[Wylug-discuss] best sig ever

[Roger Leigh]

Dave Fisher <davef at gbdirect.co.uk> writes:

> Here are just a few of the many fundamental usability issues that
> Windows users don't have to deal with:
>
>   OSS Printing Systems -- so many sub-optimal packages to choose from!

This takes a lot of stick, but is it /really/ so bad?  What are
currently the worst aspects of printing?

>   X Configuration -- Gurus with infinite time on their hands struggle to
>                      wrestle its complexity to the ground!

X can be nasty, but I've found most recent distributions get most
hardware set up decently.  Hardware configuration in general is vastly
improved now we have stuff like hotplug, which can set up all your PCI
devices automatically.  I'll never need to touch modules.conf again!!

(This is the envy of Windows users at work, where "Plug and Play"
hardware takes far more messing, and since it's not dynamically
discovered each boot, it can lead to broken configurations if you
alter the hardware!).

>   Character encoding -- at least Windows gets it wrong consistently!

What problems have you had in this respect?

This is one area which is improving dramatically, and should be fixed
for good in a year or so (I hope!) when we are all using UCS/UTF-8 as
the standard encoding.  Are you using a UTF-8 locale?

This was discussed on the debian-policy list recently.  After the
release of Sarge, UTF-8 will become the standard system encoding, and
we might recode the entire system into UTF-8 (documentation in
particular, but also package metadata in control files).  Non-UCS
character sets would be deprecated and no longer used for new stuff,
although they will continue to be supported.


>   Documentation -- Does it even exist? Which one of a dozen formats is it in?
>                    What were they smoking when they wrote it? Have they even
>                    heard of the concept of an illustrative example?

I have to agree here.  It varies much between projects, especially
with examples.  Some is superb (e.g. PostgreSQL), while much is
shocking (I had to set up a DHCP and BIND setup with dynamic DNS
updates today.  The BIND folks don't like to give too much away: two
trivial example named.conf snippets in the whole manual, and NO
example zone files at all--how on earth is a newcomer to understand
it!!).


--
Roger Leigh

                Printing on GNU/Linux?  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/
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