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Originally posted by ararisq
When the response to everything is to open a command shell --
it sucks...
Originally posted by Fopicon
If you know what the hell you are doing then Linux is just fine. Don't get on Linux and expect to be boss at it instantly.
Originally posted by autowrench
Originally posted by Fopicon
If you know what the hell you are doing then Linux is just fine. Don't get on Linux and expect to be boss at it instantly.
That is exactly correct. Linux must be learned, that may be one thing that throws people off, but once learned, one will never go back to Windows! I started, like most everyone, on Ubuntu. then I went on the Linux Hop ride, where you try them all, trying to find the perfect Desktop. I finally settled on Fedora. Fedora is not for the new Linux convert, and it is cutting edge technology. New versions do not always work right. Sometimes there are problems.
But hey, you like what you like. I repair computers for a partial living out of my home. 98% of customers run Windows, so I may sit in front of a Windows PC for hours at a time. It is always a pleasure to fire up my custom machine, and watch as the text rolls by, type in the encryption passphrase, and then the log in info. What comes up is a beautiful, eye candy intensive KDE 4 Desktop, with analog clock, a solar system widgit, a picture frame with a nice photo of me and the wife, and my desktop photo of a custom, lowered '54 Ford Sunliner.
Fedora, running Firefox with 5 taps open, Thunderbird, and Gedit, and Home Folder opened, is only using 20% of each of my dual AMD CPUs, and 1.2 Gb of 3Gb of memory.
Originally posted by InsideYourMind
As for the people saying Linux isn't designed for the desktop or isn't good on the desktop.... they are lost. Chances are they have only wever seen a screenshot of TWM with an xterm... LOL.
Originally posted by schuyler
Originally posted by InsideYourMind
As for the people saying Linux isn't designed for the desktop or isn't good on the desktop.... they are lost. Chances are they have only wever seen a screenshot of TWM with an xterm... LOL.
That very sentence makes my point nicely. TWM? xterm? Your average user simply does not talk in code like that. They never read slashdot. They don't know how to "install a printer driver in the usual manner." They don't know what a codec is. They've never written a line of code. They've never used vi to write a script. When I was head of the IT department at my local library the four of us thought it would be great fun to all get baseball caps for "All Staff Day" that said "Got root?" on them like the "Got milk?" ads. Not a single other person on staff, that's 200 people, had any idea what it meant, and we wound up looking like elitists.
People simply expect things to work with no particular effort on their part in the same way they can drive a car perfectly adequately and have only a vague notion of how an internal combustion engine works. In the early days of automobiles you had to be a mechanic to operate one competently. Today you don't even have to know how to change a tire. We now have a generation of people who have literally never used a clutch or rolled a window down manually.
In order to make Linux sing, you have to be a Linux mechanic. I'm not anti-Linux. I hope I've proven that. When I left the library I had a dozen Linux machines doing various tasks, plus Solaris, HP-UX, and even BSD on one. But I do maintain that Linux was never designed nor intended for the desktop and that the attempts to make it equal and appropriate to the desktop are like Cinderella's ugly stepsisters trying to fit their feet into the glass slipper.edit on 1/18/2012 by schuyler because: (no reason given)
never designed nor intended for the desktop
Tiling Window Manager, or Tom's Window Manager
X TERMinal emulator
You say you have experience with Solaris, HP-UX or BSD... yet you reffer to the names of standard modules in the X.Org distribution as "code".... give me a break. So then tell me, what about the windows world... common ones such as NTFS? GDI? PnP? You going to tell me those are not cryptic? Why does it matter.
Just because you don't know what it is, you don't dismiss it as garbage or do you? Your argument is like saying "I can't read french so it sucks" or "I can't be bothered to read an instruction manual or a tutorial so it sucks".
What are you on about... Linux is a multi-tasking kernel... of coursxe it was designed for desktop use, or at least be able to support some kind of graphical interface (X.Org and a window manager).
You also say that people expect things to work, and they just want everything to be done automatically. Well here you are wrong. "YOU" want that. You cannot state something which is an opinion of your use about a computer as fact of everyone else.
I do what i want on my computer, and i expect to be able to do what i want without a restriction or stranglehold with draconian DRM systems in place to prevent "copying".
These Linux arguments have not changed one part since ~2005. It's the same old argument all the time about how Linux is not ready for the desktop and how it utterly sucks, things change very fast with open source.
I mean, how is this not a useful desktop for everyday computing;
Linux might have it's problems, but they are not ones that effect me. Windows is a problem to me.