"David Schwartz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Mike Schilling wrote: > >> "David Schwartz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message >> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >>> There is no different to Microsoft beween a bare computer and one >>> preloaded with Linux or FreeBSD. One can quickly be converted to >>> other with minimal cost of effort. In the market, bare PCs really do >>> compete with Windows PCs. > >> There's a huge difference to the non-techy consumer. One of the >> buggest reasons Linux has had a reputation of being harder to use >> than Windows was the fact that Linux had to be installed, while >> Windows just booted up. > > Is that really true? I mean, I remember distributions of Linux that you > could just stick in the CD, boot from CD, and you were up in minutes. > Installing was as simple as pushing the 'install to hard drive' button.
If all of the hardware is known to Linux, that can work, and Linux has gotten much better at being able to recognize and auto-configure lots of devices. But picture that, when this was less true, you wanted to buy a machine with the newest-whizbang graphics card or disk controller. For Windows, the manufacturer would make sure the proper drivers are installed and configured. For Linux, you the consumer had to find a driver, install it, configure it (the phrase "drive geometry" sticks in my head) and deal with the lack of useful feedback if anything goes wrong. I haven't tried to install Windows since Windows 95 was current. I recall that as being pretty horrible, but for different reasons. There was a step where, after the basic OS had been installed onto the hard drive, and it was time to sense other devices. Half the time, this would simply hang the computer, and you'd have to start over from scratch. Most of the rest of the time, it would find most of the devices and make really awful guesses about the rest, like thinking the sound card was a CD player. I suspect this works better these days too. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
