On Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 21:25:43 +0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 08:36:59AM +1100, Benno wrote: > >> We have a chicken-egg problem here of the desktop community not being >> big enough that every printer is tested and provides drivers for >> Linux, but it is exactly reasons like that that hinder the growth of >> the community. >> >> Maybe it means desktop Linux companies need to knock on more doors >> to try and get more printers being sold with a "Works with Linux" >> sticker or something. > >There already is... >...look for the printers with "Postscript" written on them.
Of course the problem here is that there aren't that many printers with "Postscript" written on them. And most of them are considerably more expensive than those without postscript written on them. (And of course printers we just a handy example, since it was recently discussed on list, but the same can apply to any other peripheral as well.) >This problem has been solved for many years. The difficulty that we are >experiencing is a reflection of the inability of Australian consumers >to demand high quality products when they go shopping. Giving them a >wider range of printer drivers will NOT fix this fundamental problem. Strange, I was discussing this with colleagues over lunch a couple of days a ago. One of our theories was that device manufacturers don't want to release drivers because it would show up the hardware for the shit that it is. But still at the end of the day your general consumer (i.e: target of the desktop), doesn't know, or want to know, and often will just take whatever the sales droid at the local Hardly Normal tells them, which is most likely going to be whatever product has the biggest margin (or has an associated salesperson competition), which makes our job as advocates of desktop Linux harder. Cheers, Benno -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
