Some personal linux observations

From: Mark Andereck (andereck_at_everestkc.net)
Date: 01/21/05 

Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 00:52:36 -0600

I just wanted to share some personal linux observations. I have been running
a redhat distribution or another since '01 out of curiosity and a desire to
broaden my skills. I am not an IT professional, nor do I get to play with
our SystemV box at work...its just for fun.

Linux is 95% user supported. Nearly every installation or reconfiguration
issue has been solved by Googling and nearly every site is non-commercial in
nature. The users have no equal and the user base is more technical/capable
than the microsoft base.

The OS is free, the book is not. While there are dozens of great how too's
on linux, a book specific to the distribution is indespensible to operate
the system. This is in contrast to MS oses which are gui first and
intuitive, the neat command line stuff in windows is mostly undocumented,
except for obscure KB articles.

Man pages leave much interpretation up to the user. More real word specific
examples would go a long way towards understanding the many options programs
have and how they interact. The develpers might consider explaining their
programs to their mother and then have her write the manual for us first
time non-developer users, or is it just me?

Fedora should really consider distributing Webmin as Redhat did. I was a
very frustrated user until I discovered port 10000. I readily admit my
limitations and desire to know the conf files better, but webmin makes some
things so easy..I was intimidated by VI. Now I can navigate and edit better
with VI, but its still unintuitive to me. I have spent many hours just
cat'ing my configuration files to see if I can understand what they do.

A color terminal is essential to the beginner who is used to file extensions
under ms! Symbolic links? Executable text files without a bat extension?
Holy Cow! Its still a bit frustrating at times to know when to cd or cat
....maybe its me.

I now love the single tree style file system, but I hated it at first when I
was used to looking for a drive letter. Once you start playing around with
netwok mounts and symbolic links you realize what you have been missing..but
until you do you won't understand and its difficult to explain to somebody
how 4 drives and network mounts can seemlessly interact.

Compiling programs isn't scary unless something goes wrong. Portabilty of
code is great for everybody as the support just gets better as more people
use the program, but this portability means its not going to always work out
of the box and when errors occur during compile time how the hell do I fix
them without a strong C background?? Help!

While there are numerous issues that we can drag on about pertaining to ms
windows they deserve a hand for plug and play. The linux community though
has the tougher job and deserves commendation for making these mostly
unsupported devices work for me and at no charge. I hope to someday be able
to support another user that has a hardware installation problem as the
community has given to me so many times in the past.

Where do all these smart users come from? Seriously I was at a windows 98
kickoff event at compusa when a couple grunge rockers in front of me struck
up a conversation and one asked me if I had ever played with linux. I said
no, as I had only barely heard of it and he told me to get a copy of redhat
and see what I thought. 3 years later I did and a whole new world opened up
to me. Just the ammount of K and Gnome themes amazed me as there had to be
untold thousands of users out there..where the hell had I been hiding? I
have yet to have a problem that someone else hasn't already had and then
been kind enough to share the solution with the rest of the community.

One click, no dependency installation isn't here yet, and I wish it was. I
have both apt-get and yum installed and they are kick ass for installing
applications for me, but when apt says I need a perl module for my installed
webmin and it can't install it and I have that perl module installed how do
I fix the dependency tree? Its the little things....

Where the hell is the book on X? The only one I can find is nearly 20 years
old and out of print..why all the different file locations for X? Does
anybody understand what it all does and where to go to fix it if it doesn't
work the way it should? X can be a mean bitch.

Cygwin is god's gift to a ms idiot like me. With XDM setup to give me a
remote session from one of my 3 linux boxes I can play from just one box,
and fast too. This is awesome. I dream about a house full of linux terminals
that I can use to access any computer in the house. Windows users by large
have no clue about this one. Only server support staff can really appreciate
the whole remote/local desktop remote X app thing. I love it. I can't
believe how well it works too, It runs as good as it does locally on my
network.

The media writes often about linux progress. Does the average linux user
care about mainstream acceptance? I'm sure several would love more
manuafactuer hardware driver/app support, but isn't there something about
linux that makes one feel kinda like an outlaw? or is it outcast? Relying on
ones god given talents to put a working system together is very rewarding.
Its a feeling that can't be matched by an XP install for instance....: )

Thanks for those of you that took the time to view some of my thoughts.
Comments are encouraged. 

-- 
Mark Andereck

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