On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Bill Oliver <[email protected]> wrote: > > I think that there are no distros that "just work." In fact there are no > *operating systems* that "just work." That's why Windows comes installed
Exactly. > on most machines -- it has been tuned to that machine. If you were to buy a > new generic copy of Windows and install it on a random box, it would likely > not "just work." In fact, there are broad categories of older machines for Actually, I do that quite frequently, and it works just fine. On laptops you usually run into a few problems with vendor-specific ACPI devices and sometimes the keyboard doesn't work, but laptops are more like appliances than PCs anyways. (You should be buying a full hardware/software stack from a single vendor if you're buying a laptop). > which Windows 7 doesn't even *pretend* to work on. I think that Pentium 4 is the oldest chip I've put Windows 7 on. It's a bit slow, but it works fine. (I use it for testing web apps for compatibility with older versions of Internet Explorer... specifically IE 7). > But all of that is transparent to someone who just goes out and buys a > computer with Windows because all the installation and tuning is already > done. If you do something that makes your machine different, then all sorts > of problems arise. Do a Google search on "HP Code Purple" for instance. HP is one of the worst offenders for proprietary vendor-specific hardware. HP builds many components and many solution stacks from the ground up as a single solution. You can buy an HP printer, HP desktop, and HP laptop, and an HP phone, and the phone will work with the printer which will work with the laptop which will sync to the desktop. If you're in the HP walled garden, it works great! If you're trying to get something like a CUPS print server between the HP printer and the HP phone, congrats! You just broke the walled garden! Now print-from-IP is broken, because HP uses a proprietary print-from-IP protocol. > In contrast, when you install a Linux distro on your box, it's like > installing a fresh copy of Windows. There will likely something that isn't > perfect. You either have the choice of changing distros or getting on the > web and seeing who else had the same installation issues and fixed them. > > I dont' mind tinkering, so it doesn't bother me if I have to download and > alternate driver, etc. But, if you want a distro that "just works" on a > specific box, you likely would have to do a search for that particular box > and see what issues people have had when they installed linux. Or buy a complete solution from a vendor. Like system76 or Lenovo. > And, some problems are universal. A couple of years ago, for instance, > there were issues in all distros with Radeon support. Now those have mostly > been fixed. Linux gfx drivers suck even more now than they did then. Instead of not compiling or starting, now they compile and start, but they're completely broken and cause crashes in odd situations. That most GL code from Linux sources is written by untrained people that don't have specific testing proceedures doesn't help either. Anyways, Debian is a freaking tool. It's a rock-solid stable distro which has terrible driver support. However, it is great for torture-testing hardware to diagnose hardware instabilities because it doesn't get a lot of unrelated errors in the way of that task. Sorry if you thought I was going all "Debian-sanctity" on you there Roy. I've used many RealTek NICs, and they all suck really bad. People who use RealTek devices and then complain that they don't work... well... argh. Buy a cheap PCI NIC. You'll save yourself a lot of pain. -- Registered Linux Addict #431495 For Faith and Family! | John 3:16! fsdev.net | 0x5f3759df.org | chrismiller.at -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup
