Karol, Some points you make I agree with, but most I do not. I do believe Linux is ready for the desktop and from the different distros I have seen, SuSE leads the way in doing that. I came directly from the AmigaOS, use Winblows and a little MacOS to Linux. Took me about 30-45 minutes to install, setup and start using Linux without ever having played with it before! I consider that pretty good considering I have never installed Windows in that short a time nor had it up and running right after installation. I think it says a lot for the newbie getting started with Linux on the desktop. I have had the same luck in all the installations I have done since with SuSE on different hardware. I also find the programs comparable to any I have used on other platforms and StarOffice is a blessing compared to MS Office/Word, I think. Of course, I still prefer WordPerfect/Office to both. Other programs available on Linux have also easily replaced the programs I was using and I have only used the other systems since to just download my files over to the Linux box. I too used Pegasus when operating Windows, but found I had to struggle thru the setup and later had to fix or hack commands to get it to work after another Windows program installed itself corrupting dlls in the process, a normal Windows anomaly. Sure, I will agree Linux has a way to go in some areas, but it works, works reliably and was certainly ready for my desktop! end of line Tracer ------------------------- On Sunday 02 September 2001 09:46 pm, Karol Pietrzak, you wrote:
Vitaly unconciously raises an interesting point: the Linux Experience _can_ be a good one, provided you _do_ have some Linux experience to begin with, which seems like a contradiction. Vitaly, you make it seem Linux (particularly SuSE 7.2) is perfectly ready as a newbie replacement for Windows 9x for home users. The truth, however, could not be further.
You are the cream-of-the-crop in the Linux world: all your hardware is supported flawlessly, all the software you need is ported as or has Linux equivalents, etc. Once again, you are the elite.
Most users would not even consider Linux after hearing of its disadvantages as a home OS: StarOffice is nowhere near as fast or feature-full as MS Office, IE is nowhere near as stable and fails to render all pages perfectly, fonts (even anti-aliased) look like crap compared to the latest WIndows / Mac desktop (my win95 installation has better / more fonts than my SuSE 7.2 installation), no standard package format, no standard GUI, no standard video / audio API (a la DirectX), etc.
You seem to have taken your near-perfect subjective Linux experiences and carried them over to the objective standpoint, declaring in the meantime that SuSE 7.2 can serve as a replacement for virtually any home desktop.
For me, however, the opposite is true. Win95 is my standard OS (I'm writing this in Pegasus Mail), while SuSE 7.2 remains mainly as a hobby apart from the CD-burning I occasionally do here at home. At school, however, SuSE 7.2 is more prevalent. SuSE 7.2 is the router and file server, as well as the Internet terminal.
To sum it all up, Linux will need a _long_ time to become as usable as a home desktop as Windows 9x / NT. It's a Catch-22: Linux needs standards to become popular, and popularity will bring those standards. ********************************* -- ---KMail 1.3--- SuSE Linux v7.2--- Registered Linux User #225206 /tracerb@sprintmail.com/ *Magic Page Products* *Team Amiga* http://home.sprintmail.com/~tracerb