AI War Official 8.002-8.005 "Lock And Load " Released!

[Cinth]

My laptop has rather frequent BSOD (overheating issues).  My desktop often has issues with graphics drivers causing crashes (more like self-reboots).  And those usually are program specific.  Those happen surprisingly often.

As far as it goes, I think the environment is a lot better than it used to be.  Apple? I've never owned or wanted to own anything made by them.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, the hardware has to be solid or things are going to go sideways regardless of OS.  Though potentially Linux has greater potential to handle those cases in a helpful way (for diagnosis, if nothing else) rather than running around with its hair on fire.

[Draco18s]

Windows as an environment has been better than its ever been.  Ignoring Windows 8.

I hear 8.1 is alright, but I also heard why Microsoft thought Windows 8 was what people wanted:

All of their "user experience profiling" that had been gathering data from Vista and 7 was showing that kind of trend....but the only people they were getting data from where the users who were too dumb to turn the data gatherer off.  Every single "power user" and geekophile disabled the monitoring program because it was such a resource hog.

[Cinth]

Windows 8.

Yo dawg! I heard you like mobile interfaces, so we made your PC interface a mobile interface.


That's what impression I got from Win8, anyway.

I think I've hit every major Windows OS version since the mid 90's.  3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP, 7.  Vista only because I can't be bothered to upgrade my laptop to 7 (laptop came with a free upgrade to 7).  I miss 3.11 (seriously).

[keith.lamothe]

My father still runs 3.11 on one of his machines and does OrCAD work on it.

[Cinth]

Pretty sure my dad has that old 3.11 machine somewhere...

Back in the days where it took longer to install DOS than it took to install Windows.   

[Aklyon]

My girlfriend took a Samsung laptop and put Linux on it.  All she does is web browse.  She's learned how to do everything she has needed to do in Linux and she doesn't have to deal with the mess that is Windows.

I've done the same thing for a laptop and a desktop (person only web browses/emails), though for these it wasn't so much voluntary as it was 'Hey, the computers broken and it won't turn on, can you fix it?' turning out to be somehow-unbootable windows xp. I put Mint LTS on both, wrote down what got to the internet for them, and its been working fine.

[Cinth]

I've done the same thing for a laptop and a desktop (person only web browses/emails), though for these it wasn't so much voluntary as it was 'Hey, the computers broken and it won't turn on, can you fix it?' turning out to be somehow-unbootable windows xp. I put Mint LTS on both, wrote down what got to the internet for them, and its been working fine.

Reasons as varied.  The gf wanted to tinker around with something different.  It works for her, though I rib her on occasions where she has functional problems with Linux.  I have no idea how to fix Linux issues so she is pretty much on her own there.

[Draco18s]

I have no idea how to fix Linux issues so she is pretty much on her own there.

Pretty much sums up why I won't be installing *nix any time soon.  I realize it's a case of "don't -> can't -> won't -> don't" but at the same time, the issues I have with Windows 7 are less severe than the ones I have with my phone.

(The programming on my not-smart phone are so mindnumbingly dumb I want to request the source code from Samsung just so I can fix it myself).

[doctorfrog]

On the textbox thing: yes, the unity upgrade broke it for all platforms.  Even if we didn't do a linux build it would still have broken it.  Though the linux build is the main reason we did the unity upgrade.

One of the things I hope to pull off with the UI is to get away from the underlying stuff that leads to that kind of nonsense   Which our other games on later versions of our architecture have mostly managed to do, it just takes a lot of time to retrofit something like that, etc.

Well, there are bigger crimes than having a weird pimple on the interface, I suppose. It's just weird that it's up there. I thought the chatbox was down near the bottom. I'll assume that if it could be hidden, it would be. I bet you're looking forward to... well maybe not starting the UI cleanup, but seeing how great it'll be when you're done. Kind of how I feel about the double stack of file boxes in the corner of my office.

So, is this thing already on your task list, or should I create a Mantis for it?

That said I still use Windows for everything, I'm not an idealist about it, but I look forward to the day when I have viable alternatives.

This sums up my feeling as well. My main machine is Windows, it's more or less where I live and work and play video games, but I have an old netbook and headless file server that both run desktop Linux distros, and for some reason it really pleases me that they do, like I'm getting away with something. I'm just patiently waiting for it to be a genuinely better choice than Windows (7), but in the meantime, it's nice to be able to have an OS choice this or that task.

[keith.lamothe]

So, is this thing already on your task list, or should I create a Mantis for it?

Hiding the empty message log box is something I'd make sure to do anyway, yea.

And yea, if I was running any dedicated server hardware I'd probably use Linux for that.  Certainly not spending extra $ to use an OS I've already bought multiple times.  But all our server stuff is hosted elsewhere, which is more reliable etc etc.

[keith.lamothe]

Update: 8.004 beta update out to hotfix an issue that causes a crash while (auto)saving when the game is run with the steam overlay enabled (and, probably, the report-high-scores option on).

[Wingflier]

Windows 8 has been, in my experience, a freaking disaster which is only rivaled (and probably surpassed by) Windows Vista. The problem with a Capitalistic system is that the "if it's not broken don't fix it" approach is not very profitable. Microsoft has to try "innovative" new things every couple years with their new OS in order to keep feeding the cash cow, and what they end up doing is ruining a perfectly good thing, and furthermore, forcing YOU to pay for it. Windows 8 is particularly bad because you can't even uninstall the damn thing without finagling with the bios (there's a good idea) or calling Microsoft directly to get specific instructions on how to remove it. Complete disaster, please let Windows 9 be more like 7.

[Coppermantis]

I honestly haven't had any major grievances with 8. Granted, I only use it for my on-the-go laptop, and do heavy-duty gaming and such on my desktop with 7, but it's worked well for my purposes.

[Draco18s]

Windows 8 (not 8.1) is a great tablet OS.  It does not make any sense when using a mouse and keyboard (all those swipe gesutres?  yeah, still swipe gestures...with a mouse).

Windows 8 happened the way it did, because Microsoft put in a program to monitor how people used their computers in earlier versions of Windows (7 and Vista).  Which every power-user turned off and disabled because it was such a resource hog (and also because they didn't want to share their usage info).  So what was left was the usage info for the people who didn't know any better.