hi all,

I have been aware of linux for some years, though i've never looked at it, or into why it is considered better, I'm not a techy minded computer user, so have no idea what it can do for me, if anything,

i understand i can partition my disk (1 of 2 in a raid set-up) and run it simultaneously with windows, but why would i want to, or need to?

i'm told the empeg uses linux, and part of it's appeal is the ability for techy minded people to dabble with it's frimware, but why did it use linux over any other kind of OS in the first place?

i'm keen to learn more about computers and OS's in general, for no other reason than i'm getting a little bored with the pc and not being able to remmedy what are probably simple problems when they occur, not to mention it would help me understand what you lot are talking about!!!

i now have a good pc (gigbyte motherboard, Q6600 quad core processors, 3 gig ram, 320gb hd raid drives, nvidea GeForce 8500GT graphics, etc etc, running xp-pro), it does all i need, very quickly, and for the most part, very reliably, but I still have little idea on how to get the best from it.

ta.
Hugh

For you? Probably nothing.

Linux is useful for people who want to have or do these things:

- Stable file servers and web servers (things a non-techy probably doesn't run).

- Extreme configurability and flexibility, right down to the ability to change the operating system by rewriting part of it if needed (again, things a non-techy probably doesn't need).

- Learning about computer programming (again, things a non-techy probably doesn't need, and which can also be learned on other operating systems).

- Extremely powerful network diagnostic and routing tools (again, things a non-techy probably doesn't need).

- The ability to solve your own problems if something goes wrong with your computer system (but which requires the requisite technical knowledge to solve).

- The ability to write your own versions of the operating system, modifying it to your whims to run on just about any kind of device you can imagine. For example, running on a new kind of in-dash car MP3 player that runs on a StrongARM processor.

Non-techies are usually happier with Windows and Mac OS, though, because a lot of the more complicated (and more powerful) stuff is hidden or nonexistent.

However, there's nothing wrong with trying out Linux just to see if you like it. There are even versions of it which will boot from a CD-ROM and run without even needing to partition your hard disk or modify your computer in any way.

Here's a good primer.

eek, i'll stick to making signs and asking dumb questions i think!! :?

thank you!

Hugh (non techy, can ya tell? !!)

It's also quite good at doing tasks extremely well, and with great stability. I had a file server running non-stop for over 5 years. No reboots in all that time. The only reason I rebooted it at all was when the power supply failed and needed to be replaced. My windoze servers like to be rebooted every 2-3 months to work happily.

It also gives the ability to do certain things that windows simply cannot do, although they're getting closer. Symbolic links are a good example.

For example, I currently have a need to share 7 documents from 7 different users with one user. This user does not need any other documents that these 7 people have in their folders. How do you share just 7 docs and nothing else in windows? You don't. Or you have to create 7 folders for 7 people and share all seven folders. But this requires changing the way these people like to sort their documents. In linux, you simply type "ln -s /path/docname /newpath/docname" for all seven docs and magically, the files can all appear in /newpath/ where the overseer can view all 7 docs. It's completely transparent to the users, and it just WORKS. ln -s creates a symbolic link, which is sortof like a shortcut, only better.

For the end user, a typical GNU/Linux system frees one from considerable software costs. No fees for the system, upgrades, future upgrades, add-ons, thousands of apps/tools, etc.

Quite the shift from other systems, where each little gadget costs another $5-$500 or so, even for trivial things.

Those things add up over the years, to rather large numbers.

Cheers

Related to the cost issue, but not quite the same, there's also an issue of trust. When everyone can see the source-code, there's less chance that it contains nasty surprises, and more chance that it was written with your, the user's, best interests at heart, rather than those interests being in conflict with other interests such as the authors' interest in making money from you. Or other, more sinister, interests such as phishing, attacking competing products, or conniving with intelligence agencies.

Which is not, of course, to imply that all providers of closed-source software do those things. But without the source-code, you never know for sure. (Open-source projects, such as Firefox and now Songbird, where you're very strongly encouraged, using trademark law, to use their binary builds, lose much of that trust.)

Peter

Such a shame that you're saying this, because you're really just perpetuating myths that Linux is only good for the nerdly.

For what it's worth, I use Linux at home, and I don't do any of those things with it (though I do love not being stuck with a window manager that won't let you configure it to use focus-follows-mouse). Instead, I use it to surf the web, write email, do photo retouching, listen to music, write my resume, and all the other normal things that people do. My wife, who's a Mac person, uses it for that stuff, too.

So what can it do for you? If you're not a techie person, probably everything you need it to do, and, like a Mac, you don't have to worry about constantly running spyware and virus checkers (and that, right there, is far more than "probably nothing").

Like Mark says, there's plenty of software you can use, for free, that's sometimes better, sometimes worse, than the software you have to pay for and, it's a cinch to install and even un-install.


Uh... have you tried a recent Linux distro, like Ubuntu, or KUbuntu? The last time I did an install, everything was just up and running, with no configuration required on my part.

I'd tend to agree with all of that, but I want to also point out the one prominent thing that you basically can't do with Linux: play modern commercial computer games. Thus the moniker "Wintendo" that some people use for Windows systems.

Oh, and both Windows and MacOS have far more universal GUI homogeneity. That is, they tend to have programs that all look like they were made to look similar to each other. Linux is much more of a mish-mash in this category. But it's a totally aesthetic point.

Yes. But you're a techie person, and you know what to do if things go wrong. Have you ever, on that Linux box, had to drop to a shell prompt and execute a command to get something to work?

I know that people on Windows and Mac have to do that sometimes, too, but my point is that, for a desktop OS, you still need to do that kind of thing more often on Linux than you do on MacOS or Windows. Those OS's were designed for non-techie users, and they're meant for people to never have to use a shell prompt or know anything about the underpinnings of the operating system. Linux still isn't there.

What do you do when something goes wrong in Windows?

Well, durr, nothing ever goes wrong in Windows.

I addressed that point in my post.

Seriously, though. If you wanted to hand your grandma a computer, knowing that you'd get the support calls, which one would you hand her?
- Windows
- OSX
- Linux

Clearly you'd hand grandma an OSX box in a heartbeat. If grandma wanted to play Counter-Strike, she'd get a Windows box. If grandma needed to connect to her corporate network and share files with her coworkers, she'd get a Windows box.

I would actually love to hand my grandmother something like gOS. I would lock it down so nothing could be installed and everything is run from the web.

My grandfather thinks he's a computer whiz, so this is unlikely to happen. He loves screwing up Windows.

I hadn't heard about that one. That looks very interesting.

Assuming she had no preconceived notions about how a computer should work (that is, wasn't already experienced with Windows and moving to a new interface wouldn't confuse her), I'd choose the one with the most stable networking implementation so that I could help her remotely. So Linux.

That said, I got Mom a Windows computer because she'd been using it at the office for years. I intelligently installed a VNC server on her computer so I could do remote help. In the couple of years that she's had it, I've been able to use VNC to fix a problem a total of once, I think, and the rest of the time I have to go over because her networking has gone haywire for no apparent reason.

Like Rob, I have a friend who thinks he's a computer expert. I guess I should more accurately say "had" a friend. I don't ever talk to him anymore because any time I ever talked to him, I got about 3 minutes of conversation and then I had to fix his computer for hours. I got sick of it.

Can anyone cite a successful installed long-term instance of a day-to-day desktop linux system used by a non-techie? (That kept being used and didn't get replaced with Mac or Win after a while?)

Win/Mac, on the other hand, that's their bread and butter business, so there are examples of those all around us. (Defining "successful", well, that's a different question altogether.)

My wife used my Linux computer for a long time ages ago. All she really does is web and email, so it wasn't much of a problem at all.

It occurs to me that you're going to say "yes, but you were using it and fixed problems with it". To which my response is: yes, but no more frequently than I fix her current MacOS machine and far and away less frequently than I fixed her Windows machine.

Right, every OS is going to need support.

So that's 1 cited success example for web+email only.

See, now this is the very thing I'm talking about...

I thought I'd try out gOS because it was easy to just throw it onto a fresh VM. It installed cleanly and quickly, and came up with a very pretty screen full of gadgets just like in the screen shot.

Within 20 seconds, I run into a stumper.

There's a little "Sno-globe" weather applet in the center of the screen. It's showing me the weather for Austin TX in Celsius. I open up its options panel and try to change it to Seattle WA in Fahrenheit. It appears to take the settings OK, I press the OK button. Thing still says Austin, TX, in Celsius. No matter how many times I open up that preferences panel, it's still showing the wrong city and the wrong temperature scale.

Clearly this one thing isn't representative of all-things-linux (it's not even part of the operating system), I'm just saying it's the *sort* of thing that happens all the time every time I try to use a linux distro. It's a tiny little fit-n-finish issue, not a major deal breaker for the OS in general. But I see lots of tiny little inconsistencies like that all the time. It's why a monolithic company like Microsoft or Apple will always do better in the Desktop OS realm, because they have the manpower to do the extra polishing work to iron out that kind of thing.

How many different file open dialogs exist in Windows? Oh, and how many different interfaces in general? Somehow, the manpower at MS isn't enough to keep things unified and updated either. Going between IE7, Office 2008, and Notepad reveals 3 distinct toolbar and menu interfaces.

I will agree the fit and finish part is an issue with desktop Linux, but the same also seems to apply to the commercial Windows OS as well.

Or a better example from the OS itself: Try to adjust the date and time settings of the OS.

I set the time zone (it gives me a map, and Seattle isn't on the map, but that's OK, I click Los Angeles, OK, that's fine).

I try to set it so that it gets its time automatically from the internet instead of setting it manually.

It gives me an error saying that NTP support is not installed.

One of the available buttons is "Install NTP support". I click on the button. The box goes away, but nothing happens. I try to set it to get its time automatically again. Again, I get the "install NTP support" box. Ad infinitum.

The proper way to fix this would be to install NTP support by using the shell. If I knew how.

Agreed.

On my current Linux box, which has been going strong for a few months, now? No, and the only time it's been rebooted was during power outages.

On my previous Linux box, a few times, because I techie enough to resolve the problem without a reboot (I like my uptime), which would also have adequately solved the problem in a non-techie fashion.

But generally... no. The times where I do have to drop to a shell to resolve something technical is because I was doing something technical in a shell to begin with. When I don't tinker with it as a techie, I don't have to do techie fixes.


Seriously... have you used a recent Linux distro like Ubuntu, or KUbuntu?


Sorry, Tony, but you sound like you're parroting the Microsoft line, without having any first-hand knowledge of what you're talking about. Don't get me wrong, Linux isn't without it's problems, but having to drop to a shell to fix things isn't one of them. Please... quit spreading the FUD.

Wrong. I'd hand her a Linux box. If I don't want to get her support calls, I'd hand her an OSX box, because I don't know how to support OSX, and I can tell her to call someone else.

But that's just me.

What'd I do for my dad? I asked what he needed, what he wanted to do, and ended up suggesting an OSX box (so I didn't have to get the support calls), with a parallels install, for the MS-only software he needed for work.

I actually hadn't tried gOS prior to just now. I got the temperature gadget working by inputting my zip code. That's surely annoying, but probably more of a Google Gadget issue than Linux.

Gnome really needs to stop using that ugly, wide font, though. (As seen in the calendar app.)

I wouldn't disagree that Linux apps are a mish-mash what with the GIMPs of the world, but I think the effect is amplified by the number of doo-dad programs that get delivered by default.

Having recently had to deal with a whole slew of vendor-provided and small-3rd-party and shareware Windows programs, I don't think things are much prettier in Windows land. D-Link and Logitech camera configurators, sensor monitors, smart lock/iButton programmers and more. What an impenetrable CUAgmire.

I use Debian with KDE every day (it still doesn't work right, I never got it to function with DHCP, I have to give it a fixed IP every time), Messed about a bit with Knoppix fairly recently, and tried that gOS distro just yesterday. I haven't installed a full Ubuntu distro lately. Perhaps I'll do that just to satisfy your (and my) curiosity. I'll report my experiences with Ubuntu here when I'm done.



I'm talking from experience, not parroting a party line. Every time I touch a Linux desktop, I'm painfully reminded of just how much I would *not* want to use it as my daily driver. And that's *me*, a techie. The idea of a non-techie having to do the same makes me shudder. Here's another example:

I wanted to look up which base distro and build number the gOS thing uses, and accidentally opened up an applet caled "About Me", hoping it would give me info about the operating system. It gave me an error: "There was an error while trying to get the addressbook information Evolution Data Server can't handle the protocol" (bad punctuation was in the error message itself).

That's from a fresh installation of the OS. All I did was install the OS from scratch, open up its program menu, and pick an innocent-looking icon. I'm presented with a cryptic, poorly-worded error message with no hint of how to solve the problem. As a techie type, I can look past the bad English and get a vague idea of what might be wrong, but I still have no clue how to fix something like that.

That's just flat-out a Quality Assurance problem. Microsoft and Apple's OS's might have their issues, but their out of box experience from a fresh install is better than that.

Agreed. My favorite pet peeve is third-party wireless connection utilities. Those are just awful. Once upon a time, they were necessary, back before Windows had that stuff built in. Now, the one built in to Windows is better than any third-party connection manager I've seen.

Change that to "can anyone cite a successful installed long-term instance of a day-to-day desktop XXXXX system used by a non-techie, other than the one that came pre-installed (and pre-paid) on their system?".

Non-techies just use what's already on the box, and MS forces h/w sellers to pre-install MS products.

Cheers

True. But every once in a while, you get a non-techie asking a question, such as in an online forum, wondering if they should try Linux.

I'm waiting for the Linux crowd to make liveUSB versions a *simple* reality.
LiveCDs are not good enough- you can't make any changes and they are slow.
LiveUSB is a reality, but there are several hoops to jump through. Perhaps the hoops are easy for someone familiar with it all, but it doesn't look easy yet to me.
Still, I might be game to have a go at those hoops in a couple weeks when the new Ubuntu version is released.

Okay... that's cool, then. There's definitely room for different opinions based on experience. You generally come across as a pretty damn knowledgeable guy, so it seemed like a bit of a departure to read something from you that, while I'd have agreed with it in the past whole heartedly, it didn't seem to be current. Part of the reason I was asking is because, in addition to using Linux at home, for the last 7 years I've been working at large companies (300+ employees) that successfully use Linux on the desktop. Sure, there's some kvetching due to unfamiliarity, but for the most part, from the seasoned unix folks down to the complete computer newbie, things are pretty smooth.

Yeah, there are always going to be examples of something that can be done better, but like you suggested in a previous post, Windows and OS X aren't immune from those, either. The last time I tried to help my parents with a computer problem, a fresh install of the OS still left me searching out, and downloading drivers. So really, I'd still be pretty hesitant to suggest that Microsoft's OOtB experience is any better. Apple, yeah... I won't argue, there.

Quick update: Latest Ubuntu distro fails the same basic test as gOS did.

I simply tried to set the time clock to update automatically from the internet. It told me a I had to install NTP support to do so. I pressed the "Install NTP support" button.

This one did slightly better than gOS did: It actually prompted me for the administrator password to install NTP support. It worked, downloaded the NTP support package, and installed it. Underneath a "DETAILS" button, I could open a little window and see the command-line shell output from the thingy that installed and started the NTP support. I could clearly see it saying "NTP started". So far so good!

After closing that window, I tried to set it to get internet time automatically, and...

"NTP Support is not installed. You must install NTP support..."

Ad infinitum.

Keeping in mind that this is a a Microsoft contractor (employee?)..

IMHO it's nothing to do with "techie"

I think it is how 'investigative' you are and how 'closed' you are to change and learning.

If you're older and you've become a little conservative (as we are biologically predisposed to do) you can get to the point where you are too worried to push a button on a VCR.

OTOH, if you take things to bits to see how they work you probably already have linux.

My father-in-law got into linux on his own in his 60's
He occasionally asks me for help.

His profession was in forestry and he was so "not bothered" by technology that he wouldn't have a TV in the house until they retired.

Linux still isn't totally easy-to-use, but the main problem that people have (as someone said) is that it's different.

Linux (like the other OSes) isn't a buy-and-forget. It's a way of life; it will take time to get comfortable. I still curse my linux boxes regularly!!


Oh, for LiveUSB, try Unetbootin http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

(sorry, I've not actually seen if this properly runs from the usb stick)

Who? Tony? I was pretty sure he left that dark period in his life a long time ago

Former. I haven't worked there for a year and have no ties to them.

And yes, I'll always admit that Microsoft's and Apple's own OS's have their problems, some of them requiring pretty arcane fixes. I scream at them all the time.

I'm just saying that, for a desktop OS, the fit and finish is better on Windows and OSX. Out of the box, there's less little "weird stuff" like that NTP issue I cited above, and fewer things that need fixing and adjusting.

I adore Linux for what it has always done well. I would personally never put a Windows server outside of a firewall. But despite the strides that Linux desktops have made, I still maintain a non-techie would be happier with OSX or Windows than Linux.

That Ubuntu distro still looks pretty nice, though. It did a Windows-style "automatic updates" thing right off the bat, quite smoothly. I intend to play with it some more.

Recently set up a CentOS server at work, CUPS found all the available printers on the network and actually had drivers for them, all I had to do was hit the "add printer" (or similar) button. Quite a shock for me.

Oh, excellent then. My apologies!

Meanwhile, I have a 12 year old Windows glitch that I've yet to solve: when I dual boot (rarely, but once or twice a year) one of the machines at home into MS WXP (or even W98SE), the clock is always off by either 5 or 8 hours from EST.

Oh, and sometimes the MS WXP "helpfully" adjusts the time by 1 hour (+/-) for daylight savings, which then screws up the time by that same amount when I later boot back into the native OS (Linux).

Peculiar that.

Cheers

Ah!
Starting from the Wikipedia Ubuntu#LiveUSB section, I only checked into the first two options listed. Your suggestion (third listing) seems quite a tidy package. Thanks!

Not true. Microsoft did have very shady deals and requirements back in the early to mid 90s with hardware vendors, but the legal cases that started in 93 helped to bring an end to this. Any hardware vendor can (and many do) offer multiple operating systems on hardware. Unfortunately the practices Microsoft used in the past helped kill off any foothold OS/2, BeOS and others could have made in the 90s to avoid the situation today.

This is clearly a situation where the Linux community cannot try and play as the victim and expect things to get better. More effort is clearly needed to ensure Linux is in a state that the big OEMs are willing to bundle, sell, and support Linux in the desktop market in a broader way then they currently are.


Windows by default will read the system time as local time instead of UTC. There is some code in the NT kernel back from the RISC days to try and set Windows to use UTC time, but it is buggy. More info on the issue here. It pretty much comes from the IBM PC legacy Windows was born from, where all IBM PCs stored real time in the BIOS and not UTC.

I've used Linux on and off for 10 years now and I still get a kick out of it when it 'just works'. The zealot in me just thinks that it's another kick in Microsoft's pants.

So what you're saying is that the problem in his case isn't necessarily that Windows has a time clock issue. It's that he's dual booting with a different OS which reads the time clock differently (UTC versus local). So the problem is caused by the act of dual booting with another OS, not by either of the OS's per se.

Am I reading that right?

And FUD like mine isn't helping, right?

Yes, but it's insane in this global world that Windows doesn't even offer an option for time to be stored in the BIOS as UTC. The way MS deals with time is awful.

Only if both conventions -- interpreting the clock as UTC, and as local time -- made equal sense. As Drakino's link explains, that's not the case. There's a right way and a wrong way, and DOS and Windows do it the wrong way.

Peter

You are reading it right. MSDOS, really old versions of OS/2 and Windows though have been the only mainstream OSes to do this, and POSIX standards actually state this is the wrong way to do it. All variants of Unix, BeOS, 32 bit versions of OS/2, OS X, Linux, and so on all follow POSIX standards that the real time clock should be set to UTC and never adjusted to local time zone/daylight settings. Dealing with time zone and daylight savings calculations should be a function of the OS or application, and not the RTC.

Ooh. That's a good link. I'd skipped over it before, as Tom's context implied it was just a listing of problems Windows had with its vestigial UTC support, but it's much more than that.

I guess that explains why my Media Center box tends to mess up the start times of series when they cross in/out of DST.

It dawned on me that nobody, so far as I could see, addressed this stated interest.

If you are truly keen, then I think Linux is your man, so to speak. At the present time, I can't think of a more efficient way to exercise a certain degree of computing keenness than Linux (warts and all).

As others have said, Live CDs mean it can be just dating, not an expensive wedding. Partitioning and dual boot may be worth considering, but why not see if your BIOS will let you boot from an outboard USB hard drive and set up Linux on that?

I am Fedora and Redhat-focused due to employment, but Ubuntu/Kubuntu certainly win the prize today for not-so-painful general-purpose Linux. Kubuntu for me.

What are the things that bug me?;

- wireless support not so fantastic

- support for USB scanners needs to be better, SANE or no.

It's been a couple years since I actively tried Linux.

Knoppix live CD being the exception. It worked well on this laptop even getting the Wi-Fi working with only setting the necessary prefs.

I'm kind of guessing though that new, newer, newest, machines will be the ones most likely to be missing support for various bits of hardware. True?

Good point! Agreed.

Not sure. Anything with a pure Intel chipset will just work on Linux, either at release or within 6 months (Ubuntu release cycle).

In the past, Toshiba and Compaq branded machines seem to have given the most difficulties, and Dell and (especially) Lenovo machines generally work without issues (unless one has last week's latest ATI video chips.. but that's apparently also now much better).

Cheers

Okay, I'll admit it. I don't know very many non-techies who also happen to own computers.

So it took a while to think through this one, but then I realized that two of our non-techie friends do indeed own/use exclusively Linux notebooks and prefer to leave them exactly the way they came from the store. ASUS EeePCs, of course. One for the teacher, and another for the sales dude.

Cheers

OEM's tend to offer Windows because they can bundle other stuff with it, like 90-day trials of AV products, Everquest (or whatever the current thing is), etc. They get paid to do this by the software vendors, actually meaning that Linux costs them more to include, even though it's free...

I think I first used Linux in either '94 or '95. It was back when Slackware was the defacto distribution, the kernel was at something like 0.74 (I think) and the only way to install it was following the guide by Matt (Welsch or something?). Some things are (or were) just easier in Linux. Some things are not. There is a level of frustration that can be had with any operating system. When things just work, it is awesome. When things don't just work, it is the exact opposite of awesome If you are lucky, you can fix it in Linux faster/easier than in Windows. As a member of this community, we are extremely lucky to have the membership we do.

Right now, my biggest complaint about Linux is the lack of direction. You have all these people doing great things, but they are just scattered all over the map. There seems to be massive steps backwards in some releases. One of the big things people promote about Linux is the security, then somebody goes and makes it so in Fedora 9 you can't hide the list of users from the login screen. Something like that is just baffling. Reading on the forums it looks like it was a personal agenda thing, preparing for 10 instead of keeping security in mind all the way through.

I have a few simulation packages that only run on Linux. Since a few of them are only provided with binaries, I can't just do a simple recompile to match my system. That would be too easy. Instead, I have to do all kinds of goofy stuff to try to get them to run on the distribution the others are using.

I've had more problems with lib hell than I ever had with dll hell. Go figure.

Some of the things in Linux are phenomenal though. The file command has saved me so many times, the latest when a new version of a sim wouldn't run because it couldn't execute a file. Turns out the file was a tar, just without the extension so it looked like the executable.

I suggest you do try it. While it isn't all funs and grins, it can be really useful. Just a piece of advice, when you do try it - never, ever use your hard drive as a decoding device for a mp3

Good point. I'd forgotten about the EeePCs thingys.

The only ones of those I've ever seen were owned by techies, but I could envision them being owned by non techies.

Given the variety of free virtualization products might that not be easier then dual booting? Plus one can download pre-build Linux virtual machines - not quite marriage, but more then dating

Today heralds the latest release of Ubuntu! Included, according to Slashdot, is a LiveUSB option.

I'll give it a try a little later.

edit:
more info from the ubuntu forums.

I've been running Ubuntu 8.10 (the latest) here all week (well, the final Release Candidate, more or less identical).

On the whole, I like it very much. The 3D desktop itegration is simply amazing, and parts of it are actually quite useful -- eg. the desktop zoom function is handy for youtube videos and for Chris's photography website, as otherwise images look tiny on my 1920x1200 notebook screen!

The networking "just works" perfectly. And, a first for Canon, I plugged in my Pixma 8500 photo printer, and was greated by a simple little bubble stating that it had been detected and configured.. sure enough, it "just worked" without any interaction or driver discs. Way cool -- Canon printers have hardly ever been supported before now.

Kubuntu-8.10 ships with slower-than-winter KDE4 as the only "choice". Problem is, KDE4 is *not* KDE -- it's some newfangled desktop system that shares the same first three characters ('K', 'D', 'E'). The similarity and usability ends there.

As does my affinity for Kubuntu. Real KDE ("KDE3") is no longer offered even as an option, so now I'm learning GNOME and gconf-editor in particular. With the latter, the desktop can be made somewhat usable, though it does still lack nice essentials like toggle keys for maximize vertical/horizontal.

But I cannot live/work with GNOME's poor excuse for a terminal app, so I've grabbed Konsole from KDE3 (Kubuntu Hardy) and use it for all of my text windows on GNOME.

I think I'll survive the demise of KDE, and the new Compiz-Fusion eye candy tricks are great time-consumers.

Ubuntu-8.10 is going onto both of my notebooks, and its sweet young sister, Xubuntu, is going to end up on the PVR with Mythbuntu running on top of it.

Cheers

I still use xterm. I find it superior to all of the other terminal apps. The only place it could use some work, IMO, is in its memory usage, and none of the other apps I've seen are any better.

"Problem is, KDE4 is *not* KDE -- it's some newfangled desktop system that shares the same first three characters ('K', 'D', 'E'). The similarity and usability ends there."

Yes, what a bummer this is. I've stopped at Fedora 8 to retain KDE 3.5.

I really, really hate GNOME, but KDE will have to pull off a miracle to produce an alternative in time for 3 or 4 people to still care. Yes, it seems like after a lot of initial screams of horror over KDE4, I can't find much shouting out there. I fear that's because folks are just voting with their feet.

KDE 4.2 supposedly in January 2009. Supposed some new things called "features". No problem to stand pat until January 2010 if I had to, but I am not optimistic. Dang I hate GNOME

What's wrong with KDE4? Rather, what's more wrong with it than with KDE3? (Not that Gnome isn't worse.)

Slow, (VERY slow), incomprehensible menu system, broken shortcut keys in Konsole (possibly others as well), dog ugly themes, no "kicker", etc..

And mostly, it's not KDE. If I'm gonna learn a new desktop, then it might as well be GNOME.

On the plus side, XFCE is looking a lot like KDE from, oh, about 7 years ago. That's a *good* thing.

Cheers

Right, I installed KDE4, and not only did it not carry forward my HTTP proxy setting from KDE3, it plain didn't support HTTP proxying -- so, no web in Konqueror. I uninstalled it again and went back to KDE3, and the shouting stopped. I don't expect to start shouting again until I reinstall it, which, unless I hear very good things about it, won't be until after they mothball KDE3. (And this is coming from someone who's usually so keen on the bleeding-edge that I download new point releases of GCC the day they come out and recompile the whole of userland against them.)

Peter

Aside from slowness mark mentions and some impenetrable (to me) new desktop metaphors (like no desktop) they just decided not to carry over "old" things like an auto-hiding task bar and tons of other familiar KDE elements. I used to be able to set my background to a "update-every-5-minute" webcam grab. Gone now. or I can't find it.

The explanations seem to vary from "You don't need those things anymore!" to "this is a development release!" to "You don't need those things anymore!" to "Maybe we'll have some of those things in 4.2."

So I have set up Fedora 9 in a virtual machine, turned on rawhide, and I run yum update every few weeks to see if I detect any KDE4 miracle.

I find it very interesting to read this. I too am currently taking my first steps with Linux, and for this I'm using Suse 11 with KDE 4. I liked what I saw (for one reason or the other, I absolutely hate Gnome, and I can't stand that orangy-brown theme in Ubuntu), but now it seems KDE 4 is not even 'the real thing'.

In other words: it's intriguing to hear that KDE 3.5 was even better. Maybe I should install that instead.

I snagged a copy of the KDE4 remix of 8.04 shortly after it was released and I was frankly horrified by what I saw. It didn't even seem as though they'd got a quarter of the way towards replicating the functionality of KDE3.

Given that 8.04 is an LTS release it'll be around for a least as long as 8.10, I'm hoping by that point KDE4 will have 'matured' by then.

I've not actually turned my home desktop machine on in months as I do pretty much everything on my MacBook Pro. But I'm hoping work will stump up the readies for an octal core Xeon powered Dell Precision as my office machine in which case I will probably make the move to Linux at work. I'll probably stick with 8.04 as the host OS and then try KDE4 in VMware alongside a few Windows guests.