Dear Snarkster:

  Thanks for all your help, and the Tripeaks 2001 game is enclosed, as
promised.

  Unfortunately, the ArkLinux experiment is now over for me. Maybe you can
blog my thoughts to those who are pushing it, so someday Linux can be
better.

  My conclusion is that Linux is very, very difficult for Joe Schmoe and
Plain Jane who are just using their computers as occasional tools for work,
news or shopping, and it is retrogressive in terms of how it is actually
used for people like me who have been at it for decades. It's even hard,
requiring memorizing instructions and function keys, perhaps demanding
keyboard templates, something that became passe 15 years ago.

  I found it to be much too unfriendly to dare give it to a secretary or
clerk with average intelligence, skills, and motivation, or a kid or anyone
else who wasn't completely rapped up in overcoming the obstacles of using
it. Among other difficulties, service programs, such as Kynaptic, have names
that don't tell users a thing, and once opened, a design that doesn't
indicate what it is they do or how they work, so they have to memorize names
and steps on their own. Kynaptic, I am told, is used for installing
programs -- but it couldn't even show a proprietary CD in its place, much
less install a program from there. It is especially confusing because it
does not use the word "install" or "Setup" anywhere so a user knows where to
click to do the desired job, assuming that is what it was put there to do,
and because the main Help index did not include "install" as one of the
subjects that a user could learn about. I never did figure out how Kynaptic
worked.

  No matter how good Linux may be at operating a computer, nor how many
technical advantages it may have, it seems to me that hundreds of otherwise
productive hours are needed to teach the unfriendly and non-intuitive Linux
system and programs to employees of average intelligence, especially when
much of it purposely conflicts with their current knowledge of Windows
systems. As a boss, I'd much rather pay Microsoft a premium and get an
employee who can sit down with a computer on his/her desk right away and
"start" a job immediately with what he/she already knows and/or could easily
figure out and not have to shut down my business to have him/her pick up
Linux, only to find out at the far end that I am held hostage by an employee
with basically unique skills who knows he/she can not be easily replaced
because of the weeks of training he/she has. Nobody wants to pay Bill Gates
any more than they have to, but after perusing Linux, I'm convinced it's
cheaper to pay for Windows and the accompanying software once than shell out
$700 a week to workers, probably several times over the lifetime of a
business, to learn to do without it, and then have to give them a raise on
top if and when they master it, and then still have to pay an IT guy to do
the kind of defrag, program installation, routine updating, virus checking
and miscellaenous that go along with owning a PC.

  TheWindows Explorer-type program, Konquerer, was so poor as to be
unacceptable. First, I couldn't even find it on the start menu; go know one
has to click on the house icon on the desktop for it, as that icon
ordinarily stands for Internet home page. It didn't show and could not
figure out the appropriate launch application from the filename extension
for some of my things, like CDA files (music on a regular audio CD). It also
would not give the "details" view of the listings, instead giving an "icon"
view that is without value to me, and would not maximize until clicked to do
so, when that should be either the default or, at the very least, an
optional default setting. I was not able to bulk delete files, such as
songs; they had to be deleted one at a time, or folder by folder. Some
created folder files would not delete, even though empty. It collapsed file
trees to the basic minimum, requiring repeated clicks on plus signs to
reveal what was lurking under each main area, some of them having obscure,
if not misleading names, like "remote areas" and "storage media," vague
names that cover more territory than the materials actually within them.

  Just as bad, all I saw under there were bizarre and less than meaningless
folder and file names for the stuff of Linux, like "bin." My installed
programs went into sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub folders with names that were
useless gibberish, so I could never begin guess where they were, something
like this: arklinux/usr/share/hda/wine-c/, notwithstanding the new folder
names specifically approved during installation. Good luck finding those
files again if you are a newbie, even as ArkLinux is supposed to be for
them. Even the contents of the CD drive were hard to find, tipped off only
by strings of initials that are meaningless to the unititiated, and buried
in a long string of other intials, slashes and dots, instead of just F:,
which is simplicity itself. Why a user would have to "configure" an
installation disc that gets used just once if done properly when that dialog
box pops up is beyond me, and plainly counterintuitive to the general user.

  Having multiple desktops was really no bargain; I could not remember what
was active where, so I had to flip through them repeatedly to get back. I
also prefer to launch from a menu than have to minimize everything else I am
doing to get back to a desktop mode to launch the next one.

  Linux seems to have been designed oblivious to the fact that most people
who are using computers are also still having trouble programming their
VCR's. It not only has to be easy, it has to be easy enough for people who
are not too bright to be able to proceed with no need for a manual to get
going because days still only have 24 hours. Bill Gates got the KISS (Keep
it Simple, Stupid) part just right, not that I'm a big fan of his, but
anyone can pretty much sit down and use Windows applications right away
without having to spend any time figuring it out.

  I really disliked having to remember and use the old function keys (which
often didn't work for me) to launch programs like Konquerer, and having to
enter command line instructions, like configwine, to ease certain tasks. You
said -- and I saw on Linux sites -- tha much work is done that way. But that
was so 20 years ago computing-wise -- before God invented the mouse, really.
Buying keyboard templates to remember this stuff is like going back to the
stone age of computing -- one step up from using punch cards. Except for
word processing and other data entry, Windows users basically never need to
take their hands off the mouse, but Linux has gone the other way, and needs
lots of memorized and then typed out information to make it useful, and
that's going backwards.

  It's great Linux offers the ability to just delete undesirable programs
rather than having to uninstall them, but the utility of that is diminished
by the fact one has to find where a program is buried in folders and
subfolders to delete it, and this invites a user to mistakenly delete the
wrong thing with a single click by inadvertently placing the arrow on a
vague filename or foldername. Windows Uninstall gives several confirmation
points and large print to minimize the odds of that particular mistake, and
also gives the option of also removing now useless *.dll files that may
confuse other programs and take up needed drive space; Linux did not.
Moreover, Linux kept deleted programs on the start menu and on the desktop,
to be separately deleted in a multi-step process, and this too is a hassle.

  Among other flaws, I disliked having to "dismount" CD's (a term that
harkens back to the 1980's, when reel-to-reel computer tapes were common on
mainframes) by deleting the icon from the desktop so they would eject. I
disliked the star icons and other generic icons that appear all over the
place that don't even begin to hint at what they are for. I'm against having
to use programs with gibberish names like apt-get or kde-something that
don't give the slightest clue what the are for to do my regular work. I also
couldn't use the "desktop properties" to allow easy setting of colors.

  And that's just the problems incurred with using Linux as intended.
Putting aside the retro-this and memorize-that nature of using Linux, I ran
into a big array of other problems in using the software, and resulting in a
conclusion that Linux is really no better than Windows in terms of
stability, even though this is supposed to be the edge Linux has. It may
even be worse than Windows, and I had several events pretty close to Windows
style crashes.

  Now I understand that I was trying to do something very cumbersome -- work
with applications not designed for Linux through an emulator. But that is
where it is at in terms of software writing, especially with older
proprietary and educational programs, which is 99% of what is out there, so
the problems I faced are by no means going to be rare. And my computer
itself is pretty powerful, so if the Linux is any good, it should have done
the job, especially for the simple programs that I wanted to load onto it.

  Tripeaks 2001, a very simple, proprietary, 3 MB solitaire card game for
Windows, fouled up after it was installed, turning cards over at the wrong
time, not showing cards at all, showing spurrious, non-existing cards, and
not allowing some proper moves. At least it gave me an error message
(although it was incomprehensible, something about a file list that would
not load).

  A "Magic School Bus" proprietary disc designed for Win98 wouldn't read at
all, and then would not eject with the mechanical button until I
"dismounted" it, a step I took purely by trial and error step of
purposefully deleting the desktop icon -- somthing one dares not do in
Windows for fear of losing a shortcut for good -- after failing to find a
"disc eject" button anywhere, and after rebooting several times just to make
sure the disc drive machinery and the mechanical button were still
functional.

  "Mahjongg Madness," a proprietary game bought for $9 at Staples, was
misread as an audio CD even though I had previously installed it (but found
it not able to function), and Konquerer did not show me an executable file
anywhere on the disc so I could install it again. The first installation
failed because the computer insisted I insert the CD even though it was
already there.

  My kid's Candyland proprietary game, at least 8 or 10 years old, caused
something like 50 blank Konquerer windows to pop up when I loaded it into
the CD tray, a process I could not stop or slow, until the box just hung
(without any blue screen of death for that matter), probably because of
memory overload. Ctl-Alt-Del did not kick on for several minutes, and, most
strangely, even the clock stopped until I could close everything out (7
minutes later).

  His "Toy Story" game crapped out because it insisted on a setting for 256
colors -- a setting that I could have easily changed to under Windows but
could not even find in Linux.

  I installed the gemu emulator, only to find no icon installed on the
desktop, no listing in the start menu, and no folder in Konquerer to get it
going. And when I finally tracked down the executable file in some 6 layer
deep subfolder with no revealing name, it didn't launch or do anything, much
less help with the installation of proprietary programs.

  I was ultimately 0 for 6 installing and using programs, even though none
of the Windows programs required anything more than Windows 2000 to run, and
one was specifically for Linux.

  As for the other software that came with Linux, I had previously tried
Open Office, and was underwhelmed. It did not work too well in Windows, and
the Power-point type program was actually hard to use and did not function
too well. I seem to recall that the Open Office word processor could not
open or properly convert my Office 97 documents, a clear failing. All of
that kind of software is readily available for the taking as shareware and
freeware for Windows anyway, so that is not the reason to get Linux. If all
Linux is to be is a slap in the face of Bill Gates, then the joke is on the
Linux designers. Bill is using Linux to claim there is viable competition in
the market, so he does not have to face jail for antitrust violations in
tying the operating system to application software.

  The upsthot is that if there are real advantages to using Linux as opposed
to Windows, it is conspicuously absent for average users, meaning 98% of the
public who are not spending their every waking moment at a computer, and
whatever these advantages are, they surely appear too far down along the
learning process to be of much use to employers in a competitive economic
environment, and hardly likely to make any kind of splash, except a negative
one.

  The only things I saw that were better about Linux than Windows were speed
of booting and speed of shut down, but I suspect both are more related to
the fact that virus protection is not needed at this point, and that is
usually the software that slows you down in Windows. Everything else I saw
was weaker than the comparable part of Windows, usually by several orders of
magnitude.

  Nine years ago, my then 2-year-old niece turned on her grandfather's
Windows computer, loaded in her game disc, installed her game, played for 2
hours, closed the game, and shut down the computer. Everyone else in the
house was taking a nap.

  In 2007, a computer should not be harder to operate than a toaster. If
Linux remains as hard and as unfriendly as it is now, it is doomed and a
benefector to Microsoft all at once.

Rod Kovel