Friday, October 30, 2009

Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Re: LINUX_NEWBIES or TECHNICAL JARGON?

 

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Scott wrote:

> That's a pretty good point. I find, that on Fedora Forums, I can help
> less and less. The majority of the folks asking for help are using
> Gnome, and I know very little about it. (I'm a fluxbox/openbox fan).
>
> As Linux becomes more mainstream, the GUI tools become more and more
> sophisticated. The good part is that it becomes easier for folks to
> use, so, from an advocate's standpoint, that's a good thing.
>

The GUI tools are a good thing for the future of Linux, for sure,
because they will permit End Users to access functionality that would
otherwise be beyond their reach.

I started programming (G-BASIC) back around DOS 3.something, and
stayed with Microsoft from 'Presentation Manager' (Windows 1.0??)
through Windows 98se, which was when I started messing with Linux, so
my experience was different in kind from the typical End User from the
get-go.

Command line was 'King', and 'Edit' was my app of choice (edlin
sucked, as did 'ed' on *nix).

I remember when I moved over to Linux and discovered *nix shells (as
opposed to DOS batch files)... yikes! command lines with their own
programming languages built-in!

> The bad thing, aside from we grouchy elitists mumbling to
> ourselves--shucks folks, in the old days, when you set up X, there was a
> risk of destroying your monitor if you got your settings wrong--

Yep... the joys of carefully measuring my monitor screen with a
ruler... made extra hard, because the old monitors were curved, not
flat, and then frantically sniffing for smoke on the reboot, while
waiting for the GUI to come up, or for the monitor to start frying
(never actually happened, but the anticipation and paranoia were real
fun).

> The two abovementioned desktop distros also now do one of the things
> that annoys me most about MS/Apple, hiding the bootup info behind cutesy
> splash screens. In most cases, this can be circumvented, but to
> re-achieve functionality that has always been there, is, in my not so
> humble opinion, a regression. They also all aim for quick boots.

I like to boot into a text only shell, and then manually start X, but
when I can't, I can always just run dmesg from a console to see how
things went, after the fact.

- --
- -wittig http://www.robertwittig.com/
http://robertwittig.net/
http://robertwittig.org/
.
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