The Clueless Newbie's Linux Odyssey 998
overshoot writes "Just what we've always (said we) wanted: people who are fed up with Microsoft and are willing, even eager, to give Linux a real try. Well, she did. And did. And did some more. Not only that, she's a technical writer and she took notes. Not fun reading, but worth reading anyway."
Article Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
If a computer literate technical writer can't even get Linux working properly, how can we expect it to be widely adopted by the masses? Linux is not ready for the desktop.
Re:Article Summary (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what the masses will expect, the average computer user doesn't upgrade their OS and they're likely to get a friend, relative or shop to do it. It is these people who will make the decision to deploy Linux.
With Microsoft clamping down on piracy it is becoming more likely that these people will be deploying Linux at some stage in the future as some computer owners just don't want to pay anything for an OS upgrade.
Unfair review, should be pulled (Score:5, Informative)
Just by that fact alone, I consider this review nothing more than pure crap rant by a pure crap reviewer. There is no excuse for not using a fairly modern release and such a lazy effort should be rewarded with the article being pulled.
Re:Unfair review, should be pulled (Score:3, Interesting)
I am no geek but Mandarke 9.0 installed painlessly, recognising all my hardware. Even with Mandrake 8.1 I only had to edit a config file once (to mount my camera as USB mass storage).
I have also tried KNoppix on a number of several machines and it works every time as long as there is enough memory.
The other thing is that Windows is not that easy to install - it is just that most people do not do it as it is already installed when they buy their PCs. I know plently of people who struggle for hours
Re:Unfair review, should be pulled (Score:3, Informative)
She said that her review is based on a pile of discs someone gave her to try. You're going to have new and old distros in that bunch. She was clear that it was SuSE 7.1 she tried, not that SuSE in general sucks.
Re:Article Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what you're saying then is that Windows isn't ready for the masses either, right?
Re:Article Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Knoppix does that, but takes only 5 minutes to boot up (bootable CD, not install).
It took me nearly a week to finish setting up my work PC on Windows2000 with all the netmasks, proxy servers, g
Tool or toy? (Score:5, Interesting)
figure it this way. If you futz with your computer more than ten days a year (trying to get it to print, boot, re-install, upgrade) and you are paid more than 10$ an hour then you should seriously ask yourself if its cheaper to futz with an old machine when a new major system change is affoot or to get a new comuter.
On the other habd I can see why people might want to keep some of their accumlated perfrials if they are particularly expensive or many. Likewise using old software is nice too.
However if you really want to make the switch from windows to linux then most of your software is our. and much of your perfirials are out too.
This article sort of proves the point. So if you want something thats easy to use and is still unix, well you better get a mac. You only have to do the switch once. you can run Windows 95 and all your old apps on your old machine. Even keep the perifrials going during the trasition period.
macs work. yeah sure they have problems too, just none of the ones she mentioned. And mac hardware not only works its insanely interchangable. When I used to blow up a mac in my lab I would just yank the hard drive and boards and jam them in another mac. Ha! try that on your linux machine or windows machine. That effect alone saved me DAYS of time and kept my lab working.
in short the cost of a machine is how much you futz with it, not the 300$ you thought you saved buying a dell dude. (I say thought because you did not get all the cool software that comes with macs) Of course none of what I said applies to gamers.
Re:Tool or toy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually I've slapped in different m/boards with no issues and other hard drives with Linux and have no issues. And I have known Apple people have issues when swapping hard drives around mac's.
Sorry to say but you're just bs'ing, its all down to your hardware, not the OS as much, although I remeber win98 goi
Re:Tool or toy? (Score:3, Insightful)
What about the requirement to not use the net? I thought that was ridiculous. She clearly had access to it, so placing artificial restrictions on herself just further removes this review from the realms of reality, rather than making it more "real world".
I'd like to see any newbie (re)install Windows (any version) from scratch with the tiny manual Microsoft provide.
Review my backside. Publish
Re:Tool or toy? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would appear that Dell always buys batches of stuff from the current lowest bidder. That mish-mash of parts is then what they put in your new dell machine.
Re:Article Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
As a Linux newb, I couldn't agree more.
I'm a programmer on the Microsoft side of the development fence (keep comments to self, please), and decided a few months ago that it would be a good idea to learn Linux. So I put together a decent box and downloaded a couple of distros (Red Hat 8, Debian). So far, so good.
Well, in my desire to keep things simple, I apparently chose a mobo that isn't really a good starting point for Linux newbs to work with (Asus A7N266-VM... Nforce chipset). RH8 and Debian both installed fine, but when attempting to start X, the box just went to (and stayed at) a blank screen. Head to the newsgroups and forums, right?
Everything I read online related to the problem I was having either A) was too general for a newb to understand, or B) listed specific steps, but those steps didn't match what I was seeing. A friend of mine (a rabid Debianite) insisted that I let apt-get grab anything it needed off the net. If my net card worked, I would have been happy to try that. He kept going around with "apt-get will grab and set up modules you need," and "you need net modules for apt-get to work." Chicken and egg.
After two weeks of nightly work on trying to get things going, I gave up in frustration. My buddy continues to bitch incessantly about Microsoft "sucking" and being "a bitch to use." Guess what, though? Here I am, a computer literate, pro-Microsoft guy who honestly wants to learn Linux, and I can't even get something as rudimentary as network, sound, and video working. It shouldn't be this hard to evangelize the willing!
It's very frustrating, because I want to get into Linux and OSS development.
Re:Article Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a few reasons why this might happen (video card with multiple outputs and X picked the wrong one springs to mind) but the number one cause is the monitor turning itself off to protect it from an incorrect setting.
The advent of XFree86 4.x with its -configure
Re:Article Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
My suggestion:
New distro's coming out within the month, get 8.2 end of this month and join the SuSE mailing list.
More info here:
www.suse.com
I am going to plug the mailing list as there some very smart peope on that list and its newbie friendly. Even the experts remember being newbie's at some point
StarTux
Re:Article Summary (Score:3, Interesting)
Urgh. I hate this. Nobody should EVER recommend Debian, Gentoo or Slack to newbies - no matter how elite they think they're being, they are just making more work for themselves and people on tech support channels further down the line.
What I really hate is the attitude that "they'll learn quicker if they use Debian". There is of course nothing stopping you from learning quickly on any distro if you so wish, they are all Linux after all. It just turns what i
Clueless newbie *using* linux is no problem ... (Score:4, Insightful)
When my friends want to get started with Linux, I do the install, download the couple of missing pieces and make sure that basic functionality is there. Once that happens, they tend to be pretty quiet on the support front.
When she said that she was insisting on doing her own installs, I pretty much knew that trouble was on the path. I didn't manage to read the whole article (server errors), but I'm not too hopeful at this point.
MS wants people to take a 6 week course just to be able to say that they know how to config a Windows box. I think that Linux is easier than Windows on this front, but it's still not likely to be a complete cakewalk with a hodgepoge system.
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
I use it every day. I don't have Windows installed on any of my systems. I *still* think it sucks.
Why do so many people think that it's always the users problem? Bah, it's so stupid I won't even argue this one.
The thing is, why hasn't anyone tried to make a *good* distribution yet? We have Debian "we have ten thousand pounds of shitty, buggy, out of date software, but hell, that's a lot, so its good". There's slackware (my favorite) which just has this "you had better know how to do everything because I aint helping you" attitude. Mandrake is as broken as the above. RH is as broken as the above.
Most niches have decent software in them. There are some genuinely good word processors for Linux. Ditto for web browsers, email clients, etc. Why package 45 shitty ones in a distro?
And on the topic of hardware support, I'll just paint an analogy: BeOS. BeOS supported almost no hardware. It has worse support than any other OS I've used, in terms of quantity. But what it *does* support, it supports perfectly. Swap video cards? You won't get any messages. The new one will just work, same resolution, same bit depth (assuming they both were supported, but that's not avoidable). THIS is what support should be: when it works, it should *work*.
When I installed my HP722C a while back, I had to manually write a magicfilter print filter because no existing system supported it at the time. Unacceptable.
And people like you come along and make jackass comments like "You're not l33t enough to move to Linux, because you're still running Windows 95! Only Win2Kers are cool enough to join my OS!". Asshole. Shut the fuck up.
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Why package 45 shitty [insert software type here] ones in a distro? Choice, my man, choice.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously, the parent is 100% on the money. Linux wasn't, isn't, and probably never will be ready for the masses, because the masses want things to just work. Now, before everyone jumps on their anti-microsoft steed screaming 'Microsoft's stuff never does what I want it to do,' remember the following:
1) As crappy as it might be, Microsoft offers real, live human support for their products, assuming you purchase them and don't pirate.
2) If something doesn't work, one doesn't have to play 'find the config file and learn how to use whatever sort of configuration options the author decided to implement.' One simply a) doesn't use the product and returns it or b) finds someone to get it to work for them, which is much more likely if they're running Windows or MacOS than if they're running linux.
3) Why *are* there so many different ways of doing things in Linux? How about one or two *good* ways, instead of half a dozen not-so-good ones?
Joe user wants things to work. He wants to go to Best Buy, grab the latest game, gadget, whatnot, and he wants to go home, plug it in, idely stand by while it installs God-knows-what spy-ware, and then he wants to use the product, even if he has to jump through a few hoops to do so.
And probably the biggest reason why Linux will never make it to the main stream population: UI design. Sure, Apple's got a better one than Microsoft... Or is it the other way around? The truth is, it doesn't matter - they have the money and resources to hire someone who knows a thing or two about UI design, and they have the same money and resources to conduct focus groups and research and all those things that open source simply can't do, and they can figure out what works the best for the most number of people, and not just the geeks and their playmates who happen to have written the software.
It's not a matter of lots of money (Score:3, Insightful)
- It's made by developers for developers
What's this mean? It means that it's made by people who care that they can be as productive as humanly possibly with the least effort humanly possible.
So, why not one good interface?
People work in different ways. If you're writing code, you want to use every niftty feature you usually do, and you want to do it the way you have always done so. That's why there's VIM and E
Re:It's not a matter of lots of money (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not a matter of lots of money (Score:5, Interesting)
Putting
and
together makes one wonder, what developers was (because like it or not, the various Linux distros are trying to target Joe Sixpack-type users these days) Linux trying to target? There are essentially three types of developers in the world, with variations on each:
It seems to me that the last developer type is what Linux is targetting. Maybe it's a little short-sighted to target the least-common of developer types?
Regardless, all of that is more or less a red herring today. As I mentioned above, nearly every distro is moving towards one of two things (or both, in the case of Redhat) -- they're targetting servers, or desktop users. The hardcore developers don't really matter, because they know how to get all the tools they need if they're not distributed with the system, like you mentioned. The other types are more or less ignored -- there's no real RAD solution under Linux other than Kylix, and there's no single, coherent object model or set of interfaces (I just re-purposed the word "interface", because while I know you meant "user interface", I think it should also apply to programming interfaces) for writing software (there's GNOME, KDE, GTK, Qt, GNUStep, etc, none of which are guaranteed to be available for any given end-user, so they either have to make a conscious choice to exclude potential customers, or take pains to make sure the neccessary depenedencies are available at install time).
Re:It's not a matter of lots of money (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps you mean to say that current IDEs suck? What's stopping an IDE from integrating autotools support? I'd use it. I don't know how to use autoconf/automake (more from lack of caring than anything), but I think if an IDE made it easy for me, I would. As well, why does an IDE need to support autotools? There's no reason why you need to compile within an IDE. I spend probably 95% of my programming time writing code in an IDE but compiling it from
Stasism and the Linux vs. MS War. (Score:3, Insightful)
The up side is that WinXP *does* recognize all manner of hardware without so much as blinking at it, and so on. Which is largely why I still use it, at the moment.
But
Re:Article Summary (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you know why there are 45 "shitty" variations on a theme? Becuase there were 45 different people/groups who had a good idea. And guess what? Each one of those looks oon the distro list and says "gee, why are there 44 shitty variations on my theme?"
Whats *good* for you, might not be good for me. I rock in nvi, suck in emacs. Taking your magical "The One Program" and making it the only thing available is bound to be disaster
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Win2k->Linux *IS* a much easier migration than Win95->Linux, because Win2k has more tools available, has a user paradigm closer to that of Linux (ie: actual security, user profiles that are not just "profiles", etc.) We're not saying that only Win2kers are "cool enough"--hell, I've seen a few WinME'ers migrate over to Linux more easily than Win2k'ers, we're just saying it's an *easier migration* because there's less to learn. (Assuming the migrating party bothered to learn Win2k in the first place)
There are REASONS why Linux advocates say what they say--often reasons that extend past the snottiness you sweepingly accuse them of.
As for your complaints about the distros--it's all a matter of personal preference. If you don't like it, you're not required to use it, you know? You do sound like you'd be far more happy on Windows, OS X, or even BeOS. Or are they more sucky, resulting in you staying on the Linux-side?
Yeah, the Linux community does tend to be a bit short tempered. They're more than happy to help you work out issues, but if you keep complaining about the OS they're also more than happy to tell you to go back to whatever OS you feel most comfortable with. There's plenty of newbies that aren't whining, are more likely to listen, and less likely to waste our time by complaining about how Linux can't do X, Y, and Z--completely forgetting that their "favored" operating system can't do X, Y, or Z reliably, either.
Anyone who's a negative little fucker is going to have a very negative experience with ANY community they venture into, and ANY OS they attempt to use.
-Sara
Linux sucks less (sometimes) (Score:5, Insightful)
This question is rhetorical. You probably use it every day for the same reason I use it every day--that being, although it sucks, everything else sucks more.
But different people have different needs. I'm one of the biggest Linux fans in the world. However, I happen to think after reading the article that the writer would be better off using Windows.
This is not because of l33tness, or because I want to be an asshole. The simple fact is that Linux is not yet ready right now for what our writer needs. The most distressing part of the article to me is that it took the writer 18 months to figure this out.
The reason why no one has tried to make a *good* distribution is that the set of people capable of making distributions (call this set A) is not a representative sample of the population of people who need a *good* distribution. Members of set A tend to be just fine with using command lines and writing printer magicfilters.
People often lose track of the following two points:
- This problem is *hard* to solve. It is a classic chicken and egg. You can't create a distribution until you enter set A, but by the time you've entered set A what's good for you is no longer what's good for average joe.
- There's no rush to solve this problem. People often fall into the trap of thinking that Linux has to grow in order to survive. But Linux is not like other commerical platforms. Linux is the most successful user-developed platform in history. Because Linux development is so open and accessible, Linux does not need popular success in order to thrive.
While I certainly agree that Linux should suck less, I also don't think that Linux can be all things to all people. Some users really are better off not using Linux. In time this problem may be solved, but that hasn't happened yet.Re:Linux sucks less (sometimes) (Score:3, Interesting)
The members of set A you are talking about are those who put together Debian, Gentoo, etc. I'm happy to leave these people alone and let them contribute in their own way. I don't expe
Actually they have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
Why isn't this guy modded down as a troll?
Anyway, these people complaining about her Win95 machine have a point regardless. She's (or whoever, the name is an obviously a pseudonym, say it out loud, and probably a clever troll) has an old machine and most of her problems are driver/hardware problems.
Linux for the masses means the same thing Windows for the maasses means: preinstalled OS. An equivalant review would be someone taking an old Linux PC and trying to put windows on it only to find that she's missing the proper drivers. Now add the industy's lack of Linux support and she has no one to hand her drivers.
Linux on the desktop != supported hardware. It would be nice if there were drivers for everything, but that just isn't the case.
I'm curious. When she bought that PC from dell, or whomever, did they just ship a box with a bunch of drivers on a bunch of floppies with a sticker saying, "Good luck!" Yeah, I don't think so either.
No, she, like 99.999% of PC buyers got a PC with a working OS installed and working components because the manufacturer had to provide a working machine. Whether they installed drivers after the OS install or just got them to MS on time, is besides the point.
All this review is telling us is that installation is especially hard with her hardware. Fine, but that isn't saying much. We all know Linux's driver support is limited.
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
I admit I was a bit (bit? Whatever... understatements are fun) negative in my original post.
I mean to say that many people (not necessarily a majority, but more than 5) here on slashdot bash people for being stupid, for not knowing this or that random command.
I just think it's in poor taste to flame the author of this article for not getting things to work. Or for not searching hard enough. Or for not having spare computers for internet access.
I just mean to point out that the aforementioned part of the population writes these flames far too much.
I apologize for ripping on the various distros so much; I meant only to illustrate that there isn't a distro out there that has a stated and executed goal of making a distribution that is genuinely good and that works well, for the average user (Say, the author).
Slackware provides nothing. Perfect for me, but not our average user. Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, etc. all provide many useful tools, but they are too fragile. Debian has some things better, some worse.
The reason I mention debian is important: the optimal distribution for the average user doesn't provide 10000 packages, like Debian does.
It provides a few packages, maybe a couple hundred, that have been reviewed, checked, and polished. That don't crash. That are well documented. That do the job. Why not include the best 2 products for a task, that have been looked over first and polished to perfection, rather than just shoving in many others that halfway do the job?
I think the author is presenting an exaggerated view, because of her perspective. That's OK: it's a relatively average user's perspective. I just get annoyed when her exaggerations are flamed by slashdotters that exaggerate as much in the other direction. Nothing personal, but seriously folks, think before you insult.
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
i like skiing.
i've tried snowboarding, but for me, it's about as much fun as watching paint dry.
funny thing is that despite my opinion about snowboarding, lots of other people seem to really dig it.
no shit.
you see them all over the place, wasting their time on those miserable snowplows when they could be skiing.
sitting on their asses at the top of every run.
slogging along on the cattracks like wounded animals.
to a skier, you could think of them as the lowest form of life.
or you could notice that these worms pump money into the lift systems.
and force "ski" areas to change their way of thinking.
i credit these scumbags with the phenomenal expansion of back country skiing in america. 10 years ago you couldn't cut through the woods without getting your ticket clipped, but today most mountains are opening up their backcountry. it is the biggest advancement of liberty since the signing of the declaration of independence. a fucking revolution (excuse my french.)
now i'm off piste.
my point is that the author's "exaggerated view" is more distored than exaggerated. she's a skier who got on a snowboard and got pissed off and frustrated when she couldn't turn. she wants to do all the same things she can do easily on skis, but no matter how hard she tries, snowboarding puts her on her ass.
instead of complaining that snowboarding is not skiing, she should get back on her skis and thank all those dirtbag snowboarders for making skiing a better experience.
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow so its a fact now? Linux officially sucks? Why didn't I get the letter?
"I use it every day. I don't have Windows installed on any of my systems. I *still* think it sucks."
That's nice. So not only does it officially suck, but *you* think it sucks. Well that does it then, Linux officially sucks.
"Asshole. Shut the fuck up."
Umm. Relax dude you'll live longer.
The parent btw was hardly a strong example of windows user bashing.
More On topic
These "I tried to install linux and these are the things that don't work" reviews are boring to say the least. At this point there must be half a dozen a week.
I just don't understand why people can't get over the whole debate of whether linux is "ready" for the desktop. The answer now is the same as it was 5 years ago. It depends.
Linux is an OS that mostly caters to those interested in using a different tool while at the same time learning more about their computers. Because it doesn't enjoy the same attention from hardware and software vendors that Windows does, it tends to take more effort to use and setup.
This is one of the few truths in life and if everyone would just accept that and move on we'd all be better off.
If anyone here think a few letters jumbled together out of pride or rage are going to change the fate of either Linux or Windows, its time to unplug.
Re:Article Summary - TROLL ALERT (Score:5, Insightful)
Tsu Dho Nimh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Tsu Dho Nimh (Score:5, Funny)
Even a moron can see that there's got to be something more than meets the eye to a story that purports to show how Linux is still too complicated for the masses. I wipe my ass on your article, Bill. You're not fooling me!
Re:Tsu Dho Nimh (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2003/040
Technical writer? (Score:5, Funny)
Let me get this striaght. She's a Technical writer, but a lousy typist.
Her work day must be living hell.
Re:Technical writer? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Technical writer? (Score:5, Informative)
Someone who knows the subject inside out is quite possibly the worst choice as a technical writer. They usually make that all too common mistake of assuming you know an important tidbit of information because "it's so basic".
Re:Step outside sometime (Score:3, Insightful)
Every linux distro I've used may include a nice installer (or not) and use KDE, but they also completely fail to obfuscate all the complexities of linux. At the worst, the installer poops out on a hardware detect and the new user is forced to figure out how to insall their hardware manually, and at best the configuration tools don't cover every feature you need so the user is forced to figure out how to handle some nightmare confi
Re:Technical writer? (Score:5, Funny)
Besdies, from what I've seen, "Technical" and "Writer" don't belong in the same sentence, unless the sentence is "Techncally I'm a Writer, but I'm not terribly creative..."
Soko
Re:Technical writer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Technical writers don't just write about things technical though. They write business process manuals, assembly instructions (ala IKEA), and so on. It's a wide field.
Also, saying a technical writer lacks creativity is like saying a programmer lacks creativity. They both deal with important rules and standards and may seem "rigid" to a layperson, but it still takes creativity and talent to do it well.
(My fiance has taken technical writing courses, though she's switched to doing research as a career goal. Anyone in the field, feel free to add your two cents.)
Re:Technical writer? (Score:5, Informative)
She's a fairly regular posted on comp.os.linux.advocacy, and explained this there. Here is what she said:
Here's the posting [google.com].Here's the complete thread [google.com].
It is hard, but possible (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It is hard, but possible (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It is hard, but possible (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be the kernel of truth that the author should have deduced and commented on.
Re:It is hard, but possible (Score:5, Insightful)
- I think a computer is a tool rather than a hobby. If software is distributed in mass-market retail outlets, I expect it to work straight out of the box.
Could it possible get any clearer?However, she does have a three demands in particular that strike me as unreasonable. It's these
- 1. [U]sing an old Microsoft Office file with Linux should be no more of a pain in the neck than using an old Office file with a new version of Office.
Linux is a competitor to Microsoft, and it's largely up to MS whether demands of this kind can ever be met in full or not. I think that the public at large realizes and accepts this. The Linux community is struggling hard to make what she asks for a reality, and so far they're doing alright (or so I've heard - I've never tried any of this myself). But that's not the point. The point is that these demands are unreasonble.2. I must have the ability to edit documents created by clients with Windows systems and return them to the client in their preferred format.
3. Existing software must remain usable unless the new operating system has equivalent features to the ones I use, there is no loss of data and data-transfer is easy.
When you buy your first CD player you have to toss away your old record collection and go buy new CDs instead. Likewise with VCR and DVD. As with a lot of other things. Why is it a given that it should be different when you switch to a completely different computer enviroment?
Most people want installation to be swift and simple. They want to be able to handle their system and to some degree understand how it works. If she has trouble with this, I agree that we have a long way to go. Full compatibility with MS products on the other hand, while nice, is an extra.
Re:It is hard, but possible (Score:3, Interesting)
A little study? You missed the point. (Score:5, Insightful)
I see two problems here.
One is in the GNU/Linux camp where on one hand the people are screaming for the downfall of Microsoft, hailing free software as the key, but on the other they are constantly insulting the very users they are trying to woo over, either directly or indirectly with bad user interfaces.
The other problem is related to the first; the people holding the keys to the "computing palace" are techies. Overwhelmingly we techies play out some passive agressive game where we make this shit hard to use. Don't deny it, we do it.
I'm trying NOT to do it anymore, in my software designs, and when I'm dealing with people who just want to get things done and not make operating a workstation a second job.
It's where the free software, and GNU/Linux communities have to head towards, if we actually want people to switch!
Give up the leet, for god's sake, learn to love the simplicity. Study is OUR job, not Joe and Jill user's.
Not fun reading, but worth reading anyway. (Score:3, Funny)
The Real Problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
At least Linux is reliable and after you get used to working with it, is powerful and useful. And also I don't seem to have so many damn device driver problems as in Windows...with those clueless vendors writing garbage drivers (I'm thinking Creative and ATI at the moment, grumble)
Re:The Real Problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, before you get your panties in a twist, I think you have to differentiate between the kernel and the gui. I will agree that on average, the Linux kernel is more stable than windows 9x, me, and 2k (I've never used XP, couldn't tell you). *However*, the Linux GUI is just as unstable and crappy as those listed. Now I personally take that as a challenge, and help out with various KDE projects, with bug reporting/fixing, and the like. But pretending that the general state of the GUI in linux is that of stable, reliable, user-friendly, and intuitive programs would be self-deluding.-
Re:The Real Problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
As an aside, I've used Redhat for a while
nice quote (Score:5, Funny)
that's a nice way to endear yourself to the readers. I'd like to read some of her technical writings...
Now configure sendmail; you know where the sendmail.cf file is, you twit!
Re:nice quote (Score:4, Insightful)
No. I think average is upgrading every 3 or 4 releases. Letsee, 95, 98,me,2k,xp (which has been out 2 years) and now she is average? No, the average person may be running 98 or me, but not 95.
a file is set immutable, by something or other.
I have installed more distributions of Linux and every other OS than you can imagine. Never have I ever had an installer do that. I have never had software set an immutable bit. I googled it and can't find much either. Nope. Not likely. Not impossible, but I am betting I have installed a couple hundred more boxes than you if you think this was the problem.
And then you insult her: she wrote an honest critique of her experiances.
I could write a critique or review of Italian suites over $1000, but you know what? I still wouldn't know shit about $1000 suits. I am not going to "be sweet to her" simply because she wrote an article. It wasn't a good article. The information is flawed, the premise is flawed, the execution was terrible. And I don't use Linux on the desktop, Im not advocating anything. I don't HAVE a favorite OS. I use them all. 95-XP, bsd, linux, and even OSX when I can. But I know a lame article when I see one.
Whatever. I'm tired of reading posts by pricks that can't take one whiff of honest criticism. Go smoke another with Ellen.
Thats the problem: you are the prick that can't take me criticising her article. If someone doesnt want to be criticized, then they shouldnt publish. She is touted as a technical writer, but I question her credentials as well.
And Ellen is entirely too young for me to be smoking one with. Maybe in a few years.
Re:nice quote (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is: who the fuck cares WHY it happened. It happened. And it prevented her from doing something she can do in Windows. That alone should be
Newbie? I'd call her an expert! (Score:5, Interesting)
I have had similar frustrations trying to get my printer at home to work. I've never been able to do it properly. Its an HP USB inkjet and it works just find from Windows 98. I really wish I had a postscript laser printer [gccprinters.com], since those are so easy to set up from Linux. (Never mind that Windows makes it harder than it should be to install one.)
As far as the CD burner goes, she had problems getting it to work on Redhat. I've found that whatever version comes with RedHat is pretty bad. Upgrading to the newest version of XCDRoast [xcdroast.org] solved all my problems. They even have RPMs that are a breeze to install in RedHat. Yes you have to run it as root, but only once. You can give anybody permission to run it from its graphical interface.
plain old troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like one of those people who love to complain and are just looking for an audience.
Not a lot of variety (Score:5, Insightful)
Why keep banging your head?! (Score:3, Insightful)
I was told the definition of insanity was doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Now I've had some bad linux installs (*Cough* linuxppc *cough*) but I take that as an indicator that I have to move on. This woman is crazy!
And do you think it wo
Re:Not a lot of variety (Score:5, Funny)
Help me here -- she's having trouble with Mandrake's installer and you want her to try the BSDs?
Re:Not a lot of variety (Score:5, Interesting)
Not scare. This is a common misconception among Linux users, that complicated things scare us. (By us I mean the non-geeks and ex-geeks of the world, those of us who, in Tsu Dho Nimh's words, do not consider computers to be a hobby.) It's not true. Complicated things, like the ports tree, and for that matter all UNIX and UNIXesque operating systems other than Mac OS X, do not scare us. They piss us off. We get pissed off when things that should work, won't. We get pissed off when things that should be easy to find and use, aren't. We get pissed off when things are harder, more complex, more time consuming, or more needful of our attention than we want them to be.
That's the key, you know. The ticket is not to ask yourself, "What can we do to keep from scaring the users?" The ticket is, "What can we do to keep from pissing off the users?"
what about from the other direction? (Score:5, Interesting)
Second: The author talks about the need (in her case) of a dual-boot system, and that's surely a common situation. However: What about Windows? If someone has a mostly happy, generally successfull Linux installation on a machine with a few tens of gigs of hard drive space, can Windows be nicely (non-destructively) installed as a novelty or
I have installed Mandrake Linux (versions 7.1 and 8.0) on Laptops which arrived with different versions of Windows, and contrary to the upshot of this article, those installs (dual-booting with Windows) went pretty automagically (though I regret that I ended up with a big never-used partition on each of those hard-drives
(This question is out of ignorance, and is not rhetorical.)
timothy
p.s. A very similar, just-as-damning article could be written about the various interface flaws that infest Microsoft Windows; a few recent visits to my dad, trying to help him set up wireless networking under Windows led me to show him how if I popped in a Knoppix CD, everything Just Worked, but we never did get Windows XP happy with his network.
Faith in moral paradigms (Score:5, Insightful)
During WWII, Charles Lindburg went over to germany, looked at their massive numbers of factories and aircraft, and concluded that the USA could never win the war. I suppose also, that in 1950's USSR, many people saw their huge building projects, factories, and the space program and concluded that the USA would never beat out the Soviets which at the time seemed more elloquent and "sophisticated" in their approach. But if you believed that people had inaliable rights as dignified human biengs, and believed that freedom was an end in itself - then there was only one way to go.
Well the same is true with Linux. Some Microsoft features may seem more "sophisticated", others may see Microsoft's huge amount of cash and never believe that they could loose to Linux. But if you believe that copying things is not a sin, but a human nature; and you believe that property rights derive from physical truths and not from artifical monopolies imposed by the government - like copyrights. Then there is only one way to go, and that way will free and benefit the people who believe in it over the long run, and destroy the people who don't.
Brief comment (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you probably just aren't familiar with the shell. Many very good typists get very frustrated with UNIX because of the need to understand the shell.
BTW - Is anyone else totally baffled by the choices Mr. Gates and co used when developing MSDOS many years ago? The MSDOS "shell" has commands that are totally crazy. Some, like "dir" (and its output) are a little more intuitive than the default "ls". Others, like md are (arguably) less intuitive than mkdir. Still others are inexplicable, like using \'s instead of
-Sean
Re:Brief comment (Score:5, Informative)
Muscle memory sanity for people switching between DOS and Unix wasn't exactly seen as an issue to those guys
r.
Re:Brief comment (Score:3, Insightful)
Google Posting [google.com]
$ ls
hello.h ebonics.h ebonics.o
Re:Brief comment (Score:3, Insightful)
"No, you probably just aren't familiar with the shell. Many very good typists get very frustrated with UNIX because of the need to understand the shell."
You bonehead--she can't be wrong about what her own requirements are.
Tired of reading about installation (Score:3, Insightful)
If the installation prevents Linux from world domination in someones eyes, so be it. There will always be issues with some hardware or unique configuration, but that is the case with Windows as well.
If installation is a major issue for anyone get someone that knows to do it.
Tempt them with Free as in Beer and stop yammering about something that is not so important compared with how does this work once installed.
Before everybody piles on... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to add that this was my experience too.
Let me preface this by saying that I run a web design company, I maintained our servers for the first few years, I put in my time on PETs and TRS-80s, and APPLE IIs and Windows 3.0 and 95 and NT and 2000 and Linux. Take my word for it, I'm a seriously fucking technical guy. I offer as further evidence the fact that I'm posting to Slashdot on the Linux holy war at 9pm on a Saturday night.
I made an honest go of making my home main OS Linux, but I quit in frustration. The main problem is that it's not that Linux isn't *capable* of doing everything I need, but the tiny things that are slightly greater hassles in Linux end up being a death by a thousand cuts.
If there's one main way I can think of to characterize my regular use of my main OS, it's "freewheeling." I need it to be a transparent conduit in my productivity, whether it be hitting the Net, writing documents, personal finance, etc. Linux was *always* functional, but *never* transparent. I constantly had to tweak little things to make it work, find new libraries, etc. That's fun when I'm using hobby time, but not fun at all when I have shit to do on a deadline.
Honestly, I don't know how you're going to fix this aspect of the OS without doing what Microsoft has done - compromise fundamental stability and security in favor of useability. Personally I hope the debate stops, and we stop trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Let MS spend their money catering to the masses, let's keep Linux stable and robust for hard core needs.
I think we'd be doing the world a lot more good putting Microsoft's server products out of business than their desktop products. I'd feel a much greater sense of accomplishment knowing that I helped get the world's credit cards onto a Linux server than the world's Mom's on a Linux desktop.
-----
Re:Before everybody piles on... (Score:4, Interesting)
Stability is not antithetical to usability. If anything, reliability improves usability, since it means that things work more consistently. Security can be a pain, but basic stuff like having separate root and user accounts isn't too much of an issue.
IMHO, the problems with Linux's usability have more to do with the availability and quality of GUI config tools, and the lack of a standard target for third-party developers to build against, which in turn makes it tricky to install third-party binary applications. Making Linux usable by the masses is doable. Both the technology and the standardization efforts are in place. It just has yet to gel.
Busted! (Score:3, Funny)
By your own admition: Saturday night, posting to Slashdot.
You may be a technical guy, but c'mon, you aren't seriously fucking. Anything.
Hey... (Score:3, Funny)
Unrealistic expectations,Unfair without benchmark (Score:5, Insightful)
The expectation that Linux will fulfill the hardware driver installation off the distribution CD, when you admit that you may have to replace the entire hardware for XP, is inherently unfair and beyond what can be reasonably expected in any operating system. XP is not without it's major problems when it comes to older hardware ( especially scanners ) support and driver conflict problems.
The lack of any relative comparison in your article to the Microsoft alternative, paints Linux in a far worse light than is the reality. Compare your article to the recent articles by Joe Barr, comparing Linux installation with XP [linuxworld.com] and Windows 2000 [linuxworld.com].
Also, given the rapid improvement of Linux distributions, 18 months is in my opinion, too long ago to represent the current state of Linux on the desktop. See Michael C. Barnes updates look at leading desktop operating system options [desktoplinux.com] on the market.As with Joe Barr's article, it benchmarks Linux against Microsoft's offerings.
There is nothing inherently wrong with pointing out faults, in fact any *constructive* criticism over current releases of Linux is both welcome and necessary to the Kazan like rapid improvement of Linux. However, just repeating war-stories without acknowledging either that the issue has been fixed in the lastest release of that distribution, or similar problem also exists with Win2k and XP, does nothing but provide fodder for Microsoft's trolls. I am surprised that this article in it's current form, made it past the editors at Linuxworld.
Not all linux distributions are targeted for the non-technical deployer. For example: Lycoris, Xandros and ELX are more likely to have SMB functionality preconfigured on install.
However, does not someone also re-configure windows for your colleagues? When they log in, is the SMB shares,printers and defaults always pre-installed for them? If not, who ever provides techsuppport for you is not doing their job properly.
Deployment, day to day management and just using a computer, require a different level of technical knowledge, no matter what operating system you are using.
Although many non-technical people to install and with windows often reinstall the operating system, that does not mean that they do a good job of it. I have been too often called in to repair a screwed up home based 98 to XP systems to personally attest to that.
That some Linux distributions, for example RedHat 8, do require a lot more knowleadge to deploy, once properly deployed and configured, they are a hell of a lot easier to remotely manage on a day to day basis, even using GUIs. ( hint - ssh -X root@TARGET-IP ). The quality of the technical knowledge from Linux user groups and distributions forums, especially in comparison to phone support from Microsoft, can more than make up for the difference in relative difficulty. That Tsu Dho Nimh set up a a pre-requisite that no external support was aceptable, is unrealistic even for windows XP.
Dispite the absolute terror of the Microsoft advocates, Linux is NOW a more than adequate as a desktop for the enterprise, a replacement for XP and an upgrade from window98 and NT4.
At work , we have upgraded 80% of our ghosted win98se desktop from Microsoft Office 98 to StarOffice6 and Mozilla
Well, I tried Mandrake (Score:3, Insightful)
Article has a bad tone (Score:5, Insightful)
1) It was degrading. I'd rather not be condescendingly referred to as a "shreiking geek".
2) She says she has problems that are absolutely absurd. For instance, "Root gets locked out of files". If this is occuring, then Linux has some serious security problems...
I hear so much complaining about how Linux developers aren't helpful to new users and such. Well, I'm sick of new users who aren't helpful to Linux developers and just sit around complaining about how things don't work like they should and then fail to explain how they should work or make general statements like "all my old legacy applications should just work".
End-users of Open Source software have as much, if not more, of an obligation to be helpful to developers as developers have to be helpful to end-users.
Re:Article has a bad tone (Score:5, Funny)
I've been sitting in the IRC channel for a popular icculus game recently and every day someone brings up (again) the "we need OpenGL support" topic.
Now, you can't do this in general, but today on LKML I saw what I consider to be a contender for greatest message ever
From: Alan Cox
Subject: Re: poweroff problem
On Sad, 2003-04-05 at 07:08, Anant Aneja wrote:
> also i cant give u the complete listing of the cpu
> registers since it occurs at the last stage
> of shutdown and i cant copy it to a file
> and am too lazy to write it down
We are too lazy to help you.
Goodbye
Alan
Bull, bull, and bull (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so at work we have about a dozen test machines. At home, I have a couple of spare machines. Broad range of hardware, from cutting edge XP1800's and 128mb video cards, to barely usable p100's with 64mb ram and 1mb video. ISA, PCI, AGP, sound, network, scsi you name it, it's here.
So freeweed decides to try installing linux. Ooo, I've heard good things about this Red Hat. Download the isos, burn, start the install. Wow, looks as good as, if not better than, the current batch of Windows installers. Very slick and intuitive (as long as you understand drive partitioning, something required even in the Microsoft world). A short while later and I'm in Gnome thinking "huh. except for a really odd filesystem, it's like Windows with nicer graphics". So, I carry on. Mandrake. Debian. Slackware (ok, that was a bit of a bitch and I needed to ask for help
So, I'm pretty used to installing linux at this point, and with all these different configurations, the worst I had to deal with was looking up how to get an old ISA network card to work. Huh. Just like Windows. Now, it's time to try using some of this software. Holy shit! There's an office suite installed, free! Mp3 player, ftp client, multiple browsers, packet sniffers, IRC clients, you name it. I have almost everything I need, without the 18 reboots and hunting down cd after cd after cd trying to install everything I use. Ok, let's see how hard it is to get something not on this system. Hmm.. download a package, double click it in nautilus, it's installed! No easy desktop shortcut or start menu entry, so let's try just typing its name on the command line (just as I've done for years in Windows). No pathing errors, this is pretty damn cool!
Summary: I've been a Windows kid since the early 90s. Installing linux was at least as easy as Windows (it even told me that 'root' was the linux word for 'administrator'). I can do everything I want, for FREE. So far it's been pretty easy, and I'm hooked.
This writer who's coming from Windows 95 obviously hasn't tried installing 2000 or XP, they're at least as involved as a Red Hat install. (Oh, and for the record, anyone with an older machine that finds Gnome/KDE a tad slow, try windowmaker. Nope, it doesn't look like Windows, but boy, is it fast!).
Re:Bull, bull, and bull (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux printing is a nightmare. (Score:5, Informative)
Having administered Linux web servers for several years, I decided to set up a dedicated Linux print server at home. My printer is an HP Color Laserjet 4500 which installs easily with pretty much any Windows version; I decided to forego buying the JetDirect ethernet card for the printer and use Linux as a print server instead.
I asked my friends what to use on my AMD K6-2 300 that had been commandeered for the purpose of running Linux (no dual-boot attempts here.) They said "Debian." I shouldn't have listened.
dselect is the most nightmarish application I have ever seen. I spent a good 15 minutes reading the help files, most of which were of no use to me. I then somehow managed to exit out of dselect by hitting some keystroke. BAM! I was dropped into a console prompt with absolutely no packages installed.
Aha! I thought. Apt-get to my rescue! After all, that was the saving grace of Debian. I tried "apt-get install kde." Not the right package name. Okay.... "apt-get install gnome." No? I just need to apt-get some sort of GUI!
With tedious Google searching, I finally figured out the sequence of commands to install KDE, and I was off and running. (I think I ended up installing some calculator program that required the KDE libraries, and it went ahead and installed KDE for me.)
I rebooted and was dropped into KDE.... exxcept that Debian wouldn't detect my USB mouse. I ended up having to go into #debian on freenode and get the instructions on how to edit some mouse configuration file just to make Debian understand that my mouse was on a USB port. After my mouse worked, I started using Debian, except that I got this weird C error dialog whenever I ran any application. I gave up and tried Red Hat 7.3 (then the latest) instead.
Red Hat was much easier for me to use. It detected my mouse during the install program, which was nice. However, it didn't detect my printer. I finally got the printer installed under the "control panel" sort of thing that KDE had, only to find out that most of the computer's applications didn't recognize that I was using CUPS! I went back to IRC and asked what the deal was. "Oh, that's normal," was the response. "If you set up the printer under KDE, only KDE applications will recognize it! Then you have to go in and tell all your other applications that the printer is now defined under CUPS instead of LPR. A window manager doesn't control your entire system! You should learn the difference between a window manager and the underlying OS."
By this time, I was miffed. If I set up a printer in Windows or Mac OS under the Control Panel, all the applications realize that that printer is now my default printer. Why in the world couldn't Mozilla (to use one example) do this? As far as I was concerned, the GUI control panel was the system control panel. To force users to learn the difference between window managers and the underlying OS and to force users to understand that changes they make in the window manager won't apply to the entire OS is a usability gaffe of such proportions that it hasn't been committed since Windows 95 took DOS out of the picture 8 years ago.
It took me several more hours to set up Samba to share my printer out to my Windows XP box, most notably because of a bug in Samba that prevented sharing printers to Windows XP. I then had the printer working with over 7 hours of work. It was a very long day for me.
I used the print server successfully for a few weeks. I then went away for Christmas and turned the computer off. When I came home and turned it on, there was no print server (and yes, I'd made sure that all the correct services were set to run on startup, which was yet another annoyance I had to consider in the 7-hour setup process.) Instead of being frustrated, I remembered that I had an old Pentium 75 in the garage that ran Windows 95. 15 minutes later, I had downloaded the Windows 95 drivers from HP's website, clicked the "enable printer sharing" button,
Re:Linux printing is a nightmare. (Score:3, Interesting)
No it doesn't. I quote "hlt - Halts CPU until RESET line is activated, NMI or maskable interrupt received. The CPU becomes dormant but retains the current CS:IP for later restart." That's why it's called the (surprise) halt-intruction.
don't go the upgrade route (Score:5, Insightful)
Regular users should be discouraged from doing anything else: PC hardware is just too complex and messy to allow installation on arbitrary configurations. And that's as true of Windows as it is of Linux.
Hardware matters (Score:3, Informative)
Installation was dead simple. I'm hardly a newbie, but the installer didn't really give me the chance to do all that much. I let it autopartition, autoselect the filesystems, picked my package sets (GNOME workstation, etc) and sat by while it installed. I occasionally had to swap discs. The bootmanager configuration would probably be a little confusing. There is no reason to really have it in the "braindead-newbie installation mode" because installed OSs can probably be auto-detected. Then, it rebooted do a nice GNOME desktop. The GeForce4Go in my Inspiron 8200 was autodetected. My USB mouse was autodetected. My network card was autodetected. I had to install the NVIDIA drivers seperately, which required me to drop into the command line. This would be the first hitch for a newbie user (who wants 3D anyway). In all, there was one text file to edit (a one-liner). No recompiles. Overall, it was easier than the average WinXP installation. The WinXP does partitioning and filesystem formatting through a curses-like interface. Two of it's options panels (date-time settings, network configuration) are a good deal more complex than the very direct RedHat panels. Getting good 3D performance in XP also requires an trip to NVIDIA's websites for it's drivers. Further, after the install, about an hour of additional software installation is necessary to get the system to a usable state. Once the RedHat install is done, it's done.
Probably isn't author's real name, but.... (Score:3, Interesting)
That probably is a pen name and not the author's real name, but it's not unheard of for columnists to do this.
The author might not be able to whip up a brand new operating system in assembly overnight, but it's obvious from reading the entire article that he or she knows a lot more about computers than the average user and is no stranger to installing software.
We need to get Taco to set up one of those best 10 question interviews with him/her.
Re:Probably isn't author's real name, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Definately "She" (Score:3, Interesting)
Tsu Dho Nimh has been posting to Usenet for a loooong time. Several posters to bot news.admin.net-abuse.email and comp.os.linux.advocacy have met her in person [1], and "tOSG" of the article is a known poster who works with her.
Just in case it matters to anyone.
[1] Under another handle, I'm one of them.
I'd have to agree (Score:5, Insightful)
My biggest pet peeve though? There don't appear to be any good GUI ftp clients for Linux. There's gftp, which is lacking lots of features and is crashy, and there's something-or-other from the KDE people that's not so good either. Nothing approaching Windows' BulletProof FTP or SmartFTP. So I use ncftp, which is a CLI interface. Works for me, but I doubt it would for most casual computer users.
Mandrake 9 seems to be the winner (Score:5, Informative)
I will say, from the progress I've seen over the last few years with Linux desktops, they are improving at a fast rate. The distros just keep getting better and better, and I think we will one day soon see a truly usable Linux desktop.
similar experience (Score:4, Interesting)
The first command I ever ran on my Linux box was "rm -rf
That was my first, and last Linux installation. Don't get me wrong, I've tried to install other flavors of Linux since then, multiple times. Never been successful though. Mandrake installer would always freeze, or something wouldn't go right with the distro of choice at the time. Funny how FreeBSD has installed every time with no problems, and is remarkably stable.
In the end, I bought a Mac. I'm suprised that hasn't been mentioned more, as many comments are discussing Windows vs Linux. Try a Mac running OS X. Awesome GUI, very powerful, and stable. What more would you want?
I Couldn't Care Less (Score:3, Insightful)
I was reading the article right up to this:
And then I switched off. I really couldn't care less whether she uses Linux or not. She's not the sort of person who is worth fighting for. How can anybody act so ungraciously when a community gives her a free gift of software, a free gift of their time, and a free gift of their knowledge, all with the goal of HELPING her? She can go pay for new hardware and Windows XP and avoid having to deal with all those "shrieking geeks".
If this lady is the sort of person that will be attracted to Linux if Linux is made easier to use then I think the current situation is fine. Keep Linux hard to use because that will keep these ungrateful brats away from Linux. Any valid improvements she might suggest are irrelevant if those improvements result in more users like her. She obviously considers herself to be a better person than the "geeks". I think the situation is exactly the opposite. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Re:I Couldn't Care Less (Score:3)
The most frustrating part about these articles is that they aren't productive, in any way -- a person who has been given a free set of tools and all the resources they'd conceivably need to help maintain and improve them bitches that said tools don't do exactly what they want.
Perhaps we as a community are somewhat at fault for trying to shoehorn Linux into a desktop role (although consider the alternatives, which are often insecure, buggy, and expensive), but regardles
Right (Score:3, Funny)
Ummmm (Score:3, Funny)
Linux will be ready for the masses... (Score:3, Interesting)
As long as people have to choose to wipe 'Doze of their box and fiddle with Linux CDs, and getting everything to work right, there won't be much incentive for it to happen. But when a consumer-savvy manufacturer steps in, makes it all just work, provides decent hardware and decent tech support, and sells it all for less than an equivelant 'Doze system, we'll be getting somewhere!
I have written up a Proposal for such a system [eradicatewindowsnow.com]. Come on computer manufacturers, listen up!
You're missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Also it doesn't make sense to say "what do you expect for free". If I pay RedHat or SuSE for a distribution I expect a certain level of quality. I wouldn't blame the authors of the individual GPL'ed packages, but I would blame the distribution people who let packages get on their CD without adequate QA.
To the distributors that the author specifically mentions, I hope you are taking advantage of this free QA. Either she is lying about the problems she had (what would be the point of that) or these problems really happened. If they did they should be fixed. Bugs are bugs.
The conclusion of the article is that Linux isn't ready for the mass market. If you disagree, fine, but don't claim it's perfect or more stable than Windows and therefore the whole article is BS.
Cracking the box (Score:3, Informative)
Except that I have it on very good authority (tOSG from the story) that she indeed runs Win95 at home, although at the office she runs whatever IT sets up. Right now IIRC that's Win2K and Solaris, but these things change.
Don't confuse knowing the language with having skills.
Re:Buy a NEWER computer! (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not a solution, only a bad trade off.
What you call old systems are not that old and they are still working hardware.
Perhaps I shouldn't say this as alot of the systems I have now are from others tossing them away as they "upgrade their system hardware".
And it is this hardware that I'm looking to find software to make them useful in
Re:Minimum IQ (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, because insulting potential users by calling them stupid whenever they have a problem is the quickest way to build up a strong user base.
"All kidding aside, she essentially tried installing it on some crap hardware without having an either net access to search the newsgroups for solutions or having the geek that gave her the distros on hand."
And you call Redmond's software junk? I can t
Re:Too many damn CDs (Score:3, Insightful)
www.redhat.com->download->Red Hat Linux 8.0
At this point, you can click on "How to download Red Hat Linux", which explains the process in great detail and fairly simply, or you can continue to "Download Now!"
Click "Download Now!" and you are in the ftp directory. If you read the instructions, or you know what you're doing, you're already downloading.
How is this "retardedly i