http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/the-regular-holy-war.html

WordStar and Unix

TRX
October 21, 2013
49:
>Wordstar
Wordstar predated both the IBM PC and the Mac; it was designed to run on S-100 machines that might be hooked to any sort of dumb terminal. Terminals usually had at least one "special" key (mapped to the Control key on a PC), but they didn't necessarily have function keys, alt keys, or in many cases, arrow keys. A lot of Wordstar's command structure makes more sense if you visualize a typewriter keyboard with no "computer" keys.

Many editors support the old Wordstar commands as an option; it provides a convenient way for people to move across platforms without having to learn new commands for basic tasks, and with so many "portable devices" having no (or unusable) arrow keys, its like its 1980 again...

> KDE
KDE 3.5x was a wonder. KDE4 broke, slowed, or complicated almost everything, and the Schutzstaffel developers' attitude was basically "we don't care what users think." When no major distribution supported KDE3 any more I made the switch, but I have some old servers on a client site still running openSUSE 10.1 and KDE3.5, and they're still a delight to use, and faster on a single core 1.8GHz machine than 4.7 is on my quad-core 3.2GHz machine. [sigh]

Trinity was a fork of the KDE3.5.9 tree. I followed it for a long time, but they were going down the wrong route, trying to torture it into working with the Qt4 libraries KDE4 uses. Now Qt5 is out, and KDE will be moving to that, with whatever new downgrades and problems it brings. Meanwhile, TrollTech turned the old Qt3 toolkit over to the Trinity guys. Last I looked, they were still trying to decide what to do with their mutilated code base; dump it and start over, keep on with dual Qt3/Qt4 as they're doing now, or just give up and buy an Etch-A-Sketch...


TRX
October 23, 2013
114:
@91:
if you don't like the way a particular component works, you can swap out just that component and keep all the rest.
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"Unix - the 'Mr. Potato Head' of operating systems!"


TRX
October 23, 2013
116:
@108:
I've seen a semi-joking suggestion that Linux will end up winning the desktop ... because everybody else will be using laptops, tablets, and phones.
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Probably, since the "average user" does very little with a computer. Some webmail, maybe a couple of games, some YouTube. Their phone, on the other hand, does all that, plus it texts, does voicemail, and is right there in their pocket. These are people with no real need for a "computer" at all.

If you need to enter or edit more than trivial amounts of text, or do sound or video editing, or CAD, or any of several other tasks, you'll be walking a long, rocky path doing it on a phone or tablet.