[thelist] Mac advice?

Jay Turley jayturley at gmail.com
Tue Mar 30 19:06:11 CDT 2010


On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-03-30 at 14:07 -0700, Jay Turley wrote:
>> I then installed Ubuntu and used that as my primary OS for almost a
>> year. Now, while Ubuntu (among others) has brought desktop Linux to a
>> point where it's reasonably similar to windows in usability, it is
>> still a tool for power users; so much needs to be handled through the
>> command line.
>
> I'm using Ubuntu GNU/Linux and I rarely need to use the command line
> unless I really want to. I would feel a lot more comfortable giving an
> average computer user a PC with Ubuntu on it versus, say, Debian.
>
> What, exactly, did you find you needed to use the command line for?


First of all, I want to say that I have set up Ubuntu desktops for
several friends, and after they are set up, they NEVER have to touch
the command line, so it works great for them, as you point out.

But for me, there were lots of apt-gets to find things that didn't
appear in the Ubuntu or 3rd-party repostories, doing SVN from the
command line, obtaining codecs.

I think - looking back on it - much of the stuff I did from the
command line could have been done through a windowed interface, only
it was much easier  for me to google the command line instructions
than to try to hunt down how to do it through the UI.

One problem area on my Dell Inspiron and my friend's eMachine was
sound issues, and the only way I found to fix them was command line.
But don't ask me how, because I forgot as soon as I fixed it.

But when I speak of command-line stuff, I am also talking about web
dev stuff, starting and stopping servers, svn, etc - not just setting
up the distro.

So yea, I agree with you it's a friendly distro. My daughter used it
on her netbooks with no problem. But it's not up to Mac speed at all.

J


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