I don't understand what you mean about drag and drop being shaky. I've had no trouble at all with it behaving just like it does in windows in KDE. Yes, the eye candy is certainly available in KDE if you wish, but that doesn't mean it must be used.
>on the flip side, from joe shmoe: will my particular digital camera
>connect to my PC, still?
The kernel is likely to pick it right up as a drive, though a mount point might need to be set. I had no trouble with my camera.
>will tivo desktop run on linux?
I don't have tivo, but I do have a scanner, internal DVD drive, hp laser printer, and an external 80gig hard drive and cd burner running usb2 off PCMCIA. The standard installed kernel and hotplugging picks it all up for me on bootup. I had no trouble with file sharing after I clicked thru a Lisa setup. I'm no system or network admin by a long shot, just know the basics. But I got all my hardware working with little trouble. There are so many apps available for each one. The biggest problem with linux is too much choice.
Over the years I've installed Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, and Debian. I was very disappointed with Fedora Core which seemed nearly as bloated as windows and grindingly slow on this old 700mhz laptop. All these systems have gotten so proprietary in their layouts and configurations, whereas slack is simple old standard unix layout. Slack on this laptop runs like greased lightning compared to FC and SuSe. I particularly like slack's rc.d format for services and its simple package manager. Linuxpackages.com packages alot of apps and what they don't have a simple ./configure + make + make install compilation very rarely fails.
>how about
> my favourite chat client? (GAIM doesn't even do presence right for
> certain protocols).
I've had various IMs working before in linux. Xchat is a nice IRC client.
> how about sync'ing my pocketPC?
I don't have a palmtop and unchecked several palm apps that would have happily installed on setup. Since that's pretty old tech, I'd bet there aren't many bugs left.
> or the cool
> games i bought? (perhaps i have to learn how to use WinE? or run
> Xen!).
I'm not a gamer, but I think that support for some of the fancier video cards is lacking, though I hear the situation is improving.
>redhat has done a great
> job (criticism from the geek gallery, notwithstanding)
Bah humbug. Red Hat has sold out to the corporations and is too good now to be bothered with supporting the community who brought them to success. I wish them well but I am disappointed.
>the linux/gnome/KDE crowd is beginning to prioritize
> usability.
KDE has long had usability built in. Gnome and some of the other window managers can run faster because they are lighter, but it usually takes some work to get them setup with just what you want. KDE's Konqueror has the full usability of Windows Explorer, with drag and drop FTP and cd burning, full right click features, and lan and web browsing all from one window. There is no function I had in windows that I don't have in KDE just as easily.
Eudora was the only thing that kept me on windows and away from linux for so many years. I kept checking linux email apps over the years, but none held a candle to Eudora until a year ago when I found that Kmail finally was as good as Eudora. The next version of kmail was better than Eudora.
>however, i fail to see: a) why they will act faster and produce
>something more consistent than what microsoft already puts out,
> leave alone, what MS will have in the future, b) why users
> (individuals at home, or enterprises user desktops) will switch.
Better security and less vulnerability to viruses, worms, trojans, adware and spyware, same usability or better, windows apps available, more stable, more configurable, no license fee, evading the M$ monopoly... none of that good enough?
>one reason i hear is security. i am yet to be convinced by that
>argument. windows in the enterprise (and at home) is an insecure OS
>primarily because of user laziness/ignorance (but as i remember
> someone in the unix group at bell labs, perhaps pike, used to say:
> unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot! and
> that's true) and IT staff laxity (they are content mopping the
> floor and letting corner office VP click at random on the 1MB
> attachments that they are currently too afraid to block at the
> gateway).
For one, the crackers aren't out to hurt linux or macs. They are out to get M$. And because M$ is so buggy and full of security holes, they are succeeding easily. Did you know that opening a jpeg attachment has the potential to do damage to Win2000 and XP machines? I didn't believe it, but there it was on microsoft.com, where their image viewer can have a buffer overflow that could be abused. So now its not even just self-executing files that can be abused, now even files that should open in a "safe" application can put your machine at risk. If that is the case, any attachment of any file type could conceivably be a risk. So one tries to keep up with the dozens of critical updates and service packs. But even the updates are buggy and can cripple a machine. I was fed up and I was only dealing with one ME PC. I can't imagine how admins trying to keep an entire LAN of PCs intact can have any sanity left. Though I guess that does mean that they do have excellent job security...
--tully