[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 03 May 2006 @ 20:40 -0700, Don Y said:

> Yup.  Hence, keep focused on why you *got* the machine in the first
> place (i.e. which applications you *were* planning on running).

Well, this is one reason why I am very dead set against mandatory
licensing of software.

It's the surest way to lose the ability to keep a machine running at its
original job when the manufacturer arbitrarily decides you need to upgrade.

> > In the UNIX world, Gnome tries hard to fullfill that role...
> 
> I was going to suggest KDE, as well... (below)  :>

I just switched to KDE after using Gnome for 2 years.  It was a quest to
try and live with it, submit bug reports, etc.

I hated KDE a few years ago, but 3.5 is quite usable and I find I can
get a lot of work done with it.

It is a pig, but I find it a much more disciplined project than Gnome, far
fewer bugs, and a more pragmatically focused.

One thing I have found lately is that the quality of the fonts when KDE is
running is making it hard for me to go back to vanilla X window managers,
because they don't have support for that.

It's not just fonts, but widget layout in the applications looks a lot
better too.

Overall, KDE works, doesn't crash, and doesn't get in my way.

Also, while it does use a lot of memory, it reaches a plateau and
doesn't tend to have memory leaks.

With Gnome, it just eats memory until I run out, and has bugs that interfere
with getting work done.

I'm really still waiting to see a desktop that I really like, and KDE is
as close as I've found so far.

I would like to get a Mac, but I don't have the budget for it.

> Exactly.  I.e. my Windows machine is stuck in W98-land.  The
> apps that it runs suit me just fine.  I have no need to upgrade
> to the latest feature (bug) set for each of those applications
> (with the attendant increase in resource requirements without
> accompanying BENEFIT increases).

Personally, I found Win98 runs quite a bit slower than Win2k on my hardware,
and Win2k is more stable.

It was a pretty painless switch for me. Of course, I don't depend on Windows,
so app breakage was not a big issue, and nothing I had failed to run on Win2k
except Word Perfect 7, which I no longer have a need for.

I also play games, and Win2k is much better for that than any of the DOS
based Windows.  In fact, a lot of games simply won't work on pre-Win2k.

> > I obviously need to move...
> 
> Trust me, this is the WRONG time of year to be considering
> that!  :>  (we're already flirting with the century mark...)

Well, I was just lamenting the lack of findable computer hardware around here.

> Exactly.  No need for "religion".  Get what you need to do
> the job most effectively IN YOUR ENVIRONMENT.  I'm annoyed
> at how few non-Linux users I run into locally (I run other
> *BSD's, no Linux).  

To be fair, Linux runs faster and has better support on PCs than the BSD
systems. I also don't have the problems other people on this list report.

Linux RAID and LVM work very well, and filesystems like XFS and JFS are nice
to have, and ext3 with journaling and btrees is very nice as well.

Even still, I would rather run NetBSD on my desktop, but the hardware support
just isn't there.

It is mostly nVidia graphics support that I miss with BSD. I find the nv
driver so slow I just can't use it. It's truly horrible if you try to use
anything that requires XRender or OpenGL support.

Hopefully the driver situation will change.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The trade of governing has always been
monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of
mankind.  -- Thomas Paine"]