No, what you should have done was run Linux then virtualize a pirated Windows install to run your pirated Bioshock. That way, you are not only a pirate but a communist too!!!
But it is wrong that it even got introduced. It would be like introducing a bill that allowed the government to take whatever you owned with no warrant and the ability to sell that at auctions. Sure that bill wouldn't get voted in, and hopefully the supreme court would find it un-constitutional, but it shouldn't have gotten introduced.
Well, we can re-elect new ones, but all of them are the same. I say. RMS for president! Put Torvalds, ESR and other open source figures in congress and we might have a decent government. But I don't see RMS campaign posters... yet.
Honestly, why do we need this? Everyone talks about how music is dying, and how movies are dying. But a quick search on MySpace or YouTube gives thousands of indie bands and a lot are as good or somewhat better than the ones signed with a record company. There are lots of low-budget films circulating YouTube, now while a lot aren't as good as the ones that take millions to make, a lot are really entertaining, something that a lot of Hollywood films aren't.
Just because not everyone wants fast food doesn't give the fast foot industry the right to in a way punish previously legal activities for the goal of getting more people to eat fast food. In any other industry, a bill like this would be laughed at even by the idiots that are in our congress, but it seems that any trade group with the word America is enough to throw both republicans and democrats into passing a bill. Idiots.
Yes, but if you are going to code something, code it for Firefox. Firefox is enough standards-compliant that more strict browsers (such as Safari and Opera) can usually read JavaScript for Firefox. Leave out IE till the end, because likely it will give you more headaches then it is worth. Plus, IE is only written for 1 platform (Windows) and also, IE becomes more standards supporting with each release, but still proprietary enough to make it an absolute pain to code anything for it.
I have a friend that will try to do exactly this and when his point is proven wrong he'll change topics or even try to mix up the sides of the arguments and reposition himself in the right.
Has your friend ever considered a job in politics? They seem to hire people like that all the time.
Of course jobs are going to increase in open source areas. Right now, the software industry is in a period of change from 100% proprietary code to now about 25% proprietary and 75% OSS. The thing though is, for any small company, making a general purpose program is nearly impossible. If it is a proprietary system, it gets 0 marketshare due to monopolies in every single program genre. If it is OSS, it may have great marketshare, but won't make any money because your company is too small to give support. Once we find a good balance, we will see another major software boom comparable to the '90s one. But until then, we will see either failing closed-source companies, or open source companies that have yet to see a profit.
Soccer players has to throw in their towel when they're in their thirties.
But a good soccer player can make enough money in 10 years to cover a lifetime of work. A good programmer has to work all of his life to make enough money to feed themselves most of the time.
Then why doesn't Fedora fix that? It seems like an obvious flaw, since my Ubuntu box automatically alerts me to any updates available, whether I last ran apt-get update a month ago or two minutes ago.
Stop it. This is a total troll and is 100% FUD. Fedora isn't a "trial" version at all -- it's a bleeding edge distro made for people who don't need commercial-grade support for their distro, but they want a Red Hat based system.
Yes, but you can't ignore the fact that Red Hat uses Fedora as the basis of RHEL. Much how OOo is used as Sun's trial version of Star Office.
Think of it this way, what is the edition of Ubuntu that IBM would get? A) The Ubuntu you download off Ubuntu's website or B) Some super enterprise system that isn't available for download? The answer of course is A. Now what is the version of Red Hat that IBM would get A) Fedora, the Red Hat you can download from Red Hat's site* or B) RHEL that IBM has to pay and has features not included in Fedora. The answer for that is B.
No matter how you cut it, Red Hat wants to, and needs to make Fedora inferior to RHEL in order to sell it, either in features, stability or someway else. Ubuntu does the same thing as Red Hat, they sell support, but your Ubuntu you download is the same Ubuntu they support, the same Ubuntu that everyone from Shuttleworth, to the president of a major corporation, to some poor kid in a public school uses.
*Yes, I do know that CentOS does exist and that it is RHEL, but still, my point stands.
Plus, Fedora isn't just "usable," it's awesome. Far from being a collection of bits and pieces, it's a coherent, organized collection of software -- in short, it's everything you expect a distro to be.
Not really. In my tests, on the same hardware, Fedora 8 ran super slow compared to my Ubuntu 7.10/8.04 installed on a different partition, all of them were stock installs. Fedora also takes a long time to install packages compared to Ubuntu. Plus, Ubuntu's repos are larger than Fedora's.
Give me one reason that Fedora is better than Ubuntu and I will belive you, but as it stands, though Fedora is decent, Ubuntu just does everything so much better.
Exactly. Plus, in my experience, Ubuntu runs faster on a default setup then Fedora (Tested Fedora 8 vs Ubuntu 7.10 and an alpha of 8.04, on a 1.5 Ghz Intel M CPU with 512 MB of RAM, both were installed with the same amount of swap, and both were on default Gnome desktops), Plus, installing packages were always quicker on Ubuntu then Fedora, most likely do to the speed of Deb compared to RPM (but could, possibly be differences between my Wi-Fi card driver, but I don't think it would affect that much).
I don't see how this would even be a problem in the first place. Ubuntu has Main, Restricted, Multiverse, Universe, etc. So if you download things from main, and universe things, they are 100% OSS. And Restricted/Multiverse are not OSS. As for third-party Debs, it is the same thing with Windows EXEs and that hasn't stopped countless computer makers from pre-installing and recommending Windows. Plus, in 99% of GUI applications, going to help and then about will give you the licensing info. For others, a command line flag or the man or info pages will give you the info needed.
Fedora by design isn't a *real* distro. It is a testing ground for RHEL. Now, Fedora is usable, and nice and all. But Ubuntu is a *real* distro, you don't have to pay for the "full" version. With Ubuntu, you get Debian cleaned up. With Fedora you get all the bits and pieces that make up RHEL in a developer-oriented way.
Intel needs to give people a real distro, not a "trial" version of RHEL.
And by the way, RPM (at least the "true" RPM versions) seem to be outdated and DEB in most ways is superior. (Note: Not trying to start a flame war, but merely stating facts)
Right, so someone needs to develop a stable but extensible API for Linux kernel driver installation so that you don't have to recompile everything, or they have to open source their drivers, or create a mechanism to automatically compile a kernel module. The last solution is a pain in the butt, the middle solution is ideal for consumers, and the former would help having for the companies that want to play hard ball, so consumers have the option of using binaries instead of having to recompile, and so Linux can have true "third-party" driver support without these parties having to kiss the kernel dev's toes.:)
But, there are many versions of the Linux kernel. There is of course, the vanilla kernel, but just about every major distro has a minor variation of the kernel. And that isn't even including all the versions of the kernel itself. That and along with the absolute pain drivers are to manage.
If the hardware manufacturers want Linux support, release the hardware specs under a NDA to a kernel developer, have them develop an open source driver for it. Because proprietary drivers will slow down Linux in more ways than one. For example, Adobe provides Flash for Linux. The problem is, it is absolutely crappy. More recent ones have had CPU leaks and manage to crash Firefox like crazy. The problem is, because Adobe had released at least some Linux Flash player, everyone except for the loyal followers of RMS, installed it and it was good. Now, the player is riddled with bugs, CPU leaks (no, it shouldn't need 80% of the CPU to display a banner ad), and the only major open source alternative, GNASH isn't really good. I can see the exact same thing happening with drivers.
You're right to some degree there, however the parent's point about penguins on the boxes is a huge problem. For Linux to be "easy", it has to have hardware which tells consumers that it's Linux-compatible.
Because most of the people read the boxes for Windows support? Not anymore. It has been accepted that, whether there is a nice Windows logo on there or not, it will work with Windows unless it says "For Mac" or is made by Apple. Linux will be the same, no need for fancy logos, etc. Though I do try to buy things that have Linux on the system requirements (such as flash drives, all will work with Linux I know, but I would rather buy the one that specifically mentions it, vote with your wallet)
But the thing in the way of solving that is Tux's catch22: "Linux won't get support until it gets widely used, but it won't see wide use until it gets support." The problem is being solved, it's just slow. Even the supposed thing with ATI/AMD releasing their new graphics cards, the Radeon HD 48x0's, that would have Tux on the box never happened. Disappointing. However, since driver installation is still insane on Linux, it's not too surprising that manufacturers don't support it better. If they had a kernel module or API which OEMs could use for quick driver installation so you wouldn't have to compile or reinstall your driver for every kernel upgrade you went through, and could also provide an install package that could register itself with the most common package managers out there by using a universally accepted packaging API, then I think you'll start seeing that happening more.
But the thing is, if they would just release the specs for the hardware, even under a NDA, someone could write a kernel driver for it, include it with the main kernel and all would be good. And there are a lot of people that are willing to do it. And I honestly don't want to do what I have to do with Windows and that is install some driver, which installs some proprietary application to do something that should be done with a generic driver for things such as printers, USB drives, etc. And it is really bad if you lose the CD that comes with it and then have unusable hardware... So, in the way, free reversed engineered drivers are slow, but they are better than the super-proprietary, niche drivers that the manufacturers want to give us for No-Good-Reason (TM).
Anything that helps adoption by helping easy installation is a good thing, and will increase Linux's adoption, and that's all I want to see happen. Users still will have the choice to use binary blobs or not, but they will have a lot more choices when Linux adoption becomes greater.)
Linux does not need an easy install to be used. If you have *ever* had to reinstall XP, it is a headache, compare that to Ubuntu's install. Ubuntu generally gives you good defaults with few hard choices rather than Window's installer (like how is a novice user supposed to know which to format the disks as, FAT or NTFS?). DOS wasn't good. But it was pre-installed so that's what everyone used. Windows wasn't great either, but it was the only thing you could get for a long time. When/if Dell starts actually promoting the systems they have with Ubuntu on them, I expect the marketshare to rise. Seriously, Dell and the OSS community would have a lot to gain if Dell didn't hide the Ubuntu systems in a dark corner of their website.
So, well, just about anything that isn't my laptop? I am not attempting to argue (you go on to say that these are the symptoms) but I would like to see someone smarter than I make fairly common hardware work easily with the various distros.
On the about 7 laptops I have used Linux with in live mode, or installed, 2 the wireless cards wouldn't work with Ubuntu, but worked with Mepis flawlessly, and the other 5 worked 100%. And these were ranging from an Alienware laptop, to a recent low-end Toshiba, to an older mid-range HP.
Compiz and KDE 4 (If they ever get KDE 4 to work right) will definitely start to draw people to Ubuntu.
Yes on Compiz, no on KDE 4. Even being used to KDE, GNOME and every other DE available for *Nix, KDE 4 just feels... Odd. Sure it may be better than KDE 3 or GNOME, but to a Windows user, KDE 4 along with looking like Vista (big mistake right there), doesn't have the same look and feel as Windows or GNOME. I think that GNOME with Compiz will attract people, but KDE 4 just won't work for Windows refugees. (And, no I don't mean this as a KDE flame, I like how KDE 4 is new and different, but, to attract people from Windows it needs to be at least somewhat familiar)
the major GNU/Linux distros (and BSD too) are getting there, but some parts still too esoteric for Aunt Minnie or Grandma.
Really, other than the install process (which, honestly the install for Windows is a lot more difficult, but it is usually pre-installed), Ubuntu is just about easy enough for anyone to use with little to no problems.
Half the "problem" is teaching people that Linux != Windows. And that is the major reason why OS X can get away with not being Windows. When you buy a Mac, you don't buy a computer, you buy a Mac. When you use Linux, you still have your hardware that ran Windows, it doesn't look any different, and so they think it should act the same. With a Mac it looks different so they expect it to act different.
If you take 2 people who have never used a computer and stick one in front of Ubuntu and the other in front of a Windows desktop, the one running Ubuntu is most likely to figure out things better than the Windows user.
but Firefox grew when it adopted a marketing campaign. People seem to forget that.
Ummm... What marketing campaign? Most people either used Firefox because either A) It was preinstalled on the computer they have (by a geek, or by work, etc) B) They didn't want IE C) Some guy who they thought knew a lot about computers told them to D) A guy on some forum is always raving about how great Firefox is.
I don't know of a single person who has installed Firefox because of the marketing campaign it has. Sure, it is great and I wish that more OSS projects had it, but as for it really giving results to the general public other than the name "Firefox", it didn't do much.
Are you sure that was the last missing part? There's still a problem with getting manufacturers of PC components designed for home use to work wholeheartedly with the Ubuntu community.
Sure, but 98% of the things I plug into my Linux box work 100% fine and are up fast. The last time I plugged in a simple flash drive into a Vista box, it took at least a minute trying to find the driver and eventually worked. Then there are all kinds of other things that Vista needs a driver for but they work out-of-the-box for Linux. Just about anything except for ATI/nVidia cards with work 100% out-of-the-box.
I don't see penguin logos on boxes, and not everybody has a working printer and enough paper to print out a distribution's hardware compatibility list and carry it into a local computer store.
But with Ubuntu you don't need that just about everything will work without any configuration. And the things that don't either are A) specialty devices that most of the time the programs for using them are Windows-only or B) Major computer components that are mostly built-in when you buy a computer (Wi-Fi cards, Graphics cards, Sound cards, etc.). But as for buying just about anything you can be 99% sure it will work on the newest Ubuntu, and if not, than download the alpha/beta of the next one and most of the time it will work.
This has to be the worst time ever to be a web surfer.
Ummm... No. Today I can easily surf the 'net with just about every ad blocked, have Flash blocked when I want it to, but re-enable it for say, YouTube, all at the click of a mouse. I can use an OS and browser that is free and open source. I can surf 100% anonymously easily. I can download every video game I played as a child in less than an hour. And I can hear just about any song I ever would want to hear in less than a minute.
Sure, some things suck today, BT throttling, the ISP's "No-Usenet" crusades, but all in all, it is a better time than the very early 2000s or the late 90s.
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No, what you should have done was run Linux then virtualize a pirated Windows install to run your pirated Bioshock. That way, you are not only a pirate but a communist too!!!
But it is wrong that it even got introduced. It would be like introducing a bill that allowed the government to take whatever you owned with no warrant and the ability to sell that at auctions. Sure that bill wouldn't get voted in, and hopefully the supreme court would find it un-constitutional, but it shouldn't have gotten introduced.
Well, we can re-elect new ones, but all of them are the same. I say. RMS for president! Put Torvalds, ESR and other open source figures in congress and we might have a decent government. But I don't see RMS campaign posters... yet.
Honestly, why do we need this? Everyone talks about how music is dying, and how movies are dying. But a quick search on MySpace or YouTube gives thousands of indie bands and a lot are as good or somewhat better than the ones signed with a record company. There are lots of low-budget films circulating YouTube, now while a lot aren't as good as the ones that take millions to make, a lot are really entertaining, something that a lot of Hollywood films aren't.
Just because not everyone wants fast food doesn't give the fast foot industry the right to in a way punish previously legal activities for the goal of getting more people to eat fast food. In any other industry, a bill like this would be laughed at even by the idiots that are in our congress, but it seems that any trade group with the word America is enough to throw both republicans and democrats into passing a bill. Idiots.
Yes, but if you are going to code something, code it for Firefox. Firefox is enough standards-compliant that more strict browsers (such as Safari and Opera) can usually read JavaScript for Firefox. Leave out IE till the end, because likely it will give you more headaches then it is worth. Plus, IE is only written for 1 platform (Windows) and also, IE becomes more standards supporting with each release, but still proprietary enough to make it an absolute pain to code anything for it.
Yes, I think stray HTML tags get eaten up by /. to avoid posting invalid HTML that crashes IE.
I'm excited either way because I 3 Debian!
Well, I 4 Debian so I beat you.
I have a friend that will try to do exactly this and when his point is proven wrong he'll change topics or even try to mix up the sides of the arguments and reposition himself in the right.
Has your friend ever considered a job in politics? They seem to hire people like that all the time.
Of course jobs are going to increase in open source areas. Right now, the software industry is in a period of change from 100% proprietary code to now about 25% proprietary and 75% OSS. The thing though is, for any small company, making a general purpose program is nearly impossible. If it is a proprietary system, it gets 0 marketshare due to monopolies in every single program genre. If it is OSS, it may have great marketshare, but won't make any money because your company is too small to give support. Once we find a good balance, we will see another major software boom comparable to the '90s one. But until then, we will see either failing closed-source companies, or open source companies that have yet to see a profit.
Soccer players has to throw in their towel when they're in their thirties.
But a good soccer player can make enough money in 10 years to cover a lifetime of work. A good programmer has to work all of his life to make enough money to feed themselves most of the time.
What? They are now open sourcing Steve Jobs and then making him go BOOM!?!?!?!?
Then why doesn't Fedora fix that? It seems like an obvious flaw, since my Ubuntu box automatically alerts me to any updates available, whether I last ran apt-get update a month ago or two minutes ago.
Stop it. This is a total troll and is 100% FUD. Fedora isn't a "trial" version at all -- it's a bleeding edge distro made for people who don't need commercial-grade support for their distro, but they want a Red Hat based system.
Yes, but you can't ignore the fact that Red Hat uses Fedora as the basis of RHEL. Much how OOo is used as Sun's trial version of Star Office.
Think of it this way, what is the edition of Ubuntu that IBM would get? A) The Ubuntu you download off Ubuntu's website or B) Some super enterprise system that isn't available for download? The answer of course is A. Now what is the version of Red Hat that IBM would get A) Fedora, the Red Hat you can download from Red Hat's site* or B) RHEL that IBM has to pay and has features not included in Fedora. The answer for that is B.
No matter how you cut it, Red Hat wants to, and needs to make Fedora inferior to RHEL in order to sell it, either in features, stability or someway else. Ubuntu does the same thing as Red Hat, they sell support, but your Ubuntu you download is the same Ubuntu they support, the same Ubuntu that everyone from Shuttleworth, to the president of a major corporation, to some poor kid in a public school uses.
*Yes, I do know that CentOS does exist and that it is RHEL, but still, my point stands.
Plus, Fedora isn't just "usable," it's awesome. Far from being a collection of bits and pieces, it's a coherent, organized collection of software -- in short, it's everything you expect a distro to be.
Not really. In my tests, on the same hardware, Fedora 8 ran super slow compared to my Ubuntu 7.10/8.04 installed on a different partition, all of them were stock installs. Fedora also takes a long time to install packages compared to Ubuntu. Plus, Ubuntu's repos are larger than Fedora's.
Give me one reason that Fedora is better than Ubuntu and I will belive you, but as it stands, though Fedora is decent, Ubuntu just does everything so much better.
Exactly. Plus, in my experience, Ubuntu runs faster on a default setup then Fedora (Tested Fedora 8 vs Ubuntu 7.10 and an alpha of 8.04, on a 1.5 Ghz Intel M CPU with 512 MB of RAM, both were installed with the same amount of swap, and both were on default Gnome desktops), Plus, installing packages were always quicker on Ubuntu then Fedora, most likely do to the speed of Deb compared to RPM (but could, possibly be differences between my Wi-Fi card driver, but I don't think it would affect that much).
I don't see how this would even be a problem in the first place. Ubuntu has Main, Restricted, Multiverse, Universe, etc. So if you download things from main, and universe things, they are 100% OSS. And Restricted/Multiverse are not OSS. As for third-party Debs, it is the same thing with Windows EXEs and that hasn't stopped countless computer makers from pre-installing and recommending Windows. Plus, in 99% of GUI applications, going to help and then about will give you the licensing info. For others, a command line flag or the man or info pages will give you the info needed.
Fedora by design isn't a *real* distro. It is a testing ground for RHEL. Now, Fedora is usable, and nice and all. But Ubuntu is a *real* distro, you don't have to pay for the "full" version. With Ubuntu, you get Debian cleaned up. With Fedora you get all the bits and pieces that make up RHEL in a developer-oriented way.
Intel needs to give people a real distro, not a "trial" version of RHEL.
And by the way, RPM (at least the "true" RPM versions) seem to be outdated and DEB in most ways is superior. (Note: Not trying to start a flame war, but merely stating facts)
Right, so someone needs to develop a stable but extensible API for Linux kernel driver installation so that you don't have to recompile everything, or they have to open source their drivers, or create a mechanism to automatically compile a kernel module. The last solution is a pain in the butt, the middle solution is ideal for consumers, and the former would help having for the companies that want to play hard ball, so consumers have the option of using binaries instead of having to recompile, and so Linux can have true "third-party" driver support without these parties having to kiss the kernel dev's toes. :)
But, there are many versions of the Linux kernel. There is of course, the vanilla kernel, but just about every major distro has a minor variation of the kernel. And that isn't even including all the versions of the kernel itself. That and along with the absolute pain drivers are to manage.
If the hardware manufacturers want Linux support, release the hardware specs under a NDA to a kernel developer, have them develop an open source driver for it. Because proprietary drivers will slow down Linux in more ways than one. For example, Adobe provides Flash for Linux. The problem is, it is absolutely crappy. More recent ones have had CPU leaks and manage to crash Firefox like crazy. The problem is, because Adobe had released at least some Linux Flash player, everyone except for the loyal followers of RMS, installed it and it was good. Now, the player is riddled with bugs, CPU leaks (no, it shouldn't need 80% of the CPU to display a banner ad), and the only major open source alternative, GNASH isn't really good. I can see the exact same thing happening with drivers.
I had Best Buy tell me I wouldn't see it because they were a Microsoft-only shop. :P
That, I find odd after Best Buy is selling a boxed version of Ubuntu http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2222 http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/105142/index.html
You're right to some degree there, however the parent's point about penguins on the boxes is a huge problem. For Linux to be "easy", it has to have hardware which tells consumers that it's Linux-compatible.
Because most of the people read the boxes for Windows support? Not anymore. It has been accepted that, whether there is a nice Windows logo on there or not, it will work with Windows unless it says "For Mac" or is made by Apple. Linux will be the same, no need for fancy logos, etc. Though I do try to buy things that have Linux on the system requirements (such as flash drives, all will work with Linux I know, but I would rather buy the one that specifically mentions it, vote with your wallet)
But the thing in the way of solving that is Tux's catch22: "Linux won't get support until it gets widely used, but it won't see wide use until it gets support." The problem is being solved, it's just slow. Even the supposed thing with ATI/AMD releasing their new graphics cards, the Radeon HD 48x0's, that would have Tux on the box never happened. Disappointing. However, since driver installation is still insane on Linux, it's not too surprising that manufacturers don't support it better. If they had a kernel module or API which OEMs could use for quick driver installation so you wouldn't have to compile or reinstall your driver for every kernel upgrade you went through, and could also provide an install package that could register itself with the most common package managers out there by using a universally accepted packaging API, then I think you'll start seeing that happening more.
But the thing is, if they would just release the specs for the hardware, even under a NDA, someone could write a kernel driver for it, include it with the main kernel and all would be good. And there are a lot of people that are willing to do it. And I honestly don't want to do what I have to do with Windows and that is install some driver, which installs some proprietary application to do something that should be done with a generic driver for things such as printers, USB drives, etc. And it is really bad if you lose the CD that comes with it and then have unusable hardware... So, in the way, free reversed engineered drivers are slow, but they are better than the super-proprietary, niche drivers that the manufacturers want to give us for No-Good-Reason (TM).
Anything that helps adoption by helping easy installation is a good thing, and will increase Linux's adoption, and that's all I want to see happen. Users still will have the choice to use binary blobs or not, but they will have a lot more choices when Linux adoption becomes greater.)
Linux does not need an easy install to be used. If you have *ever* had to reinstall XP, it is a headache, compare that to Ubuntu's install. Ubuntu generally gives you good defaults with few hard choices rather than Window's installer (like how is a novice user supposed to know which to format the disks as, FAT or NTFS?). DOS wasn't good. But it was pre-installed so that's what everyone used. Windows wasn't great either, but it was the only thing you could get for a long time. When/if Dell starts actually promoting the systems they have with Ubuntu on them, I expect the marketshare to rise. Seriously, Dell and the OSS community would have a lot to gain if Dell didn't hide the Ubuntu systems in a dark corner of their website.
So, well, just about anything that isn't my laptop? I am not attempting to argue (you go on to say that these are the symptoms) but I would like to see someone smarter than I make fairly common hardware work easily with the various distros.
On the about 7 laptops I have used Linux with in live mode, or installed, 2 the wireless cards wouldn't work with Ubuntu, but worked with Mepis flawlessly, and the other 5 worked 100%. And these were ranging from an Alienware laptop, to a recent low-end Toshiba, to an older mid-range HP.
Compiz and KDE 4 (If they ever get KDE 4 to work right) will definitely start to draw people to Ubuntu.
Yes on Compiz, no on KDE 4. Even being used to KDE, GNOME and every other DE available for *Nix, KDE 4 just feels... Odd. Sure it may be better than KDE 3 or GNOME, but to a Windows user, KDE 4 along with looking like Vista (big mistake right there), doesn't have the same look and feel as Windows or GNOME. I think that GNOME with Compiz will attract people, but KDE 4 just won't work for Windows refugees. (And, no I don't mean this as a KDE flame, I like how KDE 4 is new and different, but, to attract people from Windows it needs to be at least somewhat familiar)
the major GNU/Linux distros (and BSD too) are getting there, but some parts still too esoteric for Aunt Minnie or Grandma.
Really, other than the install process (which, honestly the install for Windows is a lot more difficult, but it is usually pre-installed), Ubuntu is just about easy enough for anyone to use with little to no problems.
Half the "problem" is teaching people that Linux != Windows. And that is the major reason why OS X can get away with not being Windows. When you buy a Mac, you don't buy a computer, you buy a Mac. When you use Linux, you still have your hardware that ran Windows, it doesn't look any different, and so they think it should act the same. With a Mac it looks different so they expect it to act different.
If you take 2 people who have never used a computer and stick one in front of Ubuntu and the other in front of a Windows desktop, the one running Ubuntu is most likely to figure out things better than the Windows user.
but Firefox grew when it adopted a marketing campaign. People seem to forget that.
Ummm... What marketing campaign? Most people either used Firefox because either A) It was preinstalled on the computer they have (by a geek, or by work, etc) B) They didn't want IE C) Some guy who they thought knew a lot about computers told them to D) A guy on some forum is always raving about how great Firefox is.
I don't know of a single person who has installed Firefox because of the marketing campaign it has. Sure, it is great and I wish that more OSS projects had it, but as for it really giving results to the general public other than the name "Firefox", it didn't do much.
Are you sure that was the last missing part? There's still a problem with getting manufacturers of PC components designed for home use to work wholeheartedly with the Ubuntu community.
Sure, but 98% of the things I plug into my Linux box work 100% fine and are up fast. The last time I plugged in a simple flash drive into a Vista box, it took at least a minute trying to find the driver and eventually worked. Then there are all kinds of other things that Vista needs a driver for but they work out-of-the-box for Linux. Just about anything except for ATI/nVidia cards with work 100% out-of-the-box.
I don't see penguin logos on boxes, and not everybody has a working printer and enough paper to print out a distribution's hardware compatibility list and carry it into a local computer store.
But with Ubuntu you don't need that just about everything will work without any configuration. And the things that don't either are A) specialty devices that most of the time the programs for using them are Windows-only or B) Major computer components that are mostly built-in when you buy a computer (Wi-Fi cards, Graphics cards, Sound cards, etc.). But as for buying just about anything you can be 99% sure it will work on the newest Ubuntu, and if not, than download the alpha/beta of the next one and most of the time it will work.
This has to be the worst time ever to be a web surfer.
Ummm... No. Today I can easily surf the 'net with just about every ad blocked, have Flash blocked when I want it to, but re-enable it for say, YouTube, all at the click of a mouse. I can use an OS and browser that is free and open source. I can surf 100% anonymously easily. I can download every video game I played as a child in less than an hour. And I can hear just about any song I ever would want to hear in less than a minute.
Sure, some things suck today, BT throttling, the ISP's "No-Usenet" crusades, but all in all, it is a better time than the very early 2000s or the late 90s.