I was in the process of building up a system last night to give to a young fellow in need of one. The circumstances which made that necessary are not important to this post, but critical to damn near everything else. Suffice it to say that besides and in spite of all the jugheaded bullsnot that passes for critical thinking skills these days, The availability, popularity, general acceptance and use of assorted drugs and intoxicating materials has immediate and far reaching consequences. Bad ones. Up to and including ripping basic family units to shreds, and thereby destroying lives, whole communities, societies built on those communities -- and in the end, eventually, ourselves. --- Social rant over.
The reasons/reasoning behind a full desktop/laptop computer are as mundane as they are inescapable. A smartphone is just that. It's pretty much a cellphone putting on airs. It's not a workstation. Neither is a tablet. Especially in situations where and when financial resources do not allow for that kind of initial impact then continuing drain on family resources. And if you think for one minute such circumstances are rare, I've got a reality check for you. It just 'tain't so. Kinda tough to do homework, be creative and save/manage substantive files/projects on a flippin' iPhone.
But I ain't made out of money, either. I do have some basic skills, though. Skills which allow the rescue and re-purposing of older computers abandoned when the newer, faster, shinier model gets marketed, and/or the latest and greatest operating system/software becomes power and resource hungry beyond all reason -- obsoleting what was the new hotness yesterday morning.
That stage being set, enter this beast ... And fedora F18.
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Note the operating system here. That wasn't the one I started with. I started this adventure with fedora, as is usually my wont. But, that didn't work out so good.
Sadly, Dream Linux has gone the way of the Dodo. But there's a reason it's now successfully parked in this salvage box, instead of F18. That reason being several, actually.
All that being said or foreshadowed, oddly enough, the new Anaconda didn't give me a minute's worth of trouble. All went smooth ... once I got it started.
The bottom line which finally drove me back to the CD box for a different distro was both Gnome -- and Cinnamon. neither one is suitable for use on a resource-limited box. Period. Beyond that, something in F18 (and I suspect related to systemd) results in a quasi-broken boot about one time in three. Not good.
So the reality of moving ahead at the speed of Linux is ... In many ways, at least among the so-called "Big Distros", linux has lost its traditional strength of being faster, and lighter on resources than the other two big names in the OS business. In the process, I hope linux isn't losing its real-world usefulness as well.
Not to worry, though. As long as I've got a drawer full of old ISOs, I can still put together something useful. But the point is, whereas keeping one foot mired in the past isn't a good idea in a fast paced world, ignoring/jettisoning our roots and running pell mell into the iShiney of the future maybe isn't such a good idea either.
And the real bottom line is, can the user actually use the product to get something done ... and do a little producing of their own.
This kid got lucky. He's got someone in his extended family who may not be financially comfortable, but they actually give a damn about him more than the dope, and he's smart as hell. I don't know what will come of the box, and the uses to which he will put it, but I do know that without salvaging the "junk" hardware, and having a free and open source operating system and software to put on it, owning/using a computer would still be no more than an unaffordable dream to him.
Maybe someday he will have enough discretionary income to buy enough hardware to run the latest incarnation of fedora (xx), Gnome 3, or Cinnamon. But by then, to be honest, with any kind of luck at all, he'll also understand why he really doesn't need to.
The reasons/reasoning behind a full desktop/laptop computer are as mundane as they are inescapable. A smartphone is just that. It's pretty much a cellphone putting on airs. It's not a workstation. Neither is a tablet. Especially in situations where and when financial resources do not allow for that kind of initial impact then continuing drain on family resources. And if you think for one minute such circumstances are rare, I've got a reality check for you. It just 'tain't so. Kinda tough to do homework, be creative and save/manage substantive files/projects on a flippin' iPhone.
But I ain't made out of money, either. I do have some basic skills, though. Skills which allow the rescue and re-purposing of older computers abandoned when the newer, faster, shinier model gets marketed, and/or the latest and greatest operating system/software becomes power and resource hungry beyond all reason -- obsoleting what was the new hotness yesterday morning.
That stage being set, enter this beast ... And fedora F18.
Note the operating system here. That wasn't the one I started with. I started this adventure with fedora, as is usually my wont. But, that didn't work out so good.
Sadly, Dream Linux has gone the way of the Dodo. But there's a reason it's now successfully parked in this salvage box, instead of F18. That reason being several, actually.
- Feature removal on one hand
- GUI bloat on the other
- OS overall Size
- Default software inclusion
- OS/GUI/DE weight/useability
- Conversely, default GUI polish
- Resource demand
All that being said or foreshadowed, oddly enough, the new Anaconda didn't give me a minute's worth of trouble. All went smooth ... once I got it started.
The bottom line which finally drove me back to the CD box for a different distro was both Gnome -- and Cinnamon. neither one is suitable for use on a resource-limited box. Period. Beyond that, something in F18 (and I suspect related to systemd) results in a quasi-broken boot about one time in three. Not good.
So the reality of moving ahead at the speed of Linux is ... In many ways, at least among the so-called "Big Distros", linux has lost its traditional strength of being faster, and lighter on resources than the other two big names in the OS business. In the process, I hope linux isn't losing its real-world usefulness as well.
Not to worry, though. As long as I've got a drawer full of old ISOs, I can still put together something useful. But the point is, whereas keeping one foot mired in the past isn't a good idea in a fast paced world, ignoring/jettisoning our roots and running pell mell into the iShiney of the future maybe isn't such a good idea either.
And the real bottom line is, can the user actually use the product to get something done ... and do a little producing of their own.
This kid got lucky. He's got someone in his extended family who may not be financially comfortable, but they actually give a damn about him more than the dope, and he's smart as hell. I don't know what will come of the box, and the uses to which he will put it, but I do know that without salvaging the "junk" hardware, and having a free and open source operating system and software to put on it, owning/using a computer would still be no more than an unaffordable dream to him.
Maybe someday he will have enough discretionary income to buy enough hardware to run the latest incarnation of fedora (xx), Gnome 3, or Cinnamon. But by then, to be honest, with any kind of luck at all, he'll also understand why he really doesn't need to.