[scribus] Newbie Mac User

[John Morris]

   Thanks for the clarification, Jeffrey. I'll keep it in mind as I 
move forward. It seems to me possible that a distribution could make 
the hard choices for the "typical" user and yet cleanly leave the 
option open for a more adventurous user to choose a different path. 
Unfortunately, this tends to require extra work on the part of the 
developers and also leaves open the possibility the the novice user 
might mess something up without knowing how to restore it. Such a 
situation would cast a poor light on the distribution and thus might 
be avoided by the developers who, very reasonably, want their work 
seen in the best of light. Therefore, I would have to see it before I 
believed that a simplified distribution was really as flexible as I 
would like it to be.
   That said, I can imagine that Ubuntu, even with some dumbing down, 
might be fine for me. If the type of application that is crippled is 
things like screen savers and other eye candy, I'll never even 
notice. One of the first things I do with any operating system is 
turn off and, preferably, remove all the eye candy I can. I see no 
point in wasting hard drive space on things I don't want in my house. 
However, I do have to admit that locking in the text displayed by a 
screen saver seems particularly heavy handed.

   As a small clarification, the possibility of removing a crippled 
application and reinstalling the OS version is generally available in 
Mac OS X. I used that option when I installed the much more 
functional rsync 3.0.6 in favor of the ridiculously old 2.6.9 
installed by Apple's latest installers. Naturally, when I'm messing 
around with other people's work, I have to take steps to ensure that 
their work does not cause me problems and that my messing does not 
cause their work to break. Therefore, I have left rsync 2.6.9 in 
place to be used by Apple's processes and installed the newer version 
of rsync under a different name to be used by my scripts. This works 
for me because I'm not expecting any other UNIX processes to use the 
newer version of rsync. If I ever do need that functionality, I'll 
burn that bridge when I get to it.

Best,
John

Jeffrey Silverman wrote:
>Hey, there does appear to be a misunderstanding about Ubuntu. Ubuntu is not
>"dumbed down" in any way. It merely makes the hard, annoying stuff easier.
>Like installation. Like setting up your network, or printer, or webcam. If,
>occasionally, you come across an example like the 3D text one, there is
>always a way around it, even if that way is reinstalling that package from
>source. Mac OS does not have that option, typically. I would simply never
>recommend Debian to new Linux users.
>
>Hey, I am a professional systems administrator and I use Ubuntu. Believe me
>that it is in no way dumbed down; Ubuntu makes some decisions, but they are
>typically good ones, and typically can be overridden.