At 08:57 02/28/2002 +0000, Fergus Wilde wrote:
I concur--SuSE (or any other distro) is not ready for application to the masses as a suitable home/office desktop candidate as long as there are other OS's which are much more friendly.
Well I would have said this might have been true up to the release of 7.3. I know there's a lot of luck in this in terms of hardware (tho' it clearly helps if you use mainstream stuff), but I recently had to reinstall both Windows and SuSE 7.3 when a motherboard broke. The SuSE installation was
faster and the easier of the two, and set up all hardware right first time, unlike Windows. This went down as far as the mouse-wheel, parallel port zip drive and pass-through to the printer. I was ready to run, including a decent (if not wonderful) office suite in the shape of Star Office. And
the this
cost a *tiny fraction* of setting up anything like a similar working environment under Windows, in which I would have paid for the office suite, a graphics programme, anti-virus, you name it.
7.3 required no 'guru' tricks, which is a good thing, because I'm not one. I only boot Windows now in order to play the odd game.
Just my 2 euro-cents, Best Fergus
/snip/ I saw the next version of Star Office at the Linux show in New York last month. If it really does what they showed, it will be stupendous. I only wish they had imitated more of WordPerfect, but maybe some of that's in there. It's supposed to be available in April, some time. Free. (I think.) I always liked the WordPerfect 5.1 Windows version. I think they made it worse with all the extra stuff they added later, but I STILL like the current version better than WORD. (I refer to the Windows version. I could never read the screen fonts in Linux.) If I didn't have to read modern word processer docs all the time, I would cheerfully run WP5.1 as mine. --doug