[plug]

[The Thought Assassin]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, tlee wrote:
> one would hardly go for linux if one wanted to have an easy life.
I certainly do. After a certain amount of initial investment in time,
Linux will leave you alone and just sit in the background and do what you
tell it to. That kind of reliability and peace of mind is essential for me
to have an easy life. Since I seem fated to dealing with computers for my
livelihood, I make certain that have a system that I can forget about 99%
of the time. Using Linux, I never have to spend time trying to work out
how to do something out of the ordinary, or why my computer is doing
something out of the ordinary without me telling it to. That makes my life
so much easier, I can work with computers every day and am not yet insane.

> Usually the hardest way works out to be the quickest way - rather like a
> mechanic in engine of your car. He does not walk around to the seat to
> start the engine - simply shorts out the starter motor and the engine
> bursts into life. 
The equivalent for a sysadmin is probably telnetting into a box from miles
away instead of having to drive over to where it is to configure/fix it.

> Vi and Emacs will accomplish tasks without the added comlication of a
> word processor editor. But I don't suppose they are much good for word
> processing and the like? What say?
Don't know. I don't do word processing. When I am composing large
documents, I use the LaTeX text processing and typesetting system for
reasons very similar to the reasons I give above for using Linux. It does
what I tell it to and stays out of my way. I have complete control because
I feed into LaTex plain ASCII files describing the output I want, and it
determines how to display what I have writen on the page in agrement with
standard typesetting procedures. I edit the input files in vim.

If one wants a word processor, I have heard good things about the 
Staroffice and Koffice ones, and that AbiWord will provide a nice modular 
lightweight system once it has been polished up a bit. I wouldn't go for
anything that is not open source, since you don't know what havoc may be
wreaked on it in the future.

-Greg Mildenhall