Re: [tlug] Japan Times Linux Article

["Martin Arballo" <martin@example.com>]

Thank you Jim, sorry Ryan, I did it again!!!

Personally, I like the kitchen (: only if I don't have to eat a hard drive or to chew a CD-ROM, that produce me a binary indigestion :).
I will search in the internet, may be I can find that somebody had same problem before and published a list like this,
Thank you ,
Martin (:-)

I suspect that if you made it through windows, you'll become proficient in using Linux even quicker - that might sound like a snide comment, 
but I do believe it.

To me, the difference between Linux and Windows is like the difference between a restaurant and a party at someone's house.  
If you'd prefer to hang out in the kitchen at a party, watching, helping, tasting, interfering and generally having a good time, 
Linux may be for you.  
If, on the other hand, you like to be seated in a restaurant and have things brought in a supposedly finished state, 
you might want to stick with windows.
There's nothing wrong with either option, as long as you know what the deal is:
You can't expect to hang in the kitchen at a restaurant and you can't expect to get waited on hand-and-foot at a party with friends.
It all depends on what you're in the mood for...

You do raise an interesting point about compatible software though - good idea.  It would be nice to have a list like:  
 "If you use XXX in Windows, try ZZZ in linux (from ZZZ.sourceforge.net)"  

(There probably *is* such a list somewhere, I just don't know of one...)

Ideally it would have some kind of voting to keep it current and also allow for unresolvable conflicts such as KDE vs Gnome or VI vs. Emacs.
I wish sourceforge had some kind of rating system beyond the very general 'Most Active' list.

When you're a beginner, the thing that will probably frustrate you most is getting and installing software.  
Learn how to use a package manager like apt or rpm at first, depending on your distro.  This will help you get productively using the most common applications out there.  Then you may want to learn how to install new stuff from those dreaded tar.gz files. (Or you might not - many people never do.)

Another common thing I see is beginners using old distros - don't.  Recently my friend told me he spent a day trying to get RedHat installed on his PC for the first time and he came away with a really bad experience - as it turns out, he had grabbed a CD set from his office that was RedHat 6.something.  Needless to say, RH 7.3 was a bit less painful to install and configure.

Anyway, good luck with it - 
Cheers,
Jim