Lionel Lecoq wrote: > > Glad to find someone who has been involved with computers longer than I have...
Another grumpy old graybeard ;-) > The bit about Linux or X being easy is obviously completely false. This list is the >proof of it. > The main problem is the lack of drivers due to the missing motivation of most cards >manufacturers. Well I, as a FreeBSD user, have never been much bothered by this, with few exceptions. The worst is probably video cards. By the time the XFree86 guys can get their hands on the latest stuff and get drivers written and debugged, the manufacturers have quit making that model and the stores have quit stocking it. So you never know what to buy. The way I work around that is to give the new equipment to my wife (Windows) and take the hand-me-downs. Easier to justify the money that way. ;-) > Another problem is the way the documentation is presented: The man pages are very >verbose and are > not always structured, the how-to s can go from excellent to less than satisfactory. I don't have much first-hand experience with Linux, but the impression I get is that there's a huge quantity of "documentation" but the quality is highly variable (some is excellent, and straight from the horse's mouth, and some is well-meaning but inaccurate). And it takes a bit of searching to find what you need. Have you considered Solaris? It's not free-as-in-speech, but it's cheap ($10 + shipping for a few CDs) and the man pages are uniformly good, but the set of device drivers is even more limited. I can highly recommend FreeBSD. When I first tried it back in '95 (ver. 2.0) it was better than anything else I had ever used, including Solaris 2.2, and it's continued to improve. But it's growing over time; if bloat bothers you, try NetBSD. Those guys concentrate on quality rather than feature creep. I'm about to switch my Alpha back from Free- to Net-, just to keep up with what those guys are doing. > I have mainly difficulties getting used to OOP (why use a 2KB assembler program to >do what a 10MB > C++ program can do?) Symptomatic of old graybeards. -- Remember, more computing power was thrown away last week than existed in the world in 1982. -- http://www.tom.womack.net/computing/prices.html _______________________________________________ Newbie mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** To unsubscribe , or change message options, see: http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/newbie
