My position on laptops is they all suck. I have a macbook pro which was really expensive and I find nothing special at all about it. Even the screen sucks. Sure it has a microscopic dot pitch but the color reproduction is lousy compared to my desktop monitor (When I can get the video card to play well with it.). The specs are alright, but nothing special for the cost. Build quality seems alright... helps that it's solid metal, I guess, but even the cheaper models have the same construction.

As for non-Mac laptops, well, they're cheaper but suck too. The majority of them have piss-poor build quality all around.

Software library? Meh it's more or less the same, there are just a handful of Apple exclusives, but nothing special, considering you have to buy them separate along with the expensive hardware.

So really, the best solution is the good desktop + netbook combo. Use the desktop for gaming and heavy work and the netbook for when you need something portable.

If you really must have a mac, get the cheapest thing you can get, or just hackintosh it.

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I think the major issue with windows, even XP, is that it gave you Administrator accounts by default, unlike most linux distributions where it pretty much yells at you for using root to do stuff that's not administrative and gives you plenty of opportunity right away to give you passworded accounts.

Windows 7 I guess tried to fix that by still giving you retardoadministrator access by default, but made everything convoluted to do anything ever, rather than having you on a plain limited account and having you use something like su to have a real administrator run a program as needed, like an installer, which windows does have with the right click -> run as administrator option, but administrator is STILL pretty limited in a lot of areas like modifying system files and stuff, but then you have free reign it seems in Program Files because shitty old programs want to be able to write to their own directory and there's no sandboxing for older apps (which is what they should've done for for compatibility in the first place... something like Wine where it has it's own virtual root and compatibility settings.).

The whole thing seems like a fight between trying to keep stuff stupid and convenient and trying to make things more secure (though I guess in a lazy way.). Honestly, when it comes to security, they should be a bit harder on it and the users who find it inconvenient to have to run in a limited account and enter the administrator password to access folders outside of their Users folder should suck it up and get used to it. This one thing will probably protect against a large amount of viruses more than anything they've done so far.

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Originally posted by Schala

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... and at least it's not like Linux, where I have to type my password every time I want to change a setting or install something. =/

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It's really not that often, and I think you can configure a lot of stuff like gksu and all that to remember your password, which I think is even the default to the extent that it'll remember it for a little bit. Though that's really not that great, in the case that there is some exploit that allows a script to run and wreak havoc.

I really think users need to stop being protected from mild inconveniences while hurting security and allow all these viruses and whatnot to propagate the way they do.

Oh yeah and fucking hiding extensions by default is so annoying. :/ There have been instances where someone needed help with something and I tried to direct them and the only way I could address a file was by extension but since windows hides them, they had no idea what I meant. Most useless feature ever and it's been enabled since what? At least windows 98? Maybe even 95 but I don't recall. This is also bad for the virus.jpg.exe problem. I would say this is "protecting from mild inconvenience" but I don't see any inconvenience in displaying extensions... I honestly have no idea what they're thinking having this option at all.

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