gentoo - wow!! - progress

[Collins]

[ snips ]

On Sun, 30 Jun 2002 12:28:55 -0400 dep <dep at linuxandmain.com> wrote:
> begin  Collins's  quote:
> 
> | We agree to disagree.  
> 
> interesting. i have a little p-166 64-meg machine here, and when i
> pop in the otherwise identical w2k drive performance just blows the
> doors off an equivalent linux installation.

> | Windows was a miserable experience on 133MZ machines; basic linux
> | stuff is a little better. 
> 
> we have 98 running on two machines, both p-133s with 64 megs. we
> would put linux on them, but performance is painfully slow. 
> 
> | Claims are almost always bogus.
> 
> but with linux they oughtn't be. if the linux community finds lying 
> for sport to be as attractive as lying for money is, we have some 
> serious, systemic problems.
> 
> | Current results would counter this argument.  Linux as a complete
> | solution and in the univeristy community appears to be growing
> most| rapidly in the higher tier third world countries and in the
> non-US| first tier countries. 
> 
> i normally ignore paragraphs that use "solution" as you have,
> because it is first-order marketspeak, not reasoning. 

A simple term meant to include the business/government communities.

but there is

> what goes on in their businesses, and in their homes, is of far more
> 
> importance than what goes on in their universities. american uni-
> versities were all once populated by unix. which is why
> you find practically nothing in use on any american computer
> anywhere today but unix. 

As I failed to mention, linux is winning in the business and
government arenas (except US, where M$ still has a strangle hold on
most).

> 
> | There are efforts to provide linux for less capable machines
> | (Peanut Linux comes to mind).
> 
> yes, there are. but in that there is no reason why *any* linux needs
> high-powered hardware (look what OS/2 was doing on a 386-16 with 8 
> megs a decade ago, for chrissakes!), there is no real justification 
> for the direction linux has gone, unless the idea is not to have a 
> quick and efficient and reliable operating system but instead to
> sell hardware.
> -- 

There are other elements at work here.

1) This has little to do with selling hardware.  Linux must repond to
the myriad of hardware being offered by the market, or no one (other
than a few eggheads) will use it.

2) Granted the major desktops all have their heads in a dark place
(IMO).  There is no good reason that linux can't circle the wagons
around something simpler like xfce, Icewm, Blackbox, etc. that has
more reasonable resource requirements.

3) The principle raison d'etre for most of this is the pressure to
provide a better M$ product than M$ itself provides.  This effort may
well fail.

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area - WWTLRD?
gentoo(since 01/01/01) 2.4.18+(ext3) xfce-sylpheed-mozilla