> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of > Tim > Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 1:03 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: My hard-to-kill OpenBSD >
<snip> > > I've noticed that to a lot of techies have this attitude: > > if it isn't GUI, it's not worth knowing. > > I said GUI instead of Windows because now that you can do a lot of > things with a GUI on Linux, even the Linux people are starting to > have this attitude, especially newbies. It's even frustrating to > teach a newbie the advantages of vi. Never mind that I would much > rather talk a computer-illiterate person over the phone on how to > change a configuration file with vi than any other GUI text editor. > > When I first started toying with OpenBSD, I installed it on an old > system laying around. Then I got bored and tried to install > Debian, Red Hat, NetBSD, and FreeBSD. All of them could not get > past the installation routines. So I put OpenBSD back on. This > really isn't a fair story because it was so long ago and I don't > remember all the details. But I do remember the impression OpenBSD > had on me because of this. > It's not only the users. It's the disto makers, as well. If you've seen any current distros of Linux, almost all of them are standardizing on GUI installs, and GUI management. In fact, they've gotten to the point where it's getting much harder to manage them through the command-line, because of the insane configuration files that redhat, suse, and the others are using now. What's worse is that since new sysadmins are not learning the command-line anymore, they're going to be in a LOT of trouble if the GUI is broken (i.e., xorg.conf is misconfigured). While using a GUI can be useful, having easy, complete control from a command-prompt is vital. My OpenBSD install has no X installed, and is fully managed via ssh or console. That's the way UNIX was meant to be managed. -- Jordan Klein ~ Beware of dragons [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ for you are crunchy Solaris / OpenBSD / Linux Admin ~ and go well with ketchup
