On Tue, Jun 16, 1998 at 09:43:27PM -0500, Dave Ihnat wrote:
> MS is trying to simplify the world too much; most
> Linux advocates (as, to be fair, most Unix advocates I've known for the
> last quarter-century) try to trivialize the difficulties of configuring and
> maintaining a complex OS.
I (largely) agree.
Albert Einstein wrote that "Everything should be as simple as possible,
but no simpler." He was talking about cognitive models of complex
physical processes and the pitfall that we all sometimes fall into
of oversimplfying the model (in order to aid our understanding) so much
so that the model no longer corresponds with reality.
But his comment also applies to OS design and implementation. I'm not
in favor of gratuitous complexity, and am as tough a critic of it as
anyone when I bump into it. However, I recognize that there is a
certain amount of necessary complexity involved in most engineering
projects. If you try to design and build a modular, portable, scalable,
modifiable, reliable, high-performance OS, you will probably find it
a continuous struggle to keep it simple.
This is, by the way, one of the primary reasons I use 'nix: I need
those positive attributes and find that the accompanying complexity
is within what I consider to be reasonable bounds -- given what
I get for it. It's also one of the primary reasons that I ridicule NT:
it has an equivalent or higher level of complexity, but with only
trace amounts of the positive attributes that make dealing with
the complexity worthwhile.
This is also why I tell people that 'nix is not for everyone. There
are a *lot* of people who live in some combination of a mail client,
web client, word processor, spreadsheet, graphics manipulator, etc.,
and whose entire use of the machine is simply to run applications.
They don't provide services; they don't run multi-user; they just
want to work on specific tasks.
I tell those people to get a Mac: they can install and configure the
software themselves; they can handle their own sysadmin tasks; and
they'll find it much harder to shoot themselves in the foot than
with other platforms.
I suspect that in 1-2 years I'll be able to point them to a Linux
distribution which approaches this ease-of-use and for which the
appropriate applications are available. *And* which still retains
all the features of Linux that make it a technically superior
operating system.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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