The Stealth Desktop Part III

uninet writes "In the third installment of the Stealth Desktop series about Slackware Linux, Eduardo Sánchez builds upon the previous steps of Part I and Part II. Continuing where those parts left off, he introduces the subjects of user, font and printer management in Slackware using KDE."

Comments

Happy that the direction of thought is changing

[tod_miller]

Not talking about slaskware as the distro, or the server distro, but like linspire, and perhaps SuSE, they are aiming at really easy to run and user experience oriented linux.

The article picks up on some great standard management applications, KUser and font installer, the whoel article reads like a PCPro article about windows 98 through XP - and many people read those articles and glean new ways to use thier OS.

even the printer installation looks scarey, but upon reading I can imagine a newbie person running this command, setting it up, seeing the results, and then using the fairly friendly dialogues to complete the tasks.

Figure 18 I had to check they weren't comparing with windows way of doing things.

I have to say, linux has crept from being 'will it ever be ready for the desktop' to 'which distro will desktop people pick'

I recommend you let some of your friends read this and see how easy it all is.

Re:Command line examples would be useful

[Viol8]

"Why would you say Slackware isn't really the first choice as a desktop system? "

Simply because its tricky to set up for your average user. Slackware gives you little hand holding and someone whos used to putting in even a redhat CD and just cliking a few buttons with be thrown by Slakcware. I'm not say thats bad (I myself prefer knowing whats happening in the install) but for someone who just wants to use office apps its a bit daunting.

Re:Command line examples would be useful

[pe1rxq]

I always found that Slackware had the best handholding.... Its just in a different place.
Its not hidding the inner workings in nice GUI interfaces.. It has nicely commented config and startup files and a clear /etc/rc.d directory.

Jeroen

Re:Call This A troll. I Don't Care.

[NightWhistler]

OK, I'll feed this troll...

Slackware is not, and was never meant to be a migration path for Joe Sixpack coming from Windows. We have loads of distros that handle that task a million times better.

What Slackware is great for is people who like a simple, clean UNIX-like OS on their home machine, and don't want to bother with all sorts of distro-specific tools. It's also great if you prefer to compile your software from source, without having to be afraid to mess up you package management DB. Using Linux is much like riding a bike: try it with training wheels first, move on when you're ready.

Finally, if we really want to get grandma's, sisters and Joe Sixpack off of Windows, we should probably start promoting KDE as the "OS". It's what they see anyway, and it shouldn't really matter if it runs on top of Linux, BSD, Solaris, whatever...

OK, done ranting now... feel so much better ;-)