Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 10th Apr 2006 03:58 UTC
An ex-Microsoft employee is arguing that Linux is ready for the primetime and that only thing keeping it away is the number of bugs it has. He claims that if these few high-importance bugs are fixed one way or another, Linux can become a dominant power in the desktop OS world.
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Member since:
2005-07-18
The problem is that, as many of the comments here have pointed out, most of those bugs have easy workarounds. In fact many of them could be called bad default configurations. The "it just works" factor is missing because the user is expected to know how to configure and install things.
Many distributions seem to compete on who releases packages with the highest version numbers these days. I've tried SuSE, ubuntu and kubuntu lately and all of them had obvious flaws in their (default) graphical environments ranging from crashes to configuration tools just not working. Had I not known how to fix the numerous problems by hand I would have gone back to windows in a heartbeat. Distributions really should spend a lot more time on testing. Every crash, no matter how minor, should be addressed.
Of course a great part of the problem are proprietary/patented multimedia algorithms and undocumented hardware. Working with those require manual user intervention. The challenge is to reduce the extra work needed as much as possible.