discuss: Ready for review: first five chapters of Windows-to-Linux Guide
Subject:
Re: [discuss] Ready for review: first five chapters of Windows-to-Linux Guide
From:
"Omari Norman" ####@####.####
Date:
4 Jun 2006 16:10:24 -0000
Message-Id: <b4b77f3a0606040910m5977b328n67896e38de2cf0a8@mail.gmail.com>
Hi Alexey,
On 6/4/06, Alexey Eremenko ####@####.#### wrote:
> While FireFox & KolourPaint might be better than MS IE & Paint - Adobe
> Photoshop & MS Office 2003 combo are more powerful than
> Thunderbird,OpenOffice,Gimp and Krita.
> Also DreamWeaver is much more powerful in it's field than NVU/Quanta+
> or a dozen other packages that Linux offers.
>
> Sorry, but this section is complete bullsh*t. Proprietary software is better.
Well, at most what I'll do is temper this and say that equally
powerful choices are available. There are a lot of Linux packages that
whip anything available for Windows. amaroK beats anything like it
that I have seen for Windows (iTunes comes close but has some very
irritating aspects, such as the way it makes itself the default player
whether you want it to or not.) My Windows DVD player was painful to
use, as was my Windows TV viewer--xine-ui and tvtime are far superior.
I struggled for ages to find a decent Windows backup program that I
could automate and ended up paying $35 for something I did not like
much; rdiff-backup for Linux is better than anything I saw for
Windows, and is free. Making image thumbnails in Windows is tedious at
best; in Linux I can automate this with ImageMagick and I get higher
quality thumbnails too. K3B whips every piece of burning garbage that
has ever been bundled with any of my Dells, though yes, for all I know
a $100 package from Nero is better. And trying to administer a website
from Windows is, at least for me, a gigantic pain--Windows doesn't
even come with an ssh client
Certainly some proprietary packages are better, but some free packages
are better too. I'll edit the document to reflect that.
> You totally overlook that on Windows anything (say about 95% of all
> features) can be reached with integrated GUI - while most features
> with Linux can be reached only by command-line - so it's better for
> the users to learn command-line if they wanna work seriously on Linux
> in the long-term.
I'll have to disagree on that one; on countless occasions in Windows I
found myself digging into regedit--and not because I wanted to. Many
MS knowledge base articles tell users to dig into regedit. Certainly
in Linux some command-line use can be necessary, but this is no worse
than regedit. Meanwhile good distros like SUSE have GUI tools to
configure most anything else.
BTW I'll stay away from most CLI issues; other books at TLDP handle
those very well and I'll just link to those, as I often have already.
I figure most Windows users are most comfortable getting started in
the GUIs. I will keep a DOS-vs-Linux equivalent commands section that
Guido wrote earlier.
> But plz give some idea of formats that Linux likes most:
>
> a. Graphics: JPEG, PNG
> b. Multimedia: OGG-Vorbis Audio and OGG-Theora Video
> c. Documents: HTML, OpenDocument, Plain Text
>
> please give recommendation to use those free format when on Linux -
> and provide links to support those formats on Windows too - so for
> dual-boot users - we will recommend Free formats.
Good point; I've always gotten my mp3s to work, but it's more trouble
than getting OGGs to work. The only question is, which is more
trouble: getting MP3 to work, or converting a bunch of MP3s to OGG?
I'll present the choices and let readers decide.
> please tell users that most distros don't support Multimedia codecs
> out-of-the-box like: MP3, DivX, Xvid, Quicktime, Real, Windows Media,
Yep, there'll be a whole section on multimedia codecs.
Thanks for your comments!
Omari
