Adventures in Linux

Like athanman, for me there are too many posts to look for just one point. Even so, I am not 100% positive of my input, but it seems to me that I read somewhere that the Linux distros have a problem with Logitech mice. I am 99.99% sure I stumbled across that somewhere, but since I do not own a Logitech, I didn't make it a point to memorize the source of the input. I might recommend a simple $5.00 investment in a generic mouse just to see if it works better than Logitech on the Linux OS. For myself, I've been procrastinating for almost four years about installing a Linux distro. I now possess Mandrake 7.1, RedHat 7.1, Linspire 5.0.59, and Fedora Core 4. I think I'm finally ready to make the leap. I will probably go with Fedora Core 4, since I've got a 700+ page book. Wish me luck, just as I wish you luck.

Carpetbombing a discussion forum is rude and annoying. Stop it.

That said, I'll repeat here the same thing I said in response to your horribly underinformed rant in the "Linux in the real world" thread:

When you've supported as many end-users trying to install Windows from scratch, or trying to resolve issues when hardware gets replaced, as I have, then perhaps you'll realize that Windows is at best no better than Linux for issues like this.

"Aunt Betty and her quilt knitting friends will NEVER edit config files or compile source code."
They'll never hack the Windows Registry, flash BIOS, or resolve driver conflicts through the Device Manager, either. The real difference is in the fact that it's harder to find vendors that sell complete systems with Linux pre-installed and pre-configured.

"in some distros you have to be a geek even to find the documentation by using the CLI MAN commands"
Funny, I never realized you had to be a "geek" to type "man" and hit the Enter key. That's news to me. In any case, I'd rather have obscure documentation than none at all.

"A while back I read a piece about some guy trying to print to a shared printer (on XP), it went on to describe his efforts digging through the documentation, setting up SAMBA, dealing with dependencies, etc."
Funny, with Red Hat using KDE (for instance), I just click Control Center > System > Printing Manager and use the GUI printing configuration tool; this is very like the way Windows handles it. On Mandrake with KDE it's slightly more complex: I open the Mandrake menu and go to System > Configuration > Configure Your Computer > Hardware > Printers (which is made a little more obvious by the fact that the icon for Hardware shows a printer). It's similarly easy in GNOME. While I wouldn't throw a user who'd only used Windows previously into CLI printing configuration without waterwings, even it is not too difficult on distributions like Debian (my favorite).

"The same thing goes for installing applications. In Windoze, you put the disc in, double click 'setup.exe' and it auto-magically does its thing."
Jeez, that sounds pretty much like a pain in the arse. You have to have a CD? I just type "apt-get install [packagename]" in Debian, or "urpmi [packagename]" in Mandrake, or "yum install [packagename]" in Fedora Core, and it installs, dependencies and all. Even better, unlike with Windows applications, installing a new one using "apt-get install" doesn't tend to break other applications that use some of the same libraries (DLLs in Windows-speak).

"Just because some functionality can be added in, doesn?t mean that is should be added in."
Gee, I've been saying that about Microsoft for years, and they're still not listening to little old me. Next time you decide to say something like that, maybe you should have a look at the broken-ass mess of "features" that MS calls "Office" first.

"Once your software is ?Aunt Betty proof?, and accomplishes its primary goal (i.e. the printer auto-magically prints), then you can make the advanced features available through either config files or plug-ins or whatever."
Well, good. Then we're done. See above, re: KDE and GNOME configuration of printing. By the way, "config files . . . or whatever" is what's going on behind the scenes, just as Windows Registry settings, MIME type configuration, DLL dependencies, and so on are going on behind the scenes when you configure printers for Windows. This isn't "extra functionality" that gets added on later. This is what makes it all work in the first place. The point of using plain text config files rather than a Windows Registry is to make it easier for an expert to troubleshoot when Aunt Betty completely screws something up.

"Make installers that include everything your software needs to run!"
Ooh, bloat. Good plan. More complexity. Less secure software is fun. More broken software is fun. Oh, yeah, and even Windows doesn't do this as much as you think. Luckily, unlike Windows, major Linux distributions provide massive software package repositories that allow you to ignore things like dependencies and just say "install this thing", and it installs and automagically works. I'm guessing you haven't actually tried this stuff out, though.

"If you can?t grab it off the shelf, rip off the shrink-wrap, and install it,"
Why would I want to do all that? I can just skip the "grab it off the shelf" and "rip off the shrink-wrap" steps and go straight to "install it".

In general, you should use what many call a "hardware" modem for anything but Windows. The reason "Winmodems" are called "Winmodems" is that they were designed with only part of the modulation/demodulation functionality provided by hardware, with most of it being provided through a software emulator of the hardware functionality of a "true" modem.

This software-based modulation and demodulation has a number of (negative) side-effects. For one thing, it's more "fragile", as it's entirely too easy for the software component to get corrupted (thus introducing a shorter lifespan for the modem). For another, there's higher latency with software-based operation rather than hardware-based. Finally, because it relies on specific software functionality to work, and because that functionality is the only thing that differentiates one brand of Winmodem from another, all of the source code is jealously guarded, copyrighted, legally protected trade secrets, making it difficult indeed for the open source community to properly support Winmodems.

These days, the only fully hardware-based modems available are, for the most part, external modems. Unfortunately, they tend to cost significantly more than internal modems (around five times as much: average $35 instead of $7, roughly). There are internal hardware modems out there, but they all tend to be ten years old and hard to find.