Why Linux

[declassified]

linux will never, ever be a viable desktop solution until they have the 'one UI to hold them all and in the darkness, bind them'.

Well, the two mayor UIs (KDE and Gnome) both come with a fair amount of desktop software that is statically integrated into the project and has been tested with it and optimized to work with it.
Take SuSe or Mandrake Linux, I don't see why it wouldn't fit the desktop PC.
A friend of mine, who is absolutely alien to computers, decided to buy a PC, got Linux as his OS and learned it wihout problems.
So I guess, Linux is only hard to learn when you're addicted to the microsoft way of doing things.

[BONES]

linux will never, ever be a viable desktop solution until they have the 'one UI to hold them all and in the darkness, bind them'.

What a load of shit. Which UI would that be? For me it would be WindowMaker but you would probably prefer KDE or GNOME. Choice, the ability to have an OS that concentrates on the things you do has to be an awesome thing, surely? Don't want to use it for audio? Don't load any audio support. Don't need any networking? Don't load any of that shit either. Compile your own kernel with just the things you need and see ho wmuch faster it is than some bloated piece of one-size-fits-all shit from Micro$haft. The problem is that too many people buy a distribution with a million useless little apps and just pile 'em all on. That's missing the point.
Here's a good example - how big do you think a full-featured 3D animation and rendering application with it's own built-in games engine [i.e. you can play games in it] would be in terms of Mb of download? 50Mb? 100Mb? 200Mb? That's certainly what you get from the big commercial companies but blender3d, which runs on lots of OS's, fits onto a floppy-disc. That's because development isn't focussed on shipping upgrades and selling new licenses, it's on creating a better product. That, my friends, is the beauty of open source software.

[declassified]

Here's a good example - how big do you think a full-featured 3D animation and rendering application with it's own built-in games engine [i.e. you can play games in it] would be in terms of Mb of download? 50Mb? 100Mb? 200Mb? That's certainly what you get from the big commercial companies but blender3d, which runs on lots of OS's, fits onto a floppy-disc. That's because development isn't focussed on shipping upgrades and selling new licenses, it's on creating a better product.

Prime example!
I would have taken Gimp, but this example is a thousand times better

[BONES]

GIMP is very good but it is considerably slower than Photoshop in a lot areas whereas blender3d had high-end features like radiosity lighting solutions and sub-division surfaces long before 3ds max.

[pljones]

If you call the Suse Linux Setup assistant "bloody hard work", then I can't help ya.

Debian from scratch... last time. (Mandrake before that. SuSE cost too much.) And I don't remember the distro our 1.3.13-based system ran on... SLS, may be..?

[declassified]

Hehe...don't start out with something like Debian.

The first distro I tried was Gentoo 1.4 I wanted maximum speed and control, but i wasn't aware of the fact that I wouldn't have the guts to set it up.
I got it running several times (I printed several 20-page-guides and read them all), but never managed to get ISDN (internet) support. So I dumped it later.

Mandrake is as easy to setup as Suse.

[UltraJv]

The last distro I tried was Suse pro 9.2 It loaded support for Bluetooth which my laptop dosnt have and failed to load wifi support for the cardbus wifi which it does have. It also failed to load audio. I played around with YAST for a while to convince it that my hardware was really there but gave up. I also had to tell it I had an LCD display before it would let me use the native 1024*768 display!! It failed to load attal on my older lappy. Its not ready for the desktop yet.

[pljones]

Hehe...don't start out with something like Debian.

Absolutely! I loved it, though I had a 2.3.9x kernel running on Sid (iirc) and I think I nearly got as far as 2.4.0 before finally running out of steam on my old PC. Never got around to installing it on this one. Had been running Linux since .. well, I can't remember if we had a 1.0.x kernel, but we certainly had a 1.2.x-based system (mid '95).

[declassified]

Its not ready for the desktop yet.

I may rephrase this a bit...

Its not ready for the desktop user yet.

[UltraJv]

With patience, almost any system can be made to work. The question is - why bother? Linux offers less than Windows (waits for flames ) I still class it as geekware. Linux is an operating system, if it cant determine my hardware, its not operating properly lol

[IIRs]

Why Linux? Because it sucks - and everybody who's anybody knows that it's real fun to defend something because it's not the majority, so that you feel cool.
Just kidding - but please, flame me. Linux sucks because it's a plurality, rather than a consistent singularity - although others would argue that this is a virtue, I utterly disagree - decentralisation of user interface and standards design led to fragmented consistency of user interfaces=no desktop potential. Asides from specific projects where it's efficiency is extremely useful (rendering, high-cpu situations and security-risk scenarios (networking, obviously)), linux will never, ever be a viable desktop solution until they have the 'one UI to hold them all and in the darkness, bind them'. Until then, until programmers put away their egocentric (and usually, habit-based rather than commonsense-based) design protocols, there will never be a place for linux on my computer, or anybodie's computer I set up-
m@

Have you tried Ubuntu yet?

[nuffink]

UNIX. The next big thing since 1969.

[declassified]

Linux offers less than Windows

Can someone justify that statement?




...



Anyone?

[scandipandy]

With patience, almost any system can be made to work.

Im still waiting for windows to work.

The question is - why bother? Linux offers less than Windows

in what area , gaming or are you talking about load balancing matrix servers!

I still class it as geekware.

it ?, what distribution do you mean. There are 100 of them doing different things, from OpenOffice OS backends to bash/vi only. Some are for hitech educated research scientists, others are used for windows virus removal but the most mainstream are the OpenOffice consumer OS, and I dont think you can call them geeks for using "it".

Linux is an operating system, if it cant determine my hardware, its not operating properly lol

cmon, just down a LiveCD (knoppix, mepis ...) pop it into the CD and you have linux on any hardware running win.

[IIRs]

Linux is an operating system, if it cant determine my hardware, its not operating properly lol

Have you tried Ubuntu yet?