Re: Another Linux Myth Exposed - Hopeless at playing music ..

David Wright <david_c_wright@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ian Semmel wrote:



Rick wrote:
On Sat, 04 Feb 2006 23:53:30 +0000, Ian Semmel wrote:

.. compared to Windows.

It comes with about 13.5 so-called CD/Multimedia players, most of which
don't work and either crash or play with distorted sound.

If you want to re-burn everything as .ogg it amarok sort of works.
RealPlayer will play mp3 but the ui is hopeless.

Linux is still locked into Nerdland and will not make any impression on
the wider market.

Don't like it? Don't use it.


I use it :
(a) Because I get paid to write programs under it
(b) I actually want it (or something better) to succeed.

The trouble is that so many Linux adherents are just irrational when it
comes to comparing Linux to Windows. Post a message stating the obvious
like Windows is much more user-friendly and you get the usual "idiot
blah blah.." replies.

It depends on what tasks you are talking about whether Windows or Linux is
more friendly. And yes, I agree in some area Linux has to improve, but in
others Windows has some catching up to do. They aren't necessarily idiots,
but they pick areas where Linux is strong and Windows is weak and gloss
over the areas where it is the other way round.

Windows XP installation is a nightmare compared to SUSE, although Vista is
supposed to be a click a couple of buttons and leave it affair. XP also
takes forever to install. SUSE takes aroung 1 hour including patching to
install all the apps I need on my AMD64 machine. XP takes several hours to
patch just itself, then you have to start on the drivers and applications;
why you can't just download 1 set of patches and it is up to date and
requires 1 restart like SUSE I don't know, why do I need to install a bunch
of 3 year old patches so I can install the 2 year old patches, which I need
to install before I can install the 1 year old patches, which are required
before I can roll out the current patches? And just about every set of
patches requires at least 1 reboot!

In some areas Linux is more user friendly, in others it isn't. Things like
not having to worry about AV updates and personal firewalls stopping apps
phoning home for example is a very nice thing. I find Kontact/KMail a much
better mail client than Outlook 2003 - especially as it doesn't show HTML
messages translated unless you want it to, not to mention not knowing what
to do with a VBScript or Windows .exe virus...

In other areas it needs some to a lot of work to make things friendlier,
such as server daemon configuration, it is getting there gradually, Samba
and MySQL are a lot easier to administer these days through things like
Webmin and PHPMySQL etc. than they were a few years ago.

Linux is changing, but it will only be through its development being
integrated more into the corporate world eg RedHat and Novell. At the
moment there is no real incentive for commercial packages to be
developed. It is a fact of life that the profit motive inspires people
to work a bit harder.

Yes and no... It needs some help on the media-centre front which won't come
from corprate improvement. I have MPlayer, the extended Kaffeine and
libdvdcss installed and still it barfs on some DVD's. Once it starts to
play DVD's with the ease of WinDVD or PowerDVD it will have won that
battle... In fact that is probably my main gripe at the moment - not that
it should play DVD's out of the box, even Windows can't manage that, but
that there should be an easy to install package which is legal to install
and plays all current DVD's...

DVB-S support is also a bit skimpy, the NOVA-S card I tried wasn't
recognised and there weren't any drivers for it... Saying that, the Windows
software showed 1 frame every 2 seconds and crashed after about 45 seconds,
so I wasn't overly impressed with the card or the quality of the
manufacturers drives and software under Windows either ;-)

I agree with most of this. I have done two installs of 10.0,
each one taking about an hour all told in the end.

But I can't get sound working on either machine. I can't find
any help or clues either.

And I can't get my wireless card working on my laptop. It
is a Linksys with a Broadcom chipset. I'd be happy to buy
another card if somebody would give me a clue as to what
works out of the box with 10.0 and what doesn't.

Configuration is another problem. Yast has gotten very good
but I'd guess that novices would have trouble.

Some of what SuSE does is just awful, such as breaking the
Apache configuration files into many segments. I know why
they do that and it is laudable. But since detailed configuration
has to be done by hand, they certainly have not made *my* job
easier.

But by and large it is a painless install compared to Windows XP.
I've installed that about a dozen times, eight of them on the
same machine...

---- Paul J. Gans
.