Congratulations on your success. I'm glad it was nothing like my first
experiences trying to install linux four years ago (tried to do Slackware,
but one of the seven installation floppies I made was corrupted, so I
decided to install Redhat 4.0 instead because its installation required
fewer floppies. heh.)
If you're new to Linux and X (and I assume you're using Corel's customized
KDE), maybe you'd be willing to post your experience learning the interface:
what you thought was good, intuitive, or easy, and what you thought was bad,
nonsensical, annoying, or impossible. Desktop interfaces seem to be
progressing rapidly on Linux, and that would be interesting feedback.
I'm not sure who thinks looking like Windows is a necessarily bad idea.
Change just for the sake of being different isn't a good idea, but there are
a lot of things which could be better about current interfaces. For
example, on a Mac, icons appear down the right edge of the desktop and the
taskbar thingie is on the top. When Windows95 came out, they put the icons
on the left side and the taskbar on the bottom. Why? To me, having new
icons appear on the right side of the desktop makes more sense, since new
windows often show up in the upper-left corner of the screen, covering the
desktop icons.
Anyway, I think Microsoft gets too much credit for its user interface. I
remember thinking, when Windows 95 came out, that it looked like a ripoff of
the OS/2 Workplace Shell. If you closely, a lot of the widgets in Windows
are clearly stolen from NextStep (too bad none of NextStep's classy "look"
and well-thought-out "feel" rubbed off on Windows). Windows was hardly the
first system with a taskbar or grey "3d" widgets. While the program list
and systray in KDE appear to have come from Windows, the taskbars of KDE and
GNOME seem more like evolved versions of the taskbar found in CDE (the Open
Group's Motif-based Common Desktop Environment, the standard on commercial
Unix, except for Irix, which has the interface formerly known as the Indigo
Magic Desktop). And I never liked that instead of a Trash Can, Windows has
a politically-correct "Recycle Bin."
I hope you'll tell us what you think about your user experience in X.
Good luck with Linux,
Chad
On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Stu wrote:
> Although it's vaguely been mentioned on here, I have to say something
> about Corel's distribution: it's really something special.
>
> I have a Dell 400 with a mix of hardware on and off the supported list
> (The NIC, monitor and sound card have been problems before). I finally
> decided to reformat my drive and start over, and downloaded the Corel iso.
> It boots up, asks me where I want to place it (though I took the time to
> use its pretty neat advanced partitioning tool), asked me whether I wanted
> a desktop, desktop plus (development), server, or custom package (chose
> server). It reformatted my harddrive, installed packages, rebooted. After
> entering a password, I found myself at a desktop. I changed the
> resolution, launched a terminal, and typed in telnet, and it worked.
>
> That's literally it. I haven't told it jack about my computer, and my
> computer isn't exactly the most plug and play friendly. Although I'm sure
> I'll find some idiosyncracies later on, I think it's very important to
> emphasize how nice their installation is (completely graphical as well).
>
> Yes, it does look a lot like Windows, but I don't understand why that's a
> problem. The problems with Windows are mainly that it's a) not free/run by
> Microsoft, and b) that it's less stable than a toddler on crack.
>
> The problem is not its UI. It does have some annoying idiosyncracies and
> flaws like any system, but it's also a well-known interface that virtually
> all computer users are familiar with and can use easily, almost
> transparently. If borrowing an transparent and familiar user-interface is
> something Corel should be ashamed of, this sounds like a very weird
> position to me.
>
> In any case, I'll probably be writing into this list a bit more
> frequently, seeing how I am a complete linux newbie, but just wanted to
> comment on how easy this process has been.
>
> stu / james.stuart@yale.edu / MC 02
> you can see a million miles from here
> but you can't get very far -- AD
> www.despair.com /\ 203.436.3209
>
>
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