tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12906299.post116258759942623797..comments2023-05-26T09:52:30.568-04:00Comments on This Old Blog: The continuing usability issue with LinuxBillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06749942763035029635noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12906299.post-52418368046595253952006-11-06T09:02:00.000-05:002006-11-06T09:02:00.000-05:00Speaking as someone who hates Windows with a passi...Speaking as someone who hates Windows with a passion, and prefers a *nix environment, I definitely feel your pain. Several years ago I came to an agreement that Linux was junk, and just became a hard-core UNIX user. That meant IRIX, AIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and such, depending on the machine/purpose. What got me to switch back, was having the sudden need for an x86 desktop (my "primary desktop" during most of this time was an SGI or a Sun system).<br /><br />While I prefer FreeBSD whenever I have a choice, Linux just has better all-around 3rd party support on x86. (For example, VMware doesn't care about FreeBSD, and nVidia only has 32-bit drivers for FreeBSD) The problem was finding a Linux distro that I could tolerate, since I've always hated the RedHats, found Slackware too bare, never got the hang of Debian, didn't want to screw with my system 24/7 on Gentoo, etc.<br /><br />Aside from horrible distro management performance issues (I'm sorry, but an Athlon64 with a 10krpm SCSI hard drive should be *very fast*, not *very slow*, at package management), SuSE 10.x has actually made me quite happy. My only real annoyance is that I hate being totally beholden to the maker of my distro for 3rd party software updates. That's especially true since it means I don't get major version updates until the next major distro version. (well, unless I want to break my distro with 3rd party package sources, which I ultimately did)<br /><br />These days, I think hardcore users just need to bite the bullet and run Gentoo, if they actually want things to work like they want them to. I certainly almost did myself, but stopped at the last minute because I actually needed a functional machine *now*, not 3 weeks of tinkering from now.Derekhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14640499079957252690noreply@blogger.com