Denial

rhurst wrote:Kiddies use Ubuntu; engineers use Red Hat; and hard-core nerds use Gentoo and Slackware.

Poor Yggdrasil. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

Anyway, real men use BSD.

I don't believe technology is an end in itself. That's all.

I used Slackware for a significant time and some people in that community though that because they used this harder product they must be better. I don't believe that usage of technology makes me better than anyone else.

I prefer CBM Basic V2

rhurst wrote: Kiddies use Ubuntu

Boray wrote: Except for that Vista already IS snappier than Ubuntu

In my experience that is very far from the truth.

rhurst wrote:Kiddies use Ubuntu; engineers use Red Hat; and hard-core nerds use Gentoo and Slackware.

A good example of a statement that makes it so very difficult for Linux to be taken seriously. You realize that those silly distro arguments boil down to a person's preference of a package manager right?

Package managers? Bloody luxury! When I was young we had to manage our own dependancies and that's the way we liked it!

Ian Colquhoun wrote:

rhurst wrote:Kiddies use Ubuntu; engineers use Red Hat; and hard-core nerds use Gentoo and Slackware.

A good example of a statement that makes it so very difficult for Linux to be taken seriously. You realize that those silly distro arguments boil down to a person's preference of a package manager right?

Note quite. There's also the question of which programs get installed by default, customizations to config files, custom config tools, number of programs available from the repositories, tweaks to the kernel, default desktop manager, and on and on... I'd say that the package manager is of very little concern, at least to me.

I use Kubuntu because I prefer KDE, I like the friendly atmosphere in the Ubuntu forums and how easy it is to get help thanks to the large number of users, and it's got all the programs I need and more. Plus it's easy to install and maintain. Since I started with Linux in the late 90's I've gone through Red Hat, Mandrake, Gentoo, Best Linux, Slackware, and probably a couple of others and I've frankly never cared much about the package manager. Except for Gentoo, which doesn't have one

I suppose rhurst's comment was a bit tounge-in-cheek, but there's some truth to it because of the reasons above.

Then again, just because you're an expert at doing something doesn't have to mean you enjoy doing it a lot, much more than you otherwise would have need to do. That is a comment on package manager vs manually getting all the mundane software you need, or even compile everything from scratch as you go.

As much as I like the idea of Linux over Windoze I have found too many times too many hurdles and when looking for help on forums I have, in the main, found people to be obtuse and a little arrogant.

As an example I wanted to play a game called DooM RL (Doom roguelike). I downloaded the files from the site and tried to get it to run on my Ubuntu installation (I chose Ubuntu as it was recommended as a good entry point for beginners). Lo and behold, I couldn't get it to work at all. I signed up at the support forum (plus another one I can't recall just now) and asked for help. At best the replies were cheeky and it worst just downright smug. One response actually said I obviously wasn't clever enough and should go back to Windoze! Suffice to say I banged my head against the wall for a while and eventually gave up. This is just one example...I have many more!

I then downloaded the Windoze version of DooM RL, clicked the icon twice and then started playing the game...

As unstable, bug ridden and slow as Windoze is sometimes it's just easier to do things on - I have never once had to update repositories or had to worry about different flavours of the same file that may upset my particular distro of Windoze just to play a simple game...

Just for the record, I hate Bill & Co and this is not a Windoze fanboy post. It's just my experience.

I am actually seriously considering going back to Amiga OS now that PrBoom and Vice are up to date on it...

I used to be more critical to Windows ten years ago than I am today. Back then I was still struggling with my old Amiga, had terrible memories of Windows 3.1 and 95 and saw Microsoft had a long way to go. But as far as I can tell, since Windows 2000 and forwards it pretty much has been a stable product. Yes, I know it has weaknesses, sometimes security holes and other things but compared to the products offered in the 1990's it is a whole different game.

I have also tried Linux, and think it is excellent for servers. Web servers, ftp, mail, even video streaming. But when it comes to desktop, there is much to be done. Even the beginner friendly distros tend to come to a point where things get difficult to do, and obtaining new software is a matter in itself. I once had my whole X Windows setup trounced by Debian during an apt-get update, partly because my current choice of window manager had changed its license since the last Debian release and thus promptly was removed from the distribution. Removed in this case really means removed, the update program removed the files from my hard disk without asking me for permission! You can say very many nasty things about Windows, but the Windows Update program probably never removes legal user installed software just because Microsoft thinks it doesn't adhere to their political views anymore.

That said, I do have a Linux desktop partition on one of my home computers, soon to be both of them. There are some pieces of hardware and software that has better support in Linux than Windows, so I boot into it whenever I need to run those programs, just like several of you would do the opposite whenever you need to run a Windows program not suitably executed in WINE or other form of virtualization.

But to each their own. If you require to in theory have total control of every byte of software running on your CPU, and find joy in setting up a lot of things by yourself, I suppose any Linux or *BSD distribution is the right choice. If you are lazy, for most part trust Microsoft and rather get things done without knowing exactly how they are done, some kind of Windows is good enough. I suppose for those Macintosh users, OSX falls somewhere inbetween the two, based on mostly free software but with layers of highly proprietary code.

all a man need in life is a good child-bearing wife and Norton Commander.

Luzur wrote:all a man need in life is a good child-bearing wife and Norton Commander.

Er, and a Vic 20...

I split the rest of this thread to this one:
http://sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bul ... php?t=4238

Jeff-20 wrote:anyone using 7?

Yes.

So far so good (knock on wood).

I was going to upgrade to 7 but have decided to spend another couple of quid and plump for a Mac Mini with OS X and MorphOS on it. As long as I can browse the 'net, play zDooM and run Vice I'll be pretty happy.