[CS-FSLUG] Confirming Old Complaints

[l4c]

Ed Hurst wrote:
> Over the past year, I tested several distros, played some more with 
> FreeBSD, and with Syllable and Haiku. Most of the time, I was confined 
> to testing them on my old Inspiron 4100 laptop. Most of the time, I had 
> trouble.
> 
> Aside from the usual bugs and gotchas we must realistically expect from 
> something so large as a Linux distribution, there were plenty of things 
> bothering me which weren't actually bugs. I still consider the X server 
> a major boondoggle for the desktop. We get lots of pretty stuff, and 
> drivers are pretty good these days, but I still believe we can do 
> better. I'm convinced Haiku has a much better framework. With equivalent 
> support, it could easily outshine X.org in graphics. Even Syllable, 
> currently relying entirely on the framebuffer, does quite nice. So I ran 
> the most recent, but old stable distro on my laptop: CentOS. It worked, 
> but there were plenty of accommodations I made to the lower power of the 
> machine against the ever-swelling power demands of every distro I tried.
> 
> In the future, I will probably shift the laptop to Haiku, once wifi and 
> ACPI come up to standard. If that doesn't work out, I'll probably use 
> Syllable, simply because it is designed to build almost everything Open 
> Source without much tweaking, via POSIX compliance. That's not to say 
> I'm through with Linux.
> 
> I was praying for a desktop system because of how critical a computer is 
> to the research and writing I do. Sensing this was God's time to get 
> something solid, I checked with a couple of previous donors and found at 
> least one willing to help with the initial costs, to be repaid on terms 
> I could afford. I figured I could just build something, and was getting 
> help deciding how to proceed down that path. Yeah, I drooled over a 
> bundled Intel board with quad core CPU. I wanted something with enough 
> zip for the next few years to carry the load of things I typically do. 
> Running Windows, as you might expect, was out of the question, for the 
> simple reason it can't work the way I do.
> 
> In my research, I checked the prices of full systems to give me 
> perspective. With a friend one day, we spotted a "last one" system on 
> sale at the local Sam's Club. It was a Dell Inspiron 545MT, with an 
> extravagant 23" LCD monitor. I admit I lusted, since I've gotten so 
> tired of CRTs with my aging eyes. The laptop display was a great deal 
> more comfortable, even with such a tiny screen. The price of this thing 
> was just over $600, quite a reduction from the original retail of $800+ 
> (at least in Central Oklahoma). To make a long story short, he decided 
> to use his Sam's blue card to get it for me, and allow me to pay him 
> directly as I could. Further, he generously ate some of the price. God 
> is good!
> 
> So I've got this thing: Intel Dual Core 2.7Ghz, an embarrassingly huge 
> 6GB of RAM, a half-TB hard drive, Intel graphics (which I have come to 
> love), but the disgusting Vista Home Premium. I would have preferred 
> SUSE all along, but have spent lots of time with CentOS since getting 
> the laptop. Currently supported versions of SUSE don't work well on it. 
> But for this beast, I tried openSUSE 11.1 first. I suppose to some 
> degree I voided the warranty, but I removed all traces of Windows.
> 
> The point of all this is: SUSE 11 has not been good to me, at least on 
> the hardware I had before (including a couple of desktops). I braced 
> myself for dealing with it, but was surprised to find almost nothing 
> bothered me. Was the whole issue throwing massive hardware at it to make 
> it work? I suppose that's what we have come to expect these days. It's 
> running pretty fast, and all the hardware was detected, except for the 
> monitor's native resolution (1920x1080). I'm not convinced Linux as a 
> whole couldn't do better in terms of supporting older hardware, but I 
> suppose that's not really considered important. Yes, some distros do 
> emphasize the older stuff, but at the cost of limiting the very sort of 
> work I do. (No, I'm not eliciting a long discussion about your favorite 
> distro and how to fix this or that.) I'm just one user out of millions, 
> and of no significance to the community at large.
> 
> Still, when folks I know do eventually ask about Linux, I have to steer 
> them away unless their hardware is relatively powerful, and not too 
> cheap. That's because none of the people I've met so far would tolerate 
> the way lighter distros work. The exception is the small business 
> setting, for which it should be obvious why RedHat clones keep gaining 
> traction. It fits the business norms better than anything else. Chances 
> are, if I keep this rig long enough, I'll have to migrate back to CentOS 
> 6 or 7 (whatever comes by then), because I have no doubt SUSE will run 
> off and bloat my hardware out of the game. I like SUSE, but not 
> everything about it makes me smile.
> 
> It's a good thing computers are only the most important tool I have, not 
> the mission itself. :-)
> 

   Sounds a lot to me like SUSE has soured you on Linux alltogether. 
It's unrealistic imho to base an opinion about the usability of linux on 
older/lower powered/resource computers on their performance while 
running the single largest and most bloated distribution linux has to 
offer.  Even if linux does seem slow on older hardware, the fact is that 
it's the only full featured modern OS that will run on many of these 
systems. Try running Vista on a P2/3 sometime :-)  There is always a 
trade-off.  Know what I mean?
   Now as far as Haiku (haven't tried syllable), it's really neat but 
horribly unstable. I just spent 2 days standing at a booth right next to 
2 of the developers (Ohio Linux Fest).  I am anxiously awaiting some 
good developments there as well, but it will be years before it 
resembles Linux's current state of usability.  And on that note, I use 
Linux personally all day long both in a corporate environment (I work at 
a university) and at home, and have done so for years.  I make note of 
how often my coworkers and friends have OS issues when I do not and it 
happens quite frequently.  There is no reason not to promote the use of 
Linux in either environment.  In fact, if you do, you'd be saving the 
average person a lot of time, hassle and money (good stewardship).  Imho 
anyway :-)

Blessings anyhow!

-- 
-Linc Fessenden

In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded - Yeah right...