Re: You missed the point.
From: myself (none_at_none.invalid)
Date: 03/05/04
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Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2004 17:03:35 -0600
On Thu, 04 Mar 2004 09:30:50 -0600, Autocoder wrote:
>
>> Now as to the last hurdle (as I see it.) A school district here with an
>
> You missed the point, or more probably I rambled over it.
>
> With Windows you insert said CD and wait for the bouncing ball, or if you
> have Windows set up really techie, you have to search for the setup icon
> and click on it. Simple. Really really simple. Of course, the software
> may be crap, the OS may crash if asked to accept input from the keyboard,
> but the install is REALLY REALLY SIMPLE.
One reason I started using Linux was that so many Windows application installs
were NOT simple. Some trashed the OS and I had to spend the next three days
reinstalling/reconfiguring Windows, installing 50 or so applications, trying to
restore all my applications data, restoring my file associations, and testing
it all to make sure it worked. There's the many times one application trashed
another's files. There were the many times I could fix the damage of a
screwed-up install without reformatting, but had to waste half a day digging
through the registry or chasing down replacements for corrupted DLL's to do it.
There's all the time I spent taking preventative measures against
aware/spyware, and then later hunting down and trying to remove some
well-hidden spyware code. There's all the time I had to spend studying obtuse
EULA's written in tiny print in a 2x2 window to figure out if I could legally
do what I needed to do. There were a few expensive applications that were
copy-protected and when I needed to reinstall them the manufacturers no longer
existed to provide me with a new key for the new hardware (and that's about to
get very much worse with the growth of product-activation and DRM products).
Windows is for people who don't value their time... ;)
> Anybody on this newsgroup (me included) can't see the forest for the trees.
> We LIKE problems to fix, programs to compile - it is probably the reason we
> got into Linux in the first place.
If you buy a consumer-friendly distribution, and install only the applications
that came with it, then installing and removing applications will be simpler
and more reliable than under Windows. The problem only comes when someone wants
to install something not bundled with the distribution - and quite often that
means a package that was actually put together on an entirely different distro
and never even tested with the one in question. It's a problem I'd like to see
solved but hardly a show-stopper given the 8,000 or more easy-to-install
packages that the typical consumer distro ships with.
Which brings up something I really don't understand here - with all the stuff
that comes bundled with a linux distro, why did these Linux guys have to search
the net and risk a demoing package of unknown compatability just to get a music
editor? I've got only a fraction of the apps on my own system that
comprehensive distro's like Mandrake and SuSE ship with, and yet even my small
collection includes some music editors ready to be installed in about 10
seconds with a one-line command.
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