Re: debian

[Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com>]

John Sunderhaus <jsunderhaus@cox.net> writes:

> It's livable, yes; but are you content with just working around windoze?
> As much as I like, admire and respect Bill Gates (and his victory vs.
> IBM), I'd like to push his campus in Redmond into the Pacific ocean. 

I don't admire Bill Gates. Neither do I wish to push him into the
Ocean :)

> Debian is the distro to do this - along with the FSF and other cohorts. 
> I (and my users) need to be happy - and simply doing things to just to
> work around windoze won't cut it.  Linux (and/or the BSD's) need to
> perform decisively better than windoze, or the users aren't going to go
> for it.

I'm not really worried about that. Most people I talk to already think
that Linux outperforms windows. They still don't want to switch,
mostly because of the difficulty of getting started.

>  And to reiterate - the linux core I currently have on my
> machine beats the daylights out of the windoze core (I think - MS's core
> is under lock and key); this is fundamentally necessary if the FSF
> movement - and other similar movements are going to survive against the
> jaugernauts of MS, IBM, etc.

I don't know about beating MS, IBM, etc. But for wining over users the
most important thing in my opinion is user-friendly software. Like
gnome, kde, mozilla, evolution, etc. Microsoft rarely brags that their
software runs on weaker hardware than Linux. Mostly they say that
their software is nice and GUI :)

> But your point is well taken; you can productively run X on an
> underpowered machine - but I'll bet you aren't happy. 

My choice is between running Debian and Windows on the same
machine. Windows 9x is too unstable. Windows XP is about as resource
intensive. Also I prefer Free Software. In either case I couldn't use
much of the software that I use on Debian, and even the software that
works on windows, works better on Debian. And I can recompile my
kernel. I might not be completely happy, but given the alternatives
I'm as happy as I can be.

Bijan