On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 00:23, Ryan McDougall wrote: > I agree with you there Mike, but things are getting better. I have also > seen friends et al frown upon my linux offerings, but the bottom line is > that things are getting better, slowly but surely. > > I must say that I have more confidence than ever, that Linux *will* be > ready for the desktop ( anyone's ) in about 3-5 years time. Just keep > your advocacy up, and the linux will follow. ;)
I disagree there. I have been toying with various distros and have abandoned that over a year ago. Mandrake, SuSE, and LindowsOS each are more home user orientated than Red Hat at this current time. Red Hat is truly god for the backend however, and cannot say the same for LindowsOS or Mandrake (haven't tried SuSE yet as a server, so I cant criticize it fairly). With LindowsOS 4 out now, I am awaiting the shipment. For people that want to have what I have on my desktop, that is about the closest I can give them, without becoming their tech slave. The , admittedly few, people I have endeavored to convert, have. But it was after letting them play with the tools, and choosing (thank god it was the right ones) an appropriate distro for them. For some, like my close friend Jeremy, Red Hat works perfect. He grew up on the Commodore 64 with me, and knows what the hell an Amiga is. Can he, or does he, consider himself a computer guru? No. But he recalls the good ole days when the games were good, the programs worked and the user was treated with some dignity. So telling him to open aterm and type in a 'tar zxvf nameoftar.tar.gz' is not a big deal. But then there are those that need the hands held. SuSE and Lindows are for them. Mr. Wafkowski needs to learn that too. The reason that Linux is so great is not that the software is free. Not that there are some really great companies like Red Hat out there. Its the fact that I can feel free to do whatever I damn well please. If I want to use Red Hat on my k6-233 with 96MB RAM, I can. How? I use light WM's, don't have apache or sendmail running (or installed), and choose apps that are well coded. That will make a noticeable difference in the PC's performance. I was able to run RHL8 on a p-233/32MB just fine. Speed all there. Granted, I did spend a few hours compiling a new kernel, building an appropriate kickstart image, and carefully selecting the apps that I ran (such as sylpheed for email, ROX for file management). But it made a piece of sh!t computer that Win98 was too much for (with appropriate apps) run rather nicely. And to make you really amazed -- VMWare ran too. And I had little issues, other than eventually adding in another 64MB. I am really not willing to listen to this nonsense that Linux sucks for this and that lame reason. Speed can be fixed. Graphical goodies can be made acceptable. Its called knowing how to do it. And any one who is to be setting up servers cant figure out how to make X11 work, there are some issues. I fully agree that GNOME (my favorite WM) and KDE are slower than whatever Microsoft calls their GUI code. But Windows doesn't let me do half of what I can and wish to do with my home PC's for $40. Come up with good reasons these days! I don't see anyone heralding getting their sound card up and going a major achievement, like I had done back in the day. Hell, Red Hat now has GUI tools for this ... Andrew Schott -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
