[tlug] Speaking of computer usage ....

["SL Baur" <steve@example.com>]

Just about *everyone* is missing the point why Linux rocks.  Free as
in beer?  Who cares?  I'd rather buy a CD/DVD of the distro or pay to
have it as a preinstall.  Free as in liberty?  I've posted about that
separately - we have a system that will, never, ever be end-of-life'd
on us.  Heh, unlike the MIcrosoft Windows XP guys ...  I've never much
given Microsoft any consideration at all, because they've always
delivered toy operating systems.  But efficiency in using computer
resources ...?

[I miss giving presentations at the TLUG technical meetings.  I hope
circumstances are such that the next time I'm in Japan it coincides
with one of your meetings]

I posted the following true story in response to a comment on slashdot:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=470200&cid=22595444

> Well, in my experience novices tend to have a grand total of one
> program open at once, and if you try to leave a second one open
> they will close it, sometimes even when you have carefully minimized
> it. Many developers are this way as well -- wanting to squeeze an
> extra 50msec out of that recompile. Oh, and that one program is
> almost for sure 99% most likely you-can-bet maximized.
> That's probably the case with novices. I'm surprised that
> developers would do something similar.

I'm a developer and I currently have 28 open windows on my
desktop in 8 virtual desktops. 10 of them are Eterms, some of
which have ssh sessions to other machines on the local net. I have
two Firefox windows (for viewing certain internal corporate webpages)
one instance local and one running on another machine. One copy of
Opera with 3 windows of its own (that I'm posting from now), one
copy of FSF Emacs running on another machine in the network,
8 XEmacs windows, 5 of which are unique instances, 1 Konsole, 1
plain vanilla xterm, and 1 copy of Evolution (for reading corporate
email). If I left something out, well my desktop is kind of um, cluttered.

I logged in 45 days ago, the system has an uptime of 83 days (I
don't have a UPS in my cube), I have only 1GB of memory and I'm
slightly over 1GB into swap. Everything runs with acceptable
performance except the Firefox running over the network on a
Solaris workstation. Oh and this all with the older, piggier and slower
KDE 3 *and* this is an "old" HP workstation that isn't likely to be
"Vista Capable".

Do you see how someone like me just isn't interested in Vista or
indeed any version of Microsoft Windows? I've been able to work
like this on Linux since the stable 2.0 kernel was released 12 years
ago and then I had a bit less core memory. I've been working with lots
of windows open on Unix for over 20 years (scaling up the number of
windows as core memory has increased).

By the way, the environment you describe: one application at a time
full-screened with maybe another 1 or 2 in the background is exactly
how the AT&T Unix PC worked ... 25 years ago. Actually, it was a
Microsoft Vista of its own. By default it shipped with a noisy slow hard
drive and a ridiculous amount of ram, either 256k or 512k. It wasn't
until you could buy larger, faster drives and expand the memory up
to 4MB (I ended up 3.5MB) near the end of its life that it became a
wonderful machine.