Re: Good points of non-Linux OS's? (fwd)

["Erik Walthinsen (Omega)" <omega@sequent.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 12:11:41 -0700
From: Gerrit Huizenga <gerrit@eng2.sequent.com>
To: "Erik Walthinsen (Omega)" <omega@eng2.sequent.com>
Subject: Re: Good points of non-Linux OS's? 


Okay, I know some of these exist but they have generally had rough
edges, requiring a lot more configuration work than I would have hoped:

Easy install on laptops, including more complete support in the
distribution for PCMCIA devices.  My experience, only one of my 7 or 8
PCMCIA devices was supported in the redhat distribution.  I happened to
not have a CDROM on my machine and my SCSI PCMCIA card wasn't recognized,
my ethernet card was a multifunction card that had drivers around but not
in the distribution, my ethernet PCMCIA card wasn't in the distribution,
my CD-ROM direct connect driver wasn't in the distribution, etc.  Scratch
installation was therefore very painful.  I still haven't gotten around
to trying an install on another partition with Windows 95 running.

Better integrated PalmPilot support.  It's out there, just not integrated.

Generally better integrated packages.  For instance, to find scanner
and imaging software I had to find something like 13 image management
products, some in redhat packages, some in source, some in drop in binary,
find a few scanner packages, evaluate until I found one that worked for me,
configure each package by hand, and after two weeks of playing around have
a reasonable scanning system.  All the products are out there but getting
them working on my machine took much longer than it did when I made my
laptop into a scanning machine by buying a scanner and installing the
accompanying disk.  Other examples would possibly include a full audio
package, a full PGP package set, a Web developer's kit, etc.  All the
pieces exist, and even the packages might exist if you look under the
right rock, I had to turn over a lot of rocks...

PNP support would be good.

Simpler configuration or better default configuration for things like
IP masquarading, sendmail config, more complex IP configs.  Some vendors
do better at these than others, Linux seems to be only average here.

More complete DOS/Windows emulation.  There are a lot of products that
won't show up on linux for a long time - being able to run off-the-shelf
versions of packaged products makes life cool.

I probably have more but I haven't tried to extend my machine lately.  :)

gerrit

> <asbestos>
> Can anyone think of things where Windoze or other OS's are better than Linux?
> </asbestos>
> 
> We're (seul-research - http://www.seul.org/) working on building an
> end-user survey, to try to determine what users really want from their
> computers in general, and Linux in specific.  Having a list of places
> where Linux can be improved is necessary to build a useful survey.
> 
> (snip from IRC)
> <arma> pnp support, clean install/uninstall shields, vendor support,
> <arma> consistent user interface. what else?
> 
> Anyone have any other specific ideas?
> 
> TIA,
>    Omega
> 
>         Erik Walthinsen - Programmer, webmaster, 3D artist, etc.   __
>   __                                                              / /\
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