Linux is not windows (1 Viewer)

[Rogue]

Good article

[extract] New: I wanted a new toy car, and everybody's raving about how great Lego cars can be. So I bought some Lego, but when I got home, I just had a load of bricks and cogs and stuff in the box. Where's my car?? Old: You have to build the car out of the bricks. That's the whole point of Lego.
New: What?? I don't know how to build a car. I'm not a mechanic. How am I supposed to know how to put it all together??
Old: There's a leaflet that came in the box. It tells you exactly how to put the bricks together to get a toy car. You don't need to know how, you just need to follow the instructions.
New: Okay, I found the instructions. It's going to take me hours! Why can't they just sell it as a toy car, instead of making you have to build it??
Old: Because not everybody wants to make a toy car with Lego. It can be made into anything we like. That's the whole point.
New: I still don't see why they can't supply it as a car so people who want a car have got one, and other people can take it apart if they want to. Anyway, I finally got it put together, but some bits come off occasionally. What do I do about this? Can I glue it?
Old: It's Lego. It's designed to come apart. That's the whole point. New: But I don't want it to come apart. I just want a toy car!
Old: Then why on Earth did you buy a box of Lego??

 

[pete]

So it is that in most "user-friendly" text editors & word processors, you Cut and Paste by using Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V. Totally unintuitive, but everybody's used to these combinations, so they count as a "friendly" combination.
So when somebody comes to vi and finds that it's "d" to cut, and "p" to paste, it's not considered friendly: It's not what anybody is used to.
Is it superior? Well, actually, yes.
With the Ctrl-X approach, how do you cut a word from the document you're currently in? (No using the mouse!)

Why the fuck is it "No using the mouse!"???

My response: Go fuck yourself.

 

[Wayne]

The problem is not that it's not like windows but because there is a complete lack of consistency. Cut and paste in vi are 'd' and 'p'. In emacs it's something else. On other desktop editors, they use the ctrl-x and ctrl-v. Then there is the clipboard. In the text editor I can ctrl-x from one window and ctrl-v into another to paste. Fair enough. But one of the features they always blow their horn about is the abilty to paste using the middle mouse button making it very fast. I can press it to paste what is on the clipboard and it works. But if I have any text highlighted it will paste that instead of the text on the clipboard. Hows that for consistency? Try highlighting text to replace it with text from the clipboard and press the middle mouse button to paste, it's very annoying.
Then there is the fact that different apps use different clipboards.

 

[Jerry Twig]

Why the fuck is it "No using the mouse!"???

My response: Go fuck yourself.

Strong words. stick it to those anti-mouse cocksuckers

 

[Rogue]

The one point that the article seemed to be making towards the end was that the real strength of Linux is the ability to completely customise it, that involves almost building from the ground up. Wayne's completely right about consistency, I suppose the article is saying that you make your own consitency on your own system. Sounds like a loooooong hard slog though.

 

[Wayne]

The one point that the article seemed to be making towards the end was that the real strength of Linux is the ability to completely customise it, that involves almost building from the ground up. Wayne's completely right about consistency, I suppose the article is saying that you make your own consitency on your own system. Sounds like a loooooong hard slog though.

It is. You have to spend a very long time reading up on apps and what they can and can't do and messing with different settings to see what the outcome will be. In the three years I've been using Linux, I've lost count of the times I've thrashed my system. A bit of advice here, make sure you have a separate partition for you /home directory. It will save your personal files. if you ever destroy the main system.
If you have the time and are prepared to work at it, it's a good learning tool. You can configure every little aspect of the OS. But I still wouldn't recommend it to the average windows user who doesn't want to put the time in.

 

[RSJ]

So it is that in most "user-friendly" text editors & word processors, you Cut and Paste by using Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V. Totally unintuitive, but everybody's used to these combinations, so they count as a "friendly" combination.
So when somebody comes to vi and finds that it's "d" to cut, and "p" to paste, it's not considered friendly: It's not what anybody is used to.
Is it superior? Well, actually, yes.

No it's not. "d" and "p" are on opposite sides of the keyboard. "C" is for copy, "x" and "v" are on either side of it. Makes sense to me.

 

[ernesto]

lego?

 

[tripoli]

lego?

lego is savage.

don't know much about linux, but i 'think' it's meant to be savage too.

 

[flashback]

Dont believe the hype.
Linux is as simple or as complex as you like really. The latest and greatest Ubuntu for instance is simple to use. Open lap top. Insert disk. Install Linux.

That's it. I installed it on my gf's ma's computer, cause it was riddled with windows spyware. Gave her essentially no instructions how to use it, havnt heard any complaints from her since.

And, this is a 50 yo woman who had used a computer this time last year.

Shrug. Its not complicated. I now find it much easier to use than Windows. If you want to meddle about with it, you can. If you dont, you needn't. Ubuntu works though. I see very little need to mess with it too much.

 

[Rogue]

Shrug. Its not complicated. I now find it much easier to use than Windows. If you want to meddle about with it, you can. If you dont, you needn't. Ubuntu works though. I see very little need to mess with it too much.

Any ideas if Ubuntu's any good for music apps, conventional wisdom I've heard is that red-hat and fedoracore are best for audio but I haven't tried them out (need a computer first).

More importantly, is there much of an issue running software on various linux flavours? If the software says linux it should run on any unix environment shouldn't it? (except mac, that's almost unix isn't it...)

 

[flashback]

Any ideas if Ubuntu's any good for music apps, conventional wisdom I've heard is that red-hat and fedoracore are best for audio but I haven't tried them out (need a computer first).

More importantly, is there much of an issue running software on various linux flavours? If the software says linux it should run on any unix environment shouldn't it? (except mac, that's almost unix isn't it...)

What do you mean music apps? Like Pro Tools and shit? dont think so.
For playing music Ubuntu has tons. As does Fedora I would imagine.
Go into synaptic packet manager in Ubuntu, search for audio, tons pop up. I install everything i can using that Synaptic thing. Out of the box it ccomes with a decent ripper, and a decent player. From there, just about all music player apps can be found and stuck on if you like.

Yeah. MacOSX is running on top of some class of BSD Unix. BSD is too complicated for me though.

 

[Rogue]

Yeah, high-end audio stuff like editors, sequencers, multitracking, vst-type effects... Ta though.

 

[pete]

Yeah, high-end audio stuff like editors, sequencers, multitracking, vst-type effects... Ta though.

you know, you could just use VMWare and run a virtualised windows. it's what i'm doing in work.

 

[RSJ]

you know, you could just use VMWare and run a virtualised windows. it's what i'm doing in work.

Honest question: Why not just run windows?

 

[Rogue]

Honest question: Why not just run windows?

I'm not running Linux yet, would like to use it because I 'think' it will be better for running live electronics on (pure data, csound) due to lower overheads and no windows architecture crap running around doing interrupts in the background.

Running Linux and using vmaware makes sense for someone who's main system is linux and they need linux to work on but want some windows apps to hand as well, could be useful down the line...

Pete I assume that vmware can't run windows concurrently with the linux kernel, that you have to boot in and out of the OSes, so you couldn't run PD on linux and some other apps on windows at the same time.

 

[pete]

Honest question: Why not just run windows?

we're looking into the use of Linux on the desktop, since most people could get away with linux / open office / firefox / citrix. but i still have a lot of apps that I need to run which are Windows only. So, instead of having 2 PCs I have a linux desktop with windows in a VMWare window.

 

[pete]

Pete I assume that vmware can't run windows concurrently with the linux kernel, that you have to boot in and out of the OSes, so you couldn't run PD on linux and some other apps on windows at the same time.

No, it runs Windows at the same time in a separate window.

You could also install VMWare on Windows & run Linux in it... or another Windows install... or OSX.. or multiples of these if you have enough memory / cpu poke.

 

[RSJ]

Does it run at decent speeds? The only app i really need from windows is photoshop. Other than that i'm open to making the switch, or at least giving it a boot partition.

 

[Rogue]

Ditto, I'm running a dual-core 1.66ghz laptop with a meg of RAM, that oughta do it if I don't go have a millun things open at once shouldn't it?