At 05:26 AM 2/10/00 -0600, you wrote:
>Agree wholeheartedly with Vic. Windows is "glitzier" than Linux, at least
for now, but
>stability is the "driver" for me.
Unfortunately, there do seem to be ease-of-use issues with Linux, X, and
KDE. A few K apps have quirks/warts and a couple have actual bugs;
non-KDE-aware X apps almost invariably have quirks or warts (e.g. the GIMP
is conspicuously missing any online help, and has a few other interface
oddities). Console commands mostly have man pages, but a few do not, and
others are broken/missing information/actually misleading. (E.g., "man
locate" doesn't say anything about what command is used to refresh the
database, which it should; fortunately the command in question was
mentioned in this capacity on this list recently. "man rpm" seems to be
completely muddled/confused/confusing about what command to use to build
stuff from source RPMs. Someone I emailed pretty much implied that one of
the command lines in that man page is simply wrong.)
>It is easier (or at least more productive in the long run) to
>add features to a stable OS, than it is to try to bring stability to a
feature-rich OS that
>verges on being neurotic <g> with its freezes & crashes.
True. Hopefully improved ease-of-use is top priority with Linux. Certainly
Linux has come a long way in EOU in the last year, and came a long way the
previous year as well. Unfortunately it has a long way to go. KDE certainly
helps, by bringing a modern graphical interface that adheres to the same
familiar behavior Windows and Mac users have gotten used to and which are
now the de facto industry standard behaviors for graphical apps, and by
imposing that interface on KDE-aware apps. Unfortunately, the KDE app base
is still rather small, and the areas of building stuff from sources,
installing, and uninstalling things need a heck of a lot of work -- I've
seen lots of KDE binary packages whose install scripts don't respect the
$KDEDIR environment variable and assume your KDE is in some particular
place, often /opt/kde, when most people appear to have it in /usr... The
only safe way to ensure it works is $KDEDIR. And I've seen a lot of
packages that seem to be incomplete, especially in the case of missing
documentation, or that have broken dependencies. For example, I went to
install Ktranslator for Kdevelop to use. It puked, claiming to need
libjpeg.so.6. I thought that was odd, being sure I already had libjpeg;
maybe I needed to upgrade libjpeg. I got a libjpeg RPM for version 6 and
tried to install that, and apparently it clashes with a *more recent
version* (6.5mdk, IIRC) on my system. So the KTranslator dependency is
wrong -- it should be libjpeg.so.6 *or later*. I forced it to install
without dependency checking, and eventually ran into other KDE apps
(notably the game Kjewel) with the same problem, expecting you to have
EXACTLY version 6 of that very library, and not a newer one... Packages
like that that specify an exact version and not merely a minimum version
for something are very unfriendly, because when a newer version of whatever
it is comes out, as is inevitable especially in the open-source world,
people start having to use --nodeps to install the package, and forcing
newbies to use --nodeps to work around somebody else's shortsightedness is
IMO a very bad idea.
>Oh, yes: Did the upgrade from MDK 6.1 to 7.0 without a hitch, except that
I have the
>Linux-Mandrake "welcoming" page...What can I edit to get rid of that? :)
Just change Netscrap's home page setting.
--
.*. "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not
-() < circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a
`*' straight line." -------------------------------------------------
-- B. Mandelbrot |http://surf.to/pgd.net [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_____________________ ____|________ Paul Derbyshire
Programmer & Humanist|ICQ: 10423848|
