2 of 2 customers found the following review helpful:
 Don't believe the hype, 2007-01-26
I've used Linux (Red Hat, Slackware, Mandrake), Windows, and Mac, and I can honestly say that Linux, in all its incarnations, is still highly problematic, and not ready for general consumer use.
There are a number of problems with this product:
1. Too many distributions (flavors) means hardware incompatability and application incompatability problems. Application A will work on Red Hat, but will not work on SUSE. Scanner B will work on SUSE, but not on... you get the picture. Sure, you can rig it up to work, but most of us don't want to spend 2 days re-compiling the kernal to get a cheap scanner to work on our system.
2. Support is given out on a volunteer basis (unless you pay for it). Unless you are a UNIX/Linux expert, others in the "community" won't even talk to you, and will probably kick you off their message boards. Linux users don't talk to new users. They don't want people using Linux -it is their little private club.
3. Limited or non-existent USB support. You will have to browse the web for some tool for a workaround.
4. No games -at least major games that have been out in the last 5 years.
5. Very few multimedia applications.
6. Installing applications can be a nightmare, as you eneter "dependency hell." The app needs 13 componants, all of which need to be downloaded from different websites and installed in a specific order.
This being said, Linus has its uses. Mostly as a back-end, enterprise database or email server. It is NOT a desktop OS. Red Hat has dressed it up to look like one. When you find yourself typing 700 lines of code to get your camera to work, you will discover that it is a patch job by a bunch of amateurs.
Go with Mac OSX if you want a stable, secure, powerful, OS with multimedia, and UNIX utilities.
2 of 7 customers found the following review helpful:
 Not much more than the downloads..., 2001-09-20
If you have a good broadband connection, download the ISO's and burn your own. That's pretty much all this is. The documentation is minimal at best with quite a bit of advertising, easily replaced by third party books you would be wiser to spend your money on than this.So why did I buy it? Because I couldn't get my downloads to work right until after I'd already given up and ordered it. Murphy's law of downloads :-D...
7 of 10 customers found the following review helpful:
Not the best out there, 2001-08-05
I've been running SuSE 7.1 for the past couple of months and it's been great!! So I decided to give RH 7.1 a go (since it's supposed to be one of the best/most used distributions out there). I was very dissapointed. To start Gnome's file manager kept respawning itself, programs run under certain logins and cause segmentation faults under others (these include programs that come standard with the distribution), and since I'm a Java developer what really got me was that you need to go through a whole work-around just to get Java to work!!I'm sticking to SuSE and would advise everybody to do so. This release just doesn't cut it - don't buy it!
1 of 10 customers found the following review helpful:
 If you want to run a linux server look elsewhere, 2001-08-02
First I need to mention that I am not new to linux. I have been running various versions of SuSE for the past 3 years and FreeBSD for about 6 months (but I won't got into that).When I decided to drop BSD and go back to linux (being short on cash) I decided to give RedHat a shot. First, since I have an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller, the installer refused to run. So I switched everything over to IDE (spare HD's are nice) and installed it. I will say that this installer is fairly easy to work with and went smoothly. Now that I've got the system up, I want to start working on the firewall and getting rid of some kernel bloat... Well, no go! You can't recompile the kernel (unless you want to remove the function prototypes from every header file)! The firewall is an excercise in futility too... ipchains is installed by default so the rc3.d script that fires it had to be nuked, even then iptables doesn't work (I even tried stuff right out of the docs and it wont work) all in all if you want to run linux, look somewhere else (myself, I'm going to try mandrake 8.0 next), and avoid the headaches that this distro will cause
1 of 5 customers found the following review helpful:
Linux 7.1 Upgrade, 2001-07-20
I have installed 3 different versions of RedHat, 2 of Mandrake, 1 of Caldera. Linux 7.1 is (IMHO) a disaster. It is somewhere between 50-80% bigger than 7.0 for the same modules. It refuses to upgrade a 1.1 GB 7.0 setup into a 2GB partition. Giving it 3GB and doing a complete install results in an unrecognized 3C509 card, no documentation about the network configuration utility, and a generally non-functional system. What it does do seems to run slower than 7.0. Tomorrow I start on my 2nd week of trying to get this thing to work. (Stick with 7.0 :=(( )
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