Jealous See

[xav0989]

I'm having fun following this thread...

You should participate then!
Just following is not as fun as being in the heat of the discussion!

[debio264]

Same here, although I would like to say in Linux's defense that most of our users aren't like ichwar.
Linux is a solid OS that's useful for many things, but it's not for everyone.

And ichwar, you need to figure out that Ubuntu != Linux. It's been 5 years since I touched apt-get, and I'm quite happy to be using a different and, I think, far superior package manager.
Oh, and you can't always install things with a package manager, so in many cases I make my own packages. In Debian/Ubuntu, I don't think that's really an option for the average user.

[zen-r]

At last we have some common sense prevailing! Thank you debio264, & others.

Personally, I can see the merits of Linux in it's current form, & all the potential it has to offer for the future.

It's just that, as I had tried to explain to ichwar earlier, it doesn't mean that Linux is right for everyone - either in terms of ease of use or, as in my case, in terms of justifying the time/cost in converting, transfering & relearning a new system.

And for all Window's faults, it doesn't deserve to be so lazily ridiculed by ichwar. Not only does Windows provide a very functional & diverse platform for current users, but it has also helped enormously in the development of the home PC industry.

[debio264]

The spiel I normally give to the "Everyone Should Use Linux" people is that Linux isn't for everyone because it isn't as user friendly. When something breaks, it's seriously broken, and because a linux desktop environment is built on several hundred components, you need to have a good idea of how everything works to fix anything. The Ubuntu people have at least partially succeeded in making that less of a problem, but it's still there. When the Ubuntu "automagical" GUIs and scripts get out of sync with the underlying config structure, bad things happen.

With Windows, your system is an enormous black box that's very difficult to understand, but Microsoft has set everything up so understanding is necessary only in the rarest circumstances. Pretty much anyone can install and use Windows, and the learning curve will be pretty short because all the complicated "computer stuff" that makes everything work is thoroughly hidden from the user in such a way that it just doesn't matter.

There are exceptions to both of these assertions, but 90% of the time, this is how the Linux vs Windows OS experience goes. Linux is for people that want their computer to woth a certain way or that want their computer to be based on free/open source software. Windows is for anyone; Microsoft has succeeded in that arena.

On a side note, this post was written from Firefox within the Gnome desktop on Arch Linux, and I just noticed that when I press R, the scroll lock engages, and when I press W, it disengages. Well, it did a minute ago. Now it isn't doing it anymore. I'll have to Google it, because I have no idea how that can happen.

[Brandon]

On a side note, this post was written from Firefox within the Gnome desktop on Arch Linux, and I just noticed that when I press R, the scroll lock engages, and when I press W, it disengages. Well, it did a minute ago. Now it isn't doing it anymore. I'll have to Google it, because I have no idea how that can happen.

Were you pressing any other keys than "R"?

[debio264]

Were you pressing any other keys than "R"?

No, and the only thing I can think of that's odd is that I have both a PS/2 and a USB keyboard connected right now. I was literally typing "wrwrwrwr" and watching the light turn on and off.

Oh, and I had to write this post twice because X (and my entire desktop) crashed and restarted to a login screen when I pressed enter between the last paragraph and this one. That's been going on, and it happened in both KDE and Gnome (I tried KDE 4.3 for a while but wound up switching back to Gnome). This box has moved from being my server to being my desktop in the last few weeks, so rather than figure out what's breaking, I'll probably just pull whatever files I want and reinstall. I'm not using half of the stuff on my system, and I'm too lazy to go through and delete what I don't need anymore.

[Brandon]

No, and the only thing I can think of that's odd is that I have both a PS/2 and a USB keyboard connected right now. I was literally typing "wrwrwrwr" and watching the light turn on and off.

Oh, and I had to write this post twice because X (and my entire desktop) crashed and restarted to a login screen when I pressed enter between the last paragraph and this one. That's been going on, and it happened in both KDE and Gnome (I tried KDE 4.3 for a while but wound up switching back to Gnome). This box has moved from being my server to being my desktop in the last few weeks, so rather than figure out what's breaking, I'll probably just pull whatever files I want and reinstall. I'm not using half of the stuff on my system, and I'm too lazy to go through and delete what I don't need anymore.

Yes, that would work too. What distro are you running again?

[debio264]

I'm running Arch Linux, but because of the way Arch packages things, it's very rare to find an Arch-specific problem. Unlike the Debian/Ubuntu people, we don't patch things before we package them, so bugs are generally upstream problems.

[Brandon]

I've never tried Arch before, maybe I'll give it a quick download and see if it's any better .

[debio264]

It's claim to fame is that there are no releases. You just have pacman (the package manager) update your system and you get the latest stable version of pretty much every app installed. Our current kernel version is 2.6.30.4, to show you what I mean.
There is somewhat of a penalty to stability because things do break occasionally, but that's rare, and most Arch users will tell you that the benefits of running up to date software outweigh the rare instabilities. Arch isn't a good distro for servers though. I'm in a project that's working on a stable snapshot release system for Arch that could be used on servers.
We keep it simple. The installer reboots you into a console, from which you can use pacman to install whatever desktop you want. Personally, I run Awesome (a tiling window manager) on my laptop and Gnome on my desktop.