In fact, I still support an old NT 4 server that predates the release of Windows 95.
Sorry, but NT 4 was released *after* Windows 95. NT 4 took the NT operating system and attached Windows 95's GUI to it. Prior to NT 4's release (summer of 96, IIRC), NT 3.5 had the "3.1" look.
So, if the old server you support has a "Start" button, it does *not* predate the release of Windows 95.
I'm in total agreement with kae77. "Installation" is dead easy in today's Linux distros. But after installation is "getting it to work", which is still way too difficult in many cases.
Several months ago I wanted to try Kino, which is pretty much unanimously regarded as the best non-linear video editor for a beginner (as in Premier Elements). It installed from the repositories in Kubuntu flawlessly. However, it wouldn't capture anything from my camcorder over Firewire. Turns out that Kino won't (or can't) access the Firewire interface unless it's running as root. That took a bit of searching to find out, then having to find out how to change permissions so that Kino does this without having to log myself in as root all the time. I found it "fun" to do this, but for an average user, they're just going to throw up their hands and complain that the program just doesn't work right!
My favorite example was getting my daughter's computer running on Edubuntu last Christmas. I installed Flash from the repositories for Firefox so that she could watch YouTube videos. However, the video motion was horrendously choppy as to be unviewable. Searching the forums, I found that others were having the same issues, that Adobe's latest version of Flash for Linux was screwing up the streaming Flash content from YouTube-like sites. The only solution to download an older version of Flash, by first downloading a huge tar.gz file that had to be mined from the bowels of Adobe's website, extracting through an uglyish command line program, then manually deleting files from multiple locations on the directory tree (including one hidden directory). Need I say, NOT FUN STUFF for most non-nerds.
Linux is great for me, but for 95% of the population who don't enjoy tinkering with an OS, it will always be more "down and dirty" than Windows or OSX.
Smart thieves will learn to wipe the laptop and re-install before connecting it to a network.
Ummm, thieves (particularly smash & grab style thieves) aren't generally known to fall into the "smart" category very often. "Learn to wipe the laptop", eh? If they knew how to do that, they're more knowledgeable than 95% of the computer-using population, and therefore more than likely not going to be a petty thief. I'm sure more and more idiot thieves will be caught this way as time goes on.
I was taught in my Canadian elementary school math classes that if you had a square, 2" x 2", that it could be described as being "two inches square" (meaning a 2" line making up one side of a square), and that the area of such a square was "four square inches" (2 inches ^2).
Seeing how you used the term "square inches" and sm62704 used the term "inches square", I'd say you're both correct.
It is the characteristics that enable the behavior of a spammer that mark him as an antisocial psychopath.
One of my favorite documentaries, The Corporation, shows that companies (under the implicit direction of its board of directors) also show all the characteristics of unfeeling psychopaths. Laws are broken all the time, if it can be shown that the risk is considered minimal and the payoff is great.
Lots of "entrepreneurs" fall into the category as well.
I think that if you were to give the death penalty to every amoral asshole who cares about nobody but themselves, and causes harm (but not kill) to a lot of people, you would certainly have a more pleasant place to live, but one that entirely undervalues human life.
(for those outside of Canada and didn't get the joke...)
Future Shop is essentially identical to Best Buy. They sell the same products (audio/video, computers, appliances, music/games), with the same huges floor spaces and the same useless staffs. Same shit, different interior design.
Future Shop has been around for a couple of decades here, then Best Buy moved in as competition several years ago. Shortly thereafter, Best Buy bought out Future Shop, but didn't merge the operations. In fact, they still "compete", oftentimes with brand new stores being built directly across the street from each other.
You want to know how to help out the shitholes of the world? Drop in a few special ops teams and blow off a few skulls. Seriously. Because these places WILL NOT CHANGE without cutting out the cancer that is the thugocracy running the place. Not that I necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but how does assassinating the top few tyrants really help? Someone a little lower will just step in, only with better protection.
Of course, we could step in and replace the "thugocracy" (great term, BTW) with our own puppet government. That's worked really well in Iraq so far, hasn't it?
I wish I had an answer that works, but really the only way that I can see that things actually change long-term is an all-out elimination of the bunch in power, coupled with a powerful grass-roots movement by the people of the nation to rise up an affect change, regardless of the potential personal costs. If only one is present, there may be a lot of bloodshed, but not necessarily any change for the better.
I put some short video clips on Facebook's video application (just stuff of my daughter for my friends and family to see). These are AVI files generated by my digital camera, about 20-30MB in size, lasting about 1-1.5 minutes each.
They uploaded pretty quickly, but then they were put in a queue to be encoded for their flash player. It took over 3 days for them to be online in my profile! It seems they don't need to just have large capacity for storage, but a bunch more CPU for processing.
Most people don't give their ISP their real email address, and don't use the one provided to them by their ISP. You don't know most people, then. Seriously, outside of the "geek" subculture, the vast majority of people (in my admittedly totally anecdotal experience) seem to be completely unaware of stuff that is not set up for them by their ISP, or didn't care at the time. For example, I coach my daughter's soccer team, and I do most of my communication over email. There are twelve families on my list: fully ten of them use "sympatico.ca" or "rogers.com" email addresses.
I've explained to dozens of people why an ISP should be a pipe to the Internet, and nothing more. Tying themselves to their ISP's email address means they can never change providers without messing up all their communications to others. For every one we educate, there are hundreds more:-(
I'm not positive, but if a manufacturer wants to produce a DVD player, they must purchase a license to do so (too lazy to Google the consortium's name). Part of the license would be the demand that the manufacturer not sell units that lacked respect for the region codes.
I could be wrong, but I've got to think that I'm not. If there was no contractual (and, therefore, legal) requirement to respect region codes, *of course* there would be region-free DVD players available everywhere! Why not? If the manufacturers are part of some cabal whose purpose is to restrict access to "illegal" content, why the hell does every single player on the market play VCDs and Divx discs? How much "legal" content is available in those formats? Why wouldn't they refuse to play those as well?
Visio has been the best (and the "industry standard") flowcharting-style software available for a long time, well before Microsoft bought Shape in 1999 or 2000. Visio's dominance (and the resulting reliance upon it) was already in place and only exploited by Microsoft, not created by them.
The truth is that Visio is dominant on its own merits, not because of Microsoft's monopoly position.
We've been able to crack dvd's for years, but every house I visit still has a pile of purchased dvd's, and I know of not one person who backs them up. Well, I'm one who would have never purchased a DVD player without the ability to back them up. I have a small child who likes to watch movies (think Disney/Dreamworks stuff and the like) and although she's finally old enough to be (somewhat) careful, no WAY was she going to lay a hand on any of those DVDs unless they were backed-up copies of the originals. VHS may have degraded over time, but those tapes could stand up to physical abuse way better than an optical disc ever could.
The kind of interoperability they speak of is precisely the kind that Microsoft chooses, by both word and deed, to explicitly sabotage. Nicely stated. It seems to me that FOSS already has "interoperability" completely figured out: publish and use open standards! It also seems that there is absolutely nothing (except, of course, monopolistic greed) that prevents Microsoft from utilizing the exact same standards.
I am getting kinda tired from this meme (referring to DVD being "good enough")
Hey, I agree that HD is tangibly better than standard DVD. But for me (and a whole bunch of other people), it is not nearly enough better to justify switching media formats (and, necessarily, upgrading hardware that is already paid for and working perfectly well).
And while I have no gripe with Blu-ray peacefully coexisting with DVD, what I fear is that Blu-ray gets enough penetration that the industry can start ignoring the DVD format (VHS started dying off seriously when tapes stopped being distributed for new movies). When a studio is able to justify releasing a "Blu-ray exclusive" title, DVD will be toast quickly. Then I'll be stuck with an unsupported format that will continue to be "good enough" (for me, anyway) for years and years to come. I really, really don't want to deal with new un-rippable, premium-priced discs that will force me to buy a new player at minimum (and a new TV to see any benefit at all).
Sure, this won't happen for awhile yet (heck, DVD may yet outlast Blu-ray in the market), but the swift end to the HD format war means that Blu-ray has much more of a chance of supplanting DVD.
this would be a perfect opportunity for students to do what they used to do best. Protest.
I went to Ryerson. I got a pretty good education there, no complaints. But you do not go to Ryerson if you are looking for school spirit, social activism, or really much of anything beyond classwork.
As a "university experience", Ryerson gets smothered by its location in downtown Toronto. There really is no "campus" per se, as Ryerson feels more like a collection of buildings in the core of a large city. There is also relatively little availability of campus residency. The atmosphere is *very* apathetic, there's no popular places to hang out, and everyone leaves after they are done class.
So, no, there will be no protest to support this guy, I can pretty much guarantee it.
The same idea could be applied to intellectual property. The owners of intellectual property should be required to give something back to society.
You're right, they should. It should be in the form of copyright that actually expires! That way, they give back the creative work to the public domain, as was intended by copyright law in the first place.
This isn't complicated, people. Trying to accommodate those who would forever lock up all popular culture since the 1930's is to be part of the problem, not the solution!
Agreed. The Wico Command Control joysticks were indestructible for our Commodore 64 games. Although, the "bat" style sticks were our preference, as opposed to your link to the "ball" style.
OT, but amazingly there is no "Wico" article on Wikipedia for these awesome sticks. Methinks there may be one soon!
A Veggie Tales reference on/.? I come here to escape, dammit!
LOL. I cycle through bizare-sounding Veggie sigs occasionally. I once got a response like yours only about 4 hours after changing it. Guess its now time again!
Sure, it's easier to install, but its way harder (usually) to get it to work. See my comment from further down the same original thread.
I know that software runs faster on Linux: I use it every day. In addition to my laptop, my "main" workstation is an old 1 GHz Athlon system that Vista would never run on. And its running the latest and greatest Kubuntu Gutsy just fine.
I never said the majority want to tinker with their OS: what I was talking about was that Linux forces you to be a tinkerer with your OS, and that most people do NOT want to do that. I do, 'cause I kinda like it that way, but most don't and never will. And I don't see Linux ever being as "easy" as Windows in this regard.
Hardware compatibility is the easy part about running Linux as a Desktop OS. The "pain in the ass" factor about tinkering with Linux is really what matters to the vast majority of people.
Why in the hell do people keep using ease of installation as a measure of how "ready" Linux is for the desktop?
Because it is, for better or worse, a necessary step that virtually everyone must undertake before they can use Linux, and also one which very few must undertake before they can use Windows. It's just the way the world is, and yelling about how unfair it is changes nothing.
However, installation is something that the "knowledgeable geek friend" of a user typically does, anyways. It's a moot point, for the most part.
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there is no significant difference in ease of use once installation is complete. Linux will be "ready for the desktop" when manufacturers commonly start preinstalling it on their computers like they do Windows. Not before.
Afraid I've got to disagree there. It's not just initial installation, but ongoing maintenance and installs that every user must tackle that matters a lot. "Ease of use" to a typical computer user these days would mean never, ever having to see a command line. And as much as Linux has gotten better on this in recent years (and, yes, Windows still requires Registry hacks way more often than should be necessary), there is still no comparison here. The "install" is dead easy in Ubuntu *if* the package you're looking for is in the repositories, but way too often it takes tweaking to get the application to do what its supposed to do.
Here is one of many examples I've had over the last several months as I've been running my Ubuntu (actually Kubuntu) box. I chose Kino, a DV editing program (universally recommended as the best "beginner" app for non-linear editing on Linux) from the "Add/Remove Programs" utility, and it installed flawlessly. However, when I connected my camera, it would not capture anything. Turns out there is a (perfectly reasonable, I'm sure) security issue with my Firewire connection, and the simplest solution is to always run Kino as root. Figuring this out through forums and FAQs, changing permissions, etc. was an "enjoyable" experience for me only because I'm fond of tinkering and making things work. Most people don't. For most people, the app simply doesn't work.
Here's another: the latest version of Flash (as of December) on Firefox was horridly choppy (many dropped frames) when viewing sites like YouTube and the like. The solution I found on a forum was to uninstall Flash, then download an older version via a huge tar.gz file mined from the bowels of Adobe's website, and install it through an uglyish command-line script. It also required the removal of files from hidden folders in multiple locations on the file tree. Not fun stuff for non-geeks.
Yes, I know these are anecdotal, but I don't believe my experience is abnormal. Things in Linux are easy to install. Once working, the environment is excellent. But in between installation and working is more often than not a long, tedious, "scary" journey of researching online, asking (pleading) for help online, massaging text files, discovering bugs, and all sorts of other goodies that you, I, and most everyone here doesn't get worked up about, but terrifies and pisses off the other 95% of the computer-using population.
The GP may have sounded a bit rude, but he is correct. For the "power user" (or any user that must administer their machine), Windows is "easier". It has more polish on its rough edges, polish that takes scads of man-hours to apply during the development of the software. If you want to say that its applying polish to a turd, so be it, but the Windows turd is still shinier than Linux's un-sanded mahogany.
I want Linux to be ready for the desktop. I want Linux to provide a decent end user experience. But it doesn't.
You're not wrong. For me (and for a good number of other/.ers), part of the "fun" of Linux is the hacking around, getting things working and feeling a strange sense of accomplishment when you unearth some strange tidbit of wisdom that permits everything to work the way its supposed to. And, yes, that includes purchasing hardware that supports Linux natively (unlike wireless cards that require ndiswrapper to work properly).
For those who want a computer that isn't Windows, but "works", you're right in talking about a Mac, 'cause for now that's your alternate (and a damned good one, too). Linux as a desktop OS still not for the faint of heart, even Ubuntu (which I use daily). As a Windows "power user", you are in the worst position to switch: you have a lot invested in customization, apps, and comfort level, and you need to see a truly superlative offering to make switching worth it to you. As you've correctly found out, Linux isn't it, for you. Heck, most Windows power users would probably load XP if someone dropped a brand new iMac on their desk, and never boot back to OS X again!
You decry that Microsoft is ripe for the picking, if only geeks would make things that "just work". Well, I'm not a developer, and even I know this: making things that "just work" is very, very HARD WORK! The developers of Linux desktop environments, applications, and the like do an amazing job, given that many are pure volunteers, and those that are paid don't have the same resources behind them. Making GUI interfaces slick and bug free, and testing them against myriad combinations of hardware platforms and software combinations, is just not fun! Microsoft (and Apple) pay good money to many, many people to perform the unsexy, boring, yet necessary work of trying to do this, stuff that geeks have no interest in doing if they could do "their own thing" instead.
I'm afraid that I don't see what you desire happening. Linux will always be the "geek" OS. People who use it will have to be ready for an experience which is somewhat more "down and dirty" than Windows. If that's not good enough for you, sorry man! You have to weigh which is more painful to you: Microsoft's forced upgrades, security risks, and ever-increasing hostility to its customers; or learning to deal with a less "friendly" OS and applications. Because until you feel greater pain from the former, it really makes no sense to switch to the latter.
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In fact, I still support an old NT 4 server that predates the release of Windows 95.
Sorry, but NT 4 was released *after* Windows 95. NT 4 took the NT operating system and attached Windows 95's GUI to it. Prior to NT 4's release (summer of 96, IIRC), NT 3.5 had the "3.1" look.
So, if the old server you support has a "Start" button, it does *not* predate the release of Windows 95.
I'm in total agreement with kae77. "Installation" is dead easy in today's Linux distros. But after installation is "getting it to work", which is still way too difficult in many cases.
Several months ago I wanted to try Kino, which is pretty much unanimously regarded as the best non-linear video editor for a beginner (as in Premier Elements). It installed from the repositories in Kubuntu flawlessly. However, it wouldn't capture anything from my camcorder over Firewire. Turns out that Kino won't (or can't) access the Firewire interface unless it's running as root. That took a bit of searching to find out, then having to find out how to change permissions so that Kino does this without having to log myself in as root all the time. I found it "fun" to do this, but for an average user, they're just going to throw up their hands and complain that the program just doesn't work right!
My favorite example was getting my daughter's computer running on Edubuntu last Christmas. I installed Flash from the repositories for Firefox so that she could watch YouTube videos. However, the video motion was horrendously choppy as to be unviewable. Searching the forums, I found that others were having the same issues, that Adobe's latest version of Flash for Linux was screwing up the streaming Flash content from YouTube-like sites. The only solution to download an older version of Flash, by first downloading a huge tar.gz file that had to be mined from the bowels of Adobe's website, extracting through an uglyish command line program, then manually deleting files from multiple locations on the directory tree (including one hidden directory). Need I say, NOT FUN STUFF for most non-nerds.
Linux is great for me, but for 95% of the population who don't enjoy tinkering with an OS, it will always be more "down and dirty" than Windows or OSX.
Ummm, thieves (particularly smash & grab style thieves) aren't generally known to fall into the "smart" category very often. "Learn to wipe the laptop", eh? If they knew how to do that, they're more knowledgeable than 95% of the computer-using population, and therefore more than likely not going to be a petty thief. I'm sure more and more idiot thieves will be caught this way as time goes on.
Hmmm...
I was taught in my Canadian elementary school math classes that if you had a square, 2" x 2", that it could be described as being "two inches square" (meaning a 2" line making up one side of a square), and that the area of such a square was "four square inches" (2 inches ^2).
Seeing how you used the term "square inches" and sm62704 used the term "inches square", I'd say you're both correct.
It is the characteristics that enable the behavior of a spammer that mark him as an antisocial psychopath.
One of my favorite documentaries, The Corporation, shows that companies (under the implicit direction of its board of directors) also show all the characteristics of unfeeling psychopaths. Laws are broken all the time, if it can be shown that the risk is considered minimal and the payoff is great.
Lots of "entrepreneurs" fall into the category as well.
I think that if you were to give the death penalty to every amoral asshole who cares about nobody but themselves, and causes harm (but not kill) to a lot of people, you would certainly have a more pleasant place to live, but one that entirely undervalues human life.
(for those outside of Canada and didn't get the joke...)
Future Shop is essentially identical to Best Buy. They sell the same products (audio/video, computers, appliances, music/games), with the same huges floor spaces and the same useless staffs. Same shit, different interior design.
Future Shop has been around for a couple of decades here, then Best Buy moved in as competition several years ago. Shortly thereafter, Best Buy bought out Future Shop, but didn't merge the operations. In fact, they still "compete", oftentimes with brand new stores being built directly across the street from each other.
I have mod points right now. Where is the "+1 Deliciously Evil" mod option?
Of course, we could step in and replace the "thugocracy" (great term, BTW) with our own puppet government. That's worked really well in Iraq so far, hasn't it?
I wish I had an answer that works, but really the only way that I can see that things actually change long-term is an all-out elimination of the bunch in power, coupled with a powerful grass-roots movement by the people of the nation to rise up an affect change, regardless of the potential personal costs. If only one is present, there may be a lot of bloodshed, but not necessarily any change for the better.
... or do you not realize how poor most of the planet is?
I put some short video clips on Facebook's video application (just stuff of my daughter for my friends and family to see). These are AVI files generated by my digital camera, about 20-30MB in size, lasting about 1-1.5 minutes each.
They uploaded pretty quickly, but then they were put in a queue to be encoded for their flash player. It took over 3 days for them to be online in my profile! It seems they don't need to just have large capacity for storage, but a bunch more CPU for processing.
I've explained to dozens of people why an ISP should be a pipe to the Internet, and nothing more. Tying themselves to their ISP's email address means they can never change providers without messing up all their communications to others. For every one we educate, there are hundreds more :-(
I'm not positive, but if a manufacturer wants to produce a DVD player, they must purchase a license to do so (too lazy to Google the consortium's name). Part of the license would be the demand that the manufacturer not sell units that lacked respect for the region codes.
I could be wrong, but I've got to think that I'm not. If there was no contractual (and, therefore, legal) requirement to respect region codes, *of course* there would be region-free DVD players available everywhere! Why not? If the manufacturers are part of some cabal whose purpose is to restrict access to "illegal" content, why the hell does every single player on the market play VCDs and Divx discs? How much "legal" content is available in those formats? Why wouldn't they refuse to play those as well?
Visio has been the best (and the "industry standard") flowcharting-style software available for a long time, well before Microsoft bought Shape in 1999 or 2000. Visio's dominance (and the resulting reliance upon it) was already in place and only exploited by Microsoft, not created by them.
The truth is that Visio is dominant on its own merits, not because of Microsoft's monopoly position.
Hey, I agree that HD is tangibly better than standard DVD. But for me (and a whole bunch of other people), it is not nearly enough better to justify switching media formats (and, necessarily, upgrading hardware that is already paid for and working perfectly well).
And while I have no gripe with Blu-ray peacefully coexisting with DVD, what I fear is that Blu-ray gets enough penetration that the industry can start ignoring the DVD format (VHS started dying off seriously when tapes stopped being distributed for new movies). When a studio is able to justify releasing a "Blu-ray exclusive" title, DVD will be toast quickly. Then I'll be stuck with an unsupported format that will continue to be "good enough" (for me, anyway) for years and years to come. I really, really don't want to deal with new un-rippable, premium-priced discs that will force me to buy a new player at minimum (and a new TV to see any benefit at all).
Sure, this won't happen for awhile yet (heck, DVD may yet outlast Blu-ray in the market), but the swift end to the HD format war means that Blu-ray has much more of a chance of supplanting DVD.
I went to Ryerson. I got a pretty good education there, no complaints. But you do not go to Ryerson if you are looking for school spirit, social activism, or really much of anything beyond classwork.
As a "university experience", Ryerson gets smothered by its location in downtown Toronto. There really is no "campus" per se, as Ryerson feels more like a collection of buildings in the core of a large city. There is also relatively little availability of campus residency. The atmosphere is *very* apathetic, there's no popular places to hang out, and everyone leaves after they are done class.
So, no, there will be no protest to support this guy, I can pretty much guarantee it.
You're right, they should. It should be in the form of copyright that actually expires! That way, they give back the creative work to the public domain, as was intended by copyright law in the first place.
This isn't complicated, people. Trying to accommodate those who would forever lock up all popular culture since the 1930's is to be part of the problem, not the solution!
Agreed. The Wico Command Control joysticks were indestructible for our Commodore 64 games. Although, the "bat" style sticks were our preference, as opposed to your link to the "ball" style.
OT, but amazingly there is no "Wico" article on Wikipedia for these awesome sticks. Methinks there may be one soon!
LOL. I cycle through bizare-sounding Veggie sigs occasionally. I once got a response like yours only about 4 hours after changing it. Guess its now time again!
The video itself is fine, but the advertising is not!
Sure, it's easier to install, but its way harder (usually) to get it to work. See my comment from further down the same original thread.
I know that software runs faster on Linux: I use it every day. In addition to my laptop, my "main" workstation is an old 1 GHz Athlon system that Vista would never run on. And its running the latest and greatest Kubuntu Gutsy just fine.
I never said the majority want to tinker with their OS: what I was talking about was that Linux forces you to be a tinkerer with your OS, and that most people do NOT want to do that. I do, 'cause I kinda like it that way, but most don't and never will. And I don't see Linux ever being as "easy" as Windows in this regard.
Hardware compatibility is the easy part about running Linux as a Desktop OS. The "pain in the ass" factor about tinkering with Linux is really what matters to the vast majority of people.
Because it is, for better or worse, a necessary step that virtually everyone must undertake before they can use Linux, and also one which very few must undertake before they can use Windows. It's just the way the world is, and yelling about how unfair it is changes nothing.
However, installation is something that the "knowledgeable geek friend" of a user typically does, anyways. It's a moot point, for the most part.
Afraid I've got to disagree there. It's not just initial installation, but ongoing maintenance and installs that every user must tackle that matters a lot. "Ease of use" to a typical computer user these days would mean never, ever having to see a command line. And as much as Linux has gotten better on this in recent years (and, yes, Windows still requires Registry hacks way more often than should be necessary), there is still no comparison here. The "install" is dead easy in Ubuntu *if* the package you're looking for is in the repositories, but way too often it takes tweaking to get the application to do what its supposed to do.
Here is one of many examples I've had over the last several months as I've been running my Ubuntu (actually Kubuntu) box. I chose Kino, a DV editing program (universally recommended as the best "beginner" app for non-linear editing on Linux) from the "Add/Remove Programs" utility, and it installed flawlessly. However, when I connected my camera, it would not capture anything. Turns out there is a (perfectly reasonable, I'm sure) security issue with my Firewire connection, and the simplest solution is to always run Kino as root. Figuring this out through forums and FAQs, changing permissions, etc. was an "enjoyable" experience for me only because I'm fond of tinkering and making things work. Most people don't. For most people, the app simply doesn't work.
Here's another: the latest version of Flash (as of December) on Firefox was horridly choppy (many dropped frames) when viewing sites like YouTube and the like. The solution I found on a forum was to uninstall Flash, then download an older version via a huge tar.gz file mined from the bowels of Adobe's website, and install it through an uglyish command-line script. It also required the removal of files from hidden folders in multiple locations on the file tree. Not fun stuff for non-geeks.
Yes, I know these are anecdotal, but I don't believe my experience is abnormal. Things in Linux are easy to install. Once working, the environment is excellent. But in between installation and working is more often than not a long, tedious, "scary" journey of researching online, asking (pleading) for help online, massaging text files, discovering bugs, and all sorts of other goodies that you, I, and most everyone here doesn't get worked up about, but terrifies and pisses off the other 95% of the computer-using population.
The GP may have sounded a bit rude, but he is correct. For the "power user" (or any user that must administer their machine), Windows is "easier". It has more polish on its rough edges, polish that takes scads of man-hours to apply during the development of the software. If you want to say that its applying polish to a turd, so be it, but the Windows turd is still shinier than Linux's un-sanded mahogany.
You're not wrong. For me (and for a good number of other
For those who want a computer that isn't Windows, but "works", you're right in talking about a Mac, 'cause for now that's your alternate (and a damned good one, too). Linux as a desktop OS still not for the faint of heart, even Ubuntu (which I use daily). As a Windows "power user", you are in the worst position to switch: you have a lot invested in customization, apps, and comfort level, and you need to see a truly superlative offering to make switching worth it to you. As you've correctly found out, Linux isn't it, for you. Heck, most Windows power users would probably load XP if someone dropped a brand new iMac on their desk, and never boot back to OS X again!
You decry that Microsoft is ripe for the picking, if only geeks would make things that "just work". Well, I'm not a developer, and even I know this: making things that "just work" is very, very HARD WORK! The developers of Linux desktop environments, applications, and the like do an amazing job, given that many are pure volunteers, and those that are paid don't have the same resources behind them. Making GUI interfaces slick and bug free, and testing them against myriad combinations of hardware platforms and software combinations, is just not fun! Microsoft (and Apple) pay good money to many, many people to perform the unsexy, boring, yet necessary work of trying to do this, stuff that geeks have no interest in doing if they could do "their own thing" instead.
I'm afraid that I don't see what you desire happening. Linux will always be the "geek" OS. People who use it will have to be ready for an experience which is somewhat more "down and dirty" than Windows. If that's not good enough for you, sorry man! You have to weigh which is more painful to you: Microsoft's forced upgrades, security risks, and ever-increasing hostility to its customers; or learning to deal with a less "friendly" OS and applications. Because until you feel greater pain from the former, it really makes no sense to switch to the latter.