I can get Thunderbird on windows with no additional effort (IE just the installer.) For kmail I have to step through loading the POS that is Cygwin, load KDE, then load kmail and hope nothing fucks up on the way down.
Or you may use a Real OS® in the first place and be done with it.
My sympathy if you can't for some reason (stuck-up employer policy, legacy application, etc).
Arrgh. Time to feed the trolls. Let me explain. After the install, you never actually wait for the packages to compile/install. You can use kde-3.2.0 while (should you feel the need to upgrade) you are compiling 3.2.2.
I've got you down as a friend, so you must have said something insightful in the past.
What if someone send me a document in some slightly exotic (let's say LyX) format. I need to have a look at the document to get a project going. I do not have LyX installed already; never bothered because I am not a LyX user. emerge lyx ? Yeah !... not.
Don't tell me that this someone should have sent a PDF or whatever, it's not the point. The point is that, somewhen, I will have to install a software to get something done and could definitely skip the compilation. Be it The GIMP, Scribus, Audacity, MPlayer, sodipodi or whatever, the moment I will want one of these apps, I may notfeel like twiddling my thumbs an hour or two waiting for them and all their dependancies to compile.
And don't tell me to install binary package either. I may as well use yum, up2date, Red Carpet, YaST, urpmi, apt-get or any other binary package management system in the first place and be done with it.
I was expecting the Python zealots to overwhelm this discussion with their usual snobbism of Perl, but for some reasons the PHP fanboys are the one making the most noise. It will be interesting to see where this will lead.
It well-known indeed that the plural of anecdote is data.
Re:The flagship...
on
D&D Is 30
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Same here. I just gave "Silver Marches" and the "Arms and Equipement Guide" to my son for his 12th birthday... sniff sniff, it's touching to see a proto-geek grow !
No, I would say NineNine have a decent TPG. Surf with Linux, or use Firefox on Windows at the very least, and do without these stupid popup and virus bullshit.
Autopr0n is another/. pornographer. His site have less gallery, but it's much cleaner, and every gallery carry a witty (and sometime funny) description he wrote himself. The poor boy run his TGP on Windows, so be gentle with him.
At the very least, you can tell a company that if it doesn't get fixed, you won't buy another piece of software from them, and neither will anybody else you know.
I'll tell that to Microsoft next time I have a bug with any of their software.
Re:We're talking about Samba and Linux here...
on
Samba 3 By Example
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· Score: 1
You're pretty fucked either way if your/etc gets corrupted with things like they are right now.
It should be noted that we (my employer) did not experienced any file system corruption since the introduction of journalled file systems. And we have a few 100s servers on support.
I have been out of the Windows support scene for a while (thanks, $deity!), but back when I was a support monkey, registry corruption where relatively common. Hopefully, they fixed that in Windows >= 2000.
Re:We're talking about Samba and Linux here...
on
Samba 3 By Example
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· Score: 1
That is a great idea but unfortunately is never going to happen. That's the problem with open source stuff - it lacks someone at the helm (in this case, GNU/Linux) telling it where to go and making it abide by standards, which is why UNIX in general still smacks of the 70s and always will.
Blah blah blah. Thing in the Open-Source world get adopted when people choose to use them. People choose to use new thing because they see a perceived value in using them, not because some comittee decided in your place how your system should behave.
Re:We're talking about Samba and Linux here...
on
Samba 3 By Example
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· Score: 1
When configuring a service (such as file sharing or setting up a domain) on Windows, how many times do you actually have to go into the Windows directory to change something? I run a Windows domain, and I have never had to once
You may have had to edit the registry though, which would be the Windows equivalent of editing config in/etc.
With Linux, under just about every distro, you have to go to/etc or some other folder to change settings on a config file. Would it really be that hard to create some KDE or Gnome app that takes settings that are changed/created in a graphical interface, and input them into the configuration file?
YaST
Linuxconf
Webmin
All the program in my "System Settings" menu in Fedora
KDE Control Center
... a few more I can't think of ATM
Call me a noob, tell me to RTFM, but in my experience with Linux in the past 10 years (off and on) it seems to be lacking that type of key feature.
GUI configuration tools tie you to a GUI. You come from a platform where the OS is thightly coupled with the GUI; this is not the case in the Unix world. As I demonstrated earlier, GUI configuration tools exist but we are not bound to them. You may argue that a standardized GUI way for configuration is better, but it is really trading flexibility for simplicity. We Unix people prefer the other way around.
Re:We're talking about Samba and Linux here...
on
Samba 3 By Example
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· Score: 1
- everything is organised in a neat hierarchial structure
A file system is also a "neat hierarchial structure". Unless this structure make sense, it's useless.
- values are typed (string, dword, binary data,...)
This is of interest only if you have to store binary data. Wheter you need dword and integer as configuration value is open to debate.
- common api to access it
This is neat indeed, except for the drawback that it is the only way to access it.
- per-key ACLs
This is neat too, and just about the only advantage the Windows registry have over text file configuration. We can achieve a somewhat similar result using file system ACL (possibly in conjunction with "include" directive in config files).
On the other hand, you have:
A single point of failure
Persistent program data lumped together with configuration directive
Configuration uneditable outside of a few specialized tools
... and a few more gripe I don't remember ATM. Fine if you like your Windows way; thanks, but no thanks, I'll keep my text config files.
I'd actually be willing to try an experiment with that, to go over to my folks' house with a RedHat 9 CD -- I have one here for my headless server boxes -- and give it to dad to try and install.
Get him Fedora Core 1 or Mandrake 10. While RedHat 9 is only about 1 year old, it's already somewhat outdated and there have been much progress since then. And Fedora Core 1 is still updated while RedHat 9 will be going out of support in a few days (no more updates, security or otherwise).
The speed of development in desktop Linux distro is quite litterally astounding.
My boss brought back a copy of S3bE from Real World Linux Expo in Toronto (with a dedicace to my name... w00t!), and I must say I agree with reviewer. So far, I have only read chapters 10 and 11 (but thumbed through the rest), and they alone are worth the price of the book.
Re:adds stability to Win9x/ME workgroups
on
Samba 3 By Example
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· Score: 1
WinME (95,98,XP Home) cant join a domain, so leaving it running as a PDC with no shares would be pretty pointless.
Except a Samba PDC would win every NetBIOS election and keep browse list current IN A STABLE FASHION instead of having the Win9x machines fight over it every time one reboot. Set the Samba box as a WINS server and the clients accordingly, and you could have reliable NetBIOS name resolution that don't depend on broadcast.
Re:Kerberos Authentication
on
Samba 3 By Example
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· Score: 2, Informative
According to Jeremy Allison, documentation for the PAC have been released by Microsoft, except the license to said documentation was too restrictive to be used by the Samba team.
See http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-05 -01-005-04-NW
Users can install and run alternate applications, but we should not present them with a system with more than one software per task installed, lest they get confused ? Do you see the irony here ?
No, I don't. As long as you see irony, you are not a go-to person for making Linux usable. You just don't understand how regular people use computer
Because, that's obvious, you know how regular people use computer !
I don't want a dependency laden hell or special install directories or anything that requires me to be root to install or run.
If you have been using any mainstream Linux distribution in the past year or two, you would know that "dependency hell" is a thing of the past. apt-get, yum, urpmi, up2date and cie solve the problem quite nicely, and most distribution ship with GUI frontend to these tools.
"special install directory" ???
Being root to install : sorry, not really Linux-specific. AFAIK, you need to have administrative privileges to install most software in Windows. Either you grok the concept of privileges, or you do just like most Windows users and do your day-to-day task with an administrative account (security be damned).
Do you get my point on what usability is yet? It's not a flood of options, all of the available by default! It's about picking KDE or Gnome (or, if you're really smart about the right direction to go, GNUstep) and calling it the "winner", even if it's not your pet environment. It's about putting up a unified front in order to push forward on the desktop. Until you're willing to do that, Linux will always be behind both Mac OS X and Windows in both usability and adoption.
I have yet to be explained to how having more than one web browser installed hurt usability.
In the end, your "solution" have already been implemented, it's called a distribution. Pick one, use the default and enjoy.
I ran the much malaligned Fedora printer setup program, chose "Windows network printer" and... it didn't appear. A few minutes investigation revealed there was a bug in Fedora: I had at some point in the past enabled the personal firewall but the firewall config program was blocking Windows networking traffic.
It is interesting to note that such a problem is not Linux-specific. The same thing could happen with Windows if you use software firewall that block NetBIOS traffic. Then, if it happen in Windows, does that say anything about Windows user-friendliness ?
All in all, your experience pretty much match mine, except I did not experienced any bugs or hicups using the Fedora printer configuration applet. It have been quite straightforward and, from my limited experience of other OS, seem on-par with competing offering.
I may be willing to sit there for a couple hours to tweak drivers and get everything working, but my parents are far less likely to... nor should they have to. And if the answer is anything more difficult than 'click on Find Drivers' or 'insert the driver CD,' then Linux is not, in at least one area, as easy-to-use as Windows for a desktop OS.
I know pointing finger will not help your parent use Linux, but you need to draw the line where the responsability of the OS end and the one of the manufacturer begin. I expect such a device to be shipped with an application/drivers CD that you need to install in Windows for all these wonderful functions to work. But they do ship with, say, MacOS X version of said applications/drivers ? Hopefully yes. But if not, does that mean the "MacOS X is not ready for the desktop" because it does not support some oddball hardware ? If not, why is it OK then to judge Linux readiness for desktop usage on such a claim ?
All in all, I think the original post to which I answered was overly dramatic and totally uninformed. Constructive criticism of Linux welcome, as long as they are actually revelant.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you should get a sense of humor.
Here a smily for you :
:)
Are you feeling any better now ?
Or you may use a Real OS® in the first place and be done with it.
My sympathy if you can't for some reason (stuck-up employer policy, legacy application, etc).
I would agree if :
1. Threading would not suck so bad in Kmail
2. It would do PGP/MIME instead of signing inline (yuck!).
Enigmail is a big plus for Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird.
For once, I found an analyst whom I can tolerate. Does this women have a blog ?
I do, and enjoying the better performance and POSIX ACL support.
What if someone send me a document in some slightly exotic (let's say LyX) format. I need to have a look at the document to get a project going. I do not have LyX installed already; never bothered because I am not a LyX user. emerge lyx ? Yeah ! ... not.
Don't tell me that this someone should have sent a PDF or whatever, it's not the point. The point is that, somewhen, I will have to install a software to get something done and could definitely skip the compilation. Be it The GIMP, Scribus, Audacity, MPlayer, sodipodi or whatever, the moment I will want one of these apps, I may notfeel like twiddling my thumbs an hour or two waiting for them and all their dependancies to compile.
And don't tell me to install binary package either. I may as well use yum, up2date, Red Carpet, YaST, urpmi, apt-get or any other binary package management system in the first place and be done with it.
HELLO ? PEAR ?
I was expecting the Python zealots to overwhelm this discussion with their usual snobbism of Perl, but for some reasons the PHP fanboys are the one making the most noise. It will be interesting to see where this will lead.
It well-known indeed that the plural of anecdote is data.
Same here. I just gave "Silver Marches" and the "Arms and Equipement Guide" to my son for his 12th birthday ... sniff sniff, it's touching to see a proto-geek grow !
No, I would say NineNine have a decent TPG. Surf with Linux, or use Firefox on Windows at the very least, and do without these stupid popup and virus bullshit.
/. pornographer. His site have less gallery, but it's much cleaner, and every gallery carry a witty (and sometime funny) description he wrote himself. The poor boy run his TGP on Windows, so be gentle with him.
Autopr0n is another
I'll tell that to Microsoft next time I have a bug with any of their software.
It should be noted that we (my employer) did not experienced any file system corruption since the introduction of journalled file systems. And we have a few 100s servers on support.
I have been out of the Windows support scene for a while (thanks, $deity!), but back when I was a support monkey, registry corruption where relatively common. Hopefully, they fixed that in Windows >= 2000.
Blah blah blah. Thing in the Open-Source world get adopted when people choose to use them. People choose to use new thing because they see a perceived value in using them, not because some comittee decided in your place how your system should behave.
You may have had to edit the registry though, which would be the Windows equivalent of editing config in /etc.
GUI configuration tools tie you to a GUI. You come from a platform where the OS is thightly coupled with the GUI; this is not the case in the Unix world. As I demonstrated earlier, GUI configuration tools exist but we are not bound to them. You may argue that a standardized GUI way for configuration is better, but it is really trading flexibility for simplicity. We Unix people prefer the other way around.
A file system is also a "neat hierarchial structure". Unless this structure make sense, it's useless.
This is of interest only if you have to store binary data. Wheter you need dword and integer as configuration value is open to debate.
This is neat indeed, except for the drawback that it is the only way to access it.
This is neat too, and just about the only advantage the Windows registry have over text file configuration. We can achieve a somewhat similar result using file system ACL (possibly in conjunction with "include" directive in config files).
On the other hand, you have :
... and a few more gripe I don't remember ATM. Fine if you like your Windows way; thanks, but no thanks, I'll keep my text config files.
follow symlinks = yes ?
Get him Fedora Core 1 or Mandrake 10. While RedHat 9 is only about 1 year old, it's already somewhat outdated and there have been much progress since then. And Fedora Core 1 is still updated while RedHat 9 will be going out of support in a few days (no more updates, security or otherwise).
The speed of development in desktop Linux distro is quite litterally astounding.
My boss brought back a copy of S3bE from Real World Linux Expo in Toronto (with a dedicace to my name ... w00t!), and I must say I agree with reviewer. So far, I have only read chapters 10 and 11 (but thumbed through the rest), and they alone are worth the price of the book.
Except a Samba PDC would win every NetBIOS election and keep browse list current IN A STABLE FASHION instead of having the Win9x machines fight over it every time one reboot. Set the Samba box as a WINS server and the clients accordingly, and you could have reliable NetBIOS name resolution that don't depend on broadcast.
According to Jeremy Allison, documentation for the PAC have been released by Microsoft, except the license to said documentation was too restrictive to be used by the Samba team.
5 -01-005-04-NW
See http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-0
... are these iApps rip-off Open-Source ?
Because, that's obvious, you know how regular people use computer !
I have yet to be explained to how having more than one web browser installed hurt usability.
In the end, your "solution" have already been implemented, it's called a distribution. Pick one, use the default and enjoy.
It is interesting to note that such a problem is not Linux-specific. The same thing could happen with Windows if you use software firewall that block NetBIOS traffic. Then, if it happen in Windows, does that say anything about Windows user-friendliness ?
All in all, your experience pretty much match mine, except I did not experienced any bugs or hicups using the Fedora printer configuration applet. It have been quite straightforward and, from my limited experience of other OS, seem on-par with competing offering.
I know pointing finger will not help your parent use Linux, but you need to draw the line where the responsability of the OS end and the one of the manufacturer begin. I expect such a device to be shipped with an application/drivers CD that you need to install in Windows for all these wonderful functions to work. But they do ship with, say, MacOS X version of said applications/drivers ? Hopefully yes. But if not, does that mean the "MacOS X is not ready for the desktop" because it does not support some oddball hardware ? If not, why is it OK then to judge Linux readiness for desktop usage on such a claim ?
All in all, I think the original post to which I answered was overly dramatic and totally uninformed. Constructive criticism of Linux welcome, as long as they are actually revelant.