OFB Community Mailing Lists

[Ed Hurst]

Over the past year, I tested several distros, played some more with  
FreeBSD, and with Syllable and Haiku. Most of the time, I was confined to  
testing them on my old Inspiron 4100 laptop. Most of the time, I had  
trouble.

Aside from the usual bugs and gotchas we must realistically expect from  
something so large as a Linux distribution, there were plenty of things  
bothering me which weren't actually bugs. I still consider the X server a  
major boondoggle for the desktop. We get lots of pretty stuff, and drivers  
are pretty good these days, but I still believe we can do better. I'm  
convinced Haiku has a much better framework. With equivalent support, it  
could easily outshine X.org in graphics. Even Syllable, currently relying  
entirely on the framebuffer, does quite nice. So I ran the most recent,  
but old stable distro on my laptop: CentOS. It worked, but there were  
plenty of accommodations I made to the lower power of the machine against  
the ever-swelling power demands of every distro I tried.

In the future, I will probably shift the laptop to Haiku, once wifi and  
ACPI come up to standard. If that doesn't work out, I'll probably use  
Syllable, simply because it is designed to build almost everything Open  
Source without much tweaking, via POSIX compliance. That's not to say I'm  
through with Linux.

I was praying for a desktop system because of how critical a computer is  
to the research and writing I do. Sensing this was God's time to get  
something solid, I checked with a couple of previous donors and found at  
least one willing to help with the initial costs, to be repaid on terms I  
could afford. I figured I could just build something, and was getting help  
deciding how to proceed down that path. Yeah, I drooled over a bundled  
Intel board with quad core CPU. I wanted something with enough zip for the  
next few years to carry the load of things I typically do. Running  
Windows, as you might expect, was out of the question, for the simple  
reason it can't work the way I do.

In my research, I checked the prices of full systems to give me  
perspective. With a friend one day, we spotted a "last one" system on sale  
at the local Sam's Club. It was a Dell Inspiron 545MT, with an extravagant  
23" LCD monitor. I admit I lusted, since I've gotten so tired of CRTs with  
my aging eyes. The laptop display was a great deal more comfortable, even  
with such a tiny screen. The price of this thing was just over $600, quite  
a reduction from the original retail of $800+ (at least in Central  
Oklahoma). To make a long story short, he decided to use his Sam's blue  
card to get it for me, and allow me to pay him directly as I could.  
Further, he generously ate some of the price. God is good!

So I've got this thing: Intel Dual Core 2.7Ghz, an embarrassingly huge 6GB  
of RAM, a half-TB hard drive, Intel graphics (which I have come to love),  
but the disgusting Vista Home Premium. I would have preferred SUSE all  
along, but have spent lots of time with CentOS since getting the laptop.  
Currently supported versions of SUSE don't work well on it. But for this  
beast, I tried openSUSE 11.1 first. I suppose to some degree I voided the  
warranty, but I removed all traces of Windows.

The point of all this is: SUSE 11 has not been good to me, at least on the  
hardware I had before (including a couple of desktops). I braced myself  
for dealing with it, but was surprised to find almost nothing bothered me.  
Was the whole issue throwing massive hardware at it to make it work? I  
suppose that's what we have come to expect these days. It's running pretty  
fast, and all the hardware was detected, except for the monitor's native  
resolution (1920x1080). I'm not convinced Linux as a whole couldn't do  
better in terms of supporting older hardware, but I suppose that's not  
really considered important. Yes, some distros do emphasize the older  
stuff, but at the cost of limiting the very sort of work I do. (No, I'm  
not eliciting a long discussion about your favorite distro and how to fix  
this or that.) I'm just one user out of millions, and of no significance  
to the community at large.

Still, when folks I know do eventually ask about Linux, I have to steer  
them away unless their hardware is relatively powerful, and not too cheap.  
That's because none of the people I've met so far would tolerate the way  
lighter distros work. The exception is the small business setting, for  
which it should be obvious why RedHat clones keep gaining traction. It  
fits the business norms better than anything else. Chances are, if I keep  
this rig long enough, I'll have to migrate back to CentOS 6 or 7 (whatever  
comes by then), because I have no doubt SUSE will run off and bloat my  
hardware out of the game. I like SUSE, but not everything about it makes  
me smile.

It's a good thing computers are only the most important tool I have, not  
the mission itself. :-)

-- 
Ed Hurst
------------
Associate Editor, Open for Business: http://ofb.biz/
Applied Bible - http://soulkiln.org/
Kiln of the Soul - http://soulkiln.blogspot.com/