[conspire] (forw) Re: (forw) Re: [Felton LUG] feltonlug.org website online

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> More than a decade ago, I went to a Linux conference.  There weremany
> distros represented in different booths.   I asked various reps
> whytheir distro was better.  The S.U.S.E. rep replied SUSE was the
> easiest to install and handed me some disks.  This was before CD's. 
> At the time, it was easier than some of the others I had tried.  This
> was back when most installations required manually selecting the
> monitor parameters.  

Before CDs, wow, that's indeed back there.  

Autodetecting the abilities of monitors had to wait for something called
EDID (Extended display identification data) to be published by Video
Electronics Standards Association (VESA) and implemented by all the
monitor manufacturers.  That started happening in 1994 but took about
two years to percolate out, so call it 1996 for the effective date.

The Linux community was on top of that development with a tool called
read-edid, which soon entered distros such as the Linuxcare BBC and
Knoppix, and then either that code or code inspired by it got put into
XFree86 and its X.org successor.

Point is, _some_ of Linux installations getting easier relied on
improvements to hardware.  Another big improvement happened when the ISA
expansion slot, and 'PlugAndPlay ISA', which never really worked, became
obsolete and went away.

Anyway, since 2000, when _every_ desktop Linux distribution learned from
the example of Knoppix and built a forehead-installation default into
their installers, 'our distribution is easiest to install' has been
about the lamest and most transparent bit of chicanery in all of
software.  They're _all_ dead-easy to install.  Just accept the defaults
and leave your mind switched off.  The result is always suboptimal, but
Gods above is it ever easy!

And Ubuntistas claiming 'You should install us because we're easiest' is
neither true nor compelling.  It's pretty much a con-job for the
gullible, and it's past time to put a stake through its heart.



By the way, good people, gentle reminder:  This mailing list doesn't do
any lamer header-munging tricks to force all replies public and thereby
hinder everyone's ability to reply-sender if they so please (the mailer
command usable for talking offlist).

Therefore, please use your mailer's _reply-all_ command for normal list
replies that continue the public conversation.  (I notice several people
keep accidentally departing into private mail because they did
reply-sender.)
 
There are kiddie mailing lists that force headers under the assumption
that users cannot master the use of two distinct reply commands.  This
is a real-world list where existence of both reply-sender and reply-all
is assumed.