[rescue] SGI Indigo2 & IRIX 6.5

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 1 Dec 2008, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> followed by a quick and entirely ungrounded stab at printing systems on
> Linux (you implied there is no single printing system for Linux that
> Just Works with everything on the system; just off the top of my head,
> both lprng and CUPS meet the criterion).

Printing systems were just an example.  Go through the package list for
most any distribution and look at all the competing packages.  Software
that does exactly the same thing, only differently: printing systems,
MTAs, web servers, database servers, desktop environments, etc.  Any one
of them is supported well by part of other packages included with the rest
of the system and mostly ignored by the rest.

At least when Microsoft does this, they tend to support everything equally
poorly (the many different database-access APIs come to mind).

Linux distributions, on the other hand, tend to be just that: a bunch of
programs distributed on the same medium with little care in shaping the
entirety of the system into a single product.

> but diluted your message by bashing Linux for the cryptic component
> names often adopted by Red Hat (the Microsoft of open source) and GNOME,

You wondered what one would ever use online help for.  I gave you an
example (ie: I know what I want to do, but I have no idea what tool does
that job).  These are the sort of things that a normal user would also use
online help for.

To put it another way: if anyone on this list (even dumb Mac users like
me) can't figure out how to burn a CD, chances are that most end-users
won't be able to figure it out, either.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke < "There is great satisfaction in building good tools
Elgin, TX          > for other people to use."
USA               <                                     --Freeman Dyson