Maudlin ruminations of a mind bit by wanderlust.

It's just over a week after I started using linux on a daily basis. After all this experience, there's is one thought that jumps to mind rather clearly : "The manuals suck!". I hate the linux documentation, generally. There are exceptions, but in most cases, the manual assumes you already know what's going on, and that drives me nuts. What's more, if you go on IRC channels (The most proliferated communication medium over the net) and ask for help, the first response is "RTFM!!" (Read the ******* Manual) and you get no further help. To be fair, some channels are nice, and don't flame you. But most do. That's one thing I like about windows. The documentation treats you like an idiot. Unfortunately, windows is too easy to use to require documentation. On the other hand, Fedora does require documentation, and it isn't good enough. Ah well.

Then there's the IRC client. I am unfortunate enough to live behind a very restrictive HTTP proxy. Thus, I cannot do IRC or Torrenting natively, because my proxy just stops all those requests. Thankfully, one of my friends devised an ingenuous way to tunnel to his computer from mine through the proxy, and then do IRC and torrent from there, using his internet connection. Basically, I chat with him using the client on his computer, while he does the same thing on the same computer. The facility makes up for the slight lag and many other inconveniences. I use the irssi client, a very sleek text mode client which is fast, and has no frills and no mouse. It has very subtle notifications though, so don't be surprised if your friends hang up on you because you haven't realized they're talking to you. I also use the bitlbee extension for IRC. Basically, it sets up an IRC channel on your own computer, which allows you to access your IM protocols - Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc - within the same IRC client. It's very handy, as all your chats can be organize within one window.

After the IRC, there's the window manager. The most commmonly used are Gnome, and KDE. These are not technically 'window managers' but the name suffices. Of these, KDE is more advanced and all, but it's still a windows-like interface. At some recommendations, I went in for a try of Ratpoison, a completely rodent (mouse) free window manager. It has no mouse dependency, and opening, closing and resizing of windows is done through a number of intuitive keyboard shortcuts. The defaults are horrible though, I've had to take several breaks while working in ratpoison because my fingers had been stretched out too much. Like most else in linux, the keybindings in ratpoison are customizable, but I haven't figured that out yet. Ratpoison has no frills -- No titlebar, minimize/maximize/close buttons, etc. No window decorations, only windows. In my opinion, it's good to work in ratpoison if you're doing only a couple of dedicated things, like programming and chatting. If you try to do too many things all at once, you'll go mad with the windows. Of course, there are people who use ratpoison on a regular basis, as their default WM. for them, repetitive stress injury is a very real threat, much more so than for the average user.

I still work mostly from the terminal, even when I'm in KDE. It's moderately faster than clicking on the menus, and I cannot for the life of me find out where things are in the kmenu. Installing software is also much simpler, even if it is not much easier. Oxymoronic? The amount of pain you feel to install a new program is minimal, if you already know which program you want.. On the other hand, if you don't know what program you want, but rather only an idea of what you want it to do, god help you, cause I certainly can't. It takes ages to decipher the output from the searches. It's easier to go on goolge, search for a program and then get it internally.

That said, I'm moderately happy with Fedora. I haven't used it long enough to find out why it sucks, but that will come in time. The main reason I like it is because, predominantly, things just work. There's near to no heartache because of programs not working, because the just work.

Then again, I don't need all too many programs to begin with.

Refer:

• Ratpoison : http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/
  
• KDE : http://www.kde.org/
  
• Gnome : http://www.gnome.org/
  
• Irssi : http://www.irssi.org/
  
• Bitlbee : http://www.bitlbee.org/
  
• Fedora Core 5 : http://www.fedora.redhat.com/