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List:       kde-user
Subject:    Re: desktop
From:       Mike Green <linux () saesolved ! com>
Date:       1999-11-15 17:25:40
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On Mon, 15 Nov 1999, Michael P. Soulier wrote:
> 
> 	That's something that I think is a shame really. The age of GUIs. GUIs
> are like icing on the cake. They serve a purpose, but except for artistic
> applications such as graphic design and games, I don't believe that they should
> be the primary method of accessing your computer. 

Well, I wonder sometimes if the universe is divided into two types of people:
those who can type without making errors in nearly every word and those who
can't?  I personally fall (with a big thud) in the latter group.  And there is
another division I wonder about:  those who remember things pictorially and
those who remember them in terms of words.  I tend to fall (more gently
perhaps) in the former of these two groups. :-)

I think that it is a good idea to learn to do things with command lines.  But
so is it a good idea to learn how to change the tires on ones car... ;-)

Anyhow,  I empathize very much with all who want a more GUI'd interface for
Linux.  I, too, am an engineer -- and I have a lot of programming experience
-- who has been trying to learn to use Linux for about a year. And if it
weren't for the good progress on GUIs that groups like KDE are making (and for
the horrendous problems with crashes I have with Windows) I would have given up
on Linux long ago.   

But a lot of this is just having to learn.  I learned DOS/Windows with a great
deal of pain (which hasn't stopped ;-)), and have been using this system for
something like 15 years.  I probably have accumulated something more like 15
(well, maybe 30) days total experience with Linux over the past year, a bit
here a bit there.

By the way, I am quite capable of crashing Linux.  Yesterday I sent it into a
complete tail spin by making some sort of a command line typo.  I was not using
any GUI.  I was trying to figure out where a script was located, that the rpm
for the upgrade of KDE had supposedly installed on my system somewhere. I was
using virtual consoles via "alt-Fn." In one I had the readme file open, in
another I was trying to run the update, and in a third I was searching for the
missing script.  I intended to type "ls."  I must have typed something else. 
All virtual consoles went into rapidly scrolling screens.  "Cntl-Alt-Del" even
wouldn't stop it.  I finally reset the computer.  That caused a hard drive
error which Linux couldn't recover from.  After several tries at rebooting, I
finally turned the machine off completely and then -- after the traditional
(from MS DOS days) wait -- turned it back on.  This time it booted without the
error, Linux recovered, and I went on to do the upgrade -- with which I'm
pleased.

So perhaps the moral of that rather long (and meant to be amusing to y'all)
adventure is that all that experience with system crashes with MS products is
not entirely lost.  I may still find a need to know how to turn the machine off
and back on again with Linux ;-)

Cheers!

Mike Green

-- 
Mike Green
SaeSolved::
http://www.saesolved.com
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