[Carbon]

The terminal is not "easy-to-use" for anyone and is a necessity for a majority of fixes. It does not support more hardware than any OS, people just buy hardware that's "compatible" in the first place. If you have a lot of time on your hands and want to mess around with the kernel or whatever that's fine, but Ubuntu is another failure of OSS developers to actually focus on usability because they have no experience with the average consumer's needs.

[Cew27]

first off, yes it does. this is just one of the many articles that explains that

secondly i didnt say its easy to use, but when you are finding a fix online its easier for you to just paste something into term than following instruction through lots of menu's taking considerably more time.

and claiming ubuntu is a failure of an os is laughable and incredibly funny coming from a windows user

and i have never messed with the kernel and never needed to. nor have i ever needed to mess with the systems deep internals and no one should. secondly you obviously dont know that much about linux seing as you made all these assumtptions and have no idea of how to use it correctly.

sorry carbon

[Carbon]

That's a vast oversimplification of what I said and you know it. "Ready for the desktop" does not mean "it's sort of easy to use and supports a bunch of stuff I guess if you know how to do X and Y and Z" . It means a user should be able to install the operating system, a minimum of drivers, and go. Considerable amount of people come to me saying "hey, I want to run *X distro*, but I can't use this motherboard and this motherboard and this motherboard" and end up buying some G31 crap. Based on the sheer numbers, I can't just write it off as PEBCAK.

Now, if it's difficult to fix something in a bunch of menus, as you admit, then that is a usability failure exactly the way I said. Windows, for all its faults, not only duplicates most "terminal" commands in a GUI (i.e. "repair" an internet connection essentially == cmd -> ipconfig), but presents common tasks in a centralized area and often in the quick launch bar. It isn't perfect, but the ones that are hidden away tend to be esoteric like services.msc. I don't think Windows is perfect by any means (OS X, for all its failings, probably is the top scorer here), but it's certainly a hell of a lot better.

When installing drivers for wireless devices, for example, takes more than a dozen cryptic terminal commands, your OS is not ready for the average consumer . This wasn't rare - users of a massive amount of these devices had to do so until recently, when Broadcom support was fully ironed out. And this isn't limited to this category of devices - it was just a hell of a lot more prevalent. Given a choice between running ndiswrapper or an executable, what would you choose? Or would you just install Vista where it works on first installation with no driver executables needed and you can set up a network in 5 minutes?

While Arch and its companions in the "power user" category can be excused for not claiming they are all ready for everyone to use as fervently as Ubuntu and other OSS advocates do is misleading. This is repeated again and again with open-source projects, because they form core groups of users, some of which develop, then claim nothing's wrong because those core groups are still happy! Look at Blender's UI debacle for an example of this.

I see absolutely no reason to run a distro, as I said, unless you want to mess with the kernel, you want a free OS, or you want your OS to be lightweight/are installing it on an older machine (of course, Ubuntu doesn't really run on anything with under 512MB RAM or pre-2000, so Windows is the only real alternative there too). It's like I say when people ask whether they should run RAID: keep it on servers.

[serverguy]

Originally Posted by Carbon

keep it on servers.

So true.

[Hybr!d]

A short time ago I gave ubuntu a roasting when it didn't support anything out of the box, totally agree with Carbon. If Linux is to compete with Windows it has to work for the mass market. That said, I have been trying Mandriva Free 2009 over the last day or so and I am impressed, 99% working out of the box.

[Cew27]

ndiswrapper is not a driver, it is a way of getting wireless not supported in linux kernel to run using a windows binary, and ubuntu run soo much more hardware out of the box, wireless drivers, graphics drivers at the click of a button using the hardware manager.
you guys just dont like doing things differently and think its "too hard" because you dont know how to do it properly.
and i had ubuntu running on machines with as low a 128 meg of ram. stable aswell.
also it isnt difficult to fix something using the gui and that isnt what i said. i said it difficult and takes more time than nessecary to instruct someone through menus's.

"I see absolutely no reason to run a distro, as I said, unless you want to mess with the kernel" once again why are you talking about kernels?! no body said they are going to mess with kernels and no new user should even attempt it.

you do a fresh install of windows and then tell me how much hardware works out of the box. then compare that to linux mint.

in windows...
wireless wont work
ethernet may not but sometimes does
no graphics driver aside from the windows generic ones


and in linux, all these will work with the correct drivers out of the box. how can you flame ubuntu for doing a better job than windows at ease of use out of the box.

and keeping linux to servers, that talk you heard in the nineties and now look where linux is now. windows vista is the biggest mess ever, any linux distro craps all over it.

[Carbon]

you guys just dont like doing things differently and think its "too hard" because you dont know how to do it properly.

If I don't, how is someone that doesn't know anything about computers going to?

and i had ubuntu running on machines with as low a 128 meg of ram. stable aswell.

Great, but I couldn't get it running on my old 800mhz Athlon (despite a lot of googling and several boot options) and just ended up installing a custom version of XP. Much less hassle, ultimately less bloat, and everything worked even without graphics drivers. The average user, again, given a XP license will do that too. And remember - not everyone is running stuff from 2008. I worked on a older lady's computer a few weeks ago that was running Win 98 and had a 400mhz processor and 128MB of RAM. Someone might be driven to try out one of the various lightweight distros available as an alternative, but obviously that's not such a great idea.

and ubuntu run soo much more hardware out of the box, wireless drivers, graphics drivers at the click of a button using the hardware manager.

you do a fresh install of windows and then tell me how much hardware works out of the box. then compare that to linux mint

in windows...
wireless wont work
ethernet may not but sometimes does
no graphics driver aside from the windows generic ones

and in linux, all these will work with the correct drivers out of the box. how can you flame ubuntu for doing a better job than windows at ease of use out of the box.

Right, but then you compare it to XP rather than Vista, which is just as old as those versions of Ubuntu which didn't. If we want to compare new versions, let's compare Vista to Ubuntu. FYI, the windows generic drivers, at least the XP ones, work fine for most users as well - obviously it's better to get the correct ones but basic web surfing etc will work fine on those that come with XP.

"I see absolutely no reason to run a distro, as I said, unless you want to mess with the kernel" once again why are you talking about kernels?! no body said they are going to mess with kernels and no new user should even attempt it.

Because that's one of the only upsides. You can do whatever you want with it, assuming that's something you like doing. It's a nice feature, but obviously not relevant to most users.

and keeping linux to servers, that talk you heard in the nineties and now look where linux is now.

It's nowhere. Every year people say will be the "year of the Linux desktop". It's a joke at this point.

[MJM]

I use both quite actively and have to say that they both have their own advantages.
I run Linux mostly because the software I'm using is difficult to run in Windows.
I keep Windows because, well, I don't really know why, but some things seem to run better, mostly flash or graphics related (since there is no ATI driver on Fedora).

I would say however that Ubuntu has the best hardware supports I've seen. On several machines I've seen it installed on, everything worked out of the box. The only thing it asked me was whether I wanted to use the ATI driver instead of the native Linux driver.


It's probably true that for the most part, Linux is not ready for consumers, not for the average consumer at least. RPM/DEB/etc, a user doesn't know what the **** that is and there's really no reason to not hide it from them. Personal experience tells me that at some point they will ahve to use the terminal for things other than quick bug fixes, but instead to find stuff out and alter settings... stuff that sometimes occurs in Windows, but most of the time is hidden away from the user.
Aside from that, doing normal tasks (writing docs, spreadsheets, email, etc) works just as well in Linux as it does in Windows.

[Cew27]

you cant say that linux isnt ready for the desktop because people dont know what the package formats are? how will they learn what they are if they dont use it?!
the truth is people dont like change, and if that means sticking with failing windows then they will do it.
also carbon were you running gnome on that 900 mhz athlon?
and saying linux is having no impression on the marker is not true at all.
look at the sucess of the eee pc look at russia using ubuntu in all there goverment and school computers, that millions of computer and a whole country adoption.
so yeah, linus is rubbish and just for servers......

[serverguy]

Originally Posted by Cew27

look at the sucess of the eee pc

They have sold more XP units than Linux units since they have offered that option.

It also doesn't help that the XP one is cheaper since Microsoft practically gave them the licences: http://apcmag.com/windowsbased_eeepc..._linux_one.htm

I bought and Eee with the Xandros it comes with. Tried in vain to use it for a month but it was hopeless. It was really slow (and I have an EeePC 900 (1GB of RAM).

Then I tried the Ubuntu for the Eee. What an even bigger piece of crap. Wireless support didn't exist and when it did it was hopelessly useless.

Then I installed a thinned down XP, Office 2007. Firefox.

Perfect. So much more useable. Much better for using for network troubleshooting. Runs much faster with the bloat cut out of XP.
It works much better with the rest of the network which is primarily Windows based.

And if I need to I can quickly boot BackTrack up which I also have installed for a little wireless security testing

I tried in vain to like Linux on this little laptop, but it just was never going to work. Check out how many people have done the same on EeeUser.



Also, no one has ever said that Linux is rubbish.

Also, nothing has been rolled out in Russia yet. It is still in a very much early testing stage in select few establishments.