Just a bit of background information on myself and my firewall request.
Personally, I've been a geek since I bought a second hand TRS-80 back in
'83. I loved DOS but thought it could have been taken further. In the
late 90's I was one of Microsoft's biggest fans, but dear old Bill
retired in 2001 and it turns out the rest of the board are complete
arseholes that couldn't give a rat's fart for their customers as long as
the money keeps rolling in. This is when I started playing with
different Linuxes.
These days I still run a couple of Windows's for playing games but they
are completely isolated systems. I never give Windows drivers for Lan or
Wireless, saves so much heartache and pain and Windows is actually
stable as long as it can't find what it thinks is an update. Runs a lot
quicker without virus protection too. Still impossibly slow compared to
Fedora with an early version of Gnome 3 though. Later versions of Gnome3
are worse than Windows.
My educational background - I didn't even finish high school but I had a
genuine interest in computers, like any puzzle, I just wanted to know
how they worked and ripping the case open wasn't very helpful at first.
My community - There are many service providers in Australia catering to
about 85% of the population, but in rural Australia there is only one
service provider. Optus, Dodo, iPrimus, Vodaphone and the rest cover
less than 15% of Australia's land mass, the one unmentionable provider
knows it has us over a barrel. It can charge what it likes, ignore
complaints and fail to service infrastructure and there is nothing we
can do about it.
Just to add insult to injury, if we get someone old to phone them and
complain and mention the legal obligations of a sole service provider
and communications - "I'm old and I'm sick and I need to send my blood
test results to the doctor" etc. then we all get reliable high speed
access for a few hours before they throttle it back again. And we pay
through the nose for this type of service.
Under normal service conditions we can get speeds of up to 1800 Kbps but
this is rare, normal speeds you would expect are around 40 Kbps. So an
unadulterated install of Fedora means that every time you turn the
computer on your internet access is bogged down by PackageKit and you
can't browse the net or send emails until it has finished 40 minutes later.
Then there's a few people running several computers, collectively
PackageKit is costing them about $1 a day each even when they've just
done updates, and they've got no internet access for 40 minutes. Some
have rightly mentioned that except for the virus problems they were
better off with Windows.
Then take in to consideration that the most popular accounting software
package in Australia, the one supported by our taxation department, is
Windows only. Even Mac users have to install Wine for that one. This
internet access is costing us a fortune and worse, the programmers and
developers aren't seeing any of that money, it all goes to a modern day
pirate.
There's about 80 people running Linux in my community now, they all
hated Win8 enough to try something different. Most are Fedora but I've
done a few Ubuntu's as well depending on the person's needs, knowledge
and skills, that would be about $1200 a month just for PackageKit going
to the service provider if I didn't cripple it just after install.
Please sort out this firewall issue, I'm sure that it won't just be my
community that is grateful.
Cheers,
Andrew.
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