emerge world

It's not you. It really is easier. The file layout is cleaner and the libraries are in the correct place. I started using slack in the late 90s and still have a laptop at the house running it. I have never found a better system for development or custom source builds. Gentoo was close (before I gave up on it), but never quite as clean and streamlined as slack.

The only real addition that I have to go out of my for on any slack install is Dropline. I just can't get past how butt-ugly KDE was/is. I never could stand it.

As a human holy priest on a PVP server that is almost 2:1 horde to alliance, quests are soloable only for as long as you can keep from getting ganked. Questing in groups is mandatory. Phasing has made that a bit more difficult, since you have to find people that will go from start to finish with you.

I wouldn't remove the phasing though.. it's just too cool and opens up so many possibilities for future story lines, but there are real issues with it.

The starter quests were designed that way to really make you uncomfortable so that you would understand why your character would choose to walk away from all of that power and join the weaker alliance/horde. If they didn't do this, people would lament that there was no backstory to explain why their Death Knight was suddenly running amok and hanging out with the very people they used to kill with great relish just because it was Monday night and Heros was a rerun.

My chief lamentation is that Blizzard should have implemented a heroic healing class to complement. Not only would it have made the 60-70 grind in Outland a little more pleasant for instancing and grouping, but it would have given a boost to the dwindling ranks of available healers in the game. We didn't need another tank class. We needed a healing class that has enough offensive capability and PVP survival that they would be damned fun to play without changing specs away from raid healing.

The XP Pro install on my primary desktop at my house is 5 years old and still going. It has seen SP1, SP2, and SP3 with no issues. It has never had a virus, worm, or trojan. It serves daily as my MMO gaming computer, multimedia machine, and general internet surfing machine for my family.

The point is that the long-term stability and reliability of the OS has far more to do with the person using it than any other factor. Garbage-In, Garbage-Out.

I was citing one office as an example, not as the definitive sole issue holding back linux. Be realistic. No one piece of software will make or break an OS, but my use of Solidworks, Pro-E, and Lightwave are, in this case, definite examples that keep this particular office from looking at linux. Denying the existence of the elephant in the room does not make its actual presence a fact.

You can extrapolate from that to include Photoshop (no, GIMP is not good enough for serious work), accounting software, 3DS max, and much more.

The point was that by presenting a real moving target, that the lack of software is rather self-inflicted.

Windows presents much less of a moving target that linux ever has. Games that ran on my 2000 desktop over 8 years ago work just fine on my Vista desktop. Old Photoshop works fine too.

I'd love to see real graphics packages ported to linux. Having Photoshop and a real 3D package (3DS or Lightwave) available would go a LONG way to making it my primary desktop and not just my development box.

Well, ignoring the false dichotomy and overall tone of this, the prison of choice is, in fact, a prison nonetheless even if the walls are painted the colors I like most. So many here want to see real commercial software delivered to the linux platform, yet are not willing to agree on much of anything. How can we expect commercial software developers to want to target a moving object? How is that realistic or financially solvent?

Free software is nice and fits the needs of some, but a lot of the good software out there that people need is just not available for it.

When the popular distributions can not even agree on a single package manager, this is not something that will change. The LSB is selectively followed at best. Until the community comes together and makes some basic decisions like .tar.gz, .rpm, .deb, .pkg, etc. then how can we possibly expect development houses to even give serious consideration?

I just spent the last week with my father-in-law who is a sole proprietor of an engineering company out of New Jersey. We talked about computers a lot, since it is a common interest. One of his very first laments was being strapped to Windows on all of his computers because it is a requirement for Solidworks. This is a man who would love to change his OS because he started with and loves *nix, but cannot because of his software requirements. I asked him about using Pro-E, since I know it supports a few different *nixes, and he said that it never worked right on them, and that graphically it was inferior to Windows.

His software needs?
Solidworks
Pro-E
Lightwave

This is true for everyone that works for him as well. A whole office of people that are strapped to Windows because of the software.

We can lament that it is the software makers fault for only producing for one or two OSs, but the reality is a chunk of graphics and engineering software supports OS X just fine. It's not a question whether they would produce it for *nix then, but a question of how we can make linux attractive as a platform.

One way to absolutely make sure that does NOT happen is to keep moving the targets and to keep living in our prison of choice.

If you mean that your root / environment is limited to the installation directory, that is no longer the case. You can move outside of the standard root using standard drive letters just like in Windows. You can also bind the /bin and /usr/bin (and more) directories into your path statement as a standard Windows environment PATH variable so that you can use all your UNIX commands from the DOS prompt as well.

To move outside your install directory, use /cygdrive/

Example:

To change to D:\
cd /cygdrive/d/

Then move into standard directories just like you normally would.

cd "Documents and Settings"
cd "JoeUser"
cd "My Documents"
ls

Tab completion works fine. You can do it all in one, or even softlink Windows directories into your standard cygwin environment. I do this regularly.

Example:
ln -s /cygdrive/e/Code/C/ ~/c-projects

Hope that helps.