"Jeremy Bradley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Please do not take this as a flame, I am serious about this.
> I would like to hear opinions of why users of this list are
> so happy with Redhat compared to Microsoft. I have always
> delt with Microsoft Windows and NT machines and have never
> had any experience at all with Linux or any type of UNIX.
> After hearing so much about Linux I have decided to try to
> learn a little about it. I downloaded RH 6.1 and installed
> it on the second drive of my 200 MMX at home.
Okay, well the short answer is that currently Linux is being
a little oversold as all things to all people, when it
really isn't. It's very strong for server use (much
stronger than Microsoft), but only so-so as a client. It's
pretty good if you know a lot of unix stuff already, and
it's really good if you're running a business with a lot of
seats and you're going to have a professional
IT/sysadmin/unix dude doing setup and maintenance, but for
home use by Joe Citizen, Linux is still quite a bit of
hassle compared to Microsoft or Macintosh.
It's entirely likely that this is going to get better, and
get better rapidly within the next year, but at the moment
there are quite a few problems, as you've found out:
> I found it to
> be a little tricky configuring things such as the internet
> connection and such. I am sure if I had a little UNIX
> background it wouldn't have been that bad. I had though
> that most users went to Linux to get away from Microsoft
> bugs and patches and all of that crap, but now after being
> on the lists I see that users are constantly adding patches
> and recompiling kernels and such. Is this type the type of
> stuff that has to be done, or is this mostly just the little
> hacker and developer type things? I must admit right now
> that I feel completely stupid for being so clueless of how
> this OS works. I am determined to stick with it until I
> learn to use it decent, I am not going to just give up and
> say I don't like it...I'm sure I will like it once I am
> confortable with it. Our IS manager is a firm believer in
> SCO Unix and says the extra hassles setting up a Unix type
> OS is worth it in the long run. But right now I must admit
> I have found it more difficult to work with, and have found
> that it has bugs too...I spent all weekend trying to get
> Linux to find my printer port, I thought that it was because
> my printer was hooked to my scanner, I changed BIOS
> settings, browsed all sorts of help files and then finally
> found out there was a bug that needed VERY simple fix in the
> conf.modules file.
Let me guess, was it something like:
alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
I find this very annoying also. Redhat should really be
able to do better than this, and with some luck they'll
actually do some QA on their next releases. If it turns out
that they've been convinced by Microsoft's example that the
public likes buggy crap and they might as well give it to
them, then I'll switch to another distribution. (This is
one nice thing about the Linux world... you're just not
locked in to one vendor the way you are with Microsoft.)
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