a non technical question
 

For the last year or so I got more and more annoyed by MS. I didn't like the way they do buisness. I didn't like the way XP does certain things on the internet without me knowing about it. But most of all didn't like the way their os's seemed to be designed to keep me unaware of what it is that makes my computer tick. Like I was unable to get to the heart of things, or should I say source.

I started looking for alternatives and ofcourse found Linux and the open source community. I read "the Cathedral and the Bazaar" and got really exited, because it all made perfect sense to me; cutting edge technology by the people for the people, designed and maintained by the people that use it, the profit being in using the software rather than in selling the product. So I read and read and read. I learned about amazing new concepts (to me) like kernel-tweaking, compiling software from source and customizing a system to a degree unheared of in windows. About 5 weeks ago I decided I was ready to make the jump. I had counted all the cilinders on my 120 gb harddrive, made a list of all my hardware/drivers, backed up about 30 gb of critical data (mainly mp3 and mpeg) on cd-rom and told my friends not to count on me for the next week or so.

Installing redhat 9 was so straightforward it almost made me cry (after all my preparations), all my hardware was recognized instantly and not a single bit of data was lost. So far, so good. So I mounted my windows partition, typed /mnt/win/music/alanis/supp/iwashoping.mp3 and... Minor hurdle, RH 9 does not support mp3 due to copyright issues. Fixed that whith a little bit of reading and a patch I downloaded somewhere and learned a few things about rpm's in the process, not bad all in all. After that I thought it would be a good idea to do some basic tutorials to get to know the command line (which I have come to love) so I did. But all of a sudden my system started to get unstable, taking minutes to log in and out and load programs and eventually crashing alltogether. Only to function perfectly an hour later. After this happening a few times I noticed that when ever my cable internet connection was down (I 've got a lousy ISP) my system became unstable, so I did some reading and fixed the problem by manually adding a local host to a system file (forgot wich).
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy so after that I thought it might be fun to watch a "music" video. Installed videolan and, after some reading, got it to work. VLC, in my humble opinion, is still way behind the windows media player in looks and functionality and it crashes a little too often to be really practical. So I tried mplayer, boosting support for almost all formats known to man, only to find out that its as buggy as videolan and plays files when it feels like it, not when I feel like it. So I did some reading, a little more reading, installed a few codecs and now it works reasonably well, although it still crashes from time to time, giving me prompts like: "mPlayer crashed, this shouldn't happen..." Well, duh.

A while later I needed to calculate how broke I was so I tried to open calc. (which I had happily running under windows for some time). It crashed on startup. Tried the other open-office apps, they all crashed like aeroflot planes. No info whatsoever on why they crashed, they just did. I haven't adressed this problem yet, but I'm sure I'll get them to work, eventually.
Last week a friend came by my house with an audio cd he wanted me to hear, so I put it in my cd-rom drive (first time audio cd), the cd player started running automaticly but; no sound. "A well" I thought "I'll fix that in the morning (which I did) meanwhile I'll play some mp3's" but xmms protested my soundcard wasn't ready, so I closed xmms, after that my system crashed alltogether.

Yesterday I tried to install giFT from source and let me put it this way:

I've been to dependency-hell and the devel is a package my system says I've got, and my giFT configure file says I don't.

I gave up for the time being and tried gtk-gnutella instead. It configured fine, so I run make and it looked fine (I got my prompt back, anyway) I run make-install and all is still looking fine but when I give the command, nothing happens. I checked the log and saw nothing comprehensive, only that it's supposed to build a library in /lib/ so I check and sure enough, the lib was built. I then checked my various bins but there was no gtk-gnutella, a system wide search yielded nothing, nothing at all. I found a web forum somewhere (not on this site) where someone with the same problem was told to rtfm. Well I've rtfm, and tfinfopages and at that point I was ready to Return To F* Microsoft.

I didn't ofcourse, but instead I decided to write all this down and ask all you guru's, enthousiasts and tweakers this one question:

Is it worth it?

Will all my efforts, the endless reading, the hope and the despair eventually reward me with a system that is stable, fast and totally under my control or is this the way it's gonna be forever; Fixing one problem after another to get the most basic of jobs done? Don't get me wrong here, I'm more than willing to read and learn, that's the reason I installed linux in the first place, but right now, I need to know if there's light at the end of the tunnel. Please tell me.

PS English is not my first language, so I apologise for any bad spelling.

sure, there is a light at the end of the tunnel!!!:D
GNU/Linux is just cool!

Every second you are using it, you learn a bit more, and the more you learn, the more you will find the system cool.

once you have the system configured in a way you like it, it will run without any trouble.

but, believe, in me, you will never stop to discover it, because you will love it.

Yes, it is very much worth it. Like Zmieff said: The more you learn, the more you will find the system cool.

Linux is hard to jump over to for the beginner; different and frustrating. Even the most basic things won't work in the start, and you start to ask yourself wheater it is worth it (I did...). But then, little after little, more and more begins to work.

Time goes by, and maybe you will consider to change distribution (or update to a newer release). And then it doen't work again. But now you have a lot of experience, so it isn't that hard this time. New problems seems easier and easier to fix.

See? Now you have a stable system (in Linux; bugs have a reason, the don't just popup at random like in some other OS i tried earlier :)).

So all I can say: Work, and you will not regret it...

id say, get rid of red hat, as that is more for servers i hear

i hear Slackware good

and of course its worth it, in linux for me, almost everything doesn't work right, so i tweak and look around, and compile, and tweak, and then it works right, and i don't ever have a problem with it again,

windows you have everything that might work good at start, but after a while it will break for no really good reason, in linux if it breaks then theres a reason and its not overly hard to find

Re: a non technical question
 

I can relate to the growing dislike of MS - the excitement of learning about this thing called Linux - a surprisingly easy first install, and, after that - wanting to throw your computer through a wall and set the pieces on fire. :D

Absolutely.

I dunno about all that - maybe. But if you do the reading and put in the effort, as you're obviously doing, then stable, fast, and mostly under your control: definitely. Be careful, though - if you keep at it, the idea of going back to Windows will come to fill you with more despair than you feel now, because of how much you've come to love Linux. ;)

Is it worth it?
If I were in your place I would say no.
I thought that several times (especially in the first months of using Linux) when I had similar problems.

Then I still sticked with Linux somehow, and I think I will never leave it. 'cause it worth it.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel its called slackware

Well, I finished elementry school last summer (Yes i am that young, so what???). So after I started high school, I no longer had time to tweak around GNU/Linux. So I install m$ windoze, and I just did my home work. Every thing worked, and I was happy. But it was also boring. I only used my computer for stuff, i had to do, not for fun anymore. Then I decided, that i would install GNU/Linux. Now I have to spend time, getting this computer to work, and you know what ? I enjoy it. It is ofcause still much simple with m$ windoze, but grow addicted to GNU/linux.

And yes there are light at the end of the tunnel, you can succesfully start to bash m$

i must say that i dont think slackware is the best newbies distro, but then again, which is? (an age old debate).

is it worth it, YES & 1,000 times yes. but ti will take a little more effort on your part, your are more "in control" of the system.
i also must say that ive never really been impressed w/ RH, although i like some of the distros based of it.
but i dont wan to start another "which distro..." rant, so ill end my post.

I think I see some light again, thanks for your reactions and your unanimous consent on linux. Maybe I should have added that nobody I know (in the flesh) is on linux , and I have never seen it running on a desktop computer other than my own.

It is most definitely worth it :),

very nice post btw Dowski, laughed at the Aeroflot reference :D

RH9 was the first distro I tried too, and like you it all installed fine for me only to start to show cracks after a short time. I changed to Fedora and so far (about 2 1/2 months) it has been much better.

HTH

mark

Dear All,

Its been a greatjourneyt as far as I am concerned with Mandrake 9.1. The first install was great and so has the subsequent usage. I have encounteredthe occasional dependency hell problem.

Has it all been worth the extra effort???

Can you guarantee with Windowws that when you shut it down and retire at night, that it will power down everytime and not require you to stay up to ensure that it does. I am sure not..

With Mandy.. I do just that.. cool no??