I have not to go back to anytime to manage my system from command line. I'm
doing it right now. Besides I was 13 on the 80s, watching TV was the most tech
experience I had at that time.

People here should stop thinking everyone should learn to do stuff on pc manually. I always think about my grandma, if she had to mount her stuff manually I think she would die trying. Even Windows might be difficult to her (she has a book with a lot of pictures teaching step-by-step how to: copy a file, move a file, rename a file, etc). Anyways, not everyone is as geeky as we sre here.

We have computers to help us automate repetitive tasks like mounting removable media. But a common fallacy is that the only way to do this has to be an opaque and complicated one and it must happen secretly behind your back, otherwise it is supposedly not "easy to use".

That is what the desktop-foo and haldisks-bar maintainers try to suggest: "You don't like our ubercomplex, undocumented and source-configured framework doing dark magic? Then just do 'mknod /dev/foo && mount /dev/foo' manually. There is no other way, you want it so!"

What is a Linux desktop ecosystem worth, if it is not able to get even a triviality like device-mounting done right for once and leave stuff that just works alone?

Further reading on this: http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/...oss-for-linux/

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OMG!
there is full of old farts!
if without joking, i be only dreaming to have that active mind and memory in 60+.
i about 37 or 38 y.o, but even at this age i have a problems with memory, remembering and concentration,sadly...
see first computer about an age of 15 or so on - in our school start to make a "computer class" - there are a BK-0010 machines, and general computer was DVK-series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVK

it was happy times. and then, about after 3 or 4 years there is start of speccy-revolution - spectrums, who normal people can afford. about in 1992 or so on i purchased my first spectrum 48k clone.
http://old.computerra.ru/vision/606586/
http://habrahabr.ru/post/150684/

I mostly use KDE, but use XFCE and the other DEs/WMs now and then for a change.

Thanks for the compliment.

I've read again what you wrote here. There is something I am not able to
*relate*. Are you calling voodoo to hack your system scripting i.e. Slackware
rc files and comparing it with Windows registry? That is in clear
contradiction with your assumption that Slackware is "transparent" in the sense
it easy to know what happens behind the scene.


OT: Do not link to me that iguru site. He plainly censored one comment I did
on his blog.

You're trying to ally with tronayne to put him against me too. ;-)

Maybe because English is not my native language, I understood quite the opposite.

Don't take me wrong. I've said +50 "non tech". Because a +75 familiarized
with computers can do it better than you. I assume this is a Slackware forum,
not some Mary's Kitchen blog.

Besides, experience, till now, says that adapting a Unix-like OS to the masses
doesn't give a happy result. Have you used MacOSX? Specially if that mutation
end depriving the real beauty of Unix to *every one*. It's not an elitist wish
of mine, I think that is good to count with different OSs for different uses
that a lot of OSs competing for the same market's place then doing all the same
and doing it mediocre.

You're looping the loop. I quit.

Yes, I understood the same like you at fist glance with my native quechua. But I never assume I fully understand what others say (specially their aim ;-)).

Heh-heh. Yes. I highly recommend it. Some bells, not all of the whistles.

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From what I've seen from my friends and my family most people are like my grandma. They don't know much about computers and it is particularly hard for them to learn even if they want to. My grandma is trying but whenever she has a problem with her PC she struggles to explain what is happening, it is too confusing for her. Might be because of her age (arpund 70). Anyways, most people don't seen to care much about what is going on their machines (init systems, registers, logs, graphical sytem) and/or don't understand. They see a PC as a tool and they use it like that. Asking for any of these people to edit scripts, mount their stuff manually, etc would sound like an alien thing to do.

A few weeks ago a friend asked if I would help her get a new computer; her old one, ten or so years old, XP, not much RAM, was giving up the ghost and she didn't want to try to update.

I didn't even suggest Linux -- went shopping at Staples, found a Dell box with Win7, 4-core Xeon, 8G RAM, and a terabyte drive(!). Came with keyboard and mouse, selected a Samsung LED display, selected a router (she was also getting satellite service), selected an APC UPS (her old one's battery wouldn't hold a charge).

OK, Peggy, if you're ready, let's go shopping.

Point to the computer, point to the Samsung and an Acer LCD next to it (same price on sale), pointed to the router (when the grandkids come, they'll be able to use their wi-fi stuff, Peg), pointed to the UPS.

You OK with all this?

Yup.

Throw the boxes in the pickup, head to her house, up and running in about an hour. Spend a little time explaining the subtle (and some not-so-subtle) differences between WinXP and Win7. Happy camper: Golly, this thing is fast (well, yeah, it is, even with Windows).

Removed the expensive anti-virus introduction package, installed Microsoft Security Essentials. Removed other crap, shut of auto-start stuff.

Installed OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird. Got her gmail account (she was running with dial-up and used the ISP mail, no more of that). She likes the separate mail application, so Thunderbird. She never liked IE, so Firefox (Gee, this is really nice!). Her husband is the township supervisor and she does all the "secretarial" work for him (he doesn't touch computers). Loves OpenOffice with all the bells and whistles. Installed Adblock Plus, didn't install NoScript (it's kind of a pain for the uninitiated). Shut off the Java plug-in.

In the weeks since, exactly two questions: one about resizing images, one about why the lights are flashing really fast on the satellite modem every so often (Were you playing a game on Facebook? Uh, yeah. OK, try to avoid that sort of thing or you'll eat your 10G monthly allowance. Oh.).

Linux on that box? Maybe someday but not now. Peggy is an explorer, likes to fiddle with things, reads the instructions, pays attention to the details. But she's not ready for Linux and may never be -- you have to consider your audience -- I'd like to convert her but that's for next year, maybe, maybe not (get her used to the applications -- OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird that she actually uses -- then maybe a step in a different direction).

She's a happy, happy camper and that's a good thing.

We'll see.

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Is it really us old guys that don't feel the need for bells and whistles and eye candy? How many older people despise windows 8.x and didn't really like Windows Vista/7? How many younger people think Windows 8 is the next best thing to sliced bread? I wonder how much of it is an age thing? Or is it that us older guys grew up when all we had was a console or terminal? My first job as a programmer was on some old Sperry Univac v76 minis, and our "terminal" was a TI Silent 700 thermal printer - we didn't even have monitors. And yes, it sat right next to the card reader, and old IBM dinosaur that weighed a ton. When all you have is a console, you get pretty darn good at it. When some fancy bloated gui comes along and you know you can do it faster in a console, you stick to what works for you. I've worked with people that hate Linux for the simple reason that they don't like to use consoles. <shrug>

I don't even have a smart phone. Not that I wouldn't know what to do with one, I've just never felt the need to have one. I don't take selfies every time a pigeon flies by, I like my dumb cell phone. It makes phone calls and I can play solitary on it.

I moved to xfce when KDE 4.x came out. Why? I felt that KDE was bloated and had unnecessary eye candy and had higher resource consumption, something I discovered by doing some simple benchmarks - when I did I discovered KDE using more than twice the memory that xfce did. This isn't denigrating anyone for their choices, it was simply my observations of KDE at the time and the reason I moved to xfce. If this offends someone, then they can go right ahead and be offended for all i care. I discovered xfce and it was love at first sight.

OMG HOW DO YOU GET RID OF IT???? This has got to be the single most annoying "feature" of xfce.

And for the record, I always mount usb sticks and my mp3 player etc. manually. I mount them only when and where I want them. I hate it when they auto mount - anyone remember the bug that was around a few years ago that caused a kernel panic from time to time by simply inserting a USB stick? That got old real fast, but it went away when I moved on from the 2.6 kernel - never did find out what was causing it.

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