Stephen <mca### [at] aoldotcom> wrote:
> I tried Red Hat about 5 years ago but it never really grabbed my 
> interest.

  Not all distros are equally easy to use. And Red Hat in particular is
more or less obsolete now (since they stopped developing it).

  Most people consider OpenSUSE and Ubuntu to be the user-friendliest.
Personally I only have experience of the former.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   One difference is also that the user can have an impact on the development
> of a distro. You can go to the official forums/mailing lits of the distro
> and suggest some improvement or whatever, and there's a good chance that
> someone will actually listen and implement it. I have first-hand experience.

Yeah, I've fixed 3 or 4 bugs in widely-used packages too. (Tcl and Wings3D 
both spring to mind.)

>   I don't see Microsoft roaming through the millions of messages
> Microsoft-related newsgroups and online forums probably have, and
> implementing people's suggestions. Windows is "too" popular, with "too
> many" users, and it's owned by a single company, so it's basically
> impossible for them to listen to all of them.

I'm not sure of that. The whole ribbon toolbar thing was based on user 
feedback. A lot of it is automatically collected, including crash dumps and 
just usage information. They have millions of people telling them where they 
first look for "right-justify text in an excel cell" for example. It's a 
level of data-collection you'd have a hard time supporting in Linux, 
particularly for free. (Except maybe specific products, like TiVo, where the 
company is making money selling hardware as well.)

I never heard of any free Linux products doing stuff like focus groups, 
either. You often get in Linux that which the geeks think is most useful, at 
the expense of what clueless people can handle. Or you get Linux programs 
using the kinds of interfaces that are already well-established in Windows 
or MacOS, like drop-down window menus, toolbars, border decorations, etc.

It's difficult for MS to pay attention to specific individual users, sure, 
but I think they do a better job of implementing what the majority want, 
mainly because it's in MS's best financial interests to implement what the 
majority want in most cases. (Excluding the majority wanting everything for 
free, etc of course.) And they have the money to pay people to do that sort 
of research, when otherwise it would just cost too much for a free program.

(Of course, there's some free software like Open Office that was essentially 
created as a loss leader, where a lot of work went into it that a normal 
self-motivated nerd wouldn't have bothered with.)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Warp wrote:
>   (Another theory I have is this: Cursive is often used in literature for
> emphasis. 

The way I learned it, it's not "cursive" but "italic."  ("Cursive" purely 
means hand-written words all strung together rather than as block writing. 
I'm sure you know what I mean.)

That nit aside, I was also taught that quotes go around articles, but book 
titles (and foreign words) are in italic, as is emphasis. And that's 
indicated in handwriting by underlining.

Thus, _this_ word will probably show as _italic_ on your screen, if you're 
using something that does things like make *this* word bold.

> maybe someone got confused and thought that cursive and quotes
> are also interchangeable when denoting emphasis.)

I tend to believe it's just laziness and ignorance over an honest mistake 
someone was trying not to make. But then I'm cynical. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Warp wrote:
> However, most Windows users are equally clueless as well, so it
> doesn't really make much of a difference. They still have to call the
> neighbor's kid or take the machine to the shop.

I think the problem is more that it's harder to find someone with Linux 
expertise living next door. :-)

I will agree I see much less random inexplicable breakage on Linux, even 
with very recent versions of Windows.

And it's really only very recently that Linux has been user-friendly enough 
for this to work.  A couple years ago, my dad called me on the phone asking 
how to center what he wanted to print. Altho I'd never used his brand of 
printer before and I didn't know what program he was trying to print from, I 
confidently walked him thru setting it to centered. I knew it would be 
"file->print setup->page layout->center" basically.

Five years ago (heck, even now between KDE and GNOME) you couldn't even tell 
someone on Linux where to find the menu full of installed programs. You 
wouldn't even be able to say "here's how you open a command-line" for 
example. Let alone what you would have needed to do to help someone with 
Linux back when Win98 was popular.

Don't forget we're all the early adopters here. There's *still* a lot of 
people running Win98 at home.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Warp wrote:
>   Not all distros are equally easy to use. And Red Hat in particular is
> more or less obsolete now (since they stopped developing it).

The red-hat distros were also primarily targetting the server market. 
"Fedora" was the home user market, which they kind of gave up on.

>   Most people consider OpenSUSE and Ubuntu to be the user-friendliest.
> Personally I only have experience of the former.

Ubuntu isn't bad, but OpenSuSE is easier to learn IMO.  I'd start with 
OpenSuSE if you can, and Ubuntu after that if OpenSuSE doesn't easily 
support your hardware and all.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Warp wrote:
> Stephen <mca### [at] aoldotcom> wrote:
>> I tried Red Hat about 5 years ago but it never really grabbed my 
>> interest.
> 
>   Not all distros are equally easy to use. And Red Hat in particular is
> more or less obsolete now (since they stopped developing it).
> 
>   Most people consider OpenSUSE and Ubuntu to be the user-friendliest.
> Personally I only have experience of the former.
> 

rely on the limited space on a laptop (ha ha how the world has changed 
when I consider a 250 Gig HD limited space) I might try one of the ones 
with a GUI. That and finding the time.

-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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Darren New wrote:

>>   Most people consider OpenSUSE and Ubuntu to be the user-friendliest.
>> Personally I only have experience of the former.
> 
> Ubuntu isn't bad, but OpenSuSE is easier to learn IMO.  I'd start with 
> OpenSuSE if you can, and Ubuntu after that if OpenSuSE doesn't easily 
> support your hardware and all.
> 

Thanks for the advice, I might just do that when this contract finishes.

-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> >   (Another theory I have is this: Cursive is often used in literature for
> > emphasis. 

> The way I learned it, it's not "cursive" but "italic."  ("Cursive" purely 
> means hand-written words all strung together rather than as block writing. 
> I'm sure you know what I mean.)

  Ah, another example of "false friends" between Finnish and English (that
is, words which seem to be direct equivalents to each other, the Finnish
word seemingly being a direct loan of the English word, but which aren't.

  The finnish word "kursiivi" means italic or oblique (I'm not exactly sure
what the difference is between those two, as I'm not a typographist), while
the English word "cursive" is a completely different word in Finnish
("kaunokirjoitus").

> > maybe someone got confused and thought that cursive and quotes
> > are also interchangeable when denoting emphasis.)

> I tend to believe it's just laziness and ignorance over an honest mistake 
> someone was trying not to make. But then I'm cynical. :-)

  Sometimes misusing quotes can result in rather hilarious, albeit unintended,
meanings. http://adamcadre.ac/images/topa4.jpg

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >   I don't see Microsoft roaming through the millions of messages
> > Microsoft-related newsgroups and online forums probably have, and
> > implementing people's suggestions. Windows is "too" popular, with "too
> > many" users, and it's owned by a single company, so it's basically
> > impossible for them to listen to all of them.

> I'm not sure of that.

  I am pretty sure.

  It's one thing that a program collects some data about how it's being used
and phones home with it (is that even legal?), and a completely different
thing when single person makes one post in a forum, causing a significant
improvement to be made to the distro. I can see the latter happening quite
often in the Linux world.

  User feedback is different. Individuals can feel like they are actually
making a difference. They don't necessarily feel like being part of a grey
mass of millions of users, which are only used to calculate averages.

> It's difficult for MS to pay attention to specific individual users, sure, 
> but I think they do a better job of implementing what the majority want, 

  I think some features of Vista are a sign that Microsoft is not always
so good at implementing what people want. (Yes, people wanted more security,
but not of the type that MS implemented in Vista.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Stephen <mca### [at] aoldotcom> wrote:
>> You make a good case for Linux, there.
> 
>   At least for power users, who know what they are doing. I readily admit
> that Linux is, in some aspects, rather hard for beginners to approach.

Linux is Unix. The stated design goal of Unix was to be an OS for 
experts. The whole system is predicated around the assumption that the 
person at the keyboard is an expert.

Once you accept that it's supposed to be operated by an expert, most of 
the design seems logical and straight-forward. That's why there's not 
much feedback, why the OS does exactly what you tell it to without 
question (you're an expert, right?), why all the configuration is easily 
scriptable, and so forth.

I gather Unix (not necessarily Linux) is popular for servers, presumably 
for this exact reason. (It's also popular for embedded applications, but 
that presumably is due to its extreme portability and configurability 
more than anything else...)

Now, if you're *not* an expert... then an OS designed from the ground-up 
to support the kinds of things an expert wants is arguably not such a 
great idea. From what I've seen, Linux now has various pretty 
front-ends, but as soon as you need to configure something the front-end 
doesn't support, or you import a config file from somewhere else, or 
some other tool (such as a product install script) configures something 
that the front-end can't handle, you suddenly get unceromoniously dumped 
back into exprt-land.

Some day, I might run a Linux box again. But I don't think I'd set one 
up for my grandma.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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