On Friday 23 February 2001 22:59, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
<SoapBox> <snip> </SoapBox>
Any opinions?
Steve
Nice rant, for the most part. It is interesting to keep in mind that Linux began it's serious run at OS domination beginning about 1994, with 1.0. So, it has been out as a serious OS for about seven years. Win1.0 started about 1987 and took eight years to get to Win95 which, IMO, wasn't much better than Win3.11. Since 95, M$ has been adding look & feel, instability, combined with Win<hardware> drivers that control the hardware market even now, for the most part. So, six years of polish and monoply control brings us to Win2000, and their claim that it is the most stable OS yet. Despite its at least two weeks of stability, Linux 2.2 or 2.4 beats it. The Linux GUI desktop is another matter. If I remember correctly, KDE started about 3 years ago. KDE1, setting on top of a well configured Xserver, was/is considerably more stable that anyting M$ has put out todate. At least it was for me. I am currently using KDE2 on the Mach_64 Rage Xserver with Linux 2.2.16 underneath. I am up 24/7 for weeks at a time. Neither the kernel nor the official KDE2 release have EVER crashed on me. (An experimental beta gave me a race condition once, but I knew I was was running beta.) I don't run GNOME (and have no complaints against it - I just prefer KDE's look, feel and signal-socket programming protocol) but IMO KDE has made a rather miraculous product in such a short time. (3 yrs of KDE vs 14 yrs for M$). And what I see in KOffice and the more than 1,000 Qt based KDE apps being created by the countless community coders out there, it makes my heart glad! So, be patient. As more hardware vendors realize that Linux is to their advantage, profit wise, and as more drivers come on line, and as folks at SuSE and the other software houses learn and improve, things are only getting better and better. JLK -- Athiests believe they know there is no god. Agnostics know they believe there is no god. Thiests believe there is a god. Christians believe in God through His Son, Jesus Christ.