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



 I think the argument can be simplified to the following: 

"If the hardware manufacturers spend a lot of time and money to make 
their hardware work on Windows, while simultaneously spending no 
time or money to test it on Linux and refusing to let us look at the 
hardware specs, then it should be easy for us to make the hardware 
work as well on Linux as it does on Windows." 

Put that way, it seems like a silly argument. 


On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 7:56 PM, Peter Petrakis 
<[hidden email]> wrote: 
> 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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> 
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