Hi:
NOTE: This is *NOT* a flame... rather a mail to counter what is IMHO a wrong
way of looking at things.... (look at it this way.... if I wanted to flame you
I would have sent in a one-liner saying what you say is utter FUD ;)
Prateek Sureka wrote:
> Well, firstly, in India, i barely know of any machines available on a wide
> scale (whose sales figures are also formidable) which are preinstalled with
> Linux.
Didn't you notice the price was mentioned in USD ;-) .... abt India, we will
change that soon... but don't expect Linux to make major difference to the
Desktop PC market... for example, most of my consulting working is largely
restricted to the server-side.
BTW, this might be of particular interest to JPM who is interested to see
AS/400s run on Linux :) --> IBM is porting Linux over to the S/390 -- the
standard mainframe workhorse from IBM's stables....
> Besides, for a newbie, a UNIX prompt is nothing more than Greek.
Then a Greek's greek must be English or maybe Hindi
> trying to get RH6.0 up with startx (ChipCD) - lotsa probs with graphics
> cards and stuff)
Trash the CHIP CDs.... most ppl I know don't have kind words have for them....
Therefore I didn't even both to try them.... use the PCQ RHL 6.1 CD that came
with PCQ Nov. 99 issue....
> Linux still lacks a stable GUI where the user need not make too many choices.
> I know I'll be flamed for this but this is truly all the non-techies need)
Balderdash!!! KDE is pretty Stable (no BSODs!).... do take a look at KDE 2.0
beta (the final stuff is expected soon) ... even in Beta it is faster, sleeker
and far more feature-rich.... the KDE browser to be bundled with KDE 2.0 is
really shaping up to be something to be reckoned with... its faster than NS,
with a smaller footprint.
The problem with ppl as I find is that they expect Linux & its native apps to
behave Windows-style.... thats a wrong expectation.... rather than Linux being
ready for you, it is more often whether you are ready for Linux... you needn't
be a guru but if you come expecting Windows you will stumble....
I wish I could turn time back to the early days of 1995 (before the arrival of
the W95 pestilence).... if you think a standard GUI where you can point & click
is the be-all-and-end-all in user-friendliness... I wonder just how you would
feel if you were put before a OS/2 Warp 3.... at that time OS/2 had a sizeable
following and was one of the OSes in the reckoning (those of you who had
installed & used it in DOS 6.20 days will know what I mean.... it hardly looked
anything like Win3.x)
Having said that, despite the fact that I use Linux for almost all my work, I
don't yet go around recommending it to ppl as a replacement for their desktop
OS....
> Linux still doesnt offer that. RH is still quite complicated.
Have you tried Caldera OpenLinux with its Lizard Installer, SuSE with its YaST
installer... or any other distro out there.... it is rather unfair to comment
like this after tinkering with one single distro.....
Get this..... RHL doth not Linux make!
> interested in word processing have to know the IRQs and LPT specs and data
> formats for a printer? - Insanity.
Have you tried using Printtools, magicfilter et. al?
> Its well for you people who love its flexibility but its utterly useless to
> a great extent for the people who dont need it. (Now u know why Microsoft
> has been monopolizing all this while)
Microsoft has been monopolizing for reasons apart from ones you mention... had
it been the only reason for their monopoly, Macintosh would have been the King
of the Hill rather than MS....
> which i barely use) - Its much more productive to get things done by simply
> clicking on pictures.... maybe that makes me dumb.... but thats what most
> people want.
No, that doesn't make you dumb... however how much you can achieve using the
GUI again depends on what you do with the machine.... I doubt if there is any
difference between editing the Registry keys & doing "vi /etc/conf.modules"
inside an xterm on KDE....
Some of us were at your age or when we started fiddling with Linux.... that
time we didn't have access to the Net, nor to people who had an idea what Linux
was... I for one had no idea what RAMDAC or Clockchip meant... it meant that we
had to learn things largely on our own individual effort... we didn't spend the
time learning abt Linux because it was "IN", or because it could get us good
jobs, or we would be considered as Gurus if we knew it well (no one in those
days would bat an eyelid if we told them that we were into Linux).... we did
because we were curious to know how it worked, the fact that it was also a UNIX
clone that we could afford legally, certainly gave us added incentive....
Most of the better Open Source s/w were written because someone wanted to
"Scratch their itch".... To be truly a part of the OSS community whether a
developer or as an user, you have to foster the spirit of inquistiveness
& curiosity...
> linux can do. Otherwise LMB will not be interested. THAT I KNOW FOR A FACT.
> believe me. the techies which we had since the days of riddhi are gone. sad
> but true.
AFAIK, most educationists consider children's minds to be like clean slates, to
be conditioned in the process of schooling.... therefore it might make more
sense on the long term to expose younger students (say Class 5/6/ upwards) to
Linux... it is the young, fresh minds we should really go after.... maybe then
we can reverse the situation that you lament.
Cheers,
--Indra.
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