Its not only scientfic publications that is supposed to follow some rules. All professionals try to follow some guidelines mostly to make it easy to read. If you for example look at a regular newspaper can you observe that the same font is used, textlines is not too long and so on.

Unfortunate is a lot work done by "creative" amateurs with programs like MS office. Even if you dont know exactly what is wrong does it give the wrong feeling. The text seems to be "nervous" and unurganized.

If you dont have professional skill will latex probably give a better result.

Back on topic ->
I use Linux, even though it''s not a "real" UNIX (but technically neither is Darwin/Mach, so hey). Slackware.

Kernel 2.4.something this summer, running 2.2.19 right now because it''s stable.

Resist everyone
Talk on RavForum(tm)

Lyx is a GUI frontend to LaTeX.

Too bad it''s kinda ugly.

I originally used linux because all the good free software is available for linux, sometimes exclusively. (try finding a good free font editor like pfaedit for windows. Or, a year or two ago, finding a good free sound editor like snd (now there''s audacity, which is available for both linux and windows))

You might want to try BeOS (if you can find a copy, they''ve gone out of business now) or AtheOS

You''ll still want to keep an eye on Gnome and KDE. Gnome, at least (I don''t follow KDE), has plans that will have them end up quite different from Windows (living up to its name (Gnu network object model environment) by becoming more data centered -- the applications you use are not important, it''s your data that matters), and of course bugs continue to be fixed and features continue to be added. It''s rough edges are a lot less so than 1 year ago when I last checked.

well, i personally use linux as my only os

i spent years as a windows user, and i was tired of the same problems i guess all of us get sick of now and then, so about 5 months back i put debian on my system
ive now tried debian, redhat, and slackware, and i must say that my favorite is by far slackware 9
i like the feeling that their is nothing running that i dont know about, and that i am in control of what is happening in my system -- windows just always seemed like such a passive experience, just watching and hoping that it would work, with no real control over what was happening

as far as ides, i tried Anjuta a while back and thought it was alright, but since installing slackware ive gone with nothing but a properly configured emacs, and a terminal calling g++ and gdb, and in my whole life i have never been this happy and productive coding -- it seems to me that ides just got in my way in the past

Just this morning I had a run-in with Windows that illustrates what''s wrong with it. When things work, they work great. When things go wrong, they go horribly wrong. Windows apps and services generally assume the user isn''t terribly technically sophisticated, and as such don''t present poweruser options. I was irritated by how little configurability of the printer spooling service and related components XP afforded.

I guess the reality is there is no "perfect" OS. Feh.

Whomever said they used Mandrake 9.1, get ride of it, NOW. Get something like RedHat, which isn''t HALF has bloated and system heavy and Mandrake.

I now use College Linux, which is a slack based distro with an easy install (I can istall slack, but configging the kernel is a biznitch which I can''t do, and I can''t get sound). I recenlty got some drivers fro my modem (software) so I''ll have to get those installed, plus FluxBox - a window manager which is extremely good, and only takes up like a meg or so of RAM, unlike KDE/Gnome which are horrible WM''s.

Windows I dislike do to it''s bloated Kernel/OS, which hogs your RAM, CPU and everything else, plus the Kerenl isn''t open source, which is bad.

I suggest College Linux, it''s easy to install, comes with BlackBox, KDE and XFCE, and still has all the necessary GCC stuff (basically most of the slackware packages except Emacs and some others come with it).

Well, peace.

"Few creatures of the night have captured our imagination like vampires..." Godsmack
(c) 2003 DigiCode - My solo company in progress.

You might want to try a *BSD. Try FreeBSD which is very stable, very programmer friendly, but not that easy to set up so reffering the the FreeBSD handbook would be a dandy choice. It's deffinately the closest to Unix you'll get with a free Unix based OS.

Give it a shot.

"Few creatures of the night have captured our imagination like vampires..." Godsmack
(c) 2003 DigiCode - My solo company in progress.

[edited by - Drevay on June 25, 2003 1:24:22 PM]

Currently, I''m an addicted user of the Gentoo linux distribution. Before, I''ve used some Suse, caldera and corel, all of which I have dumped pretty soon after installing it. Suse was OK, but way too commercial. Caldera was nice for a beginner, but didn''t really continue to develop. Corel linux didn''t give me access to anything in the system it seemed. I simply couldn''t decently install a package. Could''ve been my knowledge of Linux by that time though. Anyway, after trying and experimenting a lot with different distro''s and different unices, I ended up with mandrake. A beautifully easy distro, that actually made everything in my system run, and easy accessible.

Then, on a good day, I decided to give Gentoo linux a try. Took quite a while to make exactly the right settings, but thanks to the very good documentation (quality is better than any manual I''ve seen before) I managed to do it, and lean a lot about Linux. Then waiting a few days till everything was finally compiled that I wanted, and WHOW, I was impressed. The speed was extremely high compared to Mandrake. Everything is very configurable through only a few configuration files, and there seem to be a lot less of those -beep- dependencies than there are on pre-compiled distro''s.

At the moment, I''m only haveing trouble getting some program with midi-keyboard support to compile. They all seem to fail. Too bad..

Anyway, Gentoo rocks!

i use gnu/linux pretty much all the time for programming, wordprocessing, email, chat etc, except for the occasional games session where i''m forced to use windows. i''m just using windows now after about 2 weeks of linux and i have to say i hate it. i keep putting my mouse in a window and expecting it to get focus but it doesn''t :S sloppy focus is one thing i love about blackbox. i haven''t yet found my distro of choice, started off using redhat 5 or something, then various suse''s and then debian and then back to suse. i really like the apt of debian but it''s pretty annoying how loads of the packages available are a few versions out of date so you end up having to compile everything yourself. this was the reason i switched back to suse in the hope of some up to date packages and my friend already had the ISOs so i just installed it. but then i started to miss apt after getting bogged down with fixing dependencies whenever i want to install anything, and i tried to install the rpm version of apt which required me to install about 20 new packages and it still didn''t wanna play, so now i''m in the process of downloading redhat 9. a thing i really like with linux is the ease of transfering all your settings from on version to the next, just copy your home directory over and that''s it. with windows you''re pretty much screwed and just have to make all your settings over again (or go the the rigmarole of exporting registry fragments etc but whose ever don that?). a thing i hate about windows is the registry. it always get''s bloated and or broken and just causes trouble. what was wrong with having a few ini files in the program directory. haven''t they ever heard not to put all their eggs in one basket?
and i don''t know about anyone else but when you first install windows, every is fine but as the weeks pass it jsut gets progressively slower and slower. multitasking is a joke, and when you try and do two things at once it pretty much draws to a stand still. at one point a few weeks ago i tried to start mozilla whilst some other program was running and nothing happened until i closed the first program, and only then did mozilaa start. pretty lame if you ask me (and it''s not the fault of my machine being crappy), in linux problems like that never happen.

quote: Original post by Oluseyi
I had college papers to write and none of the Linux word processors quite did it for me. I know all the options, from AbiWord to KWrite to OpenOffice.org, but none of them have me focusing squarely on my content like Word - especially Word v.X for OS X.

I am generally not a Linux fan, I dislike its philosophy and architecture and I always tend to point out its shortcomings. I hate open source software and never seize to point out its crappiness, but even I must admin that OpenOffice did a damn good job. It's certainly not as polished as MS Word, but for something as simple as college papers it seems like a perfect tool. Even I (an avid Windows supporter) was able to easily take advantage of OpenOffice and thought it was a pretty good tool. What exactly is it about OpenOffice that turned you off?

Anyway, I first bought (I believe developers must be supported) and installed a distro of Suse Linux a few years ago. I never had any experience with Linux before and tried it out of sheer curiosity. What I saw was a crappy GUI that doesn't even begin to approach the level of clarity of Windows GUI both in its look and feel and functionality. I saw lack of decent configuration tools and miriads of unstandardized config files. I saw a rediculously bloated install with a plethora of compilers to languages I never intend to use, software I have no need for and daemons that have no relevance to my requirements. I saw lack of a half-decent IDE. Needless to say the system was gone from my harddrive the next day.

Since then I've tried RedHat and Mandrake and had the same exact experience every time. I was able to customize KDE on RedHat to look like Windows and have a fairly good feel, but I still found the system to be too bloated for my use. Currently I'm running Mandrake because I need to port a web application to Linux browsers and generally Mozilla on Linux renders html differently from Mozilla on windows. Once I am done with this task, I'm going to wipe Mandrake off my drive.

Recently I took a look at Gentoo and so far it seems like the only Linux distro that's actually worth trying. Finally I am going to get a level of customization Linux is so well known for, my install is not going to contain thousands of software packages I do not need, and the requirement to compile the kernel will actually return the benefit by giving me a more efficient system. I am going to give Gentoo a try when I get some free time, and it seems like it might end up being a distro I actually stay with. From there I plan to port my .NET web app to Linux and Mono, set up Wine and try to run some of my favorite Windows tools and get started on cross platform development of future projects. My goal is to get a larger potential market, cheaper servers, and cross platform programming experience that might prove to be useful on the market. I'm still having trouble finding a good IDE though, so I don't know how that'll go. Perhaps I'm going to develop on Windows, transfer the code back to Linux and make it without an IDE. I don't know how I'll do without a decent GUI-enabled debugger, perhaps I'll find something by then.

[edited by - CoffeeMug on June 30, 2003 11:58:39 PM]