So whose fault is it that the nvidia headers for binary drivers have to be recompiled every kernel release due to incompatabilities for no good reason?
How do you know it's for no good reason? If you've seen the source code, then perhaps you might enlighten us.
In any case, who cares? nVidia does it, and does it very promptly when required. Which is more than we can say for the majority of hardware producers, who as a rule are content to leave Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD users completely unsupported.
Heh. Keyboards are for wimps! Nothing wrong with the old 029 card punch.
Except that I no longer have a card reader. Damn. Guess I'll just have to toggle my programs directly into the control panel on the computer. Except that computers don't have them any more. Damn.
Oh well. Sigh...
That said, this old Burroughs card punch I've got here (a relic of my first years in computing) is pretty good for holding the door open...
Wow. I've never tried Ubuntu or Kubuntu, but I've never seen a panic from any Linux install disk before - though I guess it could happen if you tried booting a kernel built for SCSI on IDE, or something of that nature.
I don't see a single comment in your statement that can't be turned around, as well. When Slackware's install mysteriously dies, with a cryptic error message, what help do they have?
Not that I have ever seen a Slackware install die, but at least you would have an error message, however cryptic. In the XP case I mentioned, there was no error message whatsoever. In their wisdom, the guys at Microsoft have obviously decided the user is too dumb to be able to make use of an error message, so they left him hanging out to dry. Trouble is, that works against everybody, not just the less savvy users.
Often repeated, but repetition doesn't make it true. People were perfectly able to "learn something new" back in the days of PC-DOS, and I see no indication that stupidity is so totally pervasive in the consumer computer market now. I have yet to know of a person who, while familiar with XP, really cannot become productive on OS X in a vanishingly small period of time.
And I don't even particularly like OS X. I just get peevish when people invent arguments that are meaningless or untrue.
Unfortunately, being a moderator doesn't reflect any degree of competence. What we see here is a moderator with an agenda, and his work has already been dealt with.
In any case, the parent indeed has a point. It would be kind of interesting to see a contender of the stature of OS X duking it out against Windows. I've met any number of "switchers" who have mentioned their relief at no longer having to be so concerned with all the issues of Windows security or the absence of it.
However, with OEMs such as Dell beginning to come on board with pre-installed Linux on some of their machines, it may not be too long before we start hearing some of the "buzz" mentioned in the submission applied to Linux. We'll have to wait and see, I guess...
Do you think maybe this has a bit to do with familiarity?
...The first time I tried to install Slackware (having previous installed Debian with several issues), it didn't take a single hour. In fact, the third and fourth install didn't take only an hour, either.
No, not really.
The point I was making is that Slackware's install (and presumably that of any number of distributions) is simple and predictable. I am perfectly familiar with XP and any number of OSs, but that doesn't necessarily help much when it fails without ever providing a hint as to why.
XP has a lot hidden under the bonnet, which when it works as intended is easy enough to get along with. However, the downside of all that automation and self-advertising bumf is that if anything at all goes wrong, the user is entirely left in the dark. If Microsoft had stuck to a simpler model, I wouldn't have had to waste all that time waiting for the XP install to copy all those files to a drive it would never be able to boot from.
I guess it doesn't really matter too much which distro you choose these days. They're all easy.
What it not easy, as I've just rediscovered over the last two days, is Windows XP. I had the thankless task of ridding the boss's wife's computer of all the bugware/spyware/malware her offspring had managed to install, and in my cocky wisdom I decided to wipe everything and reinstall from scratch.
Two days later, after pulling out hard drives to partition and format them one at a time (no sir, XP decided it didn't like disks it had just formatted), I was swearing in frustration at this dumbass OS that goes so far out of its way to make life difficult for the user.
Contrast with a standard Slackware install, which is simply done with and usable in an hour. Makes me want to take the next moron who says Linux isn't ready for the desktop and shove his teeth so far down his throat he'll have to stick his toothbrush up his ass...
...It's going to make absolutely no difference to me. I have every doubleclick server known to mankind blocked in my hosts file. I don't want to know them, and I don't care who buys them.
Excellent post, but there's a point where your reasoning breaks down, and I reached that with Three who had my mobile phone service for just over a year. It got to the point where my primary reason (among many) for moving the service back to Vodafone was so that I would never have to speak to their call-centre again. It cost me money, but it was worth every cent.
Seems to me that whenever I boot a Windows box, it takes somewhere around 35 seconds to show up a desktop, then at least that again tipping up its hourglass while I wait for all the spyware and malware to load.;-)
And yet, try sending Office files from different version offices, and you have the same issue.
Indeed. But given that the majority of these MSOffice files that are routinely circulated tend to be Word docs, which translate quite well to OOo, I don't see the problem.
The files are never so mangled that you can't read them at all. If it is that critical that formatting remains in place, then one should be using PDF (or ps). Simple as that, and no excuses.
The fact still remains that there is probably more hardware that runs out of the box on Linux than on Windows. Most people I know who run Windows need to retain CDROMs for each and every one of their pieces of hardware.
This Slackware box (remember, Slackware doesn't particularly go out of its way to be newbie-friendly) is perfectly able to run all of my hardware with the contents of the 1st CDROM in the install set. In fact, I never even download the other ISOs.
I have no difficulty in imagining that a distro such as Ubuntu, with something of a reputation for being accommodating to novices, should have no trouble in smoothing out some of the bumps.
In any case, I have good reason to believe (read: bitter experience) that installing and running Windows can be a distinctly counter-intuitive and frustrating process.
If Win2kpro rocks your boat and does everything your little heart could possibly desire, then why bother changing?
In my case, I did my distro-hopping between between 1997 and 2001 after a long spell with Slackware. I eventually went back to Slackware, and that's what I still use today. And a very cool and froody desktop Slackware can make, too, especially in combination with Dropline Gnome.
I'm getting off the point here, which is that if you use a given system a lot (by which I mean years, not just a one-day trial), whether it be Ubuntu, OpenBSD or whatever, you eventually find yourself getting familiar with it to the extent that Windows just doesn't cut it.
However, all bets are off if you're into gaming.There you don't really have much choice.
Yes, and in fact I have read those. However, at this stage they don't really tell us anything very much more profound than not to choose non-dictionary passwords, and to keep our PHP daemons (not that a desktop machine is necessarily likely to be running one) up to date with patches.
They stare at the code for a while, make wild guesses...
Sure. But that's only because "The C Programming Language [is] A language which combines the flexibility and power of assembly language with the readability of assembly language".;-P
One of the best reasons to learn to do assembly programming is because it's fun.
Though I can't say that's why I did it. In my case (back in the early fourteenth century), we all wrote assembly code because that's how serious programming was done. Sure, we had COBOL to update ledgers and write reports, and FORTRAN to take the hard work out of maths computation, but for anything that really needed any kind of optimisation on those old core-memory machines, assembly was the only way to go.
There were other reasons too; I worked in a computer bureau with several Burroughs B3700 machines, and we had one or two clients for whose packages the source code had been long since mislaid.
So rather than re-writing the thing from scratch whenever mods needed to be made, a couple of us used to hack directly on the binary. It's not all that easy, but it's job security.;-)
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So whose fault is it that the nvidia headers for binary drivers have to be recompiled every kernel release due to incompatabilities for no good reason?
How do you know it's for no good reason? If you've seen the source code, then perhaps you might enlighten us.
In any case, who cares? nVidia does it, and does it very promptly when required. Which is more than we can say for the majority of hardware producers, who as a rule are content to leave Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD users completely unsupported.
Heh. Keyboards are for wimps! Nothing wrong with the old 029 card punch.
Except that I no longer have a card reader. Damn. Guess I'll just have to toggle my programs directly into the control panel on the computer. Except that computers don't have them any more. Damn.
Oh well. Sigh...
That said, this old Burroughs card punch I've got here (a relic of my first years in computing) is pretty good for holding the door open...
Wow. I've never tried Ubuntu or Kubuntu, but I've never seen a panic from any Linux install disk before - though I guess it could happen if you tried booting a kernel built for SCSI on IDE, or something of that nature.
Did the md5 for the ISO check out OK?
That's why we have metamoderation, too.
That's why I said "his work has already been dealt with".
I don't see a single comment in your statement that can't be turned around, as well. When Slackware's install mysteriously dies, with a cryptic error message, what help do they have?
Not that I have ever seen a Slackware install die, but at least you would have an error message, however cryptic. In the XP case I mentioned, there was no error message whatsoever. In their wisdom, the guys at Microsoft have obviously decided the user is too dumb to be able to make use of an error message, so they left him hanging out to dry. Trouble is, that works against everybody, not just the less savvy users.
The other is having to learn something new.
Often repeated, but repetition doesn't make it true. People were perfectly able to "learn something new" back in the days of PC-DOS, and I see no indication that stupidity is so totally pervasive in the consumer computer market now. I have yet to know of a person who, while familiar with XP, really cannot become productive on OS X in a vanishingly small period of time.
And I don't even particularly like OS X. I just get peevish when people invent arguments that are meaningless or untrue.
Unfortunately, being a moderator doesn't reflect any degree of competence. What we see here is a moderator with an agenda, and his work has already been dealt with.
In any case, the parent indeed has a point. It would be kind of interesting to see a contender of the stature of OS X duking it out against Windows. I've met any number of "switchers" who have mentioned their relief at no longer having to be so concerned with all the issues of Windows security or the absence of it.
However, with OEMs such as Dell beginning to come on board with pre-installed Linux on some of their machines, it may not be too long before we start hearing some of the "buzz" mentioned in the submission applied to Linux. We'll have to wait and see, I guess...
The 3.1 desktop was okay, but you still couldn't put folders within folders
:-P
No, but it came with "Rodent's Revenge", the greatest computer game of all time...
Do you think maybe this has a bit to do with familiarity?
...The first time I tried to install Slackware (having previous installed Debian with several issues), it didn't take a single hour. In fact, the third and fourth install didn't take only an hour, either.
No, not really.
The point I was making is that Slackware's install (and presumably that of any number of distributions) is simple and predictable. I am perfectly familiar with XP and any number of OSs, but that doesn't necessarily help much when it fails without ever providing a hint as to why.
XP has a lot hidden under the bonnet, which when it works as intended is easy enough to get along with. However, the downside of all that automation and self-advertising bumf is that if anything at all goes wrong, the user is entirely left in the dark. If Microsoft had stuck to a simpler model, I wouldn't have had to waste all that time waiting for the XP install to copy all those files to a drive it would never be able to boot from.
So easy to misread. So very easy.
;-)
Not if you had seen her. My private name for her is Medusa - that should give you an idea...
I guess Amarok is good if it works for you. I found the interface a bit counterintuitive, but that might just be me.
However, I have a 600GiB music library at my workplace sitting on an old PII 400MHz using Rhythmbox, and it seems to work just fine.
I guess it doesn't really matter too much which distro you choose these days. They're all easy.
;-}
What it not easy, as I've just rediscovered over the last two days, is Windows XP. I had the thankless task of ridding the boss's wife's computer of all the bugware/spyware/malware her offspring had managed to install, and in my cocky wisdom I decided to wipe everything and reinstall from scratch.
Two days later, after pulling out hard drives to partition and format them one at a time (no sir, XP decided it didn't like disks it had just formatted), I was swearing in frustration at this dumbass OS that goes so far out of its way to make life difficult for the user.
Contrast with a standard Slackware install, which is simply done with and usable in an hour. Makes me want to take the next moron who says Linux isn't ready for the desktop and shove his teeth so far down his throat he'll have to stick his toothbrush up his ass...
Grrrr.
...It's going to make absolutely no difference to me. I have every doubleclick server known to mankind blocked in my hosts file. I don't want to know them, and I don't care who buys them.
All this is saying is that people don't (yet) want Vista at any price.
Excellent post, but there's a point where your reasoning breaks down, and I reached that with Three who had my mobile phone service for just over a year. It got to the point where my primary reason (among many) for moving the service back to Vodafone was so that I would never have to speak to their call-centre again. It cost me money, but it was worth every cent.
This DDMMYYYY or MMDDYYYY stuff is confusing...
:-P
Nonsense. Just do it the way I and _all_ other right-thinking people do: DDMMYY.
OK. Which idiot moderator thought that was funny?
Seems to me that whenever I boot a Windows box, it takes somewhere around 35 seconds to show up a desktop, then at least that again tipping up its hourglass while I wait for all the spyware and malware to load. ;-)
And yet, try sending Office files from different version offices, and you have the same issue.
Indeed. But given that the majority of these MSOffice files that are routinely circulated tend to be Word docs, which translate quite well to OOo, I don't see the problem. The files are never so mangled that you can't read them at all. If it is that critical that formatting remains in place, then one should be using PDF (or ps). Simple as that, and no excuses.
The fact still remains that there is probably more hardware that runs out of the box on Linux than on Windows. Most people I know who run Windows need to retain CDROMs for each and every one of their pieces of hardware.
This Slackware box (remember, Slackware doesn't particularly go out of its way to be newbie-friendly) is perfectly able to run all of my hardware with the contents of the 1st CDROM in the install set. In fact, I never even download the other ISOs.
I have no difficulty in imagining that a distro such as Ubuntu, with something of a reputation for being accommodating to novices, should have no trouble in smoothing out some of the bumps.
In any case, I have good reason to believe (read: bitter experience) that installing and running Windows can be a distinctly counter-intuitive and frustrating process.
If Win2kpro rocks your boat and does everything your little heart could possibly desire, then why bother changing?
In my case, I did my distro-hopping between between 1997 and 2001 after a long spell with Slackware. I eventually went back to Slackware, and that's what I still use today. And a very cool and froody desktop Slackware can make, too, especially in combination with Dropline Gnome.
I'm getting off the point here, which is that if you use a given system a lot (by which I mean years, not just a one-day trial), whether it be Ubuntu, OpenBSD or whatever, you eventually find yourself getting familiar with it to the extent that Windows just doesn't cut it.
However, all bets are off if you're into gaming.There you don't really have much choice.
Seems to me that those criteria make sense. What doesn't make sense is that Microsoft chooses not to make those criteria the default configuration.
Yes, and in fact I have read those. However, at this stage they don't really tell us anything very much more profound than not to choose non-dictionary passwords, and to keep our PHP daemons (not that a desktop machine is necessarily likely to be running one) up to date with patches.
They stare at the code for a while, make wild guesses...
;-P
Sure. But that's only because "The C Programming Language [is] A language which combines the flexibility and power of assembly language with the readability of assembly language".
One of the best reasons to learn to do assembly programming is because it's fun.
;-)
Though I can't say that's why I did it. In my case (back in the early fourteenth century), we all wrote assembly code because that's how serious programming was done. Sure, we had COBOL to update ledgers and write reports, and FORTRAN to take the hard work out of maths computation, but for anything that really needed any kind of optimisation on those old core-memory machines, assembly was the only way to go.
There were other reasons too; I worked in a computer bureau with several Burroughs B3700 machines, and we had one or two clients for whose packages the source code had been long since mislaid.
So rather than re-writing the thing from scratch whenever mods needed to be made, a couple of us used to hack directly on the binary. It's not all that easy, but it's job security.