[OT] Re: Is Ubuntu safe to try

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 09:03:00AM -0400, Larry Grover wrote:
> (1) Set up printing to use a CUPS printer on a linux box.  This was 
> absolutely impossible for me to accomplish under OS X.  I finally got 
> it working by copying the config files over to OS X from a linux 
> (Ubuntu) system.  Setting up Ubuntu to use the CUPS printer was a 
> breeze, by comparison.

Interesting. I've always had better luck getting CUPS
printing to work under OS X. It mostly "just works," though
I suppose I'm mostly trying to print to printers that are on
other OS X machines.

This point and your point (2) bring up a big advantage that
Linux has: it's not trying to lock anyone in. Windows and OS
X want to make it hard for you to do anything on another
platform, because they obviously want to keep you on theirs.

> (2) Burn a data CD I can easily read on a linux system.  OS X defaults 
> to burning data CDs with an HFS+ file system.  While it's not 
> impossible to burn an ISO9660 data CD, it's not obvious how to do it, 
> and it cost me several coasters before I figured out how.
> 
> (3) Reliably connect to a linux NFS share.

Hm. I've had no trouble with (3). What sort of difficulties
do you encounter? Quite often you need to configure the
Linux side of the NFS share to allow connections from
unprivileged ports. Other than that, NFS under OS X has
never been more or less difficult for me than NFS under
Linux.

> (4) Adjust mouse tracking (independently adjust speed and acceration) 
> so that the GUI is usable.  I've found this impossible to do on OS X 
> without a 3rd party app (extra $$).  In contract, for every linux 
> system I've ever sat in front of, the default behavior of the mouse in 
> X has always been usable.

I've never tried to do this under OS X, oddly (it is odd,
because I configure these right away under Linux and
Windows). I'll check with my OS X-head friends and see if
they have any OS X-native ways of doing it.

> (6) Customize the GUI so that the window control widgets (maximize, 
> minimize, close buttons) are on the same side of the window as the 
> scroll bar:  where they belong.  As far as I know, this is impossible 
> to do in OS X.

Maybe so, but would you agree that this isn't something that
most users will be concerned about? Granted, I asked you for
difficulties that you yourself had, and I'm glad you
answered so thoroughly. But I'm mostly looking out here for
features that new users will care about -- since they're
really the market that distros like Ubuntu are focused on.

Thanks for chiming in with your OS X woes.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20050706/c33e18f5/attachment.sig>