2009/8/8 Arnel Tuazon <[email protected]>: > > Well I thought I'd give my old iBook G3 some new life by installing Jaunty > Jackalope as I kept hearing about Ubuntu and how great it is. All I can say > is if you're a regular Joe computer user, Linux is still not for you IMHO. > I don't understand how an OS (Linux) after all these years and with all the > past hype still seems like it's in the beta stages as an OS for the masses. > Ease of use it ain't (well maybe just for Ubuntu as I haven't tried YDL in 4 > years).
I'm sorry to hear you say that, but as a Linux user and occasional evangelist for 13y now, I have to admit that *as a modern Internet desktop OS* it is essentially an x86 OS. As a server, it can be just fine on various non-x86 machines, including PowerPC. The problem is that although Linux itself is open source, some of the fairly critical parts of the GUI desktop are not; they are proprietary binary blobs supplied as freeware by large commercial companies like Adobe. This applies to a number of things you might reasonably want, such as the Flash player and Skype and drivers for quite a variety of hardware. Some other bits, such as Adobe Reader, one can more happily live without. Without these, you will have a sub-optimal experience, to say the least - and alas there is little chance of them ever appearing. On a very basic x86 PC, Linux is entirely capable of being installed and used by a non-expert user these days. Indeed it can be better for "newbies" than for those with a little PC experience. A common problem is people thinking that they know how to do things on a computer, when actually, all they know is how /Windows/ does something. So, for instance, if they want to play RealPlayer, they think "ah! I need RealPlayer. I'll go to the Real site, download it, install it and I'll be running." The snag is, that's not the way it works on Linux, and that method will be very hard, complex, failure-prone and probably won't work. If they simply stuck "how to play realplayer video on ubuntu" into Google and followed the instructions, they'd be fine. Either way, sadly, for a modern distro like Ubuntu, a 700MHz machine is a low spec. My 1.6GHz PC laptop struggles with Ubuntu! Frankly, if your Mac can run OS X, you're better off with OS X than any flavour of Linux. The only exception is if you're trying to build a server and either can't afford OS X Server or it is not suitable for the requirement. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: [email protected] • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: [email protected] Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: [email protected] • ICQ: 73187508 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
