Originally posted by: Brentx
Originally posted by: scottws
I've tried to move to Linux a few times and failed. It's always hardware related. I have an ATi Radeon 9800XT and you know how that can be with ATi drivers. I also have a Motorola WPCI810G wireless Ethernet adapter that isn't even recognized under Linux. Attempts to utilize the Windows driver with ndiswrapper have failed misearably.
Talk all you want about how easy Linux is... it's not for the user that's used MS-DOS since 2.01 and hasn't even had a sniff of UNIX, or MAX OS, or OS/2, or anything non-Microsoft. Installing programs in my experience was a hit-or-miss affair. I didn't know where anything resided. I couldn't play Linux 3-D games because my video drivers didn't install. Attempts to create kernel modules told me I needed the kernel source. Got that, needed the GCC compiler. Got that, it needed three other things. Got one of those, it needed three other things. Et cetera. After I finally succeeded getting my video drivers working, a subsequent upgrade of the driver brought me back to square one with it not working again after nearly a month spent getting it working the first time.
Linux is easy once you get things installed. But that's the catch, isn't it?
I will give you that. Linux can be hard to configure if you have weird devices, or "soft" devices, where half of the devices calculations are offloaded to the CPU. However, once you really get the hang of Linux, and know where things start running and how to edit and find the proper config files to edit, everything starts to fall into place.
I started using Linux mainstream about 6 months ago, and I just finished configuring a SAMBA server based on Debian without any GUI installed. Just keep at it and you will eventually get it. There were many times in those 6 months where I would have liked to go back to Windows, but I wouldn't let myself do it (unless I needed to game or write up a power point presentation
😛).
I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent computer user - I've been using PCs since the MS-DOS days, have a couple of engineering degrees, have used UNIX before, and write software for a living. But, I use Windows because 99% of the time, it does what I need it to do without me having to spend several hours screwing around with it trying to get it to work.
I have several complaints about Linux - first of all, nothing is standardized. There are something like 200 different distributions, and every one of them does things differently, so that when you try to configure something, you have to hunt around & try to figure out which of 187847823734832934 different config files you have to edit. And forget about trying to follow any online instructions if they aren't for the specific distribution & version you're using...
I recently gave up on trying to use Linux for a HTPC - mostly due to lack of hardware support. Sure, when I installed Ubuntu (5.10) everything seemed fine at first, until KDE locked up after about 2 minutes. Seems that Ubuntu doesn't install the nVidia drivers. Ok, so I need to install those separately. I can live with that. Hmmm...apt-get only gives me an older version of the driver (older than the one on nVidia's site), but it seems to be working ok...that is, until I try to use the TV-out - everything is a lovely shade of purple. So we'll try the new drivers. Following nVidia's instructions, I just run this script (after downloading the compiler, kernel headers, kernel source, and a bunch of other stuff that should have already been installed), change some environment variables to point to the correct version of the compiler (seems that their installer doesn't like the fact that the kernel was compiled with a different version of GCC), and reboot. And, I'm greeted with a nice blank screen. This was after spending over a week getting MythTV compiled & running. And I never could get the TV tuner card or remote control to work like they should. In Windows, on the other hand, I had everything up & running in an afternoon.
My next big complaint is with quality control. Every time I've tried Linux, I've seen quality problems - from frequent crashes & error messages in KDE (just doing things like browsing files), to installation failures (I was trying to install Ubuntu on an old Compaq server, and discovered that support for my RAID card mysteriously disappeared in 5.10, even though it should be supported). Maybe my expectations are just too high - at the company I work for, if a piece of software doesn't work, it doesn't go out the door.
And finally, there's the issue of documentation. Most of the Linux software I've used simply isn't documented well. Installation instructions are often incomplete and written for a specific distribution (and don't work with others), and online help is incomplete or is written for the programmer and not the everyday user. Again, maybe I'm just expecting too much.
If Linux is ever going to replace Windows, it needs to get over these issues. I'll probably try Linux again at some point, but for everyday use, I'm sticking with Windows.
