Months go, I reviewed Windows Vista, and concluded: "All in all, I am impressed by Windows Vista [...]. Windows Vista is better than XP, and definitely more than just an improved look as many say." After 5 months of usage, it is time to put that statement into perspective.
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Member since:2006-02-02
You must have missed the part where it said he wanted it working "Out of the Box"...
Not really. I don't consider *any* operating system to work "out of the box".
Give me an office suite, a browser with flash and java plugins, accelerated video drivers, working multimedia codecs-- I'll consider that a basic package.
Then keep in mind that for that to work "Out of the box", you're either running a Windows OEM install, a loaded OS X install, or a violation of the terms of the GNU Public License (v2 or later), which doesn't forbid you from making it work, but it forbids distribution of the components in a "just works" fashion.
Oh, and I'll have to track down printer drivers as well as various other drivers regardless of OS. Some of that will be on the hard drive, some on the install disk, some of it will require browsing the web.
Against all that, browsing to http://mozilla.org/firefox and http://openoffice.org are fairly trivial operations (Less so since I tend to keep recent versions on my file server).
Member since:2005-07-02
Not quite. It's illegal to distribute pre-linked drivers, but there's nothing preventing the drivers to be built and install during the user's first boot. To the user, it will seem as if it "just works", even though his interaction (a simple click) would be required at some point.
The way Ubuntu 7.04 does it is also good, i.e. suggest automatic installation of proprietary drivers when you want to activate desktop effects.
As for printer drivers, they're likely already installed, but it's true that this sometimes requires downloading and installing (with Windows as much as with Linux).
Member since:
2005-07-02
You must have missed the part where it said he wanted it working "Out of the Box"...