The Linux world's very own version of Paul Thurrot, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, lists 5 things Linux can learn from... Microsoft. "Linux does a lot of things right - open-source, security, reliability - but it's far from perfect. In fact, Linux and its vendors could stand to learn a few things from Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft. Like what? Here's my list of the top five things that Linux could learn from Microsoft." Next thing you'll know we'll have Apple switching to Intel and... Oh, wait.
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Member since:2005-07-06
1) "No gaming" is false, yes. "Poor gaming" is on the contrary no myth. Well you know, most PC games doesn't work on Linux.
2) "Poor" is an overstatement. I would call it just "worse". As you say, it doesn't always work on Linux. Also the feature set can be smaller or performance lower compared to the official drivers. Like my own printer. In Linux it prints at maybe half speed and the drivers have less features.
3) Yes, you said it yourself, ATI & nVidia. Wireless too in some cases. ATI & nVidia will never open source their drivers. I don't see why they should either. It is the Linux kernel that should have had a real, working, stable driver system. But the kernel developers don't want that...
4) A Linux system is based on RTFM and editing config files. All users will have to do this sooner or later. This philosophy will probably never change. For ordinary users this is worse because typing stuff on the command line or in files isn't as self explaining as clicking buttons and checkboxes. They don't know what to type and they don't want to read the manual. Even if they would find the man page (say xorg.conf) they wouldn't understand it.
5 & 6) If your distribution doesn't provide you with a particular application or you need a newer version you will often need to download the source package and compile because every author cannot provide binaries for every version of every Linux distribution. To compile you have to have a LOT of additional packages but an ordinary user cannot easily know what packages...
Member since:
2006-03-12
1) No Gaming
2) Poor Hardware Support
3) Search for patches
4) You have to edit Config Files
5) Dependency Problems
6) Compile stuff
The reality these are all true, or were true, and true to someone who tried linux once and it was then.
1) Linux gaming is good enough for occasional gamers and its cheaper and suitable to get a wii
2) Its true that if it works on windows it won't always work on linux, and why should it, Live-CD's have been a blessing and a curse for exposing this. Its better to buy your components to work with the OS. I would even for Windows.
3) ATI/Nvidia being the biggest problem in this, I can't think of many reasons why a sane person would want to, see point 2
4) You may have to but they are easier to find than a dialog box, often contain inline documention, but more importantly you almost never need to edit one.
5) I don't hit these. I suspect these are often obscure packages, I suspect they have alternatives, I suspect they will be fixed, I don't know I just haven't had a problem sine I updated Xfree from source on slackware 3.2.
6) When do you need to compile anything, unless your developing. The program I have on my system that I compile by hand is scummvm becuase that program is just too long between releases.