On 3/6/19 11:42 PM, Paul wrote:
T wrote:
On 3/6/19 6:09 PM, Paul wrote:
And I still don't believe a bit, the stories about "I gave
my grandma Linux and she hasn't phoned back since".

I have a few Grandmas" on Linux.Â* They still call me, but when they
buy a new printer. They also often forget where the print button is
in Firefox.Â*Â* "Its printing!Â* Who'd you do that?", "I pressed the
print button".Â* Then I show them the print button, again.Â* (Linux's
HP print support is getting pretty good as of late.Â* They should still
call me first though.)

I put them on Xfce and configure the toobars to look like XP.Â* And
I give them desktop icons to press on.Â* They forget about five
minutes after I leave that they are not running XP.Â* And
they very very seldom ever call me.Â* Windows Garndma's are
always calling me.Â* This makes sense if you look at IBM's help
desk experience with Windows and Mac.

With Linux and Mac, I seldom ever fuss with system issues.Â* It
is mainly installation of things and training.Â* It is a whole
different.. And explaining that their Internet is down, not them.

I stated Unix with Sun OS. It hard to save anything bad about
it, but just as soon as found Linux, I dropped Sun OS.Â* I think
Sun's big mistake was the same as Novell's Netware.Â* Both
were solid system, but they just over charged for services
and left a bad taste in everyone's mouths.Â* Netware was just
to stinkin' weird and difficult to maintain.Â* I did manager
very well, but could not help but think they did it on purpose
to charge for consulting services.Â* When NT hit, Netware was
dead.Â* Sun's tech support ($300/hr back in the 90's) was
extraordinary.

There's a big difference between Sun and Linux.

On SunOS, I could get real work done. The software, the
APIs were documented. I could write a program and use
a V2 library, and when the V3 library came along, it
"didn't break" my program. There was backward compatibility.
I'm not a programmer, and I could write networking utilities using
their documentation to bootstrap myself. In addition, we designed
hardware in VME Sun boxes - we did have to send a couple guys off
for a few months to take a "driver writers" course, but other than
that, the whole experience was quite pleasurable.

When Solaris came along, the edges were a bit rougher at first.
But you had Answerbook as reference material, so again,
lots of documentation.

With Linux, the edges are a lot rougher. Gentoo for
example, is relatively decent, in that it's a "from source"
kind of distro, but it has a "Manual" for new users to
bootstrap from, that's pretty good.

A couple weeks ago, I tried my hand at Arch, which is
a "source"-like distro. I got as far as getting to
a command line terminal, but it was the usual problem
getting LightDM working (I *hate* Display Managers).
So the experiment stopped there, as I couldn't
find any documentation to sort it out.

There's just no comparison between the good ole days
with Sun, and what I find in Linux now. Yes, sometimes
you find Linux stuff that works, but there's a lack of consistency
which means every time a new release comes out, stuff
that used to work could be broken again. (The lamentable
situation with File Sharing being an example. Dammit,
it worked *perfectly* at one point. How annoying.)

Â*Â* Paul

I though Sun OS was beautifully done, but too expensive to operate.

Try your hand at Fedora next. I adore it.