Ben Reser wrote: >On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 12:37:26AM +0000, SI Reasoning wrote: > > >>I am in the middle of a benefit so I have not participated in the development >>process this time. But my brother (a very loud microsoft proponent) has tried it >>out. He actually was very impressed but ran into two problems that I heard about, >>one dealing with the nvidea driver and the other was the mouse lockup problem. I >>don't have enough info to help debug it, but it appears that I have seen similar >>issues reported. For what it is worth, he runs a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop. For >>people like him, if this was the release, he would install it, run into a problem >>with a basic issue, and lose interest (this has been the history as he has installed >>every new version of Mandrake). These are the people who will need to convert. He is >>open, but Mandrake has lost out because of the little things. When the little >>details are handled, we are there. >> >> > >Well it sounds to me that basically your brother is expecting as good of >hardware support for Linux as for Windows. And unfortunately that just >isn't going to happen right now. As long as hardware manufacturers >refuse to take the Linux market seriously and don't provide high quality >drivers for their hardware this is going to be an issue. > > > This is very true, although I would say that overall the linux community is doing a great great job on drivers which seem to be of far higher quality than their windows counterparts. True, if you get a fancy soundcard or graphics card it may not have everything the windows version has (overclocking tweakers etc) but generally I feel that there is a far lower level of annoyance associated with them. For example, my winTV card has never worked properly in windows XP despite numerous driver revisions since it came out, the sound is still cutting out and fading - messages to hauppauge have proved useless, they simply send standard replys back. However, with the linux bttv driver i've never experienced a single problem, it just works flawlessly, and thats all down to the work of an invidividual and the army of driver patchers, not some big company, so in a way i'm glad that there is a nice, open source, high quality driver for my tv card in linux.
Its true that with windows you just run the install program and reboot, and maybe sometimes in linux it's not that easy, but believe me, once you have it working in my experience you don't need to touch it again (until you install lastest cooker packages lol). So despite install issues that may occur, I think you have to play with linux a little longer before you throw it away, however off-putting a failed install may be. cheers cris.
