Day 2 with the new computer.

[seishonagon]

I'm kind of waiting for the honeymoon period to wear off. I'm not sure it will, though, especially compared to my last computer, which I disliked almost from the moment I brought it home. It worked okay, most of the time, but had all sorts of problems with it. This one, once thespooniest is done tinkering with it to personalize it for me, should be just

Comments

[ouij]

A few points:

* Please be careful when adding apt repositories; its' probably a good idea to apt-pin certain packages to prevent breakage.

* I was an Opera user from about '99 to '03. I still like it, but I like Firefox more. Kazehakase is a close second. I'm waiting to see if the the Atlantis project gets up off the ground. That will give me both GTK and KHTML/Webcore together. yay.

* The desktop is actually inoffensive. If you work out a way to add arbitrary launchers on the "simple mode" desktop, let me know. I'd want one for Kate or maybe Kvim

[seishonagon]

Even thespooniest, who doesn't normally say things like this, agrees with me on this one: Firefox hates me. I don't know why, but I've never had anything but trouble with it, in any version. It freezes, it quits unexpectedly, it slows down my whole damn computer permanently... I hate it, and the feeling seems to be mutual.

Opera, though, was a good experience from the start.

I'm sure I'd like Firefox better if I were more into the technical aspects of computing, but I'm just not. For me, Opera is hands-down the better browser.

As for the desktop, I just want a different background, so I don't have to have the ASUS logo on it all the time.

[ouij]

I really can't imagine what kind of sites would stop Firefox on Linux in its tracks.

Opera was good to begin with, incredibly standards-compliant (one of the first to pass Acid2), and very responsive. Firefox however has been much more extensible and agreeable to me. I remember Opera 1.0: the executable was about a megabyte, and a java runtime environment another three or four megabytes. Hot stuff in 1999, hot stuff now.

[seishonagon]

The thing is, the way our county sites work, they simply block you from access if you're useing Firefox. It's not that the browser doesn't work for the site, it's that instead of getting to the site, you get redirected to a page that says the county doesn't support Firefox.

I can see that Firefox would be a lot more extensible, and if I were the type of user that really dealt with that feature, I would probably like Firefox a lot better. But I'm really not. I know my way around a computer for basic usage - I wouldn't call my computer ability awful, but it's certainly not good; I passed my technology proficiency exams for my teaching license, but that doesn't say much - and I really don't need one for much more than that.

[ouij]

Once I'd started running Linux, I began creeping towards a "Free when possible, proprietary only when necessary" rule for software. Opera is a fine browser, but the licensing terms on it aren't free enough to please me. So in the marketplace for ideas, I pass it over in favor of Firefox.