Msg: Re: Linux

I must admit that my Linux exposure thus far has been limited to a few of the self-contained "Live" CDs, such as Dayna Mint, Knoppix, and a few others. With the best of these, I was impressed at certain things, such as how they could query your hardware for whatever might be needed, call in appropriate drivers on the fly, get you out onto the Internet for browsing (perhaps even via wi-fi ?), and things like that. My main issues with these was basically not being able to find where most things (apps) were, or having much insight into how they worked if I did manage to find them. Even getting the display from a microscopic size to one that was readable to me took detailed, explicit instructions that had to be available for reference prior to running the disc. I also never determined which of the many flavors and distros was most accessible to Win users. "Steep learning curve" seemed an apt description.

btw, if you happen to know, whatever became of "Lindows" ? At one point, some years back, this was supposedly poised to take the spotlight, having a major deal with Walmart or another very big player like that. But then, total silence. I've not heard the name in years. The hype was that they had come up with a UI closely mimicking the Win one, setting the stage for much easier user adoption. Either this was a promise not delivered on, or the product went under suddenly, or perhaps MS pushed them off a cliff ?

Some might argue (as in that article I linked) that the Mac OS is in fact the more readily accessible Linux. And it does seem to have fairly non-geeky solutions for running a lot of Windows software.

Jordan

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From: Raphael
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2014 2:45 PM
Subject: Re: Linux

my pleasure, flash. I am happy to help out anyone who wants to try using
Ubuntu as his or her XyWrite platform. I think I've discussed with
someone else on this list the possibility of putting together a how-to
for XyWrite for the six or seven people who *might* be interested;
stepping someone through it here would be a great way to get started.

my best recommendation to anyone who is curious: take out an old laptop,
install it on that, and play around with it, or, failing that, download
a DVD ISO, burn it, boot it -- then spend a little time seeing how well
the things you use all day long (Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird) or the
things very like them (LibreOffice) work. the days are long since gone
when Linux was command-line only; Ubuntu's Unity has some extremely cool
GUI stuff going on that puts BOTH Mac and Windows to shame.

-rafe

On 03/31/2014 02:17 AM, flash wrote:
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> There are more things under the sun than are dreamed of by Microsoft.
> Thanks for reminding us, Rafe.
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