Tanguy Ortolo

Installing an operating system

When you want to install a new operating system, the first thing to do is to get an installer medium, which usually involves two steps: downloading an image, and writing it to a medium. There are two major types of media usable for that purpose: optical discs and USB sticks. There used to be a third one, floppy disks, but it is no longer used, and it was conceptually very similar to USB sticks.

Read more A desktop file managers failure: writing an USB stick image

I used to recommend the GNOME desktop for simple users for two main advantages over Windows:

• the logical, automatically filled and translated applications menu (compare that to the messy Windows Programs menu…);
• the general interface consistency (compare that with Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, Avast! and each piece of crap^Wsoftware whose author believed developing yet another custom interface was the way to go).

Both points are what I call calm advantages, because users will usually enjoy them without noticing. Instead, they will enhance their experience so that they will miss them when they come back to a system which does not provide these features. In fact, being used to that, I do not really consider these points as actual advantages, but rather as a bare minimum for any decent desktop and as very important lacks of some competitors.

Read more GNOME 3 killing interface consistency