[Wickers]

Brad,

While I'm not about to jump to the defense of Linux after your post (in zealot fashion that is). . . I will say that learning Linux can be fun. Yes, it can be a steep learning curve, but it depends on how you look at it.

When I first started with Linux, I wanted something easy to use. So I installed RedHat 7.1 (latest at the time). .. Boy was that a headache. Time rolled on and I upgraded to 7.2 . . but the small annoyances were still present. The problems I was having was not with incompatibility or funky drivers (or just being a noob). It was with RedHat's config programs... the nifty little GUI programs that did all the hard work for you. I would use them, they would do their job, but the end result was not what I wanted. So I thought, 'why not get your hands dirty and learn to do the work yourself?'.

So the hunt began for a simple, yet non-hand-holding distro. This landed me with Slackware Linux 8.1 (latest at the time). I had to setup video, sound, networking, and most other things by hand. . . but one by one with the help of the Slackware community and HOWTO files I had a working desktop that was acted exactly the way I wanted it. Slackware forced me to learn about Linux. . . not because things needed to be fixed (like in RedHat) but because they work just fine if you learn how to set them up.

Linux can be as good as YOU make it. (server wise, desktop wise, anything wise)

And you are right, Brad, Linux is not ready for any power user of today, or Joe six-pack of tomorrow... I have used distros like SuSE (hehe.. remember that thread?) which prides itself on ease-of-use. .. but sadly, you still need to know a fare bit about Linux to get things done (unless you have a Linux help desk on hand, around the office that is).

It's my hobby, most kids my age play video games... I play around with Linux.
And the fruits of my hobby are a smooth, tweaked out, up to date system that acts exactly the way I want it to, without having to worry about spyware, or nasty problems with un-patched software.

(PS. about that friend of yours who wanted to setup a server on his laptop... yah RedHat on laptops can be a pain, one thing I would have done before installing RedHat would have been running Knoppix to see if all his hardware would work the way it should, and setup a basic server from Knoppix to see if it would do what he wanted... Then just make a copy of the generated config files for reference when dealing with RedHat, which makes things a lot easier.)