[sf-lug] Linux Hater's Blog

[jim]

   your point of view is interesting. i recommend 
choosing a distro that lots of people use. seems 
to me fedora and ubuntu are good choices. each is 
different, and each is the base for a variety of 
distros that have "copped their licks" from either 
the red hat family (fedora) or the debian family 
(ubuntu). 
   if you want to learn what's needed to get a 
job, the red hat family is probably still the 
better choice (more enterprises are running red 
hat systems), so choose fedora. 
   if you want to use linux at home, probably 
ubuntu is the better choice as it seems to have 
a wider set of drivers, thus wider number of 
machines it can run on and easier installation, 
and also a greater or at least more active 
community. i'm betting more people in sf-lug know 
ubuntu than know fedora. 
   i've found occasionally that if installing one 
(fedora or ubuntu) fails, installing the other 
succeeds. 
   i like that there are tons of distros, all 
with their idiosyncracies. not that i use them, 
but great variety promotes best technologies in 
the long run, and best technologies get adopted 
by all distros, including eventually the one that 
you have chosen. 




On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 18:17 -0700, JW wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> 
>  > DAMN toothpaste makers and car manufacturers for giving me choice!!!
>  > ;)
> 
> Bill, as a real newbie to Linux, may I offer my point of view?  Having 
> tried several distributions, the real problem is inconsistency, 
> flakiness, and reinventing the wheel. Why do we need to have so many 
> interfaces that all do the same thing, so many icons and menus that 
> need to be re-learned each time?  Why so many applications that do 
> almost the same thing and so many different file structures?  Even 
> simple things like scrolling and clicking are inconsistent within the 
> same distribution, not to mention across distributions.  I have had 
> windows plop themselves halfway off the screen for no apparent reason, 
> and had no way to recover other than to kill processes.  The learning 
> curve for each distro seems annoying and unnecessary to me.  Again, I 
> am a newbie, but how many newbies are going to go through this until 
> they find a distribution they like?  Is there any effort to make the 
> interfaces uniform across distributions, or do developers reserve the 
> right to fabricate totally new gadgets and icons every time just 
> because they can?  Yeah, I like having different brands of toothpaste 
> too, but that's because they all come in similar boxes, and it's 
> pretty easy to get the caps off the tubes.  It's just a matter of how 
> people want to spend their time I guess.
> 
> -- Jim W.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> sf-lug mailing list
> sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug
>