On Friday 05 May 2006 06:18, elefino wrote:
The first group reached saturation long ago. There's not much growth to be had anymore among hobbyists. There's plenty of room among users-with-actual-lives. Eventually, some of the hobbyists will get so pissed with the expectations and limitations of users-with-actual-lives, that some of them will get together and create a new hobbyist platform... well, they will after the wars about switching to a "pure" form of BSD or some such.
I'm actually in the middle... I am a computer hobbyist, and I also have a life which involves compute science to one degree or another. I use my systems for real-world applications and I find that the Unix-like platform i686 does the best job. One of the main reasons is that it is infinitely configurable and open-source. I do believe that there are a number of people moving from Windoze who are not up to speed yet with the primary advantages of open-source-- we hobbyists need to educate when possible. I also *buy* distributions (I used to buy RedHat, now I buy Suse)... unlike some hobbyists who believe it is *not* moral to spend money for software, I find that packaged documented tested distributions are great starting points for real-world users and hobbyists alike. However, the real power and freedom I get from Linux distributions is that they provide real flexibility not available to PC users under Micro$oft Windoze. It is high time that the computer user community (hobbyists and real-world users) are no longer under the thumbs of those knot-heads at Redmond, nor under the constant attack of Windblows crackers, spyware, yadda yadda. Anyone can learn to use a makefile... compiling from sources is a piece of cake. -- Kind regards, Mark H. Harris <>< harrismh777@earthlink.net