Carlos E. R. said the following on 10/24/2008 03:42 PM:
Well, I object, I don't take M$ as guiding master, certainly not where Linux is concerned. I like command line. I prefer certain things not to rely on a GUI at all.
You and me both, Bro', but we've got geekiness in our blood. We don't represent the market. Are you saying you want Linux and openSUSE reserved for the elite like us?
But the point is that if the alerts aren't seen they can't be acted on.
Oh, they are seen alright.
How? If Joe AverageUser has done a vanilla install and the mail is routed to the localhost, aka /var/spool/mail/joe, and Joe is using Gmail, how is he going to see these mail generated alerts? He's using the GUI not the command line. However much we may dislike and/or despise Microsoft they have succeeded in convincing the public at large that they can use PCs, and in doing so have made this new world of the internet ad all this stuff and stuff and stuff and in doing so made PCs and networking cheap so we can have our jollies.
If my job is to see them, I assure you I will see them ASAP. If I'm Joe User, I'll see them when I want to see them, not when the system wants me to see them. Let the system take care of itself and let me sleep!
I'm not talking about you or me; like I say, we're capable of slicing and dicing all this to suit us. I'm talking about the vanilla unsophisticated user.
I see that large number of netbooks are being returned, the ones running Linux being traded in for ones that run Windows. The average Joe consumer isn't as geeky as us and can't set up all that mail forwarding, ldap, nis all the rest. He's been brainwashed, rightly or wrongly, by Microsoft and for him a pop-up notifier is the right way.
Why would he have to configure ldap, nis and all the rest? Or mail forwarding? I haven't.
That's the point. The vanilla installation, as found out this weekend, expects ldap (see earlier notes in this thread about what I found in /etc/nsswitch and /etc/pam.d/common-*) and if the mail forwarding isn't set up his system generated mail is not going to appear on his Gmail account. The latter will eventually freeze the machine as /var/spool/mail/joe fills up the whole partition. THAT is a security issue.
And, as far as I'm concerned, if a user doesn't know how to set up Linux, he should not install Linux >:-P
Well I'm sure Joe AverageUser can be an elitist, arrogant, condescending idiot if he wants to be as well. After all. he owns a mint condition 1965 Mustang and has a golf handicap of 17. So there!
I don't deny him anything, but just don't try to convince me just because M$ does it that way, because them I will be convinced it is a bad thing and we should do the contrary. If you want to be warned by SMS, do so. Many do so with openSUSE the way it is now.
Its not a case of "M$ does it that way" so we should too. its a case of that's a sensible way to do it. The command line mode where there is a loop and each time around the loop the shell can check things is very different from the multiple processes in parallel model of the GUI/windows. Saying "because X does it that way" so we should or shouldn't doesn't make sense in a lot of engineering and UI. Its like saying "In England they drive on the left, which is why at the time of the American Revolution, the Americans decided to drive on the right". How many buttons does your mouse have? Two, like M$, one like Apple or three like Xerox? Mine has ... 7 WOW! Thank you Logitech. I'm so glad that Logitech targeted the Linux market; using a mouse that was designed for Microsoft machines would be so .... The "way openSUSE is now" is the way it was last weekend when I downloaded the 11.0 liveCD from the web site, burnt it and installed it - and the found it was configured to use LDAP before FILES in many of the /etc/nsswitch entries and had LDAP as "mandatory" in the /etc/pam.d/common-* files. Yes, you and I can do something about that, but its not suitable for Joe AverageUser who, as you rightly say, can't do anything about it cos he doesn't know and he'd not geeky enough to find out.
To be meaningful, because its not a pop-up and because Joe AverageUser is running the GUI and not a command line shell, it needs to be forwarded to his email account. The installation/set-up should do that. Then when he reads his mail via Thunderbird, Gmail, Hotmail, whatever, there's his system messages. TaDah!
No, mail is not forwarded. It is stored on his local account. You can set any mail client to read that: some do so by default, some not.
You can; I can, but Joe AverageUser *doesn't* *even* *know* *about* *it*. Its all done without telling him. THAT is a security problem.
Personally, I still think that Microsoft have demonstrated with their I object to comparisons to M$. See above. If you can't learn from them ...
Not in regard to Linux. We are different and I do not want to do things their way. I didn't migrate to Linux with a lot of personal effort just to dot hings the Microsoft way.
I can think of a lot of things that you do their way for a whole pile of reasons, most of them being that it is the simplest, most straightforward way of doing things. Do you imagine there are engineers/programmers/designers/managers who decided no to do things the way UNIX and Linux does them? * no hierarchical directories * no hidden files * no use of ".." to mean the parent directory * no symbolic linking and so on and so on, all things that UNIX had before Microsoft. And you tell me, was X-Windows around before Microsoft Windows? You may have migrated from Microsoft to Linux, but not me; UNIX was my first OS; people I work for make me use Microsoft and I make them pay me to do that. -- It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. W. Somerset Maugham -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org