The Linux Community is Killing Linux. I Thought This Was the FAQ 3780

On Wed, 19 Apr 2006 15:21:50 +0000, susan.fahgin

Actually, I've tried mandrake, redhat, debian, and now ubuntu over the last three years I've been using nix. I've only ever had trouble once, and that was with an aged s3 vid card.

Rubbish. I just did a fresh install of Ubuntu Breezy. 30 minutes was all it took to install, then the only essential post set up was downloading the updates - which ubuntu did automatically, as soon as I clicked the update button.

Everything was downloaded and installed pre packaged binaries in the form of deb packages. For the updates there was no configuring necessary, apart from my personal preferences. Mind you, it did take a while, because I only have a 256k download rate atm. Thank god I'm not on dialup anymore! But dialup is fast becoming a way of the past anyway.

I must have done at least 10 different linux installs in the past three years. That has never happened to me.

Actually 2GB isn't really that much. My last windows install, which was '98, was nearly a gig. XP must be bigger than that by now.

I'll concede there was a couple of little bits of manual editing to do. I had to manually edit theetc-fstab to get it to automatically mount the parbreastions on my other drive at boot up. I also had to set up the environment variables for j2re, by manually editing theetc-bash.bashrc file. Yes, that that's the sort of thing you'll have tremendous difficulty getting the stereotypical n00b to do.

But these things are getting fixed. When was the last time you used a user friendly distro like ubuntu? Every release is better and better in terms of n00b friendliness.

And all those little command line utilities are basically there to be used by user friendly GUI programs these days, like Gnome System Monitor. Still, it's nice to know that you can still do it from the command line isn't it?

Actually those good "community created programs" are not far and few inbetween AT ALL. I must have tens of thousands of such programs in my apt-get repositories. And all I have to do is click a couple of buttons to download and install one of them. They are all open source, meaning that I don't have to worry about spyware or malware at all.

Bah! All that stuff was solved years ago. Where have you been? On debian based distros, apt-get automatically resolves all dependencies, downloading and installing them when necessary. On mandrake they used URPMI to do the same, on fedora it's Yum. Ubuntu, which is debian based, comes with Synaptic Package Manager which is basically a user friendly GUI frontend for apt-get, so the n00b doesn't even need to know what that stuff means. The 'failed dependencies' error is about as old and forgotten as napster.

Unnecessary these days. See above.

I can automatically download and install them simply by typing "apt-get install package", or using Synaptic Package Manager. I don't need to to my local store. Don't even need to pay for them 99% of the time.

My Gnome desktop is much sleeker and faster than any XP desktop I've encountered, as well as being infinitely more configurable. I'd like to see some empirical data to back that up before I believe it thankyou. Maybe you would have been correct back when some people were still on Windows 98. Maybe.

Petty complaint, not even worthy of dismissing.

I agree. I wouldn't buy it.

Struggling to overtake Windows as it happens. And gaining on it rapidly, given how little time linux has been in development by comparison.

snip

I agree that there is the only real problem with linux. It is designed primarily by computer savvy people, with other computer savvy people in mind. Most people on this planet may be very smart when it comes to teaching, playing music, office politics, or whatever. But when it comes to computers most people around are dumb dumb dumb.

The "linux community" relies on feedback from its desktop users as to what user friendly features they would like. Unfortunately, that body of people only makes up about 5% of desktop users world wide at best. And I think it's probably open to question whether this is really a representative body of people, or more a minority of people prone to a bit of computer geekness anyway. We're a bit of a clique, in effect.

Whereas with big corporations like Microsoft and Apple, I would be surprised if they didn't rely more on extensive qualitative research into the matter. They probably keep that research private.