Life is Too Short...

N.B. None of this really applies anymore.. I have a kicking Mandrake 9.1 install. KDE 3 won me over.

... for me to bother with linux.

So I'm a little mad, here's why. (Mandrake Linux 8.2 - it's a little old, but so is my computer). Notice please that this is not a screed against open source.

Installation with the Gnome environment goes okay, X defaults to a 60hz refresh rate. No big deal until I try to change it because it's giving me a headache. I run Xconfigurator, it crashes with a segmentation fault because it couldn't find an environmental variable saying I want the program to run in english. So I try to change the variable and 'LANG' refuses to be changed and Xconfigurator refuses to run. No problem, I'll just modify the X setup manually. Except that nowhere in the Mandrake menus can I find a text editor. It installed every conceivable network utility I'll never need and leaves me with VIM as my only text editor. If you ever have the opportunity to run VIM with little or no prior knowledge of how it works, try it and maybe you'll start to understand the roots of my fury. Since it was designed to be used without a mouse, you have to use letters to access commands. The problem arises from the fact you usually want to use those letters to do other things, like type words. "What about 'Nautilus'?" You might ask. It's Gnome's all-in-one explorer and pretty good-looking, except that it was constantly in a state of waiting or crashing from simply trying to browse through files. I go back to VIM, instantly creating a bad XF86Config that won't start, and I can't undo to get back into Gnome.

So I run xf86config and I have no idea what my monitor's hsync and vsync rates are, and the program warns me I could hurt my monitor if they're entered incorrectly. So I have to hunt around the web on another computer because naturally the computer didn't ship with that information. Dell doesn't post that info for just anyone, so I have to hunt down a Japanese site that has them. I carefully tell it much more than it needs to know to change my refresh rate and write XF86Config just fine. Except that the configuration is totally invalid and X chokes when I try to start it (no matter how many syntax errors I foolishly try to fix).

Okay, so I can deal with 60hz for the time being, so I load that backup X configuration than the one I started with. I try fixing it, but by this point VIM is giving me a headache too because it runs in a little console window. I try to change the font and color in the console window to something reasonable like black text on a white background and VIM starts spitting out garbage at me. Time to take a break...

How about playing some MP3s sitting on my other (Windows..) drive. Are they mounted? Phhbt. Can I maybe find a utility with an easy-to-use GUI that lets me mount stuff? Not that I can find in Mandrake, maybe I can start looking for some help files. The Gnome manual page comes up with the 'user manual' section broken and all that's left is a listing of commands, no description of what any of them do. I try to play with some of the toys that come with the Mandrake distro and they immediately fail to start. I try just browsing around with Nautilus but it constantly displays every directory with large icons though I repeatedly set 'View as List'.

Web browsing? The strangest thing I've ever seen.. I use Mozilla on windows and love it, but the version that came with the distro for some odd reason assumed that every page listed in any search engine was hosted on that search engine's server. I would search for my homepage, click on the link, and get an error message when trying to reach the link 'http://www.google.com/lameduckie'. Happened on AllTheWeb.com, too. I still have no idea what to make of it. So I try GAIM, and even though I haven't seen anyone on my buddy list in days it logs in and crashes with yet another segmentation fault. I have to restart.

But it's not over yet.. I decide I've had enough of Mandrake, so I try installing 'CollegeLinux' over it. I hope that GRUB will be smart enough to just boot it since it's in the same partition as Mandrake and if not, surely there's a way of fixing that. That would be too easy. I reboot and am greeted with nothing but 'GRUB GRUB GRUB' filling my screen. CollegeLinux has killed it, failing to mention that it was installing its own bootloader. I have to boot from my trusty old win98 boot floppy; mercifully, fdisk /mbr still works.

I don't think it's unreasonable to be ignorant of your monitor's horizontal sync and vertical refresh rates, nor to want your CDs to be accessible when you put them in rather than having to mount and unmount them. How about special documentation for windows users of all the linux equivalents of windows features such as SETTING YOUR REFRESH RATE WITHOUT A DEGREE IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING. (Why does XF86Config generate individual modelines if they're obsolete? What am I saying? It didn't generate anything that works to begin with.) Dear God in heaven above, I'm almost done with a BS in Computer Science and have been around computers for 15 years - is something wrong here or is it just me?