[Cumbria] CUMBRIA LUG -- Red Hat cp SuSE

[Schwuk]

Ken Hough wrote:
> With regard to 'vi', this does seem a bit OTT for modifying a line or 
> two in a small script.

On the contrary, it is always worth being familiar with vi as you are 
pretty much assured of it being installed on every box you will come 
across. And after the mild learning curve (for 'mild' read  'forget what 
you know about every other editor') editing a line in a script is just 
as straight forward as every other editor. The current LUG webpage was 
created completely in vim, and is updated remotely with the same. Far 
easier than "Edit - Save - FTP - Test - Repeat..."

> I don't accept that new major distros should be allowed to have 
> (serious?) bugs. Of course this will happen, but SuSE v8.0 is fairly 
> major and seems to be pretty good -- I haven't managed to rubbish 
> anything on it yet! Any major distro today must be pretty good on 
> release or it's going to get hammered.

Every .0 release of the major distributions always incorporate a few 
major changes, and due to the nature of the distributions there will 
always be bugs. And most of the hammering for RH 8.0 was about the 
desktop so the rest of distro can't that bad then...

> Why should Red Hat 'b*****' about with KDE and Gnome when the rest of 
> the Linux fraternity concentrates on getting the distro right? Probably 
> for selfish (commercial) reasons.  I believe that if this attitude 
> proliferates we'll end up with a lot of different versions of Linux 
> (etc) as happened to Unix.

They are doing it to present a 'unified' desktop to the users. Users 
(especially new ones) do not really care what window manager or desktop 
environment they are using and would simply prefer things to work. They 
also don't expect that if they are logged into a KDE session and fire up 
a Gnome based application that they will display differently.

'the rest of the Linux fraternity concentrates on getting the distro 
right'? That doesn't sound much like the Linux fraternity - not enough 
in-fighting... :)

Red Hat were never going to make everyone happy with their strategy, but 
look at this way - they are trying something different, whilst other 
distros carry on with their 'favorite' desktop environment and seemingly 
bundle others as an afterthought. At the end of the day, as KDE and 
Gnome are open source, they can do what they like with them. If people 
don't like it they can use something else.

Whilst we are 'distro-bashing', aren't SuSE tools like YAST proprietry? 
Why are they so special?

Ah, flame wars. Always keep you warm on a cold winters night... ;)
-- 
Schwuk