Re: Re: Ok. Heh, is there still an smtp-based list out here:D

Tim Bates schreef:
> It's not time yet for you to make it your primary OS


Phooey.

About the only real problems left are professional audio recording, and
possibly similar applications to that that I have no experience in.

If you don't like the Gimp (and I don't, either), you can use Krita, or
Pixel, or even Photoshop under Crossover Office (which is well worth the
money, as it definitely does what it says on the tin, ime).

But for pretty much all "normal" usage, and even for many specialized
usage needs, Linux is perfectly adequate.

You probably will need to learn a thing or two, not least because it's
*not the same* as Windows, but once upon a time, you (generic "you")
didn't know how to use Windows either. Most people have forgotten how
difficult that was, so they say that learning Linux is "harder".

But it's probably not, except that you need to change your *mind* to a
different design philosophy, and people seem to get thrown by that.

No, you're probably not going to get some seamless "everything done for
you with one click of the mouse" environment-- since that assumes you
use a mouse at all, and that you have a GUI in the first place.

Stunned? (What could she mean, no GUI??!!) You can actually do pretty
much all your basic, workaday tasks (surf the web, read and write email,
read and write text, listen to music, watch a movie, convert a movie
from a dvd to an AVI or vice-versa and add subtitles to it to boot,
manage your files, burn data backups to disk and quite a bit more)-- all
without ever starting an X server to provide you a GUI to "pretty it up".

Because the GUI is no longer a "given", the applications you might need
may or may not be part of your particular window management environment
(if you use something like GNOME or KDE), but they're all there.... some
in GNOME, some in KDE, some in console, or some well GUI, but
"unaffiliated".

But yes, everything you most likely need is probably somewhere in your
package manager, and on your distro's repository (and if it isn't, it's
because you're using Slackware, and under Slack you can just compile it
without problem, so... no problem).

I did build a Win box, but all it does is run games, and that only
because I was a bit tired of dicking around with Wine and trying to get
my ATI card to handle it properly-- if I had the cash to buy an nVidia
card, I wouldn't have bothered. But the Win box does nothing else-- it's
not even connected to the Internet, because 1. I'm not a fool and
Windows + Internet = a world of pain, and 2. I do everything else that I
do (including write this email) from my Linux box, which has been my
main box for some 3 or 4 years now, and up to about a year ago was my
only box (and my only OS, since I despise dual-booting).

Anyway, please don't make such sweeping generalizations, as they are
generally never true, and in this case, while I agree that for some
users, Linux is indeed not ready to be the user's primary OS, for most
users, the issue tends more to be that the user is not ready, rather
than that the OS is itself not ready.

Holly

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