[Klug-general] Ubuntu and Kabuntu

[Karl Lattimer]

Ethical google "Do no evil" lol

I'm not an ubuntu or kabuntu user or even a SuSE user. I just had to put
my sixth peneth in about YaST.

YaST should be sent to the black hole that consumed linux conf, and will
consume webmin. Admittedly a great idea for early linux users, I used to
advocate things like this, but one thing that I've noticed about all of
them is that they only incorporate the configuration methods of the few
developers of the tools.

Linux conf would for instance, break a manual set up of vhosts in apache
when you tried to configure any of the server defaults via the tool.
Other items were things like network card driver configuration being
changed when you open the app and close it without even doing anything.
Linuxconf taught redhat a very valuable lesson. Generalised
configuration tools restrict the users movement and can lead to
breakages in a lot of the system configuration (just look at the windows
registry), in some cases breakages which cannot be fixed by the tool and
even on manual repair the tool continues to misbehave. After redhat's 90
day free support calls went through the roof as a result of linuxconf
(rh6.2) they ditched it in favour of small specialised fault tolerant
front ends (system-config-*), this has now become the norm amongst gnome
and fedora developers. The all in one linux configuration solution is a
bad idea, yast will probably either get ditched by novell fairly soon or
be replaced with something simpler/smaller/more specialised.

In simple terms, to learn linux you learn yast, but learning yast
defeats the point of learning linux, you get apathetic, so you're still
on the phone/mailing lists etc... trying to get someone to help you fix
a problem outside of the scope of yast, then when you fire up yast to
change something simple it breaks the fixes you put in place.

Isn't it much better to have a tool for a specific task too, I can't
even count the number of times I've been searching through control panel
for something I KNOW IS THERE but can't find it, EVEN THOUGH I SAW IT IN
THE LAST VERSION OF WINDOWS... Spreading configuration about makes the
user look for it, no matter how well designed the front end is. What
happens if suse decide to move proxy configuration from a well known
spot to somewhere inside the network settings instead of where it
USUALLY is ...

You get the point?
Karl,

On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 14:53 +0000, George Prowse wrote:
> Useable...  Oh, you mean GNOME is usable?
> 
> Ethical... You mean they dont kill kittens if you dont use it?
> 
> Pretty good... I've used better. SuSE 9.3, which has just been released
> is better for the beginner in my opinion. YaST has grown so much in
> stature that there is a thread on the Gentoo forums about whether it
> could be ported to be used on a Gentoo system so newcomers to Gentoo are
> able to configure their system easily.
> 
> I very much doubt you're stupid, you're using linux for a start!
> 
> George
> 
> 
> aleX Layfield wrote:
> 
> >It's useable... and ethically... pretty good...
> >
> >For kids? Maybe... but I'm not a kid... just stupid...
> >
> >----- Original Message ----- 
> >From: "George Prowse" <cokehabit2003 at yahoo.co.uk>
> >To: "Kent Linux User Group - General Topics" <kent at mailman.lug.org.uk>
> >Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 9:07 AM
> >Subject: Re: [Klug-general] Ubuntu and Kabuntu
> >
> 
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