Not a bash, just the facts

[Chanchao]

On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 18:45 -0600, Scott wrote:

> I wiped out my Ubuntu partion
> today, and loaded SuSE.  It works out of the box, so to say, and runs
> DVD's, has everything you want, and absolutely NO crazy setup stuff,
> or convaluted you can install this, but, type of things.  If you want
> it, it works.  

I'm sure a lot of reasonable people will come up with perfectly
reasonable reasons revolving around legalities and licensing issues, but
taking back a step and seeing what a hassle it is to play music or use
all functions in Office (JRE something) or on just about any website
(Flash), I have to fully agree.

* Of course though, being a quick & easy & very free one-CD installation
means that it doesn't come with 3 kitchen sinks stacked on top of each
other but rather just one, with the option to install the rest. * 

Getting back to my pet peeve of restricted formats and how well hidden
they are and how their hiding place seems to change from one version to
the next:  

Either Ubuntu has to be distributed from somewhere where it's legal to
enable common formats, or there needs to be one very friendly fuzzy
cutesy designed icon in the middle of the desktop, so fuzzy-cutesy in
fact that it BEGS to be clicked, that displays the legal blurb in a very
small text pane that's about 3 lines high and another very 'Click me,
click me oh please click me!' button below it that will install all that
stuff in one easy go.  

Better yet, no huge legal blurb but condense it to: "If you don't live
in Gestapoland and/or like freedom and the pursuit of happiness, click
this button to install the stuff needed to do so."

I'm not kidding, the alternative being someone starting "Frubuntu", (for
Freedom), with all that stuff pre-installed.  :)   (I bet that name made
your toes cramp into a curl.)

Cheers,
CC