Obviously, choice is a good thing; no one really disputes that. But too much choice always runs the risk of being overly confusing, and contributing to many people overlooking the good and using the bad, or at least using the not so good. Mandrake comes with far far too much duplication in applications that just breeds confusion (and frustration) it needs a lot more rationalization of the apps it installs by default.
Why are there three basic text editors installed with KDE? I'm sure if I'd installed Gnome there would be even more? If just one was installed by default, with the others being left on the CD or downloadable from the web, knowledgeable, power users could go ahead and get them if needed. But as it is, its' just confusing, to my eye, they all look and perform about the same anyway, I mostly use them as a basic text editor, or for opening up readme files. (as I'm sure most people will do with them) I've also got what initially appears to be four different image viewers,
Is there a reason for them all? Why not just have one good image/camera application rather than 3 or 4 that are similar - I don't have a digital camera, so have no idea why I would need any one over another. I've got two competing Audio ripping tools installed, Grip andKaudioCenter, two sound and volume mixers, the badly named Aumix and Kmix, several cd players: Xmms, KSCD, Noatun, Xine and Kaboodle, two multimedia audio player: Kaboodle and Noatun. There's three word processors, OpenOffice Writer, Kword and Abiword. Two ICQ clients, two ftp clients, three web editors (Mozilla, Quanta and Bluefish, two scanning programs: (Xsane and Kooka), three image viewers, Two KDE system monitoring tools, two version of Ghostview, several email clients, two slideshow, spreadsheet and flowcharting programs and a myriad of terminal tools and I only installed KDE I didn't install Gnome, goodness knows how many other duplicate programs I would have got had I installed that as well?.
Don't get me wrong! There's nothing wrong with these programs; they are all fine in themselves but there's no need for them all to be installed by default for every user, when just one, the "best one" would suffice. I wonder how many CDs Mandrake would ship on if they supplied just the best or most common applications needed by most people? Not to mention how much money they would save on packaging, testing and configuring the apps. Let alone how much less confusing Linux would be.
There is so much about Linux to adore. KDE and most of the KDE applications are brilliant, Koffice is truly wonderful, (I'm writing this in Kword and it's genuinely superb). I can burn CDs effortlessly with K3d, Scan easily and quickly with Xsane, quickly get to what I want with Konqueror, manage my diary, address book and sync with exchange using the wonderful Evolution (Kmail is pretty damn good too). But the wonderful and brilliant applications of Mandrake-Linux (and Linux in general) are hugely overshadowed by the sheer difficulty in getting the system working, using it day-to-day and the sheer and needless complexity of some of the basic operations and the sheer amount of redundant (i.e. duplicate) applications.
Footnote & Resume
Many of the comments I received last time commented that I didn't give
much detail about myself and level of ability, so in an attempt to
rectify the situation I will conclude with a brief resume of my computer
experience.
My first computer experience was my next door neighbors Atari VCS (can't remember the model version, but pre 2600, the one with the wood effect paneling), from then on I was hooked. My Dad bought a ZX81 for £99 (mail order) in 1981 (when I was 10) and this was my first experience with personal computing. It grew from there to a ZX Spectrum, (AKA Thompson/Timex I believe?) Dragon 32 (my dad's computer actually), Commodore Plus 4 (sadly), Commodore 64 and then to the (godlike) Amiga and BBC/Acorns at school. Spend most of my time in Secondary school working in a computer shop selling home and business machine (at that time that was AT compatible Amstrad 1512s 1640s and then 8086s and Amstrad PCWs, Back in the days when 4 color monitors and high density 5.25" floppies were a BIG deal!)
Went to university with my Trusty 286 in tow, after taking it to bits and "improving" it several times. I finally "improved it" a bit too much :) and ditched it in 1995 for Pentium 90 that was the dog's bollocks of processors then and which I built myself. Moved from Win3.11 to Win95 (via OS/2 briefly). At University worked extensively on Macs (OS7), HP Workstations, (HP/UK) and Sun boxes (Solaris). Then left Uni and started working in IT as a web developer/graphic designer. (Primarily developing on Sun boxes running Apache/Perl and when I installed Linux (Red Hat 5) for the first time) 7 years down the line from University I'm a freelance web developer/graphic designer/System Admin/network kind of person, who also dabbles in a bit of journalism now and again (not always IT-related).
I mostly (though not exclusively) develop for Windows web platforms nowadays: .NET/ traditional asp, SQL server/ MySQL, a little PHP and the odd bit of Python and Rebol (www.rebol.com) - thankfully no more Perl...ever!!!
I'm currently using a self-built computer: AMD Athlon XP 2400+, MSI motherboard, with USB2 and Bluetooth (onboard), 60gb HD + 30Gb (slave), 1GB ram, Matrox g550 Graphics card, DVD+RW drive Real Magic Hollywood+ Decoder card USB ISDN TA (EIcon Diva) PQI USB 6 in 1 (removable) Media reader/writer (for writing Mp3s to my PDA and mp3 player) Wacom Graphics Table (A4 size) - Serial all running in rather nice Orange colored "i-Tee" PC case.
- "Linux Giving Grief, Part 1"
- "Linux Giving Grief, Part 2"
- "Linux Giving Grief, Part 3"
