Comments on: People Who’ve Never Run Linux Shouldn’t Write About Linux

By: Xaviersx

Xaviersx — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:09:48 +0000

Nice thing about free societies is that people can freely write about things to the degrees that they know them, problem is, they may not label that degree of knowledge.

As for wants or needs, we should use what we want, forget about bashing the things that we won’t or aren’t using, and improve about that we do.

As for guides, especially for newbies, is how to find out about the ‘definitive guides’ or resources. With some OSes (proprietary), you at least know of their one family of products and the 1st party resources, maybe with pointers to 3rd parties. With a multitude of distros, 1st you have to pick the one that you think fulfills a need or want, take the time to explore it’s knowledge bases, and hopefully pointers to 3rd party resources.

As someone wrote elsewhere, the problem with Linux isn’t Linux but people’s expectations coming into using it. It’s now Windows, it’s not Mac OS/xxxx, it may not even be your grandma’s Unix. Linux shouldn’t necessarily try to be the other OSes and newbies should come to it with open minds. The more experienced should be mentors of knowledge gained when encountering newbies and not witch hunters of those still using other systems.

With a little less religion in the OS mix, it becomes much easier to see tools as tools and not as weapons, making moving back and forth between them a luxury of choice and not a choice to avoid or engage in confrontations, IMO.

By: Jason

Jason — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 02:12:11 +0000

There are plenty of bad articles out there written by ignorant people, which
is why I decided some time ago not to read them. You can usually tell from the
summary at a site such as fsdaily.com, lwn.net or linuxtoday.com whether an
article is likely to be content-free or worth reading.

Another problem with these people who try out a Linux distribution and
criticize it is that they usually experience only the most Mac-like or
Windows-like aspects of Linux: the graphical desktop and X applications, and
never come to any understanding of the text-oriented, often command-oriented
tools which make working with Linux (and Unix-like operating systems in
general) so convenient and productive for those who know what they are doing.

For example, LaTeX is better than any word processor; Emacs and Vi are better
than the sorry excuses for text editors that you’ll find elsewhere, and the
shell is the best file manager ever written (and much more besides). These are
only a few illustrations of a general point.

I don’t have a job that requires me to interoperate with Microsoft
applications or network protocols, except for reading the occasional MS-Word
file which is easy enough under Linux. Once MS compatibility is taken out of
consideration as a non-requirement, which effectively compensates for the
distortion introduced by the MS monopoly and their “embrace, extend and
extinguish” strategy, then Linux suddenly becomes a much more attractive
working environment, due to the advantages noted above and many others that
Linux users have pointed out elsewhere.

By: Hawkeyeaz1

Hawkeyeaz1 — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:56:28 +0000

Clarification: My post above is to those complaining

By: Hawkeyeaz1

Hawkeyeaz1 — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:55:58 +0000

Either you contribute in some (beneficial) way (ex: money, code, tech support–then you have a right to complain), or you appreciate what you get, or you move on as there is nothing to see. you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

By: Dave W

Dave W — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 13:41:51 +0000

While pixel has tried really, really hard to /look/ like photoshop, the functionality isn’t all there yet. Maybe in version 2, if it continues development….It also, like Gimp, lacks 8BF plugin support, which is a showstopper for many.

By: SirYes

SirYes — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 12:23:30 +0000

For those that require Photoshop functionality, check out the “Pixel image editor”. Although it’s not free, it works on a multitude of OS-es and may be a good (and cheaper) replacement:

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12

By: John

John — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:36:57 +0000

For the people complaining Linux is not easy to use on AD..

Just wait a while.. As some of you maybe know the Samba team has gotten access to all protocols and more Microsoft is using in their servers. Microsoft was ordered by the EU to give full access to all those information for a reasonable price. The price was payed, and the Samba team got the information (that Microsoft has to keep updated as ordered) It’s just a matter of time before the Samba team will include all that knowledge in their product. I don’t think it wont last very long before Linux can be used in a AD environment just as easy as a Windows server/workstation…

Now for the Gimp etc. thingie. As I said – there will be people needing Photoshop etcetera, but I also said that a overwhelming majority of people do NOT need this programs. They are simply not professional graphic designers and only use the basic tools of Photoshop, leaving about 75% to 80% of the features unused. So – this huge majority can just use a free program like Gimp. No reason to buy an expensive program for features you just do not use.

By: John

John — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:45:14 +0000

I have a TV computer. It runs a script with one line of mencoder to do the hard stuff. The difficult bit was finding the identity of the real cheap innoDV smartTV card without any ROM was: tuner=56 card=3 alsa=1
It also runs a tiny webserver, so we have the vid streaming on our net.
It kills our HD recorder which will not let you save to USB stick, does not have a net socket, and has limits on how many movies you can program or save on the HD. Beat that and come back and tell us how poorly we are served by Linux.
The great feature of Linux is that you are the limit. Remember that, YOU are the limit.

Your experience may vary, but please try this at home.

By: Richard Chapman

Richard Chapman — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:49:03 +0000

@ Tyrone Miles

“Linux is VERY stable on servers and very reliable on the desktop but in KDE (Which by the way KDE 4 is really bad!)”

How can you say KDE4 is bad, it hasn’t been released yet. You must be talking about the beta releases of KDE4. Yes, it has been known that in some cases beta releases sometimes have some bugs in them occasionally. Did you actually test a beta version of KDE4, or did your information come from something you read?

By: ic

ic — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 23:32:50 +0000

There are a bunch of ways to make linux work in an AD environment. SuSE and Redhat do it out of the box.

If not google it, it’s there. Pam, kerberos, nss and a few other packages are all that is needed, and generally installed by default.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:53:20 +0000

asim wrote
I can use blender too in my winXP without convert to any bugggy OS like
linuxxxx

I see it has been awhile since you used linux… if you ever did. I run a business which has as it’s core the fact that the wonderful products from Redmond are so buggy that they need constant nurse-maiding.

By: Heavy

Heavy — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:50:34 +0000

@Tyrone — If you don;t know anything about LDAP, then you will never be more than a weekend hack with AD implimentations. the AD admin MUST know ldap to allow things such as ADAM to work properly, and to allow those Linux/*NIX/MAC’;s to authenticate to that imformation store. I use my SUSE linux machines quite well in an AD forest, mapping users, shares, printers, and ACL’s due to proper planning of the POSIX attributes that allow me to map out my connetions using ldqp, kerberos, and winbind with Samba. IF you do not understand LDEAP, then you are going to have a dog of a time getting Exchange 2007 to ever fold into a AD 2003 tree or forest. that requires schema extentions.

As far as tough, I find it incredibley easy to manage eDir.

By: Steve Szmidt

Steve Szmidt — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:37:18 +0000

There are some good views from machiner. I would like to qualify his comments with the fact that the experience of starting to use Linux can vary greatly depending on the Distro and how you approach it. The only other thing I would add is that Linux, just like MAC, does not really try to be a better Windows. They each have different philosophies that are pretty drastically different from each other. Which is what you really should ensure you include in your evaluation, of what to use.

Having been around since the days before all three, I’ve seen the developments from the first versions to current and Windows never stood out as this awesome platform for me even after a decade of development. I came to a cross road of being unhappy with the whole direction, the ramifications, including what the future promised on Windows and re-evaluated what to use. Both Windows and MAC were buggy, though MAC was more fun, but I hated the single button mouse and how hard it was to get behind the scene to fix things.

Linux did not have that many options in those days and things were buggy as well. Though it never felt like bugs on the same level as they were quickly identified and fixed.

But, here’s what made the difference to me.

Looking at Linux, it opened up the future with promises that looked a whole lot more productive. With Linux I had hope that things would continue to improve. That those programs that were not running right would be fixed properly. Without breaking something else! (Something Windows has perfected in the reverse meaning.)

I was happy to have the limitations of the Linux desktop in the early years because I felt certain my investment would pay off. Today there is such wealth and depth of applications that as a power user I seldom miss anything. I pay no heed to what is available under Windows as I don’t use it. (I simply refuse to carry what I see as the yoke of Windows and the lock down into corrupted standards and business methods.)

My choice had nothing to do with emotions, I simply did not want to build a business that relied on Microsoft to do things properly. For me, the ability to integrate anything on any level far surpasses the ton of very nice applications available under Windows.

The fact that Linux is a very inexpensive platform does not hurt either. But it was never the reason I went with it. It came down to this thing of having the freedom I choose without the threats and liabilities that are routine with Windows.

If your preferences are different then follow your heart as long as you are true to yourself.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:24:31 +0000

For working with RAW photos, your best bet is Digikam. It supports a 16 bit workflow, and handles tons of cameras and their RAW formats. If you’re looking for a painting/image manipulation program, definitely check out Krita- supports many colorspaces, converting between them, 16 bit (and in some cases 32 bits if the colorspace supports it). It has tons of customizable brushes, and a realistic color mixing scheme.

Both programs also support color-managed workflows from start to end.

By: Robert Krawitz

Robert Krawitz — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 20:43:43 +0000

GIMP does have some very real limitations for professional work, such as not having support for high bit depth (e. g. 16 bit) images.

For cataloguing images, I use KPhotoAlbum, which handles RAW images and also large numbers of images quite well.