[Glastonbury] "An Open Source Horror Story" article....

[Kelvin McNulty]

On Saturday 28 February 2004 05:54, Sean Miller wrote:
> See http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Sean

<rant>
I did not read the whose sage, it really is a bit of an epic, but I certainly 
resonate with this.

I have personally spent hours learning how to use Linux for my personal work 
and every time I have thought about recommending Linux to someone, I have not 
proceeded with the idea, knowing that I would be spending more hours trying 
to get them going.

I don't regret the hours that I have spent, though, because I am really 
pleased about being able to do my work without having to use leaky insecure 
expensive Windows. Windows has also given me grief sometimes, notably around 
the issue of updating software, but I stopped using Windows for email and web 
well before the current blizzard of viruses and worms.

I use very simple things for my personal admin - simple text files that I can 
edit in a trice from the command line. The one tool that I use for complex 
admin is Microsoft Excel, but with the help of Crossover Office I am running 
that on Linux. I have made a few efforts to switch to OpenOffice.org, but 
every time I try to open one of my Excel double entry ledger accounts files 
with OOo, it crashes. So I would have to start again working up to a format 
that would not crash, having to do heaps of installs of updated versions on 
the many different computers that I use (including client's computers).

OOo also takes ages to crank itself into action... (Zzzzzz.....) ...longer 
than Excel, for sure.

I am slowly switching over to using Web based PHP/HTML/MySQL scripts for doing 
admin and in a few years time I expect to be doing bookkeeping that way and 
Excel will be history, or at least only used for local report generation. 
Right now I am hacking through getting XHTML/XML to work for me in a way that 
will validate at W3C. Having done these, I will be able to work anywhere 
anytime on any computer, and I'm mighty glad to have learnt Linux for this 
purpose.

But for regular punters, when they want to plug in the latest gizmo that has 
no Linux support, or a parallel port scanner (like the one I own but cannot 
use without Windows because parport requires more hours of research, soon to 
be redundant as USB takes over, thank goodness because USB support does seem 
good on Linux), etc. etc., Linux is really NOT yet a good idea.

As for CUPS, I did quite successfully connect to my laser printer, and now I 
have to connect to a colour inkjet, but the effort involved in these has 
actually pushed me hard away from using paper at all, and that I have 
actually appreciated. And so far my experience is that provided it is 
properly done, it is much easier to find things in the computer than 
elsewhere... Email in general remains rather poor because it is so easy to 
delete them accidentally and there is no easy way to back them up and/or 
restore from backup.

There is definite scope for a retailer to sell gizmos and peripherals with 
Linux handers that will work without hassle on the main distributions 
(probably are some somewhere, must have a look).

And I still feel delighted with the way that SuSE virtually installed itself 
on my three PCs. I'm delighted, too, with being able to run PHP and  MySQL on 
my own computers instead of having to use servers.
</rant>

SO: a really user friendly Linux that runs easily for non-techies is a really 
useful thing. Does it exist? If so, let's use it (Knoppix shows promise...). 
If not, let's keep looking out for it, and/or create it.

Best,

Kelvin