Falling Hardware Prices Favor Linux

An anonymous reader sends us to a blog posting arguing that, as hardware prices fall below $250 for laptops and desktops, Linux should gain as the Microsoft tax stands out in sharper relief. "In previous years, if you were spending US$1500 and up on a laptop, the Microsoft tax you were paying didn't seem like such a big deal. XP or Vista was pre-installed, fairly convenient... But as the price of hardware for small basic machines comes down, (think under US$250 by the end of next year), then software price starts to become a big issue. Why would you pay the price of your new laptop again just for the software, when all you want to do is really basic things?"

Comments

Serving the diners or the cooks?

[shanen]

Linux will never 'take off' until the Linux people stop answering almost every question with the equivalent of "Go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." Most people just want to at a tasty Linux sandwich, and they have no aspirations to be master chefs.

As far as I know, Ubuntu is the only distro that mostly understands this. Just a coincidence that it's the most popular desktop?

Re:Serving the diners or the cooks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, I used to think Linux people were bad with answering questions, until I got a job revolving around Windows CE. Every Microsoft "expert" out there tells you URRR LOOK IN DUH PLATFURM BULDER MANUAL LOL when the manual is so disjointed and nonlinear you'd swear it was done by the author of the House of Leaves. Or a particular article in the manual never got updated to pertain to the newest version of Windows CE you're using such that you're wasting your time messing with registry keys that Windows CE stopped recognizing years ago.

At least when Linux people answer you, it's "okay do this, then this, then this, in that order -- and watch out for x, y, and z". Microsoft people are "okay look in the manual" and then the manual of the product you're trying to use just has clues scattered about in many tiny articles that you have to piece together.

Fuck no. Linux's world these days, in terms of how-tos, is leaps and bounds ahead of Microsoft culture. The only reason Windows has any edge over Linux these days is "IT HAS GAEMS", and even that's only because of a self-feeding cycle among game company marketing weenies where game developers won't make Linux games because WINDOWS HAS GAEMS AND LINUX DOESNT SO LETS MAKE MOAR WINDOZE GAEMS.

Re:Serving the diners or the cooks?

[TheNetAvenger]

Just for time comparisons, I'll let you take a brand new HP Vista laptop, Power it up, make a set of recovery disks, connect wireless, and create a couple user accounts.


You are either making up a good story are just full of crap.

1) HP Vista laptops ship with recovery DVDs, there is no reason to create one.

2) Connecting to wireless is as easy as clicking on the freaking ballon that says, networks are available, click to connect to one, and even if it is WPA or WEP, you type in the freaking number or insert the USB drive with the key.

3) Setting up accounts is hard on Vista? Wow, then you better run from any *nix. Control Panel -> User accounts -> Create new account (Type Name and Password, select security level) Done...

4) Product activation is automatic if you tell it to just activate when you are online, or one click in the control panel.

5) AV Software? Wow, that is tough, download AVG, and you are done.

So again tell us how this took you ALL DAY?

I'll call you out on this, as I just delivered several new HP laptops to family and friends that don't even understand the difference between the left and right mouse buttons, and they ALL completed the tasks you describe by themselves in under 5 minutes...

So which is it, are you really that stupid or lying to get positive SlashDot points?

Re:Serving the diners or the cooks?

[Hal_Porter]

DirectX 10 is just a thin wrapper over the WDM driver model.

So if you run a DirectX 10 game on Vista and it calls DrawPrimitive with a bunch of polygons, Windows can switch to kernel mode and make an call into a function in the graphics driver which knows how to set the hardware up to do the work. The key thing here is that all this stuff is highly integrated. There's competition between ATI and NVidia and so both have an incentive to make this as efficient as possible. Since Windows has an enormous market share it makes sense to optimize the hardware so that the device driver doesn't need to do anything time consuming. So the hardware is designed to be able to read DirectX datastructures.

Now consider on Wine. The game makes the call to DrawPrimitive. So far so good. But Linux doesn't have WDM. As far as I can tell Wine needs to emulate the function using OpenGL. All the DirectX datastructures need to be converted to OpenGL ones. Then the OpenGL driver needs to do another conversion back to the hardware format which was designed to be compatible with DirectX. And unless you have the closed source drive which is not included in most Linux distributions it won't even attempt to use hardware acceleration. And from what I can tell the ATI closed source driver isn't particularly good.

Now on Windows Halo 2 is somewhat scandalously tied to Vista or XBox 360 since Microsoft want to sell one of either to people that want to play Halo 2. But most games aren't going to be like that - they'll work on either DirectX 9 or 10.

And actually, I've got Vista here and DirectX 10 works very well, even on a laptop GPU. Looking at really high end benchmarks it's not as optimized as DirectX9 on XP yet, and it will take another six months to do so. Similarly on the Linux side ATI will document the hardware and allow people to write an optimized open source driver. But the Windows side has massive advantages here - market share for sure but also the technical one that in Windows the hardware was designed to be able to do what the game asks for directly. If the graphics companies know that they're doing they can make the driver a very thin layer that just passes a pointer from the user mode application to hardware and sets it going. Wine can't do that.

Re:Mods: I suggest

[the_leander]

When I posted the above that was the only comment on this article. I didn't do it to annoy or offend or "riding the top post just to get their post seen", just clicked on the first bit of the page that caught my eye when looking for "reply".

I think I've posted maybe 20 comments ever on this site, this is I think the first one I've posted with the new system in place. I hope that you'll be able to overlook this small omission.

Sorry you feel so strongly about it - next time I will look that little bit longer so as not to offend.

Dead and buried at Walmart.com

[westlake]

Brick and mortar, or online only?

Neither.

OEM Linux disappeared from Walmart.com in late January.

Walmart.com's cheapest Compaq Presario has an Athlon Dual Core CPU, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, DVD burner, GeForce 6150 SE graphics and runs Vista Basic. $348.

Top of the line at $1900:

The HP Elite with Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, 3 GB RAM, 2 500 GB HDDs, ATSC tuner, etc., running Vista Ultimate

And where are Wal-Mart's national advertisements for this product line?

Where they have always been: In Limbo. Non-existent.

Re: OEM Windows or OEM Linux

[chuckymonkey]

I'm here to help. There are plenty of good wifi cards out there that linux supports out of the box. Here's one that works flawlessly out of the box. Also, if you don't mind telling me which card you have I may be able to help you out. Email me at chuckyb21 at hotmail dot com if you would like a hand.