From: Randall Parker 

So far:

1) I wish I'd chosen KDE during installation. Gnome isn't sophisticated
enough for my needs. I want a tree view directory explorer and the ability
to move the top/bottom bar(s) to the side.

2) Linux Firefox is way slower for me than Windows Firefox. If you have
Firefox go to this link and use the Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- (or View | Text Size)
to resize the fonts:
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/cat_aging_reversal.html
For me that happens almost instantaneously on Windows but takes 12 seconds
on Linux with similar speed hardware. Would a faster graphics car help?
Does my graphics card have a slow driver?

3) Linux Thunderbird is much slower (more than an order of magnitude -
maybe two orders of magnitude) than Windows Thunderbird at fetching
messages from a _Barkto_ news group. I just tried newsgroups.borland.com
and found it fetched messages instantaneously from there. So what's with
the Barkto news server?

4) Sometimes in Linux Thunderbird when I hit Reply the reply window pops up
but without any text for at least 10 to 15 seconds. The controls for
writing in are grayed out. What's it doing? Sometimes it happens
instantaneously. Can't see a pattern to it. But I suspect it is related to
the previous item. It probably talks to the server when you hit Reply.

5) Fonts still are a problem. Part of the problem is that the web is
designed around MS fonts. The default fonts that get used on Linux when MS
fonts aren't found (e.g. Verdana, Arial, Garamond) do not look as good.
Maybe Linux has better fonts and Firefox and other browsers would render
web pages better if they chose different Linux fonts to use?

6) Installs are more difficult than in Windows. You download a tar.gz. Now
what? Unzip it and start looking for stuff. Try to run an install script
and it complains it can't write somewhere. Run as root to install all apps?
How to log on as root at the bash prompt? I've asked and noone has answered
so far. You have to know lots of little Linux lure to do basic stuff.

7) I want to configure Samba and make it run on start-up. I think I have it
on the machine. Do not know what next step to take. Go where to put it in a
start-up script? Or is there a services/daemon manager?

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5