Re: Experience the New Windows

["dodobh@xxxxxxxxxxx" <dodobh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nero The Fiddler spewed into the ether:
>linux need not be idiot-friendly, but it can atleast
>be userfriendly, which it already is, but not as easy
Like the sig said, it chooses its friends carefully.

>'ordinary user' must have atleast some extent of
>willingness to learn a new OS, then he'll find linux
>to be friendly, like i discovered, as i had a lot of
that willingness to learn defines a power user :). The 
`ordinary user ` will expect it to do everything he wants 
at the click of a mouse (or a keystroke), without much 
configuration (preferably any configuration at all).

>time to try various linux apps. but at times i feel if
>it were friendlier than this. i must confess i had no
>difficulties except non-rpm installations, font
The only difficulties I have with *.tar.gz installs are knowing which files are installed.
Easily overcome by doing 
#find / -type f * 
before and after the installations and finding out which files are new.
Fonts are a pain (but since I generally work in console mode, I don't need fancy fonts).

>installations, samba configuration, and the slowness
Any software takes some time to figure out, but once you know it, it
is consistent from then on.

>and crash-proneness of KDE2, which, i think, can be
I think that the RPMs released for KDE2 have not been compiled with -O flags set. Try recompiling with -O2 or -O3

>overcome with more effort on my part. i'm ready to
>re-install linux 100 times to learn all these things.
>100 times because i'd mess up the system as an
>inexperienced root :) and i'm thinking of
ACK! Never work as root unless absoultely necessary.
su -c is good for your machine

>investigating on why KDE2 crashes on an i810 - celeron
>machine. or i'll just switch to gnome!
Or Afterstep/Windowmaker/whatever suits your fancy.

>userfriendliness sure makes an OS slow. but how come
Does it? Mine is fast enough, but ok, the slowness is because of X
(which for all its good points has never ben designed for speed). Also, you cannot compare the Windows GUI running in kernel mode with X in userland on the basis of speed.

>it makes the OS lack security? Suresh, i'm curious to
>know, can you please explain it to me?
Well, generally this is a question of usability vs security.
You can make a setup extremely paranoid (copying from a file with
higher privileges to one with lower privileges in not allowed....)
This makes it rather difficult to productively use the system for most
purposes.

Again, to make a system userfriendly, you have to second guess whjat
the user will need to do. Since no two people will have exactly the same needs, this has to be a broad guess.

So, you have redhat starting lpd, inet, sendmail, httpd.... by
default. Not all these services are required for a `ordinary user`.
But if you connect to the net, and have telnet/wu-ftpd running (and how many people botherto patch ftpd on a dialup?) and have an exploit run against you, there goes your machine.

The default set of permissions should be DENY ALL, keep all services
closed. Let the user start all those services which (s)he needs.
(wirex or trustix)

Again, consider MS. You have all kinds of executable scripts running
when you just view a mail in OE. "I LOVE YOU" should suffice.
This won't work in Linux because you have to explicitly save the mail,
change permissions to executable and then run.

HTH,
Devdas Bhagat



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