I am not a Microsoft fan. I'm not a Windows fan either. I started using computers a long time before either existed. In these days computers did not only offer room for bugs and mice but were even large enough to house a bear. A whole family of bears if they would have liked it.
My own first computer was a VIC 20. It was able to be used as word processor, database, spreadsheet, it could talk over the phone line to other computers around the world and lots of games were available. I knew the CP/M operating system, VIC didn't.
Those good old CP/M days... to copy text.txt from a: to b: you had to type
pip text.txt b: a:
The DOS command
copy a:text.txt b:
looked a lot better.
Drag and drop under Windows was a next step.
Then came the Internet. At first it looked worse than VIC, CP/M or DOS. I didn't like gopher, I couldn't find my way around ftp sites. Hypertext, the world wide web, Mosaic, Netscape and then Internet Explorer and currently Firefox made it sooo much easier.
I'm an amateur photographer. The ability to save my pictures on my computer, crop, correct, edit, stitch them, exchange ideas and techniques over the Internet, these are really great improvements. But apart from that I still use my computer a lot for word processing, databases and spreadsheets. Have those applications become much easier, much faster ever since my first VIC? A little, yes, but really not that much. If you're ever tempted to buy a new computer with twice the processor speed, four times as much RAM, ten times more storage, just to make such daily tasks faster, forget it. Spend a fraction of the money on a speedtyping tutor, spend some extra time on studying the manuals of your software to see if you can cut some corners.
This is going to be a zigzag story. I know it, there are a dozen threads in my head and I'm trying to type them all down at once. I'm sorry, maybe I'll rewrite this page later, maybe not. But for now please do read on. Or if you leave, please take the time to leave your comment.
Back to the start. I'm not a Windows fan. I'm constantly strugling with it, I'm constantly running into limitations, incompatabilities, bugs and so on. Although I'm very well aware of the historical facts that made Bill Gates the richest man on earth, although there's no law against him accepting money from clients who apparently are willing to pay, I don't like it. As long as freeware exists I've always been a great fan of it, the same applies to open source software, Linux, hardware independent software and operating systems and so on. I really hope that that stuff will finally make Windows a thing of the past.
Because of my work,
because my files always had to be compatible with WordPerfect, MSWord, DBase, Lotus 123 and so on,
because I had to be able to solve my clients' problems, and all of tem worked in DOS or Windows,
because all hardware comes with Windows drivers and hardly ever is Linux compatible right from the start,
and because nobody near me knew anything about Linux,
it took me lots of years to take the time to dive deep into Linux.
A few months ago a neighbor gave me his old PC with Suze Linux installed. It booted but came up with a lot of errors. It took me little time to find out that the harddisk was badly damaged.
Then I found Knoppix on a CD in a magazine. Funny, bootable from CD, needed no installation whatsoever, but very limited. Because I couldn't write on the CD I couldn't configure anything.
I downloaded Fedora, tried to set up a dual boot system (soory, but for the time being I still need Windows until I'm able to do with Linux what I'm currently doing with Windows). Fedora was not the answer. Somehow I didn't get it up and running the way it should.
Next I downloaded Ubuntu from the VMware site and started once again running Linux without installation. It comes with a load of extra programs, but every other mouse click it asked my password. Neither the Ubuntu website nor the VMware site offered any help. Trial and error appeared easier than expected: user ubuntu, password ubuntu opened most doors.
Ubuntu came with an old version of Firefox installed. I'm used to Firefox 1.5 with a lot of extensions under Windows, so I wanted to set up the same for Ubuntu. I was able to download it, I was able to unpack and view the files. I read the pages about the installation both on the Mozila site and the Ubuntu site. No matter what I tried, I was only able to start the old Firefox.
I went to the Dutch Ubuntu forum, straight into the newbies section and started asking some questions. Some experienced Ubuntu users were very polite, very helpful. Others were plain rude, started flaming, telling me that if I expected that Linux would be a Windows clone that it would be better to stick with Windows. (Yes, if I would expect that, then Linux obviously would be the wrong choice.)
I told them that I searched for answers both in help files and online documentation. Some replies told me I couldn't read, others told me to keep my dumb questions out of a seious forum and told me to learn how to use Google.
And so on and so forth. There were enough flames in that forum to heat up hell.
I wrote a long reply trying to cool it down a little, I quoted some of the flames to comment on them, IMHO very politely. Unfortunately and accidentally I quoted several flames from the same source. And that very source happened to be the moderator of that forum.
He deleted my post, replaced it by a remark that the moderator had to remove my post because flaming was not welcome in that forum...
I decided that the Dutch Ubuntu community was definately not my kind of people, removed Ubuntu, downloaded Debian.
Yes, it's running. Yes, I find the online documentation a lot better than that of Ubuntu, especially because most Debian documentation comes with external links not only to other Debian related sites but also to specialized sites.
I've not yet been able to run Debian in any higher resolution than 1024x768, but I'll find a way.
I've not yet been able to play a CD. The CD player tells me which CD is in the drive, allows me to select a song, allows me to press play, the clock starts ticking, the slider moves, the VU meter stays dark. The drivers seem to be installed correctly, I can click a wav on harddisk and it plays, loud and clear. None of my volume control sliders is down or muted. I'll find a solution.
I've not yet been able to start learning typed in commands. There are an awful lot, many more than in DOS, some are identical to DOS, for example cd means change directory, I guess rd will remove a directory.
Most of them are at least as cryptical as DOS commands or worse. Linux users seem to love two-letter commands with lots of command line options, single letters, regular expressions, slashes, stars, they do not spare the keyboard. Most tasks can be done either in terminal mode (the command line) or with mouse clicks. But it's often easier and faster in teminal mode. The mouse often responds slow. But it remembers what I wanted to do. Sometimes I click something a second time when I believe that my first click must have missed the target, then suddenly it responds to both clicks. Annoying and confusing. I guess I'll be able to find the cause, maybe soon. Lets hope so.
Linux is full of protection, passwords, user rights, owner right, groroup rights. Not always very straight forward. There are an awful lot of files and folders, most of which come standard with very cryptical names. Some sound familiar like tmp (temporary), boot (has probably something to do with booting), usr (I guess short for user), lib (library?), dev (develop?, device?), opt (options? optional?) and so on.
I tried to download, unpack and install some stuff, a.o. once again a newer version of Firefox. And once again I've not yet been able to succeed.
Windows can do some unexpected things. several times I swapped hardware, a.o. harddisks, from one computer to another. Sometimes Windows accept it, allowing me to see, open and write whatever I want, where I want on the new device. Sometimes the device stays hidden untill I mount it in some strange system administration utility. And sometimes the files are visible, but Windows tells me they are not mine. In that case I have to dive into advanced file system security, have to claim ownership of these files, grant myself permission to read, write and so on. Although I've become quite familiar with these procedures, it's not yet always straight forward .
From time to time this leads to outbursts: This computer is MINE, these files are MINE, do you hear me?
No, my computer doesn't hear me. And Linux is even less polite than Windows in this respect. Everything belongs to Linux, if I want access to ANYTHING I first have to prove that I'm me.
WHY??? This is a single user computer behind a physical firewall. Why do I have to type in my password every 5 minutes? Why do I get the message "you have no permission to write in this directory"? Why doesn't it unpack my downloads where I say that I want them? And even refuses to give an error message, the entire unpacking just doesn't happen unless I specify a path that dear Debian likes.
Most of the screansavers are absolutely gorgeous, if there is any one reason to advice Debian, this is it.
But the documentation.... 99% of it is written in the same non-human language as they expect the Linux user to talk to his computer, none of it starts in a first things first style like how do you store your data and where do you store it, how do you find old data back? I've not yet found a find or search command...
My computer is dual Xeon. I believe that Linux should be able to support that, but Debian is currently still runing on one.