[Qiranworms]

In the past couple years I've cycled through various Linux distros...but each time I always had trouble with some aspect of my hardware...and I never completely migrated away from Windows. I'm now in Slackware...with the help of a good friend (who now uses Gentoo), I've finally got my hardware working. And it's great. Additionally, I've learned a lot more about Linux and UNIX in general by using Slackware...because I've had to manually set up many things that other distros just do automatically...or using a GUI based menu. And generally, it seems to work better this way.

The thing with Linux, as difficult to set it up as it is, once it's setup...it really works. And it doesn't just work...it works the way YOU want it to.

[horndude]

The cool thing is once youve done one, the rest are easy, especially with slackware.I think the biggest hurdle most face is just unlearning what theyve learned in windows and learning some basic ins and outs of linux.There's a whole mindset and set of procedures in linux that was made from the ground up, some of it so basic and simple its easy to make it tougher than it is.

Take tonite for example, have a new printer Ive got a couple weeks ago, figured access from my other linux machines to this printer would be cool.Hmm, thought about it for awhile, well cups on the host machine prob has a line somewhere in its config file about sharing, so I look........sure enough, there it is, add IP's of other machines.Ok. so far so good, well I guess the other boxes will need to know about the new printer so I install samsungs drivers/config tool, set them up and point them at host machine's IP address.Check cups is running on all machines, yep, try a test page.........yep, it worked.Simple as that.Took 5 mins to get it to work.Now, 5 years ago Id have been scratching my head,cussing, and doing lots of research on the net looking for answers.It doesnt take long though for the light to come on and all of a sudden one day you just understand why things are the way they are in linux, once that happens it gets way easier.