Thread: From Mac to PC
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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2004-10-04, 13:21

Unless you are really going to dedicate a major portion of your life to tinkering, stick with Windows and don't install Linux!

Man, oh, man. A guy I know got a new Windows notebook over the summer and decided he wanted to turn his tower into a Fedora (formerly Red Hat) Linux server. Big mistake! I worked with this guy for hours on end thinking that my thorough experience with Mac OS X would be useful. While my knowledge helped a lot in a few areas, it fell way short in others, leaving us completely stymied by various issues. What about Google? Yeah, it helped a little, but often we just found forum pages where people had the same question that no one could answer or other pages where explanations went totally over our heads with technobabble and assumptions that we knew how to do X before doing Y.

Anyone installing Linux who doesn't already have some real-world experience with it is going to face a mammoth learning curve. I don't care what people say about some distros using gussied-up installers that are supposed to make it easier to get software running. Not all software titles come with those nice little distributors and even those that do don't explain where everything is put and how to configure it all.

Sure, Linux may be great for servers that just sit in closets or the occasional hardcore nerds/tinkerer who has either a lot of time on his hands or a serious bent against Microsoft, but it is still years away from being completely usable by the above-average computer user and a solid decade away from being usable by average Joe Sixpack.


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