Another rant

[Tom H]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 7:22 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17 November 2017 at 23:59, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Arch and Gentoo like to promote themselves as not for noobs but it's
>> more of macho posturing than reality. But what does this have to do
>> with maintaining a wiki? Also the Gentoo wiki's far less useful than
>> it used to be. Given that it's more complex than Arch, this doesn't
>> fit into your complex-distribution-means-good-wiki, if that's what you
>> meant with the above.
>
> Archo doesn't even have an installation program.

You mean it doesn't have a gui installation program.

I installed Arch in a VM last night. It has deboostrap-like program.
It also has a chrooting script that mounts all the relevant kernel
filesystems before chrooting. Gentoo doesn't have that kind of
automation but they both have very easy instructions that anyone can
follow. It's not rocket science.


> Both make no particular effort to be easy to install or to configure.

They're more difficult to install but just as easy to configure as
Ubuntu. It's Linux after all.


> Therefore, since you have to hand-construct your own installation from
> a command line, copious documentation is a _necessity_. The projects
> _must_ provide a lot of instructions since their extreme
> customisability, with users rolling their own installation by hand, is
> the entire point of their existence.
>
> Whereas Ubuntu goes as far as it can the other way. It asks as few
> questions as it can. It even tries to work out your timezone and
> localisation automatically. So, far less documentation is needed, as
> the company is trying to make it as easy as possible.
>
> Fedora is more complex. SUSE is more complex than that. Etc. There's a
> continuum.

Fedora's installer's almost as sparse, question-wise, as Ubuntu's but
its interface is moronic.


> Win10 is a work in progress. Even Win8 was, and although it's seldom
> talked about, the relationship between Win8 and Win10 is like that
> between Vista and Win7.
>
> Vista (NT 6.0) == Windows 8.0  (NT 7) -- new UI, significant internal
> reorganisation
> Vista SP 1 == Windows 8.1 -- fixes up a lot of omissions and issues
> with the first release
> Windows 7 (NT 6.1) == Windows 10 -- same core OS, given a facelift.
> Controversial features removed (e.g. Vista's Gadgets sidebar removed;
> Win8's Start Screen removed).

Thanks.


> MS has said Win10 is the last ever release.

OS X envy anyone? LOL