Re: Why I dumped Linux and Went Back to Windows.

From: Tom Shelton (tom_at_YOUKNOWTHEDRILLmtogden.com)
Date: 02/23/05 

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 21:33:01 GMT

In article <pan.2005.02.23.18.21.15.318891@NOSPAM.liamslider.com>, Liam Slider wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 22:06:07 -0500, narrows_whitefish wrote:
>
>> Linux sounded great on paper as well as listening to posts in various
>> newsgroups. So what could a person find wrong with a ton of free
>> software?
>> The short answer is it depends
>> The long answer is, most of the free software needs a lot of work to
>> become usable.
>

<snip>

>>
>> Odd since all I did was plug the printer in with Windows XP and it
>> worked.
>
> This is an outright lie, after all...Windows XP requires drivers for
> hardware too.
>

Yes, windows xp requires drivers - but many drivers are built in. For
instance, my HP932c. I plug it into XP - bing, it just works. I'm not
saying this isn't the case for Linux as well, I'm just pointing out you
don't always have to install something for them to "just work" under
windows.

>>
>> How about web browsing?
>> I used konqueror which I found out sucks.
>
> Another lie. Konqueror is very feature rich, and if you are running KDE,
> it's no system hog, running light on the resources and is very peppy.
> That's why Apple chose it to base their Safari web browser on.
>

I personally don't like Konq all that much. It's great for browsing man
pages and stuff - but I prefer firefox.

>> So I tried firefox. I quickly discovered that browsing was so slow it
>> was pathetic. A little research showed I needed to turn off IPV6.
>
> Firefox, while not as peppy as Konqueror, is certainly a nice web browser,
> and while light on features, they are easy to add-on. And while I used it
> I certainly didn't find that *browsing* was slow.
>

It seems fine for me on Gentoo. Of course, I disabled IPV6 on everything.
I have no use for it.

>>
>> Funny, I didn't have to do that with Windows. Same firefox and it works
>> great with Windows.
>
> Uh, yeah, sure.
>

Liam - I know you aren't going to believe this. I'm sure you'll call me
a liar - but I'm going to say it anyway... Firefox works much, much
better on XP then it does on Linux - at least in my experience.

>>
>> I also noticed that I could not play CD's until I created a /mnt
>> directory in which xmms would mount my audio cds.
>
> Funny how I've never had to do that. Ever. I've never once had to *mount*
> an audio CD to play it.
>

I didn't have to create the mount point either, mostly because I already
had created a /mnt/cdrom for other uses. But, I did have to tell xmms
about it. I'm on Gentoo, so I expect this sort of thing - but I would
immagine that SuSE would set this up in the default installation?

<snip>

>> I tried Openoffice, which seems to take an eternity to load even on a P4
>> machine.
>> What a dog!!
>> It seems to work ok once it loads.
>
> Certainly not slow here, but then Open Office is now considered
> tightly integrated into GNOME, and I run GNOME....so it has much more pep
> than if I was running KDE as my DE.
>

Hmmm... It doesn't seem to load any faster in Gnome for me - that's why
for general word processing I've switched to Abiword. OO is just to
slow - I still use it to open office documents on Linux though. Besides,
I thought OO2 was going to integrate into both KDE and Gnome natively.

By the way... Do you really like Gnome? Have you tried xfce4? Why
do you choose Gnome over something like xfce? I'm just curious.

<snip>

> Compile a kernel? Who does that any more?

Me. 

-- 
Tom Shelton

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