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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

"Avoid the pain of Windows 8."

I've been running Windows 8 since the RTM went to MSDN. I adjusted to the cheese-moving pain of Windows 8 within a week.

Four months into Ubuntu with Unity I eventually adjusted to the cheese-moving pain of Unity by switching to Mint.

Ubuntu has no leg to stand on when it comes to new versions of an OS making unwanted changes to UX.

[Before anyone chimes in here, I know you can set up Ubuntu to work with other desktops than Unity, but IMO there's not really a compelling reason to stick with it when the out-of-the-box experience is inferior to another distro.]

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Same here. Windows 8 is a clear improvement over Windows 7 once you acclimate to the new interface (which you only need to spend a tiny fraction of your time using anyway).

I've noticed that a lot of the criticism comes from people who tried Windows 8 in a VM, where it's difficult to hit the corners, and people who dabbled with dual booting it or using it on secondary machines, without truly committing to learning the new interface.

Not me. I installed Windows 8 as a partition. It was a nightmare. There are four corners of the screen that seem to do different things when you point there. After about two weeks of casual use, I gave up and went back to Windows 7. My head seriously hurt trying to remember (guess) which corner did what, in order to go "back and forth" between the different UI paradigms (which by the way is UNNECESSARY to have more than one paradigm on my UI). I have no interest in the new "tablet" paradigm that's being forced onto desktops. It doesn't make sense. I dumped Ubuntu for a similar reason (Unity was/is awful) - I put up with it in Ubuntu for about 8 months. I now run Windows 7 and Linux Mint. Now you may argue that I wasn't committed to learning the new UI after only two weeks, but you know what? It either works, or it doesn't. I could learn to walk with a warn-out hip and a limp, but it doesn't make it ideal or optimal.

Corners? Yeah, I don't like those either, and I hated Windows 8 at first.

But there turned out to be a simple solution: the Windows+letter shortcut keys. Start with the Windows key (literally), or use Windows+I for quick settings (power, wireless, etc.), Windows+X for power tools, or any of the other Windows+letter shortcuts.

I posted several of them here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4663376

After getting used to those keys I started to like Windows 8 after all. I'd always used the Windows key to open the Start menu on Windows 7 and earlier, there were just some new Windows+letter combinations in Windows 8. Handy stuff.

I'm not saying you should switch back to Windows 8 again, but if/when you do, just go through the whole alphabet trying every Windows+letter combination to see what they do. You won't need those four corners any more.

Hot corners have been in OS X and Ubuntu/Gnome for many years...

For my part Unity is the first time I have an UI that doesn't make me swear and wish I was back to using my old Amiga....

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 with the intention of ripping out Unity for a tiling window manager, but gave it a day or so, and that was enough to realize that with minimal adjustment to keybindings etc., it was pretty much exactly what I wanted with the exception of the loss of spatial file browsing which still annoys me,but then again I rarely use use the gui for finding files so it's something I can live with.

Forgive me, but I don't know what you mean by "cheese-moving pain". Two questions: first, is this a well-known term that I've just not run across? And second, what do you mean by it? (And if the answer to 1 is "no" then, WTH?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese

Interesting. Have you read the book? Wondering if I could use something out of this for clients who fear the change (be it UI, UX, process)

I've never read the book the phrase comes from actually, so I can't speak to it directly. I'm only aware of the phrase "moving the cheese" because it has become a bit of a meme over the past few years in development/IT (this may be a regional thing).

You can read the book in less than an hour, it's not big.

Well, even you'd have to admit that this comment flogs the goat. There is so much goat flogging going around on HN, it's no surprise. Obviously we're lacking a gilded trough.

I hear you on Ubuntu, I've switched from recommending it as a Windows alternative to Mint. Linux Mint is lovely; too bad I still have a Windows dependance due to a few legacy desktop apps.

I really wish I could use Evernote on Linux.

I haven't really used it too much (i usually use evernote on my tablet), but Nevernote is supposed to work http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/

In my opinion Everpad is better Evernote client.

You can via the Chrome/Chromium addons:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/evernote-web/lbfeh...

For whatever reason there's no counterpart for Firefox, just Evernote's Web Clipper addon and Readability.com clones.

There's also Springpad which has its note-taking addons for both browsers.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/springpad/?sr...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/springpad/fkmopoam...

I have explored all these options but a dedicated Linux client would be awesome.

Indeed, but lets not hold our breaths. The dedicated Linux client is pretty much Firefox or Chrome/ium these days.

Mint's packaging and documentation is significantly worse than Ubuntu's. There is no reason to use Mint and not Debian or Ubuntu, except that you are interested in Cinnamon (which I have never once found to work)

Right now on Debian, every desktop sucks out-of-the-box - I've been bouncing around them trying to find something that will satisfy my preference for a traditional desktop. As Debian doesn't do much in the way of UI customisation, so this pretty much means every core desktop sucks at the moment without a downstream maintainer nailing it down properly. XFCE is a little coarse though it would be usable... if only it didn't stop my laptop from properly resuming from sleep (other environs don't do this).

I've used Mint's LMDE distribution and liked the desktop in it, but the community around it doesn't seem too big, which makes me a little nervous.

If what you want is a "traditional desktop" UI and you're running Debian, ISTM you'd have plenty of options. You can install a complete environment (GNOME 2, XFCE) or one of the many tiling wm's (awesome, dwm, xmonad, &c).

As far as I am aware, gnome 2 was losing maintainer focus. Certainly right now, it's hard to clearly find gnome 2/debian sid results on google - something that is important when things go wrong. XFCE is somewhat coarse but usable... if only it wasn't the only desktop that prevented my laptop from resuming from sleep. The tiling WMs I haven't installed, but when looking at their webpages don't seem to be traditional desktops - floating windows, ability to put thing on the desktop itself. The latter item is important to my workflow, and I can't understand the religious zeal with which people think that the desktop must be clear these days...

Right. Correction to my comment above: I meant to separate the tiling wm's out of "trad desktop" distinctions: I don't think the tiling wm is what most users think of when considering desktop UIs. Still, I from what I've seen wm's like awesome or xmonad do a good job of maximising screen real estate and make everything keyboard-centric, which saves a lot of time for developers.

XMonad is really great, provided you're willing to spend some time learning Haskell to configure it, which isn't a trivial task. It's in my book a very rewarding experience.

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