Linux was not up to snuff until recently.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Nunix Sep 06, 2005 8:02 AM EDT |
We can go on about 'potential' benifits but the reality is that KDE 3.3 was not upo to snuff.and KDE 3.4 finally is as well as distros now reading hardware properly. In the 90's the Linux community was unrealistic and it didnt compete with the Windows desktop as in user freindliness. Sure their was 'potential' there but that is not solid reality. |
| phsolide Sep 06, 2005 2:21 PM EDT |
Quoting:In the 90's the Linux community was unrealistic and it didnt compete with the Windows desktop as in user freindliness. Rubbish. The famed Windows "user friendliness" and "intuitiveness" was only and solely a result of the monopoly status of Windows: almost every fool trade rag reporter and nitwit BASIC prorammer had used it. In the 90s, MSFT released the utterly bogus Windows 3.11 which was no peach for users, and NT 3.0, which had an "interface" modeled after that of 3.11. Remember "progman"? Why did you WIndows Morons need a separate browsers for files and programs? In the 90s, MSFT released Windows 95, whose "user friendliness" led to the enormous plagues of viruses and email viruses we still suffer from today. That's fake "user friendliness", my friend. Anyone who didn't come from a solid, Windows/MSFT only brainwashed background DID NOT find Windows "user friendly". They found it incomprehensible. I've never owned a Windows box until my wife bought a Windows 98 Gateway in 1999. Horrible, misgrouped, poorly-labeled menuing system on top of a mishmash of 16 and 32-bit code. How Windows 95 and Windows 98 managed to even stay up, much less acquire their reputation for ease of crashing is beyond me. Don't even start down that path: the road to Windows "user friendliness" is paved with the incomprehensiblity of "shortcuts", "progman", drive letters, backslash vs slash confusion, shot path names, "long file names" vs 8.3 file names, the pitiful design of Win32, endless buffer overflows, email worms, MSFT corporate conviction for illegal monopoly maintenance, a bad case of the Jaggies, and a lot of other crap. |
| lordshipmayhem Sep 06, 2005 6:16 PM EDT |
>>How Windows 95 and Windows 98 managed to even stay up, much less acquire their reputation for ease of crashing is beyond me. |
| tadelste Sep 06, 2005 7:27 PM EDT |
Hold on. I managed to get plenty of work done on text based terminals hooked to S/390's; VAX -VMS; R-6000's; System 32-38's; HP-UX; Apple Mac's etc. Linux provided a pretty decent experience too. In the 90's Linux users were unrealistic? I guess if all one knew was DOS and Windows you could say that. But then, I would say that people limited to DOS and Windows in the 1990's could not really call themselves IT professionals. Wannabe's maybe. IBM PC's in the 1990's were expensive toys with some limited functionality. But they definitely were not enterprise ready. That's my story and I'm stickin to it! |
| Tsela Sep 07, 2005 1:52 AM EDT |
Windows user-friendly? I completely agree with phsolide and tadelste here: except for people who have only ever known Windows, it cannot be considered user-friendly. And don't you remember the months it took you before you got used to the quirky Windows interface the first time you used it? My partner, after four years of using Windows, is *still* not used to it. How can you call that user-friendly? There is a difference between user-friendliness and the force of habit. Moreover, what one might find user-friendly may not be user-friendly to the other. It all depends on one's experience. My experience with computers began at a time when computers were not shipped with a graphical OS but with a BASIC interpreter which took that place. Having learned to use computers using a keyboard and no mouse, I still have no problem going to the command line when needed, and the command line *is* user-friendly, to me. That's the big problem about those talks about user-friendliness: it all depends on the user, and it is often confused with force of habit. |
| number6x Sep 07, 2005 2:43 AM EDT |
No one is born with the knowledge of what an "A:\" or a "C:\"drive is any more than they are born with the knowledge of what "/dev/hda" has do do with a computer. These things are not intuitive and they must be learned. The guis developed for people to use these systems are not intuitive. I used to own an apple IIgs. Yes, an apple II, not a mac. If I put a cd in the cdrom of the IIgs, a little icon of a cd would appear on the screen. I intuitively knew the cd icon on the screen somehow represented the cd in the drive. That is intuitive. The Apple IIe I owned before the IIgs was command line only, not intuitive, but a nice little computer. Apple did a good job of developing an intuitive gui for the apple II line. Of course, one of the ways to eject the cd on the IIgs was to drag the icon to the trash can. This was not intuitive. kde and gnome still seem to be concentrating on developing their feature set, but both have a strong drive to make their gui's more intuitive. |
| Tsela Sep 07, 2005 5:13 AM EDT |
number6x: Funny, this story about the little icon that appears on your screen when you put a CD in is exactly how both KDE and Gnome behave (at least on my computer ;) ) when you do the same (you get the same thing when you plug in a USB-key too, but you get a different icon :) ). And the funny part is that I read comments on Internet of people finding that behaviour annoying and unintuitive! They apparently prefer the behaviour of Windows, where when you plug in a USB-key one of three things can happen, apparently at random: - an Explorer window appears somewhere with the contents of the key. Not a bad behaviour I must say, although I prefer the icon thing, less intrusive (when I plug in a USB-key I don't always want to see its contents immediately). - nothing appears, but a new letter appears in the list available in My Computer. Already more unintuitive. - nothing happens at all. "user-friendliness" at its best I suppose! ;) |
| number6x Sep 07, 2005 10:12 AM EDT |
Tsela, I'm usually working on my debian install. It has been updated and upgraded many times through apt. I still mount my cdroms at the command line. I'll google to see how to set gnome up to do that, thanks. I have a suse 9.2 install on this machine as well, and KDE does just as you say. I guess I haven't used suse enough to notice that before you pointed it out. Thanks again. The people who think that the one-to-one relationship between inserting media, and having an icon that looks like the media appear on the screen is not intuitive need to get their definitions of 'intuitive' checked out. It may not be what they have learned to expect happen in their current desktop, but it is very intuitive. |
| SFN Sep 07, 2005 10:40 AM EDT |
"I'm usually working on my debian install. It has been updated and upgraded many times through apt. I still mount my cdroms at the command line. I'll google to see how to set gnome up to do that, thanks." number6x, This is just a guess as I have not tried it on Debian proper. In Ubuntu, to get this to happen outside of Gnome (that is in Fluxbox, XFCE4 and Enlightenment so far), I had to install gnome-volume-manager. Just installing that then making sure it ran on startup did the trick. |
| TxtEdMacs Sep 07, 2005 12:57 PM EDT |
I do not know what you guys are running, but from what began as Debian Sarge that was morphed by Testing and Unstable (with some screwups with extra video players that did not quite work out) I have been seeing the "Audio Disc" icon pop up for a long time. Moreover a player appears, with the name of the album including selection details of the track that begins playing. However, please note I am running Gnome 2.10.2, which was not the starting default version available with Sarge. Furthermore, if I right click on the icon a menu with a number of options appears including eject. One problem I noticed: the disc icon sits on top of the Deer Park Firefox icon that was there first. |
| SFN Sep 07, 2005 1:22 PM EDT |
"I have been seeing the "Audio Disc" icon pop up for a long time." Is that just audio discs or anything you pop into the CD/DVD drive? Also, what about USB drives? |
| TxtEdMacs Sep 07, 2005 2:34 PM EDT |
It's locked up right now, but if memory serves me I think I see a disk like icon whenever I insert a disc into either my built-in CD (writable) or DVD ROM drives. |
| Tsela Sep 07, 2005 11:42 PM EDT |
I am using Debian unstable (installed as Debian Sarge), and this icon pop-up has been there from the very beginning. I basically have the same installation as TxtEdMacs then. SFN: with me it works with data disks too, both when I put them in my internal DVD and DVD-rewriter drives. I haven't tried DVDs yet. And it works with USB-keys too at least. |
| SFN Sep 08, 2005 5:20 AM EDT |
So it sounds like gnome-volume-manager is running by default on Sarge. Very cool. |
| TxtEdMacs Sep 08, 2005 3:26 PM EDT |
SFN - finally got my DVD drive to work again, just like the CD-Writable with the icon a bit lower on the screen but still on top of the Deer Park Firefox (anyone see the beta yet?). |
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