I do agree with you.
On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 12:53 AM, francis picabia
<fpicabia@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, however, if you are curious in addition to willing, the GUI front
end can be educational. Change something in GUI which impacts the
firewall, authentication, etc., and then look at the file system to
see what files it changes and with what content. This was me with
Redhat in '96 and it built knowledge I could take to Slackware, etc.
I guess this must have impact on the system files, GUI too asks for authentication (as for what I know....)!
But more significantly, the older generation of Unix users were
introduced to stuff gradually. It was like going through school, but
we were introduced to each piece as it came into maturity. We were
not on the web, we probably didn't have email except to other users on
the same Unix system. We
started with vt100-ish terminals, not any sort of Windows. We did have
lots of time to experiment with shell scripting, regular expressions,
awk, tricks in vi (it was called fred when I first used it) etc. This
was our elementary school period we built up the basics of living and
working from the command line. Even when XFree86 came along, it was a
bit of research to find how to configure your particular video card,
monitor, mouse, etc. with the windowing system.
That was old times when email was not so common as it is now, but you have good experience.
For someone starting today, there is a mountain of information to
learn all at once. They have to sort out what is worth learning. I
don't know how they would go about it. Of course to me it makes sense
to learn it the same order it was developed, but really, a bunch of it
can be forgotten (e.g. uucp).
It is forgotten, today people learn only the things they require or want to work in, and that's why they take so long to grep perfection!
I think it is getting to the point where more and more, only the
developers (or people
able to read and understand the code) will have inside knowledge on changing
low level config. It is like that now for projects like Horde Webmail
or Mailman.
Of course, general people cannot do level of technical changes or editing such files...The general people only use the system which developers do provide them....!
On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 12:16 AM, Robert Blair Mason Jr.
<rbmj@verizon.net> wrote:
Beyond just stability and freedom, I also didn't like the openSUSE way
of doing things. I find that debian's package management and system
administration tools are very robust. I haven't yet had a good
experience with YaST. For me it's always been slow, slightly clunky,
and annoying, like when YaST settings override settings in
configuration files. I always thought that if a user changed a config
file, that meant they wanted it changed.
Oh I see. But generally (what people say and I heard people saying that) YaST is good! However, it could be not good for somebody, it it fact is a personal choice. But with openSUSE also, there is nothing which you cannot do which you really can do with Debian and vice-versa too. There is nothing which Debian cannot do which openSUSE can do, so both are rock-solid like mountains of Linux and both are highly secured and versatile, for sure both of these give excellent learning opportunities and to be used widely ( ***I say according to what I read, and on the suggestions I get from the experts like you, and they cannot be wrong when many people say the same things***).
Debian also has a much more centralized repository system (i.e. not
having to add a new repo every time you want to install something).
I view it as a convenience advantage - I can always add an extra repo
if I want to, but for standard packages I shouldn't have to mess with
that.
Choose aptitude and dpkg and you can't go wrong.
So yes, I'm one to blindly point to debian : D
That's really great that Debian too is such a great distro, I agree with you but based on the experts' comments and people experiences, I cannot even deny the fact that openSUSE too is rock solid and nice (it might have not run well on your machine though). It could happen sometimes that Debian too gives some problem to somebody (might be driver issue with the latest hardware or anything) and then the users says that Debain is not good for him only. While it is Debian or it is openSUSE, both are excellent in my views (***now***) and with WHATEVER I go, I am sure that it would be highly exciting and for me it would not matter for how long I take to learn the Linux since I would have to spare the time from my other Job.
Said that, now my mind is really knowing something regarding Linux.
A typical scenario: "A general person is going to job (say like in Business and not related with computers at all). In the evening he comes to the home and want to use the computer without learning that all things required for Linux, but simultaneously he doesn't want any viruses too (of course) but want to use the system at the earliest for his personal purposes." In this typical scenario, I guess (again not sure) that openSUSE (being a better GUI then Debian) can give the person that all--if I am not wrong....Further after 18 months the person would again reinstall the next version and it doesn't involve (I guess) learning all that.....And simultaneously would get all that a typical Linux system could do except the things which only technical people use (like system administration or network administration....) However as suggested by someone here, PCLinuxOS too can give all that in GUI (like openSUSE). Being a person from other field, if I am wrong, please do let me know so that I can get the correct and accurate information.
Thx.