Hello. Hmmm, this is very much a tweaker's viewpoint. How many regular users (secretaries, managers, dentists, uncles, grandmas) do you know that are capable of installing Windows ? Do you think that their shiny new Dell came with a blank hard drive and they were expected to install the OS, drivers and apps themselves ? Of course not. Windows came pre-installed and configured for them, and they just switch it on and send out email and play Mahjong on it. If consumer level PCs came with Linux pre-installed and configured for the hardware in the system, the end user would not be faced with any of the issues you mention below. To someone who is strictly an end user, the PC is a tool. They have no interest in what OS it runs, or what applications it runs, as long as it helps them to achieve their end goal, whatever that goal may be. Setting up Windows is not the piece of cake that everyone seems to think it is. It involves partitioning the hard drive, and selecting a file system to use. A simple network setup will most likely be autoconfigured, but a more involved network must be configured manually. If you have a motherboard with a newer chipset than the installation medium has drivers for, you will need to add drivers for that before certain devices will function. Windows is generally easy to install, but is not without pitfalls. Windows applications also interfere with one another. I myself installed two very small apps this week in W2K, and immediately had to remove them both. Each on its own would work OK, but in combination, I would get a BSOD at bootup, with no useful error messages to help troubleshoot the problem. The SLE list is available to anyone. People come here to get answers to any SuSE related issue. In fact, people come here for help on lots of things; some of them remarkably un-SuSE related. This list, by its very nature, makes us aware of the problems that people have with SuSE. Infrequently, someone will post a message just to say that something was great, or worked more easily than expected. But on the whole, we deal with problems here. I have yet to find any resource that comes close to the SLE list that would help with Windows issues. If such a list existed for Windows, I'm willing to bet we would see nothing but problems there, too. And probably a lot more of them. The funny thing is, when Windows is working, it works well. When it breaks, it can be nigh on impossible to actually fix. It may be true that Linux is not yet ready for the desktop - if we have to rely on end users to set it up themselves. However, if you plonked a brand new computer user (there are still a few out there) down in front of a running Linux box, the learning curve for sending email and playing Mahjong would be no steeper than for a Windows machine. Bye for now, Stuart.
Charles Griffin <cng3@yahoo.com> 05/24/02 03:41PM >>>
<Major snippage> I think the guy is basically right -- until linux can install perfectly without requiring users to drop in to the command line to update the XF86Config file in order to get nvidia drivers working, or to change the font installation directory, or to change symlinks and edit lilo.conf and fstab in order to get a cdrw working, or do other such things, it is not ready for the masses. </Major snippage>