On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 11:23:02AM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote:
| On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 01:15:45AM -0300, synthespian wrote:
| > You can't use Potato for a desktop (to outdated) and you remain in this
| > security limbo...
|
| <rant>
|
| Why does everyone keep repeating this "potato is too old to be a
| desktop" line? I heartily disagree and I have somewhere in the
| neighborhood of 35 office personnel (accountants, purchasing, etc. -
| not technogeeks) to back me up.
Your audience is not me. For *me*, potato is too old for desktop use.
Here's why :
1) My background began with RH. I found I liked GNOME better
than KDE so I went with it. (at first I bounced back and
forth trying to decide. It was a fair competition.) I
followed the GNOME updates, and my RH6.1 box was more
up-to-date than RH7.0 was when it was released. After
learning of the libc and gcc fiasco (stabled? hah.) I looked
around at the various distros. I tried out potato, and liked
many of it's qualities, but gnome was too old on it. (I also
had to work some more to get X to look nice like it did in
RH.) I couldn't run gnome (1.0.55) because the panel
segfaulted on my config files -- I was using new features in
1.2. I eventually dug through the X config and got it to be
pretty as well, but didn't use it much because I didn't want
my carefully built gnome (1.2) config to get trashed. I
eventually bit the bullet and grabbed woody (about a year ago,
or almost). It had gnome 1.4 and was great.
2) I like playing with new things.
o Gabber isn't in potato (AFAIK).
o vim 6 isn't in potato. While I was stuck in windows
land at work I was following vim development and liked
some of the new features in vim6.
o python 2 isn't in potato
o what else can I think of now ... as I'm preparing to
start some C development soon I want to use gcc 3.
That's not in potato.
As you can see, I have some valid reasons for considering potato too
old. (see next paragraph ...)
| not a one has complained about missing functionality in the year
| I've been supporting them.
Your audience isn't a computer geek like me (who is also a developer)
and isn't aware of what they're "missing". As a result they're happy
with what you've given them. That's great -- they're using and
learning Free Unix systems. On the one hand, slow upgrades are good
because then you're not changing everything on them every time they
turn around. They have time to learn and become acclimated with the
system.
| And for those who think that KDE or GNOME is the be-all of desktop
| usability, I've got news for you:
I barely use gnome as it is. Sure it's my desktop. It sets the
background, gives me some nice applets in a panel, and gives me some
handy launchers in another panel. I like the LnF of the widget set.
Most of my work is done from a terminal, though. My main purpose in X
is to have multiple terms and apps on screen, and for web browsing.
I'm not sure I like where some of the new gnome stuff is heading
(windows-like registry, so-called "integration", etc), so we'll see
what happens in the future.
-D
--
For society, it's probably a good thing that engineers value function
over appearance. For example, you wouldn't want engineers to build
nuclear power plants that only _look_ like they would keep all the
radiation inside.
(Scott Adams - The Dilbert principle)
GnuPG key : http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/public_key.gpg
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