> While I'm much in favor of linux and *BSD's taking over more of the
> desktop market, I've concluded some distributions are overdoing the
> hype. Easier is good, but the public is slowly getting the impression
> that linux (in particular) is like installing and using Wxx. It's not.
>
> The following is one of many examples we've seen recently ....
> ^^^^
<SNIP>
> Well, John's reply is excellent. However, I suspect the
> original poster
> is wondering how to edit fstab. Moreover, he wonders what the
> hell fstab
> is. We can't introduce people at this level. A couple of
> years ago, new
> users were coming on line and asked questions after trying to find the
> answers. MLs, NGs and IRC were a wealth of thought out info. I stopped
> IRC'ing a few months ago after a few too many Quake and RTFM
> questions.
Totally. I am dissapointed with linux. I used unix years ago but have been
working in Windows for the last 5-10 years. Linux does not cut it as a
desktop environment for the kind of users I deal with all day. I can barely
make sense of it. When linux boots up, I feel like I am facing a blank wall.
Any OS where you have to know the scan rate of your monitor to get a desktop
up does not cut it in the real world of people who want to run a word
processor and have email. I still can't run 24-bit colour. I installed Win98
on the same machine. Insert boot floppy, insert CD, go make coffee.
Installing linux? Ha. Still doing it.
No way would I recommend linux to my friends who do not have years of
computing experience.
Please someone tell me: what's a good mailer? And by good, I mean having
facilites equivalent to netscape mail. I want to have folders and I want
incoming mail to be put into folders according to rules that I make up. I
have only _just_ gotten fetchmail working and downloading mail from my POP
box. It all goes into "INBOX". I know that linux _can_ do this sort of
thing, but the feelgood visual tools are just not there. To run linux, you
have to be a UNIX sysadmin and not everyone is.
Much as I hate MicroSloth, they _do_ provide a unified set of tools for the
kind of people who purchase a computer because they want to do things with
it. Linux and Windoze are as different as a professional rally car and an
off-the-shop-floor hyundai. Linux is great for people like you and me who
are into comuters _as_ _such_. But not for anyone who simply wants to use
one to get some work done.
I could go on. And I shall. Even now that I have X running, the tools look
clunky and amateurish. Windows apps have polish. I have run netscape for
linux and the XT numpad cursor keys dont work, and home and end don't do
what I'd expect. Why the hell not? Probably something buried deep inside
some blecherous config file, or in a keyboard driver that I am supposed to
actually compile. Who the hell ever heard of a personal-market OS where you
had actually compile source code? Why would, say, an advertising exec even
want to know what compiling _is_? There is a lot to be said for having a
monopoly and corporate nazis enforcing look and feel guidelines. There's a
lot to be said for drag-n-drop.
X freezes on my machine. Turns out that the Mandrake distrib of X may have
problems. Arrgh! Who needs this? Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that
linux fans give windows a hard time about?
I wouldn't have said that Bill Gate$ had vision before I tried running some
other OS, but now I'm re-evaluating. There is just nothing else that comes
anywhere near windows for making it possible for an
idiot^H^H^H^H^Hnon-computer person to run a computer. Bill Gate$ did have a
vision: that of making computers acessible to people who don't like
computers. And it's a wild success. The kind of people behind linux could
not do, and are not doing, what Bill did.
Linux does not have vision. It has 600 bits of software all half-written by
students, none of which will work unless you have a bunch of development
libraries that you have to get from somewhere else on the web, and none of
which really do what you want. Sure the underlying OS is great, the kernel
is hot, but people don't run OSes. They run apps. And getting apps together
with a decent interface and good help material is just plain hard work. It's
boring. I hate doing it. The only kind of people who will do it are wage
slaves. Comp Sci students would rather be writing memory management tweaks.
Can I say something to the developers out there? RPM your packages. Really.
If it is not RPMmed, I'm not interested in even trying to install it. Kindly
remember, I was once like you. 10 years ago I was a Comp Sci student myself.
Yes, I wrote a text editor entirely in bsh. Nigel wrote one in C, in which
each character of the file occupied a node in a linked list. The follies of
youth. Since then I have been earning a living writing Excel macros and
Access databases for the kind of people who make it possible for our
industry to exist. Users. If you haven't met any yet you will someday.
Possibly the first week after you finish your degree in theoretical compiler
writing. Trust me, it comes as a shock. Linux is not saleable to these
people and possibly never will be. These people, as I mentioned before, are
just not interested in becoming unix sysadmins. I'm not even sure I am.
After 30, your mind starts to slow down (and bits of your body start getting
unreliable, but that's another story).
Can someone, please, recommend to me a text on how linux works. The books in
the bookshop are all about the command line options available to "awk", and
I'm not interested. I want to know how the filesystem works, what the kernel
does, which daemon processes I really need and what they do. What would an
absolutely minimal install contain? If it's on the web, fine.
And HTF can I get 24 and 32 bit colour going? Windows does it fine and does
not need to know the f*cking horizontal and vertical scan rate of my
monitor.
Oh by the way: I tried to compile a "hello world" program. In C. Turns out,
I have a c compiler but dont have stdio.h anywhere on my system. Can anybody
out there recommend a location where I can get a full c compiler? I'd like
to reinstall mandrake, but I don't dare because I have actual email on my
system that may, for instance, have stuff relevant to my job aka earning a
living aka not starving to death and I don't want to reinstall the whole OS
and run the risk of wiping it.
At this stage, I would be looking at wiping linux off my "real" machine, and
putting it on my toy box and using windows for anything serious.
