How do you feel about Linux

[fryke]

I've installed Fedora Core 2 on an AMD Athlon 900 MHz a few weeks ago. Installation was a snap - and shorter in time than WinXP. Setup was a breeze and the 'basic things' like web surfing, sending and receiving E-Mail, autoupdating as well as writing with OpenOffice.org's Writer application was all done very, very easily. Now if only _those_ were the only purposes for a computer, the world'd be a fine linux place to live in. No need for anything else. No need for faster computers, either. But: That's not how the world evolves...

Still: People who claim installation of linux is difficult have either got _very_ strange, very old or very new hardware, because with more or less common hardware, everything's just fine and dandy...

[texanpenguin]

With the exception (perhaps) of FC (1 & 2) with Gnome, I despise Linux.

All the perfectly good Dell Opterons at Uni run RedHat 9, since it's free. I choose to use the Gnome WM because KDE was so ugly and unintuitive, and because I hate Konqueror.

These machines routinely will lock up during simple, ordinary, usual tasks (writing C++ code [not compiling or running, WRITING] in nedit), and will refuse to restart until you reinstall the operating system. This is such a problem that the boot manager "Rembo" has two options: Boot Linux, Reinstall Linux. Keep in mind these machines don't get much of a beating. They don't do much. Yet they fail repeatedly.

And these are STOCK DELLS. They're about the most supported hardware you can get in Linux.


So aside from its horrible reliability (despite what everyone else seems to think), there's the issue of its inconsistent and illogical ergonomics. It's all over the place. On occasion, windows will allow you to make them active, and yet not bring them infront of other document windows of the same program. Simple GUI ideas that appear in every operating system aren't there anymore. In gFTP, the connect button is in the most illogical place in the world. People read screen elements (primarily) left to right. So they put the elements in the order "Connect", "Server", "Log-on Details", "Server Settings". What the hell was going on there? Seriously?

I know it comes from the concept of collaborative projects, but to me, it's just a reason to HATE collaborative programming projects. The ones that make it to OS X are, gladly, refined and usable (Mozilla, etc), but so many are tragic.

I've tried to install a simple program once on Linux. I followed the readme (on the site's website) to the letter, but it didn't work. So I went to the program's forum. I asked "why doesn't this work? It keeps telling me such and such isn't valid?" And they say "Well, naturally you need to install * and * and * libs" - the accumulative size of which was well in excess of 40 megs. A 200K program became 40.2MB (which, on dialup, is stupid).

Not to mention that the whole system runs badly and awkwardly, like my regular distaste for its handling of alpha-transparency in the Terminal, and that it all looks pathetic, even with good Window themes.


Fedora Core looks and runs nicely when it's set up right for the computer it's on though, but I still wouldn't use Linux as a primary operating system, ever.

I like Windows (most of the time), I like Mac OS (all of the time), but I despise Linux. I'd prefer to use a BSD shell than use any of the awkward interfaces I've used on Linux. Although Gnome is somewhat usable (unlike KDE which makes me want to eat my own feet instead of sitting at the computer)

[Jeffo]

I, personally, have never seen linux be that unstable. sounds to me like something in the setup or faulty hardware. i doubt it would be faulty hardware if all of them do it though.