OT: VISTA

[PvK]

When M$ says Vista has the most security ever, I think they probably are thinking about all their attempts to keep users from copying any corporate products with it...

[Baron Munchausen]

Because of DX, Windows has prety much locked up the 'flashy' games market. Not good strategy games, though. You can get lots of cool games for Linux like Free Civ. Just not the latest RTS games like Homeworld II or FPS games like Doom. But other than games, there are lots of equivalent options beyond Windows and it's getting better all the time. Linux has the most options ever: Anything important that you can find for Windows you can find for Linux. The Firefox/Seamonkey/K-Meleon and Opera browsers, for example. And Open Office is now a complete replacement for MS Office. And two other complete desktop suites are getting close to complete as well, Gnome and KDE. And you have many choices of who to buy from instead of being locked into one manipulative source. There are even dedicated sites for comparing the various distributions available:

http://distrowatch.com/

[Fyron]

I find Free Civ to be a crappy game, however.

It saddens me that there is no Foobar2000 for linux. Amarok probably comes the closest, but it just isn't the same. :-\ Then you've got sub-par multi-IM clients like Gaim and Kopete... Linux text editors are either ancient monstrosities like emacs and vim, or they are really basic like Nano or Gedit. I have yet to see any good modern gui "programmers" text editors on linux. sigh..

[Will]

Doom 3 runs on Linux. As do other id Software titles, such as the Quake series.

Also, there is speculation that the upcoming new version of Trillian, named Astra, will run on OSX and Linux as well. The developers have said that they got their core engine to compile for both platforms, and hinted that it might be released for more than just Windows. No official announcement as far as I've seen, however. I haven't used Linux as a desktop in a few months, so I'm not sure of the state of IM on the platform. On my Powerbook, I use Adium, which is based on the gAIM engine, and of course, use Trillian on the Windows PC.

If you're looking for "programmer's" text editor, have you tried Eclipse? As for emacs and vim, the "ancient monstrosity" description may fit emacs, which is on version 21.4 and has been in nearly constant development since at least the 1970s. But vim is a much newer "clone" of the older vi. Once you get used to vim, it is a very powerful editor, absolutely perfect for editing config files.

[Fyron]

Eclipse is an IDE, not just a text editor. It is nice software, but generally overkill.

IMO, vim is a monstrosity, ancient or no. I find the fundamental control scheme to be ridiculous.

Here's hoping "Astra" won't be a bloated flop like Trillian 3 was.

[aegisx]

You don't like Esc-Shift-Z-Z?

[Tim_Ward]

You can get lots of cool games for Linux like Free Civ

FreeCiv is the only 4x game except for FreeOrion, who's progress can charitably described as "glacial".

Doom 3 runs on Linux. As do other id Software titles, such as the Quake series.

And the Unreal series. Linux is in fact better served for FPS games than it is for detailed stratagy games.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

aegisx said:
You don't like Esc-Shift-Z-Z?

Ack! Kill it kill it kill it!!!

Who thought up that key combo? A demented platform fighter addict?

[Will]

narf poit chez BOOM said:

Ack! Kill it kill it kill it!!!

Who thought up that key combo? A demented platform fighter addict?

It's actually quite simple. The vi editor was designed to be used in a console window, with complete lack of pointer control (e.g., a mouse... sorry Narf ). So, the ESC key is just to ensure that you are in command-mode (as opposed to text mode, where doing just Shift-Z-Z would insert two capital Zs wherever the cursor happened to be). Then, IIRC, command ZZ writes the buffer if it has changed, and quits.

But really, the only basic commands you need to know to use vi are:
Esc - get into command mode
Then, once you're in command mode:
i - insert: go into text mode, begin inserting characters at the cursor
:w - write: write the buffer to file
q - quit
h - move cursor left
j - move cursor down
k - move cursor up
l - move cursor right
x - delete: delete the character at the cursor

Really just a few days using it are enough to get a feel for the basics, and start into more advanced things like yy (yank, AKA copy), and p (put, AKA paste) to and from buffers, using the /, s/, g/, etc regular expression commands... it's an absolute lifesaver if you're ever going to encounter a variety of UNIX-y systems, since they are all pretty much guaranteed to have either vi or vim installed.

--edit: almost forgot about the other "real" editor Fyron was looking for... even though it doesn't get any more real than vi
Check out the Scintilla Text Editor (SciTE). It's my "notepad replacement" for Windows, it also has a version for linux. Syntax highlighting for several different languages, brace matching, decent settings tweaking available via GUI, much more powerful tweaking through config files, has option for plaintext search/replace as well as regular expression search/replace, and a bunch of other goodies for programmers.

[Randallw]

My sister rang me up the other day to tell me she can get the education edition of Vista cheaper. What features would this have? Microsoft doesn't have it in their list which leads me to think it's one of the versions but cheaper for people in education.