Re: debiantutorials.org seeks input and new blood
> Honestly, I thought Dotan wrote the above in jest and forget the ":-)".
>
> I certainly did not post in earnest.
>
I meant it. Two years ago I had to maintain a Win98 machine that ran
some library software - nothing else, no internet - on 64 MB RAM on a
433 MHz processor. The thing flew. It would open menus and respond
instantly. I remember that OS when it first came out, I think that it
was the first time I had ever seen real multitasking (I don't think
that worked in Win95, and Macs were useless in that era). I know that
today the whole Windows family is a bloated, insecure mess, but they
once had really good products.
> On the other hand, what I wrote was bare-bone facts .. They did give me
> a 20-page manual, _and_ notepad, a web browser, a calculator and a few
> other "Accessories" whose relevance I was not able to determine at the
> time.
>
I agree that Windows comes with almost no installed software of any
value. If that's what you meant by "capabilities of the OS" then you
are right. I see the applications as being separate from the OS, but I
can understand the viewpoint that if they came with it, then they are
a part of it.
> Surely I missed something, but all the same I was not exactly bowled
> over by the OS .. or the distro.
>
> I don't know for sure, because less than a month later I installed Red
> Hat 6.2 and never gave anything Windows another glance.
>
> As to a 1,000-page manual (or ten-100 page manuals, or one hundred
> 10-page manuals) .. one should probably keep in mind that it's not just
> the OS that is therein documented but the entire distro.
>
> I am not a user of FreeBSD, but if you consider that current estimates
> of major linux distros run into the _hundreds of millions_ of lines of
> source code, I don't see how one thousand pages of documentation could
> tell you more than the basics..!
>
> Q. Since this appears to be an issue, how many pages of documentation do
> you think there are in /usr/share/man on the average user-oriented
> machine?
>
> A. Many. Mine has 30Meg's worth, gzipped so it's likely close to the
> mythical 1,000 mark .. possibly more.
>
> And that's only the man pages .. many of them only a few lines that tell
> you that the app did not have a man page.
>
> As to my assuming anything Windows is "modern", I'm not sure where you
> got the idea..
>
Depending on how your define Modern. If requiring 2 GB RAM and a 2 GHz
processor just to turn the thing on is modern, then Vista is probably
the most modern OS in existence!
That said, I really like the UI features of Windows 7, even though
most of the things that annoy me in Windows are still present. I filed
feature requests at KDE for the Windows 7 features that I liked.
--
Dotan Cohen
http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il
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