Re: Emacs - was Re: Mail/news software
Linux[1] is much more difficult (to learn anyway) yet much more powerful than,
say, windows. The Windows philosophy is: "don't think, everything should be
easy." With linux, you must think. The windows philosophy seems to rub off
onto the rest of one's life (or maybe it's the other way around). Some
people don't like to think, and windows encourages this.
Linux, on the other hand, makes and encourages you to think. Hopefully, this
will rub off onto the rest of your life and make you a better person. Yes,
Linux can make you a better person.
Unfortunately, laziness and non-thinkers are not going anywhere. That's why
kde and gnome and the like are important. If you don't want to think, you
don't have to. But if you do, there's always the command line, waiting,
beckoning. Kde and gnome will allow those people to use free software and
still not get too frustrated. I admit to being like this. I don't have time
to learn how to get latex to print a custom header for my picky english
teacher when it's 1:00 a.m. and an essay's due tommorrow. I just want to
fire up a gui/wsiwig and click on "headers & footers."
But I have chosen to use linux; I like the free software attitude, and I want
to be encouraged to think. The most fun I ever had was when my brother and I
fdisk'ed our windows partition and mke2fs'ed it. Then we broke the windows
install CD so that no one else would ever install it from that CD.
[1] When I say linux, I mean Debian, GNU, latex etc., etc.
On Mon, May 01, 2000 at 07:13:06PM +0200, Kovacs Istvan wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Apr 2000 19:35:31 -0400, Rob Lilley wrote:
>
> >Different Strokes for different folks.
> >
> >Emacs - "Show a newbie that and you will see the dust as he turns
> >and runs back to the Windows camp" <smile>. Emacs and Linux/Unix
> >for that matter is not for everybody - its there because of and
> >for the growing few that want to learn to swim upstream against
> >the current. [...]
> >There is a romance behind all of this wonderful esoteric stuff
> > - let's face it, those in the world of windows will never
> >reach out and touch the actual kernel of it all.
>
> I disagree with you: Linux is nice because it works, and not because
> it's esoteric. That's exactly the reason why I chose OS/2 five years
> ago, and why I'm switching to Linux now. As Linux matures, there'll be
> less and less need to improve the kernel and the core services of the
> OS, and more effort will be spent on the UI, including popular
> applications, which means that more and more people will find the
> system useful. Most of them won't want to 'touch the actual kernel of
> it all', what they'll want is a usable system.
> Emacs, vi, development tools are fine for developers (I also decided to
> learn Emacs and vi -- not at the wizard level, but to be able to use
> them when needed), and it's reasonable not to expect the masses to use
> them, but it's not the same case with Linux (I hope :-)
>
> Kofa
>
--
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of
Congress. But I repeat myself.
-- Mark Twain
Reply to: