Trevor Farrell wrote:
> Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
>
> > At 09:12 AM 03/21/2000 -0800, Tom Berkley wrote:
> > >Sean
> > >
> > >I cannot relate at all to what you are talking about. After 1 year
> > >playing with linux and using five different distros, I use Mandrake 7.0
> > >(GL edition) on both my laptop and my dual celeron smp box with only one
> > >problem that I had to work around. Mandrake 7.0 is a stud muffin linux
> > >and if you cannot get it to work, then you probably did not pay any
> > >attention to the hardware compatibility issues. Learn more and quit
> > >venting your frustrations here. There is a LOT of documentation and you
> > >have a lot of reading ahead of you.
> >
> > Tom. see my response on this. I am sorry, your attitude is a major reason
> > linux has never had a major amount of commercial market share (and as long
> > as the linux vendors have this same attitude, commercial users will stay
> > away in droves). I'm not trying to flame anyone here, but if my Foobar
> > CDROM worked in rev 6.1, there is no excuse for it suddenly not working in
> > Rev 7.0 (unless it is something that was explicitly deprecated). This kind
> > of nonsense happens all the time in the linux world (and is the major
> > reason the ISP I work with switched from linux to freebsd 2 years ago).
>
> I couldn't agree more, for Linux to be accepted by the general public as a
> realistic alternative, it must install and work in most cases WITHOUT one
> needing to read the fine documentation. If "you have a lot of reading ahead of
> you" then Mr average computer user will simply use the (inferior) oposition
> offering despite it costing more and offering less, SIMPLY BECAUSE IT WORKS!
> (or is seen to, 'cause the install works!) My CDrw has a firmware bug, and
> wont work under Linux (until I upgrade cdrecord) but it does work under
> Windows 95, so is the "fault" the CDrw, or Linux - most non-computer-oriented
> people (the MAJORITY of computer users) will say that if it works under
> Windows and not Linux, it must be Linux that's broken.
I don't quite consider myself a newbie anymore, but I'm nowhere near being an
expert either. My first experience with Linux was a Macmillan release of Red Hat
5.2 and since then I've used Red Hat 6, SuSE 6.3 and now Mandrake 7.02. My first
impression after installing RH5.2 was 'now what'. But since then, I've fallen in
love with Linux! I don't think that the 'general public' even cares what they're
computers OS is, just as long as they can type an email or letter, and browse the
internet. If that's all you're doing on your computer, you're missing out on the
features that Linux gives you anyway, so why bother? I understand the
frustration when you go out and pay for something and it doesn't perform the way
it was supposed to (Partition Magic 4.0 would not work on my Aptiva AT ALL with
the version of Win98 that was pre installed on the computer, and that was $70!)
I've had *plenty* of experience buying software AND hardware to find that all it
did was sit there freeze my computer! I've sent email to ATI asking why they
won't make a driver for their Rage Fury video card under BeOS 4.5 (another OS
that I'm using) and they said 'talk to Be' - didn't I pay the same $140 that
windows customers did? I learned something from that though; Be, inc. has a team
of 30 engineers working for them and they still manage to support quite a wide
range of hardware and manage to put out some pretty good software. MS is just
down the road from me in Redmond, WA. and they have a HUGE company with employees
numbering in the thousands, and they don't support every new piece of hardware on
the market today and what they do support many times is just as if they didn't.
In fact, there's not a hardware manufacturer out there that would dare release a
product without windows drivers, how can you compete with that? I've got to say,
the only cost to me for Mandrake 7.02 was the time to download and the CD-R to
burn the iso image on. That's how you compete! Think of the latest release from
Redmond - 30 million lines of code!!! A 500MB footprint!!! You'll need 256MB of
RAM just to make it run comfortably (MS says it'll run on 64MB, of course if you
want to do anything besides stare at a blue screen, you'll need 256). You've
just reduced your fast, new system to that of Win3.1 running on an i386!
Sorry to rant for so long - I've only recently signed on to this list, but can we
please move on?
Sincerely, Michael Holt
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
