The "real world" I live in is not so easy for the Windows user.
I was talking about the consumer multimedia world. This is the world where the casual user would like to point his browser at most web sites and not be faced with a grey box. When the fact that Red Hat multimedia is in the stone age is pointed out, it is easy to change the subject and try to point out Windows' disadvantages. But the fact remains that Red Hat multimedia is pathetic, playing to Windows' strengths.
I agree it takes a lot more effort to configure mozilla or konqueror with many of the plugins like Flash, Real, Java, and Acrobat that are two click installs on Windows. However, the only semi-important thing missing at this time is Quicktime.
For the Red Hat user, it's often the things you DON'T get in Windows that make it the better choice.
Again, this is changing the subject. I'm aware of Windows' weaknesses and dangers, and I do not run Windows at home. But Red Hat's weaknesses are also very apparent in the multimedia department. They don't go away when we bash Windows.
So we agree that Windows has huge problems, so much so that even YOU won't use it at home. We can work our way up from this common starting point.
For multimedia, I use XMMS for mp3/ogg, Ogle for DVDs, and Mplayer for everything else. I got all of the RPMs from freshrpms.net and had no trouble installing them. There were a few dependencies to figure out for Ogle and Mplayer, but all of them are available on freshrpms.net and it took me about 30-45 minutes to get everything I needed. Again, the only thing I don't have working smoothly is Quicktime. Hopefully, Apple will release a Quicktime player for Linux some day, but is it really that big a deal? Most movie trailers are converted to mpeg soon after they are released. If you really, really, need a watch a quicktime video, then keep Windows around for that.
SuSE is probably a better multimedia disto for most people because it has an ALSAfied kernel to start with, includes lots of the multimedia stuff in the box. I ran mostly SuSE for about 2 years, but came back to Red Hat when their update servers started flaking out. I've read they fixed their update problems with 8.2, but don't know that first hand.
Best Regards, Keith -- LPIC-2, MCSE, N+ That's your shadow on the wall Got spam? Get spastic http://spastic.sourceforge.net
