NM: the usual rant

Timothy Murphy gayleard at eircom.net
Tue Mar 3 15:22:31 UTC 2009


Tim wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 12:57 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>> I think someone who just wanted a system that works,
>> and wasn't willing to experiment and read about the system,
>> would find Fedora very frustrating.
> 
> Perhaps.  But then they might find Windows just as aggravating.  I know
> I find it more so.

I'm afraid you are viewing Fedora with rose-tinted spectacles.

Just consider WiFi, which is what this thread is nominally about.
Under Windows there is a straightforward and intelligible route
to setting up a WiFi connection -
one clicks on "Connect to" and "View all connections"
(I may have the titles wrong)
and then right-clicks on the WiFi icon,
and follows instructions.

In my experience this works 98% of the time,
and if it does not work I give up and use a different machine,
or try to get an ethernet connection.
I probably do not try to read up on the matter,
as experience tells me this is unlikely to be rewarding
on a Windows system;
while if I follows the Troubleshooter I am almost certain
to find myself in a circular loop.

If I don't have a driver for the WiFi device I am using
this is fairly obvious, and getting an appropriate driver
and installing it is fairly straightfoward.

Under Fedora, NM works eventually for me
about 95% of the time,
after an average of 1.4 re-boots.

The point is, when I ask about this
I get an enormous amount of information,
among which is probably the nugget I need.
But the process involves investigation and mild research.

This is not necessarily a criticism of Fedora (or Linux).
It is simply a description of the difference from Windows.

I think one should be honest and tell anyone
thinking of using Fedora that they are going to have to
spend quite a lot of time and energy getting it
to do what they want, whether connect to WiFi
or listen to music.

The suggestion that they will be able to solve their problems
by posting log files to "technicians" is laughably inaccurate.





-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland





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