Hi!
(I suppose this is a stupid trolling attempt, but what the heck?)
I've used a lot of Linux distributions over the years. As time has
gone by, they have come to be faster, easier and better to use.
There's been a lot of progress made on these fronts, but there is
still need for more progress.
Most recently I obtained a Power Macintosh G4/400 "Sawtooth". The hard
drive had been wiped, and the machine came to me at a very low
purchase price and in need of minor repairs. I repaired it and thought
about what OS I should use. In the end, I chose Fedora Core 6 Linux
for PowerPC systems because I could not justify the $129 for a Mac OS
X license. I had used the system when it was running Mac OS X 10.3.9
and it was always sluggish.
The good:
Under Fedora Core 6, this system really took off. Had it not been
obvious that the computer was unchanged apart from the operating
system, I wouldn't have believed it was the same hardware.
Nearly all the hardware works perfectly. Sound, USB, Firewire,
etc...it was all easily detected and configured.
Setup was a lot easier than I thought it might be.
Adding software packages has been relatively painless.
Reliability and stability are second to none. Under the Mac OS, this
system sometimes crashed for unknown reasons. Under Linux, it has been
nothing but stable.
Programs look nice--on the surface, at least, a lot of time and effort
has been put into making things pretty to look at.
Networking--hey, hey....Windows sharing courtesy of Samba worked right
after I turned it on. No swearing, cursing or diddling around. That is
really great!
Preloaded applications--Amongst many others, OpenOffice.org and
Firefox were preinstalled and ready to use. Again, this is really
great.
Now those are the strong points--and they have been strong enough to
keep me using Linux on this computer. But there are some things which
are not so great:
Printing--above and beyond everything else that's been troublesome,
printing takes the cake. I tried to set up my trusty DeskJet 5850
printer on this computer. It shouldn't be hard--the DJ5850 is a pretty
generic PCL compliant printer with onboard JetDirect hardware. Oh, was
I wrong about that. Windows prints to it. Both Mac OS X and the
"classic" Mac OS print to it. I even seem to remember getting it to
work under OS/2 for a while. But Linux just wants to piss me off, to
be blunt. Setting up the printer was a chore (oh, CUPS, where are
you?), using the printer was fraught with a lot of fiddling around and
sometimes things just ended in disaster with the printing subsystem
going vacant or getting stuck in a never ending loop.
Eric S. Raymond wrote an article about the sorry state of printing
under Fedora Core 1. Here we are, seemingly six major releases later,
and guess what? It *STILL* doesn't work right! Aaaaaagh!
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
Ah, perhaps I'm doing it wrong... I just don't care any more. It was
easier to hook up a USB floppy or put the files I wanted to print on
another system on the network.
I haven't been able to figure out how to make Linux send DPMS signals
to my monitor. The screen blanks, but the monitor itself stays fully
powered.
Media playback: I wanted to play some MP3s. Most of them were
downloaded podcasts. A few media players came preloaded, and they were
quite nice to interact with. But none of them would actually play an
MP3 file. In fact, it was worse than that. The programs I tried just
ignored me or threw up cryptic error messages. Okay, this is a little
less than wonderful. But I won't let myself get discouraged quite that
easily...
I started on the surface with this problem and did manage to solve it
eventually. It turns out that Fedora doesn't come packaged with a
complete set of the gstreamer libraries and components. On the Fedora
web site, a very positive spin is put on this--it is basically said
that Fedora Core Linux embraces everything that is open and free in
the software world, and that this seemingly includes media playback
formats. They go on to recommend use of Ogg Vorbis audio for all your
media ripping needs. Which is nice, it's just not very feasible when I
have an MP3 that I didn't make, don't want to transcode and would
really like to hear *now*.
I did find the rest of the gstreamer libraries compiled in binary
format for PowerPC microprocessors. And I even managed to get them
installed with some instructions I found. But as I was doing this, I
wondered just why I wanted to be screwing around with this in the
first place? And why did it take so much diddling around to figure out
that missing libraries were the problem? Why couldn't ANY of these
media player programs say either in a dialog or the included help
system something to the effect of "Hey dummy! You might be running an
operating system that needs to have some pieces added to it in order
to do what you're asking!" Again, this could be easier.
And then there is DVD playback. I am fully aware that most of the
trouble in this department isn't the Linux community's fault. But
still...I've got a DVD-ROM drive in this system and I might like to
use it. On Windows I can buy a DVD playback application or even use
VLC just by downloading and installing it. The Macintosh comes with a
DVD playback app, and VLC can again be easily used. I didn't find a
version of VLC compiled for PowerPC Linux systems at the time, and I'm
just not up to taking the time to try and compile one at this point.
It probably wouldn't work in some creative manner, and there's a Mac
mini across the room anyway.
I tried to find instructions for DVD playback and didn't end up in
anything productive. Oh well.
The last thing that bothers me is the way some members of the Linux
community think. Some of them have the idea that if you have to ask
about something, need instructions or can't quite pull it off, that
you are a complete idiot who shouldn't even be allowed to have a
computer. This is not how you attract newcomers to your platform.
In the end, and with years of working with various Linux distributions
on many different pieces of hardware, I have come to the conclusion
that Linux is a solid, reliable operating system that works well in
many roles. It has certainly grown up tremendously. But it still needs
improvement...mostly just to take care of "stupid bugs" and things
that don't quite live up to expectations or aren't as easy/well
documented as they should be.
William
