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...
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'm pretty sure it was also before google even had TFA.
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.
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".
OSX, iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows all have pretty big issues when doing upgrades.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.