My Linux experiment continues

[sinanju]

I'm a newbie again. All my years of accumulated experience with Windows in its various incarnations (3.1, Win95, Win98, WinXP) are as nothing. I boot Linux and discover that I know nothing. Hey--I've already reached the second stage! Conscious incompetence vs unconscious incompetence! Now I know what I don't know; previously I didn't know how much I didn't know.

So I've fumbled around for a couple of days trying to get mpegs to play. They should, but I can't get them to work properly. And the configuration and set-up windows (I'm using KDE rather than the command line right now) might as well be written in Greek. And things that would be a snap in Window (solely due to familiarity with its quirks) are a pain in the butt when I'm stumbling around a new OS.

So I found a linux tutorial site on the web. I'll be visiting there regularly for a while, til I figure out what the hell I'm doing. Then the linux desktop will look upon me and tremble.

Plus, I discovered a website (www.tuxgames.com) dedicated to computer games written for Linux. They don't have Battlefield 1942, alas. But the do have Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament 2004, among others. Cool! Games are the main thing Windows has over Linux as far as I'm concerned. I can netsurf and write using Linux. If I can find games that run in Linux, there's even less to hold me in Bill Gates' evil empire.

Of course, I can't figure out how to download the Wolfenstein demo. Clicking on the link opens a tab with a couple dozen files. Do I download all of them? Pick the appropriate one? And how do i know which one I need? And where do I install it?

That's why I'm going to be spending time on the tutorial site for a while.

Comments

Interesting.

[joelrosenberg.livejournal.com]

I've been using Linux for years now, and my own take is that the important things are easy, but the minor things are difficult -- I generally just boot my machine as a Windows box when I want to listen to music (except for mp3s; that's easy) or play games or do any of the web-interactive stuff.

But for work, it's Linux, running evolution as my mail program, and OpenOffice as my wordprocessor, with gnus for Usenet, and the latest Mozilla Firebird for a browser. Fast, clean, and easy.

Re: Interesting.

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

My experience so far is that where the desktop doesn't make it clear what I should be doing, the help is either too brief or far too in-depth to do me much good. I've discovered the "man" and "apropos" commands, which have helped somewhat, but while I can now get mpegs to play _audio_ okay, I can't get it to show the video and have no idea what the problem is.

As for using Windows for games and music, well, I mostly still do that--but I added Linux to my system to audition it for my next computer, whenever I get around to buying one. If I can play games and listen to/view multimedia in Linux, that's even less I need Windows for in the future.

I've already established that Linux is more stable than Windows. When I crash applications (which I've managed to do a couple of times), the application crashes but Linux keeps chugging along without a hitch, which is more than I can frequently say for my Win98SE setup. Being able to add software or alter settings without having to reboot (at all, much less over and over again) is a godsend, too.