Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 21:29:25 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com> To: "Kenneth Wayne Culver" <culverk@wam.umd.edu> Cc: <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: home pc use Message-ID: <00a601c17202$0f9af880$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0111201109140.27830-100000@sun08pg2.wam.umd.edu>
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Kenneth writes: > Not everyone wants their systems to look like > and feel like windows. Maybe, but you'd never know that from the fervor with which UNIX users (or newbies, at least) rush to install GUI environments on their machines. Maybe I should take a poll: How many FreeBSD users here are satisfied with just the standard command-line interface and interactions through terminal-style remote programs like telnet or ssh? I'll raise my hand, but I daresay that I won't see too many other hands going up. > I for one would never have installed FreeBSD on > my computers 5 or 6 years ago if it had looked > like windows. I installed FreeBSD specifically with the intent of leaving it in its native state. It's a server, not a desktop. If I want to throw away vast amounts of horsepower putting drop shadows and sparkly highlights on screen icons, I'll do it on my Windows desktop system (heck, do I have a choice?). Perhaps a majority of users of UNIX variants today simply weren't around before GUIs existed, and don't realize that you can get a lot of productive work done with just text on a screen. As a matter of fact, if you look at what you do during the day on a Windows system, you may find that a lot of it involves ... text on a screen (including this message!). > Support is not difficult to get, but most FreeBSD > users expect the user who is asking questions on > this list to read the manpages and search the > list archives before emailing the list. I think we are desynchronized a bit. I was talking about production use of the OS. Sorry, but you cannot sell an OS for use in production environments with the advice to "read the man pages" or "e-mail this list" if support is required. Most production environments require hotline support for the products used. If the system goes down with 1500 users connected, you cannot spend several hours reading through man pages or waiting for e-mail to be answered to resolve the problem; you need an engineer on the phone _right now_ who is competent to help you bring the system back up _right now_. If you tell your manager that you're waiting for some friends in cyberspace to give you a few educated guesses as to what's wrong, both you and your manager will be flipping burgers before the week is out. > That is largly personal opinion. No, it is a logical inevitability. What is Windows? It's the environment provided by the Microsoft Windows operating system. So where are you likely to find the most perfect implementation of a Windows environment? Under Microsoft Windows, of course! That's never going to change. > Personally if the desktop system functions and I > can get work done, I don't care if it looks like > and acts like windows, and the less it looks like > windows, the better. The problem is that 99.9% of all applications out there in the world today will not run except on a system that looks and acts exactly like Windows. So you are stuck with the Windows environment whether you want it or not. A lot of people seem to think that Windows is the leader because Microsoft pushes it, but that ceased to be the case a dozen years ago. Today, Windows it the leader because so many _other_ companies write software for Windows. Because of this, even if Microsoft did nothing at all to sell the operating system, people would still go out and buy it. What's $100 for an operating system when having it gives you access to 100,000 applications in every imaginable domain? > What were you disappointed by? The raggedness and instability of the windows environments. KDE2 was all flash and no substance. Pretty icons and graphics, obviously influenced by Redmond, but with none of the stability of a real Windows system. For example, the task bar would get stuck, with only the background painted, or icons would freeze on the screen, or all sorts of other weird anomalies. It just had a junky feel to it. Long ago, I saw a very simple windowed desktop on DEC UNIX systems, if I remember correctly. Can anyone tell me what sort of environment that was? I don't need something fancy, just something that will let me run programs that require an X environment. I don't care if I hear lovely chimes when I double-click on icons, and I don't need to have a menu of 3,245 desktop themes to choose from. > What exactly do you want to know how to do, I > didn't read your original post, but I'll read > your response to this mail, I'm sure I can help > you with most of your problems; as I still > remember the problems I had when I made the > switch (And never went back) I've asked a number of questions, and often I either got no answer at all, or vague or incomplete answers. The problem of a mysterious reboot during the night is one of them: My system rebooted abruptly sometime during the night, on one single occasion, which has not been repeated. There seems to be no evidence of what happened; I asked here if there was any place where I could look for clues, but didn't get much of an answer. The system was running setiathome, and a cron job was executing (I know this from the last screen output by top on a remote terminal before the system went down). Nothing else. The system has been in the same state on many other occasions, but no reboots have occurred. > I thought it was pretty good, it's how I learned > most of what I know about FreeBSD, and that was > about 5 years ago, the docs now are much better now > than they were when I first started. It's good when you know where to look. It's also quite good for freeware; documentation is not cheap or easy to write, and so one should not expect too much when one is getting the system for free. But for a newbie it can be hard to find things, and often significant details or functions seem to be tantalizing absent. I was unable to figure out exactly how to configure pptp and use my system as a gateway from the handbook information, for example. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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