Thanks for all the great feedback. It certainly gives me a warm fuzzy to receive such a boatload of helpful suggestions. I've got RAM on order, and I'll make some of the window-manager changes suggested by the gallery.
Even so, I really liked Marcel's statement, "Linux bloatware should run at least as fast as Windows bloatware out of the box." That pinpoints my feeling exactly, which is why I included the speed comparisons. When default installations from different vendors yield such one-sided results, Microsoft Outlook begins to look less like bloatware than some Linux alternatives. Todd said, "Linux isn't for everybody...nor should it be." There is some truth in that perhaps. After years of swimming on the edges of the Linux pool, I am still a newbie. I know enough to get sendmail, bind, and apache running. I've configured my laptop with kismet and airsnort for war driving. That kind of stuff. But there is probably not a person in this list that doesn't know more about Linux than me. Still, if Linux is just for users that have time to really know this wonderful OS, then the marketing folks at Red Hat should stop trying to position it as a replacement for a Windows desktop. I hope they don't stop trying, because I want them to succeed, but this most recent experience tells me they still have a long way to go to win customers like me. Forgive my hubris, but I think people like me represent the future of the Linux market. In one of my capacities, I am the IT Director for a medical organization with 30 WAN sites. I'm using Linux at the perimeter, but I would love to deploy it to some of my users and save gobs of money over equivalent MS solutions. For me it's about saving money--Linux instead of XP, OpenOffice instead of MS Office, etc. Unfortunately I cannot start down that path until an out-of-box installation with all the bells and whistles enabled performs at least 75% as well as an OEM Windows installation with all the value-add processes (i.e., crap) vendors throw into those. I suspect a large percentage of IT decision makers for small-medium companies have much the same sentiment. Linux may not be for everybody, but if it wants to survive it should strive to provide a solution for every reasonable market demographic, especially the average desktop. It is well known that acceptance at the desktop drives acceptance elsewhere. (Does anyone doubt that Windows' domination at the desktop helped Microsoft unseat Novell at the NOS level?) What was I saying? Oh yeah. I guess I was naive, but I expected this new 2.4GHz machine (admittedly, it needs more RAM) to run a default Red Hat installation lickety-split, even considering hogs like Gnome and Metacity. I know better now. _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
