Don Clugston wrote:

> 
> As the catalyst for the flame war, I should mention that one of my machines is a dual-boot SuSE Linux machine, so I'm not completely ignorant of the UNIX command line. You're right that I should look at doing some D dev in Linux. Unfortunately
> (a) the power supply for the PC has died, not yet repaired, so I only have my Windows laptop right now;
> (b) I am doing some GUI stuff, and also linking to Windows DLLs. So Linux is not really an option for most of what I'm doing right now.
> 
> Since almost all my free time is while commuting, I'm restricted to Windows.

Solution:  dual-boot laptop. ;)

Don Clugston wrote:
> 
> Since almost all my free time is while commuting, I'm restricted to Windows.

Same here.  Public transit is a wonderful thing :)


Sean

Georg Wrede wrote:
> One does not need very much Unix knowledge just to edit and compile. For example, often I don't even bother to fire up the GUI, I just use the console window.

Oh, the command prompt is nothing. Couple of days worth of learning, tops. It's the installation, configuration and system administration phases where the Unices are exponentially more difficult than Windows.

> Just about ls, cd, mkdir, rmdir, cat, less, joe, -- can get you a long way. (Which is not more than what one used to learn from a 20 year old MSDOS user's guide.)

I just *have* to ask, what on earth does 'joe' do? :)

-- 
Niko Korhonen
SW Developer

Niko Korhonen wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
> 
>> One does not need very much Unix knowledge just to edit and compile. For example, often I don't even bother to fire up the GUI, I just use the console window.
> 
> Oh, the command prompt is nothing. Couple of days worth of learning, tops. It's the installation, configuration and system administration phases where the Unices are exponentially more difficult than Windows.

Haven't done any of that for ages. Just slapped in my Fedora (or any other modern Linux) CD, and off it goes.

In the old days ('80s and so) I was thoroughly overworked with Solaris administration. Never knew the day would come when I have a much larger installation and don't have to do anything.

On windows I have to do disk defragmenting, and other stuff.

>> Just about ls, cd, mkdir, rmdir, cat, less, joe, -- can get you a long way. (Which is not more than what one used to learn from a 20 year old MSDOS user's guide.)
> 
> I just *have* to ask, what on earth does 'joe' do? :)

Joe is a text editor. It's for the challenged, who are scared of emacs and can't learn vim.

Georg Wrede wrote:
> In the old days ('80s and so) I was thoroughly overworked with Solaris administration. Never knew the day would come when I have a much larger installation and don't have to do anything.
> 
> On windows I have to do disk defragmenting, and other stuff.

And reinstalling it once in a while. And fixing broken network connections (the funny repair-button). :/

The M$ defragment utility (other commercial utilies may exist) helps you a lot, but it may take 8-10 hours to defragment a badly fragmented 200 GB+ NTFS-drive. My Linux-box transfers 66 MB/s between hard drives, so "defragmenting" the same data by moving the file system back and forth between two disks takes only 2h. It takes a lot more effort to cause fragmentation on ReiserFS 4. All in all, a linux user can compile a lot of programs while the windows-user just defragments his hard drive :)