[wellylug] Ruminations

[Klenner, Colin]

Jamie,
Your rant about Mandrake 10 is possibly well deserved - I can only speak
from my experience.

I upgraded from Mandrake 9.1 (fully patched). The upgrade was smooth and
clean, about 35 minutes all up. A later upgrade to the full 5-disc Community
version took about the same.
I have not had a moment of instability or issue with the upgrades, and the
net reports me fully up to date from the last upgrade. Every application I
have loaded works correctly as specified.

There are only two areas that I have not figured out, but did not have
figured out before anyway, and would love to have answers to - perhaps at a
LUG meeting.
1. Dial-on-demand. I have carefully followed examples and instructions and
it does not work, completely stopping the dialler from working and requiring
a rollback of the modifications. I have a few ideas yet to find the time to
attempt.
2. Setting up a local mail server to get the mail from my ISP. OK - I am
pretty slow on the uptake and not terribly technical so I would welcome a
hand with this one. 
Neither of these are Mandrake-10 specific issues, however.

I do not play games or put a lot of pressure on the machine unless you call
having 20+ documents/10+ spreadsheets / a presentation or two open at the
same time and being printed or altered something stressful. All the machine
does is slow down terribly.

Anyway I just want to balance your experience with mine for readers.

Colin

-----Original Message-----
From: wellylug-admin at lists.naos.co.nz
[mailto:wellylug-admin at lists.naos.co.nz] On Behalf Of Jamie Dobbs
Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 10:41 AM
To: wellylug at lists.naos.co.nz
Subject: [wellylug] Ruminations


Well due to one thing and another I no longer have Linux installed on my
desktop PC at home and don't intend to reinstall for quite some time (if
ever!). The main reason for this was somehow Linux screwed up my partition
tables and I had to spend around 4 to 6 hours recovering a lost NTFS
partiiton on my second HDD that had over 8GB of important data on it. At
some stage I may try and get a second PC and try Linux as a desktop OS again
but in the meantime I'll just stick with Linux on servers and Windows on
desktops.

In my opinion Linux still has a hell of a long way to go to get to the ease
of use and setup of Windows, and until it does so it's not going to win many
desktops. Some distro's are getting there (slowly) such as Xandros and
others are taking huge steps backwards in useability and stability (esp.
Mandrake 10). My beef with Mandrake 10? Why on earth release a distro then
take away all of the update mirrors? It defies any sort of logic to me, if
you want people to use your buggy OS then for gods sake let them update to
try and make it stable and get new packages. Perhaps the real 'official'
release of Mandrake 10 (due in May?) will be better, but after 9.2 I'm not
holding out much hope. The only version of Linux I think that I'll try again
(when I get a seperate machine to trun it on) is Gentoo. It seems to be the
most stable of the up-to-date Linux versions that I've tried (I don't count
Debian as up-to-date).

So ends my rant for today, these are my hear felt feelings and are not meant
to offend anyone but perhaps they might provoke some thoughts from some of
you regarding the future of Linux on the desktop.


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