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

I put them on Xfce and configure the toobars to look like XP. And
I give them desktop icons to press on. They forget about five
minutes after I leave that they are not running XP. And
they very very seldom ever call me. Windows Garndma's are
always calling me. 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. It
is mainly installation of things and training. 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. I think
Sun's big mistake was the same as Novell's Netware. Both
were solid system, but they just over charged for services
and left a bad taste in everyone's mouths. Netware was just
to stinkin' weird and difficult to maintain. I did manager
very well, but could not help but think they did it on purpose
to charge for consulting services. When NT hit, Netware was
dead. 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.)

Paul