On Saturday 12 June 2004 12:13 pm, John Andersen wrote:
On Saturday 12 June 2004 10:32, Scott Leighton wrote:
I like Linux and am now a SuSE user of a little over 1 month. I have no intention of going back to windows, but the fact is that none of the Linux distros are ready for home desktop use by the typical non-technical user.
And XP is? You mean the same XP that will be infected within 15 minutes of putting it on the net right out of the box?
And that has exactly what to do with anything?
At any given time there are a million zombie XP machines spitting out spam and viruses because their non-technical users simply did what Microsoft Told them to do.
You are changing the subject. The author of the article wasn't comparing security, he was talking about user experience.
Two years after it was introduced, XP STILL comes out of the box broken, insecure, and unpatched. What possible excuse is there for that?
No excuse, but neither the author of the article nor I am trying to excuse the poor security of any of the Windows flavors.
It is far too complicated to get things running and configured correctly and the author of the article hit it right on in his points.
Its just as difficult to get XP configured correctly. And those configurations are not consolidated in Yast but hidden all over a dozen control panel applets, many of which seemingly have nothing to do with what you are trying to configure. Some are burried so deep you have to google for them. Plug in a wireless card while hardwired to your local network and XP decides it should bridge the two!
Sorry, but the typical home workstation user will without a doubt find it much much easier to use XP versus any Linux distro. Now, I'm not saying that XP as shipped to said user will be configured ideally or even properly, but as far as that user's experience is concerned, everything will just work.
You are simply more familiar with XP.
No I'm not. I migrated from Win98 since I refuse to accept XP's EULA. My experience with XP is limited to watching co-workers who migrated from Win98 to XP use it.
Had you chosen XP as your first windows OS after being familiar with Linux for several years you be shakeing your head in disgust.
Again, you are trying to change the subject to one of which OS is better, not which OS has the better user experience. I don't disagree at all that my Linux distro is technically superior, safer, more secure, and even more powerful. But that's not what the article we are discussing was about. Stick to the subject.
You have an agenda you want to push, and its obvious.
Actually, if I have an agenda (and I don't think I do, I have an opinion on this subject, but that's it), it's simply to make sure that the user point of view isn't lost in all the ranting that various pro-Linux and pro-windows folks do, and, in this particular case, to state my point of view that the author's article is correct and doesn't deserve to be ripped apart. I myself experienced some of the flustrations he wrote about. The cut and paste example resonates strongly with me, I _still_ haven't figured out what obscure scheme klipper uses to decide what is current on the klipboard for pasting. Whatever that scheme is it is NOT intuitive and IMHO there is no excuse, no user should have to go read a manual to figure out how to cut and paste between applications. Anyways, I don't have the disposition to start engaging in a rant over which OS is best, my point is simply that the author of the article did a good job of describing some of the faults with current Linux distros that are holding those distros back from being a good choice for home user workstations. Scott -- POPFile, the OpenSource EMail Classifier http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ Linux 2.6.4-54.5-default