What I was trying to get at though in my first comment toward you was the issue of the interface being ugly. If SuSE 8.2 is your most recent taste of Linux and you are not terribly familiar with Linux, then SuSE CAN leave a bad taste in your mouth. I do understand and agree with you to an extent…there is a LOT of UI work that needs to go into Linux…RH 9/XD 2 is a BIG step in the right direction.
If you choose this route, set it up through Ximian Red Carpet…the command line based instll at the XD2 site just is crappy. I have found the UI very consistent and intuitive. SuSE 8.2…hmm well I was enamored with it briefly, but I really has many charactersitics that are just a pain in the ass…Samba being one of them.Īs far as Linux goes, I really like Red Hat 9 with Ximian’s XD 2. You won’t hear, setting up file sharing, setting up a firewall w/execptions for different services, or installing random programs was easy. Which is why when people talk about Linux and the desktop you can bet they’re going to mention: OpenOffice, Evolution and KDE and its integrated apps, because all of those are there own little isolated ease of use enviroments with in Linux. Linux isn’t like that, instead it seems to be aiming for the “lets have the users say inside these user friendly programs instead of making the whole OS user friendly”. When something is truely easy to use, then its not hard to make it do what you want. Thats the difference between easy of use and sandyboxing.
Then there is OSX, it takes me 1 click on a preference pane called Sharing to share the files I want which will be auto-discovered by the client. After that I have to setup my NFS client, tell where its sharing, etc. In fact setting up Samaba or NFS Exporting is a bit of pain in SuSE 8.2 though much nicer than before. Lets say now that I’ve typed up my document in my easy to use wordprocessing sandbox, I want to share it over my network to my laptop so that I can take it to school and print it. It means those specific programs are nice to use, not linux. The general linux thought is if I include these in my distrobution empirically linux will be easy to use.
Then you have Evolution, its a great mail client and again very well featured. OpenOffice can read work with MS Office formats, its got a easy to understand interface, and its pretty well featured. Except until you step outside of these third party application sandboxes and want to do something with the OS. Do that with enough applications and somehow thats supposed to make linux easy to use. Then you make that as easy as possible to, and give a nice interface. Most of the distros seem to mistake ease of use for what I call “sandboxing.” Sandboxing is where you pick out things that the user is most likely to do – say wordprocessing. In fact from it seems like, thats not really where they are going with it. Sure its come a long way but its not easy to use. But you are way off in the ease of use department. Not always consistent, but the first impression is that its better looking than windows. I’ll give you that part about pretty interfaces – SuSE does look nice. Last time I looked at linux? SuSE 8.2… about oh 6 hours ago.
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