I've spent plenty of time learning how to use Linux. What I don't like is when GUI config tools are entrenched in the OS second-guessing everything I do and changing what I've done behind me.
Apparently I lack the relevant understanding of the SuSEConfig system or something like that.
I don't like this kind of crap and that's why I don't use SuSE. I have to administer some SuSE machiens though, and that is the extent of my experience with it. Give me Debian or Gentoo any day.
I do some system maintenance (for student worker prices... ugh) for a professor at my university who insists on using SuSE for all 20 or so of his machines.
He also just switched his desktop workstation over to it. Admittedly I don't know much about SuSE (relative to my knowledge of, say, debian or gentoo) and that's partially because I've never run it on my own desktop machine.
I also set up my girlfriend with SuSE 9.0 after all the problems she had with Mandrake and Debian. She's been a good learning experience for me as to why linux isn't really ready for a lot of home users. The real problems are not the people who know nothing about computers. They are people who are not techies but need to do a lot of complicated and specific things with their computers. My gf is ADD and having things not work consistently drives her nuts.
Anyway, kind of lost my train of thought. I'm amazed at how many replies my post got -- it's been modded up but I think looking back it was nearly flamebait. I'm sure with the opening of the code we'll have the opportunity to fix any kinks in the software.
While YaST may be great for people who know nothing about linux (and I'm happy to see that they're releasing it!) it annoys the hell out of me.
Maybe I'm just not familiar with SuSE but it seems to me like any changes you make manually to configs will either (a) not take effect or (b) be overwritten by YaST next time you do something with it.
Autoyast is very neat, btw. Apparently RedHat has something similar to that.
Speaking as a biomedical engineer (well, I'll be graduating in less than two months), and therefore someone with both mechanical and biological education and hands-on experience, I ask you to think of this.
Mechanical things are designed by humans and therefore, in most cases, thoroughly understood.
You can take apart an air conditioner. You can dismantle a brake assembly. You can rebuild an engine. You can run whatever tests you want on them, and they won't die or complain.
As something of a linux zealot for the last 4.5 years, but also someone who manages all of the computers for my research lab plus my girlfriend, I would like to disagree with you slightly.
I use linux all the time.
Every day.
It's still got some severe 'functionality' issues. A lot of that relates to lack of vendor support. Some of it relates to the more rapid development process.
Anyhow it still needs some work in terms of things just working, but I think it's improving exponentially. More and more software vendors are announcing linux versions. Now if software install and hardware detection/setup would improve just a bit more I think we'll be there.
Quite the profitable racket for those guys, back then. It's died down a bit since.
Your/. ID is somewhat (ok, a lot) lower than mine but I'd wager a lot of the newer people around here are not too familiar with, say, Windows 3.0.
Some operating systems *coughwindowscough* don't play so well with others as Linux and OS X do with each other.
The latter two interoperate pretty well. I've been using Linux on my desktop and OS X on my powerbook together for nearly 3 years.
While I get your point, certainly most linux/unix books still hold a lot of validity. Certainly some things are different, but once you learn bash and man and some basic unix concepts you can get the rest of the info from the OS... I buy outdated books all the time from the local bookstore because they're cheap, and really, how much does most of that stuff change from year to year?
I have an original TiBook. 500 MHz. I have taken it everywhere with me for the last 2.7 years.
Care to guess how many times MY powerbook has had to be repaired?
I think 6. Don't remember exactly. Parts that have been replaced by Apple (Under default and extended warranty)
Display - replaced twice
Main Logic - replaced twice
Display power inverter - replaced once
Keyboard mylar - replaced once
Power supply - replaced once
I take pretty good care of it, in fact since the warranty's almost up now I bought a used Zero Halliburton case for it as 'insurance'. I'm also no dummy, have had some electrical engineering and computer science and circuits and so on, and build my own desktops.
I love the machine and the OS (X), especially for the fairly good linux compatibility (yay netatalk), BUT that's only when it's working, and not being sent to apple for ANOTHER repair. It's getting time to buy a new laptop when I start my Ph.D. and I don't know what the hell I should get... yay software lock-in...
Re:In defense of -ist and -ic
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 2, Informative
Similar to Godwin's Law of Usenet re. nazis. In this case the ism/ist would be antisemitism.
What might harm them more is the ways in which they _do_ see nudity _when_ they (are told to) see it as taboo. These might be ways that precondition their perception of such things in less-than-natural ways. Think 'plastic surgery' though that's not the only type of scenario in which this could be the case.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
It's all discrimination, the word reverse is unnecessary. That said, I agree with the principle if not with the wording.
Things like whole menus disappearing, control center modules that crash every time I try to load them and the like. These last couple of times I probably didn't give it enough of a chance, but I feel like most distros (SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, I don't know about Slackware, never tried it) are too modified-up, they lack base compaitibility for everything. You never know what's been patched.
My current favorite is Gentoo but I've thought about trying LFS one of these days...
The last thing I want to do is start a distro flamewar. If there's one thing I've realized from trying a bunch of different Linux distros it's that they're very much a matter of personal taste, and there's no accounting for taste.
Every time I've tried mandrake and redhat (and that's going back to RH 6 and madrake 7, which is admittedly not too far...) they have showstopping problems that do not exist in distros such as Gentoo and Debian. I've tried all the redhats up through 8 and all the mandrakes up through the latest... what is it, 8.2? 9.2? My roommate gave me the CDs and I tried it but I don't remember the exact version.
Are the problems fixable? Sometimes. Would I rather use a distro I don't have to fix in the first place? Most certainly.
Yeah that actually helped my grades a lot in college. When I switched I quit wasting my time on games.
I just loaded WineX up on my new machine though and started playing CounterStrike again for the first time in 3 years. Bye bye proeductivity...
Every time I have tried to use an ATI card with Linux I have regretted it. Sure, sometimes I can get it to work. I even got an All-in-Wonder to work fairly well. It was not, however, worth the effort. Every NVidia card I have owned has worked splendidly with linux. I only had a little trouble with my newest card (dual-out replacing two relatively useless ATIs) because I'm using 2.6.0. If you want your card to work with minimal hassle, pick the brand that has put some effort toward supporting linux (albeit with closed-source drivers): NVidia.
PS- I've heard that ATI has good Linux drivers for their high-end cards now, but I've never dropped the money. I vowed not to give them another dime a while ago.
I wish... I work in a business school computer lab (I'm an engineering student) and I can tell you what you need to consider. I deal with the PHBs of the future, and 90% of them need to be beaten with a clue stick. The other 10% are engineers getting MBAs.
These people (who will often make purchasing decisions and plan technology) haven't the first clue what a filesystem is. All they know is that if they stick it in the machine and it doesn't work, it's broken. Now, if you were a memory card manufacturer, and you had the option to not pay a $0.25 license fee per device, at the risk of a very high rate of 'defective' product returns and lost satisfaction, while your competitors bit the bullet and sent preformatted devices to market, what would you choose?
Honestly, I'm as much of a Microsoft-hater as the next guy (maybe moreso) but I just can't see them shooting themselves in the foot on this one.
What concerns me is, does this effect FAT implementations in other operating systems?
I don't know if I find this more funny or frightening. I've ceased to be surprised by the undending stupidity of some of these companies, their stockholders, and the legal system.
I think this is more the case. One loses only a small amount of space between GB and GiB, but vast amounts of space due to filesystem overhead (comparatively).
In that case their lawsuit will probably go over like a lead balloon. Nothing like nontechies getting in over their heads.
The menu being at the top also helps to avoid a major problem with both Windows and most *N*X systems. When you slide the mouse to the top of the screen, you can't overshoot the menu bar and go into the title bar -- the menu bar is topmost. This saves time and keeps you from overshooting then backtracking down to the menu.
I know KDE can do this but I haven't played with it much. I'm an OS X and KDE (and formerly enlightenment) user, and have found the menu bar at the top to be a very nice feature, especially with a trackpad (as opposed to a mouse).
I was under the impression you could at least get out of the draft that way, IE don't register and we don't provide anything for you. I would much rather have my lost 10% back. Freaking pinko commies.
J/k on the pinko thing.
Alan Cox also releases his own patchsets for newer kernels. He is the reason that linux runs on my new nforce2 motherboard, and I can use SATA with it. Therefore, I am very grateful to him. He r0x0rz.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently I lack the relevant understanding of the SuSEConfig system or something like that.
I don't like this kind of crap and that's why I don't use SuSE. I have to administer some SuSE machiens though, and that is the extent of my experience with it. Give me Debian or Gentoo any day.
He also just switched his desktop workstation over to it. Admittedly I don't know much about SuSE (relative to my knowledge of, say, debian or gentoo) and that's partially because I've never run it on my own desktop machine.
I also set up my girlfriend with SuSE 9.0 after all the problems she had with Mandrake and Debian. She's been a good learning experience for me as to why linux isn't really ready for a lot of home users. The real problems are not the people who know nothing about computers. They are people who are not techies but need to do a lot of complicated and specific things with their computers. My gf is ADD and having things not work consistently drives her nuts.
Anyway, kind of lost my train of thought. I'm amazed at how many replies my post got -- it's been modded up but I think looking back it was nearly flamebait. I'm sure with the opening of the code we'll have the opportunity to fix any kinks in the software.
Let's hope they can bring the famed Novell ease-of-use to Linux.
While YaST may be great for people who know nothing about linux (and I'm happy to see that they're releasing it!) it annoys the hell out of me. Maybe I'm just not familiar with SuSE but it seems to me like any changes you make manually to configs will either (a) not take effect or (b) be overwritten by YaST next time you do something with it. Autoyast is very neat, btw. Apparently RedHat has something similar to that.
Mechanical things are designed by humans and therefore, in most cases, thoroughly understood. You can take apart an air conditioner. You can dismantle a brake assembly. You can rebuild an engine. You can run whatever tests you want on them, and they won't die or complain.
Try doing that with a human.
As something of a linux zealot for the last 4.5 years, but also someone who manages all of the computers for my research lab plus my girlfriend, I would like to disagree with you slightly. I use linux all the time. Every day. It's still got some severe 'functionality' issues. A lot of that relates to lack of vendor support. Some of it relates to the more rapid development process. Anyhow it still needs some work in terms of things just working, but I think it's improving exponentially. More and more software vendors are announcing linux versions. Now if software install and hardware detection/setup would improve just a bit more I think we'll be there.
Quite the profitable racket for those guys, back then. It's died down a bit since. Your /. ID is somewhat (ok, a lot) lower than mine but I'd wager a lot of the newer people around here are not too familiar with, say, Windows 3.0.
Some operating systems *coughwindowscough* don't play so well with others as Linux and OS X do with each other. The latter two interoperate pretty well. I've been using Linux on my desktop and OS X on my powerbook together for nearly 3 years.
While I get your point, certainly most linux/unix books still hold a lot of validity. Certainly some things are different, but once you learn bash and man and some basic unix concepts you can get the rest of the info from the OS... I buy outdated books all the time from the local bookstore because they're cheap, and really, how much does most of that stuff change from year to year?
Care to guess how many times MY powerbook has had to be repaired?
I think 6. Don't remember exactly. Parts that have been replaced by Apple (Under default and extended warranty)
I take pretty good care of it, in fact since the warranty's almost up now I bought a used Zero Halliburton case for it as 'insurance'. I'm also no dummy, have had some electrical engineering and computer science and circuits and so on, and build my own desktops.
I love the machine and the OS (X), especially for the fairly good linux compatibility (yay netatalk), BUT that's only when it's working, and not being sent to apple for ANOTHER repair. It's getting time to buy a new laptop when I start my Ph.D. and I don't know what the hell I should get... yay software lock-in...
Similar to Godwin's Law of Usenet re. nazis. In this case the ism/ist would be antisemitism.
What might harm them more is the ways in which they _do_ see nudity _when_ they (are told to) see it as taboo. These might be ways that precondition their perception of such things in less-than-natural ways. Think 'plastic surgery' though that's not the only type of scenario in which this could be the case.
It's all discrimination, the word reverse is unnecessary. That said, I agree with the principle if not with the wording.
It's marketshare is rising
To quote StrongBad:
Ohhhh, if you want a possessive, use just I-T-S,
but if you want a contraction, use I-T-apostrophe-S,
scalawag
Things like whole menus disappearing, control center modules that crash every time I try to load them and the like. These last couple of times I probably didn't give it enough of a chance, but I feel like most distros (SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, I don't know about Slackware, never tried it) are too modified-up, they lack base compaitibility for everything. You never know what's been patched. My current favorite is Gentoo but I've thought about trying LFS one of these days... The last thing I want to do is start a distro flamewar. If there's one thing I've realized from trying a bunch of different Linux distros it's that they're very much a matter of personal taste, and there's no accounting for taste.
Every time I've tried mandrake and redhat (and that's going back to RH 6 and madrake 7, which is admittedly not too far...) they have showstopping problems that do not exist in distros such as Gentoo and Debian. I've tried all the redhats up through 8 and all the mandrakes up through the latest... what is it, 8.2? 9.2? My roommate gave me the CDs and I tried it but I don't remember the exact version. Are the problems fixable? Sometimes. Would I rather use a distro I don't have to fix in the first place? Most certainly.
Yeah that actually helped my grades a lot in college. When I switched I quit wasting my time on games. I just loaded WineX up on my new machine though and started playing CounterStrike again for the first time in 3 years. Bye bye proeductivity...
PS- I've heard that ATI has good Linux drivers for their high-end cards now, but I've never dropped the money. I vowed not to give them another dime a while ago.
These people (who will often make purchasing decisions and plan technology) haven't the first clue what a filesystem is. All they know is that if they stick it in the machine and it doesn't work, it's broken. Now, if you were a memory card manufacturer, and you had the option to not pay a $0.25 license fee per device, at the risk of a very high rate of 'defective' product returns and lost satisfaction, while your competitors bit the bullet and sent preformatted devices to market, what would you choose?
Honestly, I'm as much of a Microsoft-hater as the next guy (maybe moreso) but I just can't see them shooting themselves in the foot on this one.
What concerns me is, does this effect FAT implementations in other operating systems?
I don't know if I find this more funny or frightening. I've ceased to be surprised by the undending stupidity of some of these companies, their stockholders, and the legal system.
My favorite line, while not creative:
The 80's called, they want their features back.
heh...
I think this is more the case. One loses only a small amount of space between GB and GiB, but vast amounts of space due to filesystem overhead (comparatively). In that case their lawsuit will probably go over like a lead balloon. Nothing like nontechies getting in over their heads.
The menu being at the top also helps to avoid a major problem with both Windows and most *N*X systems. When you slide the mouse to the top of the screen, you can't overshoot the menu bar and go into the title bar -- the menu bar is topmost. This saves time and keeps you from overshooting then backtracking down to the menu. I know KDE can do this but I haven't played with it much. I'm an OS X and KDE (and formerly enlightenment) user, and have found the menu bar at the top to be a very nice feature, especially with a trackpad (as opposed to a mouse).
I was under the impression you could at least get out of the draft that way, IE don't register and we don't provide anything for you. I would much rather have my lost 10% back. Freaking pinko commies. J/k on the pinko thing.
Alan Cox also releases his own patchsets for newer kernels. He is the reason that linux runs on my new nforce2 motherboard, and I can use SATA with it. Therefore, I am very grateful to him. He r0x0rz.