Mark, On Saturday 28 May 2005 13:51, Mark Crean wrote:
Randall R Schulz wrote: [snip]
And already behind the times: Kernel 2.6.9, KDE 3.3, OO.o 1.1, X.org 6.7, Java 1.4.2, CrossOver Office 4.1 (which is a 30-day trial only). Limited s/w: Reiser and Ext3 only, e.g. But what would we expect: "Based on Debian..."
[snip]
IME, the vast majority of users neither know nor care whether they are up with or behind the times. They just want something that is dead easy to install and use, which comes with the right kind of software and which works very reliably. Since users like this probably won't be running particularly new hardware, older programs that go easier on resources can be a plus point. These users exist in their countless millions. They simply do not have the money to buy new copies of Windows software and fancy new hardware.
The real point of my post was the part you neglected to quote or respond to:
This distribution may be a good choice for some users, but probably not for those of us for whom SuSE is a good choice.
If you want no muss, no fuss, then maybe one of the laggard distributions is a better choice. I truly appreciate having available the myriad improvements that the authors of the software I use are continually making. I really notice _and miss_ what's absent from my RedHat Enterprise 3 desktop at work vis a vis SuSE 9.3. KMail has come quite a long way in the past year or so, e.g. If users just want a box for email and Web browsing, then any old thing will do. That's not me and that's not, I think, the users SuSE caters to.
A friend of mine who runs an old p2 recently asked me what a "computer's bios" was. They had never heard the term and hadn't any idea. I guess anyone who wants to produce a pop OS really has to start at a level that's this basic. My own money is on Ubuntu, but not for a couple of years at a guess.
I'm a professional software developer. I can't live at the end of the technology spectrum where these people do. It gets pretty hard just trying to be helpful to them after a while. On the other hand, I was at a bookstore the other day and the cash register (the "point-of-sale terminal"), which was Windows-based, was having problems, possibly hardware-related--it wouldn't acknowledge the mouse that was plainly there and correctly connected. The person staffing the register, who identified herself as a nurse (this was the Stanford medical bookstore, which happens to have a decent IT section, too) couldn't get the thing through its start-up processing to enable its function as a cash register. I used the arrow keys to select the icon she said she needed to click to boot the POS terminal (delicious double entendre, eh?) and got the thing going. Ignoring one more diagnostic alert was all that was required, since the mouse was not used during normal operations. Now here's the good part: She gave me 10% off my purchase for being a good samaritan!
Oh, and "based on Debian" may well be the wave of the future anyway, not a putdown. The city of Munich clearly thinks so.
Good for them. Novell's going to have to make a lot of mistakes to drive me away from SuSE.
:)
Fish
Randall Schulz