Linux for an association I work for.

[Shlomi Fish]

On Saturday 28 February 2009 17:45:11 Yotam Rubin wrote:
> Not to take the wind out of your sails, I would probably advise against
> switching to Linux for anyone who's not a Linux expert. 

How can you become a Linux expert without trying Linux?

> While it took me
> some years to reach this conclusion, I now believe that Linux is not a
> viable choice for anyone who's not an advanced user. My reasons follow:
>  1. Mainstream desktop environments (KDE, GNOME) have gotten slower and
> buggier over the years. As I bought faster hardware, KDE and GNOME seemed
> slower and crashed more often.

I don't feel that way. I've been happily using KDE-3.5.x on an ageing Pentium 
4-2.4 GHz machine for quite some time now. It didn't get any slower. GNOME is 
even faster than KDE 3, but I don't like it, so I'm not using it. If you can 
get used to it, then it is a viable option, of course. KDE 4 is also OK here 
(Mandriva Cooker), but still has many warts, so I'm still using KDE 3, but 
with many KDE 4 apps.

KDE 3 itself crashes very rarely, if at all. Applications I'm running on top 
of it, crash sometimes (but not too often), but that is expected. Are you 
using proprietary video drivers by any chance? They tend to make X crash and 
hang.

>  2. Linux distributions don't work. Even Ubuntu and other mainstream
> distributions simply do not work. Package testing is poor, and various
> programs do not integrate with one another. I often find myself having to
> fix things manually, usually by digging deep into various
> scripts/configuration files. Additionally, at least with Ubuntu, upgrades
> tend to break horribly, requiring a clean reinstallation.

Don't know about Ubuntu, and I'm using Mandriva Cooker, whose purpose is that 
users will witness the breakages before they reach the main release, so I 
cannot comment how well it suffers from this problem. But it's probably not 
worse than Windows, in case you have an expert ready. Many simpletons ("Aunt 
Tillie"'s and other) users will be perfectly happy in Linux. More so than 
Windows anyway.

>  3. Usability as a whole is becoming less viable. Applications (at least
> with my recent Ubuntu distrubutions) tend to crash often, work more slowly
> and have less features.

Applications here on my system, don't crash often, work fast enough (I don't 
recall them being substantially slower than before) and they don't have less 
features. GUI Applications I use often are: KDE4's KMail, Firefox, XChat, 
KDE4's Kopete, gvim, KDE 4's Kate, and Amarok 1.x.

>
> Windows suffers from the same problems, only it's not as slow as Linux. 

Which version of Windows?

> On
> the other hand, I've been using OS X lately, and the thing works. The UI is
> simple, relatively powerful and does not randomly crash. I'm guessing OS X
> is not a valid choice for you, due to the prohibitive cost of Mac hardware.
>

And due to the many reasons I mention here:

http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/apple/

> Anyway, that's what I think.
>

Well, and it was not very helpful to the original inquiry.

> Good luck, though.
>
> Yotam Rubin
>

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Optimizing Code for Speed - http://xrl.us/begfgk

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