[oclug] Good Point

[James Leigh]

[ so new points at the bottom ]

On Wed, 21 Mar 2001 22:12:31 Jon Earle wrote:
> > past year.  Anyone remember what a PITA Gnome 1.0 and KDE 1.1 were?
> 
> And still are?  Still too bloated and unstable and slow on "old" hardware
> like, oh, say a Pentium 233 (on which Windows 95 and NT 4.0 and Solaris
> 2.6 run quite nicely).

True, very true.  I have had similar experience.  I also know that win ME
cost about $300 and for that same price I can get a new Duron and
motherboard.  To me it is like this, you can have your win ME on a P233 or
for the same price have Gnome or Kde 750DURON and a linux server to boot. 
What is the problem here?  The choice is clear.

> > He also goes on to give the time-worn bitch about
> > not being able to open MS word documents.  I've been able to open both
> MS
> > word documents in Abiword, and Excel documents in Gnumeric for the past
> > three or four months. 
> 
> 3 or 4 months is not very much time, given how long Word has been
> around.  People want to be productive... NOW.

Two things, 1) Applixware has been able to read MSDoc for a while now, at
least since 4.x ('97) that over four years.  So do not complain about not
being able read/write msword docs. 2) Now that Abiword and StarOffice can
read MSDoc every one can NOW read them with their windows friends.

> > Then hardware drivers...  People just write those themselves.  I
> haven't
> > seen anyone wait for vendors to port their products to linux.
> 
> I have no idea how to write hardware drivers.  I must wait for vendors to
> port their products to Linux.

Just pointing out that vendors usually do not port to linux and when they
do it is not always the best.  The way it has always worked is that linux
developers build a driver that interests them and this feeds the community.
 Linux my not get those drivers as fast as windows does, but I would rather
wait and get a GPL driver then a proprietary one.

> > be a useful feature.  Linus works on stuff that's important to him,
> just
> > as everyone else does. 
> 
> Perhaps, and that may be why the author is bitching the way he is.  I
> also
> think that Linux desktop support sucks.  There are simply no equivalents
> for Eudora or Agent, very popular Windows based email and news
> clients.  Netscape doesn't run as nicely on Linux, and the plugins number
> far fewer.  PPP is more work to setup than dial-up networking, the fonts
> are still ugly as sin (and the truetype engine once running doesn't hit
> them all - many apps [incl Netscape] have fonts that don't seem to be
> affected by the font engine), X widgets such as buttons, etc are often
> much larger and/or more funny looking than Windows, and the whole X
> experience is just not as "slick" as Windows.
> 
> Yeah, I like my slick looking desktop.  I like my PC to be easy to use. 
> I
> like to simply click once or twice to accomplish a task (esp when I'm
> just
> farting around on the 'net).  I want what Windows offers, but without the
> inherent instability of the OS.  I don't always want a text based tool (I
> want those for backup/standby).

It is obvious you have never used GNOME or KDE.  My mother know more about
GNOME then you do, and she is helpless with anything that has to do with a
shell.  I have been using GNOME since 1.0 and it is amazing how much they
have pulled linux away from _having_ to use the shell.  I really believe
that given the right distro. and with the right hardware you could
install/use GNU/Linux without ever having to enter a command at the shell. 
With debconf it asks all the question you would need, including Xconfig and
any fine tuning that would need to be done in config files can be done from
gedit (X text editor for gnome).  Any windows uses would be jealous of
nautilus.  Here is a file managers that does everything and more windows
explorer _says_ it can do in ME.
  In my opinion the graphics for Nautilus and GNOME are of very high
quality, I would rather look at them then win95 16colour graphics any day,
having not seen much of ME's graphics.
  I also wanted to point out the Netscape(4.76) is dead.  Mozilla is all I
use now and this summer Mozilla is lined to have version 1.0 out.  All the
problems of netscape's mouse scrolling, font problem, etc.. have all be
fixed by mozilla.  I personally use galeon's tab browsing.  I could never
leave this new "tab" browsing.  I do not remember how I did without it.
  I also wanted to just point out that a KDE/GNOME can compete with a
windows/Mac multimedia desktop.  The latest avifile can play
avi/divx/asf/mpeg movies in linux on >500MHz PC and lokigames has brought
some of the greatest games to linux such as Unreal, SOF, Heretic, Heavy
Gear, Myth, and more.
  My final point is that any one use says they do not use GNU/Linux as
their desktop because they are afraid of a shell commands have not see the
latest KDE/GNOME.  It is as simple as that.  The Linux desktops are
maturing at a very fast rate, when will you join?

simply amazed at gnome,
james