Re: Ubuntu (Linux); my first experience of...

On a sunny day (Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:05:23 -0800) it happened "Joel Kolstad"
<JKolstad71HatesSpam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in <12u9e9kfn0l6533@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Linux is _not_ for dummies.

Then it's never going to gain a significant user base, which is unfortunate
for *everyone*, Linux super-hackers included.

I dunno, these days kids come from school, hack a DVD, write a game, make a video,
all that at < 12.
Do not under-estimate the human race.

There's plenty of crapware in the *NIX world, just as there is in the Windows
world. In fact, there might even be more so, simply because of the emphasis
on the "viral" nature of open-source *NIX software.

"Viral?', nothing viral about it.
Viral is closed source, secretly sending your private details back to MS, having
secret ports open for 'marketing reasons' allowing trojans and worms, DRM software
that installs rootkits (Sony), what not.
Open source allows you to check, and modify, and usually a choice.

It should be a sign on the wall that I have a system on line 24/7 running Linux with:
A web server, a mail server, a name server, telnet, X, ftpserver etc...
and not ONCE (1x) has there been a virus, worm, or any other evil thing, that made it
into my system.
Many years.
And _WHO_ is that company that releases a security update every few weeks?

The whole thing (MS) is SICK.
It (MS Windows) is like having a house with the doors wide open, and locks on the coffee machine,
the light switches, all inner doors, access cards, fingerprint sensors on the TV.

It is so much easier to make _one_ lock on the frontdoor and some alarms on the windows,
But no, the frontdoor must stay unlocked, so they can at regular intervals
dump 3 postbags full off spam on your doormat.

Now _that_ is viral :-)


I have a book on Macs that -- in all serious -- claims that having only a few
choices for any particular type of software on the Mac is actually "a good
thing" relative to the PC world where you can find tons of programs all trying
to do the same thing with varying degrees of success: The author claims
that -- supposedly -- the reason there are only a few offerings is that the
ones out there tend to be done "quite well" and therefore it's an advantage to
consumers that they don't have to wade through a dozen different programs
before finding one they like. I don't completely agree with him, but I would
say he has a bit of a point: Having a dozen different text editors included
with a standard OS install (the typical Linux scenario) is *not* always
serving the end-user's best interests.

I have used mac... really nice to make frontpages for equipment....
Do not remember the name of that program.
But most things Mr Jobs sells are 2x the price of the same in the PC world.

Having a dozen or more text editors allows one to select what one is most comnfortable
with.
And sometimes what one cannot do, the other can (I had some copy of some other editor standby to
work on multiple files and stuff, it simply had more features for that).



For ever their slave, your PC finally taken away from you and made a black
box
where every little thing has a big DRM lock on it, and nothing is changed,
nothing evolves, everything ever takes more resources... the darkness of
Redmond falling
on the world.

Those are good points, although I'm sure you're well aware that you seldom
hear people telling you to "just use your old beat-up 386 to run Linux --
it'll be fine!" anymore. Those looking to run those "bloatware" desktops, as
you call them, such as KDE and Gnome are running an OS that has grown just as
fast in resource utilization as what the folks in Redmond and Cupertino have
come up with.

Indeed, the latest Qt 4 I compiled (many month ago) took hours to compile...
I use xforms GUI library for my own programs, good GUI for technical stuff,

grml: # ls -l /usr/X11R6/lib/libforms.so.1.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1580536 2006-01-31 14:10 /usr/X11R6/lib/libforms.so.1.0*

Wow, a whopping 1.6 MB!!!!!
Has very nice charts and stuff too.

.

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