YMMV, but MY Linux desktop stinks

On Jan 8, 2004, at 11:12 AM, Craig White wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-01-08 at 10:37, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>> On Jan 8, 2004, at 9:25 AM, Craig White wrote:
>>
>>> you are confusing anecdotal feedback as something which truly imparts
>>> value.
>>
>> And you are confusing a direct report of a user's personal experience
>> with anecdotal evidence.
>>
>> I thought Karl's original post was clearly made with the intent to be
>> helpful. You keep trying to beat him up. Why is that? Did he shoot
>> your
>> dog?
>>
> ---
> There were two opinions - Richard who wants to tell users to use SuSE,
> Karl thinks Mandrake is the answer. I responded to both. I know I
> didn't
> say anything to 'beat him up'. Try my distro is nothing but a shot in
> the dark.

Maybe it was Richard. In any case, IIRC you speculated that if the
original person did adopt his distro and later got into trouble, he
would refuse to help. You also took him to task for not posting helpful
messages in the past. I agree that you are one of the leaders here in
posting helpful messages. That doesn't mean that others aren't trying
to be helpful to the extent of their knowledge.

> Richard's idea of maintenance is Windows/Macintosh centric which is to
> point and click it through and not have to dirty his mind via the
> command line. It's clear why he prefers SuSE (YAST).

I think that characterizes both Richard and the original poster. It's a
valid preference. Just because we don't feel that way doesn't that it's
not OK for others to feel differently.

> In both cases, there is somewhat of a reliance upon 'plug and pray' -
> hopefully there is enough proprietary drivers packaged inside the
> distro
> and sufficient auto-detection of the hardware for stuff to just work.
> If
> so, it may very well be a good choice. If not, then we have a problem.

Exactly. Trying a different distro *may* provide a very easy solution
to the problem. It costs little to perform the experiment. Both Richard
and Karl reported that this approach had worked for them. What's wrong
with them reporting that?

> Likewise with the proprietary software that's bundled in the package -
> people think that they are installing a free, open source product but
> that apparently is not the case. Personally, if I were going to use
> proprietary software for my desktop, I would probably use Windows 2000
> or XP Professional or Mac OS X.

I didn't see any evidence that any of the posters were deceived as to
the nature of the software in the packages.

> I suppose that I have gotten used to the idea of a distro not bundling
> up the proprietary license stuff (acrobat, ati & nvidia drivers, etc.)
> as part of the standard distro and thereby muddying the water of open
> source. There is much of this logic laying under this discussion that
> hasn't been addressed directly.

That is, as you say, a whole other discussion. If you have problems
with SUSE and/or Mandrake for their distribution policies, just say so.
I'm sure everybody will respect that.

> As a solution to a problem, it seems like a joke...take my
> distro...please.

I just saw it very differently. I think the original poster was
trolling. I think both Richard and Karl responded along the lines of 'I
had a similar problem and this is what worked for me.' I think they
were both trying to helpful to the best of their ability.

I happen to agree that blindly trying different distros is not the
optimum way to proceed. It just struck me as curious that your tone to
Richard and Karl was harsher than your tone to the original troll.