Bob Breed wrote in a message to Tom Walker:

 TW> I highly doubt that. I took a fling at KNOPPIX becasue so many were
 TW> Raving about it .
 TW> Well while it has excellent Hardware support it is still NOT ready for
 TW> the Big Time. I also have been played a Sucker for the 5th time and am
 TW> going to Try Mandrake 9.2 also but the word in that while it is FAr
 TW> better then Red Hat it is still not all that good for the "Casual Home
 TW> User.
 TW> I thin kmuch of the Hype about Linux is just Sour Grapes and as they
 TW> say "Misery Loves Company". So they hype it up and Sucker
others in to
 TW> joining giving them soemoen ot Laugh at or somethoing. I really don't
 TW> know. BUt it is really a very poorly designed Operating System for the
 TW> "Average" HOME user.

 BB> I agree. :)  I've tried Knoppix and a older version of Red Hat,
 BB> both suck  big time.

 BB> I believe that Lx has a place 

Lx?

 BB> and that place is for those who want to build a system around the 
 BB> Kernal - a tightly focused thing and you can probably  make a very 
 BB> lean machine that way.

Yep,  been there and done that one.  What other 32-bit OS can fit on a floppy? :-)

 BB> But as far as 'run out of the box' thing forget it!  Mounting and 
 BB> unmounting things is pain in the ass and if Windows had you doing
 BB> that the Lx dudes would be laughing their ass off.

Yeah it is,  but you don't need to if you use mtools.  And I do for
floppies for the most part.  But anything else excepting tape drives gets
plugged into the filesystem,  rather than being treated as a separate
entity.  It's a conceptual thing,  and it has its advantages.  And the
mount command is needed to tell it _where_ in the filesystem you want to
put it.

Personally,  I'd rather have that choice,  rather have the flexibility that
it gives me instead of having to put up with some OS writer's idea of how
it should work.  Got dos on this box,  and what with drives getting bigger
I have a couple of choices -- make the partitions bigger or use more of
them.  Make them bigger and all of a sudden I'm wasting lots of space,  on
the average half an allocation unit _per file_,  use more of them and
whoops!  We're out of drive letters!  And yeah,  the whole cluster size
issue goes away (or at least recedes into the background further) if you go
with the newer FAT setup, but at what cost?  And the whole mess is a flat
structure,  you can't treat drive letters the same way as you can other
stuff,  it's an artificial distinction that from the perspective of a
filesystem only gets in your way.

 BB> Lx is making a move in the business world, that's for sure - but 
 BB> again it fits the above.  Tightly focused machines to do one thing
 BB> well.

That sure doesn't seem to be where m$ wants to take it,  there's neither
tight focus,  doing one thing,  or doing it well.  :-)

In fact,  they seem to want to do it all!

 BB> My only reason to play with it at all was to see if I could do 
 BB> something for my son who runs a small plastics company.  His heart
 BB> and soul are tied to "Peachtree' as it does all his inventory,
 BB> books, mailing labels etc.  No app even close out there in Lx 
 BB> world.

You're looking for _one_ app to do all this stuff?  That's not the right
approach,  no wonder you're not finding it...

 BB> Windows 98SE blows it away across the board. Easy to use, tons of 
 BB> apps,  tons of drivers, and a few warts that you can stay away from
 BB> by using Mozilla firebird as a browser and Eudora as mail client.

Yep.  Tons of bloat,  tons of bugs,  tons of files installed whether you
need them or not,  tons of options in there but not where I'd put 'em, 
tons of features that I'll never use,  tons of BS to come along with it...

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