"Steven C. Darnold" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Day Brown wrote: > > > > A bit of history. First I was told how much better MC > > was than dos. > > Who said this? I'm sure it wasn't me (I don't use MC). > And I certainly don't remember reading it here. What > idiot told you that a filemanager is better than an OS.
Unfortunately, I can't get to the softcon archives at the moment, but my recollection is more of Day saying nothing like Norton Commander existed for Linux, at which point a couple of folks pointed out MC. Day then came back bemoaning the fact that a few keystrokes were different in MC than NC. He has since moved on to other DOS-based tools which have lower probabilities of having direct Linux counterparts, ensuring that Linux will forever be the less capable OS. Henceforth, all open source development on networked, multiuser or GUI desktop applications should stop, and all of the effort redirected to porting all DOS tools to Linux and BSD in order to get over this critical hurdle to the future acceptance of these alternative operating systems. Without this, we are doomed. > [...] > > Although, if so, I dont understand why the distros dont > > tell the users to use them. > > Why would a distro tell users what to use? A distro is just > a collection of stuff that somebody thought was useful. > Perhaps a distro includes some documentation to help newbies > get started, and perhaps somewhere in that documentation it > suggests that the newbie might find it easier to get around > the CLI using MC (the best-known CLI filemanger). > > As to why MC is the best-known CLI filemanager for Linux, > I suppose it's because MC has been around for a long time. > Just like vi is the standard editor. Many people say that > there are better editors than vi, but all of the distros > still include vi (or a clone). The abundance of choices in Linux is obviously a detriment. It may be better if a user has to pay for every utility that addresses shortcomings of the core operating system (or themselves), no matter how trivial. How much did Xtree or Norton Commander cost when they came out, $20 or so? Charge another $20-60 for a decent editor. What the hell, a few bucks for the core OS and every update that comes out. And all those startup scripts are just way too confusing. Let users learn to create them on their own. There, I think Linux has a chance. If it doesn't cost several hundred dollars for the software, people will just hoard it all and get confused. Steven, your selfish practice of providing Basic Linux for free absolutely must stop. You are confusing people by giving them far too many options to freely select what the operating system ultimately consists of, with no penalty. Although large capacity drives can be had for a few bucks, filling it with all that software is wasteful. If you insist on continuing this irresponsible behavior, you should be forced to provide hardcopy documentation with every copy consisting of not less than 600 pages of low-acid content paper. Only then will Linux begin to gain widespread acceptance. - Bob (Leading the charge ... backwards) To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
