On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Mike Connors <[email protected]> wrote:
> Russell Senior wrote: > > I'll just mention my recent Just-Works anecdote regarding printing. I > > have set up an Ubuntu install for my computer-averse 70 yo mother. > > Mostly it's been sitting unused. She lives across town. She needs a > > document printed. I haven't set up printing on the thing. Printer > > has been sitting unused, unpowered for 6 months, minimum. I plug it > > in to the USB port and power, start up Open Office, load the document, > > click the print icon, pause ... whir-whir, printed document comes > > out. No muss, no fuss. I was kind of impressed. > I'll be honest, I would never have expected it to just work that > painlessly. I was just researching if I could connect my Nokia phone to > my Linux box to get photos/files off of it. Of course there's no Nokia > suite for Linux. But a few people said Linux just sees it as a mass > storage device and you interact it with link any other. Although, I'm a > bit skeptical about the getting it connected via Bluetooth. > > I think there's still this notion that if you want to use Linux as your > daily computer you'll waste your life away tinkering w. it to get it to > work w. common peripherals. > > Which is ironic, because Linux supports a wide variety and large number > of devices. So, I think there's an intersection between the distro & > hardware that you're using that sometimes can end up in a fatal head-on > collision. And this is what sticks in our minds, the horror stories, not > the success stories, and makes skeptics and cynics out of the best of us. > > As opposed to the Microsoft world, where smaller failures more often are commonplace and expected, so they don't stick out particularly over the benefits. -wes _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
