I upgraded my linux system yesterday to a new (faster) machine. Fedora has gone to a Windows 8 style desktop, which I’m not really loving at this point. I can get used to the new style interface, but what irks me is that it’s taking me a lot more clicks to get to stuff and do stuff than it used to. This is supposed to be better?
Anyway, today has proven why linux is nowhere near ready to compete with windows as an OS. Things that come with Fedora work fine. Things that don’t have been a royal pain to install and get working. I’ve spent most of the afternoon googling and running obscure configuration and yum commands, where the windows equivalent is basically “click here to install”.
I’ve managed to get most of the system working the way I want, but I have one outstanding issue. Spell check no longer works in Firefox. From poking around on google it looks like it’s had trouble ever since Firefox 24. I’ve found a bunch of complicated workarounds that involve things like setting up new bookmarks with tons of cryptic commands embedded in them. No thanks. I just want something that works when I type in the text box here on the dope.
“Check my spellnig as I type” is checked under preferences (advanced -> general).
The only add-ons I have installed are adblock plus and noscript, and noscript is disabled for straightdope.com.
If I right click in the text box here as I am typing this, check spelling is checked.
Versions are Fedora 20 and Firefox 29.0.1.
Any ideas?
I’m an engineer. I can’t spell worth a crap. I need my spell checker.
It turns out that even though I right clicked inside the text box and it showed spell checking for English language, it hadn’t bothered to actually install the dictionary associated with that. I installed the dictionary and now it works.
You know more than one UI works on Linux systems, right? Just do ‘yum install windowmaker’ or something and try something else. Windows people don’t have to do this, because Windows people… can’t. They’re stuck. Linux users aren’t.
Yep. I’m aware that linux supports multiple UIs. I’ve played around with a few different ones in older versions of linux.
I’ve been installing different things and trying them out, and installing docky has proved to eliminate a lot of my complaints. Now I’ve got all of my most commonly used apps on a dock at the bottom of the screen, so it’s just one click to start them up and just one click to switch between them, even when I’ve got stuff open all over the screen. I also installed a better (IMHO) file manager, and having that and also being able to open a terminal command prompt with just one click really helped a lot.
I’m not hating it so much now. In fact I’m actually kinda starting to like it.
In KDE-land a few years ago, they switched in Dolphin as default file manager and relegated the previous one, Konqueror, to it’s other function as a web browser.
The trouble is that Dolphin is a very clunky file manager whereas Konqueror is a file manager par excellence and only an indifferent browser. As soon as KDE devs reach perfection they then unravel it and start over for gnomic reasons.
I set Konqueror as default manager with twin pane and tree, as it always was and always shall be. Dolphin only if I need a root file manager.
Right, which is underscored by the fact Fedora is Red Hat’s experimental distro, meaning that it’s a testbed for technologies that Red Hat wants to put into Red Hat Enterprise Linux* when it’s convinced they’re stable.
If engineer_comp_geek wanted a stable, well-tested distro, Debian stable is just as far behind the leading edge as it was back in the 1990s.
*(RHEL is the distro Red Hat sells to corporations who want a support contract to go with their Linux distro. CentOS is RHEL without the tiny amount of stuff (branding, mostly) Red Hat doesn’t freely license and without the support contract.)
Well, kinda… OpenSuse may be a testbed for SUSE main, but it is also stable in it’s own right, and quite sharply defined away from SUSE the company.
For cutting edge, I always thought it was unauthentic, as in TV writers had heard there was something called Linux, but couldn’t be bothered to look it up on Google, that Sheldon Cooper vowed Ubuntu was his favorite, when it would be obvious he would obsess with Gentoo, the distro which offers the necessity of compiling one’s own kernel ( something I have never had to do for those who think Linux is complicated ) and then rolling one’s own environment through writing lots and lots of little text files. Hours of fun for all the family.
The linux name Fedora comes from the Red Hat Shadowman logo. Personally, I think Red Hat Shadowman sounds like it could be a movie hero too, or maybe the villain. Firefox Fedora vs. the Red Hat Shadowman, coming soon to a theater near you!
Sadly though, the name Red Hat comes from the fact that the developer had a thing for red hats and used to wear them around all the time. He would name is projects Red Hat 1, Red Hat2, etc. so when it came time to name his linux he of course named it Red Hat Linux. Not so much of the super hero vibe there.
Nah, Sheldon would be using Slackware, but something so modified from anything Volkerding ever released that it’s Slackware only in name. He’s still annoying enough to bug the mailing list with how obviously superior his method is, but somehow nobody seems interested in mounting /home read-only and only moving people to a new directory structure when they prove themselves worthy.
(Slackware and Debian are the two oldest distros still being released. (Both derive from the fact SLS (Softlanding Linux System) was a terrible, terrible distro.) Slackware is just as elite as Gentoo (and Arch) but far less automated.)
He also modifies his own kernel, and is annoyed that Torvalds refuses his patches. The fact his drivers tend to make ‘lesser’ hardware self-destruct is not really a bug in Sheldon’s eyes.
He still thinks Daniel J. Bernstein’s software is weird.
