the glass toolbars, which are useless, and alt+tab thumbnails what else does Aero get you?
I think the layout of Win 7 is much simpler, easier to navigate and is much more logical that both Gnome or KDE. As you said this may be personal preference but this is a windows centric world so for most people Gnome does not make logical sense. (As evidenced by the fact not one person I tried to switch has stuck with Gnome or Linux.)
Having a Documents and Settings link that looks like a directory but you can't browse to it because it's really a junction makes sense to you? Having all of your 64-bit system files in windows\system32 makes sense to you? Or did they fix all of the stuff I mentioned because I was looking at a 2008 server, not Win7.
Gnome still uses a windows 95 type look and is way behind in how fonts look on the desktop. KDE has addressed this with KDE 4 but Gnome will not completely address this until Gnome 3 is finalized. Windows just looks more polished out of the box than Gnome so it doesn't really matter that some technical details you posted may actually be better in Gnome because at the end of the day polish is about how the software looks and functions and in most cases Windows has Linux beat in this department and OSX has all of them beat.
Gnome looks nothing like win95. The font smoothing in Gnome and KDE is much better than the blurry crap that Windows does.
Polish is getting the little things right and MS obviously fails at that. They still ship icons that are like 10 years old, hell they still had winfile shipping until Vista. You're just apologizing for MS being sloppy and saying it's polished because the stuff you use/see is what you're used to and like.
Everytime I have to use OS I just get annoyed. If you don't want to do something the Apple way you're pretty much screwed.
And low specs only matter to geeks who recycle old PC's.
Or to people buying netbooks. Does anyone try to sell Win7 netbooks or are they still just XP on the Windows side?
I don't understand how you couldn't agree that a Linux distribution is a bunch a pieces glued to the kernel?
It definitely is, I disagree with the "horribly buggy" comment. The only thing that causes me problems is flash and wouldn't ya know, it's closed source.
I installed and configured a properly working LAMP server using CLI only.
These days that's not terribly impressive because there's bundles to do it for you, I believe Ubuntu server asks you during installation, and the packages included with Ubuntu work just fine out of the box. After that all you really do is put your PHP up there, maybe create a database for it and go.
For example, at a point during Ubuntu 8.04, Network Manager wouldn't let you use a static IP. I tried it on Ubuntu and Fedora and since the version of Network Manager was the same, it refused to work on both. When 8.10 came out, it worked fine. Now you're probably saying just disable Network Manager and do it via command line which I did but I shouldn't have had to.
I might recommend doing it via the cli because IMO editing /etc/network/interfaces it simpler. However, that's a bug in Network Manager and is competely unrelated to the fact that it's not maintained with the kernel.
Yeah, an entire OS relying on a package manager to do everything is a great idea (sarcasm).
It actually is and I really hope MS is moving that way with MSI and their server core installs. Right now, because there isn't real package management on Windows, you can't convert a server core install to a full install and are just stuck reinstalling.
When SimDock became a broken package and neither Synaptic or CLI couldn't fix it I had to reinstall Ubuntu. Now that was ~2 years ago and I haven't had a broken package break the OS again but it is something that could easily happen again.
I've never had a package break the system bad enough to warrant a reinstall. And it's safer than the registry in Windows, if that gets corrupted the system just BSODs. At least my Linux system will boot even if the package manager's busted. But in both Windows and Linux you're at the mercy of the quality of the package/installer since you're running them with admin rights.
Well, I wouldn't use it as a main OS but it is certainly an interesting, free OS that has no UNIX roots and was completely written from scratch.
As was BeOS and you saw where that got them. At least ReactOS has a real target market in Windows users.