Re: Linux on the desktop - it's come a long way, but is it there yet?

["peter.petrakis (Bugzilla)" <user=1616@nabble.blu.org>]

 Hello Rich, 

One of the things your argument is missing is the economic penalty 
vendor XYZ suffers 
if they don't get their drivers into the major distros (Suse being one 
of them) or if it 
doesn't already run smoothly. Linux just doesn't have a big enough piece of the 
pie to demand their attention. 

to answer: 
"Sure, what I'll wind up doing is going into my xorg.conf file 
whenever I have a whole day to deal with it and get the X settings set up 
precisely how they need to be, and then figure out which apps break things so 
I can tweak them as well--but this is 2008, why is this even necessary?" 

The product just doesn't get enough exposure, whether that be from the company 
that made it or from the end users; the capacity just isn't there to 
find and fix all the 
bugs in time for that release. In Linux, often "you're it" when it 
comes to fixing something. 
Meaning you've google'd everywhere and found 100 people asking the 
same question and 
no one has a straight answer. Whether you realize it or not, you're on 
the bleeding 
edge. That's the price you pay for having a free desktop along with the freedom 
to do what you please with it. 

in closing: 
"I'm challenging y'all to look at this from the eyes of the neophyte and 
imagine sending a box of PC parts and a URL to your grandmother to download an 
image, build a system, and set up her own Linux box from scratch with all the 
familiar browsing, word processing, and financial management apps.  My 
grandmother born in 1919 can do that--and she effectively has--with Microsoft 
environments, but openSUSE, kubuntu, et al are not ready for her yet." 

Every OS that doesn't begin with the words "Microsoft" is going to have 
problems running on the latest and greatest hardware. There's tons of 
them out there from the *BSDs, opensolaris, plan 9... If you change your 
challenge to "a box of PC parts that's 6-9 months old" your odds will 
probably go up. Using Linux right now involves a little bit of a trade off but 
there are rewards to be had in this endeavor as well. 

Peter 

On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 4:47 PM, Rich Braun <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> David Hummel <[hidden email]>: 
>>> If you just expect it to work, then before buying the hardware, you 
>>> should investigate whether the type and level of operation you are 
>>> expecting is supported by the available (preferably open source) 
>>> drivers for that hardware.  I personally won't buy hardware unless I 
>>> know it's well supported ... 
> 
> Derek Atkins <[hidden email]> 
>> Also, you might want to try other distributions.  OpenSuse is not then 
>> end-all, be-all of Linux Distros.  Before tossing out the baby with the 
>> bathwater I'd also look at Ubuntu and/or Fedora.  They may have better 
>> support or better tools for said support. 
> 
> Thanks:  both of you addressed the actual point I was making. 
> 
> To David, I respond:  Linux has long had a hardware cross-reference list that, 
> I suppose, one could look up every item.  The reality for most of us is that, 
> as experienced users, we have access to lots of different hardware of 
> different vintages that we use to cobble together systems; or as neophyte 
> users, they simply won't be looking up any cross-reference sheet before buying 
> a system.  My posting concerned brand-new equipment of the biggest name 
> brands; I'm sure the device drivers "support" what I have, but the internals 
> have not been sufficiently tested and polished to support the configurations 
> that I want to use (and that I have been using without trouble on the chief 
> competition, Win XP, for years on a very wide variety of hardware 
> configurations). Sure, what I'll wind up doing is going into my xorg.conf file 
> whenever I have a whole day to deal with it and get the X settings set up 
> precisely how they need to be, and then figure out which apps break things so 
> I can tweak them as well--but this is 2008, why is this even necessary? 
> 
> To Derek:  at the office I have most every Linux, Windows and Mac distro under 
> the sun.  (No, we don't have any Sun boxes. But that's about the only one I'm 
> missing ;-)  As it happens, the latest openSUSE has more stuff working out of 
> the box than any of the others I wrestle with from one day to the next, in 
> particular the desktop stuff is relatively good.  But for only a narrowly 
> defined set of desktop configurations, and not at all as easily reconfigured 
> as the average Apple or Microsoft desktop. 
> 
> I'm challenging y'all to look at this from the eyes of the neophyte and 
> imagine sending a box of PC parts and a URL to your grandmother to download an 
> image, build a system, and set up her own Linux box from scratch with all the 
> familiar browsing, word processing, and financial management apps.  My 
> grandmother born in 1919 can do that--and she effectively has--with Microsoft 
> environments, but openSUSE, kubuntu, et al are not ready for her yet. 
> 
> -rich 
> 
> 
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