Re: Microsoft tries to polish a turd

"Dirk Bruere at NeoPax" <dirk.bruere@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:6g164pFdreq2U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
My main dislike was that if anything went wrong and KDE or GNOME failed to
come up all I got was a text prompt on screen.

I've had the same complaint -- I remember very early on with, e.g., Windows NT
3.51 if something went wrong with the video driver the machine might just
crash, but for many years now if Windows can't load the "proper" video driver,
it just uses "generic VGA" mode and at least still gives you a desktop.

Happily, the most recent versions of some distributions (like Ubuntu :-) ) now
take the same approach. Why it took them nearly a decade to implement this is
beyond me, although of course when it's 99+% volunteers writing the software,
prioritization of work perhaps has a larger disconnect with "what the public
wants" than with payware such as Windows.

I was just not willing to plough through 500 pages of manual learning Unix
command line i/f from scratch.

You can get reasonably familiar with *NIX command lines in probably no more
than 25 pages. However, the trick is then knowing which configuration files
to mess around with (a common Windows problem as well) -- and their formats:
Unlike Windows, where 95+% of configuration information is either in the
registry, .inf, or .xml files, in *NIX there are many, many dozens of
different configuration file formats, and while you can often just "figure
out" the format by looking at them, it's still more work than just firing up,
e.g., regedit. Additionally, not all programs use standard parsers (as
Windows provides for the registry and .inf files), having just hacked some
little parser together on their own, so programs are still somewhat fragile if
their configuration files aren't exactly what's expected. X11's configuration
file, Xorg.conf, will still crash the X server (GUI) and dump you back to text
mode if you do something as seemingly benign as forgetting double quotes
around an argument. :-(

Realistically, if you're buying a machine that already has all the hardware
setup from the likes of Apple, Dell, *NIX and Windows both work just fine. If
you're setting up a machine yourself, from scratch, the average *NIX machine
still takes a lot more effort than the average Windoze machine.

But try out, e.g., Ubuntu Hardy Heron, released back in April... it's pretty
good.

---Joel


.

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    ... I've had the same complaint -- I remember very early on with, e.g., Windows NT ... You can get reasonably familiar with *NIX command lines in probably no more ... the trick is then knowing which configuration files ... to mess around with -- and their formats: ...
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  • Re: Microsoft tries to polish a turd
    ... I've had the same complaint -- I remember very early on with, e.g., Windows NT 3.51 if something went wrong with the video driver the machine might just crash, but for many years now if Windows can't load the "proper" video driver, it just uses "generic VGA" mode and at least still gives you a desktop. ... You can get reasonably familiar with *NIX command lines in probably no more than 25 pages. ... However, the trick is then knowing which configuration files to mess around with -- and their formats: Unlike Windows, where 95+% of configuration information is either in the registry, .inf, or .xml files, in *NIX there are many, many dozens of different configuration file formats, and while you can often just "figure out" the format by looking at them, it's still more work than just firing up, e.g., regedit. ... Additionally, not all programs use standard parsers, having just hacked some little parser together on their own, so programs are still somewhat fragile if their configuration files aren't exactly what's expected. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
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