[Techtalk] New to the list

Telsa Gwynne hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk
Tue Nov 2 03:46:51 EST 2004


On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 09:36:57AM -0500 or thereabouts, Teri Solow wrote:
> 
> Of course, things may have changed in the past 4 years (I hope).  All I
> know about Mandrake is that my roommate installed it on my system
> because he thought it would be a good way to ease me into Linux.

This is definitely one problem we tend to forget about "which distro?"
Things change so fast.

I have used Linux since.. well. For quite a while. Certain I was
using it four years ago. And I remember what it looked like then.
And if I didn't remember, we have tons of boxed sets (my husband 
will -not- throw things out) which have their carefully-set-up 
screenshots on super-fast and Linux-compatible hardware on the 
back of the cover of the box. They typically had an xearth, xclock, 
and an Applix window running. And that was the absolute height 
of technology. 

Four years ago would be 2000.  At that time, Gnome and KDE had got 
as far as 1.x releases (in the case of Gnome, only just). Mozilla was 
still releasing milestones. Nautilus was a glimmer in the eye of Eazel 
(just formed). Evolution was a wild plan of Helix Code (->Ximian -> Novell). 
Sourceforge started. XFree86 4.0 came out. Advogato.org had arrived. 
Parted was highly experimental. I'm not sure we had journalling
filesystems at all. We (well, I) were still using printtool, gtop,
Xconfigurator, linuxconf, and all sorts of other things which are
no longer shipped now; they've all been replaced by stuff which
works and looks very different.

If you wanted to have secure encryption in Mozilla or mutt, you
had to find the add-on package or the patch yourself, and rebuild
it. You couldn't change the background font in the Gnome file
manager (gmc). gnorpm had something like 500 reports of the same
bug, because it happened when you hit 'Options'. I don't think 
apt-for-rpm implementations were around (not sure: Conectiva
certainly was, and they started that, so maybe). You had to check
the Linux-compatible hardware lists with the utmost care, and 
even then there was a certain element of prayer. 

OpenOffice had not been released (and when it was, I remember
the reaction: "I need half a _meg_ of RAM to build it? Who has
half a meg of RAM? No-one! And Java?") 

And to make things worse, when I upgrade, I do just that: I upgrade.
Half the time, I don't even notice handy new features because whilst
the defaults are set up to include them on new installs, my preferences
don't mention them and I thus don't even realise something is there.
What's new in Fedora? I have absolutely no idea. But to someone
whose last experience with RH was RH 7 or earlier, I am sure it
is an improvement.

And I suspect the same can be said for every other distribution.
Keeping up is hard!

Telsa



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