> Honestly, I thought Dotan wrote the above in jest and forget the ":-)". > > I certainly did not post in earnest. >
I meant it. Two years ago I had to maintain a Win98 machine that ran some library software - nothing else, no internet - on 64 MB RAM on a 433 MHz processor. The thing flew. It would open menus and respond instantly. I remember that OS when it first came out, I think that it was the first time I had ever seen real multitasking (I don't think that worked in Win95, and Macs were useless in that era). I know that today the whole Windows family is a bloated, insecure mess, but they once had really good products. > On the other hand, what I wrote was bare-bone facts .. They did give me > a 20-page manual, _and_ notepad, a web browser, a calculator and a few > other "Accessories" whose relevance I was not able to determine at the > time. > I agree that Windows comes with almost no installed software of any value. If that's what you meant by "capabilities of the OS" then you are right. I see the applications as being separate from the OS, but I can understand the viewpoint that if they came with it, then they are a part of it. > Surely I missed something, but all the same I was not exactly bowled > over by the OS .. or the distro. > > I don't know for sure, because less than a month later I installed Red > Hat 6.2 and never gave anything Windows another glance. > > As to a 1,000-page manual (or ten-100 page manuals, or one hundred > 10-page manuals) .. one should probably keep in mind that it's not just > the OS that is therein documented but the entire distro. > > I am not a user of FreeBSD, but if you consider that current estimates > of major linux distros run into the _hundreds of millions_ of lines of > source code, I don't see how one thousand pages of documentation could > tell you more than the basics..! > > Q. Since this appears to be an issue, how many pages of documentation do > you think there are in /usr/share/man on the average user-oriented > machine? > > A. Many. Mine has 30Meg's worth, gzipped so it's likely close to the > mythical 1,000 mark .. possibly more. > > And that's only the man pages .. many of them only a few lines that tell > you that the app did not have a man page. > > As to my assuming anything Windows is "modern", I'm not sure where you > got the idea.. > Depending on how your define Modern. If requiring 2 GB RAM and a 2 GHz processor just to turn the thing on is modern, then Vista is probably the most modern OS in existence! That said, I really like the UI features of Windows 7, even though most of the things that annoy me in Windows are still present. I filed feature requests at KDE for the Windows 7 features that I liked. -- Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com http://gibberish.co.il -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org