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Ormaaj
Guru
Joined: 28 Jan 2008
Posts: 319
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 Posted: Tue May 19, 2009 8:19 pm Post subject: |
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| d2_racing wrote: | | Ormaaj wrote: | | Yep, its the same idea as the debian/ubuntu release cycle - except you have to pay. Its utter madness. |
In fact, what to expect, Ubuntu release a SID version every 6 months, so it can crash a lot  It's the same with Fedora.
We see that also with Intel, when you need to buy a CPU, never buy the first release, wait for the Tock release. |
I really hate the way Intel does things - though their release cycle and tiered processors for various price ranges make sense for a company with no competition.
I have to disagree this last time around though - I'm SO glad I waited and went with the i7 since it kicks my brother's Q6600's ass; and I have a solid and hopefully cheap upgrade path for the tock in socket 1366. |
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frostschutz
Advocate
Joined: 22 Feb 2005
Posts: 2977
Location: Germany
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| Posted: Wed May 20, 2009 9:55 am Post subject: Re: Linux and Girlfriends |
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| palettentreter wrote: | | Everytime I get back to my own system(s), to Portage, to bugs.gentoo.org, to the gentoo forums... it's like... well... WOW. It's like all the twisted agony in my head suddenly stopped and turned into a beautiful feeling of self-sufficiency, self-responsibility, power and just plain freedom. |
I'm using Gentoo on my Desktop, but for my netbook, which doesn't have enough horse power to compile packages in a reasonable amount of time, I chose Debian.
I get a lot of Debian users who keep telling me how crap Gentoo is, and who don't understand why anyone would use it (because compiling takes so much more time than just installing a binary package that just works - so much the theory). The thing is, for me, in Gentoo, everything just works. The quirks that are there, I know how to get around them, after all I've been using Gentoo for years now.
Debian on the other hand is horrible. I didn't use the installer, but debootstrapped instead, to replicate the encrypted root setup of my Desktop to the Netbook (where it's even more important as netbooks are just so easy to steal). While "debootstrapping" (basically a manual chroot install) is the standard installation method for Gentoo, in Debian you can't get very far with it... you get no good instructions, and a system with absolutely no configuration. Installing a desktop system using aptitude tasks, and then running dpkg-reconfigure -a to get configuration for everything, is a really bad idea... it fails on buggy packages that somehow couldn't get their init script stopped (happens in oh-so-stable Debian, I did not use testing/unstable like I do with Gentoo), then there's no resume function (you have to start over), then for every font package it encounters it starts regenerating the whole fonts cache... every single time... long story short, I was 4 hours into the dpkg-reconfigure and still not done with it. The xorg.conf I had to make manually and I've still got no hardware acceleration working yet. Also, I had to manually build busybox, because the binary busybox shipped by Debian, lacks the switch_root command and other useful configuration options, required to build a good initramfs. Same for cryptsetup and LVM because I wanted static variants of them, and I haven't found static equivalents in the Debian package manager (Gentoo offers them with static / -dynamic use flag).
Debian is a huge mess with tons of rough edges, and unlike Gentoo, it does not have a good package managing concept... instead there are ten different things (dpkg, dselect, apt-get, aptitude, ...) and you get into trouble if you don't use just one of them exclusively. Where Gentoo provides you with long help texts on how-to-configure-this and notes as you emerge, Debian gives you nothing, it doesn't tell you which files you may have to edit, or what you may have to configure, to get a particular package you installed working. If you accidentally delete a file, you can't reinstall the package, because the package manager fails on a critical error when a file is missing or when an init script can't be executed properly.
I guess I should try a RPM based distro next... although I have some bad experience there already too (SuSE).
In theory many distros should be so much easier to use than Gentoo because you don't have to worry about compiling, but so far I haven't found any that satisfies me.
I love Gentoo, and I've yet to find another distro that just works for me, for desktop anyway. |
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d2_racing
Bodhisattva
Joined: 25 Apr 2005
Posts: 13047
Location: Ste-Foy,Canada
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| Posted: Wed May 20, 2009 11:14 am Post subject: Re: Linux and Girlfriends |
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| frostschutz wrote: |
I guess I should try a RPM based distro next... although I have some bad experience there already too (SuSE). |
If you want a mix of binary and compilation, then you should try FreeBSD. The portage tree comes for the ports |
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xtz
Apprentice
Joined: 29 Oct 2007
Posts: 181
Location: Singapore
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| Posted: Wed May 20, 2009 1:04 pm Post subject: |
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| alex.blackbit wrote: | | ToeiRei wrote: | | m.wales wrote: | | I wish I could share a tale of success. Trying to persuade the girlfriend to attempt either Linux or Mac OS X is a losing battle - unless it's Windows XP she won't go near it. Very frustrating... |
guess you could offer her vista - I'd personally use _anything_ else than vista... |
of course nobody wants to use vista. we should all wait for windows 7, that will solve all our needs.  |
Wrong. It is good, but it's not a magic OS that will do everything. However, I have to admit that even on VAIO, I had to install only 2 drivers, compared to like 8-9 on Vista (talking about 64bit versions of both).
| d2_racing wrote: | ...
In fact, win7 is the SP2 of vista. |
I have to disagree with you. Win7 uses less RAM than Vista (paging files turned off) and works faster than XP. The only thing I don't like in it is that it's just continuing the idea of being more internet-dependant and when u check your connections with netstat you will be 'surprised' There are quite a few more things to say about it, but they are not for this topic.  |
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Mr. M
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 18 Sep 2004
Posts: 89
Location: USA
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| Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2009 8:42 pm Post subject: |
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After a while my girlfriend got jealous of my laptop running Gentoo which compared to her laptop with Windows XP was working so much smoother. As her laptop is not very fast and I didn't feel like administering a Gentoo system for her we installed Ubuntu on it, well she did mostly, it's pretty easy. Ubuntu has some really stupid things, like you can't play MP3's or watch DVD's without some hacks. Then, she didn't like Gnome so she switched to Kubuntu. It is working quite well, sometimes I have to help her setting up some things, otherwise she pretty much manages it herself. For my taste, Kubuntu is not transparent enough, i.e. I have no idea what exactly is going on or if something doesn't work it's probably much harder to fix than in Gentoo, but for her it is working out alright.
One annoying thing is that she frequently has to boot into Windows in order to watch stuff on Netflix or talk to her mom via Google video chat.. unfortunately there are still companies who neglect Linux users, let's hope this is going to change soon. |
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count-corrupt
n00b
Joined: 01 Mar 2008
Posts: 22
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| Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 12:49 pm Post subject: |
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woow, fun thread.
Having a girlfriend that studies computer science as you do can help in getting rid of all the support issues to have with other people's laptops. My girlfriend l think has a neutral attitude towards linux. She uses it on my computers (Gentoo with kde4 on my desktop, Arch with xmonad on my laptop) and doesn't complain much. But for her own machines she likes to go with Windows. That is XP on her desktop and Vista on her laptop. And I have to admit that she does a much better job in administering her Windows installs that I ever could. She doesn't deny that Vista is more work on that end, but she feels comfortable with stuff she already knows. And although she's generally interested in linux she follows my advice not to approach it as long as our studies go. Had I not started Linux at the same time that I started my studies I'd be one semester away from my diploma right now. Now it's three, and I'm thinking of making it four.
It's also funny to see how perception changes. For instance, when I started using Xmonad, the tiling concept was alien to both of us, but since I configured the system I had a head start in getting used to it. Over time she became more and more jealous of the mouse-less WM aproach and I think if she started using Linux now, it would be on her laptop using a tiling WM. And I didn't even try to convince her of anything 
But If I had to recommend a distro to her it'd neither be Ubuntu nor Gentoo, it'd be Arch. Arch is way more beginner-friendly than Gentoo but almost as flexible. Until I found out about it I never thought you could successfully combine both binary and source packages in one distro but with Arch it works like a charm. So now I don't have to compile packages on my ageing laptop unless I really want a custom build which saves my a LOT of time. Gentoo only makes sense if you use it on a regular basis. I sometimes don't need my laptop for weeks. And if I came back to it in the past I had to update for a day or two, work out the quirks and then start using it. That is all past now |
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clayman0404
n00b
Joined: 02 Jul 2009
Posts: 1
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| Posted: Thu Jul 02, 2009 8:45 am Post subject: |
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I was surprised how fast my girlfriend got used to my gentoo box, but on her own laptop I tend to install Ubuntu. (+installation/configuration-time, +user-friendly)
The most convincing "feature" is the long lasting stability, her former Vista-Notebook crashed regularly.. now she has nearly the same aversion against microsoft software as I --> SUCCESS! |
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slackline
Veteran
Joined: 01 Apr 2005
Posts: 1471
Location: /uk/sheffield
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| Posted: Thu Jul 02, 2009 9:56 am Post subject: |
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Switched my wife to Xubuntu 'cause wireless connection kept on dropping out under XP and I was sick of having to dig through tons of crap to get things up and running again and having to learn XP admin crap.
She's fine with it now, and even takes a small amount of pride in telling work colleagues that she's running Linux. I'll make a geek out of her yet! 
_________________
"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." - Donald Knuth |
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MaximeG
l33t
Joined: 15 Apr 2008
Posts: 722
Location: Belgium
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| Posted: Thu Jul 02, 2009 10:26 am Post subject: |
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| slack---line wrote: | Switched my wife to Xubuntu 'cause wireless connection kept on dropping out under XP and I was sick of having to dig through tons of crap to get things up and running again and having to learn XP admin crap.
She's fine with it now, and even takes a small amount of pride in telling work colleagues that she's running Linux. I'll make a geek out of her yet! |
Until someone will ask her :
Sorry, couldn't help myself :p
Regards,
Maxime
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Future is wide open. |
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slackline
Veteran
Joined: 01 Apr 2005
Posts: 1471
Location: /uk/sheffield
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| Posted: Thu Jul 02, 2009 10:47 am Post subject: |
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| MaximeG wrote: | | slack---line wrote: | Switched my wife to Xubuntu 'cause wireless connection kept on dropping out under XP and I was sick of having to dig through tons of crap to get things up and running again and having to learn XP admin crap.
She's fine with it now, and even takes a small amount of pride in telling work colleagues that she's running Linux. I'll make a geek out of her yet! |
Until someone will ask her :
Sorry, couldn't help myself :p
Regards,
Maxime |
They no doubt do, it usually comes about 'cause she prepares her work in OpenOffice (haven't quite got her to come round to LaTeX yet!) and they're all amazed at having PDF's instead of M$ .doc's and want to know how, so she'll say "Oh I use Linux at home" which completely baffles them.
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"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." - Donald Knuth |
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MaximeG
l33t
Joined: 15 Apr 2008
Posts: 722
Location: Belgium
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| Posted: Thu Jul 02, 2009 10:50 am Post subject: |
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Hehe :p
Yeah. Love OOo's pdf :')
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DaggyStyle
Watchman
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 5909
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| Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 2:19 pm Post subject: |
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my girlfriend had a PIII 669 coppermine cpu with 192 of ram and win xp on it.
she used it for he studies and complained all the time it was slow, she would have arrived to class 15 minutes ahead, plug it in and boot and leave it in class and went to get a coffe, she know no one would still it because it was a piece of crap.
after 30 minutes, the system wouldn't finish boot and after 5 minutes she could have run word (that took another 5-10 minutes to boot), I've installed xubuntu 7.04 on that laptop, I dared her to arrive on 5 minutes before and promised to buy her the coffee if she couldn't write from the start of the lesson (not that she could before...) the computer was up and running including writer after 5 minutes, she was in shock, infact, one of her class mate noticed that the laptop was running linux and asked her to merry him.
unbelievably, after a while using oo she decided she didn't like it (for some reason DOC is a official document tamplete here and no one has heard nor willing to hear of pdf) and started nagging me that I'll re install xp on it.
I've refused, not that it mattered to her... after a while of nagging I've agreed but I've tolded her that if she has any problem with it, she should fix it, she agreed (she is clueless in regards of computer maintenance), time passed and I took advantage of her short memory, she forgot until she probably noticed that I was not going to do that so she cracked the screen!
thus we went to get a new laptop, this one runs xp ok, till xp will go away it will stay on both of her computers (laptop and desktop)
botton line, people are afraid of the difference and willing to suffer alot in order to avoid the different. that is why our kids will be raised on a linux desktop and I'll buy her a laptop with windows on so she won't cry.
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