Tony, your ESR response post on Slashdot.

[Svartalf]

Originally posted by mbpark
That's where MS gets it right. They have simple interfaces for everything. Ever try to set up a DHCP server for a subnet, let along multiple subnets, and set different lease times by MAC address? Or even try and set up an HP Laserjet over the network for remote communication? I can do either without touching text files under Win2K.

Under Linux:

The DHCP, no.
The LaserJet, yes.

However, I will offer that while DHCP setup is a nice thing- more complex situations and the whole thing becomes unusable. For some user interfaces, MS gets it ok, for others, it doesn't. I offer the Interface Hall of Shame at http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm as an example of what they do wrong as well.

However, Linuxconf is getting there, but I still won't use it to configure my networks at all. It screws a lot up still, and I feel bad that I don't have the time I want to go in there and debug it all.

What distribution are you running? Under Mandrake, it's been doing it "right" since the 7.0 version of that distribution. I do all my normal, day-in, day-out configuration of network stuff from there. Of course, I could be doing different networking tasks than you and may not have encountered your problems.

On the other hand, I am so looking forward to OS X. I want to see what they do for a user-friendly interface to UNIX based on the fact that I got an iMac DV for testing today. I have never seen such an easy machine to configure for a LAN. It beats Windows 2000 hands down, and that's a major compliment (and my metric for configuration).

Then again, I'm buying a G4 to run OS X on, so that won't be much of an issue

From what I can tell, OS X seems to need a G4 to really be usable. The copy of server I had on this loaner G3 I have for driver development seemed to be bog slow compared to even LinuxPPC 2000. That's not to say that it's a VERY nice environment to work in. But then, so's BeOS.