Science Forums 2

[nkt]

That's a good response, and I have to agree with large parts of it. I was switched to Linux for a while, but now I use XP, as does my other half, who used Redhat/98 dualboot for about two years, before we bought a copy of XP for her.

Linux (aside from Knoppix) just doesn't detect the hardware nicely, doesn't help out much while installing, and, once installed, you are often just left to get on with it. Even something as simple as changing the screen resolution can be a nightmare - we had a weird issue with the root GUI being switched into a res that was too high for the monitor, but the other two accounts were fine. It took an age to solve.

USB support, LAN cards, etc. are better supported than XP, which was great, but then the drivers were not helpful when it came to changing a small thing, sometimes, because there were six different GUI programs to help you, but only one had the switch that you needed.

3D support was weird - even when we thought the card was working, firing up TuxRacer got us a frame or two every three seconds. Much tweaking later and we got it working, but nothing told us it wasn't perfect to start with! And on an nVidea card? One of the most common cards today?

The final nail was actually just that some stuff didn't work hardware wise, and some of the software just didn't work, yet could we recompile or upgrade the system? Of course not. Something always failed. Always with the same sets of cryptic error messages. Getting anything out of the RPM system was a nightmare, even with two very computer literate IT experts trying. Eventually, I determined that the system was convinced it had no compiler installed. So then we were stuck in a catch 22 - we can't compile the compiler.

Of course, every one of these things could be solved with a cryptic keystroke or two, but we had to use another machine to get online and actually find the answers. And once this has happened a dozen times, you start to think XP isn't that bad. We tried Redhat and Fedora 1 & 3, Mandrake, Knoppix, and others.

That brings up another question: How does the average beginner know which code base to download? Which of the hundreds of Linux threads is the right one for them? And what about BSD? OpenBSD or FreeBSD? Argh! BeOS? I've heard of it, but I have no idea if it is even based on the Linux kernel...

I'm tempted by Lindows, but also by the Mac OSX, which is obviously more expensive, but the Mac is so nice, now, but you can still drop back to a CLI and *do* stuff that is otherwise impossible.

If Mac shifts to Intel, OSX may well be my next desktop.