On 2014-06-15 11:34, Tony Alfrey wrote:
Anton Aylward wrote:
So all your derogatory remarks about KDE/Linux were just that you had a configuration setting that your equipment couldn't handle. As I said KDE makes use of an incredible amount of eye-candy/glitz/bling.
My "derogatory remarks" were the same remarks that everyone made about Windows Vista when everyone discovered that they had to upgrade their video card, add more memory, or even worse, to make it work.
Please remember that this is a community, volunteering help on their free time, mostly. This is not a company making money, like Microsoft is. Derogatory remarks will not help you; on the contrary, they may make people turn against you.
The "configuration setting" was selected by the installation itself. Yes, the machine /is/ old, but I don't see anything anywhere that says that the processor (an Athlon XP) or the video card (a GeForce 6200) or the memory (2 GB) is not going to work.
Work? Yes. I have machines with far less than that, but I don't dream of using KDE4 on them.
Yes, there was a time when the big selling point of linux was that it would work on a minimal machine. What ever happened to that ethic?
It is there, but it is not the default on openSUSE. There are distributions that cater for limited machines. KDE4 is certainly not suited for old/limited machines. But you did not tell us what sort of machine you were using, or ask us for advice...
Does having all of that eye candy in KDE really make it better or does it just slow everything down?
It is wonderful on a modern, powerful machine. It is designed for that.
I'm certainly glad that Mr. van Hasstreght was enough of an expert about KDE to know that all I had to do was to use a simple keystroke combination to turn off all of this stuff.
He, try gnome then. It may refuse to run upfront, on your machine :-p And, possibly, both would work on your machine using the corresponding proprietary video driver for your card.
Will it be necessary for every new user of KDE to go and study all of this documentation? And how would I have searched for the appropriate key words, such as "KDE seems totally broken"?
By instead of shouting "broken!" instead you ask for help nicely :-) Advise: Linux is "free" in several senses, but it makes you pay with effort and time. So be prepared.
This is precisely the type of argument that I wanted to avoid, and that which seemed to be prominent on the SuSE list. It will not attract new users. In fact, I thought I might go check out the linux counter http://linuxcounter.net/
It is impossible to get a factual estimate of Linux users. They know nothing of me, for instance. :-p
It seems that the original enthusiasm for linux that attracted /me/ in 1999 may have cooled. Could it be exactly because of the sort of problems I encountered today?
Nope. :-)) In fact, there are many people that, when Microsoft dropped XP recently, converted their machines to Linux and are churning happily along. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)