On Fri, 28 Aug 1998, George Toft wrote:
Now MS-DOS has a really glamorous GUI and it has a new name, but it still walks like a duck and talks like a duck, therefore it must still be a duck.
glamourous?? LOL. I haven't heard a Linux user call Win95 'glamourous' before... <gring> . Other terms are usually used... but I can't mention it here cause I try to watch my language...
Where am I going with this? Linux can very well become a desktop OS. Just like Win 3.0 and 3.1 took days to configure (and Win95 takes days to reconfigure after it crashes 2^10 times) Linux takes a little bit of tweeking. If someone (and I hate to suggest Yet Another Linux Distro - see Linux Journal Sep 98) could combine the best features of the major distros, and throw in KDE, you would have a system that the *average* computer user could use without too much hassle.
As far as combining the best features of different dists, I feel S.u.S.E. already does this. Am I the only one? When I first used S.u.S.E. it seemed to me to have the best features of Red Hat and Slakware, without the faults. YaST has Glint and the RH Control Panel beat by a mile and Slakware doesn't have a decent database system. S.u.S.E. also include KDE AND Gnome...so I'm not sure what you mean about if someone would 'combine the best features of the major distros and throw in KDE.. then..' cause to me S.u.S.E. has already taken care of this. Am I wrong? On the other hand about desktops for newbies, I would never buy a completey graphical linux, so if they made one that was like Linux 95 (grin) I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. So long as the proselytizers that want an intuitive gui from jump keep us 'old timers' in mind...things can only go up. I do agree though that the 'average' user ( using 'average' to describe a Linux user sometimes seems paradoxical <grin>) would best benefit from not just a constructive ui but from an INTUITIVE one as well. I think YaST is functionally superior, but RH's tools as much as I don't like them are much more self-explanatory ( read self-explanatory=intuitive )from the GRAPHICAL END, which is a sense I guess what you want. Interesting to see where we are in another couple years, as things seem to be moving ahead more and more in this direction...
Point: Linux (like other Unices) needs considerable administration. Counter Point: NOT!!! (But in the interest of keeping our jobs, we'll say it does). Like was mentioned previously, YaST does a great job of shielding the user from what it is doing. When a user decides to travel the road to be a guru, they can learn what's under the hood. Even very accomplished Win95 users don't know what the registry does (except get corrupted).
Not really true. There's plenty of literature available for the registry... and one CAN tinker with it by hand. I know cause I've done it. I don't know if YaST and the registry are compare-able though. Two different types of tools. The registry isn't meant to be a user interface. I think Wolfgang made a good point about YaST though, maybe shielding the user a bit too much. <grin>. Though much of it you _can_ figure out on your own. Where was _I_ going with this? Nowhere, I just had to respond to any mail calling that Win95 desktop OS 'glamourous'. <grin> Michael - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e