I’ve earned my living from writing and testing software for over 20 years and I’ve installed and used many distros but for the world at large Linux, even in the really friendly Ubuntu 10 form, is not a viable option.

Having just spent the best part of three hours trying to get it to run a decent screen resoultion on a Fujitsu laptop I have surrendered and put the disc to one side. I don’t have the time to dedicate to that sort of activity and run my businesses.

Crack compatibility or make it simple to install drivers and Linux is going to get my vote “going forard” (horrible term) as I would rather pay a maintenance/support fee to a bunch of dedicated programmers than buy licenses to swell the corporate coffers at Microsoft.

I’d add to the drivers, the problems with sleep/hibernate – but then that’s pretty flaky on Windows as well. Probably the only good thing about OSX – rock solid hibernate.

Things may change. You have two major players now pushing Linux for specific hardware (Intel with Moblin, Google with Android and ChromeOS), while the Chinese government is very keen for Linux to be the dominant OS in China. And China’s where most of the world’s hardware comes from these days…

Thanks for the reply. Your point is well taken, and I should’ve mentioned it in my rant. I realize that it’s not the fault of the linux community but of hardware vendors (and, at the same time you can’t really blame them for neglecting what is only 1% of the market, as you pointed out). Still, the fact remains that in many cases linux “isn’t there yet” and in my humble opinion this is one of the major reasons. The last thing most computer-users (even advanced ones) want to deal with is drivers and hardware incompatibilities…

If more companies would realize that they can support a business model that encompasses open source, Linux would be leaps and bounds above where it is now in terms of desktop usage. Nvidia and ATI both seem to be afraid to release drivers for Linux users on our terms. They seem to believe that their drivers are a source of revenue and tremble at the idea that they can make money off of the hardware and open source the drivers.

I think it boils down to the idea that, because Linux isn’t corporately backed on a large enough scale, they can’t get one up on the competition or a sizable user base (comparatively, that is). To get corporate backing though, they’d have to prove that they have a sizable user base. Catch-22 if you ask me.

i’ve never had a problem with Windows being incompatible with a particular graphics card or not being able to handle two monitors or something. and since Apple makes its own hardware that’s certainly not an issue. but in my humble opinion this is still one of the major weaknesses of Linux. not Ubuntu, specifically, but the linux kernel in particular.

anyone that doesn’t know what I’m talking about should try to install 10.04 on a laptop with an intel 82852/855GM graphics card (they’re not uncommon).

i’ll be the first to admit that I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but I’ve always assumed that part of the reason that Windows is so bloated is because it maintains support for a HUGE number of hardware variations. be that as it may, it doesn’t take any hacking at all to install Windows on most x86 hardware — in fact I’ve never encountered a major compatibility problem in ~15 years. my experience with linux is MUCH shorter but in that time i’ve encountered some hardware incompatibilities that were beyond my ability to solve.

rant over.

And could he not have pointed out that Ubuntu is the only one of these distributions to have an App store.

I mean I don’t even like Ubuntu, but come on…