On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 01:43:52PM -0700, Daniel Crookston was thought to have said: > > Installing Windows on a computer that you use to surf and chat and > > email is like putting your SUV up on blocks, taking the tires off and > > then trying to go to the grocery store and drive the kids to soccer :) > > Windows has bloat, yes, but Linux has "bloat" as well, it's just a more > useful sort of bloat. If you're never going to do anything besides chat and > email, why would you need all of the power and flexibility that a shell > gives you? An SUV is powerful and has the ability to take you off-road to a > lot of places that a regular car can't; I'd say that Windows is more like a > Yugo that has a really flashy paint job, a nine-disk CD changer, leather > seats, and all the other options... but still falls apart when you test > drive it. To compare Windows to an SUV is to give it way too much credit > for power and flexibility than it deserves. > > On a somewhat related note, I've been thinking for a while now that somebody > had ought to make a computer that has nothing but Trillian and a web browser > on it. Pretty much anything that most people want to do (email, etc.) can > be done via the web nowadays. >
Can someone remind me how big a shell is compared to the typical windows bloat? And besides, do you realize how fun mutt is for email (which you're going to need a shell to use)? Why not install (for example) Gentoo with frame buffer support, elinks and mutt? You wouldn't even get the bloat of a windowing system! There's still plenty of ability to do what you want, and works well on a $200 laptop. The bonus to all this is that the end user has no way of installing other programs on the computer, which would just cause bloat anyway, right? If you want instant messaging, go ahead and install X, I guess. Or perhaps someone has come up with a way to use gaim on the console (check CPAN for good modules, I'm sure someone could use those and write a wonderful console-based gaim script in perl). Just don't tell me that linux always has bloat. -Clint P.S. - To everyone who's going to tell me that Gentoo is difficult for a typical user to install, just read the earlier threads about how you're going to have to install the machine for them anyway. So why not make it easy to do those upgrades and maintenance that you'll eventually have to do? ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
