On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 08:01:18AM +0800, Dong Calmada wrote: > I thought this would need some discussion among pluggers. > > Dong > > > _____ > > The Fast-Food Syndrome: The Linux Platform is Getting Fat > > By Bob Marr <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Posted on > 2004-06-10 05:48:42 > at OSNews [http://www.osnews.com/] >
First of all, the 'fat' that we see here is mostly (but !purely) based on perception. To illustrate, let me invoke a real-world example: I was watching local TV the evening before, and the boob tube had "Maala-ala Mo Kaya" featuring the life and troubles of Neri Naig (of Star Circle Quest) fame. Perhaps a lot of folks here in PLUG watch this (when they're not in front of their Linux CRTs ;), so I won't elaborate on the story, but rather, on the strange situations in that story: was Neri _really_ that ugly? I could understand here being downtrodden and all, but I don't get the rest of the folks in that story who think of her as some outsider. Perhaps it is reflective of the 'superhero' situation (read: spider-man2 ;) all of us are most familiar of... The most important point here wrt the 'fat', however, is the perception people have: the viewpoints of different people are as multi-faceted as a glittering diamond. Perception is the problem because we have a point of comparison, and for most of us, this point of comparison is none other than (ahem) Microsoft Windows. "Why is X slower than Windows?" "Why is action X more difficult to do under Linux than on Windows?" "Where are all the coolest, most hyped games?" "What the Fsckin' thing about FooBar XXX that sucks cycles in Linux and flies in Windows?" Most (if not all) of us are very familiar with these questions, to wit. The most unfortunate thing is, we (Linux users and developers) have to bear with these sort of questions, even if it is painful enough to warrant plunging the asker's head straight inside a CRT ;) So, what can we do to remove this 'fat'? Probably the quick and dirty way is to strip a running system of this excess baggage: unneeded apps, tools, games(!) and other stuff. With package managers getting better nowadays, this seems to be the easiest way to get Linux lean and mean ;) For the more sophisticated, turning off daemons and long-running processes are even better ideas. However, the real solution would be to inform people of the hows (and whys) of the Un*x system and its structure as opposed to Windows (and perhaps other OSes). That way, people would begin to understand the little 'eccentricites' that pervade each OS, and (hopefully) make their own decisions as to fixing, tuning and customizing their Linux system. Take me, for example: when I installed Debian 3.0 on my Machine roughly a year ago, it was pretty hard, and just trying to get X to work was a pain in the arse (remember: framebuffer OFF ;) But once I got it, everything was working fine. I had almost all the apps from tasksel installed, and even more from dselect; pretty soon I was already nearing my 2GB limit in /usr :P By that time, though, I became very familiar with the system, running Linux almost 100% of the time I use my Athlon, so I already know about resize2fs by then. As time went on I got gnome2.4 in my box (all the way on a 56K ppp) and played happily with it. Up to until now (after migrating to gnome2.6) did I realize the 'fat' was eating up cycles and memory; so, it's just an `apt-get install xfce4` away to a less cluttered, more powerful desktop. I'm now writing this in emacs btw, with 3 other aterms, a OO.o instance, firefox, and xchat on lurk, all occupying about 120MB of 251 and not a byte of swap. I was fortunate enough to be aware of one thing: DOCUMENTATION. doc-linux-* and the rest stashed in /usr/share/doc/ are lifesavers. USE THEM ;) They'll save you more than an apt-get or a full reload: rtfm, rtfm, rtfm. ... Ok, so this is turning into a book. I need to get going now to buy pan de sal at the local baker. Might as well convince him to run Linux on his La Germania ;) Cheers, Zakame -- |=-------------ZAK B. ELEP (Registered Linux User #327585)-------------=| || Web: http://zakame.spunge.org GPG ID: 0xFA53851D || || http://zakame.homelinux.org ICQ UIN: 33236644 || || Location: Daet, Camarines Norte Running Linux 2.6 || |=----------1486 7957 454D E529 E4F1 F75E 5787 B1FD FA53 851D----------=| Debian - When you've got better things to do than to fix a borken system
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