A Long Goodbye (Microsoft Bashing)

Did I miss something?

You write an OS, surly, if your goign to start anywhere, File Management is going to play a big part in it. So M$ decide that it’s going to write an OS, and then make us wait 2 hours to delete stuff? Pardon?

Of course, the resulting argument is “if you think you can do better…”, well, I have often thought I could do better, though my technical skills, and complete lack of time tend to get in the way. That said, however, there is an alternative.

“Linux” (or more specificially, things like Mandrake, Ubuntu and the like) have come a long way since their inception. People complain about the problems of getting Wireless cards working under linux, but this is meerly a problem with the fact that they are not true “hardware” per-se, and most of the work is dealt with by the operating system, requiring a higher level of driver. This, in turn, means that there should be a driver for linux.

This is where you hit a snag.

Though “kernel modules” (or drivers, for you Windows Nuts) are well documented, there arn’t many vendors that actually take the time to work out how their piece of hardware will work with them. Though, saying that, I have noticed the occasionall driver arriving with a little TUX on the side of the box (probably to denote linux compatable =) ).

Where am I giong with this? well, the current “gong” that people keep banging is that F/OSS is no-where near user-friendly. Or, nowhere near ready for the market. I think that I would probably have to start disagreeing. Indeed, to that end, I plan on seeing what happens when I install FC6 onto my laptop at home, and letting a few people play with it, see how quickly they can get stuff up and running.

Though of course, that’s never the argument. The argument is normally about installing stuff. The fact that you need to be “root” to install stuff seems to confuse people. That, my friends, is just a matter of education. Infact, Fedora does a marvelous job with SUDO applications, which simply ask for the root password before you carry on.

Years Ago Microsoft’s “Manuals” used to be these thin books with simple how-to’s in them that any monkey could follow. I never really saw the point, however, what would change if Linux started shipping with some of these? small pacakges, about £10 quid, with an Installtion, and a nice “how to install, how to use” manual with it.

The rest, of course, could be found online.

You know, that’s not a bad idea. It’s published here folks, it’s my idea, hands off =).

SK