On Sunday 16 February 2003 10:25, Michael Satterwhite wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Benjamin"
To: "SuSE English" Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2003 9:07 AM Subject: Re: [SLE] Linux isn't ready yet It may come as a shock to you but no one says that Linux is ready for the desktop. I don't think Linux is ready for my Aunt either.
Actually, if you look at comp.os.linux.advocacy, there are a lot of people saying it is. I'm not sure I take people on *ANY* advocacy group too seriously, however. They're fun to read, but not too realistic.
Hah! Just look on the boxes from any of the major distributors... SuSE, RH, etc. Especially on the "Personal" editions, they can hardly stop patting themselves on the back, in print, about how friendly and usable [their flavour of] Linux is. And they ARE friendly and usable... until you hit some dumb little user-interface or operational glitch that Windows figured out in 1996. [ Kevin stands aside as 100,000 geeks indignantly rant about "Yeah, but it's a piece of junk under the hood, and riddled with security problems and... and .... ] As usual, the people who are not computer professionals, or infatuated amateurs, are impressed by the experience, not by theoretical excellence. The experience keeps tripping the average computer user. Excellence under the hood means nothing when you waste your time figuring out how to make something work or how to recover from something that should have been automatic. The difference between: a) Windows crashed/locked up and I had to spend 6 minutes waiting for it to reboot versus b) I told Linux to print my document and it stopped when the paper ran out and then I wasted an entire morning failing to find it in the documentation, asking other people who didn't know, and waiting for responses from mailing lists... is the difference between getting on with the work your boss pays you for, versus failing to meet your deadlines and doing a lot of stuff that your boss doesn't want to be paying you for. /kevin (who was told last week to strip SuSE 8 off his office computer and to upgrade from NT to Win2K)