🚀 go-pugleaf

j.stokes@bohm.anu.edu.au (Jason Stokes) writes:

>It's just that I think arbitrarily naive users shouldn't be trying Linux if
                  ^^^^^
>they don't already have some experience with Unix, or at least computer
>science.  Because Linux, despite all the PR, is still user hostile.  To

I hope you don't give this advise to all your friends, I am not a CS grad,
I had no previous experience with Unix, my other computer is a macintosh,
but I have been happily Linuxing for the last 2 years, installation of the
Slackware CD was easier than trying to install NT Workstation (IMHO), and
Idiot's guide to Unix, man, apropos and the #linux channel on irc was my
only source of help.

I can't see why all the Unix gurus keeps saying that Unix is difficult, is
it a conspiracy to keep a good thing all to themselves :-)??? The command
line is much more flexible than dos, and man does an excellent job of
telling me what each command does. grep is great btw, I now can not do
without it :-).

>someone without the necessary background, early exposure to Linux could put
>them off free software for life.

Nah.....the only trouble I had was I didn't know how to shutdown at the
start :-) and ctrl-alt-del was how I used to shutdown for at least a month
:-) but Linux happily rewrote my partition table :-).

As an example, pico is one heck of a more intuitive text editor than dos's
edit. And if I had more bang, emacs is better than the space shuttle :-),
not to mention a whole heap of more intuitive command like find, more,
tar, etc... do this in dos and see how much hair you'd loose :-)

>Our esteemed poster didn't sound terribly knowledgable about Unix.  Hence
>the idea of him trying Linux is debatable.

He actually sounds just like me when I started, and I only looked
into linux because an amigoid friend had bsd and also because I
had a couple of spare peecees that didn't have the beef to run MS software
anymore :-). Now my 8Mb 386 is happily masq'ing my mac onto the net, it is
doing Appletalk fileserving with netatalk, and most importantly making
computing fun again :-D.

>That's the logic of my post.

Well, that's my two cents, but of course that said, if I detect that my
friend was the type that wouldn't read man pages then well I'd go with
your logic :-) .

Cheers
Paul Pham