borg said:
I meant directly. Every OS uses some obsure technique to get work done, but hides all that from the user. Thats what I mean.
The fact remains that designers can do a much better job of simplifying Linux. For some reason they just don't want to do it. Maybe its not a priority for them...sadly.
Sadly enough you don't know what you are speaking of.
Linux is the OS that came out with GUI installers. MS is yet to come out with it in Vista AFAIK. Go and see Gentoo 2006.0 and Ubuntu 6.06.
There's GUI for almost everything now in Linux. Just a few things like probably drivers for video cards need to be configured using command line. And that is because these drivers mostly can't be bundled with the distros cos distros are released under GPL, so they can't bundle non-GPL'd stuff.
You need to read on GPL, Open Source philosophy and need to explore the distros properly first to know what is there and what isn't.
Coming to talk of GUI. Yes, I agree GUI is very necessary to entice users who jsut want to get their work done. But, how many softwares will these people really want to install. They will need just the basic softwares which are more or less there. They won't ever need to go in CLI.
I am using Ubuntu as of now so will give you some gist of how much can be done by GUI in here.
1) There's synaptic, GUI for apt-get. And you can enable extra repositories from Synaptic without using CLI.
Open Synaptic => Settings => Repositories => Add => select your desired channels and components.
2) You can see hardware information from Device Manager
3) You can see your hard disks and removable media, mount and unmount it from Disks Manager.
4) Language Support for different languages.
5) Login Window to customise login screen and other login preferences right from GUI. You can add more login screens too.
6) Networking lets you configure your network.
7) Network tools give you some nice tools like ping, which can only be done in windows using CLI, traceroute, portscan, finger, whois lookup,netstat. And casual users are never going to even see that.
8 ) Priniting lets you confiure your printer
9) Services lets you configure system services, which should be on/off.
10) Shared Folders enable you to setup which folders to be shared and which not.
11) System Log lets you see all the logs on your system.
12) System Monitor lets you know all the programs running, how much resources they're consuming, bandwidth in use, processor usage, RAM and swap usage, mounted devices and space used/left in them.
13) Time and Date lets you update/correct time and date.
14) Update Manager checks for and notifies of all updates.
15) Users and groups let you add/remove/manage all the users and user groups on your system.
All these come out of the box. You can add even more GUI utilities out as you like. And I am sure casual users or newbies won't need much more than that.
GCC isn't needed for debain with more than 15,000 softwares in the portage which isn't needed to be compiled.
Drivers don't work because manufacturers don't give driver support. In the other thread we are trying to install a reverse engineered driver for winmodem. Cause the fellow has exotic hardware. He uses netodragon internal modem, which uses motorola chipset and motorola has pulled out of making chips for internal modems since 2001. So, he has to use something that doesn't come from the manufacturer. So, it will be difficult to work with. In fact the driver he uses in windows too is for windows 2000. Cos the driver for windows XP wasn't ever made. You can't blame linux for that now.
And dependancy problem arises in linux cos linux is all about choices. It gives you multiple ways of choosing your favourite components. All the components can never be given by one distro that too by mailing it to your doorstep free of cost. Big distros like SUSe and Debain try to cover all possible softwares. But, lastly it's upon developers to choose the components of their choice. So, they may include something that favours them but it won't be present in all the distros. Go and check debian. They provide 14 CD's with almost everything coming out of the box. But, that won't be a feasible download. So, they have to compromise on what to include and what not to fit in a CD or two.
As GNUrag said are you better than the developers in such big company? If you were you wouldn't be wasting time with petty people like us, discussing topics which are a waste of everyone's time.
Those left are not novice users but fools like you. Because linux doesn't need fools who waste everyone's productive time to explain what linux can and cannot do without even bothering to give a proper look. If you hate linux so much. Stay off it. No one has forced you to use it.
