Re: Linux on the desktop - it's come a long way, but is it there yet?

["Rich Braun" <user=44@nabble.blu.org>]

 David Hummel <[hidden email]>: 
>> If you just expect it to work, then before buying the hardware, you 
>> should investigate whether the type and level of operation you are 
>> expecting is supported by the available (preferably open source) 
>> drivers for that hardware.  I personally won't buy hardware unless I 
>> know it's well supported ... 

Derek Atkins <[hidden email]> 
> Also, you might want to try other distributions.  OpenSuse is not then 
> end-all, be-all of Linux Distros.  Before tossing out the baby with the 
> bathwater I'd also look at Ubuntu and/or Fedora.  They may have better 
> support or better tools for said support. 

Thanks:  both of you addressed the actual point I was making. 

To David, I respond:  Linux has long had a hardware cross-reference list that, 
I suppose, one could look up every item.  The reality for most of us is that, 
as experienced users, we have access to lots of different hardware of 
different vintages that we use to cobble together systems; or as neophyte 
users, they simply won't be looking up any cross-reference sheet before buying 
a system.  My posting concerned brand-new equipment of the biggest name 
brands; I'm sure the device drivers "support" what I have, but the internals 
have not been sufficiently tested and polished to support the configurations 
that I want to use (and that I have been using without trouble on the chief 
competition, Win XP, for years on a very wide variety of hardware 
configurations). Sure, what I'll wind up doing is going into my xorg.conf file 
whenever I have a whole day to deal with it and get the X settings set up 
precisely how they need to be, and then figure out which apps break things so 
I can tweak them as well--but this is 2008, why is this even necessary? 

To Derek:  at the office I have most every Linux, Windows and Mac distro under 
the sun.  (No, we don't have any Sun boxes. But that's about the only one I'm 
missing ;-)  As it happens, the latest openSUSE has more stuff working out of 
the box than any of the others I wrestle with from one day to the next, in 
particular the desktop stuff is relatively good.  But for only a narrowly 
defined set of desktop configurations, and not at all as easily reconfigured 
as the average Apple or Microsoft desktop. 

I'm challenging y'all to look at this from the eyes of the neophyte and 
imagine sending a box of PC parts and a URL to your grandmother to download an 
image, build a system, and set up her own Linux box from scratch with all the 
familiar browsing, word processing, and financial management apps.  My 
grandmother born in 1919 can do that--and she effectively has--with Microsoft 
environments, but openSUSE, kubuntu, et al are not ready for her yet. 

-rich 


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