On Monday 17 December 2001 11:42, Jason A.Van Cleve wrote:
You're welcome. But actually, from a usability standpoint, Linux IS as bad as you expected--probably worse. I may have started a flame war just now,
:) no flame war coming from me... just a little different point of view...
but as someone who has been trying to master this OS for over a year now, I would warn you that Linux is not for the faint of heart--or the short of time. More specifically, as a server it's a wonderful platform, for it is well-conceived and well-designed as such. But configuring Linux as a workstation or multimedia platform is, in my experience, next to impossible, <snip>
hmm... I guess you should see a little difference between those two... my experience so far is this: configuring it as a workstation is not really a problem at all when you view it as a "work"station... even back with SuSE 7.0 (and more so with 7.3 or at least with a recent KDE) an OS that you could get your work done with came right out of the box with everything the normal user needs... you get an excellent MUA, a decent office (SO5.2), a great graphics prog (gimp) and instant internet access, even almost everything a programmer needs... and with SuSE7.3 a standard installation is at least as easy as any windows installation... considering that most computer users buy their computers with a preinstalled OS and just use it (w/o being able to even install a M$ system), I'd say that for the normal user it doesn't really matter if you give him a M$-OS or some linux w/ KDE (for use as a "work"station as stated above)... But, of course, I have to admitt that it is not that easy to get all the multimedia-capabilities that come "out-of-the-box" with a recent M$-OS and it is a pain in the ass to configure a real multimedia plattform... Having just installed SuSE 7.3 on a new machine, I have to add that I was really impressed with what comes "out-of-the-box" here... Without needing to configure anything by hand: - I got a perfectly working kwintv - my cdrecorder was recognized and seems to be working (I just did it on Saturday, so I had no time to test that yet) - printing works perfectly - no additional software needs to be installed to have all the little standard tools (that you need to install on a M$-OS) and they're all part of the konqueror and beautifully integrated: ftp-client, archiver, editors with syntax-highlighting, audio-ripper (to .wav, to ogg-vorbis, to .mp3 (with lame)), download-manager-capabilities and ,of course, a fabulous browser - a good MUA (you'd need to install additional software on any M$-OS to get that... :) ...same with the browser) - ssh-client ...and so on... show me another OS that does that out of the box... And after all... as soon as you have everything configured for a multimedia platform (which is NOT impossible), you'll love it... and the best part is: it will continue to work and won't screw itself up after a while (like all the M$-stuff), so you can use it for years if you want to w/o crashes and w/o becoming slowler and slower and slower until it's unusable... Johannes -- Powered by SuSE 7.3 - KDE 2.2.1 - KMail 1.3.1 Version Info: Linux 2.4.10-4GB