On Sun, 2005-07-03 at 22:31 +0100, Peter Hunter wrote:
Interesting that. I found Evolution to be much better than Kmail. I also find that (as far as I can tell) K3B is the only decent burner for anything other than basic stuff.
Evolution is very good, it is leading the field in it's area and (as far as I know) is the only mail client that can talk to Exchange (I use it for this purpose at work) it cheats and uses the Outlook Web Access interface, but that's good enough for me.
I can agree with you about KDE being easy for Windows users, however, I hardly used Windows as my main computer was the Mac. I have to have a Windows setup at the moment as I have one program - that I can't de without - that won't run under WINE. It's a DataBase Library that installs from the CD onto the hard drive. It only works in Windows. I tried installing it into wine when I was running Suse 9.2 but it wouldn't work.
I think coming from a Mac platform explains why you are using Gnome, I find it more similar in terms of UI experience to OSX than KDE.
k3b is pretty excellent, I find myself wishing that there was a Windows port as it beats the EasyCD Creator/Nero applications hands down.
Unlike you I haven't been around Linux long enough to get used to (or fed up with!) any flavour of linux yet, so I'll stick with 9.3 for now seeing as the time it took to download and install. Mind you, I have just donwloaded and installed ubentu 5.04 onto the P3 machine (I'll use that for experimenting). It was strange seeing a 'non-gui' installer, but still very easy and straight forward. I was impressed with the speed that it installed. The thing that struck me the most, and I guess I'll get used to this as I install more varieties of Linux, is that - although it also uses Gnome 2.10 - Gnome on Ubuntu is a lot different from Gnome on Suse.
This is usually the case, there are so many configurable variables that it is sometimes hard to tell what you are experiencing. Seemingly identical software can look VERY different depending on themes and how it was packaged. Ubuntu is very clean but lacks some of the bells and whistles of SuSE...it also lacks YaST which is sometimes helpful to new users.
So, I'll keep having fun and playing. So far I feel that Linux is streets ahead of MS Windows, and easily as good as Mac OS X.
I think the group would love to hear more of your experiences as you gather knowledge of Linux. I personally would love to hear what (if anything) you prefer on Linux to OS X. I rate OS X very highly but I am only an occasional user. For the most part I find it very enjoyable to use, but I can imagine scenarios where it's friendliness gets in the way. Forgetting the (admittedly rather good) eye candy present in OS X I think that Gnome is very close in terms of user experience. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts from a Mac user perspective.