On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Sam Ewalt wrote: > > When I was switching from the Commodore 64 to > > MS-DOS 5.0, I felt the same way. > > The level of complexity with Linux is truly staggering. It's much more > complex and complicated than DOS.
When you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, you can look out and literally be overwhelmed by its immensity. You can also look down next to your feet and see the single flower sprouting out of a tiny crack in otherwise solid rock and feel a totally different kind of awe. With Linux, look at the individual flowers. You still have an awareness of the huge canyon out there, but if you don't focus on it, it gradually becomes less intimidating. > I don't need a multi-user system > with dozens of services, multiple shells, desktops, widgets and > thousands of commands. I'm a single user and single minded. I tend > to do one thing at a time and have enough trouble with that. Maybe you'd like a setup like I did for my wife's laptop. She logs in and is presented with an ASCII menu of the things she commonly uses. Hitting a letter plus <enter> starts an application in pure X. No window manager, no desktop. She has a screen full of Word Perfect, e.g., and nothing else. Unfortunately, once she exits WP, she's back at her login prompt, so she has to give her password everytime she wants to switch programs. I haven't had time to work around that, but she seems completely happy with it that way. > Another good way to learn something about Linux is to > get a shell account somewhere and spend some time getting familiar > with the basic commands and structures. I used to recommend that. As a matter of fact, I started my journey on the 'nix road with a BSD shell. Shell accounts are in much shorter supply these days though. > Starting out as the sysadmin of your own Linux system is a prime > example of what they call a "non-trivial task". Yup. It's like anything else you want to learn that's completely different than anything else you've ever done. There is effort required... and along with that, some discomfort... and, oh yeah... FRUSTRATION! ;-) > It's > probably indicative of the way things are going that there is > little discussion here anymore about Arachne and DOS. The current versions of Arachne have probably all had their bugs discussed to death already. Michael said that version 1.71 would be the next Linux upgrade. That was many months ago, and with the cross-platforming he's doing, I'm looking for the next Arachne to be something totally different. - Steve
