I've been noticing something about MythTV's overall design that is markedly better than the ATI Windows product; namely the split into client and server. On Windows, when the machine started recording a show, a window popped up over my work, a task showed up in the task bar, and I was distracted. The machine was also given to thrashing and straining whenever a recording was being done, so again, having a recording on the go was distracting, and I'd often kill them because they were annoying me while I worked.

With Myth, I literally don't know when the machine is recording. I also don't really care save when I go to watch TV and discover it's already busy with a recording. I can even watch a recorded show while it's recording another. The UI may be a PITA, but splitting into a recording server and a client is definitely a good move.

I do rather miss the "translucent overlay" feature from the Windows software/hardware combination. It was so nice to be able to have something trivial, something that wasn't really worth devoting attention to, but about which I said to myself "everyone has seen it, if you're going to have any hope of relating to normal people in this culture you need to have seen it too", play in a small window in the corner as I did my work.

One thing I definitely can see happening is that I won't get around to adding new things to record to the set. Unlike with the Windows software, where I had to set each week's recordings at the beginning of the week, Myth lets me tell it to record a show every week, and automates the download of the TV Guide info, with the result that I'll likely forget to go in and look for movies I want to record until I realise there's nothing in the hopper... which isn't really all that bad a thing... I only watch two or three a week... just noting that it seems like an event that's likely to occur with the MythTV design.