New computer

[ewx]

I bought a new computer. The main reason for wanting a new one is that for some time the images my current camera produces are large enough that my Mac Pro was rather slow on them. I’d have replaced it with another Mac but Apple’s current lineup was unattractive on both price and performance grounds, so I got a PC from World Of Computers instead. It seems to be fast enough.

It came with Windows 8. The addition of tablet features has generated a lot of fuss but in practice they don’t seem to get in the way; the usual Windows desktop is still there with the only significant difference from Windows 7 being that the start menu has turned into a start screen. Setup has mostly been easy though installing suitable drivers for my printer was a massive pain.

I’m using PuTTY more than I used to. The lack of tabs and clickable URLs makes it somewhat painful compared to the terminals available in the Linux and OSX worlds.

I’ve played through Portal 2, which is great fun. I’ve also started on Starcraft 2, though successfully creating a Blizzard account and downloading it was a bit of a struggle.

Comments

[dave holland (from livejournal.com)]

I want [many windows] for a problem I'm working on grouped together

I use virtual desktops for that. When I run out of virtual desktops, I know I'm trying to do too many things at once.

[gerald_duck]

It's not really "at once". I might, for example, do something for a bit and get to a point where I need turnaround on some question from someone in a different timezone. At that point I'm not going to close the windows, but I'm going to put it out of my mind for many hours.

In any case, I don't personally like virtual desktops much. Frames I could move around within my desktop like windows, into which I could group other windows, would be considerably nicer.

[dave holland (from livejournal.com)]

Fair enough - for that sort of context switch I do close the windows, mostly because I don't like finding 'n' virtual desktops full of windows needing to be closed at the end of the day. (Luddite that I am, I turn the machine off daily.)

I can see the appeal of MDI-for-window-manager too. Xnest?

[gerald_duck]

Re-parenting would be preferable. In the first instance, all the conversations between the server and the client wouldn't have to go via the "window manager" (i.e. the xnest), which would presumably improve performance, espeically if all three were running on different hosts. In the second, it would be nice to be able to move windows dynamically between frames, which would be fundamentally impossible with xnest.