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Jimbo · Jul 17th, 2006, 4:10 PM

About the updating thing: back when I was using FC4 (a little over a year ago, and it was my first Linux distro), about once a week there'd be a little icon in the taskbar that would have a list of all the packages that needed updating. I could just hit OK and Continue a few times and it would fetch the new .rpms, check dependencies, and install everything. At that point I didn't know what any of the packages were except for the kernel and a handful of others. It was like Windows Update, only it happened a lot more often. I'm pretty sure Ubuntu has something similar, though I never really used it (I've got a installation disc for when I clear a hard drive though...). Now, running Gentoo (where I can tweak all I want), when it comes time to update, I can just type "sudo emerge --sync; sudo emerge -uD world" and it'll update all the packages on my computer to the latest releases (in the case of dependency collisions or blockage, it'll stop before installing anything). Of course, it takes forever to install stuff from source, and things get updated quite often, but I can just update when I want. From my limited experience, I'd assume that system updating is pretty well covered.

As for software, many things do have counterparts on a Linux system. For browsers there's Firefox and Opera, plus KDE and Gnome each have Konqueror and Epiphany respectively. For office productivity, there's OpenOffice. For software development, there is always the text editor of choice + gcc (or appropriate compiler), but there's also several IDEs (Anjuta, KDevelop, Eclipse). Graphics has some issues, with Gimp being the closest replacement for Photoshop, and not much else (that I know of) to compete with Adobe's suite. Flash also has very poor support (no Flash 8 plugin AFAIK, they're waiting till Flash 9 comes out to release the next Linux version). And there's obviously more, but it's slowly changing.

Hardware as mentioned is possibly one of the biggest weaknesses of a Linux system. I know that video drivers are a pain from nVidia and ATI (Intel has open-source drivers IIRC, but who wants Intel graphics? :p). Printer support is lacking at best (this I know first-hand). As was mentioned, one of Apple's secrets to stability is the extremely limited hardware set they support. And one of Windows' greatest successes IMHO is their mostly functional support for almost any piece of hardware (yes, some still need drivers, but it's not nearly as big of an issue; the Windows HCL covers a good share of what a typical user will have).

Linux over the past few years seems to have become much more friendly for new users (I don't know first-hand, first tried it a year ago myself). The desktop oriented distros (FC, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc...) are making strides to automate or at least simplify many of the difficulties in maintaining a Linux system. However, each one is taking a slightly different approach, which is the Linux way of doing things, I guess. That's just how it goes...

Jul 17th, 2006, 4:10 PM	#27
Jimbo Battle Programmer Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Bellevue, WA, USA Posts: 770 Rep Power: 3	About the updating thing: back when I was using FC4 (a little over a year ago, and it was my first Linux distro), about once a week there'd be a little icon in the taskbar that would have a list of all the packages that needed updating. I could just hit OK and Continue a few times and it would fetch the new .rpms, check dependencies, and install everything. At that point I didn't know what any of the packages were except for the kernel and a handful of others. It was like Windows Update, only it happened a lot more often. I'm pretty sure Ubuntu has something similar, though I never really used it (I've got a installation disc for when I clear a hard drive though...). Now, running Gentoo (where I can tweak all I want), when it comes time to update, I can just type "sudo emerge --sync; sudo emerge -uD world" and it'll update all the packages on my computer to the latest releases (in the case of dependency collisions or blockage, it'll stop before installing anything). Of course, it takes forever to install stuff from source, and things get updated quite often, but I can just update when I want. From my limited experience, I'd assume that system updating is pretty well covered. As for software, many things do have counterparts on a Linux system. For browsers there's Firefox and Opera, plus KDE and Gnome each have Konqueror and Epiphany respectively. For office productivity, there's OpenOffice. For software development, there is always the text editor of choice + gcc (or appropriate compiler), but there's also several IDEs (Anjuta, KDevelop, Eclipse). Graphics has some issues, with Gimp being the closest replacement for Photoshop, and not much else (that I know of) to compete with Adobe's suite. Flash also has very poor support (no Flash 8 plugin AFAIK, they're waiting till Flash 9 comes out to release the next Linux version). And there's obviously more, but it's slowly changing. Hardware as mentioned is possibly one of the biggest weaknesses of a Linux system. I know that video drivers are a pain from nVidia and ATI (Intel has open-source drivers IIRC, but who wants Intel graphics? :p). Printer support is lacking at best (this I know first-hand). As was mentioned, one of Apple's secrets to stability is the extremely limited hardware set they support. And one of Windows' greatest successes IMHO is their mostly functional support for almost any piece of hardware (yes, some still need drivers, but it's not nearly as big of an issue; the Windows HCL covers a good share of what a typical user will have). Linux over the past few years seems to have become much more friendly for new users (I don't know first-hand, first tried it a year ago myself). The desktop oriented distros (FC, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc...) are making strides to automate or at least simplify many of the difficulties in maintaining a Linux system. However, each one is taking a slightly different approach, which is the Linux way of doing things, I guess. That's just how it goes...