I guess I'm going to show my age here. I began my computing experience running a DEC PDP8 with a proprietary operating system (punched paper tape days). That was followed by several computerized phototypesetting machines made by Compugraphic, including one of the very first area composition systems, the Compugraphic ACM 9000. (My first career was as a typographer.) My first personal computer was a KeyPro IV portable (26 pounds), which came with a CP/M operating system. I quickly discovered Rex Conn's ZCPR modifications for the CPU that enabled more versatile batch programming. I stuck with CP/M until MS DOS was at version 5.0, at which time I switched to DR DOS with the 4DOS extensions. 4DOS (also by Rex Conn) gave DOS approximately the capabilities of the UNIX KORN shell of that period. Later I added WordPerfect Corp.'s Shell 4.0 for my GUI. Shell was roughly the equivalent of Windows 3.11 but was menu rather than window and icon based. And unlike Windows it was fully programmable and had task switching memory management that was vastly superior to Windows 3.11 (I used to run Windows 3.11 as an app under Shell 4.0.) Eventually, I was forced onto Windows 98 as program support for DOS faded away. But Win98 was full of bugs and I never liked the window/icon graphical user interface (I have the same issue with OS X). Many of my DOS programs (including Shell 4.0) could no longer be used because they lacked long file name support and would convert long file names created by Windows and programs to 8.3 format, which would bring the system to its knees. Windows XP was next. There were a lot fewer critical bugs than Win98. I regained a lot of the batch processing versatility by running Rex Conn's TakeCommand on top of XP. At the time, TakeCommand used a menu-driven paradigm. I was forced to take a medical retirement in 2002 (I had been a lawyer in my second career) because of an injury that vastly curtailed my brain's working memory. At that point I had been aware of Linux for several years and after cursing a dual boot setup with Kubuntu for a few months bought a second PC for it and switched the XP machine to Win7. By this time, TakeCommand had largely switched to the windows/icon paradigm but Win 7 was far more stable for the must-have Windows programs. And I stuck with Kubuntu until KDE 4.0 was imposed. The productivity hit from all the KDE 4.0 eye candy and gadgetry sent me running for a new Linux desktop. I wound up using Linux Mint with the Mate desktop because of the developers' commitment to keeping the Gnome 2 desktop experience alive and there's access to all of the Ubuntu distro's packages. Since my retirement, my need for Windows programs has largely subsided and I mostly use the Mint box plus a laptop that also runs Mint. Because of the brain injury, use of an outliner for taking notes became important. I wasted a few years looking for an outliner that was both cross-platform and capable of a minimalist HTML export with a hyperlinked table of contents. I finally found the one I was looking for in NoteCase Pro. I fell in love with it to the extent that my retirement hobby for the last 5 years or so is assisting in its development as a volunteer, improving its accessibility (still a long way to go there), writing its Help file, and writing extensions for it in the Lua scripting language. I suspect that because of its extensibility it is among the geekiest of outliners out there. I love Linux because of the powerful command line with the BASH shell. Windows, icons, and mouse pointers at the OS level have all seemed like giant leaps backwards to me. But the advertising myth that they boost productivity seems unstoppable. Linux at least offers me a choice. Best regards, Paul; _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list