I dont usually get involved in these kind of things but I do feel the need to throw in my .02 here.
My experiences with Linux:
I have a Thinkpad, PIII. I had some wireless stuff I wanted to try. My wireless card is a Netgear 401, Prism2 chipset, circa oh, late 2001 maybe? Out of the box installs of Mandrake and Ubuntu that were current Feb last year (I dont recall which versions) both failed to recognize the wireless card. I had trouble with OOTB installs of KDE on both distros. I had to tweak ubuntu a bit but I got it to at least display at 1024x768 correctly. Mandrake I gave up on.
There were some other issues with both distro’s that frustrated me. No I did not setup a printer, no need for it.
After about 4 hrs of wasted time with both distros I fell back to FreeBSD, v5.4, which is admittedly what I’m more familiar with and had a little problem with the wireless, but the KDE install was flawless. Easier than both Ubuntu and mandrake. But maybe thats just me.
I have not even looked at installing Linux on any machine I have, both production servers or at home, I’m strictly BSD. Moms and Grandmothers aside, to take MiG’s challenge of getting avg people off the street to install both Windows and Linux and see who complains more and see how it goes I’d like to see the results of that.
While my mother might be able to navigate her way around a Linux type GUI after the OS was installed and setup, there is no way in hell she would be able to install it herself. Do you still have to go through the partition setup and choose /usr, /var and / sizing like you do with most *nix installs Ive done over the years? This includes SunOS, Solaris (on native Sun hardware and Intel hardware), BSDi and even a SCO install or two.
90% of the people I deal with daily can hardly navigate Windows, never mind sitting them down in front of Ubuntu or Mandrake or .
I run into many people who reinstall Windows and find after the install the drivers are not there for network cards, sound cards, video cards etc.
Even though they are Windows “approved hardware” and those devices are built into
most motherboards today, drivers are not included in a basic install of Windows in many cases.
Its been my experience that once you point that out to people why their network card is not working most will ask where do they get drivers for it? Do you have the motherboard driver disk that came with your computer? No? Well then your SOL unless you can download them.
What do you do if it is Linux “approved hardware” but the drivers are not in the kernel in an OOTB install? Would your avg person know what to do then?
I have used Linux with a desktop gui in the past as well as FreeBSD extensively and as Mig so eloquently put it, I still have to ‘bust out the command line’ to do certain things, with either OS.
As an aside and one last item, in the last month, I know of 5 people that have all bought brand new 20" iMac’s. 1 was already a Mac user, but the other 4 were all beige box PC people. How many people do I know that just bought a new machine and use Linux on them? 0. How many bought new machines with Windows? Who cares…
No matter how you cut it Linux still requires a certain level of computer knowledge that your basic Windows users dont have, then again that can probably be said for mac users too in some cases.
You won’t find anything but linux running my world. There’s a Linux fish on my car, not an Apple logo.
You dont get it do you? if someone who didnt know computers wanted a linux machine they wouldnt go buy a dell and slap linux on it they would go to a vendor and buy a computer with linux on it just like they would go to a vendor and buy a computer with osx or windows. You’re a fanboy because you refuse to admit that osx isnt the supreme operating system you act it is.
