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Apple has really pushed the bar up in terms of what users expect from their computers out of the box, and that has affected Windows as well, so in some sense Li
by smallnamespace 10y ago
Apple has really pushed the bar up in terms of what users expect from their computers out of the box, and that has affected Windows as well, so in some sense Linux has been swimming upstream? treading water?
In the mid-90s I remember endlessly fiddling with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to squeeze out that extra 30kb of conventional memory to run some game. Buying peripherals was such a crap shoot that 'Plug and Play' was something that needed to be advertised, and much of the time you were still stuck manually juggling IRQs, moving cards to different slots, etc.
Nowadays, one can buy any Windows or Mac computer/peripheral and generally expect it to work, with some bare minimum of reading reviews.
So while Linux has made tremendous strides in terms of driver support (you mean my wifi actually works now?), things are still very far from zero conf that users have become accustomed to.
Time is valuable, and 2-10 hours spent experimenting with various driver packages, editing text config files, recompiling the kernel, etc. is literally money out of the user's pocket, not to mention the learning curve if you don't already know how to do all these things. That doesn't include the time for extra research to see what hardware is well supported.
Here's an example of install instructions on a pretty well-supported laptop that does Linux [1]. I'd guesstimate an hour of time if you've already done this before, and anything up to 10 hours if you run into unexpected difficulties or are totally new to this.
[1] http://chaos-reins.com/2016-11-14-arch-yoga-910/ http://chaos-reins.com/2016-11-14-arch-yoga-910/
- corndoge 10y agoI like how you picked Arch, which is notorious as one of the few distros without an installer program, and the most difficult to install. I also highly doubt that recompiling kernels are the norm, though I may just be going off of a decade or so of experience...
- saghm 10y agoI've been running Linux for about 4 years now (Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch over the first year or so, been on Arch ever since), and I've never had to recompile my kernel (I did choose to do it once, but this was because I was interested in trying it out rather than something not working right; I'm a bit masochistic that way).
- smallnamespace 10y agoI mentioned Arch because its repos/kernel seem the most up to date and hence most likely to support newish hardware. Plus their docs for getting to run on new laptops seems pretty comprehensive [1]. Looking for directions for that laptop on Ubuntu returns a bunch of frustrated users and rather conflicting testimony: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=%22yoga+910%22+ubuntu https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e... Disclaimer: not an Arch user myself [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Laptops https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Laptops
- btschaegg 10y agoThis. I'm a big fan of Arch myself, but if you look at the distro's philosophy, manually installing it is actually the point. There are enough other distros if you want to avoid that.