[Sybren Stuvel] Tim Golden enlightened us with: > > Well, I'm with you. I'm sure a lot of people will chime in to point > > out just how flexible and useful and productive Linux is as a > > workstation, but every time I try to use it -- and I make an honest > > effort -- I end up back in Windows
> I'm curious, what do you mean with "it" in the part "every time I try > to use it"? Fair question. I have, over the years, installed and used Gentoo, Vector, RH, Ubuntu Breezy (my current choice) and various other flavours and distros. When I "use it" I mean typically that I use whatever desktop-type thing presents itself to me -- Gnome or XFCE or Fluxbox, say -- one or more editors (I tend to try things out to see if they suit), and one or more command shells. Aside from using Firefox & Thunderbird I'm usually only doing small-scale development things under Linux: perhaps reworking Python code for my web sites which are hosted on Cornerhost's Linux servers, or playing around with up-and-coming tools for Python, a (very) few of which only work easily -- or at all -- under Linux. > There are different distributions of Linux, and putting them all on > one big pile is like saying "I've tried Windows, and I really don't > like it's user interface" and referring to the interface of Windows > 3.1. Not quite fair. Not only would I avoid saying something with a redundant apostrophe ;) but the Windows user interface, at least for my purposes, didn't change such a huge amount between Win9x and Win2K, and if you turn off the bells and whistles in XP (which I do!) isn't so terribly different there. Which, I imagine, is by design. People like familiarity. Linux distros (and the appearance they choose) seem to vary far more widely than versions of Windows. As it happens, (and I suspect I'll have to don my flameproof suit here), I prefer the Windows command line to bash/readline for day-to-day use, including in Python. Why? Because it does what I can't for the life of me get readline to do: you can type the first few letters of a previously-entered command and press F8. This brings up (going backwards with further presses) the last command which starts like that. And *then* you can just down-arrow to retrieve the commands which followed it. If someone can tell me how to do this with bash/readline I will be indebted to them and it will increase my chances of switching to Linux a bit! (Although not at work where I have no choice!) It's obvious that everyone has a different way of working, and that I'm more comfortable in Windows because all sorts of small familiarities I can hardly articulate: the way the focus works; the shortcuts I've developed; the ability to drag files over things and have them respond. I'm very happy with many things in Linux, and I do use it from time to time, but it's never quite been enough to pull me away from Windows. Of course, I'm lucky enough to have a legal version of Windows to use; if someone wants to avoid shelling out then of course Linux is even more attractive. TJG ________________________________________________________________________ This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is powered by MessageLabs. For more information on a proactive anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit: http://www.star.net.uk ________________________________________________________________________ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
