September 19, 2003

• I'm writing this using my throwaway Pentium 200, running Slackware Linux and KDE. I haven't used the linux box for much of anything besides trying to install stuff on it, so this is a first.
  
  My thoughts are that, first of all, there needs to be a desktop linux that doesn't make you learn things in order to install it. I mean, you need to learn things, but not how to author an XFree86Config file. (I 'blogged a while back about trying to get this thing hooked up to a relatively oddball monitor. The solution was to buy a new video card, which is not an acceptable, general-purpose type solution, is it?)
  
  Anyway. I'm down with the geeky joy of learning this kind of stuff, but it gets tiresome that no matter what you're trying to do, you end up searching Google so you can find out which command line argument to add so you can get it done. The point of having a GUI is so that you don't have to learn that stuff.
  
  KDE does a good job of hiding the scary stuff from view, though. And on a more modern machine than mine, it's probably a joy to use. I found a window theme that looks like Mac OS X, complete with little red, yellow, and blue candy buttons. But the real user experience they're trying to emulate is Windows, which is ironic, given that the righteous open-sourcers want to rid the world of Microsoft. Make that 'self-righteous'... You get the idea.
  
  Also: I used Mandrake initially, but it refuses to power down the machine properly. So I switched to Slackware, which doesn't power down, but instead tells me: 'Power down.' But it also doesn't end up in a kernel panic.

  • 10:50 pm
  • 5 Comments