Jack Gates <jlgates@charter.net> wrote:<blockquote class="replbq" style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"> On Wednesday 12 July 2006 00:44, bruce wrote: > jack,... > > chill out! No problem, I am not hot. I just think it is really stupid for any one to bash Linux on a Linux mailing list and then think that they might get warm friendly help after doing so. My problem is I'm just not very tactful at times so I appear angry. :) > > i fully feel the guy regarding his wireless issues... linux is a pain in > the royal a@s no doubt... > > there's no way linux is ready for the desktop, and there's no way that > anyone without laughing, can say it's in the windows league for ease of > use.. it's getting there, but it's not there yet.. and that's cool... I disagree on which OS is in the superior league. Linux, Macintosh and Unix are all built on the same architecture and MS Windows is all by itself (by design). MS Windows (w/IE) is full of security holes (especially on the Internet), Linux is not. Unix came from the Main Frame days of the 50s. Unix is a great desktop workstation but it cost too much and there are no applications for the home user on the retail shelves. Linux is nearly an identical clone to Unix. There also are few if any Linux Distros on retail shelves either. The one area that MS Windows does dominate is the retail shelf. Applications that crash on Linux don't bring the OS down but they do on MS Windows. I use to have MS Windows crash even without an application crash. I have not had a Linux OS crash. I have had several applications crash but not cripple the OS. I have an old Dell Inspiron that worked fine for several years, then I upgraded some of the apps on MS Windows and it started crashing several times a day. Those upgrades were not reversible so I was stuck. I switched to Mandrake 9.1 and the crashing stopped. Before long I had all my Desk tops running on Mandrake 9.2. Then I tried to go to Mandrake 10.0 the hardware and Mandrake 10 did not play nice. I switched to FC2 and again the problems went away. The problem is not with Linux not working as easy as MS Windows the problem is with the hardware and software manufactures and vendors not wanting to support or help Linux achieve the inevitable of becoming the dominate desktop OS. > i like some of what linux provides, but i sure wouldn't allow my mom > anywhere near it!!! Why not! My boxes ran on FC2 for two years without me messing with the set up and they ran for months before I would shut them down only because of external power loss that was going to kill my power back up. Your mother could have easily checked and sent e-mail, surfed the web, used a spread sheet and never had a problem with one of those boxes. She probably would not notice any difference either. The only people that would know they aren't on MS Windows are the ones that use it all the time. A desktop and web browser all look pretty much the same to a novice user. > as far as the wireless issue goes, it gets into a driver issue. a good deal > of the drivers that are used for wireless cards have elements that are > proprietary licenesed...which gets into the issue of gpl, etc... > > things will slowly get worked out... it'll simply take time.. > > -bruce > > </blockquote> There is a problem with Vendor hardware support for Linux, but the Linux Devs are in the process of making it worse by excluding vendor drivers from their Distros that some Vendors have provided. This is because they are not open source (Suse 10.1 did this recently). I have even read were up comming versions of the Kernels are going to be changed so that only open source drivers can be used. Don't know how they are going to do that, but I am sure there is a way. I have read all of the arguments for doing this and I still think it is a step the wrong direction.