Giving up on Linux...

[xyzzy at hotpop.com]

... for the foreseeable future on my home system.

My home system is an ASUS PVP800-VM motherboard which has hi-speed USB, ACPI, 
Pentium IV with hyperthread, S-ATA, Intel Extreme 2 graphics (865G chipset).

I also have an antique Adaptec 2930 SCSI card for my LS-2000 scanner.

Redhat 9 install disks won't even boot on this machine unless I disable the 
Enhanced IDE (<-- totally bogus!!) ...  Fedora Core 1 is about the same.

I decided on FC1 because it uses a later kernel (2.4.22 ... 24?) which seems 
to support hyperthread and S-ATA better.  When I finally got FC1 installed (I 
had to disable Enhanced IDE, install, compile a custom kernel and then 
re-enable Enhanced IDE), it was horribly SLOOOOOOW... running a shell in X 
and pasting a long command line took forever to complete.

I figured that this might be due to the graphics driver, so I updated the 
graphics driver from Intel and then X crashed with a segmentation fault in 
the closed source part of the driver when attempting to start the X server.  
Even changing back to the original driver in the XF86Config didn't fix the 
segfault.  Gotta reinstall?  Who needs this? What a nightmare.

The issue here is that Windows XP runs "out-of-the-box" on this system without 
problems and it is FAST, once it boots.

I could try the 2.6 kernel (and I have a LOT of experience with computers), 
but what's the use?  The 2.6 kernel is not ready for prime-time, not by a 
long shot, and neither, it seems, is Linux in general.

I have seen too many bugs and posts on these topics about SMP/hyperthread/ACPI 
and other issues that cause the system to lock up after a time of running or 
not run at all and no fixes seem to be in sight - maybe because these 
problems are intractable without inside information about ACPI and other 
things that Intel will give to Microsoft but not to Open Source developers. 
Maybe Redhat just doesn't care. Who knows?

I pity the average user that tries to install and run Linux on their latest 
hardware.  If I, as an experienced software engineer, throw up my hands, what 
would a relative newbie who just needs the system to work do?

I have real problems seeing how Linux is going to make it to the desktop by 
2005 with these kinds of road-blocks.

Sad.