[CS-FSLUG] The new enlightenment

[Ed Hurst]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 14:04:52 +0100, 'Mash <re.mash at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have started moving further and further away from bells and
> whistles and back to the UNIX philosophy of good tools. To the point
> that I am starting to get into Emacs properly and will probably start
> using it for my mail and news. I like the keyboard shortcuts and I
> still love white text on a black terminal window. It is functional   
> ridiculously quick and tends to give you only what you really need.
>
> Throw those mice away and start using your fingers again. joy !

There's a lot of that going around these days. While I cannot share your  
enthusiasm for Emacs, I can empathize with simplicity and power. After  
getting the Presario laptop all revved up and running quick and smooth  
with SUSE 9.2, I found the lack of reliablity (it's a cheap laptop; SUSE  
works fine) too irritating. I'm back to running the old Gateway Solo with  
FreeBSD 4.11, IceWM, and only Opera for graphical browsing (opens much  
more quickly on old hardware). Even though I'm stuck with 800x600, this is  
much more preferable because the machine and OS work too smoothly  
together. An old reliable machine is better for me than a flashy new one  
that has too many hiccups.

It's this sense of contentment with power over style that drives my  
interest in a console distro of Linux. John-Thomas and I are supposed to  
be working on a project for that, but we only have one developer last time  
I checked. I'd be willing even to dump the GUI completely if we could get  
a strong console desktop such as might have been found on DOS in the old  
days. (No, I'm not pining for DOS, but for the simplicity.)

-- 
Ed Hurst
----------------
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