2002 2? 13 ??? 13:40??????????: > > Id depends on what you want. For most of the people of this list > > (including me), Mandraje provides everything for the daily use. > > As for my frustrations: > > - No consistent cut & paste; > > This can be frustrating if you use different toolkits. The > select-and-middle-click method works in most places, though.
Most of the places doesn't mean all the places. I know that the middle button has a higher success likelyhood, and that's why I use it all the time. But what I am saying is that some applications use ctrl-c / ctrl-v and some other don't. Just imagine: you're a new user coming from MacOSX (where cut&paste is a key feature) and you land in an OS without this feature. What do you do then? You buy another Mac. Note that I am not saying that Linux is bad, otherwise I would not use it and not even bother writing here. Linux improves constantly. Among the distribs I have used, Mandrake is the most advanced in terms of user-friendness, and I am really looking foreward to more consistency which will make it an unbeatable office machine. So to summarize what I mean by non-consistent cut&paste: Most of the applics work with select-middle button. -> some fair consistency. Some accept ctrl-c / x / v, some don't some other use a different key combination -> the general case is no consistent cut&paste. If you want to add more consistency, then remove the ctrll-c / x/ v from all the applications that support it and replace that with select / middle button or do the opposite. I am aware that this cannot be solved by Mandrake. At least not Mandrake alone. > > - No way to reassign the shortcuts consistently to mimick Mac's > > behaviour. At least not in KDE, and the changes don't apply consistently > > everywhere. > > Have you looked for alternatives? If KDE doesn't suit your needs, then try > something else. Have you looked at GNOME and/or WindowMaker? KDE isn't the > whole world, you know. I know. But I was replying to a person who wants to convince a Mac addict to switch to Linux, Mandrake or other. Just imagine the guy who buys the CDs or downloads them. Since he doesn't know anything about Linux, he just chooses the default options. As you may know, KDE is the default of Mandrake (I mean, if you press enter to all the questions you don't know during installation, you will end up with a KDE environment). As a new user, you don't know the difference between KDE and Gnome, do you? And as an average user who does not want to bother reading the docs (90% of the users, including me), you just try an see. So to summarize the situation, as a default config (in KDE), you are not able to configure the keys. At least it does not work consistently, system-wide. If you want system-wide settings, I guess you have to provide these settings at some level earlier than the window manager, be it gnome or kde. I don't know if this can be done by environment variables, but something like that may work. export LINUX_COPY_KEY="ctrl-C" export LINUX_PASTE_KEY="ctrl-V" (or the same configs with alt) etc... and all the window managers should refer to the same settings. I am not saying it's simple or even feasible with the current OS status... > > - Fonts / encoding problems as soon as you don't use an english > > platform. I am still unable, for instance, to send a message that > > contains French AND Japanese in the same page. Either the accents or the > > kanjis are unsuported. > > Internationalisation suport in GNU/Linux is supposed to be very good. Is supposed, yes, once you manage to configure it properly, which is (I think) beyond beginner's capabilities. > Again, have you tried different apps to see if one suited your needs? I > hear that Pango (the GNOME2 internationalisation library, used by GNOME2 > apps) handles this sort of thing quite well. Also, make sure you're using > Unicode fonts. Again, if you think as a new user would, you just take all the defaults. Here is my Mandrake 8.1 experience: - I clean installed 8.1 with Japanese option from the installer; - Everything went pretty well until the installation finishes. A few messages came out in English, which may bring some trouble for the non-english speakers, but the localization ratio is very good. - At reboot time, I had no fonts at all (this means no menus or at best a few garbage characters) - I had to choose fonts blindly (fortunately there were some icons). After a few restarts of KDE, I got the menus working. Now I opened kmail. As it was the first time I used the mail, I think the app could have taken the font parameters I had setup for kde, but no, I had to configure fonts for kmail as well. Now, my config works rather well. Both the OS and me have made a step towards each other (I got a more or less working config, and I have adapted myself to what I cannot configure). At one point after receiving 8,1, I sent quite a lot of reports to the i18n group, and I hope 8.2 will have made some fixes. But there are still things that don't work. For instance, I don't know how to write Japanese and French in the same message. That's more a kmail than a Mandrake issue, but as Mandrake distributes kmail... In the meantime, I use MacOSX for Japanese mail. At the time, I cannot have both (Japanese and French in a single message). I am not saying it is not possible, I am saying it is not easy to configure, and trying to think like a computer illiterate (I am close to that anyway), I don't want to know that I should encode in iso-2022-JP for Japanese and iso-8859-15 (?) for roman characters with accents and euro-enabled, or unicode, utf-8 or whatever. It should be the mail client's job to set the encoding to ascii if I write plain english, to switch to iso-8859-1 if I write an accentuated character, and further switch to unicode if I add a chineese character. > > We (on this list) can cope with this, but as for a person coming from > > MacOSX world where the 3 points above work perfectly, I guess it is > > not easy and for them, Mac is still the only solution that works out of > > the box, without any other config. > > That's true. I'm sure free software will get there; it'll just take some > time :) Well, sorry, i was a long shot. And many thanks if you read until here. Pascal By the way, is there any standard way to find a file like crtl-f (or something like) in windows's file manager and command-f in MacOS finder / BeOS tracker?
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