At 6:46 AM -0800 3/3/10, Thaths wrote: >On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 6:11 AM, Giancarlo Livraghi <[email protected]> wrote: >> The fact, as I understand it, is that unix has existed for forty years, >> linux for twenty, but they were "for the experts".
I've been using Unix for 34 years, and it's always been easy to *use*. If you don't mind working in the shell, that is. Installing and configuring it, however, has always been a royal pain. I bought my first Mac because OSX is built on top of BSD, and I was tired of Microsoft hiding things from me on my own computer. OSX works great out of the box, and you can tinker with the Unix under the hood pretty easily as well. Software packages downloaded from the network mostly just work. So, Unix has been for the masses for at least 10 years, OSX being pretty much plain vanilla BSD Unix plus a really fancy desktop. It is hands-down the easiest and most reliable operating system I've ever used, particularly Snow Leopard. Linux is definitely getting there, too. My daughter has spent the past 5 years or so installing Linuces on various hardware configurations (it's her hobby). She's tried pretty much every Linux distro on old sparcs and x86 boxes and Macintoshes. She used to have to give up certain configurations (we never got anything to work on the Sun 3, for example) and write certain distros off on certain combinations of hardware. Recently, however, her emphasis has changed from "Which distro can I get to run acceptably on this hardware?" to "Which distro do I prefer on this hardware?" I bought an eeepc a few months ago and put the netbook respin of Ubuntu on it. It was enchanting watching it install and configure itself and then *work* without the need to slog through configuration files trying to figure out why the keyboard or touch pad or speakers or network were apparently hooked up to a coke machine somewhere in Kansas. I spent the first few weeks waiting for something major to break so I could fix it, and watching with amazement while it connected to wireless networks as if by magic everywhere I went. I am easily amused by things like this, because I used computers back when hardly anything worked well, let alone out of the box. > >Now it's easy for >> everybody. And that is a *big* change. Strangely enough, nobody (including >> penguin advocates) seems to have noticed how important this can be. We're still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Seriously, though, I've always found Unix easier to use than Windows. It just wasn't as pretty and the documentation wasn't as friendly. The truly awful frustrating system problems I've had have always been on Windows, and I'm still annoyed at how difficult Microsoft makes networking configuration. Networking is easier on the eeepc under Ubuntu and GNOME than it was under Windows 7. And, with a netbook, wireless networking is something you want to do a lot. It's the whole point of the machine. >There are many reasons why Linux has become much more userfriendly. >Device manufacturers wisening up and working actively to have drivers >for Linux, the move away from ISA to PCI (and USB and UPnP), the >rock-solid stability that Debian brings to the distribution space, the >nicer uniform UI that GNOME and KDE have, etc. The money Shuttleworth >invested in making Ubuntu is just one of the final steps (agreed, it >is a pretty big step). It seems like the step that's pulling all the bits and pieces together into the seamless whole that naive users find so reassuring. I have to admit that it's purely luxurious to work with either GNOME or KDE as they are now. They work nicely, they're pretty intuitive, and you can still pop up a shell if anything goes wrong that you need to fix. A few years ago, I wouldn't have recommended Linux to anyone who didn't have a decent technical background. Now, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Ubuntu to anyone. Microsoft seems to be crumbling slowly, and Apple has always (since the release of the original Macintosh in 1984, anyway) been way too fond of vertical monopoly for my tastes. -- Heather Madrone ([email protected]) http://www.madrone.com http://www.sunsplinter.blogspot.com I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me access to the source code.
