In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Roy Schestowitz
<newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote
on Mon, 19 Jun 2006 09:51:36 +0100
<1150725785.cy60shSkB4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> 20 Great Low-Cost Utilities
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Your PC (READ: Windows) is a complicated piece of machinery. It probably
> | has thousands of files, hundreds of folders, and any number of things
> | that can break, disappear, or otherwise behave unexpectedly. Fortunately,
> | there are plenty tools that can help you control the chaos. I looked at
> | four important types of products that everyone should be familiar with:
> | file managers, hard-disk utilities, desktop tools, and performance
> | enhancers. I opted for products that were effective, easy to use, fun
> | to try out, and, most important, free or low-cost.
> `----
>
> http://pcworld.com/resource/printable/article/0,aid,126037,00.asp
>
> Linux sucks. It doesn't have these 20 utilities. I guess it just doesn't
> require them.
Linux systems *do* have many of these utilities.
File Managers: I use Nautilus. I don't know what the KDE
variant is called offhand. There's also xfm, which is by
today's standards rather crude, and of course good old ls,
find, locate/slocate/updatedb, etc., running in an xterm
or other such terminal emulator.
Hard Disk Utilities: Not sure what goes into this space,
but mkfs.*, fdisk, parted, ntfsresize, and other such are
good candidates AFAICT. These are designed to be used
on a rare-to-occasional basis. One might also include
backup/restore utilities such as tar and cpio.
Desktop Tools: Probably includes a file manager, plus in my
case Gnome panels and various other gnome applets such as
the Open System Monitor, geyes, and the clock. One might
include the window manager and session manager as well.
Performance Enhancers: Not sure what this is. The best I
can do is an ext2 defragger, which AFAICT is rarely used --
or needed. (Personally, I prefer reiserfs. It's faster.)
In the Linux case, one might try increasing optimization,
if one has a distro such as Gentoo which allows building
from source, and lots of time -- KDE on my 1.4 MHz takes
the better part of a day to recompile.
The PC still is complicated, of course; it's a multilayered
solution, consisting of sophisticated hardware (DMA
requires some brains on all cards/chips/etc. involved),
some of it hackish (A20, anyone?) and some of it
cutting-edge (what's the top most AGPx, this year?).
The Linux kernel handles some of these issues -- in fact,
most of them, leaving the rest to system-level programs
such as X, which has its own quirks.
I for one prefer Gentoo (though I'd probably not be too
averse to using other Linux distros -- I used to use
Slackware, then RedHat, then Debian, and have settled on
Gentoo as my fave; I've not seen the need to switch though
Gentoo is being rather annoying regarding nvidia, probably
because nvidia is being rather annoying generally :-P ).
It simplifies things considerably to be insulated from the
hardware, as report after report of motherboard swaps and
such like show in this newsgroup.
Were I to switch to an ATI-based hardware solution tomorrow
(I'm tempted), 99% of my stuff would probably work right
off the bat after a recompile. (The other 1% is pretty
broken after the 'string' => 'std::string' conversion,
but that's GCC/C++ lib. I need to fix that.) But then,
I don't do a lot of Linux driver stuff, not that non-video
drivers would be affected all that much by such a card switch
anyway.
--
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Windows Vista. Because it's time to refresh your hardware. Trust us.
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