Linked by Iain Alexander on Thu 17th Apr 2003 07:28 UTC
Several days ago I wrote a rather scathing article about my utter dismay and disappoint with Mandrake 9.1 and by association, Linux as a whole. Since then I have had many many flames and equally as many agreeing emails (is there a simple opposite word for flame?) Since then I have been trying, really really trying to get my system working fully. But time and again I'm coming up against the same brick wall of (un)usability, computer esotericism and down right idiocy. 
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OK. For the record I run Mac OS X. So if you don't like that, think people who do don't know anything, or whatever about the Mac OS X makes you violently ill don't bother reading any more.
Flashback. Winter 2001.
AMD 1.33GHz 512MB DDR system I have, hard drive gets bad sectors, tanks my Windows 98 installation, does all sorts of evil things like deletes all my email in my inbox (corrupted directory where the files were).
Sitting there thinking, you know, I never really bought Win98 for this machine now that I think about it. I need to be legal, what are my options?
RedHat 7.2 to the rescue. I install it, with Gnome as my desktop (don't ask me why, I just like it's interface more). I start to get things going.
What didn't work?
My Zip drive (it actually died, figured that out later)
My current library of games (ho hum, bought a PS2 and a GameCube instead)
Other than that, my network card, Video card (GeForce2 based) worked ok, later found out about nVidia's drivers.
Somewhere along the line, I stumbled onto Ximian, and started using them as my update/desktop providor. I think it was because Evolution was coming out/betaing whatever you call it at the time. I really really liked Evolution. It was easy to use, did what I needed, and had a similar interface to what i was used to (Outlook Express).
For about eight months I ran ximian desktop and Red Hat 7.2/7.3 as my primary workstation. i could surf the net, read my email, do what I needed to do short of games. I bought a few from Loki (Quake III, Heritic II, Alpha Centauri) to get my fix. However I could never get Quake or Heritic to run. I actually couldn't find where the heck they installed! Alpha Centauri worked great.
Some things I never figured out:
How to add an icon for a program to my desktop
How to get most plugins to work with Mozilla (Until Safari came out, i still used Mozilla on the Mac platform)
How to get any IM client to work (I still had my work computer, which ran Windows 2000 in a VM ontop of Linux. the reason I stopped using Linux on my work machine was an internal application/VPN dialer and my winmodem didn't get along, worked fine over the ethernet though)
I finally dumped Linux for a used Powerbook G4 after I got my wife an iMac that following July. She was my 'experiment' to see if Mac OS X was any good. I moved off to my iMac, formatted my AMD with RH 7.3 again and a new, larger drive (I was using a 10GB to replace my failed 75GB drive, had to buy a new one because of an un-related shipping issue with mailing my drive back to IBM, didn't use a static bag, my stupid mistake)
Why did I do it? Surfing the web was inconsistant for me on Linux. I could never get flash to work right, or realplayer. And unfortunately Quicktime didn't work either (I did go back and try cross over after I found out about that, it actually worked well)
So now, I'm on Mac OS X on a new Powerbook 12" G4 that I really enjoy. It has Unix underpinnings, I can play with Apache, Tomcat, whatever I want, but the Internet surfing environment is better.
It's not perfect mind you, still have a few tiny things that don't work, but they're MS Specific so what would you expect?