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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] aoldot com> 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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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Some day, I might run a Linux box again. But I don't think I'd set one
> up for my grandma.
Then you'll have to clean it from spyware once a month. Is that really a
better alternative?
--
- Warp
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>> Some day, I might run a Linux box again. But I don't think I'd set one
>> up for my grandma.
>
> Then you'll have to clean it from spyware once a month. Is that really a
> better alternative?
In my experience, only certain people have this problem.
My dad's PC seems to get infected with puzzling frequency. But my
mother's PC has yet to be infected, ever. Same goes for my PC, my
sister's laptop, my grandparents' PC, and so on. Also, where I work,
certain people's PCs get infected from time to time, but most of them
remain completely clean.
Certainly Windows is radically more vulnerable to malware than Linux.
But if you operate the computer sensibly, it tends not to cause
problems. In other words, using Windows does *not* necessarily mean
constant malware issues.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> 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.
I choose which distro to use based mainly on how pretty the installer
and the default desktop are. Arbitrary and shallow, but I have no idea
what else to base the choice on.
I tried Ubuntu, and while it was quite easy to set up, I dislike the
drab shade of brown. OpenSUSE is a lush shade of green, however.
(Similarly, uninstall OpenSUSE 7 and install OpenSUSE 8. Now the
graphics look a different, but... is that the only difference??)
One somewhat annoying thing is that most distros will automatically
install multiple gigabytes of "stuff", most of which I have no interest
in. Sure, you could *try* to uninstall it all, but you still have to
wait for it to install in the first place. *Some* distros give you a
"minimal text install" option or similar, and if so I usually start from
there. However...
...package management. Doesn't really exist on Windows. You just install
something, and either it works or it tells you it can't find XYZ and you
should install that first. On Linux, dependency management is insane
sometimes.
I don't have any specific, repeatable examples. But, from memory, I once
had a KDE desktop, and I just wanted to install gnumeric (because
KSpread was rubbish). Watch as the dependency resolver decides I need to
download and install every GNOME library known to man - including the
GNOME sound system (something beginning with e?) In fact, I recall it
was something like KDE was using one kernel API for audio, and GNOME
wanted to use a completely different one, and it starts getting *really*
interesting...
I guess Windows is pretty monolithic. You install "Windows", and you
have a sound API, a graphics API, a window manager, a user shell, etc.
On Linux, these are all seperate bits, and there are several
[incompatible] options for each. /dev can be static files, or one of
several automatic device creator modules. There are at least 2 seperate
kernel sound APIs. The text-mode portion of the system can be direct VGA
text mode or some mannar of framebuffer or some other thing. The
graphics system will usually be X11, but there are often multiple
drivers that will drive your particular graphics hardware (with
differing flaws and limitations). Then of course there's KDE or GNOME
(or FluxBox or Enlightenment or OneNote or twm or ...) And then there
are widget toolkits. And then... are you bored yet?
Software written against "Windows" expects one set of APIs. (Or maybe a
few, if it supports several versions of Windows.) Software written
against "Linux"? Maybe it supports one random combinations of libraries.
Maybe there's a build option? Good luck getting it to work. On Linux you
*need* automated dependency management if you expect anything to work!
Also... Debian's dselect thing is a horrid, horrid tool! >_<
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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