What is "low spec" for you?

[Karlheinz Noise]

>What I
> have the biggest problem with is the classic newbie who comes along and
> starts bitching about bad performance on the PII-400 he dug out of the closet
> to try Linux on, to see if it was worth the effort before he tries anything
> on his real computer that's way better than mine.
>
> I've long since been at the point where I lost all sympathy for people like
> that, and I don't even bother to encourage them further anymore.

So I've noticed.

I was one of those newbies, if you might recall. I got checksum errors when I tried to even install US on my old Celeron 400, asked why, and nobody gave me any help other than "Don't bother, get a better machine."

Despite the fact that there is no mention whatsoever on the US site about system requirements. None. I just checked again, just now, and if anyone can tell me where that is mentioned, I'd like to hear it.

So, I tried installing US on my current working machine... which resulted in a reformatted hard drive, lost data, the need to completely re-install Windows (GRUB overwrote the MBR), etc etc etc. Essentially I lost a week of computer time, which is EXACTLY what I was trying to avoid by doing a "dry run" on an older machine.

I didn't even bother asking for help here, since y'all were so unhelpful in general. I did eventually get help - from someone on a forum about industrial music.

I should probably point something out to the users of this list: If you are doing a distro for artists, then the OS you are really competing with is not Windows, it's Macintosh. The reason most "artistic" people go with Mac's over PC's is that they work as promised right out of the box. No tweaking, no having to set up soundcards or any of that nonsense; just plug and go. (At least in theory...)

This, in my opinion, should be the goal of any OS geared towards musicians in general: it should be totally invisible. That also means that you should encourage newbies - because most musicians are, and always will be, computer newbies. They SHOULD be - their "job" is not to run a computer, but to play an instrument.

By the way: I still, to this day, use my 400MHz machine for mastering, since it can run WaveLab with one instance of Ozone, and that's really all I need.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm about as pissed off at the above attitude as you are at newbies like me.

Off now to try 64 Studio,

-Karlheinz
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