So I got myself a netbook. A really cheap acer aspire one with 512 meg ram, 8 gig flash drive and an additional 8 gig SD card. Plenty of room to surf and email, but coming from a windows machine, you quickly run into arguments with the linux operating system. This have been my major annoyances thus far;
* No drag and drop of menu items. I mean, windows has been doing it for years now. you want to add a program, you simply drag it where you want it to be on your start menu bar. Why do I have to go trough tedious menu’s where i have to choose an icon, at title and the location of the program?
* No standard install. No really, don’t start talking about the packages or automatic install manager because when I choose something from the list of packages it disappers. I installed text games with a ROT13 game, selected it from the list, it installed the downloaded files and now? I mean there is nothing in the start menu bar, there is nothing in the games menu, Linux can’t seriously think I enjoy going on a hunt trough my hard drive to find out where the files are now located and how I have to start the programs? Give me a windows installer with the option to create a shortcut to the program any day.
* It can’t install anything without an internet connection because everything requires a load of packages to be downloaded first. Even to install picasa which was over twenty megs when downloaded, I first had to connect online to download other stuff before the installer (Fortunately it has one)
* Printing is nearly impossible. Both my new canon printers are classified as “paperweight” according to the linux printer driver websites I found. Yeah, paperweight means it’s good to keep your papers from falling down your desk, but you can’t actually print with them. So the only recourse I have is either using my windows laptop again or creating a bitmap of my documents, putting them on an SD card and inserting the SD card into my printers so that they can print it out without computer.
The annoyances are fortunately offset by two facts:
it’s incredibly cheap at only 200 euro for a netbook and everything works out of the box with linux preinstalled. So it’s a great way to get to know linux without having to spend days on configuring it.