osOpinion: The Good, The Bad, and the Downright Ugly

[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]

“Linux is the darling of the Internet and wider computing
industry at the moment, with everyone from IBM to Corel
jumping on the bandwagon, and companies such as RedHat and VA Linux
making big splashes with IPOs (Initial Public Offering, basically
when their stock becomes available on the public stock market).
Take away the hype, and what’s the real state of
things?…“

“RedHat Linux, like Windows, strews files and programs
everywhere, seemingly at random thru out the filesystem. I’ve heard
that minimalist distributions such as Debian address this problem,
and have seen better results with OpenBSD, but RedHat is the most
common commercial distribution, and the most commonly used by
newbies….”

“Documentation in the Linux world is atrocious. It’s not a
simple case of RTFM (Read-The-Flaming-Manual), but tracking down
sometimes half-a-dozen man (short for manual) pages full of
incredibly terse, obtuse, programmer-speak (and which often say
things like “This man page is no longer maintained, check the info
pages instead”). I understand maybe three-quarters of what’s said
(on a good day), but try sitting a newbie down to read thru them,
and you’ll hear the exclamations flying….”

Complete Story