Windows or Linux for parents' PC?

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Duane Morin writes:
| I dont know about your folks, but I'll mention that the primary reason I
| can't switch my dad to Linux is his collection of USB toys.  He's always
| getting something new that he expects to just plug in and work (his most
| recent toy was a set of binoculars that have a digital camera in them).
| Many of these USB devices do not have Linux support.  It would be nice if
| they all just supported some kind of generic storage driver, but they do
| not, for the most part.
|
| If it weren't for that I would switch him to Linux with mozilla, xine or
| mplayer, cdparanoia.... in a heartbeat.

Another possibility, if/when your dad is contemplating a new machine,
is  switching him to OSX.  A few months ago, out of my wife's growing
frustration with Windows, I got her to try a  Powerbook.   Within  an
hour or so, she was saying how much she loved it, and how much better
nearly everything worked there than on Windows.  Macs have better USB
support  that  just  about  anyone, and all our USB toys seem to work
fine on the PB by just plugging them in. A few days ago, she took the
big  step  of  unplugging  the  Windows  box  and carrying it and its
display down the hall to the spare bedroom  where  it's  sitting  not
plugged in.  The space on the desk had become more valuable.

Now we just need to get linux to recognize USB gadgets as well as OSX
seems to do.  Linux is in general a better system than OSX. But there
are still a lot of problems with USB support.

Funny thing is that OSX gets it wrong when you unplug a  USB  device.
It  pops  up a window that chides you for not doing it properly.  But
the way to do it  properly  is  something  that  neither  of  us  can
remember, and is different for different devices.  Finding the proper
way takes much longer than just unplugging the device, accepting  the
chiding, and clicking on the OK button. So in reality, Apple punishes
you more for doing it properly than they do for just unplugging.

It does remind me of some advice that I read years  ago:  You  should
always  "turn  off" computing devices by unplugging them.  The reason
was that this will happen eventually, when you have a power  failure,
someone  trips  over the power cord, etc.  If the device can't handle
this, you want to know about it now rather than at some time  in  the
future.  If you learn about its problems early on, you can either fix
them or document the problems and how to recover.  If you wait  until
the  device  is  in  regular  use and nobody remembers anything about
setting it up, a power failure will be a much bigger disaster to your
operation.  The general principle applies to comm links as well as to
power supplies, of course.

Not that I always follow this advice ...