On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 11:21:17 +0100, a team of surgeons from
alt.sailing.asa removed the following benign growth from Richard
Watson:

Peter J Ross writes:

...

But Windoze users won't install Cygwin.

They won't? I'm sure some of them will, otherwise it's pointless
people going to the effort of making it.

Of course *some* will, but the people who expect their shiny new
computer to work out of the box won't.

They'll install, at best, Agent or XNews. Cygwin and Gnus and Slrn
are *complicated*,

Not sure if slrn's that complicated. Last time I used it it worked
OOTB.

You have to write a text file, and that's too complicated for most
Windoze users.

If you mean that people would be put off by lack of a snazzy gui
interface, then you might be right. However they shouldn't be. Back
when I first encountered email properly in 1989 everyone I knew was
happy using VAXMail and some of those were Arts students ;-)

It's no longer 1989, and clueless people are now allowed to use
Usenet.

It's my belief that the GUI has de-skilled the population as a whole,
but that's another matter.

My favourite programs - mutt, slrn and vim - don't need no steenkin'
GUI. But they do need some simple skills that Bill Gates wants us not
to have.

and I still insist that there's no intuitive Windoze newsreader for
the masses that's as good as KNode - or even Pan, if it's less buggy
than I found it to be.

But the point is that Pan is available for windows, without even
installing cygwin.

How stable is it?

I spent yesterday setting up a combination of XNews and Hamster, and
I'll be using it as soon as I can be bothered to download all the
messages in the groups I read.

I think the point I'm trying to make here is that with open source
software platforms become less of an issue. Whether or not Knode has
been ported to Windows is less important than the fact that it could
easily be ported if someone wanted to.

They'd have to port a few KDE libraries too.

Therefore, although there are
many reasons for using linux, choice of a decent newsreader isn't
necessarily one of them :-)

True. What they want is pr0n, and they want it fast. Maybe tomorrow
belongs to Mozilla Firebird? ;-)

--
PJR :-)
mhm34x8
news:alt.fan.pjr
http://www.petitmorte.net/pjr/
http://www.pjr-online.co.uk/