[NCLUG] Re: Thoughts on Linux Users

[John L. Bass]

Daniel Herrington <nclug at iherr.com> writes:
> On Nov 11, 2007, at 11:13 PM, Paul Hummer wrote:
> > Every time I use a Mac or a Windows machine, I wish I had something  
> > as robust as either yum or apt.
> I'm not sure what you mean, as robust as yum or apt. On the Mac I  
> install a new application by just dragging the application to the  
> Applications folder.

Applications on a Mac are generally a monolith, where they are typically
many files on Windows and Linux. RPM/Apt simply isn't necessary on a
Mac for typical applications (their are exceptions).

> >> 2. I'm still frustrated when trying to browse certain websites  
> >> with the Linux version of Firefox. For example, Best Buy and  
> >> Circuit City have menus that are supposed to pop down in front of  
> >> the flash animation, but instead they just disappear behind the  
> >> flash.
> > Just tried this, and the both work for me.
> 
> I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop, Firefox 2.0.0.8, and Adobe  
> Shockwave Flash 9.0 r48. I still have cut-off menus behind the flash  
> animations on bestbuy.com and circuitcity.com. What versions are you  
> using? Am I the only one seeing this?

I've seen this on a number of sites, where the flash object on Firefox
extends outside it's bounderies and covers other page objects. It's common
for ads on a number of sites.

More frustrating for me, is that the pages just don't work as designed.
I spent 4 hours last week dealing with 3 different problems on the AT&t
web site where firefox did the wrong thing preventing an order completition.
After several calls to AT&T support, for each road block it was necessary
to fire up a Win XP notebook and do that step. Each time it just worked on
XP, and firefox left me and the support person scratching our heads about
odd behavior and false error messages.

I've seen this with various eBay and PayPal 3rd party vendor sites, and
a number of other sites. Sometimes, close enough just isn't good enough
and without a Windows machine as a backup your stuck doing critical online
activities.

> > Thunderbird opens documents in OpenOffice just fine here.
> 
> My experience has been that tables, diagrams, and page breaks rarely  
> transfer correctly from Word to OpenOffice. Maybe my experience is  
> uncommon?

Not uncommon at all. There are a number of documents that render so badly
as to be unreadable, as portions of the text are missing ... again forcing
firing up a Win XP box to view or print them.

Ditto with PDF's and other RTF files. Sometimes that can be resolved on
linux by switching between evince, xpdf, and other similar tools. Sometimes
it's just necessary to go fire up Win XP.

Ditto with things like Yahoo Messenger ... where the Yahoo provided client
lacks most of the features, and the open source alternatives don't even
come close, or just fail.

DItto trying to get by running Win applications in wine.

To be fair, these problems sometime occur on a Mac ... but much less
frequently as Microsoft Explorer and Office tend to do the right thing,
as do Adobe products on the Mac.

There is a cost for "close enough".

> To bring it back to Linux, when I was spending all of my time trying  
> out different distros and different programs, I was distracted from  
> my real purpose (the task I was trying to accomplish with my computer  
> in the first place).

Even for techies, working first time, everytime is sometimes critical
if you income and business depend on it. For desktop activities, that
sometimes means that Linux isn't close enough. For server activities,
that sometimes means that Win products aren't close enough.

In the beginning of my Linux use, it was frustrating to see Linux boxes
seldom make it much over a 100 days of heavy server loads, where the
Sun and SGI systems (inclusing x86 Solaris on the same hardware) were
still ticking strong after a year or more. With IBM, Sun, HP, SGI and
others putting effort into Linux stability, it's much much better, and
clearly getting into the "close enough" range. The one place x86 Solaris
still shines, is that it's robust in the face of normal device errors,
where Linux drivers frequently still take the kernel or application down.
This difference, is that Sun drivers and system are required to fail
gracefully and recover in the face of errors ... as their whole system
is as a goal.  Sure, there are places it doesn't, but increasingly rare.
There are clearly applications where "close enough" is never true when
you need 6-7 9's of reliability.

John