LinuxNewbie.org: Misadventures of a Linux Newbie from the Mac World

[ Thanks to Sensei for this link.
]

“So you’re like me: a Mac user, maybe a pretty adept one,
but not a programmer, network operator, or other high level geek,
and you’re curious about Linux. Here are a few things I wish
someone had told me before I installed Linux on my iMac about a
month ago.”

“First, be prepared to feel a lot like those washed-up Hollywood
actors in the movie-spoof Galaxy Quest, who are mistaken for real
space heroes and put in command of a real Starship. When you first
enter the world of Linux, you’re in the same position as those
actors: you’re suddenly in command of this complicated,
technological wonder, expected to know what you’re doing, but
you’re basically clueless, and really lucky whenever anything works
at all.”

“There are lots of daunting Linux peculiarities that I could
talk about, but for me the biggest and most revealing shocker was
the process of mounting disks. If you’re a Mac user, you put a disk
— a standard disk, a zip, a CD-ROM, whatever — in its slot, a
picture of your disk appears on your desktop, and you’re ready to
click and drag your files around. In Linux, get this… But the
most astonishing thing of all about this is that Linux folks seem
to think all this effort is perfectly normal. The manuals,
discussion lists, and online help files are not prefaced by a
message: “Getting files off your disks is horribly complicated and
may be impossible!” or “Warning to beginners! Doing routine tasks
that take you seconds on your Mac could well take you an hour or
more the first time you do them in Linux!”

Complete
Story