Saying Farewell To The Penguin... :(

[Chewy]

That's why they call it windoze, we can do it in our sleep

[anonymez]

Only because you've been doing it for so long.

Linux is not inherently hard, just different. Hard to understand, at least initially, for intermediate XP users, easy for first-time PC users.

[katzdvd]

Linux is not inherently hard, just different. Hard to understand, at least initially, for intermediate XP users, easy for first-time PC users.

Anony, wouldn't you agree that there is a lack of good instruction/tutorials, etc. available? Sure, there are the wikis & tutorials here & there, but as far as actually addressing specific problems & getting them fixed, it seem like you are flying pretty much by the seat of your pants!

Or at the very least, at the mercy of another user who has been there before you & somehow muddled their way thru it to a solution.

That being said...
The title of this thread may be a misnomer; I am finding I can't stay away from tux, I must have hung out in the dark corners of "absolute beginner talk" for too long & now I guess I am hooked!

I stumbled across a thread on video editing & now pretty much all of my vid. programs are working under wine, but I had to revert back to an earlier version.

Still can't get any audio work done, though, as far as realtime recording... Audacity/GNUSoung/Goldwave... none will pick up the audio from the sound card for stream recording. I have selected either mixer in the properties, nothing seems to work there, except I did manage to somehow get all my sound files severely distorted as referenced earlier, but a shutdown & restart seemed to fix that...

All in all, I do like the concept of Linux...it just seems that it is very buggy & not very user friendly as far as resolving problems goes...Speaking from a "newbie" perspective here, of course!

[MilesAhead]

I disagree entirely. But feel free to voice your opinion.

It's more my experience than an opinion. As with most things if you work
steadily on something your skills improve. The mechanic who does
break jobs for a living thinks it's no big deal to put return springs on a set
of drum brake shoes. But the guy who just does his own car under the shade
tree every 3 years... well you tend to hear "ping" and "damn!" a lot from
his house.

[katzdvd]

put return springs on a set
of drum brake shoes. But the guy who just does his own car under the shade
tree every 3 years... well you tend to hear "ping" and "damn!" a lot from
his house.

Being a mechanic, I can relate....

[katzdvd]

@ Chewy; with linux, instead of K.I.S.S., it is more like S.W.A.G.

[anonymez]

Anony, wouldn't you agree that there is a lack of good instruction/tutorials, etc. available? Sure, there are the wikis & tutorials here & there, but as far as actually addressing specific problems & getting them fixed, it seem like you are flying pretty much by the seat of your pants!

I guess it might be hard finding help since the forums are so active and threads can get buried within minutes. Some of the pages in the community wikis are incomplete and outdated too. But I can't really comment on how good the support is since other than finding out "how to do" something, I haven't really needed any yet. Most questions, if not answered within the forums/wikis can be answered in other distribution's wikis. One of the most complete is here.

The title of this thread may be a misnomer; I am finding I can't stay away from tux, I must have hung out in the dark corners of "absolute beginner talk" for too long & now I guess I am hooked!

LOL. I find Windows a bore.

Still can't get any audio work done, though, as far as realtime recording... Audacity/GNUSoung/Goldwave... none will pick up the audio from the sound card for stream recording. I have selected either mixer in the properties, nothing seems to work there, except I did manage to somehow get all my sound files severely distorted as referenced earlier, but a shutdown & restart seemed to fix that...

Can you give the exact error messages?

All in all, I do like the concept of Linux...it just seems that it is very buggy & not very user friendly as far as resolving problems goes...Speaking from a "newbie" perspective here, of course!

The more severe issues stem from device drivers. Usually one of three things happen when it comes to driver support. The manufacturer may not provide Linux drivers at all (like Creative, IIRC), in which case the developers start coding their own. Depending on the type of hardware, it can take quite some time to get it stable.

They might provide crappy Linux drivers (ATI is a prime example, and they know it), again, requiring a lot of coding and testing of open source drivers. Or they can provide decent drivers, and make them open source (Intel). Unfortunately, many manufacturers go for the first scenario, but more are moving towards the second. That said, due mostly to open source, driver support is in general rather good IMO.

[MilesAhead]

The more severe issues stem from device drivers.

Yeah, one thing that frustrated me when messing with Linux is somebody in the open source community would do a driver or other support software for the brand of the hardware I had, but not the model. No matter how much you messed with it short of writing your own driver you weren't going to get it to go. So many times you end up keeping a Windows partition just to run a scanner or other peripheral.

Sometimes you can find a distro that's optimized for a brand of PC and it makes things easier. For example there was a 9.1 release of Mandrake that was sort of OEM for HP PCs. I didn't have to tinker at all to get
the standard HP peripherals to work.