Yes and they move over to Mint because with Mint you don't have to think for yourself.

Yup!

I'm 55; I've been using Linux a little over 10 years. I think there is a place for all OSs, including MS. I maintain one Win 7 install at home as my wife needs it for work, it does the job. I happily use both Slackware and Debian at home.
I am not xenophobic about operating systems. Each to his own, live and let live. Name calling serves no purpose in my opinion.

Yeah. I don't use Windows at home, but if I needed it at home for job-related purposes, then I would.

That's an odd thing to say about Mint and Ubuntu. I've always found them as hand-holding as each other but Mint tends to allow the non-free stuff out of the box so there's not as much messing around getting wireless to work.
I've not found that Mint makes any more assumptions regarding the install though.

I won't discuss the user friendlyness of Debian. Let me explain something about the user UNfriendlyness of W7.

Two weeks ago I had to do something with an SD card and a program which only runs in Windows. On my new laptop I had W7 factory installed. After I booted once in W7 to see the laptop was functional I installed Debian Wheezy but I left the W7 intact in case I ever had to return the laptop for repair. Now I had good use of it.

These are the issues:
1. Wireless: It never works when I switch on the laptop. It says it has a problem connecting to the internet. It is connected to the access point. After running "solve this problem for me" I may get an internet connection. Or not and I have to repeat the problem solving. One, two, three or four times, but eventually it gets connected. And an hour or a day later it might be gone again. Mind you, this problem solving takes anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes looking at a nicely rendered bouncing progress bar. Everything connects to this access point. Android, iPhone, Mac, Linux on this laptop. But not W7. And when it connects, there is no reason why it did not connect in the first place.

2. I have the date I need on an NFS share. W7 refuses to connect to that share, no matter how hard I try to discover the drive. No reason given.

3. So I downloaded my files using FTP. W7 stores the file somewhere, but no idea where to find them. They pop up in "My downloads", but where the heck is that?

4. Every time when I insert the SD card, W7 insists of scanning the drive and resolving problems. Wow, that is scary that I have problems on the card all the time.

5. After 10 minutes a window pops up right over the application I am working in and tries to persuade me to buy antivirus software. It says my computer is at risk of infection. Darn, what should I do?

What I write here is not fake or pretending I don't know or I am surprised. The last Windows I used on a daily basis was W2k. How can 4 billion people think Windows is user friendly.

jlinkels

oh come now, we all know windows is only 'user friendly' because the WESAYSO corporation says it is, that being said, 'user friendly' is a myth, it boils down to what's most comfortable and appropriate for you.

That was my point and you understood

jlinkels

Ever tried to update the drivers?

The reason is pretty simply: Mounting NFS shares is only available to Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7. I assume that you have Home Premium or something like that on your laptop.

Usually folders that begin with "My" are located in your users home-folder.

Usually caused by the user taking the SD card out of the device without unmounting it properly before.

Usually caused by free antivirus software. Normally they try to sell you the pro version every time they run an update to their data-base.

Because the are used to it, get their stuff done and mostly don't really know about alternatives. Also, because they just use the OS that came pre-installed, because the use their computer as an appliance, like a toaster or a microwave oven.

I never said anything about the install rather its all about usage.

Drivers? Do you mean driver's licence? I have that.
I do know something about updates though.
When I switched off the computer, it said something about updating and that I should not switch off the computers. Then it said "installing updates". Hours and hours after that it rebooted, and then it continued "installing updates", but I could not access the computer for another half a day. My, was I grateful that this did not happed just before a presentation!

I have Windows 7, yes. Do you mean my laptop came with something I can't connect to my server with? It costed $1100.-!

I can't find /home!

I clicked on that USB icon, and then Windows said: "it is now safe to remove the media". Every time.

Software that is being sold??

That must be, because this is a whole new world for me?

jlinkels

So actually, you are not complaining about Windows user-friendliness, but about the concept of proprietary software and also your unwillingness to learn something about it.
That is a bit unfair, I would think, but it is up to you.

The best way to look at all the files in MS is to boot to Linux. If you do not have it installed on the Laptop a Live Session would do it.

Take notes. You will probably find more than one place where each of your files are listed. Kind of an interesting system if you don't have to use it.

Some of you, my dear friends, did not get the point of my post.

Sure this is really what happened when I used W7. But I don't seek assistance. Although I pull the hairs out of my head at some moments I am computer literate enough to eventually find out how to solve a W7 problem.

The point is that someone who has his most experience from Windows will find Linux confusing. While as he states Windows is all logical and all user friendly. 4 billion other users will agree.

I just wanted to demonstrate that Windows is just equally confusing, and maybe even more so because everything is hidden as much as possible below GUI layers and rendered animations. And I do have prior Windows experience although it is ancient. If I had not, the confusion would haven been even more.

jlinkels

Actually it seems to be the standard behaviour for any removable storage which is formatted to a dos fat/fat32 type file system. I have this problem on a USB external HDD enclosure and USB flash pens which I use at work on Win Vista/7. I always "safely remove". Windows XP never complains

It's by design from Vista onwards.

//edit: And yes windows is obfuscated and awkward by design. In trying to produce an OS for the average joe, they've made one which is almost unusable for those of us who are fairly computer literate. I disliked XP but at least I could get it to look like and function like win2k, but Vista and 7 are monstrosities of horrendous UI design. Both provide supposedly "user friendly" features which I don't need and hide away features I do need, meaning more clicks just to cut through all of the bullshit to get some work done.