[NMLUG] [Fwd: Without BSD...(humor)]

[nmlug@swcp.com (Tim Price)]

On Thursday, October 12, 2000, Don Wilde <Don@silver-lynx.com> wrote:

>I'm not cross-posting this to start a flame war; I'd honestly like to
>hear your comments as users of Red Hat and other Linuxen, especially
>about the proliferation  of distro's and glibc's to port to. Do you like
>/ approve of / need all this glitzy stuff for desktops?

As a person who has mostly used Macintosh (at the office) since 1985, I appreciate having a GUI interface. However, I don't really care much for the glitzy stuff other than to shut-up annoying dozers. Since I have been using Linux at home for a couple of years and now at the office, I find it hard to work without having a command line available. 

I've also noticed that the more glitz that comes with a GUI, the higher the probability that your screen will get locked up or applications with crash. 

>I've been using Linux for a very long time, and I get more sick of the
>direction some people are taking it each year.  Red Hat is both angel and
>devil.  I think they have helped a lot, but I also think they have done a ton
>of damage.  

I ran Linux Pro 5.4 for 18 months without a crash. I finally upgraded to Mandrake 6.0, then Mandrake 7.0 and now Mandrake 7.1 at home. Mandrake 6.0 never crashed, but Mandrake 7.0 at home crashed a couple of times and the one at work has crashed, also. The crashes have occurred while working in a GUI (Yellow Dog on the Mac is rock solid, but I never really use X on it either). 

>Mandrake has done a lot to create a distribution that installs
>nicely, and is attractive to new users.  But they've also created a bloated
>mess that would make any admin cry.  I can't speak for SuSE, but I did try it
>once and find little difference.

I tried to install SuSE on the Pentium at work, but it would not recognize any of the off-brand hardware it has. Mandrake recognized everything and installed and configured without encountering any problems. 

Mandrake 7.1 takes up a lot of disk space, plus it has been a major pain in that the GUI crashes much too often. I have done several clean installs and ran KDE, Fvwm, Enlightenment, etc., and they all crash under 7.1. I'm currently running Helix Gnome. It crashes, but not as often.

Mandrake 7.1 has a lot more automatic configuration features and glitzy, cool looking stuff, and I suppose it's a lot more user friendly in general; but I sure feel like I'm paying the price in frustrating problems for a lot of user friendliness and neat looking desktops, buttons and gee-whiz animated functions that I don't really need and rarely use.

I would like to see a Linux or BSD that installs as easily as Mandrake (i.e. recognizes all the hardware and peripherals), without all the extra glitz.

I have been tempted to go back to LinuxPro 5.4 and upgrade the kernel; however, I get the feeling that building or upgrading all the libraries, etc. needed to support applications like GNU Cash wound be a nightmare.




------------------------------------------------------
To UNSUBSCRIBE send a message to nmlug-request@swcp.com
with only the word unsubscribe in the body.  More
information can be found at www.nmlug.org/info.html
-----------------------------------------------------