Quote Originally Posted by knewbex
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I'm frankly tired of the arrogance of some of these folks when dealing with those of us trying to learn "their" system so we can become members of "their" community.
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Are you talking about me?
Of whom?
Which thread?

In my opinion it's best practice to claim about misbehaviour close to the point, where it happens, and not in general, anonymous way, where everybody can guess, whether he is meant or not, and nobody might defend himself.

Quote Originally Posted by knewbex
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gross omissions like lack of consistent install processes including wizards and scripts to take the labor and indepth system knowledge requirement out of the equation, lack of api-s that allow inclusion of new hardware without recompiling the "kernel" (geeze what a primitive concept) etc.
You know that there isn't a consistent install process for windows (Beside: 'close all applications' 'reboot often'. )?
Suse, Redhat, debian (and ...?) have their 'install processes' but there is no central linux-company, which organizes such things.
Most programs are modular, and dependencies minimized.

I.e.: you may install Image-Magic, without libjpeg, libtiff, libpng - or install those seperately. These libs might be used from different applications as well. They might be replaced by newer versions without touching image-magic.
So there are lot of advantages of a independent-modular system-design too.

You may have a kernel with every known module build in advance - or you build a lean kernel with only the drivers you actually need.

The linux kernel is running on very different hardware (look at /usr/src/linux/arch - 20 entries), with one common source. This is a bit complicated in the beginning to understand, but show a better solution.
Again you might get benefits from an updated gcc (Gnu C Compiler) and patch your kernel often to get enhancements (and fresh bugs .)
I didn't test to optimize the kernel for my processor, and don't know, whether it is recommended - but it seems to be a benefit too.

I updated my kernel from 2.6.1 to 2.6.7 with patches of 1.4MB to 3.0MB in about half a year.

How big are MS-binary-patches? How often do you get them?

The kernel is developed in an uncentralized, networking culture.
(geeze what a primitive concept)

We all like to hear of a better one.
knewbex - the keyboard is yours!