Re: [tlug] epcEditor

[Michael Moyle <michael@example.com>]

> >> True. Except learning linux has to do with patience more than anything
> >> else. It is free after all. 
> 
> Hmmm. No excuse for things being sloppy, counter-intuitive and arcane
> (not that I can claim to be sin-free on any of those.)

hmm, too bad costing money isn't an excuse either :)

The question is though what is sloppy? 

I don't think linux infrastructure is sloppy, though I am not a kernel
hacker, so I wouldn't know, other than by judging
performance. Installation varies from distro to distro. 

I do think the documention for many things is sloppy. (again, like most
commerical products). If I were to rewrite the unix docs, I would use a
patterns approach to doc. Someone sent me a great pdf on this in the
ninjava group. It would start with high level concepts in bold for quick
reading, and pictures. Then you can drill down if you need more specific
information. The problem, I see with a lot of unix utilities and
subsytems, is that you have to read the whole manual (hence
RTFM). However in today economy of get it down now and faster, that can
make getting up to speed time consuming. If there was more step by step
documentation, I could get cretain systems running, and still drink
beers or go the park at the end of the day, unlike yesterday. Being
"free" though there is no one to blame. So the only solution is to
produce such documentation myself, or encourage others to do so. And
that is what Linux has always been about for me. Not something that is
competing with Microsoft. Sadly, MS is a monopoly, and we don't have
choices, and somehow the operating system that came from Minix is a
threat to Redmond. That is also exciting. Oh no, topic drift... 

ok. So what is arcane? The command line? Doe not arcane mean that it
has dedicated so many resources to guis that I need a PIII to run it? I
like the fact that I am running Linux on PII I got from my job because
its "too slow" to be useful. 

However, I am going to argue that command line is not arcane. There is a
consistent syntax to using unix commands. 

Last night night I remembered a good book on Unix:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lunix5/

This book has gotten a lot more expensive now and expanded from being a
pocket edition to something much larger, from the looks, but it is a
great intro to unix, which I read after using it for several years => 

Furthermore, people often do not take advantage of the unix command
line's features: Tab completion, up arrow, history, pushd, emacs style
shortcuts (here we go again :) ) ... 

And they forget (or do not realize) that the shell is not just a "command
line" but an interpretor for a pretty powerful programming language
which is the shell (usually bash or tcsh in linux). There are also great
tools like midnight commander (don't laugh) that can help speed things
up as well. 

The command line in Windows does suck, and I think that is what turns a
lot of people away from this powerful, and necessary interface that
should be considered a boon rather than a detriment. 

I am still interested in OS X as a solution that provides the best of
both worlds, I just don't know if I would like being tied down to the
hardware and window manger. No more free computers from work ;)

Were you even talking about the command line? Are there other aspects of
linux you find arcane? We could come up with a list and try to fix
certain things, at list make it know that "this is hard to
install/use/learn" and that may encourage the developers and project
maintainers to focus on those areas. I think a lot of people don't look
back, they get something running and move on (at least that's what I do
often).  

> 
> Huh? What "freebsd vs linux banter"? I thought we were stoking up the
> "vi vs emacs" religious war? Don't go bringing in red herrings! Nothing
> worse than a totally confused religious war. 

=>

regards,
Michael