Eventually, I quit using Linux altogether. I just got tired of dealing with a lot of problems that were popping up at the time.
Interesting. Isn't the point of open source to prevent bugs?
Unless you're using server components, Linux is rife with the same problems as every other OS: Lack of design, lack of testing... and if something goes wrong, the answer is always the same: "You can't expect it to be perfect when you're getting it for free!"
Linux will always be over-complicated, I don't think installing Mandrake is necessarily the best remedy, it's like painting over rising damp and pretending it's not there.
Linux is very clean and organized. It's the GNU OS tools and window managers that make up all the mess. So long as there's a complete lack of interface standardization, Linux will always be a hacker OS and will never break into the desktop market.
Maybe if people realized that Linux is just a kernel, and not a complete OS, the stigma of UNIX, X, and the slew of cranky desktop managers wouldn't plague it so much. The more I learn about OS architecture and hardware, the more I love Linux. But, distros like Gentoo and Red Hat make me sick. Mandrake has a great installation, but after that it's too slow, buggy, and just plain sucks.
It makes me wonder why when anyone makes a new OS, they tend to start from scratch, or end up using the higher-level portions of Linux instead of just the kernel. No wonder there's a hundred OS's out there, but only WIndows, Mac, and Linux show up on the radar.
If you try to hide the inner workings away from the user, they will never have a true understanding of the OS and when it fails, they're lost.
Unfortunatly, that's exactly what these distros are doing. When the Mandrake package installer destroys your Start menu, you have to open a Konsole and use Perl to start up the program that rebuilds the menu. They don't teach you THAT in the instructions, of course.
Why use a full-blown, full-featured 35+MB Perl interpreter and a script as a program launcher? I have no idea.
It's a shame QNX doesn't have the support that Linux does, it's much cleaner and a better candidate for Desktop use.
Well, you know how Linux people feel about microkernels. Linus Torvalds is a good programmer and knows his stuff, but he is definately a thouroughbred server developer and doesn't know beans about ordinary people.. :-)
