Here is an article by Eric S. Raymond



After reading this I realized why the City of Munich is having troubles getting Linux installed as a Desktop System. No wonder Windows runs on 95% of the world's PCs and my belief is that, unfortunately, it is gonna stay that for a long time to come

Hoping to hear from all you guys on this,

I can at least sympathize with the writer. If it wasn't for this board I dont't think I would have ever been able to mount my server and printer to the printers on my windows box. I really love the text file configurations and many times the man pages are really helpfull. However, sometimes things just don't work and you have no idea why. I tend to find that the gui tools may make some things easier but they also seem to just screw some things up. As far as I can tell, there is no way to mount a network drive r/w using the KDE configuration tool with Mandrake. I finally go the entry in fstab correct with the help of several memebers of this board. But I couldn't find the answer anywhere in the man pages. I still don't know how to find out what groups a particular user is in. One of the things I don't like about the latest documentation is that they don't explain how to do things via the command line. IMHO this should be the first way the documentation explains everything and then point out that you can also us such and such graphical tool. Anyway, just my 2 cents. I love Linux but it can be a bear to configure for the newbie. I still can't access any streaming audio or video on the web but I'll tackle that another day.

I totally agree with what ESR is saying. I look at it this way. Would I put a linux computer in front of my mother (who knows how to use a computer for everyday use. ie. MS Word, IE, Outlook, photoshop, etc) and say "Have at it!!" Hell no. I'd be on 24 hr tech support on-call duty.

There is a flip side to this... Do you want to a really nice setup gui to sendmail, for instance? Do you want anybody with a computer to setup and email server? I think you'd have to many email servers from people that don't know what they are doing and know nothing about securing an email server. Of course, that statement assumes that people that setup email servers now know what they are doing and that is a false statement. I didn't know what I was doing the first time, but going through config files force me to read and learn. Then I read and learned more to get it to be more secure/efficient.

If I had an easy gui to set it up, I would have probably done it once, left it how it was, and never touched it again.

But the other side of this is that CUPS implementers got some really good advice on what they have to do to make an already extremely useful system first rate. For free. I don't really know, but I imagine MS devotes substantial resources to reviewing and testing such products. Note Raymond's postscript: "PPS, 27 Feb: Got a very positive response from the CUPS folks. At least some of these things will be fixed."

I would have to agree. It needs to be a whole lot simpler out of the box to ever have a legitimate chance to challenge Windows. I'm no huge Windows fan but it is so much easier. I have Mandrake 9.2 which is supposed to be newbie friendly and I still can't get my cd burner to work, despite all the wonderful advice from this forum. It took me 2 days just to be able to play dvd's. My onboard sound has never worked. Hell the hard drives don't even install with UDMA enabled! This should not be this difficult. This is why we moved away from cars with cranks in the front... The bottom line is 98% of the people who buy PC's don't want to screw with this kind of stuff in their free time. Unless it is made easier to use its going to stay on servers and on a few dedicated individuals desktops, and away from the mainstream. It really frustrates me because this is so many hundreds of times better than Windows.... when you have the time, patience, and IQ to make it work. Linux has sooo much potential, but it still has a lot to learn about what the average PC users want. Until it learns that it's doomed to take the back seat.

It may be difficult, but i allow you to get your freedom. It sure is much easier to be in a prison, than having to make your own decisions, but i know what i would prefer at any time

Linux, it's like milk, flour, sugar, and eggs. Not that exciting by themselves, but with a little knowledge and work, Ooohhh! what you can make.

I love having linux on my computer. It never screws up and works sweet.
I don't care if anybody else uses it or not. i don't care if they're smart enough
to figure it out or not. If i had to use windows, i'd throw away my computer.
Seriously. Use what you want. I do.

Not a question, not really Hardware either. Moving to general.

Cheers,

Finegan

LOL, In Slackware I would do this........
Kicker>System>Kuser(user manager)

then click on user>edit
and click on the groups tab
and wa la, the groups the user belongs to.........

easy peasy......have at it........

My opinion is that Linux must become more of a desktop single user OS to compete with windows because your average joe does not want or want to know how to mount drives, edit fstabs or init files, install different windows managers, compile a kernel, or any other thing that Linux has us doing (or we chose to do, LOL)
Now, what would be cool is for Linux to evolve into an easy to alter/modify system being that it is very customizable already it should be easy to create dialog boxes to do things in a gui for the user rather than have to manually alter things in a console. I see that KDE tries this but it is kind of confusing and klunky, like the floppy formatter does not work (at least mine) and several of the other KDE tools dont work.

Seem to me that ALL complaints come from former (or current) Windows users.

Yeah it's called piracy.

I only read that part and I didn't want to read anymore.

I have Mandrake running with LTSP at home, there are two people in my household whom never used a PC before and they are NOT complaining on how "Difficult" or "Hard" it is to use a computer.

They can go on-line, use a browser, get email, use Instant Messenger, write letters, print, and play games, all without any problems.
The others are now used to it, after they adjusted the menu and changed the desktop to what they wanted.

Maybe the solution is a "Live-CD"? You pick the one you like best.
I like PCLinuxOS.

h3rb1: Holy Crap! That is bookmarked for more reading later!