A PCWorld post on their ‘Day 8’ of a Linux newbie day-in-the-life item made me do this. The article, by Tony Bradley, was fine, but reading the comments caused me spew forth these thoughts as I read through, so any rebuttals were enjoyed, but I don’t mention them.
Here we go with my own comments…
ITEM 1: Have been using dual monitors at home several years (desktop, and laptops before that) – at work of course, we get the cheapest PCs possible. And then they complain when things are late. Smallest screens, motherboard graphics, bla bla bla.
ITEM 2: Don’t really like webmail. Been using Outlook for centuries at home (work standard, too) since I got Office Professional 4, which ever one it showed up in. Outlook does more than everything else I have tried (Eudora was good in the early days) and trying the port of Evolution for Windows on the laptop but not loving it.
I prefer to get my mail and not leave it on the servers for the same reason I don’t use many other cloud services except as adjunct or additional options. Gmail and its services are now more involved for me since I got an Android phone, replacing my old Dell Axim PDA. But I don’t like the watered down options on Google vs Outlook. Of course I also hate Outlook for all the major stupid things it does and doesn’t do. And Outlook (XP home/2003 work) is a Pig & a Hog. If something screws up on your machine, kill Outlook first. I’ll be looking for a replacement for a long, long time, I think.
FYI I: I used to have about 8 email addresses, but now I am down to 5. Oh, plus a revived spam magnet via Gmail, and my Gmail account. OK. 7. Yikes.
FYI II: I have a real day job that takes a good 10-11 hrs per day just away from home. I’m not just snarking up blog posts. Gotta pay the bills.
FYI III: I spent many years tweaking Dos/Windows and am not really interested in having to spend time tweaking ANOTHER operating system. Formerly, there were the BBS systems and relays where one could get help or info in issues. Now, most forums are mostly snark/fanboys/spammers and or retards. Most without ‘speelchuckers’.
FYI IV: I have Android on my phone, and original Droid. 2-year contract. Hey, it is a PHONE for chrissakes!. But playing with apps and all the upgrades seem to have made it stupider than it was. There are some things I never thought were done right, what I mentioned earlier as less capable. But now it is just getting slow and weird and I don’t have time to investigate. Since I am NOT a 20 something living in my parent’s basement with nothing else to do.
ITEM 3: Well put nonseq. Like FYI II, really.
Some other pretty good comments there.
My ‘takeaway’ (I hate corpspeak) is to try Evolution on the laptop. And it started the install and when I said ‘cancel’, it actually stopped! Without installing a toolbar or requiring 30 minutes of uninstalls. What a concept! Put the question at the FRONT of the process! (Didn’t have time to deal with it. I will return to that later, after the thunderstorms and the root canal.) Not wild about it yet. Still no time (6/27/2011)
I think I have given up on my old Averatec 3225 ever running Linux properly, and it takes too long to boot, etc.
My new-ish laptop is now running Win7, and it will try Evolution.
The old standard desktop running XP? OMG, I have too many other things to do and can’t waste time with it just now. Between things I won’t have (too old to reinstall anywhere) and things I won’t get (I need a version of Excel. LO/OO just really don’t cut it for me, and NONE of my spreadsheet files will ever see a ‘cloud’. I do have a copy of VisiCalc, but there aren’t enough rows. I can’t even think about Win7 on it yet, nevermind Linux.
I do have latest versions of Ubuntu and Mint downloaded, so I may take a whack at them off a CD/DVD again, but the old laptop thing really soured me on that, since it couldn’t seem to be set up and I don’t want to go back to where I was in 1986, learning about operating systems on personal computers and how they compared to the what I had been using, and why all the snarky comments and useless comments waste more time than should be allowed.
Once a few personal crises are over, I need to return to this.
Grins,
RW