> > Why isn't there an out-of-the-box Linux solution that's as good as > > Windows? > > Actually, if you really think about it, it neither is in Windows. Last > time I installed one, I had to go to Macromedia (Flash), Adobe > (Acrobat-Reader), Apple (Quicktime), RealNetworks (Realplayer), Sun > (Java) to get the needed plugins. Oh, yeah, and to Microsoft > (Mediaplayer).
Yes, and no. In windows it seems a little nicer because it's a lot better (IMHO) about installing the plugins... you get a prompt saying "hey, install xyz", you click ok, it grinds for a few minutes, goes through an install wizard, and then you go back to the original window and voila! it's there and working. I admit that mozilla/mozillafirebird is a lot better in this respect now though. You no longer have to restart moz to get plugins recognized, simply copy the files into your plugins dir and reload and they work. As to answer the original question, no, I don't think that the browsing experience is quite as good in linux (yet), and while there are solutions (ximian desktop 2 is a very nice out of the box experience, and redhat 8/9 weren't all that bad) it's not everywhere. First of all, gentoo is by no means an end user distro. No offense, but if you don't expect to have to get your hands dirty you're using the wrong distro (for now anyway). Don't get me wrong, I love gentoo, but part of the reason I love it is because it *isn't* a end user distro. I like getting my hands dirty, and I think a lot of the other people on the list do as well. However, that's not to say that doing an "emerge gnome" *shouldn't* get everything set up and configured for you. A couple of other things that are against linux in the whole "out of the box" experience in general. First of all while macromedia has indeed "sold their soul to the devil", so have most of the other companies, but the important ones (flash, pdfs, java, etc) do work. Another thing is because linux is a multi-user system as compared to XP (much as they'd like to show different), you can't just install the acrobat reader plugin as a user, you still have to SU to root, emerge the plugin or run the file, wait for it to finish, and then go back to your user. Mac OS/X seems to have it right with running as a user with SU privileges all the time and then popping up a "please enter your user password" whenever a program needs to be installed. Not running as root, but running close enough to it that you can tasks like installing software much easier. I wish linux was a bit more like this. I am very used to popping up a root shell when I need to do things, but I don't think I should *have* to do this. I know the gnome people are talking about how to get a "root password asker" program set up for gnome, but there seems to be all sorts of debate about how to get it to work in all situations, in all architectures, and on all OSs that support GNOME... then it's left for another 6 months before someone askes the question again and it starts all over again, with no visible (that I can see) result. Redhat has a little applet that does this and allows you to run some of their apps for installing software or reconfiguring and it seems to work nicely, but because something like say, the flash installer program doesn't understand this, it doesn't ask and you end up having to drop to a root shell anyway. /rant Regards, alan -- Alan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://arcterex.net -------------------------------------------------------------------- "There are only 3 real sports: bull-fighting, car racing and mountain climbing. All the others are mere games." -- Hemingway -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
