Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
There is no money to drive these things and people don't seem to be too keen on doing these jobs either.

Are you sure?

So can I half hijack this thread and ask if anyone has tried and OpenSolaris distributions? Maybe it's too early to see it running well on x86 hardware (I triad it as soon as it came out and there were a few problems) nut it's got a big company behind it.

Anyone?

I installed Ubuntu on a laptop with XP prof. , which I thought the sound card had broken.. Ubuntu fixed the sound card! :up: i haven't had time to play around but I detest the lack of a good installer.

Quote: Original post by The Reindeer Effect
One thing that always struck me as odd was the whole "live cd" concept: we have a basic linux setup so that we can install linux. The livecd is capable of autodetecting graphics cards, ethernet interfaces, and audio drivers, and yet once you have the linux installer running from the CD, you have to configure all this stuff on your own.

The latest Gentoo CD for x86 is a live CD and it lays itself down on the target machine. You can actually have a very functional Gentoo system in about 20 minutes now (if you pick all pre-built packages). The installer is still quite rough around the edges, but it should be looking good in another release or two.

I've had some similar experiences with Linux as a desktop OS; the installers are always a little rough around the edges, the help system is pretty much inadequate, etc. Basically, as a desktop OS, Linux just isn't ready for primetime. I run Windows 2000 as my primary desktop and have a machine running Gentoo as essentially just a server. I put X and Fluxbox on it (it's fairly old, so Gnome or KDE would be horrendous) as a curiosity, and got it working (after some struggling I think), but I never open X on it. As a server I think it's great; emerge is a great tool and makes for a good installer; I think a relatively decent GUI app could be built on top of it (and might exist, but I haven't seen anything) akin to Add/Remove programs.

"Basically, as a desktop OS, Linux just isn't ready for primetime."

But.... why?

Isn't linux like 15 years old? Sheesh. Maybe when we're all dead and buried it'll start showing potential.

After that, try installing a printer, and getting it to print from a few different programs (say, Scribus, Firefox, GIMP and OpenOffice). Especially a networked, non-PostScript printer...

I've said it before: Linux excels where there's exciting, interesting technology to be driven. Say, in SCSI drivers, or high-performance networking. It falls down flat where there's boring, non-technical, dirty work to be done. I believe this is because the reward for an OpenSource developer is mostly in the developing itself.

It seems that some people think that if linux isn't ready for the desktop, it's useless.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy so long as linux (specifically gentoo, the distro I use) carries on doing what it's doing. I prefer doing things in a commandline rather than clicking around to do everything, it appeals to me. I like every so often having to dip down into configuration files and learning a little more about how my system works.

That's not to say that that suits everyone, but I like linux because it's different from windows. I don't want a windows clone with slightly different under-the-hood technology.

Supposedly, the Mepis liveCD sets up stuff in some way that allows you to simply copy files to your harddrive to 'install' it. I haven't tried that, but maybe that's more user friendly?