Soo, I've been drinking. My friends have all gone home so I thought I'd drop by and try to make some more
Anyway, recently (6 months or so), I've been wrestling with various forms of Vista on my PC... Firstly, I loved the new look/features, but got quickly tired of them when I realised they stopped me from playing my "awesomez" games (Oblivion, Space Empires V, Morrowind, Sacred, whatever) at which point I switchted to the rather tiny-in-the-sense-of-memory-footprint Emerge Desktop, freely avaliable in Beta stages... Along with RK launch toolbar, I happily plodded along until an almost complete system failure due to Vista's incapability to look after itself.
My thoughts on Vista:
For: [list][*]Security[/*:m] [*]Looks pretty for a day or two[/*:m] [*]The Opera browser still works[/*:m][/list:u]
Cons: [list] [*]Compatability with previous apps[/*:m] [*]UAC Sticks it's head nose-deep in everything[/*:m] [*]Aforementioned stability issues[/*:m] [*]More annoying than Quicktime when it comes to upgrade messages[/*:m][/list:u]
At this point, I uploaded my dev. work to my site, formated and went and grabbed some Linux. On the recommendation of a friend, instead of my usual week install of Gentoo, I opted to give another distro a try - OpenSuse... Yast Was fortunate enough to save me whinging about my text install by presenting me with a graphical thing that did it all in one night.
Firing up the machine this morning, I was happy to see that drivers for all my devices had been installed, and KDE/Kdevelop/related software was working as it should - except Java. Normally, this is not something I would worry about, due to my feelings that Java is a bloated, overused, paradigm enforcing piece of perpetuous crap that forces you to program in it's way rather than yours, however there's a little game that has captured my attention, that rather oddly, uses Java (see below).
Finally it came to my attention that OpenSuse may have presented a patch to the 32bit->64bit browser problem, and thus I fired up YaSt (Which, apart from an installer, is also a configuration tool/package manager) and ran an update. Amorak still stubbornly waits to be done, but at least I now have Java going, which has it's downsides also.
OpenSuse, I suppose, runs similar to many other *nix'es. Fast, stable, elegant yet in the background, with all the graphical bells and whistles to make Vista writhe in it's stained school boy pants. Speed-wise, I was surprised. Gentoo has always seemed to me as being the fasted (compiled from source and all that), however OpenSuse 10.3, with KDE, CompizFusion (temporarily, I add) and Beagle search all going, it barely hiccuped. Hopefully, with the full KDE4 release next week, it'll stay the same
Now for the last part, before I skull the last few beers and pass out in a drunken stupor amongst the trash on my floor: Wurm. Wurm is an online "simulation" with a strong sense of community and achievement, where players are expected to build/join villages, build their houses, and spend countless hours creating items to further achieve whatever the hell they are trying to do - whether that be masonry, woodwork, leatherworking, combat (including pvp on one server), religion, etc, etc... Oddly, it's made in Java, which equates to running like absolute crap (especially being 3d), however the gameplay alone will get me through this.
Just take a look, eh?
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