There is ALREADY an open standard, the one openoffice uses, called ODF, and it is non-patent-encumbered.
Yes, there's already a poorly specified, incomplete ISO standard called ODF. It's so bad, within 1 year they had to make major revisions (1.1) and have spent 2 years working on another major revision (1.2) that will almost double it's size (showing how important that glossed over formula stuff is). In fact, Rob Weir criticizes Microsoft for not specifying it's formulas correctly, despite the fact that ODF never did so in the first place.
How do you know it's not patent-encumbered? Sun's patent pledge is almost identical to Microsoft's. And there's no guarantee that ODF doesn't run afoul of patents by third parties either.
Also, ISO has no rules against competing standards. That's a fiction invented by ODF advocates. There are lots of examples of competing ISO standards. For example, metric and english nut and bolts.
BTW, ODF sailed through ISO standardization in less than 9 months from start to finish. Talk about rushed.
That's not going to help you if you click on a malicious smb:// link. Your only hope is to egress block SMB ports (which probably isn't a bad idea anyways).
Where did I say I was "ok" with that? I'm just saying often times, Linux is no better. For instance, I was running Trixbox 2.2 on some old hardware. I bought a new server to run it on, and I couldn't boot because it didn't support SATA (It was based on Centos 4.5). I couldn't upgrade to a later version of Trixbox (that had SATA drivers because it was Centos 5) because of some incompatibilities with that version Asterisk. So this was a catch-22 situation. I finally had to install a PATA hard drive to install the OS, yum upgrade to Centos 5, boot from a live CD, then DD the disk from one to the other.
Odd that on one hand you call dual monitors "unusual", but then come back with anectdotal evidence to support your claim about "legions of salespeople" with precisely that "unusual" configuration? I call bullshit on one or the other.
And all versions of Windows have handled dual monitors perfectly since Windows 98 and Windows 2000 (16 and 32 bit OS's respectively). Just because your "legions" of salespeople didn't bother to adjust their resolutions with the simple slider doesn't prove anything.
However, even if you were correct, it would prove the point that Windows would be taking the more conservative approach of limiting resolution to the smallest monitor rather than assuming both monitors have the higher resolution like Linux does.
Your penchence for embellishment and exageration tells me all I need to understand your motivation. "ten thousand ballon tips and icons and systray helpers" indeed. Windows tells you to reboot after an update because, if you don't, you're not safe. You're the one harping about security, yet a critical security step you want to skip and ignore. I think security is only important to you if it doesn't annoy you.
I'm neither defensive, or "unchilled". you're the one making the big deal about stuff that is only important to you. No, I do not disable anything, and no I am not annoyed by any of the things you seem to find worthy of sepuka if they stay enabled. Ballons go away. That's what they're designed to do. I suppose you get pissed off when your car beeps at you to tell you that you've left your keys in teh ignition or the lights on.
Actually, Linux pre-loaded is not any kind of guarantee that all the hardware will be supported.
I can't find it now, but there were recently some articles about Linux shipping on various computers and them including "release notes" describing hardware like fingerprint readers not working, among others. I think it was Asus, but not sure.
I doubt you have "dislexeia [sic]", or if you do it's not the cause of your bad spelling.
Dislexia doesn't make you misspell words, it makes you typo words, ie you will have letters reversed. Dislexia does not make you put in letters that aren't even in the word to begin with. I could see you spelling dual as daul or adul or something like that, but not "duel".
On a side note, if they're really "dueling", then that's your problem right there;)
Ok, so you've set up a strawman argument about how Windows sucks to isntall, and you can only justify this by creating a unique set of circumstances that simply annoy you. How original.
Let me tell you about my most recent install of Ubuntu 8.04. I put in the CD, and it starts to boot, but stalls in the middle of it.. just sitting there. I do this a few times before trying with no acpi. That works. Ok, setup goes uneventfully, but my second monitor wasn't recognized. So i go through the steps to setup a second monitor and teh screen gets all garbagy. After a lot of futzing around, i finally get an no-scambled screen only to discover that my smaller monitor thinks it's the larger monitors resolution and scrolls around the screen (something I don't want). On top of that, Compiz doesn't seem to work on the second screen. So, I have to enable the nVidia drivers and then do a bunch of totally different futzing around to make that work correctly with two monitors.
Then, when i try to run various software that's full screen, it goes across both monitors (cuttong off part of the screen on the smaller monitor)... it took me the better part of a day before I finally gave up trying to make two different sized monitors work correctly.
In Windows, this was 3 clicks and it was done, even with the built-in drivers that were installed by Windows Update.
I'm not even going to get into the no end of trouble with getting WPA encryption to work.
So please, don't preach about how Windows is so "unusable" out of the box for you without considering how Linux is unusable out of the box for so many others (and the internet is littered with people pleading for help, so don't pretend it's rare).
Not to mention, Losing half your workforce in the process, taking > 5 years before they even shipped a 1.0 version, changing organizational structures half a dozen times and moving around to different non-profits, and oh yeah.. convince everyone around you that you're "standards compliant" when you're not even close. You're just better than the bigger guy.
Back in the Office 2005-2000 days there was the Office quick start, but that's been gone for forever. I guess it extended to XP, but Office 2003 removed it (though it's on the CD somewhere if you want to install and run it manually), which means it's been gone for at least 2 versions.
And all OSA did was to pre-load load the OLE libraries (which many apps used, not just Office) which took the most time to load. Later, they added that "new document" functionality to it as well. Office hasn't needed OSA on any NT based OS because the OLE libraries don't have the long load times that they did under the 16 bit OS's.
"Office Setup no longer puts a shortcut to the Osa.exe file in the Windows Startup folder as do the earlier versions of Microsoft Office."
As for undocumented calls. You're kind of an idiot. Undocumented calls, even if they exist (which i'm sure they do), can't help with load time, because loading happens before any application code executes. It's done by, you know, the loader. I suppose you're going to say that Windows has special code built into it to detect Office, and use the super special fast loader instead of the stupid slow loader everyone else has to use.
In reality, this is entirely down to DLL rebasing, something OpenOffice has repeatedly not bothered to do. I once rebased OpenOffice by hand to test this, and it dramatically improved load time (it was about as fast as office, not counting the Java load time). Mozilla and Firefox used to have this problem as well, but they finally got wise and started rebasing of their official builds. That's why FF now loads so fast on Windows.
Why are you so vague about this special "vista tool"?
The table pencil is not a wizard. You should undestand what a wizard is.
I call them the "Scam of Scientology". However, having said that, I think Anonymous is on very shaky ground. Their stated purpose is to 'destroy' scientology (something i've read in numerous reports on Anonymous with quotes from people claiming to be part of it). The problem with this is that nearly all religions have, at one time or another, been considered "cults" by the majority around them. That includes christianity, budism, Muslinism, etc.. Lutherans were once a "cult".
Once we start getting a group of people persecuting others for their beliefs (no matter how stupid or moronic they may be) then you're not much better than many of the tyrants in history that have done so. Granted, Anonymous isn't doing physical harm to anyone (yet, who knows..) but these things can easily get out of control and mob mentality can do all kinds of horrific things.
I say, if you want to fight against the scamming of scientology, great.. but it's VERY bad to go after peoples beliefs.
So what you're saying is that Office Suites are now dead. None of them can evolve beyond the features provided by ODF, because if they do, they're trying to destroy the standard.
Or maybe you mean they shouldn't be allowed to release any upgrades until after their proposed upgrades have been ISO approved through a 3 year standardization process?
Of course even OpenOffice adds their own extensions to ODF so, this is really just pointless banter.
Where the hell are you coming up with this? The slashdot story was about a GOVERNMENT surveillence system, not private people, and that GOVERNMENT system is tied to all kinds of data mining for the government (and only the government) to use at their whim an discretion for any purpose they like.
I'm not advocating anything either, I'm suggesting that people will get fed up with it at some point. It's called civil disopedience.
"The government"? What does "the government" have to do with it?
What does it have to do with it? You might want to read the story this comment is attached to. I said "I suspect", not that I am going to be doing that, since I don't live in a country where this is an issue.
Considering your lack of ability to form a coherent sentence or to use your return key to create paragraphs, I'd question your critique of Word's grammar checker. That was extremely hard to read.
By table drawing, i'm referring to the table pencil, that lets you arbitrarily draw tables in any form you want, erase borders, etc.. It makes it simple to create a complex table layout, and has NOTHING to do with CAD. I use this feature every day, and it's absence frustrates me in OOo.
Master documents prior to 2007 did have a lot of limitations and were unstable, but as of Word 2007 things work as expected.
And no, Office does not load anything at startup, nor does the OS have parts of office in it. People keep repeating this urban myth for years. Back in the Office 2005-2000 days there was the Office quick start, but that's been gone for forever. Office starts fast because they take the time to optimize it, including regbasing DLL's, something that OpenOffice can't seem to bother doing, and thus forcing massive PE fixups on load. Not to mention the stupid Java components.
And no, OOo does *NOT* have an automation object model. At least none that i've found (and no, i'm not talking about scripting). It doesn't show up in a search of their website either. This is likely because OOo needs to be cross platform, so doesn't utilize any OS features that can't easily be propogated to other platforms.
As I said when I responded to you, you knew about all the things Word can do that OOo doesn't, but you dismiss them as unimportant because of whatever reasons.
I've not used RandR 1.2, and if it fixes things, great, but that doesn't change the fact that for many years multiple monitors have been a mess. I fully agree that Linux has come a long way, and each little fix that makes the system more cohesive is welcomed. But there's a lot of those little gotchas still floating around.
Which "average user" would that be? The one that needs grammar checking for instance? Complain all you like about Word's grammar checker, it's still better than none.
CS3's been out for almost a year now. I'd bet a lot. People tend to be either the type that upgrade right away, or they never upgrade unless forced to.
There's a lot more admin stuff a user can do by themselves without an expert under Windows than under Linux.
Here's a quick example. Let's add a second monitor to Ubunutu. If it's the same size monitor, then you might not have many problems, but if it's a different sized one then you're in for hours of futzing around, trying different things depending on which driver is installed, etc..
In Windows, you just plug in the monitor, got to the display properties page, select the monitor and click "extend my desktop to this monitor", resize the display as necessary and you're done. Anyone can do that. At most they may need to ask someone how, and it can be explained in 10 seconds.
X is still *VERY* primitive when it comes to multiple monitors, not to mention the fact that different hardware vendors add their own multimonitor modes each with their own pros and cons. Will it be Xinerama, DualView, TwinView, etc? Xinerama, for instance, doesn't support 3D on both monitors, TwinView does, but then you don't get the "xinerama aware" benefits, etc.. Windows is rock solid and bone simple in this regard.
More examples, let's add TV tuner, or an non-natively unsupported wireless adapter. How much fun are you in for now?
THere are many things that OOo can do that Word cannot
Such as?
but I have yet to see anyone show anything that Word can do that OOo cannot
Thee is no so blind as those that will not see.
I suspect that any list I give you will be met with varying excuses of "yeah, but who uses that" or some such.
But here goes, off the top of my head:
Grammar Checker Table Drawing (uses a pencil motive to draw complex tables) Live real-time style preview (hover over a style, see the changes applied as they would look if you actually selected it) Programmable object model and automation API (to allow other apps to use Word as as an engine) Fast start time (seriously).
There's a lot more than that, but that's just off the top of my head.
As for multiple indexes, that's not true. Word has had multiple index support for years.
Part of the problem with Linux is that you have to "know" which one of the 20,000 programs in your package manager does what you need done.
So how, precisely, does one know about ndisgtk? What's more, don't you have to even manually configure it to use the restricted extras?
Sure, Windows has a lot of stuff that doesn't work right either, but it has just as much stuff that installs seamlessly, with complete directions a moron could follow. And, if that fails, they can call Linksys or DLINK and they'll walk them through it over the phone (granted, by some guy in india following a script that the user could have followed, but still.. that works most of the time, unless you're an expert and have a problem not covered by that.. which would be the only reason the expert would call).
Millions of people buy computers, set them up, and use them, including installing software and devices, with very little technical knowledge and without asking an "expert". You only see the people that are too stupid (or too scared) to do it themselves, so it gives you a skewed view of reality.
One of Linux's big problems is that it has insufficient end-user technical support and it has limited use-case testing scenarios, so when things go wrong they go spectacularly wrong. The kernel and most kinds of server apps are typically rock-solid, but the GUI end user apps tend to be buggy as hell, poorly designed, and exceedingly complex and cryptic. We like that, end-users don't.
Also it says a lot that reinstalling rather than fixing Windows is generally regarded as an acceptable practice. Because reinstalling Windows doesn't (usually) require a CLI:)
No, it's a simple cost/benefit analysis. Should you spend 3 or 4 hours dicking around trying to fix something (and maybe not succeeding) or spending 1 hour to reinstall the OS (or reimage if it's a corporate machine). I'll take #2 any day of the week, except in rare situations where reinstalling will take a lot longer (my home computer, for instance, with 500+ different tweaks and programs).
Slashdot Mirror
There is ALREADY an open standard, the one openoffice uses, called ODF, and it is non-patent-encumbered.
Yes, there's already a poorly specified, incomplete ISO standard called ODF. It's so bad, within 1 year they had to make major revisions (1.1) and have spent 2 years working on another major revision (1.2) that will almost double it's size (showing how important that glossed over formula stuff is). In fact, Rob Weir criticizes Microsoft for not specifying it's formulas correctly, despite the fact that ODF never did so in the first place.
How do you know it's not patent-encumbered? Sun's patent pledge is almost identical to Microsoft's. And there's no guarantee that ODF doesn't run afoul of patents by third parties either.
Also, ISO has no rules against competing standards. That's a fiction invented by ODF advocates. There are lots of examples of competing ISO standards. For example, metric and english nut and bolts.
BTW, ODF sailed through ISO standardization in less than 9 months from start to finish. Talk about rushed.
That's not going to help you if you click on a malicious smb:// link. Your only hope is to egress block SMB ports (which probably isn't a bad idea anyways).
Where did I say I was "ok" with that? I'm just saying often times, Linux is no better. For instance, I was running Trixbox 2.2 on some old hardware. I bought a new server to run it on, and I couldn't boot because it didn't support SATA (It was based on Centos 4.5). I couldn't upgrade to a later version of Trixbox (that had SATA drivers because it was Centos 5) because of some incompatibilities with that version Asterisk. So this was a catch-22 situation. I finally had to install a PATA hard drive to install the OS, yum upgrade to Centos 5, boot from a live CD, then DD the disk from one to the other.
Yeah, that's not a pain in the ass.
Odd that on one hand you call dual monitors "unusual", but then come back with anectdotal evidence to support your claim about "legions of salespeople" with precisely that "unusual" configuration? I call bullshit on one or the other.
And all versions of Windows have handled dual monitors perfectly since Windows 98 and Windows 2000 (16 and 32 bit OS's respectively). Just because your "legions" of salespeople didn't bother to adjust their resolutions with the simple slider doesn't prove anything.
However, even if you were correct, it would prove the point that Windows would be taking the more conservative approach of limiting resolution to the smallest monitor rather than assuming both monitors have the higher resolution like Linux does.
Your penchence for embellishment and exageration tells me all I need to understand your motivation. "ten thousand ballon tips and icons and systray helpers" indeed. Windows tells you to reboot after an update because, if you don't, you're not safe. You're the one harping about security, yet a critical security step you want to skip and ignore. I think security is only important to you if it doesn't annoy you.
I'm neither defensive, or "unchilled". you're the one making the big deal about stuff that is only important to you. No, I do not disable anything, and no I am not annoyed by any of the things you seem to find worthy of sepuka if they stay enabled. Ballons go away. That's what they're designed to do. I suppose you get pissed off when your car beeps at you to tell you that you've left your keys in teh ignition or the lights on.
Actually, Linux pre-loaded is not any kind of guarantee that all the hardware will be supported.
I can't find it now, but there were recently some articles about Linux shipping on various computers and them including "release notes" describing hardware like fingerprint readers not working, among others. I think it was Asus, but not sure.
I doubt you have "dislexeia [sic]", or if you do it's not the cause of your bad spelling.
;)
Dislexia doesn't make you misspell words, it makes you typo words, ie you will have letters reversed. Dislexia does not make you put in letters that aren't even in the word to begin with. I could see you spelling dual as daul or adul or something like that, but not "duel".
On a side note, if they're really "dueling", then that's your problem right there
Ok, so you've set up a strawman argument about how Windows sucks to isntall, and you can only justify this by creating a unique set of circumstances that simply annoy you. How original.
Let me tell you about my most recent install of Ubuntu 8.04. I put in the CD, and it starts to boot, but stalls in the middle of it.. just sitting there. I do this a few times before trying with no acpi. That works. Ok, setup goes uneventfully, but my second monitor wasn't recognized. So i go through the steps to setup a second monitor and teh screen gets all garbagy. After a lot of futzing around, i finally get an no-scambled screen only to discover that my smaller monitor thinks it's the larger monitors resolution and scrolls around the screen (something I don't want). On top of that, Compiz doesn't seem to work on the second screen. So, I have to enable the nVidia drivers and then do a bunch of totally different futzing around to make that work correctly with two monitors.
Then, when i try to run various software that's full screen, it goes across both monitors (cuttong off part of the screen on the smaller monitor)... it took me the better part of a day before I finally gave up trying to make two different sized monitors work correctly.
In Windows, this was 3 clicks and it was done, even with the built-in drivers that were installed by Windows Update.
I'm not even going to get into the no end of trouble with getting WPA encryption to work.
So please, don't preach about how Windows is so "unusable" out of the box for you without considering how Linux is unusable out of the box for so many others (and the internet is littered with people pleading for help, so don't pretend it's rare).
Not to mention, Losing half your workforce in the process, taking > 5 years before they even shipped a 1.0 version, changing organizational structures half a dozen times and moving around to different non-profits, and oh yeah.. convince everyone around you that you're "standards compliant" when you're not even close. You're just better than the bigger guy.
In case you missed it, I said:
Back in the Office 2005-2000 days there was the Office quick start, but that's been gone for forever. I guess it extended to XP, but Office 2003 removed it (though it's on the CD somewhere if you want to install and run it manually), which means it's been gone for at least 2 versions.
And all OSA did was to pre-load load the OLE libraries (which many apps used, not just Office) which took the most time to load. Later, they added that "new document" functionality to it as well. Office hasn't needed OSA on any NT based OS because the OLE libraries don't have the long load times that they did under the 16 bit OS's.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826318
"Office Setup no longer puts a shortcut to the Osa.exe file in the Windows Startup folder as do the earlier versions of Microsoft Office."
As for undocumented calls. You're kind of an idiot. Undocumented calls, even if they exist (which i'm sure they do), can't help with load time, because loading happens before any application code executes. It's done by, you know, the loader. I suppose you're going to say that Windows has special code built into it to detect Office, and use the super special fast loader instead of the stupid slow loader everyone else has to use.
In reality, this is entirely down to DLL rebasing, something OpenOffice has repeatedly not bothered to do. I once rebased OpenOffice by hand to test this, and it dramatically improved load time (it was about as fast as office, not counting the Java load time). Mozilla and Firefox used to have this problem as well, but they finally got wise and started rebasing of their official builds. That's why FF now loads so fast on Windows.
Why are you so vague about this special "vista tool"?
The table pencil is not a wizard. You should undestand what a wizard is.
I call them the "Scam of Scientology". However, having said that, I think Anonymous is on very shaky ground. Their stated purpose is to 'destroy' scientology (something i've read in numerous reports on Anonymous with quotes from people claiming to be part of it). The problem with this is that nearly all religions have, at one time or another, been considered "cults" by the majority around them. That includes christianity, budism, Muslinism, etc.. Lutherans were once a "cult".
Once we start getting a group of people persecuting others for their beliefs (no matter how stupid or moronic they may be) then you're not much better than many of the tyrants in history that have done so. Granted, Anonymous isn't doing physical harm to anyone (yet, who knows..) but these things can easily get out of control and mob mentality can do all kinds of horrific things.
I say, if you want to fight against the scamming of scientology, great.. but it's VERY bad to go after peoples beliefs.
Microsoft has sought and achieved approval for all versions of C# they've produced. C# 3.0 is ISO 23270:2006, for instance.
So what you're saying is that Office Suites are now dead. None of them can evolve beyond the features provided by ODF, because if they do, they're trying to destroy the standard.
Or maybe you mean they shouldn't be allowed to release any upgrades until after their proposed upgrades have been ISO approved through a 3 year standardization process?
Of course even OpenOffice adds their own extensions to ODF so, this is really just pointless banter.
Where the hell are you coming up with this? The slashdot story was about a GOVERNMENT surveillence system, not private people, and that GOVERNMENT system is tied to all kinds of data mining for the government (and only the government) to use at their whim an discretion for any purpose they like.
I'm not advocating anything either, I'm suggesting that people will get fed up with it at some point. It's called civil disopedience.
There is nothing about David Brin in the slashdot story we're commenting on.
What are you talking about?
"The government"? What does "the government" have to do with it?
What does it have to do with it? You might want to read the story this comment is attached to. I said "I suspect", not that I am going to be doing that, since I don't live in a country where this is an issue.
Considering your lack of ability to form a coherent sentence or to use your return key to create paragraphs, I'd question your critique of Word's grammar checker. That was extremely hard to read.
By table drawing, i'm referring to the table pencil, that lets you arbitrarily draw tables in any form you want, erase borders, etc.. It makes it simple to create a complex table layout, and has NOTHING to do with CAD. I use this feature every day, and it's absence frustrates me in OOo.
Master documents prior to 2007 did have a lot of limitations and were unstable, but as of Word 2007 things work as expected.
And no, Office does not load anything at startup, nor does the OS have parts of office in it. People keep repeating this urban myth for years. Back in the Office 2005-2000 days there was the Office quick start, but that's been gone for forever. Office starts fast because they take the time to optimize it, including regbasing DLL's, something that OpenOffice can't seem to bother doing, and thus forcing massive PE fixups on load. Not to mention the stupid Java components.
And no, OOo does *NOT* have an automation object model. At least none that i've found (and no, i'm not talking about scripting). It doesn't show up in a search of their website either. This is likely because OOo needs to be cross platform, so doesn't utilize any OS features that can't easily be propogated to other platforms.
As I said when I responded to you, you knew about all the things Word can do that OOo doesn't, but you dismiss them as unimportant because of whatever reasons.
I'm not talking about add-on software. I'm talking about software to just get the hardware you have configured correctly.
You know very few users? I know dozens. Many of them ordinary professionals, just looking for a little extra screen real estate.
A second monitor is a great upgrade for anyone that uses their computer a lot
I've not used RandR 1.2, and if it fixes things, great, but that doesn't change the fact that for many years multiple monitors have been a mess. I fully agree that Linux has come a long way, and each little fix that makes the system more cohesive is welcomed. But there's a lot of those little gotchas still floating around.
Which "average user" would that be? The one that needs grammar checking for instance? Complain all you like about Word's grammar checker, it's still better than none.
CS3's been out for almost a year now. I'd bet a lot. People tend to be either the type that upgrade right away, or they never upgrade unless forced to.
There's a lot more admin stuff a user can do by themselves without an expert under Windows than under Linux.
Here's a quick example. Let's add a second monitor to Ubunutu. If it's the same size monitor, then you might not have many problems, but if it's a different sized one then you're in for hours of futzing around, trying different things depending on which driver is installed, etc..
In Windows, you just plug in the monitor, got to the display properties page, select the monitor and click "extend my desktop to this monitor", resize the display as necessary and you're done. Anyone can do that. At most they may need to ask someone how, and it can be explained in 10 seconds.
X is still *VERY* primitive when it comes to multiple monitors, not to mention the fact that different hardware vendors add their own multimonitor modes each with their own pros and cons. Will it be Xinerama, DualView, TwinView, etc? Xinerama, for instance, doesn't support 3D on both monitors, TwinView does, but then you don't get the "xinerama aware" benefits, etc.. Windows is rock solid and bone simple in this regard.
More examples, let's add TV tuner, or an non-natively unsupported wireless adapter. How much fun are you in for now?
THere are many things that OOo can do that Word cannot
Such as?
but I have yet to see anyone show anything that Word can do that OOo cannot
Thee is no so blind as those that will not see.
I suspect that any list I give you will be met with varying excuses of "yeah, but who uses that" or some such.
But here goes, off the top of my head:
Grammar Checker
Table Drawing (uses a pencil motive to draw complex tables)
Live real-time style preview (hover over a style, see the changes applied as they would look if you actually selected it)
Programmable object model and automation API (to allow other apps to use Word as as an engine)
Fast start time (seriously).
There's a lot more than that, but that's just off the top of my head.
As for multiple indexes, that's not true. Word has had multiple index support for years.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/193145
Part of the problem with Linux is that you have to "know" which one of the 20,000 programs in your package manager does what you need done.
So how, precisely, does one know about ndisgtk? What's more, don't you have to even manually configure it to use the restricted extras?
Sure, Windows has a lot of stuff that doesn't work right either, but it has just as much stuff that installs seamlessly, with complete directions a moron could follow. And, if that fails, they can call Linksys or DLINK and they'll walk them through it over the phone (granted, by some guy in india following a script that the user could have followed, but still.. that works most of the time, unless you're an expert and have a problem not covered by that.. which would be the only reason the expert would call).
Millions of people buy computers, set them up, and use them, including installing software and devices, with very little technical knowledge and without asking an "expert". You only see the people that are too stupid (or too scared) to do it themselves, so it gives you a skewed view of reality.
One of Linux's big problems is that it has insufficient end-user technical support and it has limited use-case testing scenarios, so when things go wrong they go spectacularly wrong. The kernel and most kinds of server apps are typically rock-solid, but the GUI end user apps tend to be buggy as hell, poorly designed, and exceedingly complex and cryptic. We like that, end-users don't.
Also it says a lot that reinstalling rather than fixing Windows is generally regarded as an acceptable practice. Because reinstalling Windows doesn't (usually) require a CLI :)
No, it's a simple cost/benefit analysis. Should you spend 3 or 4 hours dicking around trying to fix something (and maybe not succeeding) or spending 1 hour to reinstall the OS (or reimage if it's a corporate machine). I'll take #2 any day of the week, except in rare situations where reinstalling will take a lot longer (my home computer, for instance, with 500+ different tweaks and programs).