I don't think AmigaOS is much more user friendly than Linux to someone who has never used it before.
Compared to a modern computer, no. Compared to a 15-year-old UNIX system... oh, man. :-)
Maybe I had bad luck on installation, but an OS shouldn't be so bloated... heck! I had about the same time or more then installing XP! but my grief is on graphical interface
It's the lack of standards and coordination that's the problem. Linux is very widely standardized, but the UIs that people build on it are so fragmented, it's horrific. Try installing Debian, then Mandrake. HUGE difference, but it's basicly still the same OS (Linux and GNU).
Linux people just can't agree on a standard way of doing things, and they don't want to, either. The whole idea of free software is doing whatever the hell you want... or almost.
au contraire... Windows borrows many things from AmigaOS or use the same patterns of usage, wherever... the linux isn't and isn't exactly great on the new things...
I see very little AmigaOS in Windows. Apple had a lot more respect for the Commodore Amiga than MS did.
Sure, I could learn it all by "reading the {bleep}ing manual" and so on, but I dont want to read a manual for ages to learn how to do something as simple as use an operating system.
The best part is when they write the documentation in HTML and don't tell you how to start a text browser from the shell prompt on the emergency boot disk. I always have to read Linux documentation on my Windows computer.
I always wondered how you're supposed to install Linux from tarballs right off the Internet. FTPing from a shell is such a pain.
I use Mandrake 9.2. The gui is dog slow on my Pentium II 350 + 128 mb mem + ATI Radeon 9200!
KDE is an embarassment for Linux. It's utlra-slow, heralds visuals instead of function, and works no better than any Windows toolkit. It's a shame that GUI programmers are regarded as second-class in the programming world, but they do deserve it to a point.
One of these days I'll get around to writing my own GUI toolkit.
Mac and Windows users that aren't familliar with editing configuration and startup files, or using the CLI might be a little lost.
The thing is, most basic things can be done in the control panel, and Windows is almost guarenteed to boot into a GUI. If Linux has a problem, you'll be staring at a shell prompt with no clue where to start looking for the problem (and no web browser to log onto forums and ask questions).
Linux could really benefit from a GUI "safe mode".
I don't think, give some limitations of course, poeple that like computers should be that conserned about user friendliness. They should be more concerned about the effectiveness, responsiveness, multitasking and that kind of stuff...
You'd think the term "user-friendly" would be considered so 80's, let alone 90's. I remember when stores were telling me their "new" Windows 3.x systems were so user-friendly, and gave me funny looks when I mentioned the Amiga.
I also had a top-feed scanner that was user-friendly because it scanned automatically when you put a sheet of paper in it. The problem was, it started scanning instantly, and if you didn't put the sheet in at a perfect 90 degree angle, it would crush the paper. I would've preferred that they put a button on the scanner so I could at least tell it when the paper is set, and I'm READY for it to scan! Needless to say, I now have a flatbed. :-)
And how many people are we talkin about, 5%, 10%?
Those numbers are useless. It's said that 60% of the Internet runs on UNIX clones. According to my web stats, about 1% of my visitors use Linux, 3-4% use Mac, and 95% use Windows. I get about 8-10 gigs of traffic a month.
So far, an amazing 3 people visited my site with Amigas in the last couple years. :-)
For the most part, if you stack up, feature for feature, a Linux build against a Windows build, the Windows build will run faster.
Linux builds are so abstracted that practically anything UNIX will run. The downside is that they are damn slow and built on ancient standards, and pretty much require you to do things the UNIX way whether you want to or not.
Windows is faster than Linux overall, but speed isn't everything.
The larger distros (Mandrake, Linspire, Fedora) are very easy to learn and use. These have graphic installers and package managers that are quite a bit better than found in Windows. But these distros need horsepower. And lots of it.
I'll contest that. I've never seen a package manager in those distros that worked properly. You always have some damn dependency problem that gets in the way. Also, people overlook bugs and obscure error messages. Mandrake drives me insane with its endless barage of error messages (which just print errors and don't actually RESOLVE them), and the endless stream of bugs and glitches that really make Windows look stable by comparrison.
Linux doesn't crash, but the apps written for it are always questionable. Many Linux distros these days are getting much sloppier and focus on graphics and beating Microsoft at thier own game.
MacOS should be an example of the perfect computer. Use someone else's proven OS, and just build your own desktop. I really wish XWindows would drop dead.
There are ready to use perl scripts...
Ugh. Please don't say the "p word". Maybe what Larry Wall really wanted was to write his own shell. What's so hard about opening the Perl interpreter, rather than trying so hard to properly escape one-liners? Shells are for shell commands, not passing code to an external interpreter!
I also don't like that Perl has continuously been re-engineered to make it work like other languages. Or, maybe I'm just pissed that so many Perl books do a sucky job of teaching people how to write actual perl code. Doesn't anyone know how to use this language properly?
