wrote:
On Feb 18, 8:49 am, HK wrote:
RLM wrote:
On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:45:26 -0500, D.Duck wrote:
"nameless" wrote in message
...
http://xkcd.com/528/
It's only in Beta, MS will fix it.
Red Hat Linux is going to show MS how.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/it_managem...21700735NWMSRH
Is this the year linux overtakes MS and Apple on the desktop? :)

I presume that was sarcastic :-) They've only been at it forever and
have less than 1% to show for it. I loaded one of the linux's on an
old pc. It works ok. And the open word/spreadsheet is not bad
either. But as long as windows keeps shipping on new pc's that what
people are going to use.


I've played around with various iterations of linux from time to time.
Twice, I believe, last year. There's nothing substantially wrong with
it, but...and there are a lot of buts.

My experience:

It didn't install properly on my plain vanilla PC desktop. It choked on
setting up my video card, for example. And once I got it installed, I
had to go searching for drivers for hardware. And then I had to go
looking for software. The documentation is awful. The "help" consists of
begging in discussions groups, and getting answers such as "If you
aren't smart enough to figure it out, you shouldn't be using linux."

And then...it was a bear to remove its start up paramenters and settings
from my hard drive.

Now that I've gone completely to the dark side by switching to an Apple
laptop and desktop and OS 10.5x, I have access to a lot of "unix"
software and controls that are also accessible to linux users. So far,
I've used the terminal app.

I bootcamp into VISTA and it works just fine. There's no really good
Apple software that competes with Quicken, for example, and the
BlueChart software for my Garmin GPS demands a Windows system, not an
Apple or Linux system.

I don't see linux being any more than a hobbyist's OS on desktop
machines. On servers, it does much better, of course.