YMMV, but MY Linux desktop stinks

On Jan 9, 2004, at 6:37 AM, Craig White wrote:

> I never suggested that he would refuse to help.

I think in your zeal to confront distro chauvinism, you did come across
that way. I notice I'm not the only one to have that impression.

> ----
>>> 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.
> ----
> I suppose that the insinuation in my comment is clear. The truth of the
> matter is that much of the system administration can be handled on
> virtually any Linux or BSD distro with webmin - much like SuSE's YAST.
>
> The dark, dirty secret of Linux is that like UNIX, the GUI tools
> distance the administrator (which on a home machine is also the user)
> from understanding what is actually happening and what steps he can do
> to fix his problems.
>
> For example, let's say that you want to change the name of a computer
> in
> Linux - or for that matter Windows 2000. I would no more want to fire
> up
> YAST or in Red Hat - neat (network hardware administrator) that go to
> the periodontist. From cli it takes me all of 20 seconds to edit
> /etc/sysconfig/network and restart the network daemon. If I am
> uncertain
> of what I am doing, I can cp /etc/syconfig/network
> /etc/sysconfig/network.orig and have a backup before I edit. If I goof,
> I can put the original back easily. This process extends itself easily
> with all configuration files, they are simply text and I can even
> comment the lines to myself. No hunting down
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE_\SYSTEM\CURRENT_CONTROL_SET\WINDOWS\NETWORK in the
> registry.

This argument seems very confused to me. How the system stores state
information and how the user accesses that information are orthogonal.
One could make a version of RegEdit that looks a lot like Emacs of vi.
That wouldn't fix any of the Windows registry. Those problems stem
from poor data base design. Likewise one could write a GUI version of
crontab and it wouldn't break crontab or make the underlying mechanism
less accessible to the user. And the GUI could also do backup and
simple consistency checking.

Please don't misunderstand. There are good arguments for using zsh or
tcsh for many tasks. I just think that they are not the best tool for
*every* person for *every* job. (bash is pure evil. It should never be
used ;-) )


[little snip]

> ----
> Here's one thing that's wrong with that. Newbie gets distro packaged in
> book about Linux and installs it. Stumbles upon PLUG and says hey, I
> got
> this older version of Linux in a book and can't get something to work
> and asks for help. Answer, wipe it out and install this, it works
> better. So now he has invested more time getting nowhere and it maybe
> solves original problem, introduces a new problem and doesn't track
> with
> the book that he has.

But it's a tiny investment. A basic install takes what, half an hour to
45 minutes if all goes well? And most of that time you can be reading a
book or doing something else productive. The actual time taken out of
your life is probably under 3 minutes. And it might solve all the
problems.

My point, however, is not that blindly trying distros is *good* advice.
I'm saying merely that it was sincere advice based on the posters'
personal experience.

> Perhaps he wanted to get familiar with Red Hat to prepare for using
> Oracle and now, he has switched to SuSE because his nVidia card didn't
> give him the depth or resolutions that he was looking for. Did we
> really
> do this person a favor by switching him?

Perhaps. Only he knows unless he tells us. I think he was just a
troll. I think he should try Gentoo purely because it takes longer to
install so he would have more to whine about if it didn't work.

> ----
>> 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.
> ----
> tone is subjective

Indeed it is. It is easy to come across as more confrontational then
you intend. I certainly have on several occasions. Suffice it to say
that I, and apparently a few others, were surprised by your posts. They
seemed out of character.

> I'm avoiding the characterizations but you cannot
> miss the base construct that I've been trying to make - that try my
> distro is only the answer sometimes. It is like going to the doctor and
> getting symptomatic treatment and not ever dealing with the root cause
> of the problem in the first place. It allows the doctor to spend 5
> minutes with the patient, write a prescription and bill the insurance
> company.
>
> OK Linux newbie...You want help getting Linux to work with your nVidia
> card...get SuSE, it has more nVidia drivers built-in. Surely a whole
> lot
> easier than telling the newbie how to download and install the drivers.
> Surely a whole lot easier than telling the newbie that the reason those
> drivers aren't included is because they aren't open source. Why bother
> a
> newbie with the details of open source or non-open source when all they
> want is for the stuff to work? Why? Because if you actually understood
> the issues, it is precisely because it is open source and that is why
> they are installing Linux.

We simply don't know that unless he tells us. People have many reasons
for using Linux and I suspect, without having real data, that the
belief that one form of software license is inherently 'better' somehow
than another is among the least of them.