Beso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Tue, 07 Aug 2007 22:17:07 +0200:
> you're wrong! the bcm4310 is supported and currently working fine with > bcm43xx. > you just have to [snip a whole series of steps, some of them "scary" steps] OK, this is a bit of a rant, but anyway... I'm a pretty die-hard Linux supporter, I doubt anyone would argue that, but the above is /certainly/ one reason Linux doesn't have a greater share than it does. "Just" have to do, yeah, right. And for most people, they "just" have to do a similarly daunting series of steps to honestly say they've climbed Mt. Everest. There's no "just" about it. Sure, a newbie (or even an "oldie" =8^) can be hand-held thru the various steps, one by one, but it's not trivial by any stretch, even for the Gentoo target audience who doesn't bat an eye at compiling their entire system, and they are definitely not your "average Joe". Honestly, when one has to do all sorts of stuff including grabbing software from multiple sites, excising a firmware blob from the middle of something, and configuring by hand the system to use it, there's no way I can see that fitting the description "supported and working fine". Rather, it seems to me a more accurate claim would be that it "can be made to work, provided one jumps thru a series of possibly scary hoops." Sure, one can reassure the reader that it's not all that hard, provided one is patient and can execute a set of instructions in given order, but that doesn't change the fact that it's more "can be made to work" than "working fine", or that there's more to it than the triviality a "just" might imply. IMO, we don't help ourselves by pretending such problems don't exist, as when people /do/ encounter issues, as they will (and MS isn't immune either, people are just more familiar with the issues there and /used/ to taking the machine to the experts for malware and bug extermination periodically), it simply reinforces the stereotypes of Linux not being ready for the normal computer user. </rant> -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
