Let me start off by saying that I salute the long and hard work that developers everywhere put into their products. I am not a developer, nor do I play one on TV. I'm just a professional user and tech support person. I like to think I have above-average skills and experience, along with the ability to relate to the "typical" computer user.
Yeah, it was all free - and I'm not asking for my money back. The question I continually have is "what is the long-term goal of Linux and the open-source community?" Is it a hobbyist OS? Is it something which is content to remain in the domain of techno-geeks? Or is this something which strives for widespread acceptance in the broader business world, to be (if not on the desktops) on the approved list of every manager out there? Is this something that is meant for my mother to use to check her email, surf the web, and play videos of her grandkids? If the latter, then we're not there yet. In many ways, we're not even close. For all we say about proprietary software, OS, etc, they have created an expectation that things *work*. While I'm happy to answer questions for my mother, I'm not there all the time to be her on-site IT department. I can't take a week or two off of work to dedicate my time to making sure that her computer functions properly with all (or even most) of the parts. Until I can feel comfortable putting a linux machine in my mother's hands, I can't recommend it as a solution for perhaps 75% of the people I talk to. It's those people who maintain the MS "monopoly". When I see a 1.0.x version number, I expect there to be bugs and problems. But I expect things to work properly most of the time. It's in the 2.6 kernel? That tells me, perhaps falsely, that this is ready for broad-based use across a wide variety of hardware. This doesn't appear to be the case. Am I asking for the ALSA developers to obtain and test every sound boadr on the market, every chipset? Not at all. I wouldn't mind some sort of clear chart, as has been suggested, specifying just WHAT is *fully* supported/tested. Another section, "should work", would be nice, as well as a "don't hold your breath" section. This should be a reasonable request - the developers should know against which hardware they test, what passes and what fails. The middle section, the best-guess list, would probably be the hardest. Oh, and as long as I'm dreaming, it would be nice to see a clear and simple explanation of how to tell what chipset is on your card, so that we can refer to that instead of the manufacturer's model number. I'm sure some people will tell me to stop whining, what do I want for free. That's OK - but I'd ask in return what they're doing this for. I'm trying to learn, and trying to be an advocate, but it is often difficult when the responses I see to concerns such as mine take the tone of STFU. Just one more opinion, FWIW. -Don ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
