Of course LTE and HTML video is better :p

Having so many apps constantly spitting unnecessary data out to trackers and heaven knows what isn't better. Neither is simple apps that can't cope when you go out of data coverage, which seems to be becoming more common.

I'd rather have gnome 2 than 3, I'd rather have Win 7 than 10 or XP. I don't consider any of them the pinnacle of design, but I don't think they're currently moving in a helpful direction either. There's been precious little progress or innovation in the OS space for years.

I'd rather have google talk, which was small, light, minimal and crucially reliable over hangouts or current skype.

Just because software isn't moving in a way that you personally want doesn't mean it's wrong or that it was objectively "better" before.

We don't have apps that work offline? Maybe look around more. FFS half of the web apps i use work fine offline.

And claiming that there has been no innovation in the OS space for years is silly. There is plenty of innovation, it's just that people don't like change and will instantly reject something that isn't the same as what they are already using. FFS just look at stuff like the ip command or systemd in linux. People lament that it's the end of days because a command is different exactly because they want to innovate past the constraints of the old systems.

And if we are playing the "What i want is what is best" game...

I much prefer Windows 10 over linux now. It's gotten that nice and i'm tired of constantly fixing stuff on my workstation.

And I much prefer current hangouts to the old google talk plugin. "small", "light"? Did you ever use it. You needed to download and install 2 separate programs to get Google Talk video chat working. Sometimes you'd need to do some port forwarding bullshit just to get it to work.

Now i install chrome and sign in, and within a minute hangouts is installed and working.

Don't want to install chrome? Run it from a browser tab by going to https://hangouts.google.com/

Don't want to make a google account? You can video-chat with guests by sending them a unique link.

All of those things were impossible with the old google talk.

> And I much prefer current hangouts to the old google talk plugin. "small", "light"? Did you ever use it. You needed to download and install 2 separate programs to get Google Talk video chat working. Sometimes you'd need to do some port forwarding bullshit just to get it to work.

I'm pretty sure the GP is referring to the native google talk client that gtalk was originally launched with. It was indeed a very simple jabber+sip client (by far the simplest of the major available clients) and had a tiny memory footprint. It did nothing but chat and voice calls.

It looked like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/75/Google_talk.g...

And you needed to install that client, then install the video and voice chat plugin if you wanted that, then sign in to your account (and if you had 2 factor auth you needed to jump through some other hoops).

It just seems like people will rewrite history. It was cumbersome, had strange scaling issues on many of my PCs at the time, didn't work on macs, you needed to just do it yourself on linux (and i'm not even sure if videochat worked on linux...).

I still think you're talking about a different, later thing. The client I'm talking about had no plugins and didn't support video, but did support voip directly. It was actually a selling point at the time over MSNM/AIM, iirc. You're right it didn't work on macs, or linux for that matter, because it was a native windows program and they never released a client for any other platform and there was no web interface to it at the time (but you could use any xmpp client with it, as you still can).

I'm pretty sure it was also before google even had TFA.

Windows 10 is a pretty good OS but has serious issues with drivers (it tries to be clever and breaks stuff). And the startup is sooooo slow and the UI crashes twice before I ever get the chance to give it input.

The Mail, Calendar and OneNote apps kept me hooked. But the lack of a decent terminal was killing me. Also, Skype didn't work properly half the time and the new "Video" and "Messaging" apps built on top of Skype were crashing 90% of the time.

> And the startup is sooooo slow and the UI crashes twice before I ever get the chance to give it input.

Then your installation is clearly broken. No, it's not good, but let's not pretend these issues didn't exist in the "good old days".

Windows 8 came preinstalled with the computer and then just updated to Windows 10 from it. If the main upgrade method is broken, I'm not sure what to believe anymore...

If Windows 8 came preinstalled, and you didn't wipe it and install from a clean ISO yourself, then you've got more crapware installed than you can shake a stick at, with hooks riddled all through your system. Doubtless, some of that vendor-supplied junkware is incompatible with Windows 10.

Don't be disingenuous. There isn't a consumer OS out there that can do 100% smooth seamless upgrades between major versions.

OSX, iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows all have pretty big issues when doing upgrades.

I haven't really had problems with OS X.

There's the occasional odd package under Linux which remains installed and you need to manually remove it, but nothing unfixable. But I guess that depends more on the underlying OS structure. I'm looking forward to see more widespread usage of Snappy Ubuntu.

Since that is the main way people migrate to Windows 10, I would've expected them to be more careful with it.

Many linux systems don't even support in-place upgrades between major versions. And I don't think i've ever had one work where nothing broke.

RHEL only started supporting it for the transition between 6 and 7 on a like 3 architectures on one edition.

And OSX has it's share of issues. For me personally, updating to El Capitan was the worst upgrade processes i've done in recent memory. From not running the installer but giving no issues, to not finding the harddrive during the install process, to corrupting the current install of yosemite, to bluetooth being broken after the upgrade, and i can't get wifi speeds over 1mbps.

A clean install solved all of that, but that's pretty normal with every single OS i've ever encountered.

It's not a question of being "more careful", it's that writing software in a way that it can be in-place upgraded to something you don't know will exist at the time is EXTREMELY HARD! I really feel it's one of the big "unsolved problems" in computer science and i don't see it being solved any time soon.

I agree with untog, you need to get your install fixed. I'm running on hardware from 2011(except the SSD) since launch and Windows 10 is extremely fast to boot and the UI hasn't crashed once. It even runs my security camera software that was last updated in 2008. I only recently re-installed Skype so I can't speak to that but it has problems all of it's own.

I'll grab an ISO at some point and do it... I didn't have any point of comparison, so I didn't know how it should be behaving.

> There is plenty of innovation, it's just that people don't like change and will instantly reject something that isn't the same as what they are already using.

It's not change that people don't like, it's the mountains of randomly missing features, settings and control remotely subverted away from the system owner, tons of software no longer working, a terrible UI nobody asked for. Who wants 10 steps of innovation forward if it comes bundled with 1,000 undocumented steps backward?

The ip command is a monstrosity. It is basically trying to emulate Cisco's IOS in a command to placate those that want to use Linux as their router firmware.

compare something simple as enabling a network card using ifconfig vs using ip, as you can easily tell the difference. You end up 3 layers deep before you can even enter the card id you want to do anything with!

When seasoned kernel devs don't want to touch a tool, warning lights should come on.

But that's exactly my point!

When it's not something you want, it's to "Placate people". But if it was something you wanted, i'm sure it would be a welcome feature!

And it's not that complicated, just different.

Want a "traditional" list of interfaces? `ip addr`

Want to list running interfaces? `ip link ls up`

Want to set a device up/down? `ip link set dev {DEVICE} {up|down}`

Quick question! How do you set the MTU length in a legacy REHL system? Because with ip it's just `ip link set mtu 9000 dev eth0`!

Yeah, its new and will require some learning, but it's not inherently bad...

And talking about seasoned kernel devs, name one time that there wasn't a minority of kernel devs bitching about a new feature! Every change is going to make some people worse off.

"just". Ifconfig gets the job done, unless RH has been odd selves again...

As for devs, Torvalds didn't have much love for the ip command last time i looked into things. And a year or so back i ran into a Ts'o posting about his dislike for polkit (a close cousin of systemd).

> If you wanted to look up a business on your phone you'd have to call directory enquiries - did that "work better" than your smartphone?

Bad example. I didn't need a smartphone for this task because there was a real live human being, who brought to the task all of the adaptability and intuition that modern systems lack. I didn't need Yelp, or Google Maps, or even the entire name of the business I was looking for. "I need the number to the printing company on the east side" was enough to get me a name, an address, and the call routed, without paying monthly bandwidth fees or spending seven hundred dollars on a pocket supercomputer.

Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot (sans bandwidth issues).

Worth the price? Sure, but to quote Pulp Fictoin, let's not start beating each other off just yet. There is plenty of room for improvement, and we've lost a lot of ground.

I used to be able to take a supersonic flight across the country, without having my body inspected via millimeter-wave radar.

Has anyone set foot on the moon in your lifetime?

> I didn't need a smartphone for this task because there was a real live human being, who brought to the task all of the adaptability and intuition that modern systems lack.

OK, my example was simplistic. I want to find the best chicken tacos in San Francisco. I can't call directory enquiries for that - I have go find reviews. Then call to make a reservation at the place, then find driving directions of how to get there, somehow. In a paper road atlas? Am I having to advocate for the benefits of the internet on Hacker News?

> Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot

Well of course it was, it only had to run on one platform. Compatibility is a lot easier when that's the case. Today we have HD video being played on mobile devices in your pocket. I can't remember the last time I ran into a compatibility problem with online video.

> I used to be able to take a supersonic flight across the country, without having my body inspected via millimeter-wave radar.

That's a political decision, not a technical regression.

> Has anyone set foot on the moon in your lifetime?

No. Can I load, on demand, stunning satellite photography of planets orders of magnitude further away than the moon, on my phone, on the bus to work? You bet.

> That's a political decision, not a technical regression.

It's both. Private supersonic flights are no longer available, and it is more of a pain in the ass to get on the inferior flights that are available.

I could go on, but it's moot -- the only point I'm here to make is that progress always been paired with regression, and it's always going to be a personal decision as to whether the tradeoffs were good ones.

I call BS on the review side. Where is the 'best chicken tacos in San Francisco'?

I have no idea and Yelp is not going to help. So, the fallback is I can ask some friends for advice and directions or use some companies best of list. But, again the internet did almost nothing in this space.

PS: I also had the internet on my phone in 2006 and yes they had maps. EX: http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/08/phones-music-internet-tech-...

Sorry, but I'd be surprised if Google or Siri don't answer your question to "I need the number to the printing company on the east side", it's a pretty trivial thing to lookup. Also, Google and Siri bring you cost efficiency and scale, something you can't easily do with directory enquiries.

> Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot.

So Vorbis/MP3 and WebM/H.264 is not good enough for compatibility over all the browsers?

Pining for RealPlayer? That's a new one.

Buffering....

I will look you in the eye and say the Amiga and ST in 1986 were better than Windows or Ubuntu in 2016.

They might have been better at the small subset of things Windows and Ubuntu can do that the Amiga and ST were also capable of, but they are not "better".

A single screwdriver is better than a toolbox at being light and easy to carry. It is not better overall.

But they still make screwdrivers.

And I'll look you right back and call bullshit. I used an Amiga in the late eighties. It was a fantastic machine for its time, certainly more advanced than the contemporary 286 PCs, but Windows 95 was markedly superior (as it should have been, a decade later), let alone modern Windows or Linux.

Yes, sometimes things get screwed up and we get understandably frustrated, but that does not license revisionist history.