Il 04:26, martedì 4 settembre 2001, Karol Pietrzak ha scritto:
On 4 Sep 2001, Praise wrote:
Il 03:46, lunedì 3 settembre 2001, Karol Pietrzak ha scritto:
Vitaly unconciously raises an interesting point: the Linux
Experience _can_ be a good one, provided you _do_ have some
Linux experience to begin with, which seems like a contradiction.
It is the same as everything. How can you experience driving a good car without having any experience at all?
You can't... My point is simply that Vitaly's praise of SuSE 7.2 and its arrival into the desktop is not shared by much of the Linux community. Although Linux has made much progress in the server arena, it has yet to make a significant difference in the desktop market (although the DoJ's move toward StarOffice and Ford's Europe toward moving most desktops to Linux speaks to change that fact soon). Linux truly _is_ "too hard" for the average Windows user. Why change when everything is available, albeit at decreased stability, speed, etc.
I told you it's false. Installing linux might be too hard. Installing windows just the same. And hey, if you can read, you will never have unsolvable problem with Linux. But you always have unsovable ones with windows. You look like you have 0 experience about Windows.
The truth, however, could not be further. You specify the many things you had to do to have a truly pleasing "experience" ("putting symlinks for plugins in mozilla, enabling Acrobat Reader plugin in KDE, firing up ide-scsi, downloading windows movie codeks for avifile, configuring modules.conf manually to enable my joystick"), something that the average user would spend dozens of hours trying to figure out, if ever succeeding.
That's the same with windows though. I have been helping a friend installing windows. I was not
close to him so he phoned me about
65 times in only one day. If you know nothing, everything is hard. And think, windows is preistalled. If linux would be preinstalled, the problems you are talking about would be solved by the vendor. Just like windows ones!
I agree, Linux's installation process is top-notch. All but the most antique or brand-spanking-new hardware is detected by default without the need to download, compile, and install the newest drivers from the manufacturer's website, all with enough software to leave you installing for hours on end. It's easier than a Windows 9x install...
That does not happen by chance. I always buy supported hardware. Of course if I want to play with windows I wont buy a Macintosh, right?
So do I, but what if I don't get to choose the hardware... and its some bizarre Winmodem or some cheapo builtin sound card. Then, the seemingly easy process of getting sound or connecting to the Internet becomes a venture into the unknown: command line, learning the basic tools, patching a kernel, compiling it, seeking answers if the mentioned process doesn't succeed and trying again until it does. The "regular user" lacks the patience to do this, especially considering that nothing significa nt will become of it: everything that he / she will be able to do in Linux already is in Windows.
There is no point here. If you use a system you have to use the hardware for the system. Full stop. There is no kernel patch for running windows on a Macintosh, right?
Most users would not even consider Linux after hearing of its disadvantages as a home OS: StarOffice is nowhere near as fast or feature-full as MS Office,
How many users use half of feature of MS Office? Not one I know.
Of course (who the hell ever uses "AutoSummarize"?). But (at least Office 97) it's not as fast, nor as compatible with what the rest of the world uses.
You are saying that Office 97 is not as fast nor compatible with what the rest of the world uses? I knew that.-)
I like my standard fonts. Maybe am I blind? :-)
No, most certainly not. You are satisfied... most are not. Anti-aliasing is a must for many. It's great its been available for quite some time on QT / KDE. It just became available on GTK / glib. The fonts do not however look as good as on the Windows desktop, even if you are using the Microsoft hand-tuned fonts.
I have tons of ttf fonts. Honestly I like them in Kde2. More than in the windows GUI.
Hey Karol, you seem to have taken your near-perfect subjective Windows experiences and carried them over to the objective standpoint, declaring that Windows can serve as a replacement for virtually any home desktop.
:-)
Trust me, my Windows 95 experiences are anything but perfect. A ScanDisk session literally corrupted my FAT32 partition (which I do not use for my personal files, thankfully). Linux managed to mount if without fail, enabling me to salvage what I wanted
before having to 'mkdosfs /dev/hda3'. At some point in the last year, Windows 95 started crashing more often randomly than usual, leaving me to wonder what the hell was going on... Linux worked wonderfully (Caldera was what I used at that time), forcing me to re-install Win95 every two days (I later discovered it was a fault power supply and processor fan). For another twist, I once accidentally deleted a registry key (something like {BD84B381-8CA2-1069-AB1D-08000948F534}), which turned out to be part of my scanner driver (!). Re-instaling the scanner drivers didn't work, once again forcing me to re- install all of Windows 95. That's just off the top of my head.
Linux works better than windows. You know, the coloured screen of death and so on.-)
Yes, it does (for the most part). Except "it works better" is not much of a reason for the average windows user to switch, even if it did for that particular case. Moving to Linux the Windows home user looses familiarity, choice of software, etc.
It works better, it's cheaper, you have more choice of hardware (you can run it on an old PC). The main reason why a home user do not use linux it's because it's not preinstalled.
It might depend on what software you want to use, nothing else.
Since most people buy their computers from vendors such as Dell, Gateway, IBM, and Compaq, they do not have much of a choice as to their hardware configurations. The "linux experience" depends on both software and hardware. i.e. everything.
Please note that my entire arg ument was, and still is, that Linux is not quite ready _for the home user_. It is perfectly good (and even superior most of the time) for the server environment because of not only its stability, speed, and security, but also of the apps that run on it (Apache, DB2, Oracle, etc.). It's MHO that SuSE is the best for the server environment because of its ties with the commercial world (IBM and Oracle, as examples of two). That's probably what enabled it to get 45USD million in support money from IBM and Intel.
The only thing a home user could miss is "games". But Linux is perfectly ready to be used in an standard Office, IMHO. Tazio