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The Failures Of Desktop Linux
PDAJames writes "Maybe Linux isn't quite ready for the desktop after all. After an earlier, very positive evaluation of SuSE Linux Desktop, ZDNet UK has carried out a more in-depth review, running the system in a production environment for two weeks, and found it wanting. A key problem area was interacting with the corporate Windows network. When will this stuff finally be ironed out?"
The review is pretty positive, really. They admitted they were testing the most difficult situation -- non-technical people using Linux in a Windows environment -- and were impressed on many counts.
The fact is it's probably never going to be possible to switch operating systems without some minor glitches... switching will always cost money and time, so there's got to be a good reason to do so...
Novell is certainly not dead and has greatly fallen to the fud of NT. NDS and Novell provide the best NOS administration environment period! No lpdad is not an answer because its just a protocal and not a solution.
I use to be a fan of Caldera now SCO because of the promissed Novell integration.
Now lets wait for the next release of netware which is rumoured to have a linux kernel.
Relying on active directory is writing MFC programs and expect to port them to Unix.
http://saveie6.com/
It sounds like someone was trying to set up SAMBA without reading the documentation or they were lazy in matching the networks. Having used SAMBA in a mixed SUN and Microsoft environment, it was considered a godsend from both the Windows admins and the UN*X/SUN admins.
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
Every day I say "when this comes out, Linux will be ready" and then that thing comes out and I find something else to do just that same thing with. The problem is that if we say that coming to the latest advancements of proprietary OSes is all we need, as we have been there many times, then they (proprietary companies) come out with something else. I say Linux will be ready for the desktop when it can outpace the development of its competition. With as many people working on Linux as there is, I think that this shows good promise. I have seen so much in the two years I have used Linux, it is amazing that we have come this far in only two years. In the short term, I think that Linux 2.6 is very important and if you want to know why, then just read some of the articles on 2.6 and that will explain a lot. I think that the freedesktop.org standards need to be fully implemented and now the the linux standard base seems to have eliminated a lot of the RPM incompatibilities, we are on the road to easy software use and installation.
Explain to your boss that your apps aren't 100 percent interoperable between customer machines. Who cares if it saves money if you've managed to frustrate everyone at your company.
A perfect example is a sales and marketing type company with IT setting the standards. When your sales people have to spend more time re-learning the system and less time selling who's going to look stupid? Definitely not the sales team.
When the target stops moving.
Which will be roughly about the same time Bovines achieve lunar orbit.
and found it wanting. A key problem area was interacting with the corporate Windows network.
Well, actually the real problem is that Windows server software is wanting: it fails to conform to standard protocols and formats. If Windows server software was built from the ground up around IMAP, XML, HTML, HTTP, WebDAV, and other such protocols, then Linux desktops and Mac desktops would work well with it. While Windows currently nominally supports many of those protocols and formats, they are second class compared to Microsoft's proprietary protocols.
What's the solution? Get rid of the Windows servers. That also lowers licensing, administrative, and maintenance costs. And Windows clients can talk fairly well to Linux servers running open source software.
Try sticking a Windows box in a totally Linux environment, and see how that goes.
No NFS support, broken kerberos support, no NIS support that I know of, no ssh client or server, no X server so no remote apps. Sure, some of these things can be purchased and installed, but most of the windows versions subpar when compared with the real thing.
This study is like putting Michael Jordan on a special olympics basketball team, and then wondering why it didn't make the NBA finals.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Honestly, I don't see this as a joke. Linux, or any OS, should be evaluated by how well it does on its own merits. Complaining that it doesn't work well with Windows is like ... oh, say, evaluating an early automobile and complaining that there's no place to hitch up a horse. The question should be "Is the new technology inherently superior enough to what we've got now to justify changing?", not, "How well does the new technology mimic what we've got now?" And if the answer to the first question is "Yes" -- well, then, tell the carriage makers they're going to have to find a new job.
I now expect to get inundated with responses telling me that I don't understand the real world, that companies have too much invested in their Windows infrastructure to just switch everything over to Linux on a whim, etc. To which I say: bullshit. Lots of people had a great deal invested in the horse-and-carriage infrastructure. Changing over to automobiles required throwing away a lot of existing technology. But the overall benefit was well worth it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
companies that is.
You have this wonderful multi user OS and you use it on a single PC, arghhh.
Centralised computing is where most companies should be at, cheap disposable terminals on the desktop and a beast of a server under lock and key.
Linux will rule the enterprise desktop when companies grasp the mainfram had the right network architecture. Until then they're just wasting money.
Not sure why the poster got so bunged up over two interoperability criticisms.
The yahoo messenger thing and the outdated version of gaim is a bit of pain in the ass for a newbie but not a sysadmin. Good points all the way around on that one.
The LAN integration thing was interesting. I always end of with minor annoying bits of trouble with Windows networks until I load up LinNeighborhood and set the permissions on smbmnt and smbumount correctly for that app to work. We do this on the developer's desktops. We have tried all the KDE and gnome browsing tools and all that stuff. No go. Only LinNeighborhood really fit the bill.
Ok, what Windows browsing tools do you use?
I am using the samba browsing tool with Nautilus on Ximian Desktop2 as a try-out but I am already feeling the itch to get LinNeighborhood back.
What about you?
ACK
This isn't a very meaningful comparison, because you're focusing on installation problems. Try to imagine a world where Linux is installed before you get your PC. That's more like the world of the business desktop where Linux is heading.
Having said that, my Suse 8.2 distro recognizes everything in my box, and I've got more software than I know what to do with. There always seems to be an alternative if I can't get what I want. I've recently had to do a lot of work in Windows, and day after day I find it a major struggle. This is because I've been using Linux at home since 1996 and I don't do very much in Windows. Believe me, Linux on the desktop is more a matter of your current experience. If you're not used to Windows' particular way of doing things, you wouldn't find Linux difficult. But you might if you were required to install it for yourself.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I kinda wish that existed.
Microsoft, as much as I hate them, is everywhere. The agressive approach to converting people to Linux - forcing them onto Linux computers - isn't going to work all that well. People need to get over their fears of the alien OS, and, to do that, we need to co-exist, side-by-side, until that fateful moment when the M$ system crashes and we're the only one left running.
Seriously, Linux needs to be there in front of the common end-users' eyes for a while for them to start wanting to use it. That means Linux has to be able to work in Windows environments, and it will be graded based on how well it works with other Windows machines and server setups.
Nicholas Eckert
vidstudent
Apples and oranges. Linux doesn't revolutionize the desktop, as automobiles revolutionized transportation. Linux's big selling point is that it's cheaper than Windows. If it can't interoperate or be used without more training or something of this nature, then the price advantage disappears.
Besides, the automobile took some time before it caught on everywhere--horses were still used for some purposes in WWI, and I'm sure the army wasn't the only one.
Matt
Complaining that it doesn't work well with Windows is like ... oh, say, evaluating an early automobile and complaining that there's no place to hitch up a horse
Actually a better comparison would be evaluating a car and saying it doesn't fit on the existing roads. That is a legitimate complaint when you have years and dollars tied up into your existing highway infrastructure. New technology won't be adapted unless there's no significant barrier.
Nobody is going to design a new road just to be able to run Linux... especially not in the beginning stages.
--D
I don't think you've ever had to support a corporate network in your life. When you get out of school and into the real world, you're going to find that end users and their superiors make most of the software/hardware purchase decisions based on their needs, and not the "bottom line"
My favorite example to cite is a sales department that uses Palm Pilots.
When you purchase a palm, it comes with software, written to interopolate with your outlook. All your contacts, notes, calendars are synchronized perfectly with outlook just by installing the software, connecting the palm cradle to the PC and putting your palm in the cradle.
Linux on the other hand has about 8 groupware solutions out there, so the first question would be what to pick? Then you have to figure what you need so the linux PC can see the palm pilot. Then you have to either push the installations out, or roll your own distro that has all of the components you need to use your palm perfectly with the linux box.
It's a lot more trouble than it's worth when you can just send the palm pilot retail box to the end user and he/she can install it themselves.
Ok, there's plenty of posts that say "just get rid of Windows" as a solution to the interoperability problem. However, if I'm generous and give Apple and Linux each 10% of the desktop market, that still leaves 80% to MS. You don't throw out a product with 80% of the market just because you can't get your minority system to work correctly with it.
When will Linux take over? When it interoperates with everything, so that people can get used to using it. Then, you can slowly migrate systems as needed, instead of going all out with one system, then having to re-train all your workers, and iron out all the bugs at once.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I didn't discover something I couldn't automatically do in Linux, and would require a day's tinkering to get working.
Barely a day goes by that I don't do something in Linux that is impossible (or very much more difficult) to do in Windows. Especially automatic things. An example: I want to check every hour to see if a website has changed. No problem, three lines of shell script in a cron job.
Yes, getting hardware set up can be tough sometimes, especially if you have brand new hardware. Sometimes the community hasn't had time to write a driver, or in the case of video cards, the manufacturer has stonewalled requests for specifications.
Getting closed source apps working on Linux can be difficult too, since there isn't much you can do to debug or fix them.
Note that most of your complaints were with closed source software, quicktime, nvidia drivers, Opera. The reason you didn't get much help with those is because there's little the community can do to support such apps.
A sidenote though, mplayer RPMs from freshrpms.net, and a quick grab of the hacked up DLLs from mplayer's site and you are set with most video formats. You can blame that one on software patents, since distros would be all over mplayer and the codecs, making it as automatic as possible, if it wouldn't open them up to huge legal liabilities.
Anyway, I guess my point is, a lot of your troubles came from issues that Slashdotters are often railing against, software patents, and proprietary software.
It's not all ideological, as you have found out, we do have practical reasons for our views. IP laws are harming Free Software development in real, tangible ways.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
An infrastructure is not ripped out and replaced in a day -- or even two. I doubt that we'll see Linux being used for wholesale replacements of corporate desktops in the near future. Until that day does come, Linux needs to play nice with the current prevailing technology. Environments are not necessarily rated as reliable or not reliable based on the individual components but on how well it works overall.
You mention that you expect a number of these kinds of responses. This is because people who manage these kinds of environments understand that Windows is here to stay for the meantime. We have a lot of critical applications that only run under Windows for which there is no open source alternative, for example.
I can't comment on how hard it was to convert from teh horse and buggy to the automobile since I have no firsthand knowledge of the event and it's problems and wouldn't presume to have such.
Reviewers found that green made an inferior purple, and that until green was purple, purple would be the superior purple.
We had similar problems integrating Windows 3.11 PCs onto our Sun and Mac network[1]. They were completely crap at NFS and Appletalk. WindowsPCs will never be ready for the work environment until they can properly handle those two protocols.
Xix.
[1] Killed via CEO edict
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
This may be the dumbest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. I use PCs, SUNs, and Macs on a daily basis and all three have advantages and disadvantages. To say that SUSE is so amazingly superior to windows, the operating system that 95% of the computing public chooses to use, is ludicrous. Linux has a lot of great advantages, but all types of machines on a network should be able to play together.
Case in point is my university's network. We have SUNs, HPs, Linux boxes, Windows machines, and Macs all on the same network. They all rely on machines running various OSes for file servers, etc. It all has to play nicely together.
You think its bullshit that systems should be interoperable? Well guess what, thats why Linux will be a second class OS for years to come. It isn't the top dog now, and unless it is pleasant to switch to it isn't ever going to happen.
Computer: Libungif.so.012b conflicts with Libungif.so.013a, Unable to install software.
User: What? All I wanted was this cute screen saver with the Linux Mascot.
Linux is fast, Linux is stable, but Linux is far from user friendly.
Do you think any Windows user will understand that the have to use the "Make" command just to install a KDE theme? They just want to double click the installer and run the damn thing. And some of them don't even do that.
Did you know, that the early automobiles in London's cobbled streets, they were restricted to a speed of 4 MPH and were required to be preceded by a man carrying a red warning flag? All to not would not disrupt the horses and buggies on the road. That's not just an urban legend, and I'm sure you can see what that did to automobile performance.
How Linux and Linux software and formats interacts with for example Windows is not just a question of infrastructure and sunk cost. It's also about what you can do with Linux in a (desktop) world where 90%+ is Windows. A company can choose that they want to run a car and not a horse-and-buggy. But they can't make everybody else do the same, and if they have to proverbially run around with a red flag at 4MPH (lack of applications, incompatibilities, format lock-ins, suppliers or customers using Windows), what is then the advantage?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What the poster wants is a pipe dream. Linux is not Windows, and it has it's own set of rules and design guidelines. A Unix network is a totally different beast from a NTLM/Active Directory network. THe protocols used are standard, and do not come in a package.
What teams such have Samba have done is pretty amazing by all accounts. They have gone from NOTHING, to a product which can enable a Linux server to server a Windows network without loosing many abilities.
The otherway is different. Yes a Linux computer can access Windows networks, and of course, no it won't behave just like Windows. But it does a damned mean job of accessing NFS shares.
You have to keep in perspective what we fight against. Creating interoperbility with Windows is chasing a moving target. MS will keep adding new things, like differnet encryption in XP, different encryption in Server 2003, and we will keep playing catch up.
This is a never ending cycle. For Linux to "win" the desktop, we need a clear goal of our own set that has advangates over Windows.
Yes, we need interoperbility, and we have that. It's not hard to set up a Linux SMB server, move Windows shares to it, and map it out over Samba and NFS, but it isn't plug and play, and probably never will be.
What it gives us though is a stepping block in order to migrate other boxes. Once Windows is out of the picture (as it is at my company), 100% interoperbility ceases to matter, and it becomes WIndows that needs to interoperate with us.
My two cents.
"Can you use a Linux system successfully in a Windows-dominated environment? That's what SuSE's Linux Desktop is designed to facilitate. We find that you can, although there are plenty of glitches to iron out."
Thats the article summary. Linux doesn't inter-operate with Windows perfectly just like Windows didn't inter-operate with the TSO editor and job-streams written in IBM's JCL language. So what?
For Linux to succeed it doesn't have to be perfect, and it certainly doesn't have to inter-operate with Window perfectly. Anyone who EXPECTS it to do that has simply made up their minds to continue using Windows already and is doing the "test" to satisfy the requirement that they do some sort of comparison shopping.
Nobody in the Open Source movement will be satisfied with Linux being adopted for any other reason than that it is the best choice. It's hard to imagin how it can be both the best choice and 100 percent compatible with Windows at the same time.
If there were nothing wrong with Windows there would be no Linux in the first place.
I don't think the article is saying "don't switch" they are just saying "it will involve some work". But we all kinda know that. Small shops or small departments switching will be a lot easier. For now, the most important switchers are individuals. As the number of people using Linux at home grows the argument at the office will get easier. Thats the way it happened with Windows too.
Until you try to hook things up to an MS domain. That's where it always falls apart.
People forget, but there was a time when there were other word processors besides Word. In fact, many of them had bizarre and confusing interfaces (Wordperfect for DOS, anyone?) When people had to do the inevitable switch to something new, they may have been befuddled for a while, but eventually, they got the hang of it.
I really don't think the issue is user acceptance near as much as ADMINISTRATOR acceptance. To get that, you're going to have to play nice with the existing infrastructure (after all, it was there first).
People can adjust to OpenOffice - we've done it here. But to replace our domain system with Linux would be near impossible. Forget the investments we'd be throwing out the door - think about all the other things like mapped shares, home directories, etc. It would be a massive undertaking to recreate all of that for very little reward.
I know MS plays their little games of half-assed interoperablility ("Windows 2000 is now based on LDAP and Kerberos! Well... Except for these little changes...") But if Linux is going to want to compete it's going to have to try harder.
Xandros has done this, but it's closed source. Kinda defeats the purpose, no?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The problems you encountered (sound card, nVidia) are 100% installation issues.
They have nothing to do with Linux being ready for the desktop. I can install brand new hardware in an XP box and Windows will not know how to handle it. That is, until I install the drivers from the manufacturer. But that doesn't mean XP isn't ready for the desktop, does it?
If you had purchased a computer with Linux pre-installed, you would not have had those problems. If you had only purchased components with good Linux support, you would not have had those problems.
Those driver issues will only be solved when Linux has 50%+ of the desktop market. That's plain economics. The vidoe card manufacturers don't all support Linux to the same degree.
And claiming something should work with Linux because it is "from the most popular manufacturer out there" shows your lack of understanding. It doesn't matter how popular a manufacturer is. It matters how well that manufacturer works with the Linux community.
This is why Microsoft needs to be forced to open up its protocols. The DOJ settlement partly does this, but I think you need to pay money to see the code?
Samba is good but with each new Windows release they insert more proverbial spanners.
That't not the big advantage for me. The big advantage is that I don't have to *accept* the XP EULA. I want to own my computer, not just use it to house software that somebody else is letting me use for a while, under terms that they can choose to change at anytime. I won't tolerate that.
Linux does not need to revolve around Windows. Windows is not the center of the universe. As long as a host of applications run under Linux that satisfy the requirements of the user then there's nothing to complain about.
/Direct3D can be done in Linux as far as office productivity goes.
Almost every function with the exception of DirectX
To say that SUSE is so amazingly superior to windows, the operating system that 95% of the computing public chooses to use, is ludicrous.
Hold it right there, pal.
To say that 95% of the computing public chooses to use Windows is ludicrous.
Fact is the vast majority of Windows users did not choose it, it was simply preinstalled.
Furthermore, the fact that most people use Windows does not make Windows superior, nor does it preclude another product from being superior to Windows.
The basics of Active Directory have been around now for almost 4 years. I contend that it's not that it can't be done, but that it hasn't been the focus of the Samba group.
Want proof? Xandros HAS done it. They have Domain support out of the box. Of course, it's closed source...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I don't see what the problem is.
My Mandrake laptop plugs in quite well. This box has run with Wins configurations, DHCP, and Netware with no problems. It's run on private sector and government networks. Anyone who's ever plugged in to a government network knows how quirky they can be. Yet still no problems
In fact, I can't think of the last time my TCPIP stack got corrupted in Linux (or any major problems for that matter). Although, it happened to me in XP last week. It sounds to me that the people writing the article didn't have the tools needed to make a fair comparison. This is not the fault of Linux. Rather, the fault of the editors at C|Net for letting this stinker through.
The beauty of SQL is that it's incredibly easy to migrate from one database engine to another.
You have an ease-of-use bonus because Access is so ridiculously featureless, so it's not like you're losing your stored procedures and triggers like if you were switching from SQL Server/MSDE to PostgreSQL or Interbase.
As for training, I think someone else already mentioned, but most people don't really know how to use "Windows" anyway; your average computer user is too clueless to know how to remove a program he's installed. The issue isn't navigating the operating system itself, but the programs they'd be using. Mozilla/Konqueror do a beautiful job of intuitive use, and OpenOffice's look being not very unlike Microsoft Word/Excel eases that transition tremendously too.
I think the real problem most corporations are having is finding a suitable replacement for group policies and user permissions. I know this is one of the goals of GNOME, so I'm going to lay off of them there, but most corporations don't want their users screwing with many settings -- it dramatically reduces IT department staffing needs. I mean, even ACLs aren't implemented in any stable kernel yet (though I'm aware they will be in 2.6.x), and these are important when you have 5,000 employees of different access levels accessing the same shares of a file server in the datacenter.
Insightful??? Gee...that's funny...I could have sworn I was using SLIP and PPP to dialin to my ISP from a Slackware box back in the early/mid-90's. I must have been hallucinating.
lack of AOL support != lack of dialup Internet connectivity.
Another difference:
With windows you don't need the "right tools". They're part of the system
With linux, you need them, and if they , at C|Net didn't have them, it probably means they are not that obvious to identify and/or find for the average end user.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Versatile: No question. Simply look at the number of architectures that Linux will run on compared with Windows. From the IBM Linux wristwatch to a scattering of top 500 supercomputers. Linux is well represented across the a wide range. API versatility is there too. From win32 (via winelib) to POSIX to Java libraries. Probably 90% of Windows software runs perfectly well or has a functional replacement for Linux. The converse is certainly not true!
Reliability: No argument there. It seems to be a curse/truism that all large software projects have bugs, but the architecure of unix/linux is undoubtably more reliable than the mish-mash that is Windows. Not to mention the bugs the MS themselves introduce. DRDOS anyone? Does it concern anyone that MS's attempts at crippling competitors' products might have an unwanted side-effect of reducing stability of their core product?
Security: Security wasn't even on the radar for MS, until recently. The notion of provably secure architecure is simply incompatible with closed-source, marketing driven software.
Power: I think my comment on 'versatility' mostly covers this. For a more concrete example, take an arbitary shell script from Linux, and try to replicate the functionality from the Windows shell.
NOT Microsoft: This is probably the point that caused the Flaimbait moderation. But, surely choice is good as an end in itself? Software ought to be a commodity, and even if Microsoft software was a bastion of technical excellence, having a choice is nothing but beneficial.
Sounds like microsoft's strategy. Make subtle deviations in the networking protocols from published standards so other OS's don't play well together. Everyone knows that a standard that microsoft adopts isn't the exact same as the published standard.
For example you have W3 HTML and IE HTML. You have Java and you have MS Java. If anyone using a non-windows box has problems running a java program or applet, and you can't figure it out, odds are it was written with a microsoft program.
Though I've known this for a long time, it keeps hitting home every weekend as I travel to a small town flea market and sell used systems + offer cheap system repair and troubleshooting.
Most people out there simply want to buy a computer that runs "all the stuff I run across on the store shelves". I've tried selling perfectly good used PowerMac systems and run into this, just like I run into this if I have Linux pre-loaded on a PC that I put up for sale.
You find roughly 1 in 100 people who praise the fact that you're using Linux (or a Mac for that matter), and they typically spend the next 5 or 10 minutes chatting with you about the superiority of your choice, etc. Then they walk off without buying. (They've already got plenty of computer stuff at home.)
To the general public, Linux being "ready for the desktop" simply means it'll easily let them install and run all the "bargain bin" software on CD-ROM they picked up at Costco or WalMart, their copy of Microsoft Office they paid hundreds of dollars for a few years ago, and they really want to buy after they get their new computer.
This is, ultimately, why Linux won't ultimately be ready for "the desktop" for years and years, if ever. Apple still can't seem to pull off even a consistent 5% market share, and they have hundreds of commercially available software titles!
A Microsoft road would only fit Microsoft vehicles. If we draw the compairison to other M$ bloaty things, such as a browser that has a 1G footprint or a text document that consumes 50kB to say "Hello World", a microsoft car would be powered by three horses in a squirl cage, have 6 steel wheels that only fit on M$ patented rails, gets 2 miles to the gallon. Yes it would consume M$ gasoline as well as M$ geneticaly altered hay. Of course only one person at a time could ride in it and they would have no control over where it goes. The driver would also have to prove their identity via tatoed barcode and RFID tags, though the thing is actually leased and owned by Microsoft. Windshields and a roof would be expensive extra purchases. The horse's diet would be so poor that their performance would fail in two years, requiring the purchase of a new car. There is no owner's manual. The rider would suffer daily crashes of horse dung and often the gasoline would ignite and kill both horse and driver. The express purpose of the vehicle would be to keep everyone where they belong and mindful of their property.
There is no compairing Microsoft's hideous software to any practical device. Any physical device that was so difficult to use, performed so poorly, costs so much and worked so poorly with all established hardware standards would never be made. Ford made the automobile cheap and rugged. It was made to run on the poor roads of the day, be easy to fix and purchase by the common man. His express desire was to make it possible for people to get to know their neighbors, city and country.
Nobody is going to design a new road just to be able to run Linux.
No one ever designed anything to run Windoze either, despite the cute little marketing stickers. Microsoft's hand in hardware "standards" has all been negative, Winmodems, the destruction of unified graphics standards, web cams that require NetMeeting or don't work, sound cards that don't work, scanners and other devices that must be bought again on OS "upgrade". Their new software does not run on older hardware and their older software does now work with new hardware.
In short, M$ blows and it has given everyone a terrible impression of home computing. People are afraid to install and use software much less write any to do useful things. Because Windoze is so touchy, ureliable and sensless, they imagine free software to be a thing of vast complexity impossible to set up, grasp and use. Idiots like these ZDNet people perpetuate these negative impressions when the reality is that free software is extensively documented, configured with text files, extreemly robust and far cheaper to run and use. Because of M$'s bad reputation, people continue to purchase $2,000 computers that are little more than $400 generic computers with Windoze installed and "configured".
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Right, wow insightful, like that new happens on Windows networks. After your description I'm sure that bug will get fixed right away. Are you sure it wasn't a problem between screen and chair? Or maybe the network was designed to not let you have access unless
Sheesh. What utter crud. Expect more and expect it often.
You're in a very, very small minority who actually chooses operating systems based on their EULAs.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I work in tech support, and in doing so I've learned...
most home users choose Windows
a startling number of people have no idea what is on their computer, and.....
Linux is too difficult for most non-geeks
Windows XP is too difficult for most non-geeks.
Linux is different than Windows, and only more difficult when it doesn't come preinstalled.
Most of that 95% didn't buy the computer because of what it is- but what it does. Most of the people bought it because it runs Windows, which runs the software they want to use.
I don't think OEMs put Windows on computers because it is free, or cheap, or anything like that. They put it on computers because Windows is the REASON that people buy the computers.
No reason to lie.
"With linux, you need them, and if they , at C|Net didn't have them, it probably means they are not that obvious to identify and/or find for the average end user."
What end-users at a typical company these days know how to manage a Windows network connection?
Your analogy doesn't add up.
And who the hell looks for Linux apps at C|Net anyway?!? I have a hunch this might be your problem -- maybe a little ill informed but making an opinion anyway?
In addition, claiming that the "right tools" aren't "part of the system" (differentiate between a tool and the OS) in Linux is ridiculous. Windows has a number of services and tools built in, but nothing so specific that you'd have to hunt for a Linux equivilent in any modern distro.
For example, a typical Red Hat installation (or anything else, really) has enough software (already installed and configured) to log onto a Windows network and happily share files and print. This isn't opinion up for debate, this is plain fact. I've been doing this since I got into Linux, actually, about three years ago.
Just to help the logic-impaired, don't go flaming about "Ooh it's so hard to get SAMBA working." For one, these days, it's as easy as doing it on Windows. For two, again, what end-users do you know in a corporate environment that manage their network connection?
Sorry for the rambling.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.