Posts by At Random

Never mind the '90s...

In 1985/6/7 I made a good living writing accounting and data management applications in Pascal on Burroughts B20 BTOS (aka Convergent CTOS).

Of course, Wirth's original Pascal is useless, but with the right extensions, it is nice to use. The B20 version was modular and did things like variable-length strings. I enjoyed the BTOS/Pascal environment much more than any other '80s programming environment. When I moved on to Unix/Emacs/C, I was appalled on many levels! When I did some work in Delphi a decade later, I felt right at home!

Burroughs Pascal was the main language for BTOS applications, but they also supported COBOL. The COBOL guy would come in from time-to-time to debug something or other; he was always easy to spot because he had a jacket and tie (whereas we were all in T-shirts). He did not talk much. One day, I expressed an interest in COBOL. He tried to explain PIC clauses to me, and I almost lost the will to live!

Although I flirt with others, it is always SuSE that I come back to

After using RedHat as a plaything in the late 1990s, I bought (yes, bought, on CD, in a box) SuSE 6.3. There have been a few bumpy patches along the way, and I will install and try just about every distro going, but for me it has always been SuSE/SUSE that gets the work done and looks better than most, and I have been using S[uU]SE more or less continuously now for 15 years.

Being a fickle sort, I presently have a dual-boot machine as my main workstation with Mint 16RC and SUSE 13.1. They use the same /home partition, and do not interfere with one another at all. If I want a change, or a package that has not made it into one of the SUSE repos, then Mint is there waiting, but SUSE is running most of the time.

I can certainly see the advantages of being in the Debian environment, because of the sheer number of packages ready for installation. I really cannot see the attraction of desktop Ubuntu, with its bad joke UI and outrageous lack of privacy. Mint is just fine, but a bit dull to my mind. (I actually run Ubuntu LTS as a server without GUI, but that is another unhappy story altogether, that I am stuck with for now.)

Lots of people knock YaST. I think that they are people who have not used it. I does the routine things, like user management, partitioning, and installing software as well as many other tools on other distros, although even for simple tasks, it presents them in a much more unified control centre that can launch the YaST components than any other distro I am aware of. Where it excels is in the way it handles much more tricky stuff such as configuration of daemons and bootloaders, setting up network services such as NFS and Samba imports and exports, and editing /etc/sysconfig. OK, it does not do anything that vi cannot, but it can do so many things much more quickly and easily than vi, with much less chance of going wrong. Saving time and effort is something that should be really valued, and YaST should, IMO, be given a lot of credit for doing this.

People also still think that KDE is the beta test that was 4.0. It certainly is not! It is probably one of the sanest desktops out there, especially for converts from Windows or MacOS. It is now rock steady and fast (regularly beating Unity hands down in performance benchmarks). I have not had KDE crash or seize up in years. Get your head around Akonadi, and you might get to like it, especially if you have many email accounts. Otherwise, just use Thunderbird.

This is a distro that deserves more credit than it ever receives!