On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 09:49:19AM +1100, Benno wrote:
>
> But still at the end of the day your general consumer (i.e: target of
> the desktop), doesn't know, or want to know, and often will just take
> whatever the sales droid at the local Hardly Normal tells them, which is
> most likely going to be whatever product has the biggest margin
> (or has an associated salesperson competition), which makes our job
> as advocates of desktop Linux harder.
This is true. Consider that if making a "Linux desktop" means being able
to turn the marketing blather of the local "Hardly Normal sales droid"
into working reality for a brain dead consumer, then we won't be able
to do it. It just is not possible. Microsoft won't do it, they have
no more ability to achieve this impossible goal than we do, they just
crank out more misinformation until people believe what they are told.
My daughter bought a web-cam recently with her birthday money.
Of course, she insists on running a MS-Windows system (just to piss me
off), of course she just plugs the thing in and cranks the installer
and (big surprise to her, not a surprise to me) the thing doesn't work.
It produces a few pictures but is not compatible with other applications
that she wants to use. Of course she wants me to fix it for her,
and I tell her, "too bad, you have been ripped off".
I've seen Sony shrug and ignore the fact that the video drivers on
some of their laptops (in particular, the Vaio PCG-K74 with ATI Radeon)
are incompatible with many popular games (I'm talking about MS-Windows
games running on the factory installed Windows-XP system).
They can't even be bothered issuing driver upgrades on their website.
True, this is one of their budget models but that's no excuse for
treating your customers like dirt. The fact is that things in the
Microsoft world do NOT JUST WORK, they have problems all over the place
and require extensive support effort to get a system that consistently
does its job.
I believe that the Linux community will be far better off in the long
term if they take the trouble to clearly and explicitly write off
compatibility with all the junk devices and explain in big letters,
"NO these devices are not supported, don't buy them, don't use them".
Trying to halfway support devices that randomly fail and then pretend
that you have achieved compatibility is the worst of all worlds.
- Tel
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
