Linked by David Adams on Fri 27th Jun 2008 04:46 UTC, submitted by Rahul
Erik Huggers, a Microsoft guy at the BBC, takes a look at Fedora 9 as his first Linux desktop and finds it surprisingly good.
"I am glad that I got a chance to test drive Fedora and as a result have come to believe in the potential of Linux as a mainstream operating system.
As Ashley said in this post last year, the BBC does a lot of work with open standards already - but in the future we plan to do more.
We want to make iPlayer work on all operating systems including open source ones like Fedora and I am confident we'll make good progress on this before the end of the year."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
For me, 'ready for the desktop' seems to encroach on the same field as the definition of a 'real man' and 'real Scotsman'. If we were going to hold up every operating system to the lofty goals of 'ready for the desktop' - I don't think there would be a single one that could even come close to it.
Given the fact that I just spent 5 hours trying to get XP on a 1 year old Dell Laptop and around 5 hours more to get some basic functionality on top of it (AVG/ZoneAlarm/7-Zip/Acrobat Reader/VIM/Visual studio/OpenOffice/Firefox/Wireshark/ObjectDesktop/etc) the "is Windows ready for the desktop" question isn't even funny.
Though in Microsoft's defence, I never use the manufacturer supplied CD as I rather use -new[er]- drivers and reduce the bloat. On the other hand, XP/SP2 failed to detect the [long breath]: Ethernet, WIFI, Video, Audio, Smartcard reader, Modem and PC-card slot...
For me, installing and downloading these extra's have never really been a great chore; they're a fact of life, and I've never considered the need to rage against the system. About the only thing, in terms of hardware support I am disappointed in is the multi-megabyte driver downloads.
Take the WPN311 wireless card I have from Netgear, the driver is around 15MB, and even then, its been out for over a year and no 108mbps is available for this card. To add insult to injury, the driver itself has an obnoxious application which hijacks wireless configuration and is impossible to disable at start up.
Then there is the drivers from printer companies; my last printer alone said, "required 300mb free space" - for a printer driver?
All this makes for a very unpleasant experience - if your hardware isn't supported on Linux, it'll be supported on Windows but with a penalty of bloated drivers that are unreliable. For every good side there is to an operating system, there is going to be a laundry list of flaws with it.
The search for the perfect operating system is an on going quest (with most settling for the one that 'sucks the least') - but not to dampen ones spirits, but I don't think there will ever be a perfect operating system because we live in an imperfect world with too many variables that can disrupt and 'harmony' that might temporarily exist.
Edited 2008-06-27 23:34 UTC