I personally like to be able to tinker with my computer to do what I want, but I work in IT. Most users don’t want or need that ability.
I am totally a person who wants his computer environment to work his way and not feel as if I have no choice but to have it behave the manufacturer’s way. And I am now and have always been a Macintosh user. I know that probably sounds counterintuitive to many of you.
a) In 1985-86, I could give my documents names in plain English and once I knew how to double-click something and how to copy it from Joe’s floppy to mine I could run any new application and unless it was BADLY written figure out how to use it just by poking around in the menus. I could copy bits and pieces from one program and paste them into another, so I wasn’t constrained to using just one program and whatever it came with. I became a fonts addict, swapping fonts with other users. I wasn’t constrained to the fonts that my system came with. I acquired “INITS” that modified the basic behavior of the operating system. For instance I obtained the ability to make a new folder on-the-fly in the course of saving a document, at a time when that was NOT built into the OS. I learned how to use ResEdit and changed the names, the shortcuts, and other elements of behavior of dropdown menus and icons and what-have-you. Renamed my operating system’s folder from “System Folder” to something different if I felt like it. I craved the ability to customize and it seemed to me that I had that in an era when PC users were running DOS and were challenged to be able to use their apps and OS as they existed. Even most power users I knew did not have the flexibility I had. I’m not saying no one did, just that I didn’t see much of it.
b) Years later, in the heyday of MacOS 8.6 and 9 and thereabouts, I could run multiple versions of the same software on the same computer (even at the same time), and the INITS I spoke of above had become control panels and extensions and could modify a very wide range of OS behaviors. I did by now see PC users (running Windows, mostly) doing customizations: yeah, PC users were building their own computers and buying motherboards and installing other boards and so on. We had SCSI, though, and could daisy-chain peripheral devices pretty nicely —— external, not internal, usually. We could run multiple monitors when Windows users couldn’t yet, or had problems when they tried. We had USB and could use industry standard drives and RAM by now. I knew I was supposed to feel like I was constrained by Apple but I didn’t.
c) Now I can run Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS on the same computer. It’s a nice computer. I’ve got a lot of freedom under the MacOS environment (although I’d like more). I’d consider Linux or another Unix but the last time I tried to install and configure I had a nightmare of a time getting multiple monitors to work at the desired resolution, emulating the other environments I wanted to run, recognizing peripheral devices, etc…
When my co-worker first came on board, he boasted of his water-cooled custom computer and acted very haughty about computers in general and very contemptuous about Apple because of the “walled garden” thing, repeatedly implying that everyone on the planet wanted to be able to tweak, customize and hack their computers.
But as I pointed out to him and have pointed out on this board a few times, very few (like maybe 2% of computer or smart phone owners) really have any desire to hack/root/tweak/break/whatever their hardware. The vast majority of people don’t give a crap about that sort of thing and just want something that does what they want to do, which is usually as simple as 1> Surf the web, 2> Play games, 3> Email, (4> for phones, make calls and maybe text).
Hell, I’ve worked with computers for over 30 years. I don’t give a crap about doing anything more than using it for those purposes.
I note he doesn’t play that argument with me anymore.
All I know is that when I asked MrTao, who recently installed Win8, how to get to msconfig on it, he said he didn’t know and wasn’t sure you could.
As I’m still seething about the Windows decision to take the DOS shell out of the operator’s reach, the idea of removing msconfig, much LESS MrTao’s response that he doesn’t CARE, makes me livid.
I mean, not in any way that matters, I’m just never getting Win8.
I have no desire to tweak or fiddle with a computer or a car. I just want the damn thing to run, without giving me any headaches. If I want to work, I can pick up some work somewhere and get paid for it. Trying to tweak a computer gives me no pleasure, and earns me no money.
This is why I’ve quit buying Civilization games. I was very excited about getting Civ IV, but I had to do quite a bit of research, tweak this, fiddle with that, call tech support, and have tech support email some instructions to me. Once I had the instructions and followed them, I enjoyed the game. But I don’t believe that I’ll be putting myself through that again.
The ONLY reason that I don’t buy Apple computers is because I use my computers for gaming a good deal of the time, and many, many games that I want are simply not available for Apples. Otherwise, I’d be buying whatever iComputer Apple is willing to sell me.
A tiny minority of tinkerers want open systems. The rest love their walled garden.
The reason us tinkerers are so noisy is because we are getting pushed farther and farther into our little niche. In the “good old days”, engineers built computers the way they wanted–this means open systems. But eventually someone figured out that people really do want an appliance, and that you can make a lot more money selling appliances than toolkits.
So eventually us tinkerers will be completely isolated from mainstream computing, which isn’t really what we want. But we won’t have a choice because that’s the direction that Windows and OSX are taking, and smartphone/tablet OSes have already taken.
The writing is on the wall but we don’t have to be happy about it.
As I understand it, msconfig has been dismantled and the options put in more logical parts of the OS. For instance, the ability to activate and deactivate startup programs has been moved to the Task Manager (and, in fact, with improved functionality).
Not that I’m getting Win8 either, but I’ve played with it and read reviews/tech articles on it.
That’s one of the main reasons I always preferred PCs over Apples. Of course now I’m rusty and don’t do much tinkering (not to mention have a laptop instead of a tower and they’re a whole 'nother animal). It’s just more fun to have control.
At the software level, I think Macs are more modifiable than PCs these days. On OS X, you have a nice Unix terminal, and can screw things up or add things as you desire. In PCs, to get really good functionality, you generally need to go through effort. Perhaps not significantly more effort, but I consider it more effort than you have to go through on OS X or Linux. Especially with the whack permissions system on Windows. On Mac, I can sudo almost everything. There’s a VERY small number of things that you have to enable the root account for. In Windows, I can run command line in administrator mode and STILL have Windows look at me funny if I try certain things.
I’m still not getting Win8, but this is one less reason why, and good to know. Thank you 
I like to tinker, but Apple gives me enough tinkering to keep me happy. I even upgraded my processors in my first generation MacPro, turning it from 4-cores (2xDuo) to an 8-core (2xQuad) machine for under $200. (It’s not serious surgery, but does require some special tools, taking everything apart and using some thermal paste). Put in a new graphics card while I’m at it, but any idiot can do that. There’s really not much additional modding that I need to do with my Mac. And most of the in-OS modding I want to do I can accomplish in System Preferences or, if I really need to, from the Terminal. But I like the way everything is set-up, so I don’t bother, except for displaying hidden folders and files.
I want to be able to make my machines do what I want them to do, not what some corporate drone thinks I should want them to do. If they’re doing something weird, I want to be able to find out why, and possibly fix it if no one else beats me to it. Also–and this is a key point–I want to know that they’re not doing things I don’t want them to do without my knowledge.
I take my old computers and turn them to other uses. One old gaming PC is now an emulator box. Another is a media server; I may add a book scanner to it, based on the design Google recently released. An old laptop is slated to become the heart of an experimental ad hoc control network. Some of that could be done with locked down hardware and software, I suppose, but it would have been far more frustrating, and odds are that at least some of those machines would be useless scrap today.
Yes, ultimately computers are just tools…but do you really want a hammer that’s going to say, “Oh, no, you can’t hit that kind of nail. You need a $100 add-on for that.”?
Could one run virtual machines (either VMWare or Virtual Box) under Win8, and therein run WinXP or (even better) Win98 or Linux?
I agree with those above who say, I want everything to work just fine as-is out of the box with no muss or fuss – for things like Web browsing, Office apps (or Gnu equivalents), all that kind of stuff. When I’m actually trying to get something like that done, I just want it to work without having to fart around all day configuring things.
That said, I also want to be able to tinker to my hearts content when I want to tinker to my hearts content. When I got my first personal computer (a 386 in 1990, running some version of MSDOS), I quickly also got several 3rd party C compilers (with assemblers), a Fortran compiler, a COBOL compiler, and a Pascal compiler, and I began writing 386 assembler programs.
Today, I have Win98, WinXP, and Linux. I have various MS Visual suite developers kits, MS SQL server and development kits, MySQL and Apache servers running (so I can play with developing PHP and database apps) and fun stuff like that.
So I would call this a sort of garden, but not a walled one.
Did I read aright above that Winders 8 has finally gone and done away with the command prompt? Does it provide ways to do everything without a command prompt that we’ve been able to do all these years with a command prompt? That’s hard to imagine. What about their vaunted PowerShell? Where does that fit in now?
Regarding desktop computers? Absolutely not. Windows and Mac OS (if those are the two you’re talking about) are not a “walled garden”. Anyone can write and distribute applications for those platforms for free, using freely available tools from Apple, Microsoft, and others.
Sure, you cannot customize certain aspects of the user interface or characteristics of the operating system itself, but the only people who care about being able to change the scrollbar color or whatever are hobbyists who can’t think of anything better to do with their time. There’s not a whole lot of innovation left in OS design - it’s sort of plumbing at this point. The guy quoted in the OP is fighting last decade’s war. It’s over, no one really cares what you do with your computer - and Linux still sucks on the desktop.
In terms of application freedom, the major operating systems are totally open.
Now, for mobile computers, Apple’s iOS is certainly more locked-down than Google’s Android. Anyone can develop applications for iOS for free, but you have to pay Apple $99 / year and 30% of your profits to distribute them through the App Store (the only possible distribution channel). Apple does have certain guidelines for what kinds of app they will accept, and they’ve made some stupid editorial decisions over the years (generally involving censoring an app that includes some kind of politically or morally controversial content), but all in all I don’t think their “walled garden” has hurt technical progress much.
If the “walled garden” really were a net negative, there should be some wildly innovative applications available for Android that are not available for iOS. I am not aware of any such applications, despite the fact that Android has a significantly higher installed userbase. The mobile applications I’ve seen with truly innovative UI design appeared on iOS first.
And despite Android’s open nature, it still has many notable weak spots compared to iOS, and no discernible competitive advantage from the openness (several competitive weaknesses, though, notably the lack of standardization of screen sizes, resolutions, etc.)
I agree with the poster above that the only people who demand the ability to tinker are the ones who consider “tinkering with my phone/computer” an enjoyable hobby. Most people prefer to pay extra money for a device that does not require tinkering to function properly.
I have not used Win8, but googling suggests it’s basically the same: push winkey+R, type “msconfig” without quotes, hit “ENTER.” Does that not work? I’m sure there’s a more user-friendly way to do it, but that’s how I’ve been using Run since WinXP at least.
Nice point. I certainly view computers as a tool – once upon a time I got pretty good at C++ data structures and algorithm analysis, but while the details of stacks and ways of finding the most efficient way of allocating memory and avoiding memory leaks are interesting theoretically, I never needed or wanted anything more than a multi-user unix server to test out ideas.
It’s great to be able to fix stuff that goes wrong on a Windows box (gack, not hardware – I’m not soldering stuff to the motherboard ever again), but mostly it’s very nice to be able to have the option to get into the lower levels of the OS and do some tricks if need be.
My days of spending hours fiddling with the Windows registry are over, though – I don’t have patience for that, unless it means the difference between fixing a bunged up system and potentially losing some data I’d prefer to keep.
Sometimes I think it’d be slightly easier to write your own drivers for some things, if you have the hardware specs, than spend hours and days searching for some kids hacked-together version, though. Not a Linux fan, but they’re pretty cool people, in their own way.
Right now I think one of my biggest problems with stuff is OS disparity in how certain integral things work. Let’s just say that the environment variable menu in Windows has no undo button and I didn’t know that in Windows environment variables were case insensitive.
You see, when you have a list of variables, and some are in ALLCAPS, some are in MixedCaps, and some are in nocaps, it kinda gives the impression that case matters. So when I come in to set something up and its user manual tells me to set the PATH variable, and I only see Path I’m left with a menu that makes things look case sensitive and me needing to set a variable that doesn’t match that case…
Luckily I had a restore point.
ETA: Also, despite warning the user for EVERY DAMN THING they try to do, the Windows devs, in their infinite wisdom, did NOT see fit to prompt you if you’re about to overwrite an environment variable with a new one with the same name in the GUI.
That’s sort of the point though, Most us didn’t even know that that sort of nail even existed. When enlightened, most us don’t care much either.
In addition, the following can also come up:
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Why are you using a nail to do that? A screw came out 5 years ago that is easier to use and doesn’t rust.
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Why are you using that nail? We changed standards to a new, better nail.
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Most people decided they liked using a different nail instead, so we moved the bulk of our production to that one. You can still use that nail, you just have to pay a premium price because it’s hard to find.
The “nail” I had in mind was…playing a DVD. Do you want to be able to hammer that nail? Windows 8 doesn’t support that out of the box–Microsoft wants you to buy the Media Center pack.
Of course, you can install a third-party player…as long as MS lets you. My read of Win8 is that they’re angling for an exclusive app-store approach, where software is only available to you through their channel, which allows them to restrict or discourage third-party software as well as skim some money off for themselves.