[wellylug] Ruminations

Wood Brent pcreso at pcreso.com
Wed Apr 14 13:06:03 NZST 2004


--- Jamie Dobbs <jamie.dobbs at orcon.net.nz> wrote:
> 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!).

Fine, your choice :-) Is that such a big deal?

> 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.

Agreed, but IMHO there has been real progress made. I also think you'll find
that if you tried to install Windows on top of a Linux system for dual boot you
might well say you'll never go near Windows again coz it trashed your hard
drive. Linux, in my experience, interoperates with other OS's on a PC much
better than anything else I've tried.

> 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? 

I think you'll find the addresses moved, nothing was REmoved & Mandrake has
apologised for the problem, which was basically one of communication. It took a
couple of days, so sorry but I don't see the big deal.

> 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).

Fine, still. Linux does offer you these choices. My
opinions/desires/experiences differ. (I'll post them in full if anyone asks-
just kidding :-)

> 
> 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.

No offence taken. 

I have found Mandrake the only distro I have installed which (generally the
commercial version, although Damon's v10 compilation was comparable) has
correctly recognised all my hardware, including TV capture, comes bundled with
virtually all the applications I want to use, including RDBMS, GIS,
visualisation, Office, TV/video watching, basic games, network/internet... 

No compilation/configuration/stuffing about required. Perfect for me because I
don't want to get into that stuff. (Although, my latest foray has required
several tarballs & compiles, which have all worked fine on Mandrake 10, despite
my inexperience/incompetence in this area) 

I've used Mandrake since v7.2 because it has done what I needed. If it failed,
I'd look elsewhere (including non-Linux alternatives). I'm not tied to
Mandrake, or Linux, but to a set of tools to do what I want to do. Prob better
described as a workstation than desktop, but not a big difference in my case.

It works well for me, so I recommend it for others. Your experiences & hence
advice may well vary.

So count me as a happy Mandrake user. Not to say Debian, Fedora, Slackware,
SUSE or whatever wouldn't do just as well, but in my case it ain't broke & I'm
not about to try & fix it :-)

Brent




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