Things I am Missing:
The ability to right click any window and say "Stay on Top".
Is there a better way to distract yourself whilst doing important work than watching an episode of Mad Men? Of course if the video is constantly ending up behind your word document you can miss all of the stylish clothing and wafting smoke. KDE (and GNOME I believe) allow the user to right-click and then select a "Keep This On Top" option. Meaning that despite your typing the movie stays as the uppermost window on the screen.
Of course whilst this is my most common use of the function I can imagine in the future I will want to reference an open window whilst typing into another (for instance transferring a small amount of data from a text file to excel), I can imagine that without the Keep On Top option this task will be tedious.
The ability to download practically anything ignoring the risk of viruses
Earlier I was about to download something (A freely available DJ mix) from a site that had a slightly dodgy name and was packaged as a .zip file but then I realised "Hang on, what if this is a virus?". Thanks to obscurity and what I'm lead to believe is a better permission and security system (I haven't done any thorough investigation into this though) I never had any problems downloading random zips and seeing what was inside on my linux system.
Workspaces
I have always wondered if I really did need 4 seperate desktops as is the KDE default. It turns out I did. Although I never had a well organised system for using them I did enjoy just dragging things such as media players off to the side, knowing that I wouldn't have to alt-tab through another window. However, when I was ready for it *BAM* it was back, already maximised and ready to be intereacted with (compared to something that has minimised to the system tray).
Things I'm enjoying on Windows:
The knowledge that I can run multiple programs that use the audio without all of them failing.
I'm pretty sick of playing something in Amarok only to find that flash video becomes audio-less until a browser restart. I had so many problems with audio on my previous system that I just got the feeling most of my fellow linux users felt that sound was a primitive sense.
Office 2007
Good looking documents and presentations are so much easier to make on 2007 than on Open Office.
The Future:
Probably a dual booted system with openSUSE for day-to-day operations and Vista for Office and some VB6 software development for work. Whether or not this will be possible (soon) is a post for another day.
"The ability to right click any window and say "Stay on Top"."
ReplyDeleteBeen on KDE since... forever. Rightclick the title bar, advanced, above all.
Thanks, I couldn't remember the exact series of commands as I'm yet to find that DVD (and I'm only 82% done with my new openSUSE download).
ReplyDeleteIt seems like such a simple and useful idea yet it still didn't make it into Vista (no idea about Windows 7).
What about the win+tab function in vista? Surely it's ability to make you feel like your eyes are about to explode is a huge advantage over that other rubbish system?
ReplyDeleteThat function is almost a direct rip-off of an effect from a linux window manager. It must have been a casual friday type project because as far as I can tell all they did between XP and Vista in terms of window management was make the title transparent and add that window flick thing, not exactly impressive for a project called 'Windows'.
ReplyDeleteMicrosoft Office 2007 now runs in wine without any dramas (that I've found). Another nail in the Windows coffin. Although 7 does seem pretty schmick.
ReplyDelete