snip

On Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:24:54 +0200, Aragorn
aragorn at (no spam) chatfactory.invalid> wrote:



snip

If everyone is putting in their 2 cents....

Even though it's a very wel put argument, I think that it just doesn't
matter that much anymore...

I've been using Unix/Linux (AIX/SCO/RH5/Caldera, with or without
internet) waaaay before there was Win95 or worse, and still use Linux
for every main server I have.
While I do administer almost everything bij CLI, sometimes you just
need a GUI (like browsing.. Lynx is just a bit too much of a pain....)
or even Win (development...)

Same goes for the desktop.. If someone wants to learn how an OS works,
fine, let them read up on it, good for them.
But for the masses, they don't care about an OS, they just want to
surf, watch video's, see pictures (nude or not ) and do some word
processing.

On Wednesday 08 July 2009 22:48, someone identifying as *The Natural
Philosopher* wrote in /comp.os.linux.setup:/

My wife saw me booting Linux in the command line mode today

"Oh, it looks just like windows 95' she said..'without the windows
bit'....

I explained that a;ll operating systems looked like that, except with
windows the screen just goes blank, and with a MAC it goes grey with a
spinning wheel.

And Windows 95 was a GUI that ran on top of MS-DOS 7.0 - according to an
acquaintance of mine who had test-driven Windows 95 when it was still
called Windows 4.0 "Chicago", the DOS /ver/ command outputted
"Microsoft MS-DOS 7.00" - and DOS was basically a rebranded QDOS, which
was written by Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer - he later on
transfered to Microsoft after Bill Gates had purchased QDOS from him.

And Patterson's QDOS was in turn a not-too-legal "update" to CP/M by
Gary Kildall of Digital Research - not to be confused with "Digital",
the abbreviation of Digital Equipment Corporation (or DEC). And CP/M
was written specifically for floppy-only single-user and single-tasking
machines, but based upon the look and feel of... UNIX. ;-)

So, if we add it all up, then GNU/Linux and Windows are - at least, from
the purely technical point of view; I won't be discussing licensing
etc. - both descendents of UNIX, with GNU/Linux having the most UNIX
DNA and Windows being an offspring of an offspring of an offspring that
had serious genetic flaws. :p

Well, I don't see Windows running natively - as in "on the bare metal" -
on an IBM S/390 yet. GNU/Linux on the other hand is quite capable
of that, albeit that it's typically far more practical to run it inside
a virtual machine, even if only because of the limitations of the
amount of logical (processor) partitions in the Linux kernel versus
OS/390 (which I think is now called differently - zOS or something of
the likes? - but anyway).

Sidney Lambe wrote (in part):

I have a GUI.

Does your GUI run on top of the X Window System?

Or do you provide something
equivalent to it to support your GUI?

On my system, X is using about 36
MBytes of virtual memory; actually, most of that is paged out and it is
really using only about 7.5 meg of RAM. Some people might consider that
massive. On my machine, though, that is only about 0.2% of the virtual memory.

I don't have anything like KDE. I run Linux from
the commandline and can run any application someone using KDE
or the like can, much faster, because my system resources are not being
used up by a massive suite of apps providing nothing but eye-candy
and the illusion of 'user-friendliness'. My OS is much more stable
more secure, too. Complexity leads to instability and insecurity.

GNOME and all the little eye candy (panel, icons, etc., are only taking 2.7%
of my virtual address space.

It's also easier to maintain and modify.

I have never even felt the need to maintain or modify GNOME and its related
programs.

It takes as long to learn an artificial interface like KDE as it does
to learn the commandline, the basics of the shell and how the Linux
OS works.

I had to learn the UNIX OS without any GUI stuff, because there was none in
the early 1970s. I did not actively use a GUI until I got my first PC in
1996 that hat Windows 95 on it. The basics of that were kind-of trivial to
learn, and I never managed to learn much of the rest. I abandoned that
because of several factors:

Jean-David Beyer wrote:

The Natural Philosopher <tnp at (no spam) invalid.invalid> wrote:
Jean-David Beyer wrote:

[delete off-topic ramblings --I think they are doing it on purpose
because they don't want these ideas to get around]

Windows-clone user interfaces, Graphical Desktop Environments (GDE) like
KDE are funded by a group of corporations in order to divorce Linux
runners from Linux.

On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:02:32 +0200, Sidney Lambe wrote:

The Natural Philosopher <tnp at (no spam) invalid.invalid> wrote:
Jean-David Beyer wrote:
[delete off-topic ramblings --I think they are doing it on purpose
because they don't want these ideas to get around]

Windows-clone user interfaces, Graphical Desktop Environments (GDE) like
KDE are funded by a group of corporations in order to divorce Linux
runners from Linux.

What about the other guis?

On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:02:32 +0200, Sidney Lambe wrote:

The Natural Philosopher <tnp at (no spam) invalid.invalid> wrote:
Jean-David Beyer wrote:

[delete off-topic ramblings --I think they are doing it on purpose
because they don't want these ideas to get around]

Windows-clone user interfaces, Graphical Desktop Environments (GDE) like
KDE are funded by a group of corporations in order to divorce Linux
runners from Linux.

What about the other guis?

Allen Kistler <ackistler at (no spam) oohay.moc> wrote:

[delete]

Sid