Slashdot Mirror
Why the World Is Not Ready For Linux
eldavojohn writes "While many users reading Slashdot embrace Linux, ZDNet is running an article on why the rest of the world isn't ready. One note for Linux developers: 'Stop assuming that everyone using Linux (or who wants to use Linux) is a Linux expert.' While a lot of these topics have been brought up as both stories and comments on Slashdot, this article pretty much sums up why Vista could be absolutely terrible, and people would still believe there is no other option." From the article: "The one area of Linux ownership and use where it becomes apparent that there's an assumption that everyone who uses Linux is an expert is hardware support. Your average user doesn't have the time, the energy or the inclination to deal with uncertainty. Also, they usually only have the one PC to play with. Hardware just has to work. There's a very good reason why Microsoft spends a lot of time on hardware compatibility — it's what people want."
Fedora had no problems detecting the hardware. So, after some googling we discovered that there were separate Windows drivers for the SATA drives that came with the motherboard. We had to create a floppy (!!!!) with the drivers that had to be inserted at a specific step during the windows install. Luckily my son insisted on getting a floppy drive, otherwise we would not be able to install windows.
Fedora Core 4 installed with no problems..
...richie - It is a good day to code.
2. Fully support NTFS so I can dual boot and not only be able to work with my linux files from linux and my windows files from windows. At least have full read-write support on NTFS so I can really be able to use it in linux.
Just to be clear here... The problem with NTFS hasn't been a religious or ideaological hurdle. Nearly all Linux advocates agree that full NTFS support would be a boon to getting more people to use Linux. Microsoft knows this. Microsoft has not made the NTFS spec freely available because it could easily undermine their dominance on the desktop.
People volunteering their time have had to painstakingly reverse-engineer the NTFS file format. This is hard. How much confidence must you have in an NTFS driver before using it? A buggy driver could wipe out not only your Linux files, but all of your windows files as well.
Progress is being made. These folks seem to have a fairly well tested set of tools for NTFS access in Linux. But I would guesstimate that Linux is at least 1 year away from solid NTFS support.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
It's probably why I've had an easier time with Linux than most. The bulk of my Linux time has been spent with YellowDogLinux which is the dominant PowerPC distro put out by Terrasoft. It works on a variety of Power PC platforms but it's original target and probably still the bulk of it's user base was PowerPC Macintosh hardware. Was it as easy as point and click OS X installation? Not quite but pretty close. And it worked for me out of the box practically on every install.