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Linux Software

Freep Column: Can Linux Overtake Windows? 137

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
TheInternet writes "The head/subhead of the article sum it up very nicely: 'Can Linux crash Windows? That's the goal of the upstart operating system. Installing it, however, is just too difficult for most of us.' Note that 'crash Windows' means 'overtake Windows' in this context. It's a stretch. " Pretty typical piece.
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Freep Column: Can Linux Overtake Windows? More

Freep Column: Can Linux Overtake Windows?

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  • no apps? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First he writes:

    "Even the most dedicated supporters don't claim Linux is ready for the average user who wants to use a word processor, collect e-mail, surf the Web and use a CD-ROM encyclopedia."

    Then later, in describing his VArStation experience and playing around with KDE, he writes:

    "The computer came with the Linux version of
    Netscape Communicator, providing a Web browser and e-mail program, and an office suite called Applix for word processing and related tasks. But there wasn't much else I could do."

    I guess that lack of a CD ROM encyclopedia is what really was holding him back from accepting Linux! I mean, first say the apps aren't available and then admit he was using them, but then say, "there was nothing else." Come on! Whatever it is he does when he says "I do this for a living," it isn't editing.
  • At least "cynics" is better word to use than "mimics" or "gimmicks", which are the only other words I can think of now that rhyme with linux.
  • Linux rhymes with "cynics"?

    Personally, I find that to be almost as inflammatory as "Open Sores".
  • Sorry bro, but if you treat people like morons they behave like morons. I'd like to point out that my C average student, 10 y.o., former Mac user nephew, who's always looking for an excuse to get someone to wipe his bottom for him, uses the Linux box (with KDE) we put together. I haven't had to talk him through anything since the day after we first fired it up.
    On the other side of the coin... One of my clients constantly has to walk his users through simple procedures such as copying files to the server in a 98/NT environment. They get intimidated because if they get a BSOD while doing something they think they screwed up
  • Well, as I recently found out when I reviewed Windows 98 SE, Linux can be easier to install than Win98SE. If this trend continues, then as more software is written (and more graphical, easy to use, admin tools appear) Linux will start making a dent in the corporate desktop, and then the general population.
  • Posted by Lo-Rez:

    I don't know that linux should ever become as widespread as windows. One of the reasons I think it's so stable is that its not so damned all inclusive as windows. It doesn't have to have rehashed code so johnny keypad can run his dos games from the late eighties.
  • Try using "expert" mode to install Redhat.

    It lets you continue without a swap partition then.

  • He really sounds much like last-years Jesse... (see http://lwn.net/1999/features/1998timeline/).

    I wonder if he will follow the same path as Jesse did?

  • Quite frankly, Windows 95/98 is *much* more anal about this sort of behavior than the typical Linux distro is...

  • Erm... (Score:1)

    by Enahs ( 1606 )
    To quote Bob Metcalfe, Linux is based on 30-year-old technology...

    ...so, quite frankly, there's a *lot* more "legacy code" than Windows requires for Johnny Keypad's DOS games. :^P

  • Agreed. (Score:1)

    by Enahs ( 1606 )
    Yeah...Win95/98 can seem to be very easy to install if all one has to do is:

    1. Take computer out of box
    2. Plug in keyboard, mouse, monitor, & peripherals
    3. Turn on computer
    4. Wait for Win98 to boot

    Honestly, I've tried Red Hat (and Mandrake), SuSE, Caldera, and Slackware, and the only one that was more complex to install than Windows was Slackware. Just wait until something is misdetected under Windoze. Whoops, time to start over, or to spend the next day or so fixing everything. No thanks.

    To be fair, up until recently I had a GB Exxtreme graphics card in my machine, and no one but SuSE shipped (in anything other than full X source--ugh, I don't have enough free space to compile :^( ) so, to install any of the RH 5.x series (other than the Mandrake derivative, which came with Glint RPMs) one would have to go to SuSE. I believe the reason was that the Glint X-Server was part of the XSuSE project.

  • Minix? ;)

    Actually, the reason it annoyed me to read that is that I don't think it rhymes with any of those words. Each to their own though, I guess.

  • I guess, among other things, that this demonstrates how slow the Detroit Free Press is in publishing syndicated columns.

    I saw this column over three months ago up on the San Jose Mercury site.

    http://www.mercurycenter.com/business/top/050329 .htm

    Scroll just past the halfway point on the page to find the article.

    The publication date on that page is March 13.

    I would hope that the people with a propensity to flame columnists would refrain from sending the author a second barrage of unnecessary vitriol for this.

  • Why does Redhat *require* a swap partition? Yes, if you have 4 megs of RAM you need one, and if you have 16 or less you'd probably want one for programs which are resource-intensive *cough*Netscape*cough*KDE*cough*. However, my system has 128 megs of RAM, which is becoming increasingly more common.

    Debian doesn't require a swap partition. Slackware doesn't require a swap partition. Sure, they recommend one, but they don't absolutely require one to install. Can't Redhat use a swap file? Yes, it's a bit slower, but when you're swapping, chances are a few additional microseconds of latency in paging are the least of your performance problems.

    The main reason that Redhat's insistence annoys me, aside from the fact that it makes new users squeamish, is that when I was upgrading to Redhat from Slackware, I had no decent way to repartition my drive to make the minimal 8 meg swap partition, and so I ended up using - get this - a SCSI zip drive, for lack of a better means of satiating Redhat's installer.

    Bloody annoying.


    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

  • Ahh, that does me a lot of good now, after I've completely switched over to Debian. ;)

    Seriously, though, my point was that the swap partition issue is a bit annoying, and hoped to also convey that it's part of why new users have a hard time adopting Linux. If RedHat were to just use swapfiles instead, that would remove a LOT of the confusion, and make it much more flexible later on as well. One shouldn't have to go into expert mode to make it easier; if anything, you should have to use Expert Mode to use a swap partition.


    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
  • And I hate the term 'browse the Internet'. The Internet is not the same thing as the Web. Way too many people fail to grasp the difference, and such phrases only increase the confusion.
  • Well, you don't have to know the IRQ of your sound card. Until, of course, Windows decides it would be nice to set your sound card to the same IRQ as your network card. Then your sound stops working, your network stops working, and all Windows has to say is "System has detected a hardware conflict.".

    Oh, I'm glad it's not just me, in a twisted sort of way :-)

    Windows 98: the only OS that uninstalls your GLIDE drivers when you upgrade your soundcard drivers.

    Windows 98: the only OS that installs the same network card driver three times, and then complains about conflicts.

    Yes, the above have happened to me. The network card incident followed a hardware failure. In Linux, I replaced the card, booted, and all was well. It took (count em) 8 reboots to finally persuade Windows that a new, working, card was actually present.

    This is, apparently, ease of use in action.

    (By the way, I didn't need to know my modem COM port the last time I installed Linux either)

  • The comment that the author bailed on his install, and then asserted that it was to hard for him and he does this for a living (sic) made me laugh. It reminds me of a story where a lady asks a physist to explain the finer points of particle physics without using technical terms, but that she's sure he can do it because he's very good at what he does. Honestly, how technical can the author be? If he was planning to install the operating system he must have heard that it was just a touch more involved then the install of a windows box.

    This is a just new twist on old FUD. Now not only is Linux hard to install, but its hard for technical people to install. Which technical people?! Those who consider reading too hard? Maybe I'll take a M$ Cert. Eng exam they must be written as connect-the-dot diagrams, so that they won't be too hard for technical people!


    Oops... In advertantly turned on the flame thrower. Must be monday.

    Locust

  • You know, I'm amazed that Red Hat doesn't have "first-time users" or "journalists afraid of partitioning" option that uses UMSDOS and swap files. That's the way *I* first installed Linux, with good ol' Slackware 2.0.1 and the 1.0.9 kernel.

    No, it's not ideal. No, it won't show all the additional advantages Linux has on ext2. But it's a worthwhile option...
  • . Is your hard drive IDE or SCSI? What COM port is your modem using? What is the IP address of your Internet service provider? More stomach acid.

    Honestly, if you don't know those basic bits of information, what the hell are you doing installing a *nix OS? Of all possible basic things you should know about your computer, that phrase pretty much sums it up.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • >This is a just new twist on old FUD. Now not only is Linux hard to install, but its hard for technical people to
    >install.

    I wouldn't call this FUD. People who live in the Windows world seem to have a different criteria for evaluating reality, a fact that was made very obvious to me recently when I got a couple of Windows Magazines by accident. The mixure of incredulity, ignorance & (of course) awe at the Smart People of Redmond(tm) I found in that periodical has to be seen to be believed.

    There seems to be two kinds of Windows People: those who apparently believe all press releases as scientific truth, & those who have been burned on Microsoft's mendacity & so believe since ``they're all liars", that MS is no worse than any of the others.

    These are odd patterns of thought, & I'm not sure how one can combat these patterns of thinking, but one can't troubleshoot problems unless the problem is identified.


    Geoff

  • Operated, yes. If I used either KDE or GNOME, I'd comment on how well it did this.

    Tweaked? Nah.

    I don't think there are many people out there who want to tweak their systems but don't want to use a keyboard to do it.

    Is it a good idea to create a graphical program to manipulate text files for a console program (or worse, a daemon)? I say it depends on the program.

    We should expect and presume some level of technical competence from people -- give them a chance to rise to that level.

    By giving boneheads a chance to set up a web server with a few mouse clicks, you've given script kiddies a chance to abuse their machines with a few clever scripts. Is that good?

    There should be a learning curve. The question is, how steep?

    --
    QDMerge -- generate documents automatically.
  • Isn't this what Corel Linux is supposed to be for? I noticed that Corel Linux wasn't mentioned in that article or in any responses on Slashdot.
  • "Pretty typical article" reads like a put down.

    However whats wrong with the article?

    If the Linux community truly wants to dethrone MS (which I doubt they do - its much easier to say they want to than actually do it) then they need to make the OS easier to install and easier to use.

    One of the most important resources in this day and age is time. The bulk of people won't waste their time playing with their OS, they just want to run their application.

    So unless it becomes easy to use/install there truly won't be an applications worth using... let alone people using the OS.
  • I personally don't think Linux is able to take over the Windows' maket share. It will be able to take over a significant amount of the unhappy-with-windows users, but will never be able to take over all of them.
    --
  • "I run Windows 98 for my workstation (the server and office are Linux). I reboot my Windows box about once a day, or day and a half. I don't have a magical stable copy of windows."

    Once every couple of hrs or once every couple of days, it doesn't really matter. Compared to the uptimes of Linux/Unix, the difference is insignificant (I have never crashed or needed to reboot Linux or the HP-UX box I admin, except when I compile the kernel). Its like the difference between 1/X and 2/X where X is some very large number.
  • I have never had any printing problems with Linux. I have printed with a variety of HP laser/deskjets and Canon (sp?) Colorjet printers. In fact, I have never had any problems printing on a local printer or on a Netware printer.

    Sure, some printers/scaners may not have drivers for Linux *yet*, but all the old hardware I have seen is supported by Linux (ie a printer you may already have). If you're going to buy a new printer, its easy enough to browse the web and find if it is supported.

  • most of America doesn't need the uptime of Linux. However, there is a difference between shuting down at the end of the day and a forced reboot or crash. Before I started using Linux I, like many, used Win3.1/95. The shutdown at the end of the day was never a problem. However, having to wait for reboots after installing or making a config change was a real pain. The real kicker though was when Windows would crash while I was working on a paper, compiling, browsing the web, printing, etc. If windows crashes weren't that often we wouldn't have the acronym BSOD.

  • Since you asked...


    1. It says absolutely nothing that hasn't already been said and shows no insight whatsoever.

    2. 'I do this for a living' implies he's a computer professional. His comments clearly show that he's no such thing. Using a word-processor in your job hardly makes you a computer expert, anymore than you would expect a columnist two decades ago to be able to repair typewriters.

    3. Stupid install complaints. Have to partition? Need to do that for windows. Need to know what com port your modem is on? Need to do that for windows. Need to know if you have scsi or ide? Either know that for windows or risk locking up your machine during an 'autoprobe' for every scsi under the sun. The -real- install complaints were glossed over, making them sound even worse than they actually are.

    4. Unsubstantiated claims about linux advocates, 'most of whom have never tried to install linux' (paraphrased, because I don't want to re-read the article). How else -do- you run Linux besides installing it? Linux (mostly, barring VAResearch and a couple others) didn't come pre-installed until recently. More accurate to say Mac and Windows users haven't tried installing their favorite OS's - may not be true, but at least it's -plausible-.

    5. With KDE, WordPerfect, and Netscape ... actually, I think Linux is just fine for 'ordinary users' ... if they get it preinstalled. My GF uses my Linux box without a problem, and she borders on computer illiterate. (Or claims she does, I think she's learning something, against her will ... :))

    6. It is, an earlier poster pointed out, an article from -March-, re-published with a June date on the heading. If true, (I didn't check) it's incredibly misleading. I'm a Debian user, so I don't know, but I'd expect that RedHat 6.0 is easier to install than Redhat 5.2. If this article -is- current and the other poster was wrong, then it's even worse - shall I criticize the Win3.1 install to say why Windows is no good? Whichever way, it's a question of who did something wrong, not whether anything is wrong.

    7. 'Can't do much else' ... uh... sure. Can't do graphic design with GIMP, can't play Quake. Why didn't I notice that. And of course, 'normal users' probably wouldn't want to write programs in Perl,Python,C/C++,Java,etc, or raytrace in Povray, or listen to their e-mail in the Festival Speech Synthesis System or set up their home box with a static IP address as a web server or do IP Masquerading so more than one person can be on the net at the same time or ... well, so none of that counts. Naturally.

    Oh, and there -was- one thing write with this article.

    1. Accurately points out that printing under Linux is difficult. We really should have streamline the printing process, but really - I don't even have a printer. Don't ever print anything except my resume - which I just dump to a floppy as postscript and take to my local copy-shop. Yeah, well. We all know this. Nobody's started the Central Unified Streamlined Printing Project (CUSPP) yet.


    Anyway, remember, ... you asked. :)


  • No, the rule is that you pronounce "Linux" however you pronounce "Linus" (so it's "lyenucks" in English-speaking countries and "leenucks" pretty much everywhere else). There's even a sample of Linus Torvalds saying it, for goodness sake, and people still get it wrong.

    "I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
    "All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS

  • Windows correctly support plug and play

    No, it doesn't. Every Windows user I know either turns off PnP, or has their BIOS set it up. There is no such thing as correctly supporting Plug-and-Play, because it's a fundamentally broken standard layered on top of another fundamentally broken standard. PC hardware will not properly support autoconfiguration until the 20-year-old architecture is redesigned (perhaps more along the lines of the Amiga, which had an extremely simple autoconfiguration system that really worked).

    Also, learn to read the manual. UNIX does not cater for lazy idiots. And don't expect much help if you can't be bothered to proofread your postings.

    "I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
    "All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS

  • has this guy looked at the caldera install. Hey RH 6.0 is not that difficult. Guess next year he'll be writing that article.

  • You make some good points about the dangers of overactive Linux advocacy, but I'll disagree with you on one point: doing the computing thing for a living does not mean that you can type up a paper and browse the web with the hood of your box welded shut. You don't see Formula-1 drivers who do the driving thing for a living keep their hoods welded shut, do you? Sure, a racing pro doesn't change every tire or spark plug (they've got a pit crew for that) but they have to have a good understanding of what hardware is under the hood and what tradeoffs can be made in order to get the most out of it. Professional drivers who never think about what's under the hood (or on the axles, etc.) won't make much of a living at it.

    So it should be with computer writers - if the computing thing is your living, then you should at least be able to discuss the pros and cons of the innards of a system even if you are reviewing it for those who don't need all the details. Just because his audience may not need to get under the hood doesn't mean that an author can't mention that there is more to the story - like the IP address of your ISP. And if you only do the computing thing for a living in Windows, then why are you reviewing Linux? You don't see Formula-1 drivers taking a spin at a NASCAR race, for example - if you are an expert on only one type of system, your opinion of a different system isn't any more reliable than the average guy on the street. I would certainly agree that this author does the writing thing for a living, but saying that he does the computing thing for a living is a stretch.

  • What bothered my was that he claimed to be a computer tech but he can't partition his own hard drive.

    duh!

    -geekd

  • In reply to the person who said you need to know your com port for windows, you don't. Windows correctly support plug and play. In fact in windows you don't need to know the irq, dma, io, etc. of your sound card. It doesn't matter if you can or not, why should you have to?

    Well, you don't have to know the IRQ of your sound card. Until, of course, Windows decides it would be nice to set your sound card to the same IRQ as your network card. Then your sound stops working, your network stops working, and all Windows has to say is "System has detected a hardware conflict.". The user has no idea what that means, has no clue how to find out what the conflict is, and couldn't fix it if they did find out because Windows will proceed to use PnP to reconfigure things back to the (broken) way it thinks things should be as soon as you reboot (and you have to reboot to make any fix you try take effect).

    At this point the Windows user calls me up, and I go in and disable the PnP crud, jumper or otherwise force the cards to the correct settings, cram the settings down Windows' throat and the whole thing works again. At least until the next time he upgrades something, at which point my fixes get erased and the box breaks again and I get another call. One good thing about Microsoft products: the repeat business keeps me in beer and pretzels.

  • Your comments are inflammatory and sloppy. Don't sharpen the devil's horn by making this sloppy excuse for an article to be worse than it really is.
    Langberg wrote:'the OS doesn't yet support all the peripherals -- such as printers and scanners -- that work with Windows and the Mac.'
    He is correct in that, there are SOME PRINTERS AND SCANNERS that won't work with Linux. They either rely on hooks to an MS OS, or use interfaces that we don't have perfected yet, like USB.

    Misha, in this day and age, to "do this [computing thing] for a living" means that you likely do it in Windows. The hood of their "Ford" is welded shut and they are a professional driver. They know how to manipulate their econobox down the road to get where they need to go. When it breaks, they tow it to the dealership. Introduce those folks to a stripped down chassis made for speed, flexibility & accessibility and a courier that is on the road every day isn't going to like the idea of driving a rolling project. The greatest error in consumer Linux thinking is that most people even WANT a system that can be turned from a tire iron to a toilet plunger by changing runlevels. Most people want a computing appliance: You plug it in and USE IT. Windows isn't there, but on good days, it's closer to being usable for the "common man" than Linux is now or is likely to be soon. The MS "way of doing things" also has the inertia in the computing culture. We won't change it overnight. Indeed, it might be smarter to borrow a page from the Chinese playbook: offer as little to resistance to invasion as is prudent (make the interface similar and duplicate the style) let the new folks get comfortable, and then retain the culture of openness. Ten years from now, joe user won't be bothered if his kid wants to edit inet.d.conf. But this change doesn't take place over night, so kvetching about joe-sixpack being MS brainwashed sounds exactly like what it is: bigoted and short sighted.

    Your attitude about the villiage idiot not being allowed to use a computer stinks. How else do they learn, eh pendejo? It must be nice to be so confident in your own technical supremacy that you can indiscriminately sneer at the peasants.

    Linux has a long way to go to offer the functionality required for mass adoption. I use it every day and even went to the trouble (and I do mean TROUBLE) of installing it on my laptop in lieu of my employer's choice of NT. I administer 5 different OSs every day: HPUX11 & Solaris for my day job, Linux, Win95 & WinNT for the rest.) Philosophically I dig the OSS movement. KDE is my WM of choice. And I don't ream people a new one because they disagree with me. I ream people a new one for their sheer knowitall attitude.

    You're attitude is a disgrace to the Linux community.
  • Agreed. Upgrading my Win95 to Win98 was a nightmare -- three times the installation got partway in, then crashed leaving me to pick up the pieces using Scandisk. The third time it trashed the .sys files so Win95 would no longer boot to anything but DOS mode. I finally solved the problem by booting into another OS (thank you, Linux), copying all the CD-ROM's files onto a spare partition, and then booting back to DOS mode to start the installation from the local copies. Finally worked, but that stopped me from believing that Linux was a difficult install process.
  • Is it just me or are all the columnists suddenly unable to even install linux now, yet still able to describe how gawd-awful hard it is to use?
    I get the feeling that MS has set the hound dogs
    loose and they wont be happy until a penquin carcass is brought home, preferrably well chewed.
    I think its time to call the FUD attack what it really is... The BS attack! Man, if you cant install linux you shouldnt be using a computer, let alone writing about it.
  • Thats why he writes for a living instead of actually doing it for a living. :-)
  • And this is just the point many linux people try to expose. What you really mean is that if it doesnt run your WinOS programs, then you will not be satisfied. Never mind that we have gimp, it's not the one you want and not exactly like MicroSoft. Thats the whole problem right there! If you demand it look like a duck, and walk like a duck and quack like a duck, fine, but if you demand that it really be a duck, (ie. MS Windows), then we cant help you. The best that you can ever hope for is to just buy the real duck and use it. Linux is not for you.
    The main thing about linux is that its not MS and never will be. Thats the beauty. If you dont like it dont use it. But dont complain that it doesnt do what you want. After all, we dont go complaining that we cant run programs on another MS machine and have output redirected to our screen. MS just doesnt do that. So we use linux for things it does well, and we use MS for things it does well.
  • what frightens me, is that at college, none of the CS majors I know have even tried Linux. I'm a philospophy major --and an awful programer--, and I'm the only one I know personaly (sp?) who uses linux at ALL.

  • Perhaps you didn't see the blurb about Caldera and Troll doing a qt GUI install....
  • I have yet to see a copy of W95 "Upgrade" come with boot disk. Before you complain about illegal installs of "one of their OSes", check with the poster. Perhaps you didn't notice that he said "without a working boot disk", not, "without a boot disk."

    In the future, Anonymous COWARD, read the post you reply to.

    -sonic
  • I think you're only looking at it from one side... I, too, support several thousand users -6000- (on my server's side THANK GOD :), I understand that the user is, for the most part, an Idiot. Realize, however, that most of my ( I don't know your) users get a computer with a "Build" suited to their job and never get out of that build. They don't do installs, don't log in to netware as the supervisor, and don't log into my machines as root. They just do a job. Unfortunatly, they have to reboot all the time to do their job. I querried my helpdesk stats and discovered that last year ( assuming 30 seconds for a reboot), my company paid it's employees to sit and support a microsoft product for 4563.125 work days. Now assume each one of these people get paid $10/hour w/ an 8 hour work day (10 is very conservative), we spent $365,050 just puting up with a finicky OS. This cost doesn't take into account revenues/person that were lost because the user wasn't working and earning revenues. Also, this only notes where the help desk reported having the user reboot, not where the user, having run into this problem before, decided to reboot and that fixed the issue.

    Basicly, what I'm saying is this:
    Users do what the company tells them to do and on what os to do it on. You don't have to be a Guru to use a computer in the way Users use it. You just have to get paid. Now, if my company wanted to save $350K a year, they would switch to Linux and spend the $350 to get their 3 Windows locked apps ported (chances are, they'd get change back.)

    They could easily reduce support costs as one (or a team of) administrators could log into their box and fix any issues except hardware, which could then be diagnosed more quickly and save money on the support costs again. Bottom line, if you tell them too, users will.

    -sonic
  • With Red Hat, you can do a kickstart auto install, which will let you do this. I've never used it, but I think you just create a configuration file and you can install a duplicate setup over multiple machines using it -- without being prompted for anything.
  • Go out to all your local bookstores, computer stores, etc., and find and destroy every copy of RH5.2, Caldera 1.3, and SuSE5.2 wherever they might be discovered by newbies.
    Seriously, I've actually been in stores that were selling SuSE5.2 and SuSE6.1 side-by-side, and the 5.2 COST MORE!! Same with Caldera. Plus, they have this "Linux Starter Kit", which is supposed to appeal to newbies, but only includes Caldera 1.3. These people (looking to play around with a desktio) will be sorely disappointed to discover FVWM95, an ancient version of the gimp, and maybe StarOffice 4.0.
    Don't get me wrong, a solid install of an older linux can run great as a server, but they just present outdated installs and desktops, perpetuating the stereotype that Linux is too hard to use.
    --JZ
  • Linux has no printer and scanner support? I have never used printers or scanners on my box, but i have never had any trouble using those from a Unix station at work. and those were IRIX and AIX both of which are hardly nicer than Linux.

    Plus, when he took the computer out of the box, he says that there was nothing else he could do. What could he do with a Windows machine that he cannot with the linux box? He can surf the web, check his email, type up his articles. No games -- that is true. He mentioned no printer. Well, the claim appears to be that VAResearch did not install it for him just like the whole system.
    Weird, I would have never thought that a person who "computes" ("uses a computer" if you will) for a living would ever complain about doing something as simple as that himself. If he had any considerable experience with computers (may it be windows) he would understand how to partition his hard drive with DiskDruid that ships with RedHat. My neighbors who ARE average computer users format their windows partitions every couple of weeks, because windows gets kinda slow. and to save time, they partition their hard drive anyways, so that they do not have to back up every single mp3 they have.

    If the average village/urban idiot (the dumber part of the population) cannot use a computer correctly, maybe they should not use it. After all, the government does not let everyone drive a car. Why let everyone drive one on the Internet?


  • my only point was that the author of the article said that there was nothing he could do with Linux because there were few printers/scanners supported, which i interpreted as simply he did not have a supported printer/scanner, or more likely he did not know how to install one, possible frightened by the reference to the howto.


  • Misha, in this day and age, to "do this [computing thing] for a living" means that you likely do it in Windows. The hood of their "Ford" is welded shut and they are a professional driver. They know how to manipulate their econobox down the road to get where they need to go. When it breaks, they tow it to the dealership. Introduce those folks to a stripped down chassis made for speed, flexibility & accessibility and a courier that is on the road every day isn't going to like the idea of driving a rolling project. The greatest error in consumer Linux thinking is that most people even WANT a system that can be turned from a tire iron to a toilet plunger by changing runlevels. Most people want a computing appliance: You plug it in and USE IT. Windows isn't there, but on good days, it's closer to being usable for the "common man" than Linux is now or is likely to be soon. The MS "way of doing things" also has the inertia in the computing culture. We won't change it overnight. Indeed, it might be smarter to borrow a page from the Chinese playbook: offer as little to resistance to invasion as is prudent (make the interface similar and duplicate the style) let the new folks get comfortable, and then retain the culture of openness. Ten years from now, joe user won't be bothered if his kid wants to edit inet.d.conf. But this change doesn't take place over night, so kvetching about joe-sixpack being MS brainwashed sounds exactly like what it is: bigoted and short sighted.

    The above quote was not relevant to my post, at least from my point of view. I do not think I ever mentioned "MS" or "brainwashed" in my response.

    But perhaps you right, I may have tried to portray the "sloppy article worse than it actually is". Then I must apologize for being irritated by a hypocritical claim that Linux is "too hard". Linux is as hard as one likes it to be. It was hard for me when I started, and it still is as I am trying to poke into the source. It sounds like it was hard for you as, like me, you had trouble installing it.

    However, you and I have come through the difficulty to a status a tad above being the village idiot not through technical supremacy but simply taking the time to learn it. If you look back at the article, the author decides to get a preinstalled linux instead of figuring out the installation process and what linux actually is. In my opinion, that alone discredits his article because installation has a lot to do with what linux actually is, just like windows installation has a lot to do with what windows actually is.

    If the user would rather click five OK buttons than make twenty consious choices selecting which window manager and packages to install (thankfully for the average user RedHat installation most of the time detects if you have an IDE or a SCSI hard drive and which COM port your modem is on) then windows is a better choice. But it is only a matter of attitude toward what you want out of your computer, not whether they are learn-ed enough. Same goes for education, voting, and a lot of other aspects of life.

    You're attitude is a disgrace to the Linux community.

    On the contrary, I think I am its best advocate.






  • I don't think they need us to crash... ;-)
  • the author claims "...you would find links to sites for downloading free Linux code. But you'd have to go to other sites to get instructions on how to proceed, and no one would take responsibility if you ran into problems." i disagree completely. i have had numerious people correspond with me to answer my questions, post fixes from people who had similiar experiences. and, in turn, i have tried to answer questions that i think i might have the answer to. when i have installed linux software, i have generally had a much simpler time navigating configuration files that are plain text for the most part, then trying to deal with missing DLL's and the Windows Registry. How many people out there are able to easily navigate the MS website to find helpful FAQ's? Not once has the MS website helped me install software. as a corporation, they don't want to admit that their software has bugs, while Joe Q. Linux programmer knows and admits freely that his program has bugs, and they usually do a good job of posting them. Also, the number of free alternatives to any one linux program usually means you can get what you want without spending a dime. just my two cents...
  • My experience with Win95 has been even worse: of the copies of Win95 I've bought, about 50% have come without a working boot disk. So you can't install them on a fresh PC without modifying the supplied boot disk until it works. Never have I had such an interesting experience with Linux (except possibly when I tried to install Linux on a 4MB Acorn A5000 without a CD drive :)
  • Linux can not beat Windows in the ease of use area until someone builds a Linux distribution that can completely be operated and tweaked WITHOUT using shell or a text editor. If there is a distribution that completely hides text editor and shell from a user and at the same time remains moderately flexible and configurable then we could win..
  • Unsubstantiated claims about linux advocates, 'most of whom have never tried to install linux' (paraphrased, because I don't want to re-read the article). How else -do- you run Linux besides installing it? Linux (mostly, barring VAResearch and a couple others) didn't come pre-installed until recently. More accurate to say Mac and Windows users haven't tried installing their favorite OS's - may not be true, but at least it's -plausible-.

    This is funny, ask any windows avarege user you know if he did install his system from zero at least once? How many people did realy install windows? I would bet the only 10-20% of the windows user realy gone throw installation, and about 1-5% did install the windows in a HD that is zeroed (meaning that he needed to partion and format the HD). Why should people learn how to install linux when they don't know how to install windows now?

    In fact I do think that linux installation is as dificult as windows, and in certain situations it's even easier. I had once to boot from the OS/2 disks to install windows (95 I think), since the DOS boot in the windows disks didn't find the CDrom, and I couldn't boot windows. The fact that windows has two sets of drivers (one for DOS and other for the windows itself) is a very easy notion for beginer, don't you agree?


    --
    "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"

  • I installed (had to) WinNT on a few workstations for about a 100 times. What I learned from that is no WinNT install gets done in one sweep. At least I hadn't done that right with years of Comp. Sci. study ;)

    In particular, the "windows networking installation wizard" suxx ultimately. If it crashes, you basically have to reinstall... Not to mention the superior performance of the resulting system, as some benchmark gurus have recently demonstrated *cough* I was never lucky enough to witness the speed and smoothness of WinNT as a file server, gateway, ftp server, development environ., anything. too bad for me.

    In Linux, be it Slackware/Debian/RedHat, I've always had less headaches.
  • >Linux has no printer and scanner support?

    No, its not true. Did the article say this? I must admit I just started skimming after the "I chickened out but I'm going to write that its too hard to install anyway" comment, but I didn't see that one.

    Hell, no - its not true. I had a little fun trying to get a postscript/ghostscript filter to work, but my little cannon bjc 600e is more than happy to print anything I send it. Hell, I use samba to allow the wife's windows box to print to it over my LAN, couldn't get windows to do it the other-way-round.

    Scanners are supported, though I have no experience here. My HP scanner is USB to my wife's Windows box until Linux has better USB.
    But, there are tons of scanners listed in the hardware HOWTO.


  • Linux is not ready for the masses. Frankly I kind of wonder if it will ever be. I know I personally don't like having to write code for the masses. Even more to the point, you will never be able to get the hairdresser down the street to recompile her kernel.

    The "Free Press" writer is who we talk about when we say "The Masses". Sadly he'd probably be deemed a "power user" because he can change his background. The Great Unwashed are people that have VCRs that flash "12:00" because they can't grasp the concept of hitting clock-set-clock. They're people like him that say, "MY GOD! 20 PAGES! WHY DON"T I JUST READ _WAR_AND_PEACE_!!"

    The Geek and Unwashed Masses shall never meet. One thinks it's nice that Windows askes you 5 times if you want to delete an entire directory, the other let's out primal screams. However they both scream when they see the error message, "Something's broken". One group, because they expect the monitor to open a dimensional gateway to Hell, the other because it's not a stack trace.

    Simply put, the Great Unwashed Masses, don't think like us, and we have no desire to think like them.
  • I understand you completely - that's exactly what I did (swap on zip) when I first tried RH 5.2, coming from Slackware, as well.

    One more thing: autoprobing of the video card is nice, but you should be able to change the default server, if you _want_ to, during the install. I had a ATI Xpert98, which I already knew didn't behave too well with the Mach64 server, but worked like a charm with the SVGA one. It was impossible to change the server from Mach64 during the install, moreover, no other server than the default one was even unpacked, so I had to go get the rpm manually from the CD when it was over. Had this happened to a newbie (or journalist), he'd have run away screaming.

  • Is it just me? (Score:3)

    by DonkPunch ( 30957 ) on Monday June 28, 1999 @05:33AM (#1828710) Homepage Journal
    "Can Linux Crash Windows? That's the goal of the upstart operating system."

    Man, I have a HUGE problem with statements like that. The goal of Linux, IIRC, is to provide a Free Unix-like operating system. If Microsoft looses marketshare to such a system, so be it. If Free Software developers seek to make Linux more usable for Windows users, so be it. To say that THE goal is to crash Windows does nothing but give ammo to people who characterize Linux as a taillight-following reaction to Microsoft. If you care, it also gives credibility to Microsoft's DOJ defense.

    Also, am I the only person who cringes when a journalist writes that Linux rhymes with "cynics"? I first saw that in Newsweek and attributed it to their "cutesy" style of mock journalism. I don't like the subtle implication that Linux users are cynical. I'm sure the writers in question will claim that it's innocent and unintentional, but how hard is it to just include ("LEH-nucks") instead of saying "rhymes with cynics"?
  • Be fair now.

    I run Windows 98 for my workstation (the server and office are Linux). I reboot my Windows box about once a day, or day and a half. I don't have a magical stable copy of windows.

    And I DO use it heavily - newsgroups, web, games, email, etc.

    There are plenty of people in my complex (and they seem to seek us literate types out - maybe it was when I moved in and carried four computers up the stairs) and they can barely handle the simple windows GUI, or remember basic concepts. They're not stupid, it's just not their thing, but they're interested enough to try.

    How many slashdotters take up heavy interest in a technical trade not their own and become proficient in it? How many IFR pilots, gourmet chef's, history professors, etc. do we have here? I can tell you from the grammar that we have NO english teachers :)

    Have a little respect for the diversity of people who haven't chosen IT as their career/hobby choice...
  • OK, so here we go again. Another war between MS and Linux. This author totally misses the point though.

    So, win9x is easy to install (but only if you have all of the drivers for your cd etc - a small but important point after my last Win95 rebuild :-( ). However linux is a SERVER

    Compare it to WinNT not 95. It has a complex install because it runs SOOOOO much more stuff behind the GUI than Win9x does (DNS, FTP, telnet, httpd etc etc etc).

    If we had to config all of this stuff under win9x we would be there all night.

    I know linux is for geeks but guys like this should really ensure that his info is correct and that he compares the corrects OS's.

    But what do I know eh?
  • It's funny!!!!!!

    I just got a copy of Win NT 4. The installation was pretty quick and straight foward, But it didn't end there. After the machine rebooted I was asked to put the CD back in because Win NT had to install some more stuff. After that I had to reboot again and again and again. Then I had to configure modems and network cards and other stuff becasue Win NT inital attemp to install them failed.
    My default video settings sucked and I couldn't figure out why. I decided to put the SP#3 and it solved my video problems.

    What I can't undestand is what they mean when they say that installing Linux is so hard. I can have Linux running a ready for production in about 20 to 30 min versus 1+ hr for NT

  • he talks about the difficulty in partitioning hardrives in linux, well i guess he has never had to do the same for windows i know that i have had to many times... not to mention low level formats.

    he talks about configuring ip addresses and the difficulty in doing so under linux. i configured my cable modem a couple weeks ago with no problems what-so-ever. DHCP did everything for me basically. Yesterday i helped a friend get his modem working. I had never done it before, but i just opened up kpppd and i filled in the blanks, and viola! it worked like a charm. also it wasnt hard at all. well i should say that it wasnt any more difficult than windows.

    this is just a little criticism of his article.

    the bottom line is that he didnt give linux the credit that it deserves. i know that i am more experienced than most PC users, but i dont see how linux can be that much more difficult than windows in the areas that the author talked about. after all my mother is learning linux in similar areas with no more hang-ups than when she learned windows a few years back and she has problems cutting and pastteing between windows.

    yes linux is not the almighty flawless OS that some people make it out to be, but give it the credit it deserves.

  • amen, brother.



    i'm the IT guy for an all-mac shop (stop your snickering) and decided to give mklinux a try. the install wasn't that hard, but then again, computers don't scare this former philosophy major. but getting the damn box to do what i wanted it to do was impossible.



    the column's author had it right: it's just a crapshoot. maybe GUI's have spoiled me too much.
  • The author made one caveat that cast the rest of the article into serious doubt: that he had never tried installing Windows on a blank PC.


    I have (as have many /.ers, I suspect). This weekend, I installed Win2Kbeta3 (yes, I know a beta is not the same, but bear with me). It took a LOT longer to install from a basic DOS prompt (mostly due to it's need to copy files that took FOREVER). Additionally, one must factor in the time to install all the applications -- most distros do this FOR you. Yes, the process was fairly smooth -- but then, installing RH (5.1, 5.2, and 6.0) on the SAME system was just as smooth -- it auto-detected nearly everything. I basically had to choose the video mode I wanted, and Win2K doesn't let you do that until it's installed and you go change it. I recall Win95/98/NT4 doing the same thing.


    My point is that by now, I'd rate the two installation processes very similar, with perhaps a slight edge to Linux because for standard desktop or even low-end server usage, most everything (apps, server daemons) is installed from the get-go. Some server stuff requires tweaking (as expected), but for the desktop side (the author's focus), I can have StarOffice, Netscape, e-mail, networking, and most anything else running in less than half an hour from the start. Can't say the same for any version of Windows.

  • "..that kde isnt nearly attractive as the windows gui (let E mature)." Looks like I've found yet another person who's not sure what the word Theme means. Have you seen the Twilight Effect theme for kde? Or the Drawing Board? Or hundreds of others? Good god man, KDE is thousands of times better looking than Windows (even with the POS Plus pack). And much more functional (love that windowshade). Think before you make declarations, please.

  • Indeed the web has killed the CD-ROM encyclopedia. It has also killed CD's that have dictionaries, maps, phone numbers, medical guides, etc.
  • Yesterday I installed Caldera Open Linux 2.2.

    I placed the CD in the drive and booted, I took all the defaults and added all the networking otions for my LAN. Within minutes I had a fully working graphical operating system that was configured for everything but Internet access.

    Installed were an office suite and a copy of word Perfect, Netscape and a multitude of configuration tools.

    Connection to the Internet via a modem takes 3 minutes to setup - configuration with an ISDN adapter took a little longer (But no longer than it took me to get it going with NT)

    I rebooted once and the machine now stays up. Were I installing NT I would have gone through 3 reboots for the OS Install, 2 for the isdn installation, 1 for the video card.

    M@t :o)
  • I must agree, I do 3D graphcs ofr a living, for that I must use NT, for a long time me and my girfriend debated wat Background and Icons to use, frugal.., anyway, until I start using Linux I never realize I could have several users on my NT box, and each user with they own preferences ... I know it sounds stupid, but it's true, when I used inux, and it forces me to create a user becides root (NT I was using as Adinistrator :( ), and then learned about user previleges, and etc, etc ...

    bottom line, indded Windows users are in the dark, and most of them don't even know how to fully take advantage of theyr systems
  • Yea, that Caldera Open Linux 2.2 is a real bear to install, that's why I got my 12 year son to do it for me (well, he did have to ask which video card we had 'cause he didn't want to crack the case open...)
  • I wouldn't say the web has totally killed the CD-Encyclopedia. The web does have a lot of information, but for ease of use and quickness, I'll take the CD. It's a pain to download movies of the net when you can just get them from a CD. Not to mention it's harder to find some GOOD information on your subject. If you do a search, half are dead links and the other half are crap sites that don't have anything to do with the subject. I always go to the CD first, and if that doesn't give me enough info, then I hit the web.
  • You're missing the point. We're talking about 99% of America out there. Who really needs the uptime of Linux? Just stuff for web browsing, email, games, etc.? I'd say 99% of those turn on the computer to work on it, and turn it off when they're done. Rebooting once a day is really a minor insignificant inconvenience.
  • I agree, finding anything on the beast that is msn.com is a chore I disdain, I have people calling me up, Outlook isn't working, etc., so I say, go get the patch and they call back, I couldn't find it. Well, shit, neither can I!
    Let's not even talk about their phone support.

    Goddess help me seek the truth, but spare me the company of those who've found it.
  • Is it just me, or do Linux users have an extremely low tolerance for constructive criticism. The article was IMHO fairly positive and the writer actually gave excellent advice on how to improve things. The Linux people immediately start to wonder what kind of an idiot can't use their favorite OS.

    I am one of those idiots and I study computer science. I run both Linux (currentlu SuSe 6.1) and Win 98 on my machine and have installed both OSes too many times. Windows clearly beats Linux in ease of use and has a fairly frienly installation environment. DHCP was a breeze in Windows and a couple of hours of agony in Linux for me, and I really don't consider myself stupid beyond all hope.

    The point about the availability of programs and drivers is also an excellent one. Until I can run Corel's and Adobe's publishing and graphics programs (or their equivalents (and Gimp isn't one by itself)) and use my USB scanner and Deskjet printer under Linux using a GUI that works as well as that in MacOs (or even as well as the one in Windows) my computer will boot Windows as the default OS.

  • I really *hate* saying this, because it's *probably* flamebait that I'm being so smug... but in all of my Linux installs, (which at this point are innumerable... I love fscking around with different distros. Current fave? gotta be the Slack...) I have never had to "muck around with dozens of textfiles" as you claim. If I want things to run differently then hell, yeah, I alter things- but sometimes without even knowing it. e.g.: if I wanted to reconfigure my mouse, I could look for and find the textfile where the mouse configuration is stored. Or, under Slack, I could run "mouseconfig" and have the script determine for me where the mouse is. Do I need to know? Yep. Do I need to "muck with a textfile"? Nope. The script, which presents a pretty little interface, does it for me. Same with RedHat. Haven't tried Caldera, but SuSE's got YaST, and Debian.... well, there's always Debian.

    See, that's kinda also what it's about. You've got choice! Let's see you go out and buy Digital Research Windows. Or perhaps QWindows. Oh, wait a second- you CAN'T. Why not? There's no CHOICE, that's why not. At least, even with DOS, we had a choice.... and at this point, I've rebuilt my slackware 4.0 kernel twice. No problems yet, and the only reasons for a rebuild were:
    1) wanted new features and
    2) wanted kernel 2.2.10
    and when I was updating to 2.2.10, I figured "ah, what the hell- I'll upgrade to glibc2.1 as well" and know what? the damn thing is FASTER than it was before! How is that possible?

    With MS-DOS 6.22, you could notice almost no slowdown when running a program or executing a command on a 486DX2-66. But the same computer, running Windows3.1, was just a tad slower. Pile a Windows95 upgrade on there, and the sucker can hardly breathe. Upgrade again to Windows98SE and guess what? You have to wait a full 20 SECONDS before you get a reaction from a double-click on the desktop. Even under KDE, resource hog that it is, the lag is only about 5-10 seconds. Not 20. And the machine has stock RAM, 16MB of it- nothing fancy like EDO, but regular old non-parity RAM. A 1.6 GB hard drive, too. The best thing I ever did for it was installing Slack. And it's not that hard, either. Peace.

    -Chris
  • The installation process is full of further technical hurdles and terms such as "mount point," "package dependencies" and "boot command line."

    These are self explainatory, come on guy.
    I bet he programs in cobol..
    use HEAD.BRAIN to THINK first, THEN WRITE.

    At this point, I wimped out.

    Long before the installation really began. Big deal he had to know what his computer had in it. Everyone should anyway, this guy's just too stupid/lazy/both to learn what he paid 2 grand for.

    But I'm not going to be hard on myself, or Linux. No one buys a PC today without an operating system already installed. Putting Windows or the Mac OS onto a blank PC would probably be just about as difficult as installing Linux.

    So you never installed Windows, and you claim to be able to criticize ANY method of installation?? Are you insane or just incredibly dumb?

    Go try to get your VCR to stop flashing 12:00 and leave us alone ok buddy? You know jack, and that 'article' you posted was nothing more than slander, with a few accidentally relevant points.

    -SC
  • I don't think you should complain that Microsoft made it difficult for you to do an illegal install of the Upgrade version of one of their OSes.

    Oh really? Ever had an installation fail from your OEM disc for no reason at all? I mean, their shit installer can't even exit cleanly on you.

    And how many times have YOU ever had to reinstall, or do you just use your AOL account to check your email and post your spammy web page detailing your pathetic life to the world?

    Here's what you should do:
    Go get a screwdriver, prefferably a longish one. Make sure you are grounded first, then stick it in the power supply of your PC, and touch the pretty red wire where it's soldered in. I guarantee the world will be a better place after. *evil grin*
  • I've installed both RH 5.2 and 6.0 and found them both easier to install than Windows. If he was so scared why didn't he just do the workstation install instead isn't that what it is there for. If he was complaning about a RH install try putting him infront of SuSe.
  • As someone who has installed windows on everything from a 486/33 to a OCed Celeron 412 Windows installation is a breeze compared to a similar linux install. The thing with Windows is that it autodetects everything. Plug and Play works (much better now than the plug an pray name it used to have) and everything is automatic. WinNT will even let you script installs so the user is not even necessary. (I think you can set up apps this way too.) The hardest part of a Windows install is finding drivers and unless you have trouble grasping the "use the mouse to navigate, use the keyboard to enter data" paradigm then most people have not trouble with that. Under Linux it is a totally different story. It is impossible to get a good linux install without mucking with dozens of text files. Yes I could read the instructions, but they are often vauge and never seem to suit your hardware. I messed around with building a slackware kernel to the point where I reinstalled GCC and a host of other programs and it still did not work. To this day I still don't know why but I think it has something to do with libc5 vs. libc6. Nowhere in the HOWTO is that mentioned. Face it, machine configs are too broad to have the user input them, no HOWTO will ever be good enough for each machine type. Install a driver in windows? right click on the device click update driver and put in th disc. Under linux I have to bother with .o files pnp dump, isapnp just to get my sound card working.
  • In reply to the person who said you need to know your com port for windows, you don't. Windows correctly support plug and play. In fact in windows you don't need to know the irq, dma, io, etc. of your sound card. It doesn't matter if you can or not, why should you have to? Doing something harder does not make you anymore of a man it makes you stupid. And no you can't do image editing in GIMP. In my experiance it doesn't stand up to Satori or Photoshop. Last time I checked POVRAY read text instructions. I have yet to see decent 3d renderer for Linux, I haven't seen a good Web page editor (like hotdog, homesite, or Dreamweaver) for linux. Before you say that Linux already does everything better than windows, think a little.
  • I have been a PC technician for several years now, with a solid hardware and software background. While an elite user might not have much difficulty installing or using Linux, you have to think about the majority of users, the technically challenged... people who have problems keeping their VCR's from blinking... "what's a hard disk? is that the crunchy square with the metal door?" "how do I send e-mail?" "my coffee holder is broken." etc... logging into a Linux machine is scary for a novice user... it doesn't have big friendly prompts, or catchy graphics like a windows box or a Mac... my team supports 3500 users here at Goddard, and I would say only about %20 of them could handle Linux... and less then %5 of them would want to... you might say "Well, they should take the time to learn about their 'puter" or "well they should be smart enough to figure it out" or something like that... but remember, while a lot of people use computers now in the work and home environment, most of them are NOT computer people... while the Geeks might make an eventual mass migration to Linux... until Linxu becomes as idiot tolerant as a Mac or a Win98 box... it just isn't going to happen...
  • Damn!!! That was my blatantly obvious joke!!! I'll go mope now.

    not quick enough,

    josh
  • I had similar problems with Win98. Due to hard drive problems, I formatted and reinstalled probably 4 times in the past couple of months. My copy of Win98 came with a defective Win95 bootdisk(!), and each install took way too long. Win98 prompts you needlessly(I am going to reboot now. Is that cool with you?), leaving you sitting by the computer for 45 minutes to an hour for every install. All the applications have to be loaded by hand, and the Win98 installer hangs with alarming regularity. I finally got bored and installed an old version of Redhat using the network install. Would've worked fine, if the hard drive wasn't already riddled with holes at the time...
  • I don't think that "crashing Windows" is the real point either. I think what is more important is the presssure that Linux could put on Microsoft. If Linux really starts getting some serious market share, than MS is going to have to start building better products to keep its profits. I think what most people care about is not demolishing Microsoft, but getting the best possible OS.
  • Nope, full install version booting from the CD. Using the disk I got from the computer manufacturer, who ought to be on the up and up considering its a nationwide name brand. The damn thing screwed up so bad a couple of times that it tried to tell me the CD itself was damaged, which turned out not to be the case. The boot disk was, however, defectice, which is why I ended up booting from the CD.
  • Although I don't want to put down first timers using linux, mklinux isn't the best option if you are the IT guy for an all-mac shop with PPCs or G3s (as would be expected) Also, even if GUIs have spoiled you, just use redhat/PPC. it auto-installs with KDE & the redhat control center
  • Currently, linux's UI and setup/install make it a no-go to take over windoze's market, but as it becomes easier to use, software and game developers will realize its potential as a stable and fast OS and will likely begin writing for it. This in turn will cause it to gradually take more and more of the M$ monopoly.

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